Part 42 (2/2)
[Footnote 29: Howard's _Mississippi Reports_, II, 837-844.]
The killing or injury of a slave except under circ.u.mstances justified by law rendered the offender liable both to the master's claim for damages and to criminal prosecution; and the master's suit might be sustained even where the evidence was weak, for as was said in a Louisiana decision, the deed was ”one rarely committed in presence of witnesses, and the most that can be expected in cases of this kind are the presumptions that result from circ.u.mstances.”[30] The requirement of positive proof from white witnesses in criminal cases caused many indictments to fail.[31] A realization of this hindrance in the law deprived convicted offenders of some of the tolerance which their crimes might otherwise have met. When in 1775, for example, William Pitman was found guilty and sentenced by the Virginia General Court to be hanged for the beating of his slave to death, the _Virginia Gazette_ said: ”This man has justly incurred the penalties of the law and we hear will certainly suffer, which ought to be a warning to others to treat their slaves with more moderation.”[32] In the nineteenth century the laws generally held the maiming or murder of slaves to be felonies in the same degree and with the same penalties as in cases where the victims were whites; and when the statutes were silent in the premises the courts felt themselves free to remedy the defect.[33]
[Footnote 30: Martin, _Louisiana Reports_, XV, 142.]
[Footnote 31: H.M. Henry, _Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina_, pp. 69-79.]
[Footnote 32: _Virginia Gazette_, Apr. 21, 1775, reprinted in the _William and Mary College Quarterly_, VIII, 36.]
[Footnote 33: The State _vs_. Jones, in Walker, _Mississippi Reports_, p.
83, reprinted in J.D. Wheeler, _The Law of Slavery_, pp. 252-254.]
Despite the ferocity of the statutes and the courts, the fewness and the laxity of officials was such that from time to time other agencies were called into play. For example the maraudings of runaway slaves camped in Belle Isle swamp, a score of miles above Savannah, became so serious and lasting that their haven had to be several times destroyed by the Georgia militia. On one of these occasions, in 1786, a small force first employed was obliged to withdraw in the face of the blacks, and reinforcements merely succeeded in burning the huts and towing off the canoes, while the negroes themselves were safely in hiding. Not long afterward, however, the gang was broken up, partly through the services of Creek and Catawba Indians who hunted the maroons for the prices on their heads.[34] The Seminoles, on the other hand, gave asylum to such numbers of runaways as to prompt invasions of their country by the United States army both before and after the Florida purchase.[35] On lesser occasions raids were made by citizen volunteers. The swamps of the lower Santee River, for example, were searched by several squads in 1819, with the killing of two negroes, the capture of several others and the wounding of one of the whites as the result.[36]
[Footnote 34: _Georgia Colonial Records_, XII, 325, 326; _Georgia Gazette_ (Savannah), Oct. 19, 1786; _Ma.s.sachusetts Sentinel_ (Boston), June 13, 1787; _Georgia State Gazette and Independent Register_ (Augusta), June 16, 1787.]
[Footnote 35: Joshua R. Giddings, _The Exiles of Florida_ (Columbus, Ohio, 1858).]
[Footnote 36: Diary of Dr. Henry Ravenel, Jr., of St. John's Parish, Berkeley County, S.C. MS. in private possession.]
More frequent occasions for the creation of vigilance committees were the rumors of plots among the blacks and the reports of mischievous doings by whites. In the same Santee district of the Carolina lowlands, for instance, a public meeting at Black Oak Church on January 3, 1860, appointed three committees of five members each to look out for and dispose of any suspicious characters who might be ”prowling about the parish.” Of the sequel nothing is recorded by the local diarist of the time except the following, under date of October 25: ”Went out with a party of men to take a fellow by the name of Andrews, who lived at Cantey's Hill and traded with the negroes. He had been warned of our approach and run off. We went on and broke up the trading establishment.”[37]
[Footnote 37: Diary of Thomas P. Ravenel, which is virtually a continuation of the Diary just cited. MS. in private possession.]
Such transactions were those of the most responsible and substantial citizens, laboring to maintain social order in the face of the law's desuetude. A mere step further in that direction, however, lay outright lynch law. Lynchings, indeed, while far from habitual, were frequent enough to link the South with the frontier West of the time. The victims were not only rapists[38] but negro malefactors of sundry sorts, and occasionally white offenders as well. In some cases fairly full accounts of such episodes are available, but more commonly the record extant is laconic.
Thus the Virginia archives have under date of 1791 an affidavit reciting that ”Ralph Singo and James Richards had in January last, in Accomac County, been hung by a band of disguised men, numbering from six to fifteen”;[39] and a Georgia newspaper in 1860 the following: ”It is reported that Mr. William Smith was killed by a negro on Sat.u.r.day evening at Bowling Green, in Oglethorpe County. He was stabbed sixteen times. The negro made his escape but was arrested on Sunday, and on Monday morning a number of citizens who had investigated the case burnt him at the stake.”[40] In at least one well-known instance the mob's violence was directed against an abuser of slaves. This was at New Orleans in 1834 when a rumor spread that Madame Lalaurie, a wealthy resident, was torturing her negroes. A great crowd collected after nightfall, stormed her door, found seven slaves chained and bearing marks of inhuman treatment, and gutted the house. The woman herself had fled at the first alarm, and made her way eventually to Paris.[41] Had she been brought before a modern court it may be doubted whether she would have been committed to a penitentiary or to a lunatic asylum. At the hands of the mob, however, her shrift would presumably have been short and sure.
[Footnote 38: For examples of these see above, pp. 460-463.]
[Footnote 39: _Calendar of Virginia State Papers_, V, 328.]
[Footnote 40: _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.), June 14, 1860. Other instances, gleaned mostly from _Niles' Register_ and the _Liberator_, are given in J.E. Cutler, _Lynch Law_ (New York, 1905), pp. 90-136.]
[Footnote 41: Harriett Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_ (London, 1838), I, 262-267; V. Debouchel, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (New Orleans, 1841), p. 155; Alcee Fortier, _History of Louisiana_, III, 223.]
The violence of city mobs is a thing peculiar to no time or place. Rural Southern lynch law in that period, however, was in large part a special product of the spa.r.s.eness of population and the resulting weakness of legal machinery, for as Olmsted justly remarked in the middle 'fifties, the whole South was virtually still in a frontier condition.[42] In _post bellum_ decades, on the other hand, an increase of racial antipathy has offset the effect of the densification of settlement and has abnormally prolonged the liability to the lynching impulse.
[Footnote 42: F.L. Olmsted, _Journey in the Back Country_, p. 413.]
While the records have no parallel for Madame Lalaurie in her systematic and wholesale torture of slaves, there were thousands of masters and mistresses as tolerant and kindly as she was fiendish; and these were virtually without restraint of public authority in their benevolent rule.
Lawmakers and magistrates by personal status in their own plantation provinces, they ruled with a large degree of consent and cooperation by the governed, for indeed no other course was feasible in the long run by men and women of normal type. Concessions and friendly services beyond the countenance and contemplation of the statutes were habitual with those whose name was legion. The law, for example, conceded no property rights to the slaves, and some statutes forbade specifically their possession of horses, but the following characteristic letter of a South Carolina mistress to an influential citizen tells an opposite story: ”I hope you will pardon the liberty I take in addressing you on the subject of John, the slave of Professor Henry, Susy his wife, and the orphan children of my faithful servant Pompey, the first husband of Susy. In the first instance, Pompey owned a horse which he exchanged for a mare, which mare I permitted Susy to use after her marriage with John, but told them both I would sell it and the young colt and give Susy a third of the money, reserving the other two thirds for her children. Before I could do so, however, the mare and the colt were exchanged and sent out of my way by this dishonest couple. I then hoped at least to secure forty-five dollars for which another colt was sold to Mr. Haskell, and sent my message to him to say that Susy had no claim on the colt and that the money was to be paid to me for the children of Pompey. A few days since I sent to Mr. Haskell again who informed me that he had paid for the colt, and referred me to you. I do a.s.sure you that whatever Susy may affirm, she has no right to the money.
It is not my intention to meddle with the law on the occasion, and I infinitely prefer relying on you to do justice to the parties. My manager, who will deliver this to you, is perfectly acquainted with all the circ.u.mstances; and [if] after having a conversation with him you should decide in favor of the children I shall be much gratified.”[43]
[Footnote 43: Letter of Caroline Raoul, Belleville, S.C., Dec. 26, 1829, to James H. Hammond. MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]
Likewise where the family affairs of slaves were concerned the silence and pa.s.siveness of the law gave masters occasion for eloquence and activity.
Thus a Georgian wrote to a neighbor: ”I have a girl Amanda that has your servant Phil for a husband. I should be very glad indeed if you would purchase her. She is a very good seamstress, an excellent cook--makes cake and preserves beautifully--and washes and irons very nicely, and cannot be excelled in cleaning up a house. Her disposition is very amiable. I have had her for years and I a.s.sure you that I have not exaggerated as regards her worth.... I will send her down to see you at any time.”[44] That offers of purchase were no less likely than those of sale to be prompted by such considerations is suggested by another Georgia letter: ”I have made every attempt to get the boy Frank, the son of James Nixon; and in order to gratify James have offered as far as five hundred dollars for him--more than I would pay for any negro child in Georgia were it not James'
son.”[45] It was therefore not wholly in idyllic strain that a South Carolinian after long magisterial service remarked: ”Experience and observation fully satisfy me that the first law of slavery is that of kindness from the master to the slave. With that ... slavery becomes a family relation, next in its attachments to that of parent and child.”[46]
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