The Antebellum Domestic Slave Trade

The Antebellum Slave Trade in Regional and Historical Perspective

From HNet Calvin Schermerhor writes: Robert Gudmestad has made at least two important contributions in A Troublesome Commerce. The first is to account for regional differences in perceptions of the antebellum interstate slave trade, and the second is to account for why southerners accepted the trade while simultaneously maintaining ambivalence toward traders. Gudmestad argues that by the mid-1830s, white southerners came to view the long-distance domestic slave trade as necessary to southern society rather than as an embarrassing practice that tore apart enslaved families, corrupted the morals of slaveholders, and flooded the Lower South with potentially seditious slaves. Gudmestad orients his reader to think of the interstate slave trade in terms of regional capitalist-economic development and explores its social ramifications.

Robert H. Gudmestad. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004

A Troublesome Commerce therefore adds to an historiography that includes Steven Deyle's Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2005), Walter Johnson's Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999), and Michael Tadman's Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (1989).

Gudmestad investigates the perceptions and practices of the speculator or trader as a way to connect slavery's economic expansion with its social significance. In contrast to a slaveholder who may have bought or sold slaves locally and for a variety of reasons, traders earned a living primarily by purchasing enslaved people from slaveholders in the Upper South and selling them to buyers in the Lower South. In the popular imagination, according to Gudmestad, "The trader broke up families, emphasized profit above piety, manipulated reality, and ruined paternalism. The stereotype had all the qualities that slaveowners were supposed to control" (p. 190). Gudmestad argues that "when [the slaveholder] could not meet this idea, the speculator was one way to explain their failure.... [slaveholders] blamed all others--banks, debt, abolitionists, the slaves themselves--for the slave trade because to admit their own culpability would have undermined the whole basis of their society" (p. 190). The idea that slaves represented cash above any supposed membership in a slaveholder's extended family upset southerners and inspired reactions, from moral outrage to regulatory legislation. In response, traders joined southern politicians and other proslavery apologists to sanitize the image of the slave trade so that by the mid-1830s, southerners could defend slavery and slave trading in the same breath. Gudmestad argues compellingly that southerners ended up agreeing to ignore the realities of speculation in the interstate slave trade in order to preserve the social order it supported.

Issac Franklin watching slave caravans moving from the upper south to the lower south.

By the early nineteenth century the interstate slave trade developed in reaction to regional settlement in the southwest. Gudmestad contends that speculation "was sporadic and uncertain at a time before there was a crush of labor in the Old Southwest" (p. 17). Profits from the production of cotton and other commodities attracted settlers. Planters in the Lower South states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana increased demand for enslaved laborers, whom Gudmestad refers to most often as "bondservants" (p. 48, passim). Initially, planters moving to the cotton frontier forcibly transported slaves with them, but as white migration fell and established slaveholders sought to expand their holdings, more and more enslaved people were marched or shipped south in the interstate trade. "Rather than being relatively stable in the nineteenth century," Gudmestad argues, "the interstate slave trade increased in volume and proportion during the 1820s and 1830s as white migration declined and the demand for labor increased in the Lower South" (p. 20). Southern economic development and consequent demographic changes stand in the background in Gudmestad's narrative of what white southerners made of speculators' activities.

Slave auction.

Traders like Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, who had been in the transportation business before getting into the interstate slave trade, found a niche to exploit, transporting enslaved people on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to Natchez before investing in ships for the coastwise trade to New Orleans. By the late 1820s, Gudmestad argues, traders published newspaper advertisements offering to pay cash for large numbers of slaves for the first time. The scale of the interstate trade is difficult to calculate with precision, but traders' activities began to account for the majority of forced migration by the 1830s. Significantly, that development was a catalyst for the slave trade's social transformation.

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Slave Auction.

According to Gudmestad, the activities of speculators inspired resistance among potential victims of the trade and initially alarmed legislators in the nation's capital. In 1816, after a slave named Anna jumped from a third story window to avoid being sold away from her husband and children--shattering her arms and breaking her back--an outraged John Randolph of Virginia moved to regulate the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The measure failed, but his efforts represented the problems slave traders posed to white southerners' perceptions of slavery: the cash traders so prominently featured in advertisements belied an organic relationship between master and slave. "The irony," according to Gudmestad, "is that a business that labored mightily to reduce slaves to just another commodity accidentally promoted the fact of bondservants' humanity" (p. 48). In the 1810s and 1820s, men like Randolph anguished over what the slave trade did to the humanity of slaves and masters.

Separation of families at slave auctions.

Gudmestad explains regional differences regarding views of the slave trade by the 1820s: whites in the Upper South who were troubled by the effects of slave sales on the morals of masters, and whites in the Lower South who feared that their part of the country was becoming a dumping ground for rebellious slaves. "When southerners looked at the white image in the white mind," he contends, "they did not like what they saw" (p. 63). The dilemma confronting slaveholders in the Upper South concerned how to rationalize selling enslaved people away from their families to traders likely to transport them out of state. While many slaveholders tried to keep families together--or at least proffered that aim--the interstate trade tore families apart. Buyers in the Lower South, by and large, wanted individual laborers and not families. Observers in the Upper South who worried about the potential threats posed by a surplus slave population began to see the trade as a practical alternative to colonization. Evangelical Protestants, meanwhile, turned churches into the "'bulwark'" of slavery, at least in the minds of many abolitionists (p. 143). Gudmestad contends that churches solved the moral dilemma regarding the slave trade by shifting from opposition to noninterference in individual slaveholders' affairs. "By 1840 then," according to Gudmestad, "most southern evangelicals accepted the slave trade as a regular and necessary part of southern society" (p. 146). Ironically, the moral dilemmas slaveholders faced ended up strengthening slavery since slaveholders convinced themselves that they had no option but to sell slaves to traders. Perceived economic necessity became a solvent for moral guilt, as the interstate trade became an increasingly common and seemingly inescapable part of Upper South slavery by the mid-1830s.

The slave sale.

Citizens in the Lower South were not concerned about the moral health of masters and did not wait for religious leaders to come around to their position. Gudmestad contends, "residents there generally accepted the interstate slave trade--even with all its flaws--because of its importance in replenishing and augmenting the labor supply" (p. 95). Especially following the Turner Rebellion of 1831, Mississippi and Louisiana attempted to regulate traders' activities lest slaves become infected with the "contagion of rebellion" (pp. 104-105). Interstate slave traders found creative ways to evade restrictions on slave imports. If observers in the Upper South worried about moral decay among the slaveholding classes, whites in the Lower South worried about rebellion sweeping the country.

Interior of a slave jail.

Attitudes toward the trade in the Upper South caught up to those in the Lower South, and by the 1830s, "slave traders became a species of social workers who redeemed the dregs of society" (p. 171). Slave traders, who had been implicated in kidnappings, sexual abuse, and clandestinely dumping the bodies of dead slaves, used a variety of techniques to improve their image, including moving slave jails and auctions out of public view, keeping secret the details of their activities, and marching coffles of slaves out of cities under the cover of darkness. While abolitionists worked to publicize the terrors of family separation and the horrors of transportation at the hands of traders, traders represented themselves as respectable businessmen, which in Gudmestad's view "helped effect a change in opinions towards speculation from initial skepticism to grudging acceptance" (p. 164). Southern whites reacted to abolitionist criticisms by blaming the messenger and excusing slave traders for breaking up slave families. When southerners defended slavery, therefore, they had to defend traders' activities as well. At the issue's core, however, was the realization that there was little anyone could do to stem the interstate slave trade. Gudmestad concludes that "moralizing proved ineffective in blunting the force of economic and social considerations" (p. 177).

Slave traders Isaac Franklin and John Armfield office in Alexandria, Virginia.

A Troublesome Commerce contributes to an historiography in which the domestic slave trade stands at the center of antebellum southern politics and society rather than at the peripheries. Gudmestad's fresh perspective is interrupted by a section on "profits and piety," which revisits much familiar ground, and the reader may be seduced into ignoring broader historical and international contexts, such as the international slave trade (p. 118). Gudmestad is at his best narrating the values and business practices of traders and their observers, beginning and ending with the notorious trader Isaac Franklin, which makes this an interesting read, to lay readers and undergraduates, as well as to specialists. (source: H-Net, 2006)

Virginia Slave Sale 1812

AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE SALE OF ELEVEN SLAVES, FEBRUARY 17, 1812

This advertisement announced the sale of four men, two women, and five children that would take place on February 24, 1812, at the Eagle Tavern in Richmond. This broadside foreshadows Richmond's rise as a major market in the domestic, or interstate, slave trade by the middle of the nineteenth century. The woodcut depicting laborers suggests that the printer produced advertisements of slaves often enough to justify the expense of commissioning the artwork. Much of the slave-trading activity in Richmond took place in hotels located in the area of Shockoe Bottom. Venues like the Eagle Tavern, built in 1787 and located on the south side of Main Street between Twelfth and Thirteenth streets, the Exchange Hotel, and many others had special holding pens and showrooms where sales took place. In order to make the best impression with potential buyers, there were even businesses that specialized in dressing slaves for sale.

Notable in this broadside is the mention of the skills practiced by these enslaved African Americans. A carpenter, a “Brick Moulder,” a tanner, and “a good Crop Hand” or agricultural worker, are listed, providing evidence that many slaves were trained as artisans and craftsmen. This widespread practice was intended to save slave owners money, but it also had the effect of reducing the need for free white laborers. To avoid competition with enslaved laborers who were the mainstay of the southern workforce, many European immigrants to the United States during the antebellum period settled in the North. Between 1810 and 1820, a “prime field hand” sold for about $400. By the 1830s, that increased to $600 in Virginia, and $1,100 in Louisiana. Between 1810 and 1820, scholars estimate that 45,000 enslaved people were sold away from Virginia. As many as 300,000 enslaved African Americans were sold through Richmond to points in the lower South by the 1860s.

Being sold at an auction was an embarrassing and frightening experience for enslaved African Americans. Men and women were forced before a roomful of spectators to strip so their bodies could be inspected for defects. This included showing teeth and an inspection of mouths, eyes, and other extremities. Sales were especially frightening because slaves did not know who their new owners would be, or if they would be sold away from their loved ones. These conditions sometimes spurred some enslaved African Americans to run away from the South, and there were rumors that slave rebellions were inspired because of such forced separations. Outside of the South, the horrors of the auction block featured prominently in antislavery speeches and literature. (Virginia Memory)

Kosciuszko’s Will

Kosciuszko - Champion of Human Rights

Kosciuszko’s Will

“I, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, being just in my departure from America, do hereby declare and direct that should I make no other testamentary disposition of my property in the United States thereby authorize my friend Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole thereof in purchasing negroes from among his own as any others and giving them liberty in my name in giving them an education in trades and otherwise, and in having them instructed for their new condition in the duties of morality which may make them good neighbors, good fathers or mothers, husbands or wives and in their duties as citizens, teaching them to be defenders of their liberty and country and of the good order of society and in whatsoever may make them happy and useful, and I make the said Thomas Jefferson my executor of this.”

Thaddeus Kosciuszko

5th day of May, 1798

[Did Thomas Jefferson honor the will? Oh hell no!]

Thomas Jefferson's Broken Promise to Thaddeus Kosciuszko

History Network News article, "Why We Should All Regret Jefferson's Broken Promise to Thaddeus Kosciuszko," by Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges .

Thomas Jefferson

In March 1798, Tadeuz Kościuszko, a hero of the American and Polish revolutions, and Thomas Jefferson, Vice President of the United States, huddled in a cramped second-story room in Philadelphia to make a pact of honor centered on the Pole’s sizable American estate. Kościuszko, who had returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome less than a year before, anxiously wanted to leave for Paris to avoid entrapment by the Alien and Sedition acts. (Jefferson, estranged from President John Adams and hoping to use Kosciuszko’s prestige on a secret mission to convince the French not to wage war with the United States, prepared a fake passport for Kosciusko.) Before the Pole departed, he and Jefferson constructed a will to dispose of $15,000 (Kosciuszko’s Revolutionary pay) after his death. The two men labored together to produce a document with the potential to alter American history.

Tadeuz Kościuszko

Kościuszko’s first version deserves quotation. Though the spelling and syntax are eye-straining, the crude yet eloquent prose convey how passionately the romantic Polish revolutionary had embraced abolitionism.

I beg Mr. Jefferson that in the case I should die without will or testament he should bye out of my money So many Negroes and free them, that the restante [remaining] sums should be Sufficient to give them aducation and provide for thier maintenance, that . . . each should know before, the duty of a Cytyzen in the free Government, that he must defend his country against foreign as well as internal Enemies who would wish to change the Constitution for the worst to inslave them by degree afterwards, to have good and human heart Sensible for the Sufferings of others, each must be married and have 100 Ackres of land, wyth instruments, Cattle for tillage and know how to manage and Gouvern it well as well to know [how to] behave to neyboughs [neighbors], always wyth Kindnes and ready to help them . . . . T. Kościuszko.

Thomas Jefferson

In this unconventional but emotion-packed will, Kościuszko expressed the convictions and commitments that made him such an admirable man for black Americans. Drawing on his long-standing belief that the downtrodden could prosper--peasants, as well as slaves--if given their freedom under favorable conditions, he tried to promote universal liberty and give Jefferson the opportunity to lead Southerners in a quest to remove the stain of slavery from the new nation.

Tadeuz Kościuszko

A second revised will, entirely in Kościuszko’s hand like the first, included a change of immense significance. Rather than the vague reference in the original version to use Kościuszko’s legacy to free “so many Negroes,” the rewritten will specified that “I do hereby declare and direct that should I make no other testamentary disposition of my property in the United States I hereby authorize my friend Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole thereof in purchasing Negroes from among his own or any others.” Kościuszko surely made this crucial change with Jefferson’s consent, for Jefferson agreed to be the executor, as well as the beneficiary, of the will. Was Jefferson thinking of Sally Hemings, her daughter Harriet who was now not quite three, and the newborn Beverley, born just ten days before Jefferson witnessed Kościuszko’s signing of the will?

Jefferson endorsed Kościuszko’s scheme with a full heart, regarding the Pole as “the truest son of liberty I have even known.” For Jefferson, a promise at any time was a serious matter; but given freely under these conditions, it was to be held sacred. And for the next twenty years, Jefferson did not waver in his commitment to his Polish friend, maintaining a warm correspondence with Kosciuszko and, as they grew old together on opposite sides of the Atlantic, even invited him to live out his last years at Monticello and bury his bones alongside those of the Sage of Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson

Kosciuszko died on October 15, 1817. After several years of vacillation, Jefferson withdrew from his pact of honor with Kosciuszko by pleading in a Virginia court in Charlottesville that he could not serve as executor of his friend’s estate and would not use the money to free his slaves. As William Lloyd Garrison would say many years later, “What an all-conquering influence must have attended his illustrious example,” if he had taken the lead to abolish slavery. Merrill Peterson, for all his admiration for Jefferson, was anguished by this retreat: “The object of [Kosciuszko’s] will was lost. Had Jefferson felt stronger about the object, he would have ventured the experiment, despite statutory obstacles and the shortness of years, for the experiment [of freeing his slaves] was one he often commended to others and, indeed, one he may have himself suggested to Kosciuszko.”

Tadeuz Kościuszko

Thaddeus Kosciuszko was one of the first European volunteers to aid the American revolutionary cause in 1776. A brilliant Polish military engineer, Kosciuszko designed and constructed fortifications to help defeat the British, most notably at Saratoga and West Point in New York.

Why did Jefferson, while throwing himself energetically into the creation of the University of Virginia, plead that he was too old and tired to carry out Kosciuszko’s will and betray the trust of his Polish compatriot? One of the key reasons was Jefferson’s allegiance to the Old Dominion aristocracy and his devotion to sustaining the economic and cultural leverage of the white South in national politics. He also feared offending friends, especially slaveowners already shaken by the actions of others in Virginia who had released slaves from bondage. In a time when we are accustomed to seeing President George W. Bush reject scientific analysis on fearsome problems, stack regulatory commissions with those devoted to non-regulation, and stake out policy positions on the basis of insider friends and their deep-pocket interests, this earlier abandonment of an honor-bound pact with Kosciuszko has a peculiar odor.

As Kosciuszko’s will, abandoned by Jefferson, made its way through the courts, many complications arose. The estate was finally awarded by the Supreme Court in 1852, 26 years after most of Jefferson’s slaves had been auctioned on the rolling lawn at Monticello to extinguish his debts, to Kosciuszko’s descendants. For years in Poland, Kosciuszko’s countrymen held the view that the American Civil War could have been averted if the Polish hero’s philanthropic, abolitionist plan had been implemented. When the slaves at Monticello mounted the auction block to be sold off after the Founding Father died—the slaves that could have been freed if Kosciuszko’s will had been honored—a small-town editor in a Susquehanna River town asked how Jefferson, “surely the champion of civil liberty to the American people,” left “so many human beings in fetters to be indiscriminately sold to the highest bidder." In biting words, the editor wrote: “Heaven inspired Jefferson with the knowledge ‘that all men are created equal.’ He was not forgetful—in his last moments he ‘commended his soul to God, and his daughter to his country;’ but to whom did he commend his wretched slaves?"

(Nash and Hodges are the co-authors of Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and the Betrayal that Divided a Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull; Basic Books, April 2008)

Polish Son of Liberty: Thaddeus Kosciuszko

THADDEUS KOSCIUSZKO: A POLISH SON OF LIBERTY

Visitors to the battlements at Ticonderoga, the Saratoga Battlefield, and West Point soon become aware of the engineering genius of a young Polish officer who served with distinction in the Continental Army through, out the American Revolution. In addition, students of ethnic history can point to this same modest nobleman as an early benefactor of American blacks.

For Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kosciuszko, the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence became a way of life. Thomas Jefferson, its author and Kosciuszko's close friend, called him "the purest son of liberty . . . that I have ever known, the kind of liberty which extends to all, not only to the rich." Throughout a long lifetime (1746-.1817) the idealistic Pole directed all his energies and substance to the cause of freedom in America and in his native Poland, and to humanitarian endeavors on two continents.

Born into a "land poor" family of the Polish gentry, Thaddeus Kosciuszko received a "gentleman's" education, with emphasis on the classics, mathematics, drawing, and French, followed by three years as student and instructor at the Royal School for cadets at Warsaw where he attained the rank of captain. A royal stipend then enabled the promising young officer to spend five years in France where he studied government and economics as well as engineering, military science, architecture, and art. (Called by his contemporaries "a beautiful limner," he executed likenesses of various leaders of the American Revolution, including a pastel portrait of Jefferson and a devastating caricature of the controversial General Charles Lee.)

On his return to Poland in 1774 he found no market for his talents and, following an unfortunate love affair. he borrowed money on his share of the family estate and went to Dresden. Reports of the American Revolution fired his imagination. Taking passage, he appeared in Philadelphia in August, 1776, and offered his credentials to the Continental Congress.

Thomas Jefferson

Military engineers were in short supply, and Congress gave him an appointment with the rank of colonel, in charge of fortifying the Delaware River at two points. In the spring of 1777 General Horatio Gates invited Kosciuszko to inspect the fortifications then underway at Fort Ticonderoga. Finding blockhouses "all erected in the most improper places," nevertheless, as a foreigner, he hesitated to impose his own plan. "I would choose rather to leave all, return home and plant Cabbages," he re ported.



He remained to assist in the construction of the log boom bridge that linked "Ti" with Mount Independence and supervised the fortification of that eminence as well as works on the Ticonderoga side. Kosciuszko's superiors disregarded his advice to mount guns on Sugar Loaf Hill. A few weeks later Burgoyne advanced on Ticonderoga, and on July 5 the Americans faced a British battery atop Sugar Loaf (renamed Mount Defiance) and were forced to evacuate the fort.

In the ensuing American retreat Kosciuszko ordered obstructions placed in the path of the British. demolished bridges, and rendered Wood Creek unnavigable. On him rested the responsibility of selecting and fortifying camps and posts. He constructed numerous fortifications at Van Schaick's Island and on Haver Island. north of Albany. But his great achievement was the selection and fortification of Bemis Heights, where Burgoyne was defeated in the decisive Battle of Saratoga in October, 1777.

The ability to get along well with people (in contrast to certain other foreign officers) as well as his reputation as a capable engineer won the soft-spoken, genial Pole an appointment in March, 1778 as "Chief Engineer of the Middle Department" in charge of the fortification …f West Point. In the twenty-eight months he remained at West Point he constructed a chain of redoubts and forts, the principal one being Fort Putnam, and transformed the highlands wilderness into a bastion which effectively deterred British invasion up the Hudson.

In a rocky valley the gentle aristocrat laid out a private retreat -- a garden [still to be seen at West Point) with a fountain and cascades -- carrying soil by hand to nurture the flowers he planted. Also at West Point there re mains a tradition that he shared his meager rations with British prisoners there. The Australian grandson of one of these prisoners some decades later repaid this kindness by taking care of a Polish traveler in Australia who would otherwise have died of yellow fever.

Kosciuszko left West Point in August, 1780 and served the remainder of the war under General Nathanael Greene in the South. Returning north in 1783, he was admitted to the Order of the Cincinnati and promoted to brigadier general. On November 25, 1 783 he took part in Washington's triumphal march into New York City and is believed to have been present at Fraunces Tavern when Washington bade farewell to his officers.

In 1784 he returned to Poland where he lived a simple life in his country home, leaving it to lead a Polish army in several attempts to free Poland from Russian control, thereby becoming a national hero. He returned to the United States in 1797-1798 and visited his Revolutionary War friends. Congress then granted him $15,000 due in back pay for his wartime service and gave him a land grant of 500 acres in Ohio. Kosciuszko had freed his own serfs or reduced their service. His years in the American South had aroused his compassion for American slaves. Before he returned to Europe in 1798 he drew up a will, appointing Jefferson executor and directing that the money from the sale of his Ohio land be used to purchase and free slaves and provide for their education. After his death this land became Ohio State University. The proceeds were to be used to found a school for blacks in Newark, New Jersey, but Thomas Jefferson just gave black people the middle finger.

from: THE CORRESPONDENT (1972), The New York State American Revolution Bicentennial

Imprisoned for Teaching Free African American Children

An unlikely martyr for black education, Margaret Douglass was arrested in May 1853 for violating Virginia law, eleven months after opening a school for free black children. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, she married, and had two children. After the death of her son, Douglass moved in 1845 to Norfolk, Virginia, with her daughter, Hannah Rosa. There is little record of Douglass's life in Charleston. Documents do not disclose information about her husband's death, but after arriving in Norfolk, she was the only means of support for herself and her nine-year-old daughter. Douglass became employed as a seamstress. The family worshipped at Christ Episcopal Church with many of the community's leaders. Christ Church had a Sunday school where black children received lessons in reading. A former slave owner, Douglass felt morally compelled to help teach black children how to read and write as part of her “Christian duty.” A great many Virginians, especially women, undertook to teach their own slaves to read and write, and others readily taught in Sunday schools where they emphasized the responsibility of servants to obey their masters and mistresses and to accept the status in life into which they were born.

While conducting business in Robinson's Barber Shop one day, Douglass met the owner, a free black man. She quickly learned of his five, uneducated children and offered to allow her daughter to teach them how to read and write at no charge. The positive experience with these children encouraged Douglass and her daughter to establish a school for free black children. In June 1852, Douglass opened a school in her home, charging students three dollars per quarter. The school's beginning enrollment was twenty-five boys and girls. On the morning of May 9, 1853, eleven months after opening the school, Margaret Douglass was arrested for violating Virginia law.

At the time, in Virginia it was illegal to assemble any African Americans, free or enslaved, for the purpose of instructing them to read or write. Douglass pleaded ignorance of the law, having understood that the regulation applied to enslaved blacks only. For this reason, Douglass was careful to enroll only free blacks at her school. Although the mayor of Norfolk seemed to have dismissed Douglass's case, the local grand jury indicted her in November 1853, and she was convicted and fined one dollar. Acting in her own defense, Douglass insisted that she was not an abolitionist, that she approved of the institution of slavery in the South, that she had only tutored free blacks at her school, and that her students also attended Christ Episcopal Sunday School. When she returned to court to receive her sentence on January 10, 1854, the judge required her to serve a one-month prison sentence “as an example to all others in like cases.” She duly served her sentence, spending one week of her incarceration ill. Friendly with the jailer and his wife, she spent a few days as their guest after her sentence was completed. Soon after her release, she and her daughter moved to Philadelphia in February 1854 where Douglass published an account of her Norfolk experience and lived “happy in the consciousness that it is here no crime to teach a poor little child, of any color, to read the Word of God.” (source: http://www.virginiamemory.com/online_classroom/shaping_the_constitution/people/margaret_douglass)

Bureaucrat ripped hole in tapestry of Virginia's Indian history

From the Virginia Pilot, "Bureaucrat ripped hole in tapestry of Virginia's Indian history," by Joanne Kimberlin:

Tall and thin, with a neat mustache and white hair, Plecker was Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946. He was the gatekeeper of birth, marriage and death records during the era of eugenics – a movement that combined bans on interracial marriage with the mandatory sterilization of the mentally ill.

The plan was to improve the human race by reducing what was viewed as defective breeding. Virginia was far from alone in its support of the “science”: In the early 1900s, interracial marriage was illegal in 30 of the then 48 states. Nazi Germany’s lethal persecution policies had roots in eugenics.

Virginia, however, had the distinction of being the first to outlaw interracial marriage – a law enacted in 1691 forbidding blacks and whites to marry.

The state’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act reinforced the old prohibitions and sought to clarify the dividing line. Anyone not matching the act’s definition of “white,” with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” was classified as “colored” – including the Indians.

Plecker, an icily efficient man who rarely smiled, carried out a campaign to make sure the vital records of Indians across the state reflected their new racial category.

Indians who refused the change risked a year in jail. Hospitals detained native newborns until parents signed birth certificates designating their child as black.

Natives say Plecker’s “paper genocide” created a gap in their history that makes it nearly impossible for them to prove that their tribes have existed “continuously” – one of the requirements of federal recognition.

Chief Walter D. “Red Hawk” Brown, III. The Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe, Southampton County Virginia is an Iroquoian-speaking Tribe

But R. Lee Fleming, a director at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, says Virginia tribes aren’t as short on records as they say. Contrary to popular belief, Fleming says, Plecker did not entirely obliterate their bloodline.

Fleming has a file that contains 16 Indian birth, death or marriage certificates from the Plecker era where the race was not altered.

“I just scratched the surface and found these,” he said. “I was certainly surprised. That’s not at all what I’d been hearing.”

Steve Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy, wasn’t shocked to hear that some records escaped Plecker’s purge, but he doesn’t think there are enough to clear federal hurdles: “You can find 16 vital records in any tribe that weren’t changed, but you’ll find 150 to 200 that had the wrong documentation.”

(source: The Virginian-Pilot, 10 June 2009, by Joanne Kimberlin)

Eugenic Laws Against Race Mixing

Eugenic Laws Against Race Mixing, by Paul Lombardo, University of Virginia

Laws forbidding marriage between people of different races were common in America from the Colonial period through the middle of the 20th century. By 1915, twenty-eight states made marriages between "Negroes and white persons" invalid; six states included this prohibition in their constitutions.

In the early 1900's, the eugenics movement supplied a new set of arguments to support existing restrictions on interracial marriage. These arguments incorporated a "scientific" brand of racism, emphasizing the supposed biological dangers of mixing the races – also known as miscegenation. Influential writers like Madison Grant, a leading eugenicist, warned that racial mixing was "a social and racial crime." He said that acceptance of racial intermarriage would lead America toward "racial suicide" and the eventual disappearance of white civilization.

According to Grant, the mixture of "higher racial types," such as Nordic whites, with other "lower" races would inevitably result in the decline of the higher race. In his immensely popular book The Passing of the Great Race (1916) Grant cautioned: "The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro… When it becomes thoroughly understood that the children of mixed marriages between contrasted races belong to the lower type, the importance of transmitting in unimpaired purity the blood inheritance of ages will be appreciated at its full value."

Grant's proclamations on the perils of race mixing mirrored warnings by Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, leaders of the American eugenic bureaucracy at the Eugenics Record Office. In turn, American political leaders like Vice President Calvin Coolidge repeated similar sentiments as scientific fact. Said Coolidge: "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend."

To prevent further pollution of the country's collective "germ-plasm" and a subsequent contamination of the white race, eugenicists argued for even tighter restrictions against racial mixing. Their efforts focused on new legal definitions of who could qualify to receive a marriage license as a "white" person.

Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 stands out among anti-miscegenation laws that can be traced to eugenic advocacy. To fashion a successful legislative strategy, three local Virginia eugenicists – John Powell, Earnest Cox and Walter Plecker – consulted with Madison Grant and Harry Laughlin. Powell, a celebrated pianist and composer, was the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, an elitist version of the Ku Klux Klan dedicated to maintaining "Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization in America." Like The Passing of the Great Race, Cox's book White America emphasized white supremacy and the dangers of racial mixing. Plecker was registrar at the Bureau of Vital Statistics of the Virginia Board of Health. His ideas on racial interbreeding as the source of "public health" problems appeared in state-published pamphlets distributed to all who planned to marry.

When The Racial Integrity Act became law, it included provisions requiring racial registration certificates and strict definitions of who would qualify as members of the white race. It emphasized the "scientific" basis of race assessment, and the "dysgenic" dangers of race mixing. Its major provision declared: "It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. …the term "white person" shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons…."

It is interesting to note that at least 16 members of the Virginia General Assembly who claimed to be descendants of Pocahontas objected to the first draft of the law they proposed, because it defined as "non-white" anyone with 1/64 of American Indian ancestry. Alabama and Georgia eventually copied the Virginia law. Within a decade, similar laws prohibiting inter-ethnic marriages and attempting to sort citizens by percentage of Jewish "blood" were adopted by the government of Nazi Germany.

The 1958 case of Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia initiated a challenge that would eventually overturn the law. That year, Mildred Jeter (a black woman) and Richard Loving (a white man) were married in the District of Columbia. After moving to Virginia, they were indicted for violating the Racial Integrity Act. They pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail. The trial judge suspended their sentences on the condition that they accept banishment from the state and not return together for 25 years. The judge's written opinion declared: Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with this arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the judge's decision, and the Lovings moved back to Washington, D.C. In 1963, another attempt to overturn their convictions in Virginia was unsuccessful. The Lovings finally appealed to the United States Supreme Court. By unanimous decision, in 1967 the Court struck down the Racial Integrity Act and similar laws of fifteen other states, saying: "[T]here can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause … Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state."

(source: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay7text.html)

States in the USA with anti-miscegenation laws, and the year the law was repealed

Ohio 1887

Oregon 1951

Montana 1953

North Dakota 1955

Colorado 1957

South Dakota 1957

California 1959

Nevada 1959

Idaho 1959

Arizona 1962

Utah 1963

Nebraska 1963

Indiana 1965

Wyoming 1965

Maryland 1967

Alabama 1967

Arkansas 1967

Delaware 1967

Florida 1967

Georgia 1967

Kentucky 1967

Louisiana 1967

Mississippi 1967

Missouri 1967

No. Carolina 1967

Oklahoma 1967

So. Carolina 1967

Tennessee 1967

Texas 1967

Virginia 1967

W. Virginia 1967

An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia

"An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia," by Marie Tyler-McGraw

On October 28, 2010, Marie Tyler-McGraw discussed her book An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia. The West African nation Liberia arose from the aspirations of the American Colonization Society, which attempted to persuade free blacks to emigrate from the United States to that colony. Ultimately, the colonization scheme failed, but Liberia endured. No state was more involved with the project than Virginia. Virginians figured prominently among both leaders of the ACS and among settlers building a new life in Africa. Though their paths rarely intersected, these black and white Virginians played key roles in founding Liberia. In this presentation based on her latest book, Marie Tyler-McGraw told this compelling story of hope and misunderstanding, race and freedom. Also the author of a history of Richmond, Dr. Tyler-McGraw is an independent scholar and public historian. The lecture was co-sponsored by The Richmond Forum in conjunction with its November 6, 2010 program, featuring President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia.

Virginia Historical Society

Paul Jennings was President James Madison's enslaved manservant

Paul Jennings, who was born a slave on President James Madison’s estate at Montpelier in 1799, was a "body servant" who attended the president until his death in 1836. Jennings later purchased his freedom from Daniel Webster. Webster acquired Jennings from Pollard Webb who in turn bought the manservant from Dolley Madison in 1846. After meeting the terms of his agreement with Webster, Jennings became a free man and found work at the Department of the Interior. In 1865, Jennings published, Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, the first memoir about the White House by one who had lived there. The publication remained obscure for many years because it was printed in a limited edition, but today it is acknowledged by scholars as a classic. It provided details about one of the most critical periods in the history of the city of Washington–the War of 1812–and the formation of the city’s enterprising free Negro community in the antebellum period. It also recounted Jennings’s involvement in a plan in 1848 to undertake a large-scale escape of slaves from the capital aboard the schooner Pearl.

Notorious slave site excavated in Virginia

David Zucchino of the Los Angeles Times reports on Thursday, December 18, 2008:The place called Lumpkin's Slave Jail was indeed a jail, but it was much more than that. It was a holding pen for human chattel.

In Richmond's Shockoe Bottom river district, the notorious slave trader Robert Lumpkin ran the city's largest slave-holding facility in the 1840s and 1850s. Tens of thousands of blacks were held in the cramped brick building while they waited to be bought and sold.

Those who resisted were publicly whipped.

"The individual would be laid down, his hands and feet stretched out and fastened in the rings, and a great big man would stand over him and flog him," a clergyman wrote after witnessing the punishment.

On Wednesday, black and white Richmond residents walked together across the rain-slicked cobblestones, excavated this month, that mark the outlines of the old slave jail. This former Confederate capital's announcement that Lumpkin's Jail had been found was the latest acknowledgment of its painful slave history.

Since Richmond's City Council formed the Slave Trail Commission in 1998, the city gradually has been unearthing and commemorating both the enslavement of blacks and their contributions to the city.

"This is a part of our history that was covered up for too long," said Charles Vaughan, a retired bus operator and commission member.

Richmond, which is 57 percent black, long has honored its Confederate past with monuments to Gen. Robert E. Lee, President Jefferson Davis and thousands of rebel soldiers. But only with its decadelong examination of the slave trail - which includes the jail, an adjoining Negro Burial Ground, and the slave marketplace and docks - has it shone a light on its dark legacy of slavery.

"It was hushed for so long," said Ana Edwards of the Sacred Ground Project, which erected an historical marker for the cemetery buried under a parking lot. "Slavery was not something anybody wanted to address."

Blacks called Lumpkin's Slave Jail "Devil's Half Acre." Some died there from abuse or disease. Thousands more were fed and groomed for sale at nearby slave markets, then sent by boat or rail to toil on farms and plantations throughout the Confederacy.

"They were literally sold down the river," said Philip Schwarz, a professor emeritus of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, standing a few feet from the jail site and gesturing toward the nearby James River.

From 1808, when the United States outlawed the international slave trade, to the end of the Civil War, an estimated 300,000 slaves were bought and sold in Richmond. Lumpkin, known as a "bully trader" for his harsh treatment of slaves, sold the men, women and children who became slaves in Southern states, where slavery remained legal.

Archaeologists discovered that Lumpkin's jail was actually a complex of brick buildings. In addition to the 20-by-41-foot, two-story jail, there was a kitchen, Lumpkin's residence and a boarding house where antebellum slave owners stayed while their slaves were readied for sale.

Digging through 15 feet of muck and fill dirt beneath a city-owned parking lot, archaeologists unearthed cobblestones and brick drains that formed the jail's perimeter. The jail was torn down in the 1870s.

"We're standing on a time capsule of Richmond's history," Matthew Laird, an archaeologist on the dig, said as he led commission members across the waterlogged site. "It's exciting to find such an intact and well-preserved site."

The discovery of the jail site continues the city's "public acknowledgment of Richmond's enslaved African-Americans," said Delores McQuinn, City Council vice president and chair of the Slave Trail Commission.

Because of the Slave Trail and the commemoration of "this infamous jail," McQuinn said, "generations to come won't have to do as much work to find out who they are and where they came from."

Kathleen Kilpatrick, director of the state Department of Historic Resources, said the jail has national significance. She called it "ground zero" for understanding the slave trade.

When Robert Lumpkin died, he left his jail to his widow - Mary Lumpkin, a black woman and former slave. In 1867, she gave the property to a minister who established a school for freed slaves.

Over the years, the school evolved into what is now Virginia Union University, a historically black college. (source LA Times)

Slave Grown Tobacco Money from Virginia

In 1618 without the African labor the colonist in Virginia were able to export 2,300 pounds of tobacco.

In 1622 with the labor of 25 African bodies the colonist were able to increase their tobacco exports to 60,000 pounds.

Four years later with those same 25 African laborers the increase was 300,000 pounds. Damn, those Negroes were working hard!

Move to 1775, the year before the Revolutionary War the Virginian colonist increased the enslaved population from 25 to 210,000 humans in perpetual bondage…on the dawn of the War for Freedom….does anyone see the irony……And what kind of yield did those 210,000 unpaid, unthanked, unappreciated, unnamed African slaves produce in Virginia tobacco exports…..100,000,000 pounds of tobacco.

Can you say somebody got really, really, really rich off of the labor of these men and women…..and their descendants are looked at as pathological and a governmental burden looking for a handout….If these black men and women were paid a fair wage for their labor and toil, from day one, maybe they wouldn’t need any money!