“Ole Satan’s Church is Here Below”: White Southern Religion and Black Female Resistance

in the Late Antebellum South (1831-1861)By Leif E. Trondsen

Preface

This study originally began life as a ten-page term paper for a

2003 upper division class in early American women’s history (HIST

485A) at California State University, Long Beach. It was to focus

on one aspect of the overall experience of enslaved black women

during the antebellum South, as raised in Harriet Jacob’s noted

1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, originally

published under the pseudonym of “Linda Brent.”1 Due to my

perennial interest in religious matters, I was intrigued by

Jacob’s description of a sermon delivered by the “pious” Rev.

Pike, a local Episcopal minister, to the black slaves living on

the plantation of Jacob’s master, Dr. Flint. This white clergyman

had sternly admonished his black flock, “Obey your old master and

your young master – your old mistress and your young mistress. If

you disobey your earthly master, you offend your heavenly Master.

You must obey God’s commandments!”2 The “aspect” of American

slavery that I desired to explore in-depth, therefore, became

1

this use of religion by white slaveowners as an apparent means of

social control over enslaved black women in the “Old South.” Over

the years, I have extensively revised and expanded this once

humble undergraduate term paper, with the hope, perhaps, of using

it as the basis for a future M.A. thesis in church history or

theology. I have not altered its original focus, however, only

refined it. Accordingly, this study is not intended to be an

examination of the overall history of American slavery or an

exploration of the general lives of blacks while living in

bondage; a number of excellent studies concerning these topics

already exist.3

Few scholars, however, have delved deeply into the question

of “how” and, in particular, “why” Southern planters, supported

by clergymen of all denominations, attempted to employ the

Christian faith as a tool for “pacification” of black slaves in

the late antebellum South. While this “new” wave of

evangelization began in the early 1830s, most historians of

American slavery have offered only vague or cursory explanations

for the rise of this historical phenomenon at this specific time

in Southern history. Ira Berlin, for example, in his masterful

2

work Generations of Captivity, writes that “during the fourth decade of

the nineteenth century, large numbers of planters took up the

Cross” for a variety of reasons. Some of these white

slaveholders, he argues, “themselves having accepted Christ,

acted out of a deep commitment to their faith” by evangelizing

their plantation slaves. Others, “stung by the antislavery

charge” that they denied their black slaves access to the

Christian faith, “moved to counter the abolitionist critique.”

Lastly, Berlin notes, still other planters viewed the

Christianization of enslaved Africans as a means of making the

latter more amenable “to their will” as well as “countering the

influence of black preachers.”4 Historian Norrece T. Jones, Jr.

offers similar generalized reasons for the Southern planter

class’s “change of heart” concerning slave evangelization around

this time.5

3

Former slave Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, had no

illusions as to the origins and timing of this effort by white

slaveholders to “Christianize” the millions of enslaved Africans

in the Old South in the three decades preceding the American

Civil War (1861-1865): the pervasive fear engendered in the

hearts of Southern planters by the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion of

1831 (see below).6 The latter followed hard upon decades-worth of

violent slave uprisings and mass conspiracies throughout the

antebellum South as well as in other parts of the Americas. To

quote historian Herbert Aptheker: “The Turner Revolt was the

extra drop of water that overflows a cup, it was the precipitated

pebble that causes ripples in the pond.”7 This latest slave

revolt in turn helped to galvanize the planter class into

“remaking” the overall façade of the institution of slavery in a

bid to quell such “commotions” among the South’s enslaved black

population. This newly formulated “paternalistic” slave order

developed a number of “mechanisms” of social control over black

plantation slaves, including the use of religion as an overt means

of “pacification.”8 This newest wave of planter-inspired

evangelization, therefore, was largely an act of desperation, and

4

not one of altruism, as some Southern slaveholders (and

historians) have attempted to portray it. Its goal, in fact, was

far more mundane: to maintain the planter class’s control over

Southern society in the face of growing foreign and domestic

opposition – including that from the enslaved black population

itself – to the very institution of slavery, the source of the

large planters’ lordly wealth, power, and status.

In light of its origins, therefore, the principal focus of

this paper is the impact of Christian evangelization by white

slaveholders upon the lives of black slave women and the

latter’s often determined resistance to it. Some readers may

regard this as far too narrow a theme. Nevertheless, it is well

to remember that, in many instances, “slavery, as has been before

remarked, falls with peculiar severity on the women.”9 This was

especially true concerning the widespread sexual abuse

experienced by enslaved black women at the hands of their white

masters as well as the retaliatory actions taken against them by

their white mistresses. Many of these same black slave women also

had to bear their masters’ children, only to see them sold off by

their white fathers to conceal the latter’s secret sins (see

5

below). Until quite recently, moreover, the lives of enslaved

African women received relatively little notice from historians.

The latter typically focused on the better documented and more

public lives of enslaved black males, such as Frederick Douglass.

(The work of historian Debra Gray White has been particularly

helpful in revealing the lives, sorrows, and struggles of black

women in bondage during the antebellum South.)10 Hopefully, this

study will help to rectify this scholarly imbalance and show that

enslaved black women were equally resistive to Southern slavery

(and Southern religion) as were their male counterparts.

Lastly, as will be apparent, I have quoted extensively from the

contemporary narratives of and interviews with black ex-slaves.

Some scholars may feel that it is far too “extensive,” violating

accepted norms concerning the amount of quotation material

allowed in any “serious” academic paper. Nevertheless, I believe,

the reader will be better served in hearing directly from the

writings or oral testimony of the former slaves themselves.

During their cruel captivity, enslaved Africans were brutally

deprived of a “voice” to express their own harrowing plights and

deep-seated hopes. I have no desire to further such an injustice.

6

Besides, my own pitiful and prosaic paraphrases would do little

service to the often eloquent and heartfelt expressions of those

who bore the many ravages of American slavery firsthand. This

paper is thus dedicated to all of those unfortunate black souls,

both male and female, who suffered years, decades, or even a

lifetime of bitter servitude in “the land of the free,” one which

all too often was sanctioned by the Christian churches of the

day.

Introduction

In the three decades preceding the American Civil War (1861-

1865), Southern slavery – that “peculiar institution” – underwent

a marked outward transformation from its earlier and often more

violent manifestation, when “slave owners wove brutal acts into

the fabric of their [slaves’] daily lives.”11 During this period,

many slaveholders throughout the South adopted an openly

“paternalistic” approach toward their African slaves. This change

was due in large part to a series of ominous slave rebellions and

conspiracies that swept both the Southern United States and the

Caribbean (see below). The last of these occurred on August 21,

1831 in Southampton County, Virginia and was orchestrated by Nat

7

Turner, a black slave and apocalyptic visionary. In a bloody two-

day rampage, Turner and his rebel army savagely butchered nearly

sixty white plantation owners and their family members as well as

sacked some fifteen plantation homesteads.12 After the Virginia

militia brutally suppressed Turner’s rebel force, a wave of fear

and hysteria “rocked Virginia’s white community to its

foundations and sent concussions throughout all of Dixie.”13

Large planters in particular realized that a “kinder and gentler”

institution of slavery – at least outwardly so – was required to

mollify the simmering resentment of their increasingly defiant

black slaves.

8

One crucial component of this new “paternalistic” slave-

order was what former slave Fredrick Douglass called “Southern

religion.”14 In an unholy alliance of mutual self-interest,

Southern pastors and planters propagated their own version of

Christianity among the South’s enslaved African population, one

which demanded black obedience to white authority and justified

racial inequality. “What have we in America? Why, we have slavery

made part of the religion of the land,” Douglass once thundered

to an English audience in 1846. “Yes, the pulpit there stands as

the great defender of this cursed institution, as it is called.

Ministers of religion come forward and torture the hallowed pages

of inspired wisdom to sanction the bloody deed. They stand forth

as the foremost, the strongest defenders of this institution,” he

added.15

This paper will examine “Southern religion” as it applied in

particular to the lives of enslaved African women during the late

antebellum South (c. 1831-1861). It will address the following

three overarching themes: First, the creation and usage of

Southern religion as a tool or “mechanism” of planter control

over black female slaves; Second, the types of physical and

9

mental abuses that these “paternalistic” practitioners of

Southern religion continued to employ against enslaved black

women to enforce the latter’s obedience; and Third, the

overwhelmingly negative response of these black slave women to

this distorted version of the Christian message. In examining

these themes, this paper will quote extensively from the

generally reliable narratives and testimonies of former black

slaves themselves (particularly the well-known autobiography of

Harriet Jacobs) as its principal frame of reference (see Appendix

1). Lastly, it will conclude with an overall assessment of the

efficacy of Southern religion as a “bulwark” of slavery in the

closing decades of the “Old South.”

The Genesis of Southern Religion

As noted above, during the early 1800s an unrelenting series of

violent slave rebellions and wide-spread conspiracies throughout

the Americas forced many white plantation owners to “remake” the

time-honored institution of slavery in the late antebellum South.

The classic study of violent resistence by enslaved Africans to

slavery in the Southern United States is Herbert Aptheker’s

groundbreaking study American Negro Slave Revolts, originally published

10

as a Ph.D dissertation in 1943. In this work, Aptheker

exhaustively documented scores of slave uprisings and

conspiracies, thereby dispelling the once commonly held notion

that enslaved blacks were “passive” participants in the two-and-

a-half century saga of American slavery and even in their

ultimate freedom from bondage.16 A few of these slave revolts

have entered the public consciousness, especially the Nat Turner

Rebellion discussed above, due to recent works by scholars of

African-American history and by novelist William Styron’s award-

winning but highly controversial 1967 book entitled The Confessions

of Nat Turner.17 Nevertheless, there were a number of lesser known –

or even completely covered up – slave plots or rebellions that

occurred prior to Nat Turner’s insurrection of 1831, ones which

have largely escaped the notice of scholars examining slavery in

the antebellum South.18

In 1829, for example, a “far-reaching” slave conspiracy was

uncovered by whites in Georgetown, South Carolina, after it was

betrayed by one of the black conspirators. The townspeople

immediately suppressed all news of the slave plot from the local

press and surrounding towns. A neighboring townsman, however,

11

leaked details of the conspiracy to the New Haven Advertiser, which

published the following:

A dangerous conspiracy was formed among the blacks at Georgetown…to massacre the whites. The plan was maturedin all its details, and the time fixed for its execution with such secrecy, that no doubts can be entertained of its certain and terrible success, had not one of the conspirators proved faint of heart, and betrayed the enterprise…About 20 of the ring leaders have been arrested, the residue of the slaves disarmed,and a very active and vigilant police system adopted todisconcert any further measures the slaves may attempt.

Nevertheless, this newspaper story was not widely circulated, and

so the conspriracy remained relatively “hushed up” for over a

century or more before it was uncovered by modern historians.19

Additionally, the journals of many Southern planters yield

tantalizing references concerning local slave rebellions and

conspiracies, some of which would have remain relatively unknown

except for these personal reminiscences of white plantation

owners. Thus, in 1804 then sixteen-year-old William J. Grayson, a

noted Southern defender of the “particular institution,” recorded

in his journal that he had learned about a “negro conspiracy”

while visiting the plantation of a cousin in St. Peter’s Parish,

South Carolina. There was “a rumor afloat” – one which proved to 19 See Jones, Born a Child of Freedom, pp. 182-83.

12

be only too true – that neighborhood slaves were plotting an

insurrection against their white owners. As often occurred in

such wide-ranging slave conspiracies, one of the participants

informed his master of the plot afoot – just hours prior to “the

time appointed for the outbreak.” The white planters and

authorities acted swiftly to stamp out this imminent slave

rebellion: they arrested and tried “ten or a dozen” ringleaders

“without delay,” then hanged them all in quick succession.

Furthermore, the ringleaders’ heads were cut off and stuck on

poles along a well-traversed highway, a stark and horrific

warning to enslaved Africans who may be considering violence

against their masters in the future.20

There did arise, however, a number of high profile slave

rebellions and conspiracies throughout the South during the first

three decades of the nineteenth century, the news of which was

impossible to suppress. One such attempted slave uprising was

that of Denmark Vesey in South Carolina, which occurred in 1822 –

just 9 years before the Nat Turner Rebellion discussed above. The

discovery of this slave conspiracy by white authorities just 20 Quoted in Theodore Rosengarten, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986), p. 118.

13

prior to its violent implementation undoubtedly spared the city

of Charleston from “terrible carnage,” since some officials

estimated that the conspiracy comprised as many as 9,000 slaves!2

1 In 1811, moreover, a bloody uprising did occur in Louisiana, as

anywhere from 200-500 slaves – many dressed in military uniforms

and all armed with guns, knives, and axes – marched on New

Orleans to sack the city and slaughter its white inhabitants.

“Their January march,” notes historian Daniel Rasmussen,

“represented the largest act of armed resistance against slavery

in the history of the United States.” A hasty alliance of French

planters and federal troops, however, brutally crushed this

uprising, killing over 100 rebels in the process. Subsequently,

Rasmussen argues, generations of Southern historians have

“covered up” this slave rebellion in order to present a more

benign picture of the “peculiar institution.”22 Finally, in 1800

Gabriel Prosser’s conspiracy was thwarted by vigilant white slave

owners in Virginia. Had this “carefully planned uprising” been

successful, thousands of enslaved blacks would have attacked and

burned the city of Richmond – the future capital of the

Confederacy!23

14

The ever-present “backdrop” to these domestic slave

insurrections was the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. The latter

was the most successful of the many African slave rebellions in

the Americas and established Haiti as an independent black

republic.24 On the evening of August 21, 1791, slave

representatives from all over the island had gathered at Bois

Caiman (Gator Wood) to pledge their resistance to and revenge

against their French colonial overlords. The onset of the French

Revolution, with its mesmerizing mantra of Liberté, égalité, fraternité

(Fr. for "Liberty, equality, fraternity”) had “inflamed the

imagination” of oppressed African slaves in all the French

colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called.

Everyone present at the gathering “took the solemn vow” in the

name of Ogun, the African god of war, “that they would kill white

slave owners and exact vengenance from slavery.”25 Thus began the

Haitian Revolution, which evolved into a particularly savage

racial conflict, one which cost well over 100,000 lives, mostly

civilian. Eventually, the victorious rebel general Toussaint

Louverture and his army of former African slaves defeated the

elite troops of Napoleon Bonaparte himself and proudly proclaimed

15

Haitian independence, much to the chagrin of the American and

European political establishments.26

The powerful reverberations of this victorious slave

uprising against the French were felt throughout all of the

Southern slaveholding states (and even the wider “Atlantic

World”).27 Nat Turner, for example, ultimately chose the date of

his slave uprising to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of

the Haitian Revolution.28 Denmark Vesey and his rebel forces,

moreover, planned to sail to Haiti – and freedom – after they had

seized and burned the city of Charleston.29 The success of the

Haitian rebels also inspired many of the leaders of the 1811 New

Orleans slave insurrection mentioned above. Indeed, the latter

well knew that the uniforms their rebel troops wore would “lend

the revolt authority, wedding their struggle with the imagery of

the Haitian Revolution, whose leaders had famously adopted

European military garb.”30 Lastly, Gabriel Prosser’s “bold

conspiracy” of 1800 to burn the city of Richmond, also mentioned

above, was directly inspired by the victorious Haitian rebels.31

26 For an excellent overview of the Haitian Revolution, see ibid., pp. 39-58. For a more thorough analysis, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Storyof the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

16

In light of the success of the Haitian Revolution, notes black

scholar Randall Robinson, “the days of involuntary servitude

were, at long last, numbered. Most everyone everywhere – enslaved

and enslaver alike – recognized that the countdown to slavery’s

end…had been set ticking by the Haitian Toussaint L’Ouverture,

and his triumphant army of ex-slaves.”32

It was the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, however, that left

an indelible imprint and nagging fear in the heart of the Old

South, especially in the states most affected by this latest

slave uprising. In its aftermath, for example, a veritable “reign

of terror followed in Virginia,” according to former slave and

later historian John W. Cromwell. He writes:

In little more than one day 120 Negroes were killed. The newspapers of the time contained from day to day indignant protests against the cruelties perpetrated [by the rebel slaves]. One individual boasted that he himself had killed between ten and fifteen Negroes. Volunteer whites rode in all directions visiting plantations. Negroes were tortured to death, burned, maimed and subjected to nameless atrocities. Slaves whowere distrusted were pointed out and if they endeavoredto escape, they were ruthlessly shot down.33

In some cases, free blacks were killed during this often

indiscriminate “retaliation” against any blacks living in

17

Virginia, especially in Southampton County, where the slave

uprising had occurred. This wave of “excitement” also spread to

neighboring states, especially the Carolinas (Southampton County

bordered North Carolina directly.) Thus, in these states, local

militias were hastily called up; armed planters stood vigil over

their estates for many nights; suspect slaves were rounded up and

often whipped; and other blacks were butchered for “sport” – and

as a vivid “warning”– by white vigilantes.34

The confidence of the Southern planter class in particular

was profoundly shaken by the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831. One

contemporary Virginian observer of this bloody slave

insurrection, for example, “nervously observed” in his plantation

journal: “It will long be remembered in the annals of our

country, and many a mother as she presses her infant darling to

her bosom, will shudder at the recollection of Nat Turner.”35 For

white plantation mistresses, such as Sarah Gayle of Alabama,

whose husbands were often away from home for weeks at a time due

to their additional duties in the public sphere, the “specter” of

Nat Turner’s uprising filled them with continual dread. In her

diary, for example, Gayle recorded her great anxiety at having to

18

spend the winter of 1831 alone, “without any protection, or any

friend to keep me company.”36 Additionally, historian Eric Foner

notes that in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion, “the

Virginia legislature, fearing, as one member put it, that ‘a Nat

Turner might be in every family,’ briefly debated a plan of

gradual emancipation” of Virginia’s enslaved Africans.37

Nevertheless, “reaction prevailed over reform,” as historian

Daniel Walker Howe rightly remarks. This proposed emancipation

plan, therefore, was narrowly defeated (67-60) in the Virginia

state legislature. “By this fateful procrastination,” Howe adds,

“Virginia statesmanship abdicated responsibility for dealing with

the state’s number one problem,” thereby helping to make the

issue of slavery the nation’s number one problem in the decades to

follow.38

Even a decade or more after the Nat Turner Rebellion, whites

remained “skittish” regarding any unauthorized gatherings,

religious or otherwise, of black slaves in Virginia and the

Carolinas. Thus, former slave Charity Bowery of North Carolina

told interviewers in 1847-1848:

19

All colored folk were afraid to pray in the time of oldprophet Nat. There was no law about it; but the whites reported it round among themselves, that if a note was heard, we should have some dreadful punishment; and after that, the low whites [i.e., the patrollers] wouldfall upon any slaves they heard praying or singing a hymn, and often killed them before their masters or mistresses could get to them.39

Black slaves, the white Southerners believed, could no longer be

trusted “on their own” with matters of religion, as Nat Turner

had once been by his master (see below).

The Nat Turner Rebellion, on the other hand, caused an

electrifying effect among the South’s enslaved population, as the

testimony of former slave Charity Bowery of North Carolina –

related by her interviewer – again confirmed:

But nothing seemed to have excited her imagination as much as the insurrection of Nat Turner. The panic that prevailed throughout the slave States on that occasion of course reached her ear [in North Carolina] in repeated echoes, and the reasons are obvious why it should have awakened intense interest. It was a sort ofHegira to her mind, from which she was prone to date all important events in the history of her limited world.40

Nat Turner’s insurrection against white rule, moreover, remained

alive in the rich heritage of African-American folklore of

Southhampton County, as WPA interviews of former Virginia slaves

20

conducted in the 1930s clearly demonstrated.41 Indeed, as

historian Stephen B. Oates discovered in his research for his

1973 study of this nineteenth- century slave revolt, the stirring

memory of the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831 continues to resonate

among the black population in southeastern Virginia to the present

day!42

During Nat Turner’s insurrection, the very real threat to

the safety of the white planters and their families had emerged

from an unexpected source: enslaved black women. Historian Mary

Kemp Davis notes that, while it is unclear whether female slaves

participated in the original planning process, there did exist

reports of a “shadowy” female figure who rode with Turner and his

men during their attacks on Southampton’s plantation homes.43

Other enslaved black women, however, “opportunistically” joined

the fray and turned on their white mistresses in particular. In

fact, two of these female rebels paid with their lives for such

“gross” insubordination. Thus, in the aftermath of the revolt,

one black slave woman, an 18-20-year-old named “Lucy,” stood

trial and was hanged for the attempted murder of her mistress.

Another female slave, a woman named “Charlotte,” was summarily

21

executed by the husband of her white mistress for threatening the

latter with a “dirk.”44 The focus of planter paternalism with its

accompanying slave evangelization, therefore, was black male and

female slaves, both of whom had threatened the social order of

the Old South during the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831.

In a determined effort to forego any further slave

uprisings, many white Southern planters at this time adopted a

new “persona” in relationship to their black slaves, that of pater

familias (or “paternal head of the household”) and asserted their

“paternal interest” in all facets of the lives of their slaves.

Historian Ira Berlin writes:

This systematic application of the language of family to every aspect of the

master- slave relationship elevated the importance ofthe domestic metaphor. From

this new perspective, the plantation joined master and slave together in a

collective enterprise that benefited all. Planters – particularly the great ones – and

their apologists spoke grandly of “their people” and “their family,” black and

white, asserting the mutual affection between master and slave and bemoaning the

heavy responsibilities of mastership.45

Unfortunately, this is the image of the antebellum Southern

plantation that has captured the popular imagination in America

22

(see Appendix 2). This “romanticized” view of plantation life is

due largely to the influence of the 1936 best-selling novel (and

later highly successful film adaptation of) Gone with the Wind by

Margaret Mitchell and of the “idyllic” memoirs of many scions of

the once great slave-holding families of the Old South.

Concerning Gone With the Wind (1939), this “most popular of all

American films,” historian Eric Foner notes that it is “filled

with stock characters reflecting Hollywood’s view of the era’s

history – loyal slaves, unruly black soldiers, untrustworthy

scalawags and carpet-baggers, noble Klansmen.” Although most

viewers of Gone With the Wind are primarily focused on the troubled

romance between the lead characters Scarlett O’Hara and Red

Butler, nevertheless, they “imbibe a grossly distorted view of

history all the same,” adds Foner.46 Additionally, Historian

Catherine Clinton identifies another best-selling novel and its

film adaptation that have served to perpetuate the romanticized

portrait of the Old South in American popular culture as well. In

1958 author Kyle Onstott wrote a “formulaic novel” about

antebellum plantation life called Mandingo, which developed an

“eager” following. A 1975 film version of Mandingo, moreover,

23

served as an “updated version of the plantation myth, provid[ing]

a vehicle for sensational ‘erotic’ themes – incest, flagellation,

interracial sex” for the more “liberated” movie-going audience of

the post-1960s “sexual revolution” generation!47

A good example of the “halcyon” memoirs of the descendants

of the great slaveholding families is the engaging 1947

autobiography by Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, the great

granddaughter of a Georgia planter named William Lumpkin. Thus,

in discussing the role of William Lumpkin’s heir, Adoniram Judson

Lumpkin, as the new patriarch of the family plantation, Du Pre

Lumpkin writes:

Grandfather was a heavily burdened man. There can be nodoubt it meant this to be a resident cotton planter, whose plantation was a community and a business rolled into one. As children we may have dwelt in our minds onthe “big house,” and the life that went on there, as weheard or imagined it. Not so with Grandfather…[He] would spend most of his waking hours and by far the greater part of his mental labor on the part of this place that centered in slave quarters, stables, and springhouse, and the work radiating out into the fieldsfrom this hub of all activity.48

Du Pre Lumpkin rarely comments, however, on the far heavier

“burden” of the black field slaves, who toiled from sunup until

sundown to earn this “collective” business enterprise a sizeable

24

profit, so that the Lumpkin clan could live in relative comfort

and ease!

This new “paternal care” on the part of white planters also

extended to the spiritual lives of their black slaves. There had

existed earlier attempts to “Christianize” the millions of

enslaved Africans in the South, some of whom were Muslim,

principally during the eighteenth century by the Society to

Propagate the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Nevertheless, these

missionary attempts were rarely conducted in any systematic

fashion and only reached “a tiny percentage” of the overall slave

population.49 Such efforts by “outsiders” to evangelize the

South’s enslaved Africans, moreover, often faced considerable

opposition by the great planters themselves: the catechetical

process normally included the teaching of literacy – a

“dangerous” activity in the eyes of many white Southerners.50 For

example, former slave Frederick Douglass recorded that, when he

was a child, his mistress Mrs. Auld began to instruct him in “the

A, B, C.” His master Thomas Auld, however, summarily ended these

literary lessons with the following admonition to his wife:

25

“Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at oncebecome un-manageable, and of no value to his master. Asto himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”51

Additionally, as historian Danielle R. Johnson points out, many

Southern slaveholders feared that “the baptism of slaves would

have signified an acknowledgement of their humanity… or demand

equal treatment of Blacks as Christian brothers and sisters.” It

could even lead, they believed, to the eventual emancipation of

their African slaves.52

During the first decades of the Second Great Awakening (c.

1790-1840), however, some white planters may well have been

genuinely interested in evangelizing their slaves “for the sake

of their eternal salvation.” Nevertheless, as historian John

Lofton points out: “It is well to remember that in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries religious ministrations

to Negroes, whatever they were, were largely confined to those

who were near at hand.” The latter entailed primarily black house

servants and skilled slaves living in urban environments, who

came within the perview of the “already existing ecclesiastical

26

machinery.” Moreover, as Lofton further notes, “The plantation

mission, reaching into remote areas, was instituted largely after

1830.” By the time of Nat Turner’s insurrection, it should also

be observed, this tide of revivalism was largely spent in the

Southern states.53

The Nat Turner Rebellion, however, highlighted the dangers

of this previously haphazard and tentative approach toward

Christian evangelization of the slave population in the Old

South. Turner, like many enslaved blacks before 1831, had been

allowed to attend local services largely unsupervised by his

white owners. In fact, his masters actually encouraged the

intelligent slave as a boy and young man to pursue his interests

in literacy and religion as well as allowed him considerable

freedom of movement on Sundays to preach to many of Southampton’s

slave congregations.54 Based on this initial religious education,

however, Turner formulated his own fanatical vision of

Christianity, one which included the violent overthrow and

wholesale slaughter of the white slaveholders by their oppressed

black slaves – the new “Children of Israel” – in a final bloody

Armageddon. Indeed, Turner himself provided great insight into

27

his own apocalyptic thinking in an extended three-day series of

“Confessions” following his capture six weeks after the rebellion

he led.55 (He was later tried, convicted, and hanged for the

murder of 55 whites.)

Although some scholars over the years have doubted the

authenticity of Nat Turner’s “Confessions,” many today believe it

to be essentially genuine, since it “has an unmisitakable

consistency” and “very little contrary evidence to confront.”56

The “Confessions” was recorded by Dr. Thomas Gray, a white

physician who visited Turner in prison prior to the latter’s

trial and execution. In this remarkable document, Nat Turner

outlined the motives that led him to violently rebel against

white rule.57 From his youth, Turner believed himself to be under

the influence of “Divine inspiration” and ultimately “ordained

for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.” Through

visions and miracles provided by “the Spirit,” Turner believed

that “the day of judgment was at hand.” Following an eclipse of

the sun, which he interpreted as a divine “sign,” Turner finally

understood the “great purpose” for which God had prepared him: “I

should arise and prepare myself and slay my enemies with their

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own weapons.” In a “calm” voice and with “deliberate composure,”

Nat Turner then related to Dr. Grey the bloodbath that he and his

men unleased upon the unsuspecting white inhabitants of

Southampton County, which included the mutilation and beheading

of most of their victims (primarily women and children).

Following Turner’s execution, Dr. Grey published the

“Confessions” as a pamphlet, which was widely circulated

throughout the Old South, providing horrific reading – and

continual nightmares – for the white slaveholders who read it.58

The testimony of ex-slave Harriet Jacobs stated

unequivocally that the Nat Turner Rebellion – and not white

“altruism” or religious “revivalism” – served as the principal

catalyst for the new wave of planter-inspired evangelization

which occurred during the three decades preceeding the American

Civil War (1861-1865). “After the alarm caused by Nat Turner’s

insurrection had subsided,” she wrote, “the slaveholders came to

the conclusion that it would be well to give the slaves enough of

religious instruction to keep them from murdering their

masters.”59 Frederick Douglass too commented on the “alarm and

terror” which gripped white planters following the Nat Turner

29

Revolt, which was the culmination of decades-worth of violent

slave insurrections and wide-ranging conspiracies that rocked the

Old South.60 Accordingly, nearly every facet of this new wave of

planter-inspired evangelization after 1831 repeatedly emphasized

one overriding theme: complete black submission to white authority

(see below). Former slave George Ross of Maryland, for example,

testified that, “The religious feeling is used to induce the

slaves that they owe a duty to their masters & mistresses, more

than to their great maker above. Certain parts of the Scripture, about

obeying masters and mistresses, they quote very much, but not in

the right light.”61 Ex- slave Henry James Trentham of North

Carolina also stated that on the plantation chapel “the preacher

told us to obey our missus and marster. He told us we must be

obedient to them. Yes, sir, that’s what he told us.”62

Therefore, as historian Eugene D. Genovese remarks, Southern

slaveholders now came to regard Christianity “primarily as a

means of social control” or pacification of enslaved Africans;

they thus abandoned their earlier opposition to slave

evangelization (though not to slave literacy). “Now they feared

slaves without religion even more,” Genovese adds.63 Sociologist

30

George P. Rawick also notes that, “The slaves understood that the

official religion was being used as a method of social control

and it is clear that for many slaves it simply didn’t work.”64

Historian Eric Blake McLendon concurs with the above assessments

concerning Southern religion: “Planters gave their full support

to slave membership after Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. The

rebellion spooked slaveholders and made them more amenable to the

churches’ claims that properly controlled religious education was

the key to regulating slave behavior and preventing similar

rebellions in the future.”65

In the three decades following Nat Turner’s insurrection,

therefore, large numbers of white planters “took up the cross,”

as Ira Berlin again writes:

They supported the denominational missions to the stillskeptical slaves, welcomed itinerants onto their estates, and paid them to tutor their slaves in the Bible, visit the sick, attend funerals, and even perform marriages. Some built plantation chapels for

their slaves. A few led their “black families” in prayer, just as they did their white family. Operating against restrictive legislation passed in thewake of the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, they even encouraged slaves to take to the pulpit, if not as preachers – which was illegal in many states – then as exhorters and deacons. 

31

Berlin concludes that, “For many masters, the paternalistic

burden became a Christian burden, and Christian responsibilities

became the slaveholders’ responsibilities.”66

Certainly, this image of a pious “Christian” patriarch,

concerned with the moral and spiritual welfare of the “charges” –

both black and white – living on his plantation homestead, was

the one which the great planters in particular desired to project

to Southern society as a whole and even to the Northern states.

One such depiction is recorded by Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin

(mentioned above):

Religion was in no way incidental to these middle Georgia antebellum planters. As they were solid, ambitious men, conscious of responsibilities of rulership, so were they pious and God-fearing,…with an acutely developed sense of duty…It was a simple faith with little adornment: these men believed in church, ingoing to church, in training their charges, be they children or slaves, in religious duties; they believed,without undue commotion about it, in heaven and hell and prayer, in the Bible and salvation, and of course in immersion.67

Such a biblically inspired and paternalistic “persona” served to

justify the large planters’ position and privileges within the

66 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 206. See also Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), pp. 161-62.67 Du Pre Lumpkin, Making of a Southerner, pp. 11-12.

32

slaveholding system of the South – over both whites and blacks –

as well as to counteract the harsh caricatures of Southern slave

owners advanced by the nascent abolitionist movement in the

North.

Plantation mistresses, the wives of the great planters, were

also involved with their husbands in such plantation mission

work, since the mistress was viewed by Southern society as the

“spiritual guardian of the culture and ‘conscience’ of the

plantation.”68 Thus, Louisa Harrison, the wife of a wealthy

Episcopalian planter from Alabama, regularly conducted Sunday

services for the plantation slave community, as one contemporary

white writer “romantically recalled”:

Every Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Harrison is in her place now teaching the Bible lesson to her slaves, now playing the organ and leading in the singing of the hymns. Her house may be filled with charming [white] guests, but she permitted nothing to interrupt her in her religious service, she leaves them to go to her waiting black people.

This pious plantation mistress also taught a catechism class to

black slave children as well.69

Some plantation mistresses, however, found less time-

consuming and laborious means of assisting in the evangelization

33

of their black slaves. Former slave Solomon Northup, for example,

recorded an incident whereby a plantation mistress gave a Bible

to one of her slaves named Sam, who had become deeply interested

in “the subject of religion.” Nevertheless, this action drew deep

disapproval from white visitors to the plantation, who remarked

that any whites who allowed such independent reading of the Bible

by their black slaves were “not fit to own a nigger.”70 Ex-slave

C. H. Hall of Maryland related a similar story to that of

Northrup. His mistress “old madam Bean,” who was a devout

Baptist, believed that her slaves should “learn to spell and read

the Bible.” To that end, she instructed slave children, joined by

the now adolescent Hall, in basic literacy skills. Mistress

Bean’s husband, however, continually opposed this action, but to

no avail.71 As Master Bean was well aware, following the Nat

Turner Rebellion of 1831, a number of Southern states had

outlawed such lessons in slave literacy, with harsh penalties

assessed against all offenders, both black and white (see below).

In this new effort at Christian evangelization, moreover,

Southern planters were assisted by a host of preachers and

prelates (mostly from Protestant denominations), who served as

34

the main architects and promoters of Southern religion, as

Frederick Douglass observed above. In fact, there existed a

nearly “symbiotic” relationship between clergymen and the planter

class in the Old South. Slaveholding planters, for example,

largely influenced the selection of Southern pastors and priests

due to the polity of most Protestant denominations: the

congregations themselves normally selected their respective

clergymen. In the Episcopal Church, for example, the vestry, the

lay administrative arm of the congregation, hired (and thus could

dismiss) the local parish priest. Throughout the South, however,

mostly prominent planters held key vestry positions and thus

selected pro-slavery priests.72 In fact, George Washington

himself, who was also a respected Virginia slaveholder, served as

a vestryman for twenty-two years at his local Episcopal parish of

Truro during the late eighteenth century.73 Thus, former slave

Henry Bibb remarked that “slaveholders are put into the highest

offices in the gift of the people in both Church and State,

thereby making slaveholding popular and respectable.”74

Many members of the Southern clergy, moreover, came from or

married into important slaveholding families. To show their

35

“orthodoxy” concerning slavery to their social peers, these

“ministers of the Gospel” even owned slaves themselves. For

example, former slave George Ross from Maryland testified to the

American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission in 1863: “I have known

instances where clergymen owned slaves – Methodist preachers &

Presbyterian preachers, I believe. We had one in our place that

owned seven or eight, and also sold them.”75 However, as two

scholars have recently observed, “Among church people, a

significant percentage of the slaveholding population in the

South were Episcopalians, and two of the largest slaveholders in

the country – Leonidas Polk of Louisiana and Stephen Elliott of

Georgia – were Episcopal bishops.”76 Indeed, Bishop Polk himself

famously joined the Confederate Army – as a general –to defend the

slaveholding system of the Old South. During the Civil War,

General Polk was killed in action while participating in the

Atlanta Campaign of 1864 and later given a lavish funeral by his

fellow slaveholders.77 Another prominent Episcopal clergyman and

slaveholder who served the Southern cause as a general was

William N. Pendleton, a Virginia parish rector, who eventually

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became Robert E. Lee’s chief of artillery for most of the

conflict.78

Recently, filmmaker Katrina Browne dramatically visited the

question of slavery among Northern “absentee” planters, many of

whom were Episcopal clergymen, in the 2001 documentary film

entitled Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. Browne researched

her DeWolf family’s long history in Bristol, Rhode Island (a New

England state which remained loyal to the Union cause during the

Civil War) and discovered that she belong to the largest slave

trading family in U.S. history!79 Indeed, she writes:

From 1769 to 1820, DeWolf fathers, sons and grandsons trafficked in human beings. They sailed their ships from Bristol, Rhode Island to West Africa with rum to trade for African men, women and children. Captives were taken to plantations that the DeWolfs owned in Cuba or were sold at auction in such ports as Havana and Charleston. Sugar and molasses were then brought from Cuba to the family-owned rum distilleries in Bristol. Over the generations, the family transported more than ten thousand enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage. They amassed an enormous fortune. By the end of his life, James DeWolf had been a U.S. Senator and was reportedly the second richest man in the United States.

Moreover, this Northern slave-trading family had deep ties to the

Protestant Episcopal Church. James DeWolf Perry, for example,

37

served as the Church’s presiding bishop, while Mark Anthony

DeWolf Howe was an Episcopal bishop in Rhode Island.80

Historian James T. Fisher, moreover, points out that

“American Catholicism’s treatment of African Americans did not

differ notably from that of other Christian denominations in the

decades prior to the Civil War.”81 In fact, former slave

Charlotte Brooks found conditions on the sugarcane plantations in

“Catholic” Louisiana far less tolerable than was true on the

plantation estates in “Protestant” Virginia, from where she had

been sold:

Mistress was Catholic, and her church was a good ways off, and she did not go often to church. In rolling season we all worked Sunday and Monday grinding cane. Old marster did not care for Sunday; he made us all work hard on Sunday as well as any other day when he was pushed up. ‘Most all the planters worked on Sunday in rolling season where I lived. In Virginia every bodyrested and would go to church on Sunday, and it was strange to see every body working on Sunday here. O, how I used to wish to hear some of the old Virginia [Protestant] hymns!82

In Virginia (and many of the surrounding states), it was

customary on Sundays for enslaved blacks to be exempt from their

daily drudgery to properly celebrate the Christian Sabbath at

their local church or plantation chapel.

38

Additionally, the relatively limited numbers of Roman

Catholic clergy and religious orders in the slaveholding states

were not “without sin” in this regard. Fisher also points out

that well into the 1830s the Jesuits in Maryland owned slaves,

“though many younger members of the community wished to see them

freed.” These slaves were ultimately sold rather than granted

their freedom in 1837-38, “partly to raise capital for

educational enterprises.”83 The members of the Vincentian order in

Missouri, moreover, were major slaveholders in Perry County, just

south of St. Louis. Indeed, by 1830 the Vincentians held the

“largest number of slaves among the slaveholders in the area.”

This religious order even sold many of these enslaved Africans,

often to slave traders from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia

(i.e., the much-dreaded “Deep South”).84 Nevertheless, there is

little evidence that Catholic clergy launched a systematic defense

of slavery as an “institution” as did their Protestant

counterparts in the South at this time (see below). Indeed, many

Catholic leaders were “uneasy” with the practice of chattel

slavery in the Southern states.85

39

Two noted scholars of American slavery, however, have

remarked that, “It would be a mistake and an injustice to

interpret the proslavery stance of the[se] ministers as a supine

capitulation to Caesar and Mammon...Rather, the great majority

should be understood as having the shared values and attitudes of

their congregations.”86 While “shared values and attitudes”

certainly played an important role in shaping the views of

Southern clergymen concerning slavery, clearly “Mammon” (i.e.,

financial interest) and social “acceptance” were major factors in

this regard as well. Thus, historian Page Smith remarks: “In the

suppression of antislavery arguments, the various Christian

churches played a leading role. It was estimated that two-fifths

of the Baptist clergymen of South Carolina owned slaves and two

hundred traveling Methodist ministers held 1,600 slaves among

them.” Smith concludes that “slaveholding by the clergy came to

be a kind of test of a clergyman’s loyalty to the slave

system.”87 Episcopal archivist Julia E. Randle, moreover, notes

that in 1860 approximately 82 percent of the the Episcopal clergy

in the Diocese of Virginia were slaveholders, with some clergymen

owning dozens of slaves. She concludes: “In short, the Episcopal

40

Church in the Diocese of Virginia could not help but have

economic ties to slavery. Involuntary servitude was the basis of

Virginia’s economy, which ultimately produced the disposable

income that supported the church.”88 Accordingy, the religious

establishment – both Catholic and Protestant – had a vested

interest in maintaining the socioeconomic status quo in the late

antebellum South.

In a systematic effort to “pacify” the plantation slaves

following the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, these white clergymen

of all denominations employed a variety of religious “mechanisms

of social control” at their disposal: weekly sermons, specially-

tailored slave catechisms, highly selective readings of biblical

passages, and access to church membership. An example of the

sermons to which these slaves were subjected is one given by

Episcopal Bishop William Meade of Virginia in 1856:

Poor creatures! You little consider, when you are idle and neglectful of your master’s business, when you steal, and waste, and hurt any of their substance, whenyou are saucy and impudent, when you are telling them lies and deceiving them, or when you prove stubborn andsullen, and will not do the work you are set about without stripes and vexation – you do not consider, I say, that what faults you are guilty of towards your masters and mistresses are faults against God himself,

41

who hath set your masters and mistresses over you in his stead, and expects that you would do for them just as you would do for him. And pray do not think that I want to deceive you when I tell you that your masters and mistresses are God’s over-seers, and that, if you are faulty towards them, God himself will punish you severely for it in the next world...89

The bishop’s sermon, moreover, was widely circulated throughout

the South for other preachers or planters to use with their own

slave congregations.90

Bishop Meade delivered another condescending sermon for

slaves, also popular with Southern slaveholders, this time

concerning “correction” (i.e., “whipping”), which included the

following admonishment: “Now, when correction is given you, you

either deserve it, or you do not deserve it. But whether you

deserve or not it is your duty, and Almighty God requires, that

you bear it patiently.” Slaves should do the latter because,

Bishop Meade reminds them, they may well have committed wrongs

against their master which were “never discovered.” Certainly,

God would not allow such secret offenses to go unpunished! And

so, the pious bishop exhorts his black audience, “Ought you not

in such a case to give glory to Him, and be thankful that He

would rather punish you in this life for your wickedness, than

42

destroy your souls for it in the next life?”91 This emphasis on

“heavenly” rewards for “earthly” suffering was a common feature

of white sermons to black slave congregations.

Numerous slave naratives and testimony from the period

recorded similar sermons by Southern preachers demanding black

obedience to their white masters as well as repeating the

“divine” prohibition against slaves stealing from their masters.

One such lengthy and demeaning sermon was given by a local

Episcopal priest to the slaves of the plantation on which ex-

slave Harriet Jacobs lived, whom this clergyman berated as

“rebellious sinners!” This “pious” white preacher also informed

his black audience that, “Your hearts are filled with all manner

of evil. ‘Tis the devil that tempts you. God is angry with you,

and will surely punish you, if you don’t forsake your wicked

ways,” which included “feasting on your masters’ substance” in

secret.92 Former slave V. Waters McIntosh of Arkansas related

another slave sermon given by a white preacher to his slave

congregation, the “substance” of which was as follows: “Now when

you servants are working for you masters,” the white preacher

intoned, “you must be honest. When you go to the mill, don’t

43

carry an extra sack and put some of the meal or the flour in for

yourself. And when you women are cooking in the big house, don’t

make a big pocket under your dress and put a sack of coffee and a

sack of sugar and other things you want in it.”93

Additionally, former slave Mattie Curtis of North Carolina

testified that some white preachers would conclude these sermons

with the stern admonition that slaves who “sassed” their white

folk would “go to hell alive!” Ex-slave Sarah Fitzpatrick of

Alabama, on the other hand, recalled that her white preacher

provided a more “positive” variation on this theme. The later

exhorted the members of his black congregation “to mind deir

Marster an’ b’have deyself an’ dey’ll go to Hebben when dey

die.”94 Other white preachers, however, concluded their sermons

to black audiences by reminding the latter “how lucky they were

to be here [in America] rather than in ‘dark and benighted

Africa.’”95 Nevertheless, ex-slave Henry Bibb remarked that such

demeaning sermons by white preachers were largely ineffectual

with black slave congregations. “And the slaves, with but a few

exceptions, have no confidence at all in their preaching, because

they preach pro-slavery doctrine,” he stated.96

44

The denominational catechisms of the day also emphasized the

religious duty of slaves to obey their masters and mistresses.

These “injunctions to obedience,” notes historian John W.

Blassingame, “were skillfully inserted in the places where they

would have the maximum impact.”97 The popular 1859 Plantation

Catechism, for example, contained the following religious

instruction:

Ques. What is the fifth commandment?

Ans. Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land

which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Ques. What does this commandment require you to do?

Ans. This commandment requires me to respect and to obey my father and

mother, my master and mistress, and everybody else that has authority

over me.98

This “device” of “conjoin[ing] masters, mistresses, overseers,

and drivers with either parents, ministers, or civil authorities”

was, in fact, a “favorite” one in the specially designed slave

97 Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 87. For a thorough overview of the origin of the catechism in American Protestantism and its adoption by the pro-slavery clergy and planters of the Old South, see Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Colombia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 128-31.

45

catechisms during the three decades following the Nat Turner

Rebellion of 1831.99

Plantation preacher Charles C. Jones also included direct

biblical references in A Catechism for Colored People of 1834 in an

effort to convince enslaved Africans that obedience to one’s

masters and mistresses was “divinely ordained”:

Ques. What command has God given to Servants concerning the obedience to their masters?

Ans. “Servants be obedient to them that are your Masters, according to the flesh.” – Eph. 6.5

Ques. If the servant professes to be a Christian, ought he not to set an example to all other Servants of love and obedience to his Master?

Ans. Yes.

Ques. And if his Master is a Christian, ought he not especially love and obey

him?

Ans. Yes. – 1 Tim. 6:1-2.

Ques. Is it right for the Servant to run away; or is it right to harbor a runaway?

Ans. No.100

46

(The scriptural passage that allegedly “prohibits” the aiding or

abetting of runaway slaves is discussed below.)

Episcopal archivist John Sykes, however, has denied that

these plantation catechisms were employed by white masters as “a

form of mind control” over their black slaves. Although Sykes

agrees that these “simplified” slave catechisms were “tailored

specifically for slave congregations in language and tone,” such

rote memorization of the Episcopal Church’s Catechism, he

emphasizes, was required of all catechumens, regardless of race,

who desired confirmation within the Church. Nevertheless, as

Sykes himself notes elsewhere, white planters expanded the

slaves’ version of the Catechism to include additional material

to justify “the unique relationship of authority created by

slavery” as well as to explain “the reward for such obedience.”101

Thus, former slave Sarah Fitzpatrick of Alabama remarked that,

“Our white fo’ks made us go to church an’ Sunday School too. Dey

made us read de Chatechism. G’ess de re’son fo’ dat wuz, dey tho’t it made us

min’ dem bedder.”102

Many preachers of Southern religion also selectively – and

often speciously – quoted biblical verses to black plantation

47

congregations to enforce slave obedience (see Appendix 3). The

writings of the Apostle Paul, for example, were particular

favorites:

Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with

fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; Not with eye-

service, as menpleasers; but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the

heart; With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: Knowing that

whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord,

whether he be bond or free (Eph. 6:5-8, KJV).103

Another popular Pauline verse was Philemon 8-22, in which Paul

returned a runaway slave named Onesimus to his former Christian

owners, with the admonition that the slave be received as “a

brother beloved.” Southern preachers, of course, ignored

altogether this plea by Paul of better treatment for Onesimus and

focused solely on the fact that the great Apostle himself had

“returned a runaway.”104 Some even supplemented these biblical

verses with the so-called “slave beatitudes,” a grotesque

recasting of Christ’s own beloved Beatitudes (see Matt. 5:3-10):

“blessed are the patient, blessed are the faithful, blessed are

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the cheerful, blessed are the submissive, blessed are the

hardworking, and, above all, blessed are the obedient.”105

It is important to note that the so-called “Curse of Ham,”

an interpretation of Gen. 9:21-27 advanced by some religious

supporters of slavery, was confined primarily to the greater

discourse of Southern theologians with their Northern brethren;

it rarely appears to have “filtered” its way down to the sermons

of white plantation preachers or owners.106 In brief, this

biblical episode involves the “drunkenness of Noah,” in which the

biblical patriarch drank an excessive amount of wine and fell

asleep naked. Ham, one of Noah’s sons, saw his father’s nakedness

and quickly informed his brothers Shem and Japheth. The latter,

walking backward so as not to view their father “uncovered,”

proceeded to place a garment upon Noah. When he awoke, Noah

sternly pronounced a curse upon Ham for viewing his father’s

nakedness: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be

unto his brethren” (Gen. 9:25). In an amazing feat of biblical

exegesis, the Northern clergyman Josiah Priest in two well

circulated tracts (1843 and 1852 respectively) “elaborate[d] a

fantastic rereading of the curse of Ham that confused the color

49

of Africans’ skins with their purported sexual excess…”107 In this

contorted interpretation of the biblical tale, moreover, Priest

transformed black Africans into the direct descendants of these

“cursed” Canaanites! (It should be noted that the Canaanites were

an indigenous people of ancient Palestine and not black

Africans!) Although many Southern theologians gladly seized upon

Priest’s ideas that blacks were “divinely ordained” to slavery,

such blatant racism was often considered too “rabid [even] in the

slaveholding South.”108

Regardless of the circumstances, Southern preachers and

planters do not appear to have incorporated the “Curse of Ham”

into their plantation sermons, as few of the slave narratives and

testimony from this period mention this biblical “justification”

of black slavery. One of these rare references is that of former

slave Gus Rogers in testimony collected by a member of the WPA in

the 1930s. After recounting the tale of Noah’s drunkenness and

curse which he had heard from a white preacher, Rogers stated to

his white interviewer: “So, Miss, there we are, and that is the

way God meant us to be. We have always had to follow the white

folks…and that’s all there is to it. You just can’t get away from

50

what the Lord said.”109 Nevertheless, the baleful legacy of this

supposed biblical justification of black slavery lingered on in

the South well after the emancipation of enslaved Africans in

1865. Thus, catechisms used by blacks themselves during the 1920s

necessarily included “ammunition to defend against antiblack

ideas,” including this earliar notion that the Curse of Noah in

the book of Genesis “justified the enslavement of Africans (the

supposed descendents of Ham)…”110

The early Church Fathers, it should be pointed out, had a

very different reading of Gen. 9:21-27. St. John Chrysostom (c.

350-407 AD), for example, in a famous sermon concluded his

discussion of the Curse of Ham with the following remark: “Do you

see that slavery came from sin, and wickedness introduced

slavery?”111 For the great saint, and for many of his fellow

Church Fathers (see below), slavery in general – no particular

peoples are mentioned – is the result of human “sin” and

“wickedness” and not of God’s ordering! Unfortunately, some

Southern Catholic clergymen, such as Roman Catholic Bishop August

Marie Martin of Louisiana, did incorporate the “Curse of Ham”

into their theological justification of slavery, although mostly

51

to Northern theologians and abolitionists.112 Nevertheless,

Catholic priests and (especially) bishops had little excuse for

such “spotty” exegesis; they were normally well-trained in the

Tradition of the Church, which entailed a broad exposure to the

writings of the Church Fathers, including St. John Chrysostom

and, in particular, St. Augustine (see below).

Lastly, some white clergymen in the late antebellum South

even subjected enslaved blacks who desired to enter their

congregations to rigorous examinations to ensure that the slaves

were properly “pacified.” Thus, ex-slave James Smith of Virginia,

who had “made application” to his local Baptist church, testified

that he had to undergo the following humiliating interrogation at

the hands of his master, in the presence of the local preacher,

before the latter would consent to Smith’s baptism:

“Do you feel as if you love your master better [now] than you ever did before, and as if you could do more work and do it better? Do you feel willing to bear correction when it is given you, like a good and faithful servant, without fretting, murmuring, or running away as has heretofore been your practice? If so,it is evidence that you are a good boy, and you may be baptized.”

When Smith answered in the affirmative to all the above

questions, he was “finally received into the church and

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baptized.”113 Former slave Talitha Lewis of South Carolina

reported a similar instance of “interrogation” at her master’s

church before she too could join the congregation, an action

which led the young slave girl to conclude: “We served our

mistress and master in slavery time and not God.”114 Thus, as a

Georgia plantation mistress, famed nineteenth-century British

actress Fanny Kemble noted in her journal that “the master’s

leave” is necessary for a slave to be baptized and thus accepted

“into the bosom of the Christian Church.” Such “leave,” as

exemplified above, gave white slaveholders tremendous sway over

the spiritual lives and social behavior of their African

slaves.115

The “Inconsistencies” of Southern Religion

Such blatant distortions of the Gospel message of “faith, hope,

and love” (1 Cor. 13:13) by the advocates of Southern religion

led Harriet Jacobs to proclaim that, “There is a great difference

between Christianity and religion in the south.”116 After

recounting a litany of horrors perpetrated by slaveholding

“Christians,” ex-slave Henry Bibb also concluded, “Is this

Christianity? Is it honest and right? Is it doing as we would be

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done by? Is it in accordance with the principles of humanity or

justice?”117 In his famous Narrative, Fredrick Douglass echoed a

similar sentiment:

I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds,and the grosses of all libels.118

In fact, Henry Bibb was convinced that the highly offensive

beliefs and practices of white Southern “Christians” had

literally “driven thousands [of slaves] into infidelity” by the

latter’s wholesale (and understandable) rejection of the

Christian faith!119

Indeed, Southern religion did not promote a “genuine”

Christian theology – that is, “a systematic, disciplined

reflection on Christian faith and its implications,” one which

“uses the resources of reason, drawing in particular on the

disciplines of history and philosophy.”120 Accordingly, it could

not draw on the rich heritage of the great Christian theologians

throughout the centuries, many of whom had wrestled with the

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notion of slavery and ultimately declared it contrary to the will

of the Creator (see Appendix 4). Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-

430 A.D.), one of the most influential of the early Church

Fathers, is a good example of a gifted theologian confronting the

many difficulties surrounding the issue of slavery. In his famous

work The City of God, Augustine wrote that, at the moment of his

creation, man was born free from the bondage of slavery: “He

[God] did not wish the rational being, made in own image, to have

dominion over any but irrational creatures, not man over man, but

man over beasts.” The effects of Original Sin, however, disrupted

the fabric of human relationships: “But even this enslavement

could not have happened, if it were not for the deserts of sin…

The first cause of slavery, then, is sin, whereby man was subjected to man in

the condition of bondage.”121

According to Augustine, therefore, slavery has become part

of the “fallen” order of creation, one which was not willed by

the Creator, but is the inevitable consequence of humanity’s

Original Sin:

And yet by nature, in the condition in which God created man, no man is the slave either of man or of sin. But it remains true that slavery as a punishment is also ordained by the

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law that enjoins the preservation of the order of nature, and forbids its disturbance…That explains also the Apostle’s admonition to slaves, that they should by subject to their masters, and serve them loyally and willingly.122

Unfortunately, due to St. Augustine’s rather pessimistic views

concerning human nature after the Fall, the saint reluctantly

accepted slavery as an unpleasant “given.” Nevertheless, as

historian Henry Chadwick relates, “Augustine hated the slave

trade. Whenever feasible, he used the church chest to emancipate

slaves oppressed in bad households. . .”123 Clearly, then,

Augustine’s views concerning slavery were a "far cry" from the

later “tenants” of Southern religion, as were discussed above.

By the early nineteenth century, however, nearly all

Christian denominations in Europe and the Americas had condemned

chattel slavery as “sinful” in the eyes of God. In the words of

famed Civil War historian Bruce Canton, slavery by this time had

become “a completely repugnant anachronism.”124 Therefore, the

noted nineteenth-century American writer and social critic

Margaret Fuller proclaimed in 1843 that her country’s continuing

enslavement of black Africans had become “the scoff of the

world!”125 The Church of England, for example, led by the

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crusading efforts of William Wilberforce and the so-called

“Clapham Sect,” prodded the English government to finally abolish

both slavery and the slave trade throughout the British Empire in

the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.126 In 1829

Mexico, like most of the newly independent and largely Catholic

republics of Latin America, also abolished slavery throughout its

borders, much to the dismay and displeasure of white American

slaveholders living in the Mexican territory of Texas. (The

latter did their best to circumvent this Mexican law by calling

their black slaves “apprentices”!)127 Additionally, in 1839 Pope

Gregory XVI issued the following critique of the brutal human

bondage that still plagued some countries in the Americas (namely

the United States and Brazil): “All Catholics whether priests or

laymen are forbidden to pretend that slavery and the slave trade

are lawful.”128 Many Northern politicians were thus well aware of

the international stigma that Southern slavery cast over the

entire nation. Indeed, France and Great Britain later refused to

officially recognize or openly support the Confederacy after it

seceded from the Union in April 1861, due largely to the South’s

continuation of the practice of chattel slavery.129

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“The truth is,” one white editor wrote in his introduction

to a famous slave narrative, “that slavery is the product of

human greed and lust and oppression and not of God’s ordering.”130

The same, of course, was also true of the religious defense of

slavery. Indeed, Southern religion was an ad hoc human and

artificial creation, conceived with one overriding goal in mind:

to serve as a “bulwark” for the increasingly beleaguered

institution of slavery in the Old South, as abolitionist James

Gillespie Birney rightly observed in 1842.131 Accordingly, one

defender of slavery, the Baptist minster Thornton Stringfellow of

Virginia, rummaged through the pages of the Bible to find

“sanction of the Almighty” for “the institution of slavery.”

Towards this end, Springfellow gathered together often unrelated

and even outmoded scriptural passages for his highly influential

1856 booklet Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery.132

Unfortunately, even some Northern clergymen acted as apologists

and defenders of slavery, including two prominent Episcopalians,

one of whom was the “grandson and name-sake of the church’s first

bishop.”133

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These clerical supporters of slavery, however, proved highly

selective in choosing the biblical passages they quoted in defense

of the “peculiar institution.” Frederick Douglass thus pointed

out that, “Instead of preaching the gospel against tyranny,

rebuke, and wrong, ministers of religion have sought, by all and

every means, to throw in the background whatever in the bible

could be construed into opposition to slavery, and bring forward

that which they could torture into its support.”134 In fact,

former slave Henry Atkinson, who had escaped from American

slavery to Canadian freedom, testified that he heard the “whole”

gospel, including Christ’s call to “break every yoke” of

oppression, preached for the first time in his new northern

refuge.135 Accordingly, this “piecemeal” and “ersatz” religion of

the South was rife with glaring theological and moral

contradictions. Indeed, as Margaret Fuller (see above) once

forcefully declared in 1845: “The inconsistencies of Slaveholding

professors of religion cry to Heaven!”136 These “inconsistencies”

of Southern religion, moreover, greatly impacted the lives of

enslaved black women, particularly as regards the separation of

slave families, the sexual exploitation of female slaves, and the

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daily brutality to which all slaves in the South continued to be

subjected.

One ironic contradiction of Southern religion, which

ostensibly supported the importance of the plantation “extended

family” – consisting of both black and white members, was its

lack of moral condemnation of the sale of slave family members

for economic gain. “References to the slave force as ‘the black

family’ abound in Southern literature,” writes historian Eugene

D. Genovese, “and more impressively, in the private letters and

diaries of slaveholders.”137 Due to potent economic concerns,

however, enslaved black women were regularly separated from their

children or husbands at the whim of their white owners. In fact,

as one interviewer of runaway slaves noted, “the continual dread

of this separation of husband and wife, parents and children, by

sale,…is inseparable from the state of slavery.” The interviewer

further remarked that, “The slave may forget his hunger, bad

food, hard work, lashes, but he finds no relief from the ever-

threatening evil of separation.”138

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The utter anguish of such familial separations is captured

in a letter (1852) of Marie Perkins to her husband Richard, both

of whom were slaves:

Dear Husband I write you a letter to let you know of my distress my master has

sold Albert [their young son] to a trader on Monday court day and myself and

other child is for sale also and I want to let me hear from you very soon before

next cort if you can I don’t know when...I want you to tell Dr. Hamilton your

master if either will buy me they can attend to it know and then I can go after-

wards I don’t want a trader to get me A man buy thename of brandy bought

albert and is gone I don’t know whare they say he lives in scottsville...I am

quite heart sick nothing more I am and ever will beyour kind wife.139

Such forced separations, moreover, could occur quickly and

unexpectedly, as former slave Viney Baker from Virginia

remembered: “One night I lay down on de straw mattrees wid my

mammy, an’ de nex’ mo’nin I woke up and she wuz gone.” Baker

later learned that a slave speculator had arrived the night

before and “wanted ter buy a ‘omen.” Her master gladly obliged by

selling Baker’s mother to the speculator – without bothering to

wake up the young slave girl!140

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Harriet Jacobs too recorded similar stories of the forceful

separation of black slave families due to the insatiable greed of

their white masters:

On one of these sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-

block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all.

The children were sold to a slave-trader, and their mother was bought by a man in

her own town. Before night her children were all far away…I met that mother in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives to-day in my mind. She wrung her hands in anguish, and exclaimed, “Gone! All gone! Why don’t God kill me?” I had no words wherewith to comfort her.141

Indeed, Jacob’s own grandmother, who had saved her meager

earnings in an effort to purchase her children’s freedom, also

witnessed her sons and daughters being dragged off to the auction

block to be sold like “chattel.”142 Former slave Katie Rowe of

Arkansas also related a similar memory of heartless slave

separations of parents and children: “I seen children sold off

and the mammy not sold, and sometimes the mammy sold and a little

baby kept on the place and give to another woman to raise.” She

continued, “Them white folks didn’t care nothing ‘bout how the

slaves grieved when they tore up a family.”143

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Unfortunately, few of these separated female slaves were

able to reunite with their lost family members, despite their

desperate searches for the latter following the conclusion of the

American Civil War in April 1865. Thus, years after her

enslavement, Charlotte Brooks lamented:

I had heard people say Louisiana was a hard place for black people, and I didn’t want to come; but old marster took me and sold me from my mother anyhow, and from my sisters and brothers in Virginia. I have never seen or heard form them since I left old Virginia. That’s been more than thirty-five years ago. When I left old Virginia my mother cried for me, and when I saw my poor mother with tears in her eyes I thought I would die. O, it was a sad day for me when I was to leave my mother in old Virginia. 144

Ex-slave Tines Kendricks of Georgia also lamented that, “They washeaps of nigger families that I know what was separated in the time of bondage that tried to find they fokes what was gone. But the mostest of ‘em never git together again even after they sot free ‘cause they don’t know where one or the other is.”145 Indeed,former slave Mattie Curtis of North Carolina testified that, following the Civil War, her parents searched desperately to findtheir “fourteen oldest chilluns,” who had been sold years earlier. Nevertheless, “they did find but three of them.”146

The hypocrisy of such blatantly anti-familial actions on thepart of white slaveholding “Christians” was readily apparent to many enslaved blacks. Henry Bibb, a runaway slave, wrote years later (1852) to his former master, the Rev. Albert G. Sibley:

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You profess to be a christian – a leader in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and

the representative of the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet you sold my mother from her little children, and sent them to a distant land – you sold my brother George from his wife and dear little ones while he was a worthy member, and Clergyman, of the same church, to which you belong...Oh! what hypocrisy is this! A Methodist class leader, separating husbands and wives...Vain is your religion – base is your hypocrisy.147

Ex-slave Lewis Hayden of Kentucky echoed a similer sentiment to

that of Bibb: “I never saw anything in Kentucky which made me

suppose that ministers or professors of religion considered it

any more wrong to separate the families of slaves by sale than to

separate any domestic animals.” Hayden added, “My master was a

minister, and yet he sold my mother.…”148 Indeed, former slave

Charlotte Brooks also demanded, “How could any Christian man

believe it was right to sell and buy us poor colored people just

like we was sheep?”149 Harriet Jacobs too railed against the

practitioners of Southern religion for not stopping this

wholesale separation of enslaved black families: “Notwithstanding

my grandmother’s long and faithful service to her owners, not one

of her [five] children escaped the auction block. These God-147 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 53.

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breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their [Christian]

masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.”150

Another troubling aspect of Southern religion for enslaved

black women was its ambiguous sexual morality. Historically,

150 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 12. Former slave Solomon Northup echoed a similar sentiment when he wrote the following concerning his master Edwin Epps, “in whose heart the quality of kindness or of justice is not found”:

He is known as a “nigger breaker,” distinguished for his faculty of subduing the spirit of the slave, and priding himself upon his reputation in this respect, as a jockey boasts of his skill in managing a refractory horse. He looked upon a colored man, not as a human being, responsible to his Creator for the small talent entrusted to him, but as a “chattel personal,” as mere living property, no better, except in value, than his mule or dog.

Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 183. Many years later, ex-slave Charlotte Brooks also bitterly recalled that, “The white people thought in slave-time we poor darkies had no soul, and they separated us like dogs.” Albert, American Slaves TellTheir Stories, p. 12.

1Endnotes

1 For a complete discussion of the life and writings of ex-slave Harriet Jacobs, see the “Introduction” in Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Edited by Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), ix-xxiii.2 Ibid., p. 58.3 The best one volume introduction to antebellum slavery is, in my opinion, Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery: 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003). But see also Ira Berlin’s masterful Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), which is more “thematic” in its presentation. The classic study of the “world” created by enslaved blacks in the Old South is, of course, Eugene D. Genovese’s magisterial Roll, Jordon, Roll:The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974). 4

4 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 206.5 Norrece T. Jones, Jr., Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Hanover, NH: University Press of NewEngland, 1990), pp. 131-33.

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Protestantism had enshrined the biblical notion of “chastity”

within the framework of its Christian morality. For married

couples, chastity involved fidelity to one’s partner, while for

single people it entailed sexual abstinence. This strict moral

6 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 57.7 Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, Including the 1831 “Confessions” (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), p. 7.8 See Jones, Born a Child of Freedom, pp. 129-161 for the use of religion as a “mechanism” of both white social control and a “means” of black resistance.9 Former slave Madison Jefferson of Virginia, via the words of his interviewer, in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), p. 221.10 In particular, see Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Revised and with a New Introduction (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999).11 From the 1709 diary of Virginia planter William Byrd, quoted in Charles Johnson and Patricia Smith, Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1998), p. 86. Physical punishment, which Byrd himself routinely and casually employed with his black slaves, was the “only” means to enforce slave obedience and prevent insurrections in their view. Ibid., pp. 86-7. Additionally, Francis Le Jau, an early eighteenth-century missionary from England, was shocked by the savage treatment he witnessed of enslaved Africans at the hands of their white owners. In his memoirs, Le Jau wrote

A poor slavewoman was barbarously burnt alive near my door withoutany positive proof of the Crime she was accused of, which was, theburning of her Master’s House and protested her innocence even to myself to the last. Many Masters can’t be persuaded that Negroes and Indians are otherwise than beasts, and use them like such….I dayly perceived that many things are done here out of a Worldly and Interested principle, little for God’s sake.

Quoted in ibid., p. 90.

Additionally, as late as the early 1800s, stories of planter brutality toward their slaves abound. Thus, historian Daniel Rasmussen records the wretched tale of a creole planter in Louisiana named Francois Trepagnier, whose “contempt for his slaves was well known.” According to “local legend,”

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code was promoted by all the mainline Protestant denominations in

the Southern United States during the first half of the

nineteenth century.151 Thus, for Episcopalians, the Ten

Commandments, with its prohibition against adultery (Ex. 20:14,

Trepagnier reportedly “kept a slave boy named Gustave as a house pet!” As thishearless master ate at his banquet table, he would toss scraps of food on the floor to the hapless slave boy to eat. “Other men had dogs, went the story, but Trepagnier had a black child.” Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 108.12 The number of white victims of Nat Turner’s rebellion ranged anywhere from 55-63 killed. Of these, roughly 46 were women and children. Additionally, Turner’s men viciously decapitated or hacked to pieces most of their white victims. For an overview of this rebellion, see Herbert Aptheker, “The Event,”in Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 45-57. For the full text of Aptheker’s groundbreaking study of this 1831 slave rebellion, see Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion discussed above, which was originally published as a M.A.thesis in 1937. See also Johnson and Smith, Africans in America, pp. 308-12, whichincludes large selections of primary source material. 13 Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: HarperCollins, 1973), pp. 104-05. Historian Herbert Aptheker also writes: “Theuprising was infectious and slaves everywhere became restless, or, it was feared that they had or might become restless, so the panic, momentarily localized in Virginia, spread up to Delaware and down to Florida, across to Louisiana and up again to Kentucky.” Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, p. 57.14 For the phrase “Southern religion,” see Fredrick Douglass’s “Lecture on Slavery” given at Rochester, December 1, 1850 in Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, With an Introduction and Notes by Brent Hayes Edwards (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2005), p. 326.15 In a speech at Finsbury Chapel in Moorfields, England, on May 12, 1846, Douglass spelled out to his audience the full import of this “Southern religion”:

I have to inform you that the religion of the southern states, at this time, is the great supporter,

the great sanctioner of the bloody atrocities to which I have referred. While America is printing

tracts and bibles, sending missionaries abroad to convert the heathen; expending her money in

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Dt. 5:18), received special attention in the “Catechism” included

within the 1789 U.S. Book of Common Prayer. Indeed, this inquisitorial

instruction in the Christian Faith exhorted its reader to affirm

to keep one’s body in “temperance, soberness, and chastity.”

various ways for the promotion of the gospel in foreign lands -- the slave not only lies forgotten,

uncared for, but is trampled under foot by the very churches of the land. What have we in America? Why, we have slavery made part of the religion of the land. Yes, the pulpit there stands as the great defender of this cursed institution, as it is called. Ministersof religion come forward and torture the hallowed pages of inspired wisdom to sanction the bloody deed. They stand forth as the foremost, the strongest defenders of this institution...Instead of preaching the gospel against tyranny, rebuke, and wrong, ministers of religion have sought, by all and every means, to throw in the background whatever in the bible could be construed into opposition to slavery, and bring forward that which they could torture into its support. This I conceive tobe the darkest feature of slavery, and the most difficult to attack because it is identified with religion, and exposes those who denounces it to the charge of infidelity.

Ibid., p. 311

Ex-slave Henry Bibb, in writing to his former master, also did not mince wordsin describing to the Rev. Albert G. Sibley the Southern religion which the latter practiced:

Your church sanctions the buying and selling of men, women, and children: the robbing men of their wives, and parents of their off-spring – the violation of the whole decalogue [Ten Commandments], by permitting the profanation of the Sabbath; committing of theft, murder, incest and adultery, which is constantly done by church members holding slaves and form the veryessence of slavery…Again I ask you to feel, brother, with all of this guilt resting upon your head as an acceptable class leader inthe Methodist Episcopal Church south! Be not deceived by the long practice of your church; you have an awful account to render to the great Judge of the Universe, slave holding religion is of the devil, and your only chance for salvation lies in repentance before God and “faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, pp. 50-1, 55.

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Additionally, at the beginning of the Episcopal Church’s

Communion service, the priest would “rehearse” the Decalogue (The

Ten Commandments), including the prohibition against adultery.

After each of the Commandments was read, the congregation

16 See Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1969). For a more recent overview, see Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts and the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).17 See the response by a number of “radical” black scholars to Styron’s often sensational novel, accusing him among other things of racism, in John H. Clarke, ed., The Second Crucifixion of Nat Turner, Edited and with a New Introduction by John Henrik Clarke (New York: Black Classic Press, 1998). However, noted historian Eugene D. Genovese came to Styron’s defence in a 1968 book review entitled “The Nat Turner Case,” reprinted in in John B. Duff and Peter M. Mitchell, eds., The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 97-101. For a recent overview of the controversy, see Charles Joyner, “Styron’s Choice: A Meditation on History, Literature, and Moral Imperatives,” in Goldberg, ed., Nat Turner, pp. 179-213.18 In a recently published book, historian Alan Taylor demonstrates that in the immediate years leading up to the Nat Turner Rebellion, Virginia was wracked by rumors of slave conspiracies and some actual plots by slaves to rebel. Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013), pp. 411-13.21 John Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt: The Slave Plot That Lit a Fuse to Fort Sumter (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1964), v, p. 138. For a brief but concise overview of Denmark Vesey’s attempted uprising, see Johnson and Smith, Africans in America, pp. 286-90. For a newer, more comprehensive examination, see David M. Robertson, Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). Robertson notes that Denmark Vesey’srebellion had international ramifications as well. President James Monroe, forexample, decided to withhold diplomatic recognition of the Republic of Haiti, a newly-formed nation founded by black slaves who had revolted against the French, once he learned of Vesey’s wide-spread conspiracy in Charleston (the US did not formally recognize Haiti until 1863, while in the midst of the American Civil War). Ibid., p. 5.22 Rasmussen, American Uprising, pp. 1-3, 199-217. Indeed, prior to coming acrossRasmussen’s book, I had encountered only a brief reference regarding this slaveuprising, namely in Eugene D. Genovese’s magisterial study of Southern

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responded, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this

law.”152

In the patriarchal social order of the antebellum South,

however, the sexual exploitation of enslaved black females by

slavery. See Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, p. 592. Peter Kolchin is equally brief in describing this 1811 slave rebellion, calling the latter a “larger but moreobscure effort” than the earlier and better documented Stono rebellion of 1739. Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 156.23 Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 75. See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 593-97.For primary source documentation on this slave conspiracy, see Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp. 107-14.24 Historian Herbert Aptheker notes that beginning in 1829, just two years prior to the Nat Turner Revolt, “there were numerous, and, at times, serious slave uprisings or plots within some of the British West Indies, and in Martinique, Santiago (then called St. Jago), and Brazil.” These slave revolts or conspiracies were widely publicized, especially in William Lloyd Garrison’sabolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Indeed, these events may also have contributed to Parliament’s decision to abolish slavery throughout the BritishEmpire in 1833! See Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, pp. 17-18.25 Philippe Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 40.27 For the wide repercussions of the Haitian Revolution throughout the Americas, see Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988) as well as David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002).28 Initially, Turner had selected July 4th, a highly symbolic date, as the beginning of his slave uprising. This was postponed, however, due to an illness Turner suffered at that time. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.324. See also Oates, Fires of Jubilee, p. 54.29 Another proposed destination for the rebels was Africa. See Robertson, Denmark Vesey, pp. 52-3. As a teenager, however, Denmark Vesey had served as a slave for a brief period on the French colonial island of St. Domingue (as Haiti was then called). He was thus somewhat familiar with conditions on the island. Historian John Lofton also notes that, later in life

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their white masters was regarded as a “right” of mastery. Thus,

as one historian notes, “white males in slave society were at

liberty to exploit slave women, despite family or Christian

obligations to the contrary.”153 Former slave Jacob Manson of

Vesey eagerly kept up with the events in the Negro republic of Haiti. When news came about Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer’s battle with the Spaniards, Vesey savored it, called it to the attention of his followers, and said he too could carry his men tovictory in battle. He set about to establish liaison with Boyer bywriting him a surreptitious letter, addressing it ostensibly to the uncle of the cook on board a schooner bound for Haiti, and directing that the addressee deliver it to the Haitian president.

Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt, pp. 15-17, 137. Additionally, Charleston’s white community, in their later assessment of the principle causes of this planned slave uprising, ranked the influence of the successful Haitian Revolution on the city’s enslaved population quite high on their list. Ibid., p. 185. 30 Rasmussen, American Uprising, pp. 100-01.31 DuBois, Avengers of the New World, p. 304.32 Randall Robinson, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007), p. 7. For a selection of the inspiring writings of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the charismatic ex-slave who led this successful rebellion against French colonial rule, see Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Haitian Revolution, Introduction by Dr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Edited by Nick Nesbitt (New York: Verso, 2008).33 See John W. Cromwell, “The Aftermath of Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” in Duffand Mitchell, eds., The Nat Turner Rebellion, pp. 97-101.34 Ibid. Historian Hervert Aptheker also states that a “reign of terror” occurred in Virginia following this slave uprising. See Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, p. 57. See also Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 98-100 for this even greater carnage and brutality inflicted by whites on the black community – both enslaved and free – that followed in the wake of Nat Turner’s insurrection. 35 Quoted in Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Revised Edition (New York: Back Bay Books, 2008), p. 108.36 Quoted in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 16-17. Additionally, historian Herbert Aptheker quotes the letter

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North Carolina, for example, testified as follows concerning his

owner, Master Eden: “Marster would not have any white overseers.

He had nigger foremen. Ha! Ha! He likes some of the nigger womens

too good to have any other white man playing around them. He had

of Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, a plantation mistress, to a prominent Virginia polititian, written a couple of weeks following the Nat Turner Rebellion, which reads in part:

The dreadful events of August last in our State, the want of confidence and insecurity produced by

these horrors, compels me to address you. Our whites unhappily evince too much fear of those

wretches….it is like a smothered volcano – we know not when, or where, the flame will burst

forth, but we know that death in the most horrid form threatens us. Some have died, others have

become deranged from apprehension since the South Hampton affair….I cannot feel secure or

happy now.

Quoted in Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, pp. 59-60 (emphasis in original).37 Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, Illustrations Edited and with Commentary by Joshua Brown (New York: Random House, Inc., 2005), p. 24. See also Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 133-45.38 Howe, What Hath God Wrought, pp. 325-26. For a detailed analysis of the actions of the Virginia legislature in the immediate years following the Nat Turner Revolt, see Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, pp. 83-94.39 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 267.40 Ibid.41 Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Name, Face, Body,” in Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner, pp. 10-11. 42 Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 145-54. See also Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, pp. 106-7, for the “heritage” of Nat Turner’s uprising among the South’s blackpopulation.43 See Mary Kemp Davis, “’What Happened in This Place?’ In Search of the Female Slave in the Nat Turner Slave Insurrection,” in Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner, pp. 162-67. Nat Turner’s inner circle consisted of four males slaves

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his sweethearts among his slave women.” Manson concluded that,

“At that time, it was hard to find a master that didn’t have

women among his slaves. That was a general thing among the slave owners.”154

Accordingly, the sexual exploitation of enslaved black women –

largely involving forced or cajoled miscegenation and, to an named Hark, Nelson, Henry, and Sam. It is quite probable, however, that Turnerconfided in his wife, a slave woman named Cherry Reese, concerning his plans for a slave insurrection. Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 52-3.44 Nevertheless, the contemporary accounts of the Nat Turner Rebellion indicate that many more black slave women attempted to protect their mistresses and their children from the wrath of Nat Turner’s men. Members of this “insidious and surprisingly numerous sisterhood” even served as witnessesfor the prosecution against their fellow slaves in the trials that followed theinsurrection. See Kemp Davis, “’What Happened in This Place,’” pp. 163-65.45 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, pp. 203-05. Historian Peter Kolchin also notes that slaveholder paternalism

involved not a good, painless, or benign slavery – all contradictions in terms – but a slavery in which masters took personal interest in the lives of slaves. The typical Southern slave owner knew his or her slaves by name and interacted with them on a frequent basis, not only directing their labor but also looking after their welfare and interfering in their lives. Masters saw their slaves not just as their laborers but also as their “people,” inferior members of their extended households fromwhom they expected work and obedience but to whom they owed guidance and protection.

Kolchin, American Slavery, pp. 111-12. This outward “façade” or “persona” should not be confused with the historic and more formal “paternalism,” with its “doctrine of reciprocal obligations” dating back to medieval serfdom, which already formed the essential socioeconomic relationship between master and slave in the Old South. For the latter, see Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 3-7.46 Foner, Forever Free, xxiii. For more on the cultural history and lasting impact of both the book and movie, see Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr., Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind: A Best Seller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011).47 Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), p. 225.

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unknown extant, “slave breeding” – appears to have been

widespread in the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed,

one recent study of WPA interviews of former slaves conducted

48 See Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner, Forward by Darlene Clark Hine (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 22.49 Henry H. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realities of the First Years (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004), pp. 28-32. See also Johnson and Smith, Africans in America, pp. 90-2.

The overall number of Muslims among the enslaved black population in the Southmay have been as high as ten percent in some areas! See Robertson, Denmark Vesey, pp. 137-38. For the plight of one African Muslim slave in the Old South, see the testimony of “Uncle Moreau” (Omar Ibn Said) in Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, pp. 470-74. Additionally, historian Charles Joyner notes that Islamic beliefs persisted within the South Carolina lowcountry well into the mid-nineteenth century. In recognition of this resilience of Islam belief among black slaves, “some lowcountry planters substituted a ration of beef instead of pork for Moslem slaves.” Chares Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press), p. 171.50 See Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 114-28 and Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 143. 51 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, Introduction and Notes by Robert O’Meally (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2003), pp. 40-1. Moreover, former slave Ishrael Massie of Virginia recounted a similar incident involving literacy teaching by his mistress: “De ole mistress started learnin’ us slave chillum,” he stated. “As soon as ole marster fown’ hit out, he stopped her from learnin’ niggers anything.” Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 202. Lastly, former slave Peter Still of Kentucky reported that as a child he overheard his master “Nattie” Gist discussing his opposition to “learning” among slaves at Sabbath School as follows: “He would not have his niggers spoiled by getting learning – no, indeed! Niggers were bad enough, without being set up by such rascals as these Sunday School teachers.” His master continued ranting that, “They’d better not meddle with his property; and if he heard of one of his boys going near the school, he’d give him such a flogging that he’d never need any more education.” Kate E. R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: The Narrative of Peter and Vina Still after Forty Years of

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during the 1930s estimates that “forced sex was a problem on

roughly one out of five plantations.”155

This notion of white male sexual privilege carried over to

the younger male scions of planter families, who viewed sexual

Slavery, Introductions by Maxwell Whiteman and Nancy L. Grant (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 40.52 Danielle R. Johnson, “‘Seeking and Holding’: Afrocentric Liberation in the Antebellum South,” The Forum Journal of History, Volume 1, Spring 2009, pp. 68-9. See also Jones, Born a Child of Freedom, p. 131.53 Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt, p. 53. For slave evangelization during the Second Great Awakening, see Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 206, Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 116, and Foner, Forever Free, p. 19.54 For the particularly “relaxed” environment of white planters in SouthamptonCounty, Virginia toward slave religious education and even travel throughout the county prior to 1831, see Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 3-4, 12-13, 38-9. Herbert Aptheker convincingly argues that Nat Turner was more properly viewed as an “exhorter” (perhaps of the Baptist persuasion) rather than a “preacher” per se, since he never had been formally educated in religion or properly ordained as a minister. Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, pp. 36-8.55 See “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” in Duff and Mitchell, eds., The Nat Turner Rebellion, pp. 11-30. For more on the development of Nat Turner’s religious views, see Vincent Harding, “Symptoms of Liberty and Blackhead Signposts: David Walker and Nat Turner,” in Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner, pp. 79-102 as well as Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 35-57.56 Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery, p. 123. However, Rose notes the possibility remains that Nat Turner “may have told Dr. Grey rather more than the truth by way of explanation of his deed, and that Dr. Grey may have invested the insurrection with some of his own biases.” Nevertheless, Rose concludes that the “Confessions” remain “the best and mose credible complete account of the Nat Turner uprising.” Ibid., pp. 122-23. See also Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 122-23, who also believes in the authenticity of the “Confessions.”57 For the full text of Nat Turner’s “Confession,” see Rose, ed., Documentary History of Slavery, pp. 123-34 and Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, pp. 126-52.58 See Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 144-45 for the wide-spread circulation of Nat Turner’s “Confessions.” Additionally, modern author William Styron later used this work as the basis for his 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner.

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relations with black females almost as a “rite of passage” to

manhood. Thus, during his testimony before the American

Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission in 1863, former slave Harry

McMillan of South Carolina was asked whether the sons of masters

59 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 57.60 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 131.61 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p 407 (emphasis added). See also Raboteau, Slave Religion, pp. 163-65 and Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 148. 62 Belinda Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery: Twenty-one Oral Histories of Former North Carolina Slaves (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, Publisher, 1984), p. 7.63 Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, p. 186.64 George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1972), pp. 36-7.65 Eric Blake McLendon, “Slave Missions and Membership in Southern Alabama,” M.A. thesis, Auburn University, 2006, p. 7.68 Clinton, Plantation Mistress, p. 183. Clinton also notes that

It was under the auspices of religious duty that plantation mistresses became involved in the

tutoring of slaves. A matron described her mother’s attitudes: “The Masters and Mistresses

were liable not only for care of their Servants bodies, but for their Souls – She held Religious

instruction a duty and on Sundays regularly assembled all who would attend and read the

Scriptures.”

Ibid., pp. 161-62.69 Quoted in John Sykes, “’As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord’: Slavery and the Episcopal Church in Alabama,” The Historiographer (of the National Episcopal Historians and Archivists and the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church) XL1V No. 1 (Lent 2006), p. 12.70 Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, Introduction by Philip S. Foner (Mineola,NY: Dover Publications, 1970), pp. 97-8.71 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, pp. 416-17.

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were at “liberty” to have sexual intercourse with “colored

women.” McMillan responded, “No, not at liberty, because it was

considered a stain on the family, but the young men did it

[anyway]. There was a good deal of it.” He added that, “They often kept

one girl steady and sometimes two on different places; men who

72 David Hein and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., The Episcopalians (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), pp. 19-20. See also Robert Prichard, A History of the Episcopal Church,Revised Edition (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1999), pp. 9-11, 145-46. Confer John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South,Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 79-81. 73 Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), p. 469.74 Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005), p. 13.75 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p 407. See also Blassingame, The Slave Community, pp. 80-1.76 Hein and Shattuck, The Episcopalians, p. 77. Additionally, both Jefferson Davisand Robert E. Lee were prominent slaveholding laymen in the Episcopal Church. See David L. Homes, A Brief History of the Episcopal Church (New York: Continuum, 1993),p. 82.77 For General Polk’s exploits during the Civil War, see James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 296, 393, 519-20, 583, 672, 676, 747-48. The General is also mentioned repeatedly in Mary Chesnut’s famous Civil War diary as well. See C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chestnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 482, 569, 585, 616, and 635. Lastly, his funeral is discussed in great detail in the journal of plantation mistress Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas. See The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848-1889, Edited by Viginia Ingraham Burr, Introduction by Nell Irvin Painter (Chapel Hill, NC: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1990), pp. 225-26.78 Homes, Brief History of the Episcopal Church, p. 82. According to one modern assessment, however, Gen. Pendleton’s tenure as Lee’s artillery chief was lackluster at best and even detrimental to the overall success of the Army of Northern Virginia. See Joshua Shepard, “Chief Of Artillery William N. Pendleton Hindered Effectiveness Of Lee’s Artillery,” The Artillaryman, Spring 2011, Vol. 32, No. 2, available online at http://artillerymanmagazine.com/Archives/2011/pendleton-sheperd-su11.html.

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had wives did it too sometimes, if they could get it on their own

place it was easier but they would go wherever they could get

it.”156 Additionally, historian Wyatt-Brown writes that, “In the

American South…, sleeping with a woman was an informal rite of

79 One historian of Rhode Island notes that during the 1850s and 60s, the state “was firmly commited to holding the Union together.” Thus, Rhode Island opposed the passage of the Futive Slave Act of 1850, solidly voted for AbrahamLincoln as President of the United States in 1860, and elected a “radical abolitionist” as governor in 1860. During the Civil War, Rhode Island heavily contributed both men and material (especially textiles) to the Union war effort. William McLaughlin, Rhode Island: A History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986), pp.145-47.80 See the website for this film project at http://www.tracesofthetrade.org/. Note that PBS has recently screened this film as part of its POV series of documentary films. See http://www.pbs.org/pov/tracesofthetrade/. In Traces of the Trade, Browne also accompanies nine of her relatives as they accept her invitation in 2001 to travel together from Rhode Island to Ghana and Cuba, where the DeWolfs had owned extensive slaveholding plantations. This moving journey thus brings these DeWolf descendents “face-to-face with the history and legacy of New England’s hidden enterprise”:

The enslavement of Africans was business for more than just the DeWolf family. It was a cornerstone of Northern commercial life. The Triangle Trade drove the economy of many port cities (Rhode Island had the largest share in the trade of any state), and slavery itself existed in the North for over 200 years. Northern textile mills used slave-picked cotton from the South to fuel the Industrial Revolution, while banks and insurance companies played a key role throughout the period. While the DeWolfs were one of only a few “slaving” dynasties, the network of commercial activities that they were tied to involved an enormous portion of the Northern population. Many citizens, for example, would buy shares in slave ships in order to make a profit.

As a result of this film project, one of Browne’s relatives who had accompanied her to the Caribbean, has written a companion book to the documentary. See Thomas Norman DeWolf, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts itsLegacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).81 James T. Fisher, Communion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 52. See also Cyprian Davis, The History of Black

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virilization. The obvious way was to pursue a black partner. If

the initial effort were clumsy or brutal no one would object, in

view of the woman’s race and status. Moreover, black girls were

infinitely more accessible and experienced than the white

daughters of vigilant, wealthy families.”157

Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1999), pp. 35-46, 58-62.82 Octavia V. Rogers Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories: Six Interviews, Introductionby Willard F. Mallalieu (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005), p. 3.

83 Fisher, Communion of Immigrants, p. 53. Davis notes, however, that the sale ofthese 272 slaves by the Jesuits became “a scandal” to Catholics living in southern Maryland; in the end, the Jesuit provincial of the region, Thomas Mulledy, was forced to resign. Davis, History of Black Catholics in the United State., pp. 36-8.84 Davis, History of Black Catholics, pp. 37-8.85 See Fisher, Communion of Immigrants, pp. 52-7 and Davis, History of Black Catholics, pp. 35-46. However, a few Southern Catholic prelates did act as apologists for the “peculiar institution,” including Bishop John England of South Carolina, who even attempted to obfuscate Pope Gregory XVI’s critical stance against theslave trade. Ibid., pp. 46-57.86 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order: Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaveholders’ World View,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (1987) LV/2, p. 228.87 Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age: A People’s History of the Ante-Bellum Years, Volume 4 (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 506. See also Blassingame, The Slave Community, pp. 80-1.88 Julia E. Randle, “The Economic Benefit of Slavery to the Episcopal Church in Virginia,” Virginia Episcopalian 115 (2006), p. 23.89 Quoted in William Loren Katz, Eyewitness: A Living Documentary of the African American Contribution to American History, Revised and Updated Edition (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 134-35.90 Du Pre Lumpkin, Making of a Southerner, p. 33.91 Quoted in Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 208-09.92 Jacobs, Incidents, pp. 57-8.

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The sons of the great planters, therefore, were equally

predatory with black female slaves as were their fathers. For

example, one former slave testified that her then thirteen-year-

old grandmother, who was pregnant, was “putting up clean clothes”

93 B. A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, Forward by Jerrold Hirsh (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 26.94 Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, p. 36 and Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 642 respectively.95 Quoted in Oates, Fires of Jubilee, p. 14.96 Bibb, Narrative, p. 8. Former slave and later black minister Peter Randolf also remarked that in the churches and plantation chapels in Prince George County, Virginia, where he lived, “The Gospel was so mixed with slavery, that the people could see no beauty in it, and feel no reverence for it.” Milton C.Sernett, ed., Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 1985), p. 64.98 Quoted in Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 88 (emphasis added). Another catechism dated 1862, A Catechism to be Taught Orally to Those Who Cannot Read; Designed Especially for the Instruction of the Slaves, provides a slightly different variation on the Fifth Commandment:

Q. How are you to show your love to [your master and mistress] andyour parents?

A. I am never to lie to them, to steal from them, nor speak bad words about them; but always to do as they bid me.

For the above catechism, see the website of the Libraries of the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill at http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/catechisms/catechsl.html (accessed on 4/21/10).99 Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 87-8.100 Quoted in ibid, pp. 87-8 (emphasis in original).101 Sykes, “’As for me and my house,” p. 5.102 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, pp. 642-43 (emphasis added).103 Thus, former slave Beverly Jones of Virginia recounted that, “Niggers had to set an’ listen to the white man’s sermons, but they didn’t want to ‘cause they knowed it by heart. Always took his text from Ephesians, the white preacher did, the part what said, ‘Obey your masters, be good servants.”

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with her “old” mistress, who happened to be holding a pair of

socks in her hand. The plantation mistress said to the slave-

girl, “Tildy, who been messin wit you down there?” Her

grandmother responded, “Young marster.” Thereupon the mistress

Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery, p. 192. Harriet Jacobs also remarked that this passage from Ephesians was the choice text of her plantation preacher, the “pious” Rev. Pike. Jacobs, Incidents, p. 57. Ex-slave Peter Randolph of Virginia also noted that “the prominent preaching to the slaves was, ‘Servants, obey your masters,’” a clear reference to Eph. 6:5:8. Sernett, ed., Afro-American Religious History, p. 64. Former slave Henry Bibb also noted that this biblical passage was central to the white preachers’ “pro-slavery doctrine.” Bibb, Narrative, p. 8. Indeed, historian Eugene D. Genovese remarks that this was “the favorite text” of white preachers, such as the Rev.Charles Colcock Jones, who even “proudly acknowledged” this fact. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 208. 104 See, for example, the sermon of white preacher Charles Colcock Jones to hisblack congregation in 1834, in which he “insisted upon fidelity and obedience as Christian virtues in servants and upon the authority of Paul” in this passage from Philemon and thus “condemned the practice of running away.” In response to this sermon on slave obedience, one half of his black audience walked out of the plantation chapel. Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 294. “This is uniformly the grand climax of the pro-slavery argument from the Bible,” writesone contemporary Northern opponent of Southern slavery concerning this biblical text, “as the ‘curse of Ham’ is its invariable foundation stone.” Daniel R. Goodwin, Southern Slavery in its Present Aspects: Containing a Reply to a Late Work of theBishop of Vermont on Slavery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1864), pp. 48-9.105 Quoted in Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 85-6. It is highly instructive to compare these planter-constructed “beatitudes” with those of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself (Matt. 5:3-10, KJV):

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness:

for they shall be filled.Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children

of God.

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ran over to her and “crammed” the socks into Tildy’s mouth,

saying, “Don’t you ever tell nobody. If you do, I’ll skin you

alive.”158 Additionally, historian Melton A. McLaurin records the

story of a “famous Southerner,” Senator James Henry Hammond of

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

For a discussion of Christ’s Beatitudes from a social justice perspective, seeFr. Michael H. Cosby, O.F.M.Cap., Spirituality of the Beatitudes: Matthew’s Vision of the Church in an Unjust World, New Revised Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005). 106 Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, p. 246. In general see Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).107 See Fox-Genovese and Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order,” p., 224.108 Ibid. 109 James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember, An Oral History (New York: AvonBooks, 1988), p. 185.110 Albert J. Robataeu, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 87-8.111 St. John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty, Translated and Introduced by Catharine P. Roth (Crestwoood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), p. 115.112 See Davis, History of Black Catholics, p. 51.113 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 276 (emphasis added).114 Lewis testified to the following:

We went to the white folks’ church, so we sit in the back on the floor. They allowed us to join their church whenever one got readyto join or felt that the Lord had forgiven them of their sins. We told our determination; this is what we said: “I feel that the Lord have forgiven me of my sins. I have prayed and I feel that I am a better girl. I belong to Master So and So and I am so old.” The whitepreacher would then ask our miss and master what they thought about it and if they could see any change. They would get up and say: “I notice she don’t steal and I notice she don’t lie as much and I notice she works better.” Then they let us join. We served our

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South Carolina, who had engaged “in sexual relations with two

slave women, mother and daughter.” Later, Sen. Hammond gave both

of these slave women to his son, Harry, “who was also apparently

involved in an affair with the daughter and who had fathered a

mistress and master in slavery time and not God.

Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 33 (emphasis added).115 See Fanny Kemble’s Journals, Edited and with an Introduction by Catherine Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 126.116 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 62.117 Bibb, Narrative, pp. 128-29.118 Douglass, Narrative, p. 100. Henry Bibb offered a similar sentiment when he wrote to his former master the Rev. Albert G. Sibley: “I mean that you shall know that there is a just God in heaven, who cannot harmonize human slavery with the Christian religion…” Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 52.119 Bibb, Narrative, p. 8.120 The first part of the quote comes from Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology: TheEssential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America and Beyond (New York: Random House, Inc., 1987), p. 4. The latter part is included in a more expansive definition of “theology,” from a Roman Catholic perspective: “The methodical effort to understand and interpret the truth of [divine] revelation. As fides quaerens intellectum (Lat. ‘faith seeking understanding’), theology uses the resources of reason, drawing in particular on the disciplines of history and philosophy. In the face of the divine mystery, theology is always ‘seeking’ and never reaches final answers and definitive insights.” Gerald O’Collins, S.J., and Edward G. Farrugia, S.J., A Concise Dictionary of Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), p. 240. In light of these two scholarly definitions (andmany others), the precepts of “Southern religion” hardly qualify as a “genuine” Christian theology in the academic sense.121 St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, A New Translation by Henry Bettenson with an Introduction by John O’Meara (New York: Penguin Books,1984), pp. 874-5 (Book XIX, Ch. 15). All italics are mine.122 Ibid.123 Augustine’s train of theological thought leads the saint to a rather unsettling conclusion (to modern ears, at least), as Henry Chadwick points out: "The domination of one man over another may be abused, but it is the lesser of two evils where the alternative is anarchy and every man for

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child by her, as the elder Hammond admitted he may also have

done.”159

It is no surprise, then, that the testimonies of both blacks

and whites from this period are replete with often brutal stories

himself." Additionally, Chadwick notes, “Yet [in Augustine’s view] slavery wasnot an unmitigated evil when slaves in good homes were better clothed, fed, and housed than the free wage labourers who were the great majority of the labour force.” Henry Chadwick, Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 102.124 Bruce Canton, The Civil War, With an Introduction by James M. McPherson (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005), p. 100.125 Quoted in John Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), p. 209.126 See John R. H. Moorman, The History of the Church in England, Third Edition (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1986), pp. 313, 318-21. William Wilberforce’s personal crusade against the English slave trade is movingly portrayed by actor Ioan Gruffudd in the powerful 2006 film Amazing Grace. See the movie’s official website at http://www.amazinggracemovie.com/. See also Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), which is the companion book to the film.127 Alwyn Barr, Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 1528–1995, Second Addition (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), pp. 13-15. In a column written in 1845, shortly after the American annexation of Texas, Margaret Fuller sadly observed: “What a year it has been with us! Texas annexed, and more annexations in store; slavery perpetuates, as the most striking feature of these movements. Such are the fruits of American love of liberty!” Quoted in Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller, p. 192. At the time slavery was outlawed in Mexico, Catholicism was the “state religion and the only permitted religion” in the country. Lynn V. Foster, A Brief History of Mexico, Fourth Edition (New York: Checkmark Books, 2009), p. 119. Brazil, which alone had imported 35% of all African slaves brought to the Americas in the nineteenth century, also had the “ignominious distinction of being the last country in the Americas to officially abolish slavery” in 1888. Marshall C. Eakin, The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 102, 234-36.128 Quoted in Joe Holland, Modern Catholic Social Teaching: The Popes Confront the Industrial Age 1740-1958 (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2003), p. 347. Southern Catholics, however, did their best to obfuscate the Pope’s statement, claiming that he

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of forced miscegenation. For example, Pauli Murray, the noted

black author, lawyer, and later Episcopal priest, recounted the

rape of her enslaved great-grandmother Harriet in 1844, which had

been passed down orally within her family:

only condemned the slave trade but not slavery per se. See Fisher, Communion of Immigrants, pp. 53-4. However, Davis, History of Black Catholics, pp. 39-40, states that the pontiff’s apostolic letter In Supremo Apostolatus Fastigio was an outright “condemnation of the slave trade and, by inference, of slavery itself” (emphasis added). In any event, Gregory XVI’s successor, “Blessed” Pius XI (1846-78), reversed his predecessor’s negative stance on slavery and the slave trade. First, to his everlasting shame, Pius XI officially recognized the Confederacyin 1861; the papacy, in fact, was the only world body to do so! This papal action led many blacks to feel the utmost suspicion and hostility toward the American Catholic Church in the years following the Civil War. Thus, Octavia V. Rogers Albert, the black editor of a well-known 1890 collection of slave narratives, told one of her interviewees: “Why Aunt Lorendo, don’t you know the Catholics were bitterly opposed to the emancipation of the slaves? Why, the pope was the only power in the world that recognized the Confederacy. Theyassisted powerfully in carrying on the civil war.” Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 39.

Moreover, in an 1866 statement, this regressive pope also “upheld the slave trade as moral” in a special “accommodation” to Catholic Brazil, which was – and is – the largest Catholic country in the Americas. See Thomas Bokenkotter,A Concise History of the Catholic Church, Revised and Expanded Edition (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 487-88. Accordingly, Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), the crusading social critic of the Industrial Revolution, had to overturn Pius XI’s earlier support of slavery and the slave trade in a forceful papal letterto the Brazilian people. See Holland, Modern Catholic Social Teaching, pp. 191-2 andGerald O’Collins, S.J and Mario Farrugia, S.J., Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 342. Nevertheless, dueto its religious clout, “Catholic Brazil became the last country in the world to abolish officially slavery – only in 1888.” O’Collins and Farrugia, Catholicism., p. 80.

Overall, the Roman Catholic Church’s stance concerning slavery during the pasttwo thousand years has been “checkered” at best. For a more in-depth examination of this issue, see Joel S. Panzer, The Popes and Slavery (New York: Alba House, 1997). In general, see Bokenkotter, A Concise History of the Catholic Church, pp. 41-2, 56, 487-88. Indeed, to cite one modern example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, issued at the behest of Pope John Paul II in 1994, devotes only one paragraph (2414) out of its 688 pages of text to the issue of human

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It happened right after Reuban [Harriet’s slave husband] was run off the place.

Harriet had nailed up the door [to her shack] as usual and put barricades against it.

Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, the other slaves heard Marse Sid

[son of the plantation owner] break open Harriet’s door. Ear-splitting shrieks tore

slavery, which, however, it condemns outright as “a sin against the dignity ofpersons and their fundamental rights…” Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vatican, 1997), p. 580. See also O’Collins and Farrugia, Catholicism, p. 343. This brief condemnation of slavery in the Catholic Church’s latest catechism is regrettable, especially in light of the development of a “new slave trade,” one which now comprises tens of millions of poor people – many from officially “Catholic” countries (including Brazil), who have been displaced and exploited by the pernicious effects of globalization. See Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Second Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Indeed, as Floyd Flake, the former U.S. Congressman and now President of Wilberforce University, reminds us:

Today, in every corner of the world (the United States and Great Britain are not exempt), there remains great work to do. Slavery in Africa is still a reality. Today, the “filthy ships” ofEuropean slaver traders are dry-docked in our distant memory, but human beings are still stripped of their essence and exported to far-off and hostile places. In too many corners of Asia, Eastern Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East, trafficking in women toserve the baser desires of men is thriving; work unfinished remains.

From his “Foreword” in Metaxas, Amazing Grace, x.129 See McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 383-89, 650-51. However, prior to the unveiling of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln in September 1862, both England and France did “hedge their bets” as to which American sideto support, with a decided “tilt” toward the Confederacy, especially in light of the many Confederate victories in the first year of the war. As historian Bruce Canton rightly points out, “Up until the fall of 1862, slavery was not an issue in the war. The Federal government had explicitly declared that it was fighting to save the Union.” Therefore, Canton continues, “As far as Europe was concerned, no moral issue was involved; the game of power politics could be played with a clear conscience.” Canton, The Civil War, p, 100. In fact,a naval “incident” in the Fall of 1861 involving the US and Britain almost ledto “outright war” between the two nations! Ibid., pp. 100-02.

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the night, although he stuffed rags in the door and window cracks to muffle

Harriet’s cries. They heard little Julius [Harriet’s son] screaming and Harriet’s

violent struggle before Sidney had his way with her. Nobody interfered, of course.160

With the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in the Fall of 1862, however, the moral tenor of the Union cause shifted decisively, as Canton again notes: “The northern government now was committed to a broader cause, with deep mystical overtones; it was fighting for Union and for human freedom as well, and the very nature of the Union for which it was fighting would be permanently deepened and enriched.” Ibid., p. 107. In the words of historian Shelby Foote, after September 1862 “support for the South was [viewed as] support for slavery.” In fact, as Foote further notes, “With this one blow...Lincoln had shattered the main pillar of what had been the Southern President’s hope from the start. Europe would not be coming into the war.” Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York: Random House, Inc., 1986), p. 709. Indeed, the great nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill declared that, “The triumph of the Confederacy would be a victory for the powers of evil, which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirits of friends all over the civilized world.” Mill concluded that the American Civil War “is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.” Quoted in Geoffrey Ward with Ric Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War (New York: Random House, Inc., 1990), p. 136.130 Willard F. Mallalieu in his 1890 “Introduction” to Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, xvi.131 See James Gillespie Birney, The American Churches: The Bulwarks of American Slavery, Third Edition (Concord, NH: Parker Pillsbury, 1842).132 Thornton Springfellow, D.D., Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery, Fourth Edition, with Additions (Richmond, VA: J. W. Randolph, 1856).133 Thus, two Northern Episcopal clergymen were “particularly outspoken” in this regard. New York priest Samuel Seabury, who was the grandson and name-sake of the Episcopal Church’s first bishop, “straight-forwardly endorsed” slavery in his 1861 work American Slavery…Justified by the Law of Nature, while John Henry Hopkins, the bishop of Vermont, “not only affirmed the legitimacy of slave-holding” in his 1861 book Bible View of Slavery, but even “supported the right of the southern states to secede from the Union in its defense.” Hein and Shattuck, The Episcopalians, p. 77.134 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 311.

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These forceful rapes only ceased when Sidney’s brother Francis,

who also had eyes for Harriet, beat his sibling senseless.

Harriet, however, was already pregnant with Sidney’s child.

135 Benjamin Drew, ed., Refugees from Slavery: Autobiographies of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), p. 55.136 See the noted American Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller’s 1845 review, “On the Narrative of Frederick Douglass,” in The American Transcendentalists:Essential Writings, Edited and with an Introduction by Lawrence Buell (New York: Random House, Inc., 2006), p. 356.137 Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, With aNew Introduction (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), p. 196. The Genoveses also note that for Southern slaveholders,

Society consisted in a network of households, the inhabitants of which were encouraged to view themselves as members of a family. The common expression “my family, white and black” was therefore no passing sentimentality or mere rationalization for the exerciseof despotic power over labor. It laid bare the sense of a Christian community as an extended family within which the laborers were assimilated to an organic relation with their masters, whose duties included protection and succor as well as discipline and the imposition of order.

Fox-Genovese and Genovese, "The Divine Sanction of Social Order," pp. 220-21.138 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 347.139 Ibid., pp. 96-7.140 Quoted in Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 215. Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper), a freeborn black poet, also captured the horror of slave family separations in her 1858 poem “Bury Me in a Free Land”:

I could not rest if I heard the treadOf the coffle-gang to the shambles led,And the mother’s shriek of wild despairRise like a curse on the trembling air.

I could not rest if I heard the lashDrinking her blood at each fearful gash,And I saw her babes torn from her breastLike trembling doves from their parents nest...

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In another instance of forced miscegenation, court documents

and newspaper accounts detail the rape of a fourteen-year-old

slave girl named Celia beginning in 1850 by her middle-aged

master. Over the next five years, Robert Newsom, a wealthy and

If I saw young girls, from their mothers’ armsBartered and sold for their youthful charmsMy eye would flash with a mournful flame,My death-paled cheeks grow red with shame.

Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander, eds., Major Problems in American Women’s History, Third Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003), p. 135.141 Jacobs, Incidents, pp. 10-11. In fact, former slave George Ross of Maryland offered similar disturbing imagery of such slave sales:

I have seen hundreds of cases where families were separated. I have seen them in droves, 150 to 200 together – men, women and children – linked side by side. There used to be two drivers to a drove, on[e] driver in front and one behind. I have seen them [i.e., the slaves] from eight or nine years old up to 45-50; and when the mothers were sold, I have seen young babies, from the cradle in these gangs. I have seen this many & many a time, and heard them cry fit to break their hearts.

Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 405. In general, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).142 Jacobs, Incidents, p, 17. Former slave Solomon Northup recorded another heart-breaking story of an enslaved mother and her two children, who were lodged in the same slave holding-cell as was Northup:

Throwing herself upon the floor, and encircling the children in her arms, she poured forth such touching words as only maternal love and kindness can suggest. They nestled closely to her, as if there only was there any safety or protection. At last they slept, their heads resting upon her lap. While they slumbered, she smoothed the hair back from their little foreheads, and talked to them all night long. She called them her darlings – her sweet babes – poor things, that knew not the misery they were destined to endure. Soon they would have no mother to comfort them – they would be taken from her. What would become of them? Oh! She could not live away from her little Emmy and her dear boy…It would break

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respected Missouri farmer, made unceasing and forceful sexual

demands on Celia. The latter, however, had no legal recourse

since enslaved women were not protected from rape by state law.

The young slave girl was forced, therefore, to take increasingly

desperate measures (ultimately resorting to murder) to end the

her heart, God knew, she said, if they were taken from her; and she knew they meant to sell them, and may be, they would be separated, and could never see each other any more. It was enough to melt a heart of stone to listen to the pitiful expressions of that desolate and distracted mother.

Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 51.143 Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 106.144 Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 2. In general, see Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (ChapelHill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Historian Eric Foner notes that, “In the early days of Reconstruction, thousands of freedmen and –women seeking to locate family members from whom they had been separated whilein slavery would place advertisements in newspapers and from the Freedmen’s Bureau.” Foner, Forever Free, p. 17. Many of these efforts proved fruitless, however.

145 Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 74. Thus, ex-slave Millie Curtis of NorthCarolina related how her mother, sister, and brother had taken to a slave speculator and sold off to the Deep South. “I never heard from my mother any more,” Curtis lamented. “I never seed my brother again, but my sister come back to Charlotte. She had come to see me.” Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, p. 76.146 Ibid., p. 38.148 Ibid., p. 696.149 Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 29.151 For an overview of the sexual mores in the antebellum South, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, 25th Anniversary Edition(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 294-308.152 For the full text of The 1789 U.S. Book of Common Prayer, see the website of The Society of Archbishop Justus, an Anglican information service, http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1789/BCP_1789.htm. (Emphasis added.)

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abuse.161 Additionally, gang rapes of enslaved African women by

white males, though under-reported, do occasionally occur in

slave testimony. Thus, one female ex-slave stated that, “My

sister was given away when she was a girl. She told me and ma

Regardless of these religious injunctions, “attitudes toward male fornication [in the antebellum South] were permissive,” since “male lust was simply a recognized fact of life.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 295. In fact, miscegenation between white married men and black females was perfectly acceptable, “so long as certain rules, which were fairly easy to follow, were discretely observed.” Ibid., pp. 307-08. The infidelity of a married white woman, on the other hand, was considered an intolerable affront against the husband’s “honor” and often was answered with considerable violence. Ibid., pp. 294-98.154 Hermence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk about Slavery, p. 41(emphasis added).153 Catherine Clinton, “Caught in the Web of the Big House: Women and Slavery,”in Norton and Alexander, eds., Major Problems, p. 142.155 Clinton, “Caught in the Web of the Big House,” p. 142. The full extent to which slave “breeding” occurred on Southern plantations is unclear from the existing evidence. Some masters and mistresses did attempt to control the mating habits of their slaves, often by matching up “appropriate” couples. SeeJacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 34-5. In fact, Frederick Douglass recorded that his master, Mr. Covey, purchased a young slave girl “asa breeder.” He added that:

This young women (Caroline was her name) was virtually compelled by Mr. Covey to abandon herself to the object for which he had purchased her; and the result was, the birth of twins at the end of the year. At this addition to his human stock, both Edward Covey and his wife, Susan, were ecstatic with joy. No one dreamed of reproaching the woman [i.e., Caroline], or of finding fault with the hired man – Bill Smith – the father of the children, for Mr. Covey himself had locked the two up together every night, thusinviting the result.

Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 167.

Additionally, all black slave women were expected to bear children early and asfrequently as possible to augment their masters’ slave force. Those who failedto do so were beaten or sold. Thus, as one historian notes:

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that they’d [i.e., her white owners] make her go out and lay on a

table and two or three white men would have sex with her before

they’d let her up.” The slave girl concluded, “She was just a

Slaveholders, both men and women, manipulated Black women to have children early and frequently. First, they used verbal prodding, then subtle practices such as giving pregnant women more food and less work. Some slaveholders used an outright system of rewards such as a new dress, or silver dollars, or Saturdays off. For women who resisted these “positive” incentives, coercion always existed – the threat of whipping, sale, or both.

Deborah Gray White, “Slavery,” in Wilma Mankiller (et al), eds., The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), p. 544.

Other slave owners appear to have kept particularly virile black males for “stud service,” who were referred to as “stockmen,” “travelin’ niggers,” or “breedin’ niggers.” See Clinton, “Caught in the Web of the Big House,” p. 141.Yet, there are few references to the latter in the slave narratives and interviews written before and after the Civil War. Thus, in John W. Blassingame’s massive collection of slave testimonies, only one contains a vague reference to the practice of stud service. “I have often heard of slavesbeing kept for the purpose of breeding,” ex-slave George Ross of Maryland testified in 1863, “but I have never seen it.” Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony,p. 406. Nevertheless, as historian Paul Escott argues, “mere numbers cannot suggest the suffering and degradation they caused” to the slave men and women involved in such a practice. Escott also notes that “it is likely that reticence caused some under-reporting [in this matter].” Quoted in Clinton, “Caught in the Web of the Big House,” p. 141. See also Clinton, Plantation Mistress, pp. 205, 212.156 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 382.157 Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 296.158 Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1984), p. 25.159 Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave: A True Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 27. Additionally, historian David W. Blight writes that, “Sexual abuse of slave women by young white men on farms and plantations rarely happened in random attacks; it occurred as a result of white control over a black woman’s time, labor, movement, and body. When a slave girl reached here teenage years she was vulnerable to rape or sexual intimidation.” David W. Blight, A Slave No

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small girl. She died when she was still in her young days, still

a girl.”162

Female slaves who “dared” to rebuff their master’s sexual

advances, moreover, were usually sold, as ex-slave Fannie Berry

of Virginia related concerning a domestic slave named Sukie:

More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (New York:Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), p. 55.160 Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 43. Another former slave girl named Louisa related a similar story as part of her testimony in the Georgia divorce case of James Oden, who was accused of having sexual relations with two of his household slave women:

Louisa, (colored) sworn [in] over defendant’s objection, said Odomused to come into witness’ bed-room and try to have intercourse with her, offered her one time two dollars to feel her titties; onone occasion, to avoid Odom, she went up stairs and carried the children to sleep with her and locked the door; she nailed up the windows of her house to keep Odom out; he made these offers to herwhen Mrs. Odom was [away] from home. Odom got into witness’ windowone night, and tried to throw her on to the bed; she told him if he did she’d halloo. She blew up the light to keep him off of her,and he would blow it out. She said that Odom never had connexion [i.e., inter-course] with her.

Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, p. 26.161 McLaurin, Celia, A Slave, pp. 24-35,113. Harriet Jacobs, as a young fifteen-year-old slave, also noted her utter lack of legal protection from the constant and unwanted sexual advances of her master, the lecherous Mr. Flint: “But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be asblack as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men…The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe.” Jacobs, Incidents, p. 26. Frederick Douglass also noted that:

Laws for the protection of the lives of slaves, are, as they must needs be, utterly incapable of being

enforced, where the very parties who are nominally protected, are not permitted to give evidence,

in courts of law, against the only class of persons from whom abuse, outrage and murder might be

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Den he [the master] tell Sukie to take off her dress. She tol’ him no. Den he

grabbed her an’ pull it down her shoulders…Den dat black gal got mad. She took an’punch ole Marsa, an’ made him off’n her break loose an’ den she gave him ashove an’ push his hindparts down in de hot pot o’

soup… Well, few days later hetook Sukie off an’ sol’ her to de nigger trader.163

reasonably apprehended. While I heard of numerous murders committed by slaveholders on the

Eastern Shore of Maryland, I never knew a solitary instance in which a slaveholder was either hung or imprisoned for having murdered a slave.

Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 105.162 Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, p. 25.163 Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery, p. 57. Another slave girl was not so “fortunate” in her rebuff of her master, as former slave Madison Jefferson of Virginia related to his interviewer:

Women who refuse to submit themselves to the brutal desires of their owners are frequently sold off to the [deep] South. Madison’s young master, albeit a member of the Methodist Church, punished a young woman on the estate repeatedly on this account, and at length accomplished his purpose, while she was in a state of insensibility from the effects of a felon blow [to the head] inflicted by this monster.

Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 221. Additionally, “Uncle” Cephas of Tennessee recounted a similar tale involving an eighteen-year-old slave named Lizzie Beaufort:

Her Tennessee master had bought her to be his kept woman, but Lizzie declared that she would rather die a thousand deaths than live such a life. She was willing to work her hands off, and do any thing that was required of her, but she just told her master that he would have her to kill, but that she never would submit tobe made an instrument of his hateful lust. It was no use. He coaxed, he pleaded, he threatened, and he beat her, but Lizzie stood as firmly as a rock against all his advances. When he saw that he could not persuade her by any means he determined to sell her. She was sold to a negro trader, who brought her out to Mississippi.

Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, pp. 65-6.

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However, some white planters and their sons employed less

forceful means to gain access to the bodies of enslaved black

women. Harriet Jacobs recorded how her master, Dr. Flint, seduced

one female slave with promises of better treatment. When their

illicit liaison ended in pregnancy, Dr. Flint simply sold both

the slave woman and her husband. Following this incident, the

lustful white planter relentlessly pursued Jacobs herself with

similar blandishments (and threats).164 Additionally, former slave

Peter Still noted that, “Among the slaves on Mr. Mckiernan’s

plantation were a number of handsome women. Of these the master

was extremely fond, and many of them he beguiled with vile

flatteries, and cheated by false promises of future kindness,

till they became victims to his unbridled passions.”165

White Southerners also attested to this widespread practice

of miscegenation – forced or cajoled – in the Old South by so-

called “Christian” planters. Fanny Kemble, the famed nineteenth-

century English actress, who later married a wealthy Georgia

planter, remarked: “Nobody pretends to deny that, throughout the

164 See Jacobs, Incidents, pp. 15-16, 26-33.165 Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, p. 167.

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South, a large proportion of the population is the offspring of

white men and colored women.”166 Mary Boykin Chesnut, a plantation

mistress from South Carolina, wrote the following observations in

her well-known Civil War diary:

God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrongand an iniquity. Our men

live all in one house with their wives and concubines; and the mulattos one sees in

every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who

is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own.

These, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling

over.167

Indeed, one historian has estimated that there existed “nearly a

quarter of a million” mulatto slave children in the South during

the 1850s!168

One unfortunate byproduct of this sexual exploitation of

enslaved black women was the

wrath they incurred from their white mistresses. Black author

Pauli Murray, in recounting the history of her family, also

offers the following insightful observations concerning the

plantation mistresses:

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Their wives at home secretly hated slavery for the oldest of human reasons. The southern woman was never sure of her husband’s fidelity or her sons’ morals as long as there was a slave woman in the household. The slave woman’s presence threatened her sovereignty, insulted her womanhood and often humiliated her before her friends. She was confronted with a rival by compulsion, whose helplessness she could not fight. Norcould she hide the mulatto children always underfoot who resembled her own children so strongly that on one could doubt their parentage.169

Therefore, as historian Catherine Clinton remarks, “The jealousy

and hatred many white women harbored for the slave women to whom

their husbands were attached was legend within the Old South.”170

Accordingly, ex-slave J. W. Lindsay of Tennessee recalled in

1863, “Sometimes white mistresses will surmise that there is an

intimacy between a slave woman & the master, and perhaps she will

make a great fuss & have her whipped, & perhaps there will be no

peace until she is sold.”171 Former slave Solomon Northup, for

example, related the story of a young slave girl named Patsey,

who had the misfortune to attract the desires of her owner Master

Epps and thus incurred the wrath of Mistress Epps. The latter had

Patsey whipped – or performed the beatings herself – on the

flimsiest of excuses. The situation eventually escalated into

“the most cruel whipping” Northup ever witnessed during his

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twelve years as a slave. Patsey was stripped naked, tied face

down to four stakes, and beaten mercilessly, causing Northup to

lose count of the number of lashes inflicted on the poor slave

girl. All the while, “Mistress Epps stood on the piazza among her

children, gazing on the scene with an air of heartless

satisfaction.”172

Ex-slave W. L. Bost of North Carolina also stated that, if a

mistress discovered infidelity on the part of her husband, she

was sure to “raise revolution!”173 Thus, former slave Peter Still

recounted how Mistress McKiernan came upon her husband, a fifty-

year-old planter, in the embrace of a thirteen-year-old slave

named Maria in the parlor, after which the “fierceness of her

nature was aroused.” Still recorded that

Her husband immediately mounted his horse and rode off to escape the storm…. The enraged woman seized the trembling child and put her in a buck. Then she whippedher till she was tired, but not satisfied; for as soon as she had rested her weary arms, she flew at her again, and after beating her till she had exhausted herown strength a second time, she shut her up in the brick smoke-house.

After two weeks of confinement and limited amounts of food and

water, Maria was finally handed over to the irate mistress’s son

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to live on a plantation far from the lustful grasp of the

unfaithful Master McKiernan.174

Frederick Douglass, moreover, noted that mulatto offspring

of planters often suffered “greater hardships” than other slaves

on Southern plantations: “They are, in the first place, a

constant offense to their mistress.” He added that the latter was

“ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do any

thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she

sees them under the lash…” Due to these frequent displays of

feminine brutality, the plantation master was often forced to

sell his mulatto slave children to the slave traders. Douglass

concluded that, “And, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be,

for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is

often the dictate of humanity to do so…”175 Unfortunately, other

slave narratives also recorded this heartless sale of mulatto

children by their white planter fathers to placate the burning

ire of the plantation mistresses or to conceal their own marital

infidelities.176 Lastly, ex-slave John Boggs of Maryland added

that, “If a [black] woman asked about her [mulatto] children that

had been sold, she would be whipped or knocked and slashed about”

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by her white master – and father of her children – “Old” William

Merrick.177

Again, the hypocrisy of this unchastely behavior on the part

of white “Christian” males was obvious to many female observers,

both white and black. One plantation mistress, Ella

Gertrude Clanton Thomas of Georgia, remarked bitterly in a

journal entry dated January 2, 1859:

I know that this is a view of the subject that is thought best for women to ignore

but when we see so many cases of mulattoes commanding higher prices, advertised as “Fancy girls,” oh is it not enough to make us shudder for the standard of morality in our Southern homes? A most striking illustration of general feeling on the subject is to befound in the case of George Eve [a Southern planter], who carried on with him a woman to the North under the name of wife – She was a mulatto slave, and although itwas well known that he lived constantly with her violating one of God’s ten commandments, yet nothing was thought of it. There was no one without sin “to cast the first stone at him...” 178

In fact, Thomas’s own husband, Jefferson Thomas, who was a

regular churchgoer and communicant in the Methodist denomination,

maintained a similar, though decidedly more discrete,

“polygynous” marriage with his own slave “wife.” This flagrant

breach of their marriage vows appears to have irreparably damaged

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relations between Master Thomas and his “lawful” wife Gertrude,

as numerous entries in the latter’s journal indicate.179

Plantation mistress Mary Boykin Chesnut echoed comparable

thoughts in her famous Civil War diary, when she wrote:

I hate slavery. You say there are not more fallen womenon a plantation than in London, in proportion to numbers; but what do you say to this? A [plantation] magnate who runs a hideous black harem with its consequences under the same roof with his lovely white wife, and his beautiful and accomplished daughters? He holds his head as high and poses as the model of all human virtues to these poor women whom God and the lawshave given him. From the height of his awful majesty, he scolds and thunders at them, as if he never did wrong in his life.180

Harriet Jacobs too decried such “unchristian” actions of these

mostly married white planters, who repeatedly hounded black slave

women for sexual gratification. “On my fifteenth year…my master

began to whisper foul words in my ear…, such as only a vile

monster could think of…But he was my master,” Jacobs wrote. “I

was compelled to live under the same roof with him – where I saw

a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of

nature,” she added.181

White plantation owners in the late antebellum South also

continued the earlier practice of physical and verbal coercion

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against their black slaves to enforce obedience, now, however,

often finding religious “justification” for their cruelty by

selectively quoting passages of the Bible. Frederick Douglass,

for example, recorded the following incident involving one white

“Christian” master:

I have seen him tie up a lame young woman, and whip herwith a heavy cowskin

upon her naked shoulders, causing the warm red blood todrip; and, in

justification of the bloody deed, he would quote this passage of Scripture – “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes” [Lk. 12:47, KJV].182

Ex-slave Solomon Northup also recorded that one planter, Peter

Tanner, used this same biblical verse to justify his own harsh

actions against his black slaves. In this instance, however,

Tanner placed three “rebellious” slaves in the stocks under a

burning sun for most of the day.183 Lastly, former slave J. W.

Lindsay of Tennessee remarked that this gospel passage was a

“favorite text” of slaveholding clergymen in particular when the

latter “disciplined” their slaves.184

The arrival of the Christian “Sabbath” – the Lord’s

“sanctified” day of rest (Gen. 2:2-3), moreover, at no time

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prevented these “religious” slaveholders from engaging in such

violence against their African slaves. In fact, former slave

Elias Thomas of North Carolina testified that his master, “old

man” William Crump, “waited till Sunday morning to whip his slaves.”

Master Crump “would get ready to go to church, have his horse

hitched up to the buggy, and them call his slaves out and whip

them before he left for church.”185 Additionally, Susan Boggs, an

ex-slave from Virginia, testified the following before the

American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission in 1863: “Why the man that

baptized me had a colored woman tied up in his yard to whip when

he got home, that very Sunday and her mother belonged to that same

church. We had to sit & hear him preach, and her mother was in

church hearing him preach...And he had her [daughter] tied up &

whipped.” Boggs concluded her testimony bitterly, “That was our

preacher!”186

It is no surprise, then, that the accounts of ex-slaves from

this period abound with incidents of “Christian” planters, both

lay and clergy, repeatedly brutalizing their black slaves.

Fredrick Douglass, for example, recorded the vicious actions of

two “ministers of the Gospel” – the Reverends Daniel Weeden and

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Rigby Hopkins – who were well known for their brutality to their

black slaves. Indeed, the latter of the two was accustomed to

whip his slaves “in advance of deserving it!”187 Former slave Mattie

Curtis of North Carolina recalled that she had seen her master

Preacher Whitfield “whip my mammy with all the clothes off her

back. He’d buck her down on a barrel and beat the blood out of

her.”188 Ex-slave Charlotte Brooks of Louisiana, moreover,

recounted how her “Catholic” mistress tortured to death a young

house slave named Ella, even thought the slave girl was a fellow

Catholic.189 Indeed, Harriet Jacobs reported the barbarous actions

of a neighboring plantation owner who, among other savage acts,

“shot a woman through the head, who had run away and been brought

back to him.” Jacobs further noted that, “He also boasted the

name and standing of a Christian, though Satan never had a truer

follower.”190

Overall, therefore, Mrs. Joseph Smith spoke for many black

slaves when she commented that Christian slaveholders “were the

hardest masters.” Besides excessive violence, these “pious”

planters also practiced greater vigilance, extreme thriftiness,

and stricter control over their plantations than did their less

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“religious” counterparts.191 Thus, ex-slave Isaac Throgmorton of

Kentucky complained that religious slaveholders “don’t feed nor

clothe their slaves as well as the irreligious man.”192 Former

slave Lewis Hayden of Kentucky stated a similar viewpoint when he

remarked that, “It may seem strange, but it is a fact, – I had

more sympathy and kind advice, in my efforts to get my freedom,

from gamblers and such sort of men, than Christians. Some of the

gamblers were very kind to me.”193 Indeed, Harriet Jacobs recorded

that she endured her “worst persecutions” from her master Dr.

Flint after the latter became a communicant with the Episcopal

Church.194 Frederick Douglass also observed a similar negative

change in his master, Thomas Auld, after the latter became a

practicing “Christian” in the Methodist Church: “Prior to his

conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to shield and

sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found

religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.”195 In fact, as

Douglass later wrote in his My Bondage and My Freedom, “Religious

slaveholders, like religious persecutors, are ever extreme in

their malice and violence,” since both believe that their

“fanaticism” is in accordance with the Divine will.196 Thus, as

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contemporary theologian Daniel L. Migliore reminds us: “When

religious passion goes arwy, it is the most dangerous and

destructive passion of all.”197

The fact that a planter was also a clergy member, therefore,

rarely mitigated this overall ill treatment of the black slaves

by their white owners. Former slave Mattie Curtis of North

Carolina, for example, remarked that her master, being a

preacher, “was supposed to be good, but he ain’t half fed nor

clothed his slaves, and he whipped them bad.”198 After

orchestrating his own purchase to Francis Whitfield, a Baptist

deacon, ex-slave Henry Bibb was hopeful that the latter’s

religious “piety” and church standing would ensure better

treatment for him and his growing family. In fact, Bibb

discovered that life on the “pious” deacon’s plantation was

anything but ideal:

When we arrived there, we found his slaves poor, ragged, stupid, and half-starved. The food he allowed them per week, was one peck of corn for each grown person, one pound of pork, and sometimes a quart of molasses. This was all that they were allowed, and if they got more they stole it. He [also] had one of the most cruel overseers to be found in that section of thecounty...They were worked from daylight until after dark, without stopping but one half hour to eat or

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rest, which was at noon. And at the busy season of the year, they were compelled to work just as hard on the Sabbath, as on any other day.199

Accordingly, as historian Albert J. Raboteau has remarked, “the

ideal of the patriarchal master, his rule tempered by Christian

benevolence, was for many slaves an ironic fiction.”200

In spite of such physical brutality, some slaves believed

that the morally degrading “gospel” of slave obedience and

docility was the most offensive feature of Southern religion.

“The ministers used to preach, ‘Obey your masters and mistresses

and be good servants,’” Mrs. Joseph Smith recalled, “I never

heard anything else. I didn’t hear anything about obeying our

Maker.”201 Another ex-slave, Wes Beady of Texas, reported the

following concerning the weekly sermons of the white preacher on

his master’s plantation: “We went to church on that place and you

ought to heard the preachin’. Obey your massa and missy, don’t

steal chickens and eggs and meat, but nary a word ‘bout havin’ a

soul to save.”202 Additionally, former slave Cornelius Garner

testified that, “Dat ole white preacher jest was telling us

slaves to be good to our masters.” Nevertheless, he added, “We

ain’t keer’d a bit ‘bout dat stuff he was telling us ‘cause we

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wanted to sing, pray, and serve God in our own way.”203 As a result

of all of the above theological and moral “inconsistencies,”

enslaved blacks did their best to undermine the pernicious

influence of Southern religion in their communities. They found a

variety of highly creative ways in which to defy the evangelistic

impulses of their white masters: by boycotting plantation

services, by changing denominations, by refusing to obey white

moral precepts, and, above all, by creating their own black

churches.

“Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree”

One popular response of slaves to the continual sermons of black

obedience and docility by white preachers was for the black

congregation to walk out of the service and not return. Ex-slave

Lunsford Lane recalled one such incident in 1834: “A kind-hearted

clergyman...who was popular with colored people...gave a sermon

to us in which he argued from the Bible that it was the will of

Heaven from all eternity that we should be slaves, and our

masters be our owners, [and] many of us left him...”204

Additionally, white preacher Charles Colcock Jones recounted a

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similar reaction by a black congregation in 1834 to his sermon on

slave obedience:

I was preaching to a large congregation on the Epistle of Philemon: and when I

insisted upon fidelity and obedience as Christian virtues in servants and upon the

authority of Paul, condemned the practice of running away, one half of my

audience deliberately rose up and walked off with themselves, and those that

remained looked any thing but satisfied, either with the preacher or his

doctrine...There were some too, who had objections against me as a Preacher,

because I was a master, and said, “his people have to work as well as we.”205

It is doubtful that many of these remaining black parishioners

attended Jones’ church services on the following Sunday.

Other slaves rejected the denomination of their masters and

moved to ones that were more welcoming to blacks. Historically,

plantation slaves were expected to follow the religious practices

of their owners, as Vinnie Busby, an ex-slave from Mississippi,

described: “We went to Church at de white folks Church...We had

to go to whut ever Church our Marse went to.”206 Another former

slave, “Uncle Ben” of Texas, recounted the following story of one

slave who desired to attend a church different from that of his 205 Quoted in ibid.

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master: “At de Missionary Baptist [Church] dey has foot-washing.

I ‘member in de ole days how one er my Master’s slaves wanted to

go to dat Church. ‘You mind your business an’ hear de preacher

what I sen’ you,’ marster says.”207 Nevertheless, ex-slave Moses

Roper concluded that his master provided “a bad sample of what a

professing Christian ought to be.” Therefore, he managed to leave

his master’s Baptist congregation and opted instead for one of

the Methodist Church.208 Harriet Jacobs and her fellow slaves also

found refuge from their master’s preacher, the “sanctimonious”

Episcopal preacher the Rev. Pike, in the more joyous services of

a Methodist “shout.”209

Another means by which enslaved blacks undermined the

influence of Southern religion was their refusal to obey the

moral precepts of their plantation ministers, especially the

prohibition against stealing from one’s master. Richard

Carruthers, an ex-slave from Virginia, recalled one such sermon:

“When the white preacher come to the plantation to preach to us

niggers, he picked up his Bible and claimed he gitting the text

right out fo’m the good book, and he preach: ‘The good Lord say:

Don’t you niggers steal chickens fo’m your missus. Don’t you

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niggers steal your marster’s hogs.’” Carruthers concluded

bitterly: “And that would be all he preach.”210 Nevertheless, as

historian Albert J. Raboteau has noted, “While white preachers

repeatedly urged ‘Dont steal,’ slaves just as persistently denied

that this commandment applied to them, since they themselves were

stolen property.”211 Former slave Charles Brown of Virginia echoed

this sentiment directly to his master: “I told my master one day

– said I, ‘You white folks set the bad example of stealing – you

stole us from Africa, and not content with that, if any got free

here, you stole them afterward, and so we are made slaves.’”212

On the other hand, former slave Henry Bibb justified

stealing from one’s master on a different but related ground:

I did not regard it as stealing then, I do not regard it as such now. I hold that a slave has the moral rightto eat and drink and wear all that he needs, and that it would be a sin on his part to suffer and starve in acountry where there is plenty to eat and wear within his reach. I consider that I had a just right to what Itook, because it was the labor of my hands.213

Nevertheless, as Raboteau again notes, “the slaves’ own moral

code was careful to distinguish between ‘taking’ from the master

and ‘stealing’ from another slave, which was regarded as a

serious wrong.”214 For example, former slave Sarah Fitzpatrick of

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Alabama stated the following: “‘Niggers’ didn’t think dat

stealin’ [from their owners] wuz so bad in dem times. Fak’ is dey

didn’t call it stealin,’ dey called it takin.’ Dey say, ‘I ain’t

takin’ fo’m nobody but ma’ mistrus an’ Marster, an’ I’m doin’ dat

‘cause I’se hungry.’”215

Above all, slaves resisted Southern religion by forming

their own autonomous churches, ones free of white control.

Enslaved black women, moreover, were an integral part of these

burgeoning underground congregations, which met secretly at night

in the slave quarters or in the relative seclusion of the brush

arbors (the so-called “hush harbors”).216 The latter were

temporary shelters made of cut branches with earthen floors which

the slaves would build deep in the woods in which to hold their

clandestine services. The black slaves often referred to these

brush-constructed “churches” as “hush harbors” to confuse their

white owners.217 These outdoor meeting places, moreover, were

“usually attached to a group of trees that were considered

particularly sacred and as having magical properties,” clearly a

vestige of West African religious practices.218 Often, enslaved

215 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 652.

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blacks from neighboring plantations would jointly attend these

weekly services, during which time they could socialize and

exchange information as well as worship freely. Thus, former

slave Emily Dixon testified that, “On Sundays, us would git

tergether in de woods an’ have worship. Us could go to de white

folks’ church, but us wanted ter go whar us sing all de way

through, an hum ‘long, an shout – yo’ all know, jist turn’ loose

lak.”219

During these clandestine gatherings, slaves sang their own

hymns, though at times, as Harriet Jacobs pointed out, “not

troubl[ing] their heads about the measure.”220 Ex-slave Dinah

Cunningham, on the other hand, remembered the matter differently:

“They say us could carry de song better than white folks. Well,

maybe us does love de Lord just a little bit better, and what’s

in our mouth is in our hearts.”221 Indeed, former slave Carey

Davenport from Texas also remarked that, during their own

services, blacks sang songs and hymns that came “a-gushing up

from the heart.”222 These spirituals were drawn from a wide

variety of sources – “the Bible, Protestant hymns, sermons, and

African styles of singing and dancing” – and reflected the harsh

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experiences and deep longings of the black community in

bondage.223 Nevertheless, historian Henry H. Mitchell notes that

these slave spirituals were not simply “compensatory, something

too close to an opiate for the people.” They contained “serious

theology,” he adds, which served the genuine needs of the slave

congregations. Indeed, their “central theme of personhood or

‘somebodiness’” assisted enslaved blacks in combating the

persistent message of “black inferiority and divinely ordained

white domination,” which were the heart and soul of Southern

religion.224

Additionally, the black slaves’ “religious frenzy” during

their own services often resulted into ecstatic “shouts,” as ex-

slave Sarah Fitzpatrick of Alabama recalled: “’Niggers’ lack’ta

shout a whole lot an’ wid de white fo’ks al’ round’ em, dey

couldn’t shout jes’ lack dey want to. My a’nt use’ta tare loose

in dat white church an’ shout, my! She sho’ could shout!”225 Such

emotional displays by enslaved blacks during church services

normally “startled” white observers, notes historian Eugene D.

Genovese. The “more austere masters,” he adds, “tried to curb it

but usually had little success.”226 Former slave Emoline Glasgow

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of South Carolina, for example, related the following humorous

tale concerning the marked differences in worship between whites

and blacks: “Once when Master Gilliam took one of his slaves to

church at old Tranquil, he told him that he mustn’t shout that

day – said he would give him a pair of new boots if he didn’t

shout. About the middle of services, the old nigger couldn’t

stand it no longer. He jumped up and hollered: ‘Boots or no

boots, I gwine to shout today!’”227

Unfortunately, such highly audible “shouts” could also

compromise the clandestine religious gatherings of enslaved

blacks, as former slave Cato Carter of Alabama recalled: “One of

de slaves got happy and made a noise dat dey heerd at de big

house and den de overseer come and whip us’ cause we prayed de

Lawd to set us free.”228 Many of these underground slave

congregations, therefore, employed an upturned pot or kettle to

“muffle” or “absorb” the sound of their members’ voices as they

sang and prayed, though with mixed results. Charlotte Brooks and

her fellow slaves, for example, would place “a big wash-tub full

of water” in the center of the room “to catch the sound of their

voices” during the singing of hymns.229 In reality, the upturned

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kettle appears to have been a vestige of traditional African

worship retained by the black slave congregations in the Old

South.230

Black slaves also taught themselves and one another

literacy, so that they could read the Bible in particular.

Nevertheless, such lessons in literacy had to be conducted in

absolute secrecy, as ex-slave Jenny Proctor of Alabama related:

“We slips around and gits hold of that Webster’s old blue-back

speller and we hides it till ‘way in the night and then we lights

a little pine torch, and studies that spelling book.”231 Once they

were armed with literacy, black slaves could peruse the Bible and

glean its meaning for themselves. The articulate runaway slave

Henry Bibb, for example, was fond of quoting “liberating”

biblical verses in his letters to his former master, the Rev.

Albert G. Sibley: “Listen to the language of inspiration: ‘Feed

the hungry, and clothe the naked’ (Mt. 25:34-35); ‘Break every

yoke and let the oppressed go free’ (Lk. 4:18-19); and ‘All things,

whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so

unto them, for this is the law and the prophets’ (Mt. 7:12).”232

Indeed, the literate rebel slave Nat Turner proclaimed that the

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Bible was actually opposed to slavery. In support of this view,

Turner quoted the following biblical verses to his enraptured

black audiences during their clandestine religious gatherings:

“And he that stealeth a man, or selleth him, or if he be found in

his hand, he shall surely be put to death” (Ex. 21:16); and, “If

a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of

Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selleth him; then that

thief shall die; and thou shalt put evil away from among you”

(Duet. 24:7).233

Dynamic black preachers, moreover, whipped their

congregations into a frenzy with powerful and eloquent sermons

concerning the Bible’s more relevant themes to enslaved black

audiences. These included the Exodus of the Israelite slaves from

Egyptian bondage, the trials and tribulations of Daniel in the

lion’s den, the plight of Jonah in the belly of the whale, or

even the lowly socioeconomic status of the Lord Jesus Himself.234

Many years later, ex-slave Mary Reynolds of Louisiana recalled

one such uplifting sermon by a black preacher (and the hopeful

aspirations of his congregation):

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Once, my Maw and Paw taken me and Katherine [her sister] after night to slip to

‘nother place to a prayin’ and singin’. A nigger man with white beard [their local

preacher] told us a day am comin’ when niggers only be slaves of Gawd. We prays for the end of trib’lation andthe end of beatin’s and shoes that fit our feet. We prayed that us niggers could have all we wanted to eat,and special for freshmeat.235

“Freedom” or “liberation” from their brutal bondage was, in fact,

a persistant theme of sermons and prayers in these underground

slave congregations.236

These early black preachers also developed the “signature”

style of African American preaching known as “call-and-response,”

in which preachers “evoked” emotional responses throughout their

sermons from their enraptured audiences. Without this “give-and-

take” between preacher and congregation, enslaved blacks

believed, “the service had no relationship to God.”237 Within the

black community, notes sociologist George P. Rawick, the

preacher’s relationship to God was “manifested” through his bond

with his people. Therefore, he continues, “the cries of ‘Amen,’

‘Halleluja,’ ‘Tell it to them, Preacher,’ and the like [were] in

effect affirmations that he [was] in tune with the soul of the

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community.”238 Undoubtedly, “call-and-response” was also one of

the many survivals of African musical style present in black

slave religion throughout the Old South.239 This pattern of

preaching proved to be so popular that even some white preachers

and their slaveholding congregations attempted to imitate it,

though with decidedly mixed results!240

Some of these lay preachers, it should be noted, were

women, such as “Aunt” Jane, the itinerant female preacher who

secretly led “prayer-meetings” at the Louisiana plantation on

which ex-slave Charlotte Brooks lived. “Aunt” Jane Lee, who was

also from Brooks’ home state of Virginia, was fully literate and

thus able to read the Bible and hymn books with ease. As the

leader of these clandestine religious services in the slave

quarters, Aunt Jane read bible stories to her fellow slaves, led

them in prayers and the singing of hymns, preached to them

concerning God’s love, and “won” their souls to Jesus. Later,

when Aunt Jane’s master moved to Texas, taking his “property”

with him, the remaining slaves – including Brooks herself – took

turns leading these prayer-meetings; they thus followed the

dynamic example established for them by Aunt Jane.241

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In a recent book, however, noted historian Albert J.

Raboteau states: “As in regular churches, slave women were not

preachers in the ‘invisible institution’ [i.e., the underground

slave church].” Rather, Rabotaeu remarks that enslaved African

women “exercised religious authority” in other important ways –

such as healers, spiritual advisors, and catechists to

children.242 Nevertheless, the examples of Aunt Jane and even

Charlotte Brooks herself clearly indicate that female slaves

could on occasion transcend these rather limited religious roles

available to black women. In the impromptu “prayer-meetings” in

the slave quarters or “hush harbors,” the roles assigned to men

and women were of necessity somewhat “fluid,” often predicated on

a slave’s prior experience or background qualifications rather

than solely based on his or her gender. As Brooks made abundantly

clear in her narrative, Aunt Jane served as a bone fide preacher

and pastor to her slave congregation: “Aunt Jane was the cause of

so many on our plantation getting religion…She said people must

give their hearts to God, to love him and keep his commandments;

and we believed what she said.” Indeed, following her own

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conversion, Brooks herself desired “to preach” and “ask every

body if they loved Jesus.”243

Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, none of the sermons of

these black female preachers were recorded. A “taste” of these,

however, can be gleaned from the existing sermons of Julia A. J.

Foote (1823-1901), a daughter of former slaves, who experienced a

call to preaching in New York State during the 1840s. Struggling

against both gender and racial prejudices, Foote became a dynamic

preacher, gathering large audiences, as she travelled nearly

10,000 miles in the northern US and Canada over the next 50

years. Eventually, she was ordained as the first female deacon in

the AME Zion Church as well.244 Of particular interest is her

“Threshing” sermon from 1851, which is contemporaneous with the

late antebellum South. In this sermon, Foote thundered to her

enraptured audience:

It is encouraging to the saints to know that they are provided [by God] with weapons both offensive and defensive. The threshing instrument is of the former description…And this is one of the weapons which he employs in the hands of his people to carry his gracious designs into execution, together with the promise that they shall beat in pieces many peoples. There are many instances of the successful application of the Gospel flail, by which means the devil is

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threshed out of sinners. With the help of God, I am resolved, O sinner, to try what effect the smart strokes of this threshing instrument will produce on thy unhumbled soul. This is called the sword of the Spirit, and it is in reality the Word of God!

“Fiery” sermons such as these made Julia A. J. Foote a very

popular preacher with both blacks and whites, despite her gender

and color.245

On most Sundays evenings throughout the Old South,

therefore, enslaved blacks braved their white masters’ wrath in

order to attend their own services, ones free of the “gospel” of

slave obedience and racial inequality propagated by Southern

religion.246 Ex-slave Charlotte Brooks recalled how her master

attempted to break up any such slave religious gatherings on his

estate, like those which “Aunt” Jane – who arrived secretly from

a neighboring plantation – organized in the slave quarters in

which Brooks lived:

She would hold prayer-meetings in my house whenever shewould come to see me…; if old marster heard us singing and praying he would come out and make us stop. One time, I remember, we all were having a prayer-meeting in my cabin, and marster came up to the door and hollered out, “You, Charlotte, what’s all that fuss in there?” We all had to hush up for that night. I was so afraid old marster would see Aunt Jane. I knew Aunt

245 Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder, p. 64.

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Jane would have to suffer if her white people knew she was off at night. Marster used to say God was tired of us all hollering to him at night.247

Lastly, former slave Talitha Lewis of Arkansas recalled that, “My

master used to ask us children, ‘Do your folks pray at night?’ We

said ‘No,’ ‘cause our folks had told us what to say. But the Lord

have mercy, there was plenty of that going on. They’d pray,

‘Lord, deliver us from under bondage!’”248

Conclusion

In light of this wide-spread black defiance of planter-inspired

evangelization, as recorded by both black and white sources,

Southern religion as an ideological and religious tool to

“pacify” the slave population in the South appears to have been a

resounding failure. Although there were no further slave

insurrections of note between 1831-1861, this was due largely to

the draconian measures enforced upon enslaved blacks in the

aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion. Plantation owners, for

example, revamped the earlier system of armed patrols of poor and

unruly whites, which now acted preventively rather than reactively, to

insure that no slaves ventured out at night unauthorized.249 Ex-

slave Solomon Northup, in a famous slave narrative published in

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1854, provided a detailed description of these reorganized slave

patrols, as they existed in Bayou Boeuf, Louisiana, which is

worth quoting in full:

They ride on horseback, headed by a captain, armed, andaccompanied by dogs.

They have the right, either by law, or by general consent, to inflict discretionary

chastisement upon a black man caught beyond the boundaries of his master’s

estate without a pass, and even to shoot him, if he attempts to escape. Each

company has a certain distance to ride up and down the bayou. They are

compensated by the planters, who contribute in proportion to the number of slaves

they own. The clatter of their horses’ hoofs dashing bycan be heard at all hours of the night, and frequentlythey may be seen driving a slave before them, or leading him by a rope fastened around his neck, to his owner’s plantation.250

Harriot Jacobs observed a similar “efficiency” in the

organization and operations of the patrollers in her region as

well.251

The brutality of these white “patrollers,” moreover, was

legendary, as ex-slave Tom Holland of Georgia testified. Holland

had slipped out one night to visit a neighboring plantation, but

was caught by a group of patrollers on his way home. They

250 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 237.

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stretched the captive slave over a log and beat him mercilessly

with a “rawhide [wipe] loaded with rock.” Holland concluded that,

“They drove me home to massa and told him and he called a old

mammy to doctor my back, and I couldn’t work for four days.”252

Indeed, ex-slave “Uncle Stephen” of Louisiana described the

“‘Cadian” patrollers in his district as follows:

Why, child, they were the meanest things in creation; they were poor, low down white folks, that descended from a French and Spanish mixture. They had no slaves themselves, and so they just took pleasure in patrolling the public roads so as to get to whip somebody else’s slaves that happened to be out without a pass...They were a poor, ignorant set that was just as mean as they were poor and ignorant. The only advantage they had over the negroes was that they were white, that’s all.253

Former slave Anthony Dawson also regarded these sadistic hired

thugs with fear and contempt, calling them “low white trash.”254

Additionally, the “feral” and “ravenous” blood hounds which

accompanied these patrollers were equally feared by runaway

slaves. Ex-slave Solomon Northup, for example, described the

failed escape attempt of a slave boy named Augustus, who was

unceasingly pursued by these so-called “nigger dogs”:

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All [the] dogs were put upon his track – some fifteen of them – and soon scented his footsteps to the hiding place…As he rolled down to the ground the whole pack plunged upon him, and before they could be beaten off [by the patrollers], had gnawed and mutilated his body in the most shocking manner, their teeth having penetrated to the bone in an hundred places. He was taken up, tied upon a mule, and carried home. But this was Augustus’ last trouble. He lingered until the next day, when death sought the unhappy boy, and kindly relieved him from his agony.255

Former slave “Uncle” Ben of Texas also recounted with trepidation

the savagery of these bloodhounds used by the patrollers and

local planters. Uncle Ben related that as a slave he often

attempted to “slip out” at nights to make visits to neighboring

plantations. Once, he testified, “I thought nobody see me, but de

marster did, an’ he tole de overseer to whip me. I weren’t goin’

to be whipt, so I runned away. Den dey set de dogs on me. De dogs

is terrible.” He concluded, “When dey’s after yer dere ain’t

nothin’ to do but climb a tree or dey tear yer all to pieces.”256

Occasionally, however, the black slaves were able to strike

back at these hired white “thugs,” as ex-slave W. B. Allen of

Alabama recounted years later:

Teasing, and playing pranks on, the patrolers were favorite pastimes of some of the slaves. One of their choicest stunts was to tie a grapevine across some

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narrow, dark stretch of road where they knew the patrollers would pass. And, as the patrollers usually rode at a gallop, these vines would be sure to catch the foremost rider or riders somewhere between their saddle horns and necks and unhorse at least one or moreof them.257

Former slave William Colbert of Georgia also recalled that,

“Niggers used to tie ropes across the road so that patrollers’

horses could trip up.”258 Enslave black also employed a variety of

“preventive mechanisms” to avoid violent treatment from the hated

patrollers, such as “learning when to expect a patrol, setting up

a warning system, and playing stupid and innocent when caught.”259

Many Southern states, moreover, passed laws barring blacks

from becoming preachers, attending religious services on their

own, or even obtaining lessons in literacy. These white

legislators had not forgotten the recent examples of the rebel

leaders Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, both of whom were literate

and had utilized apocalyptic imagery gleaned from their own

readings of the Bible to incite the slave population.260 Former

slave James Curry of North Carolina noted as a child the changed

environment concerning slave education that arose throughout the

South in the wake of the Nat Turner Rebellion: “Before Nat

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Turner’s insurrection, a slave in our neighborhood might buy a

spelling or hymn-book, but now he cannot.”261 Ex-slave Henry Bibb

recalled how the white patrollers broke up a “forbidden” literacy

program for slaves that Bibb himself was attending:

There was a Miss Davis, a poor white girl, who offered to teach a Sabbath School for the slaves, not withstanding public opinion and the law was opposed to it. Books were furnished and she commenced the school; but news soon got to our owners that she was teaching us to read. Patrols were appointed to go and break up the next Sabbath [School].

In the eyes of Southern white folk, Bibb noted, the act of

teaching black slaves to read was truly an “incendiary

movement.”262

Above all, the large planters in particular reorganized

their plantations to function according to a well-ordered and

tightly supervised “system,” one which afforded African slaves

little opportunity for collective action.263 The movement of

enslaved blacks both on and off the plantation, for example, was

highly regulated. Thus, ever-vigilant overseers closely monitored

the work, habits, and associations of the slaves under their

charge, often commencing their labors with the unrelenting sound

of bells or horns.264 Additionally, all slaves who left the

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plantation grounds were required to have a written pass from

their owner or overseer authorizing this action. Former slave

Solomon Northup described the workings of this authorization

system, which had been introduced earlier in American slavery,

but now was strictly enforced:

A slave caught off his master’s plantation without a pass, may be seized and

whipped by any white man whom he meets. The one I now received was dated and read as follows: “Platt [Solomon’s slave name] has permission to go to Ford’splantation, on Bayou Boeuf, and return by Tuesday

morning. [Signed] John MTibeats.” This is the usual form. On the way, a great

many [whites] demanded it,read it, and passed on.

Additionally, financial incentives were offered to keep poor

whites in particular extra vigilant in checking for passes, as

Northup also pointed out.265

Lastly, many planters employed or enticed some slaves to

serve as spies to uncover any plots by enslaved blacks to rebel

or runaway, generously rewarding these informants for their

“services.” Former slave Fredrick Douglass related that, “The

slaveholders have been known to send spies among their slaves, to

ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition.”

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Due to this frequent practice, the slaves established the

following maxim: “a still tongue makes a wise head.” Thus, in the

presence of whites or blacks who were “untried,” most slaves

spoke only glowingly of their masters’ conduct and conditions on

their estates, so as to avoid suspicion or severe punishment.266

This policy of “divide and rule” proved to be very effective in

thwarting slave attempts at flight or insurrection, as former

slave Frederick Douglass lamented. Indeed, a slave informant was

responsible for betraying an early escape attempt by Douglass and

some fellow slaves from the estate of Mr. Freeland. Douglass

noted, “We found the evidence against us to be the testimony of

one person; our master would not tell who it was; but we came to

a unanimous decision among ourselves as to who their informant

was.” Douglass and his fellow conspirators were jailed, but

managed to receive rather lenient treatment for their

insubordination.267 Ex-slave Henry Bibb noted, moreover, that some

“domestic” slaves were particularly wont to betray runaway slaves

(like Bibb himself) in order to curry favor and better treatment

from their masters. “This is one of the principal causes of the

slaves being divided among themselves,” Bibb bitterly concluded,

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“and without which they could not be held in bondage one year,

and perhaps not half that time.”268

Due to all of these harsh and restrictive measures,

therefore, the slave insurrections of the eighteenth and early

268 Bibb, Narrative, pp. 85-6. Some mulattos – free or enslaved – also attempted to curry favor with the whites by betraying runaway black slaves during the latter’s desperate flight to freedom. Former slave Madison Jefferson of Virginia testified that this occurred to one slave who had made it as far as Cleveland, Ohio, before “some mulattos” betrayed him. Thereupon, the fugitive slave was “carried back by his master to the scene of his stripes and toil.” Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 222.166 Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, Edited, with an Introduction by John A. Scott (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), p. 9. Former slave Madison Jefferson of Virginia, in the words of his interviewer, echoed a similar sentiment as that of Fanny Kemble:

Slavery, as has been before remarked, falls with peculiar severityon the women…Placed too within the grasp of their brutal masters, neither the innocence of youth nor the virtue of womanhood is respected. Madison confirms this by details which will hardly barelaying before the public...[T]hey are liable to be broken in upon by the unbridled licentiousness of the masters, overseers, &c.; the proof of which is offered in the fact, that a very considerable portion of the slaves are of mixed race…

Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 221 (emphasis added).167 Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, Edited by Ben Ames Williams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 21-2. Historian CatherineClinton provides great insight into the psyche of many plantation mistresses, when she writes:

While southern men enjoyed their machismo culture and slaves nurtured their own sense of

community…the plantation mistress stood alone. She was isolated and besieged on her husbands

plantation. White women were immobilized, anchored to estates, severely hampered by stereo-types of frailty and femininity. Within southern society, ladies were expected to embody perfectionist ideals: chastity, piety, and purity. In order to keep white women from polluting contact with the outside world,

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nineteenth centuries were no longer possible in this new

environment of planter-driven repression in the closing decades

of the Old South. Northup himself commented on the utter futility

southern masters literally confined females – to model behavior, enclosed by the boundaries of the estate, within the domestic circle. Southern patriarchs required absolute fealty from all their subjects: slaves, children, and white women. The hierarchical nature of southern society demanded loyalty and unwavering devotion of all subordinates to “lords and masters,” asplanter-patriarchs designated themselves.

Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century, Revised Edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), p. 39.168 Blight, A Slave No More, p. 56.169 Murray, Proud Shoes, p. 37.170 Clinton, “Caught in the Web of the Big House,” pp. 143-44. See also Clinton, Plantation Mistress, pp. 188-89.171 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 401.172 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 253-60. Indeed, former slave Peter Still detailed the deterioration of his mistress’s mental and physical health due tothe continual infidelity of her husband Master McKiernan with black slave women:

Year after year, as new instances of her husband’s perfidy came toher knowledge, her jealousy ran higher, till at length reason seemed banished from her mind, and kindness became a stranger to her heart. Then she sought solace in the wine-cup; the demon of intoxication fanned the fires of hatred that burned within her, till they consumed all that was womanly in her nature, and rendered her an object of contempt and ridicule, even among her own dependents.

Prickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, p. 167. In general see Minrose C. Gwin, “Green-eyed Monsters of the Slavocracy: Jealous Mistresses in Two Slave Narratives,” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in American: An Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishers, 1993), pp. 557-72.173 Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk about Slavery, p. 95.174 Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, p. 171.

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in contemplating a slave rebellion in Louisiana during the 1840s

and 1850s:

Such an idea as insurrection, however, is not new amongthe enslaved population of Bayou Boeuf. More than once I have joined in serious consultation, when the subjecthas been discussed, and there have been times when a

175 Douglass, Narrative, pp. 18-19.176 Former slave Thomas Hughes of Virginia, the son of his white master by a black slave woman, recounted how he, his mother, and his twin sister were soldto his master’s brother when Hughes was just 11 months. Later his mother and sister were resold, never to be seen by Hughes again. He too was resold at a later date. When faced with yet another sale, Hughes was allowed to travel toKentucky to appeal in person to his white father and former master:

I told him of the injustices of my relatives, in selling me; informed him that I was to be again sold, and begged him to purchase and manumit me. I told him of the miserable life I was leading, subject to the will of any person who might become my master; but to all my entreaties he turned a deaf ear, and in public would not speak to me as he passed me. I remained in the place two weeks,to ascertain if possible, where my mother and sister were; but so indifferent was he to their fate, he had not taken the name of their purchaser, or the destination of the drove of which they formed a part (my emphasis).

Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 211. Additionally, see the witness of former slave Charlotte Brooks of Louisiana, who recounts a similar tale concerning a mulatto offspring of Brook’s master, in Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 29.177 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 422.1 78 The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, p. 168 (emphasis

added). 1 79 For the “polygynous” marriages of many white planters –

including Master Thomas – with mulatto slavewomen, see ibid., pp. 61-3.

180 Boykin Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, p. 122 (emphasis added).181 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 26 (emphasis added). Additionally, Jacobs noted that, “Though this bad institution [of slavery] deadens the moral sense, even in white women, to a fearful extent, it is not altogether extinct.” Jacobs added,“I have heard southern ladies say of Mr. Such a one, ‘He not only thinks it nodisgrace to be the father of those little niggers, but he is not ashamed to

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word from me would have placed hundreds of my fellow-bondsmen in an attitude of defiance. Without arms or ammunition, or even with them, I saw such a step would result in certain defeat, disaster and death, and always raised my voice against it.269

call himself their master. I declare, such things ought not to be tolerated inany decent society!’” Ibid., p. 33.182 Douglass, Narrative, p. 57. Former slave Charles Payton Lucas of Virginia recalled an eerily similar episode in which his master savagely whipped the slave when he was a young boy for “aggrevating” his mistress. All throughout the beating, Lucas’s master repeatedly quoted this same gospel verse! Drew, ed., Refugees from Slavery, p. 73.183 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 127-30.184 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 420. With “exquisite irony,” Nat Turner himself, who had once run away from but later returned to his master, quoted this same biblical verse to the latter at their unexpected “reunion!” Oates, Fires of Jubilee, p. 28.185 Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, p. 11 (emphasis added).186 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 420 (emphasis added). Additionally, former slave George Anderson of Virginia offered the following testimony: “My master was a minister,…he was a strict man who preached every Saturday and Sunday and on the other days gave his attention to the farm. If he thought a black man needed flogging he’d tie him to a post and do it himself if the overseer was busy.” Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 567.

Catholic clergymen, moreover, were not immune to the corrosive effects of Southern religion, as former slave Aunt Lorendo of Louisiana testified:

But, I tell you, one time I had a cousin that told the priest [during confession] he wanted to get free, and asked him to pray to God to set him free, and bless your soul, ma’am, the priest wasabout to have my cousin hung. The priest told my cousin’s marster about it, and they was talking strong about hanging my cousin. They had my cousin up and made him tell who had told him anything about freedom. But the priest managed some way to save my poor cousin.

Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 39.187 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 195.188 Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, p. 35.

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Former slave Madison Jefferson of Virginia, in the words of his

interviewer, also noted the near impossibility for slaves to

organize an insurrection at this time: “It will readily be

supposed that, under the infliction of these varied tortures,

189 Brooks testified that

She was only twelve years old. Ella’s mother did not live with her. Mistress had no more feelings for her than she had for a cat. She used to beat her and pull her ears till they were sore. She would crack her on the head with a key or any thing she couldget her hands on till blood would ooze of the poor child’s head. Mistress’s mother gave Ella to her, and when Ella got to be abouteighteen mistress got jealous of her and old marster. She used to punish Ella all sorts of ways. Sometimes she tied her up by her thumbs.She could do nothing to please her mistress. She had been in the habit of tying Ella up, but one she tied her up and left her, and when she went back she found Ella dead. She told old marster she did not intend to kill her, that she only wanted to punish her.

Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 17.190 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 43. Whites who murdered their blacks slaves were rarely, if ever, prosecuted for their crimes, as Frederick Douglass frequentlycomplained in his writings. Thus, Douglass wrote:

I speak advisedly when I say this, -- that killing a slave, or anyother colored person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community…The wife of Mr. Giles Hick, living but a short distance from where I used to live,murdered my wife’s cousin, a young girl between fifteen and sixteen years of age, mangling her person in the most horrible manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that thepoor girl expired in a few hours afterward…I will not say that this most horrid murder produced no sensation in the community…There was a warrant issued for her arrest, but it was never served. Thus she escaped not only punishment, but even the pain ofbeing arraigned before a court for her horrid crime.

Douglass, Narrative, pp. 34-5.192 Ibid., p. 435193 Ibid., p. 697.

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insurrection sometimes take place, though they are less frequent

than might at first be expected; for the slaves, being unarmed

and greatly dispirited by the treatment they receive, and having

no opportunity of organizing any combined effort, are invariably

194 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 63.195 Douglass, Narrative, p. 56.191 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 411. 196 Of the many writers of slave narratives, Fredrick Douglass certainly had the greatest insight into the true nature of Southern religion. He wrote:

For of all slaveholders whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have found

them, almost invariable, the vilest, meanest and basest of their class…Religious slaveholders, like

religious persecutors, are ever extreme in their malice and violence…I assert most unhesitatingly,

that the religion of the south – as I have observed it and proved it – is a mere covering for the most

horrid crimes; the justifier of the most appalling barbarity; a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds;

and a secure shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal abominations

fester and flourish.

Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, pp. 194-95.197 Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004), xii.198 Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk about Slavery, p. 35.199 Bibb, Narrative, p. 67.200 Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 167. Indeed, former slave and later abolitionist Harriet Tubman of Maryland described the “irony” of having such “Christian” slave masters, when she wrote the following concerning a fellow female slave named Araminta:

When quite young she lived with a very pious mistress; but the slaveholder’s religion did not prevent her from whipping the younggirl for every slight or fancied fault. Araminta found that this was usually a morning exercise; so she prepared for it by putting

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overpowered.”270 The heady days in which a Nat Turner Rebellion

could arise and threaten the established socioeconomic order of

the Old South were truly long past.

Nevertheless, the enslaved black population did not

willingly submit to the “paternalistic” slave-order that white

on all the thick clothes she could procure to protect her skin. She made sufficient outcry, however, to convince her mistress thather blow had full effect….

Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 458.201 Ibid. Former slave Henry James Trentham of North Carolina also stated that on the plantation chapel “the preacher told us to obey our missus and marster.He told us we must be obedient to them. Yes, sir, that’s what he told us.” Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, p. 7. Unfortunately, some black slaves did “internalize” this repeated message of their servile status, as Fanny Kemble, the English actress and unwilling plantation mistress, discovered. Historian Page Smith writes that “what distressed Fanny Kemble most was the disposition of the slaves on her husband’s plantation to, as we say today, put themselves down, to speak of themselves as hopelessly inferior to white people.” Page Smith concludes: “That was the slave mentality in its essence: fatalistic acceptance that, come what may, God or Providence had ordained that black should be ineradicably and perpetually inferior to white.”Page Smith, Nation Comes of Age, pp. 589-90.202 Quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 36. Former slave Hannah Crasson ofNorth Carolina also stated that, “They [i.e., the white preachers] read the Bible and told us to obey our master, for the Bible said obey your master.” Hermence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, p. 18. Indeed, as one historian has remarked, many slaves believed that “there existed somewhere a real Bible from God, ‘but they frequently say the Bible now used is master’s Bible,’ since all that they heard from it was ‘Servants, obey your masters.’” Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 295.203 Quoted in Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 144 (emphasis added).204 Quoted in Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 294.206 Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery, p. 18. Former slave Elias Thomas of North Carolina also testified that, “We went to the white folk’s church on Sunday. We went to both the Methodist and Presbyterian.” Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk about Slavery, p. 11. Moreover, historian Peter Kolchin adds that:

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planters attempted to forge in the decades between 1831-1861.

“Slavery is damnable,” cried Harriet Jacobs, regardless of the

outward form it took.271 Former slave Fredrick Douglass echoed a

similar sentiment when he wrote, “Slavery is always slavery;

Not only did the slaves adopt the general religion of their masters – Christianity – but they also adhered to the same specific (usually Protestant) denominations. Antebellum Southern blacks were, like antebellum Southern whites, most often Baptists and Methodists, with much smaller numbers of Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics, and members of other sects. There were differences between black and white Baptists and between black andwhite Methodists, but there were also differences between black Baptists and black Methodists, or for that matter between white Baptists and white Presbyterians. American Christianity constituted an amorphous and highly heterogeneous religion, withinwhich slaves found it easy to develop their own variants while remaining part of the mainstream.

Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 145.207 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 538.208 Quoted in Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 295.209 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 58.210 Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery, p. 193 (emphasis added). Former slave “Uncle Ben” from Texas recounted similar sermons by his master’s white preacher: “Once a month his preacher ‘ud come an’ talk ter de colored folks. He’d tell ‘em how dey must obey der marster an’ missus an’ not steal any chickens. He wouldn’t say much more dan dat. No real preacher.” Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 538. Ex-slave Lucretia Alexander of Arkansas also related a similar sermon from an itinerate white preacher: “He’djust say, ‘Serve your masters. Don’t steal your master’s hogs. Don’t steal your master’s meat. Do whatsomever you master tells you to do.’” Alexander concluded: “Same old thing all the time.” Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 25. Lastly, former slave Victoria McMullen of Arkansas recalled the following incident involving her grandmother, who was locked up in the seed house for refusing to go to church:

She would be locked up in the seed bin, and she would cuss the preacher out so he could hear her. She would say, “Master, let us out.” And he would say, “You want to go to church?” And she would say, “No, I don’t want to hear the same old sermon: ‘Stay out of you

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always the same foul, haggard, and damning scourge, whether found

in the eastern or in the western hemisphere.”272 Therefore,

remarks historian Deborah Gray White, “Enslaved women rejected

slavery’s system and the raw power it granted to white men and

women alike. In so doing, they made resistance a defining aspect

missus’ and master’s henhouse. Don’t steal your missus’ and master’s chickens. Stay out of your missus’ and master’s smokehouse. Don’t steal your missus’ and master’s hams.” I don’t steal nothing. Don’t need to tell me not to!

Ibid., pp. 25-6 (emphasis added).211 Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 295.212 Quoted in ibid. Ex-slave Shang Harris of Georgia stated a similar viewpointto a WPA interviewer:

Dey [the white folk] talks a heap ‘bout de niggers stealin.’ Well,you know what was de first stealin’ done? Hit was in Afriky, when de white folks stole de niggers jes’ like you’d go get a drove o’ hosses and stole ‘em. Dey’d bring a steamer down dere wid a red flag, ‘cause dey knowed dem folks like red, and when dey see it dey’d follow it till dey got on de steamer. ‘Den when it was full o’ niggers dey’d bring em over here and sell ‘em.

Berlin, Faureau, and Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery, p. 194.213 Bibb, Narrative, p. 122 (emphasis added).214 Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 295. 216 Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 212. See also William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South 1865-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), pp. 33-4.217 Rabotaeu, Canaan Land, p. 43. 218 Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 34.219 Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days, pp. 185-87.220 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 58.221 Mellon, ed. Bullwhip Days, p. 187.222 Quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 34.

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of female slavery, one that shaped relationships and identity.”273

This “resistance” was often manifested through the “intransigent”

behavior of black slave women, particularly that of the house

slaves, who often did the opposite of what was required or

223 Raboteau, Slave Religion, p. 243. For a new study concerning the historical significance and enduring legacy of these slave spirituals, see Lauri Ramey, Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).224 Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, p. 44. Sociologist George P Rawick make a similar observation when he writes the following concerning slave religion as a whole: “While religion certainly may at times be an opiate, the religion of the oppressed usually gives them the sustenance necessary for developing a resistance to their own oppression.” Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 33.225 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 643.226 Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, p. 238.227 Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 28.228 Quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 35.229 Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 6.230 Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, p. 34. See also Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, pp. 39-43, who provides concrete examples of water pots, bowls, and kettles being used in West African religious practices during this time.231 Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 91. Former slave Hannah Crasson of North Carolina also testified that, “The white folks did not allow us to have nothing to do with books. You better not be found trying to learn to read. Ourmaster was harder down on that than anything else.” Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’tWant Me to Talk About Slavery, p. 18. Former slave Susie King Taylor of Georgia related how, as children, she and her siblings were sent secretly to the houseof a free black woman to learn to read and write. “We went every day at about nine o’clock,” she wrote, “with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white people from seeing them.” Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life: A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs, Edited by Patricia W. Romero and with a New Introduction by Willie Lee Rose (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1988), p. 29. See also Jacobs, Incidents, p. 61. Cf., Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 564-65.232 Blassingame. ed., Slave Testimony, p. 50.233 Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 35-6. Additionally, Ex. 21:16 was a favorite biblical passage of Denmark Vesey and his fellow rebel slaves, who used it to

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expected of them. The plantation masters and mistresses normally

attributed this “erratic” behavior of their black slave women to

inherent “rascality” or event “imbecility.”274 Former slave Josiah

Henson recalled the erratic behavior of one enslaved female named

justify their impending slaughter of whites in Charleston. See Johnson and Smith, Africans in America, pp. 287-88. For a more in-depth examination of this issue, see Robert S. Starobin, ed., Denmark Vesey: The Slave Uprising of 1822 (Eaglewook Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 19-22.234 Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 18. See also Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 241-42.235 Patrick Minges, ed., Far More Terrible for Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slavery (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair Publishing, 2006), p. 181. Former slave Clara C. Young of Mississippi also fondly remembered one such slave preacher named Mathew Swing, who was illiterate: "He was a comely nigger, black as night, an' he sho' could read out of his han'. He neber larned no real readin' an' writin' but he sho' knowed his Bible and would hol' his han' out an' mak lak he was readin' an' preach de purtiest preachin' you ever heered." Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery, p. 191.

Sociologist George P. Rawick stresses the tight bond that existed between the black preacher and his (or her) congregation:

The intense relationship in the black church between the preacher and the congregation is

dependent upon the congregation being a community, a sacred family, in which the preacher is the leader and the head of the community. This relationship is similar to that of the elder in the West African village extended family compound. The elder is understood to have superior contact with the Unknown, but his relationship to it is manifested through his relationship with hispeople.

Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 38.236 Thus, former slave Ellen Butler of Louisiana recalled that enslaved blacks,especially those who were not allowed to attend church, would dig “big holes” in the fields in order to pray in private. Butler concluded: “They used to pray for freedom.” Quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 35.237 Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 240-41.238 Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, pp. 38-9.

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Dinah, who in reality was “clear witted, as sharp and cunning as

a fox.” Yet, Dinah would purposely act like an imbecile “in order

to take advantage of her mistress.” Henson stated that, “When the

[mistress] said, ‘Dinah, go and do your work,’ she would reply

239 Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, p. 7.240 Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 240-41.241 Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, pp. 6-7, 10-11, 14-18.242 Raboteau, Canaan Land, p. 47. Sociologist George P. Rawick identifies another crucial role for black slave women in the “invisible institution”:

The black preacher functioned in a context controlled and limited by a shadowy but powerful

group of elders or deacons and by older “sanctified” women. If these leaders failed to produce the results that were expected, the social cohesion and social solutions required, the congregation, or some segment of it, would look elsewhere. These roles have West African origins. In West Africa such elders could at moments of crisis do away with the king or the head priest to preserve the society…Women in West Africa often played very significant independent roles in religious orders and similar activities. Such people were the real residual representatives of the community.

Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, pp. 38-9.243 Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 7.244 See Bettye Collier-Thomas, Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850-1979 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1998), pp. 57-60. Foote’s autobiography, A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch by Mrs. Julia A. J. Foote, is included in William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 161-234.246 Thus, historian Eugene D. Genovese has written: “The slaves’ religious meetings would be held in secret when their masters forbade all such; or when their masters forbade all except Sunday meetings; or when rumors of rebellion or disaffection led even indulgent masters to forbid them so as to protect thepeople from trigger happy patrollers; or when the slaves wanted to make sure that no whites would hear them.” Genovese, Roll, Jordon Roll, p. 236. Former slave Cato Carter of Alabama remarked that, although his owners “didn’t mind their niggers prayin’ and singin’ hymns,…some places wouldn’ ‘low to worship a-tall

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with a laugh, ‘Yes, yes; when I get ready,’ or ‘Go do it

yourself.’ Sometimes she would scream out, ‘I won’t; that’s a lie

– catch me if you can!’ And she would take to her heels and run

and they had to put their heads in pots to sing or pray.” Quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 35.247 Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 6 (emphasis added).248 Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 27.249 White planters instituted these armed patrols in the seventeenth century, primarily to capture runaway slaves, as the latter were valuable “property.” Nevertheless, like so many features of early slavery, the slave patrols had been haphazardly organized. In the aftermath of the slave rebellions of the early nineteenth century, however, white planters and politicians reorganized these slave patrols: they now were better armed, equipped, and organized as well as more numerous. See, for example, Oates, Fires of Jubilee, pp. 138-40, for the security measures established in Virginia following the Nat Turner Rebellion. For a recent history of the slave patrollers, see Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 617-19.251 Jacobs, Incidents, pp. 54, 116-17.252 Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery, p. 173. Octavia V. Rogers Albert recounted a similar incident involving a slave named Robert, whooften stole away at night to visit his wife on a neighboring plantation, but was caught by the local patrollers on several occasions. “Sometimes they wouldcatch Richard and drive four stakes in the ground, and they would tie his feetand hands to each one and beat him half to death. I tell you,” Albert added, “sometimes he could not work. Marster did not care, for he had told Richard totake some of our women for a wife, but Richard would not do it. Richard loved Betty [his wife], and would die for her.” Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 14. Former slave Henry James Trentham of North Carolina testified that “thepattyrollers came round every now and then, and if you was off the plantation and hand no pass, they tore you up with the lash.” Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, p. 8.253 Albert, American Slaves, pp. 58-9.254 See Norman R. Yetman, ed., Voices from Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005), p. 93. Dawson also remembered “one of the songs de slaves all knowed” concerning the patrollers, which ran:

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away.” Dinah only escaped severe punishment because her mistress

assumed that the slave girl was “an idiot.”275

Undoubtedly, this feigned “imbecility” and “shiftlessness” as

a means of resistance on the part of enslaved blacks often

Run nigger, run, De Patteroll get you!

Run nigger, run, De Patteroll come!

Watch nigger, watch, De Patteroll trick you! Watch nigger, watch.

He got a big gun!

However, Dawson added that, “Sometimes I wonder iffen de white folks didn’t make dat song up so us niggers would keep in line.” Quoted in ibid. See also the detailed testimony of former slave Lewis Clarke of Kentucky concerning theatrocities committed by these patrollers – “the worst fellows that can be found” – in Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, pp. 156-58. Lastly, former slave Manda Walker of South Carolina testified to the following concerning the character of the white patrollers:

I often think that the system of paterollers and bloodhounds did more to bring on the war and the wrath of the Lord than anything else. Why the good white folks put up with them poor white-trash paterollers I never can see or understand. You never see classy buckra men a-paterolling. It was always some low-down white men, that never owned a nigger in their life, doing the paterolling anda-stripping the clothes off men like Pappy right before the wives and children and beating the blood out of him. No, sir, good whitemen never dirty their hands and souls in work of the devil as that.

Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 176.255 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 243-44. See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp.651-52 for more on the hiring and usage of these so-called “nigger dogs.”256 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 539. All of these elements of planter control created numerous obstacles and dangers for slaves who attempted to attend religious services on their own, as former slave Mary Reynolds from Louisiana discovered when she was a child:

When we’s comin back from prayin’, I think I heard the nigger dogsand somebody on horseback…You could hear them old hounds a-

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contributed to the development of the degrading “Sambo”

stereotype of African Americans, as historian Ronald Takaki has

convincingly demonstrated.276 This “Sambo” caricature – that of

the shuffling and victimized black “man-child” – arose in the

braying’,. Maw listens and says, “Sho nuff, them dogs am runnin’,and Gawd help us!” Then she and Paw talk, and they take us

to a fence corner and stands us up ‘fainst the rails and say, “Don’t move, and if anyone comes near don’t breathe loud.” They went to the woods so the hounds chase them and not get us. Me and Katherine [her sister] stand there holdin’ hands, shakin’ so we can hardly stand. We hear the hounds come nearer but don’t more. They goes after Paw and Maw, but they circles round to the cabins and gets in. Maw says it’s the power of Gawd!

Minges, ed., Far More Terrible for Women, p. 181.257 Berlin, Favreau, and Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery, p. 56.258 Quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 105.259 Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, p. 618.260 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, pp. 203-04 and Oates, Fires of Jubilee, p. 140. For a detailed list of the “frenzied legislative activity” which occurred throughout the South as a result of Nat Turner’s insurrection, see Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, pp. 74-83. However, Aptheker has shown that some stateshad already begun to enact such “repressive legislation” just one-to-two yearsprior to the Nat Turner Revolt, due to growing fears of slave insurrections. Ibid., pp. 27-32. 261 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 130. The testimony of Tabb Gross, as related by his English interviewer, also noted the repressive climate of fear that surrounded the teaching of literacy to slaves in the aftermath of the NatTurner Rebellion:

When about twenty-six years of age [c. 1841] Gross desired to learn to read, and bought a shilling spelling book. He promised his master’s son, about eight years old, an orange if he would teach him his letters. The lad did teach him for about three months, when master one night, overhearing the spelling lesson, ordered it to be discontinued. The master did not himself object to it, but it was an offense against the law of the state to teacha slave to read, and for which his son would have been put in prison if found out.

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late 1800s and dominated American popular culture, especially in

early Hollywood films, until its ultimate demise in the 1950s and

1960s.277 Unfortunately, in the mid-twentieth century, historian

Stanley Elkins gave scholarly “credence” to the existence of just

Ibid., p. 348.262 Bibb, Narrative, pp. 5-6. Frederick Douglass also recorded an incident in which a clandestine literacy school for slaves which Douglass himself headed was discovered by whites and forcibly disbanded:

I succeed in creating in them [i.e., the other slaves] a strong desire to learn how to read…They very soon mustered up some old spelling-books, and…I devoted my Sundays to teaching these my loved fellow-slaves how to read…It was understood, among all who came, that there must be as little display about it as possible. It was necessary to keep our [white] religious masters as St. Michael’s unacquainted with the fact, that instead of spending theSabbath in wrestling, boxing, and drinking whisky, we were trying to learn how to read the will of God; for they had much rather seeus engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving likeintellectual, moral, and accountable beings…Messrs. Wright Fairbanks and Garrison West, both [Methodist] class-leaders, in connection with many others, rushed in upon us with sticks and stones, and broke up our virtuous little Sabbath school, at St. Michael’s – all calling themselves Christians! humble followers ofthe Lord Jesus Christ!

Douglass, Narrative, pp. 74-5.263 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 204 and Oates, Fires of Jubilee, p. 144.264 Berlin, op. cit. Smaller planters, such as “Master” Epps who owned the plantation on which former slave Solomon Northup toiled for ten years, served themselves as the overseers. This was not the case on larger plantations, however, which functioned as well-ordered, highly supervised, and ruthlessly efficient money-making ventures, as Northup recorded:

On larger estates, employing fifty or a hundred, or perhaps two hundred hands, an overseer is deemed indispensable. These gentlemen ride into the field on horseback, without an exception, to my knowledge, armed with pistols, bowie knife, whip, and accompanied by several dogs. They follow, equipped in this fashion, in rear of the slaves, keeping a sharp lookout upon them all. The requisite qualification in an overseer are utter

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such a “Sambo” mentality among African Americans as one of the

lasting and debilitation legacies of planatation life, which he

compared to that of Nazi concentration camps, on the black

community!278 Most scholars today discount Elkins’s “Sambo Thesis”

heartlessness, brutality and cruelty…The presence of the dogs are necessary to over-haul a fugitive who may take to his heels…The pistols are reserved for any dangerous emergency, there having been instances when such weapons were necessary. Goaded into uncontrollable madness, even the slave will sometimes turn on his oppressor…

Beside the overseer, there are drivers under him, the numberbeing in proportion to the number of hands in the field. The drivers are black, who, in addition to the performance of their equal share of work, are compelled to do the whipping of their several gangs. Whips hang around their necks, and if the fail to use them thoroughly, are whipped themselves. When a slave ceases to perspire, as he often does when taxed beyond his strength, he falls to the ground and becomes entirely helpless. It is then the duty of the driver to drag him into the shade…where he dashes buckets of water upon him, and uses other means of bringing out perspiration again, when he is ordered to his place, and compelledto continue his labor.

Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 223-25. Even before the Nat Turner Rebellion, Frederick Douglass described the Maryland plantation of his owner Col. Lloyd as “a little nation of its own, having its own language, its own rules, regulations and customs.” Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 60.265 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 157-58. After the Nat Turner Rebellion, slaves were even required to carry passes to attend church services without their white masters, as ex-slave Sarah Fitzpatrick of Alabama testified: “In dem times ‘Niggers’ had to hav’va pass to go to church too. White fo’ks axed you whut church ya’ wan’na go to an’ dey issue ya a pass, write on dere de mane ob de church an’ de name of de pu’son and de name ob de pu’son an’ de time to get back.” Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 642.266 Douglass, Narrative, pp. 30-1 267 Ibid., pp. 79-83. Former slave Solomon Northup recounted that a “treacherous” slave named Lew Cheney stirred up the slaves of Bayou Boeuf, Louisiana with a plan “to fight their way against all opposition, to the neighboring territory of Mexico” prior to the Mexican-American War of 1846-

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and follow the viewpoint outlined by Takaki above that such

behavior among slaves, when it did exist, was actually an

effective means of resistance and rebelliousness.279

1848. However, Cheney, “becoming convinced of the ultimate failure of his project” and desiring “to curry favor with his master,” betrayed to plot to the local planters. Whites soon raided the slaves’ hiding place and apprehended all the would-be rebels; the later were “hung by the populace.” Cheney, of course, was “rewarded for his treachery.” Northup, Twelve Years a Slave,pp. 246-49.269 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 249.270 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, pp. 221-22.271 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 23.272 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 328. Moreover, ex-slave Solomon Northup summed up his views concerning slavery as follows:

It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives…There may behumane masters, as there certainly are inhuman ones – there may beslaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless, the institution that tolerated such wrong and inhumanity as I have witnessed, is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one.

Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 206. Additionally, former slave John Boggs of Maryland did not mince words concerning his view of slavery: “I know what slavery is. You can’t tell me anything about slavery. I would rather be in thestreet, and let the wagon run over me every day, than be in slavery!” Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 423. Runaway slave Henry Bibb also forcefully stated that, “I thank God for the blessing of liberty – the contrast is truly great between freedom and slavery. To be changed from a chattel to a human being, is no light matter...” Indeed, Bibb concluded this assessment of slavery with the following statement: “The term slave to this daysound with terror to my soul, – a word too obnoxious to speak – a system too intolerable to be endured.” Bibb, Narrative, xvii and p. 4. Moreover, ex-slave Charlie Moses of South Carolina stated to his WPA interviewer, “Slavery days was bitter, an’ I can’t forgit the sufferin’. Oh, God! I hates ‘em, hates ‘em.God Almighty never meant for human beings to be like animals. Us niggers has asoul an’ a heart an’ a mine.” Moses added, “We ain’t like a dog or a horse.” Quoted in Bullwhip Days: the Slaves Remember, An Oral History, Edited and with an

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Still other black slave women engaged in different forms of

resistance, such as work “slow-downs” or feigning illness, in an

effort to make the plantation system less productive.280 Some even

practiced what historian Kenneth M. Stampp calls “self-sabotage,”

Introduction by James Mellon (New York: Grove Press, 1988), p. 182. Lastly, former slave Jacob Manson of North Carolina remarked that, “I think slavery was a mighty bad thing, though it’s been no bed of roses since, but then no one could whip me more!” Hermence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, p.43. 273 Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Revised and with a New Introduction (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), pp. 7, 77. Whitealso notes that,

If resistance in the United States [after 1831] was seldom politically oriented, consciously collective, or violently revolutionary, it was generally individualistic and aimed at maintaining what the slaves, master, and overseer had, in the course of their relationships, perceived as an acceptable level ofwork, shelter, food, punishment, and free time. Slaves may have thought about overthrowing the system of slavery but the odds against them were so overwhelming that the best most could hope for was survival with a modicum of dignity. Slave resistance was aimed at maintaining what seemed to all concerned to be the status quo.

Ibid., p. 77. Wyatt-Brown offers a similar viewpoint when he states that, “slave resistance ordinarily took a much more personal and subtly orchestratedform, a mingling resistive and reluctant, self-protective accommodation that was suited to survival and even of a degree of limited autonomy, as [Eugene] Genovese has skillfully demonstrated.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 404. Additionally, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, following her extensive research into the “plantation household,” remarks that

Slave women demonstrably resisted the worse effects of slavery, resisted them at the very core of their identities. By the end of my research, I had no doubt that they that they resisted slavery as members of a community, as well as in lonely defiance. Their multiple contributions to the culture and communities of their people constituted a web of resistance that sought, above all, to protect the identities and cohesiveness of members of succeeding generations.

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a process by which slaves deliberately made themselves “unfit” for

service as a means of resistance. One enslaved black woman, for

example, was treated as an “invalid” by her master due to the

unusual “swelling in her arms,” until the latter learned that the

slave woman had been “thrusting her arms periodically into a

beehive!”281 Another female slave, who found that she was about to

be sold due to her rebelliousness, “took her right hand, laid it

on a meat block and cut off three fingers, and thus made the sale

impossible!”282 Stampp also points out that “a few desperate

Fox-Genovese, Within the Platation Household, pp. 33-4. In general, see Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).274 White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? pp. 77-8.275 Ibid.276 See Takaki, Different Mirror, pp. 102-13.277 See Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1986).278 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 81-139.279 For a good collection of essays critical of Elkins’s views, see Ann J. Lane, The Debate over “Slavery”: Stanley Elkins and his Critics (Urbana: Universtiy of Illinois Press, 1971).280 Many enslaved black women feigned illness in order to be relieved of their duties or to be transferred to a different line of work. “This strategy was feasible,” notes Deborah Grey White, “precisely because child bearing was a primary expectation that slave owners had of slave women.” White, “Slavery,” in Mankiller, et al., eds., Reader’s Companion, p. 546. See also White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, pp. 79-87 and Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 620-21.

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slaves carried this form of resistance to the extreme of self-

destruction [i.e., suicide].”283 Former slave Louis Hayden of

Kentucky, for example, related how his mother, who refused to

live with her master as a concubine, was imprisoned and flogged

repeatedly to break her spirit. In response, Hayden’s mother

“tried to kill herself several times, once with a knife and once

by hanging.”284

A more “direct challenge” by some female slaves to their

white owners, notes historian Peter Kolchin, was for the former

to run away. The “free” states of the North as well as Canada

proved to be a “powerful magnet,” he adds, to those slaves who

were willing to brave the many dangers and hardships of the long

northern trek to freedom.285 A popular refuge for some runaway

slaves was Canada. Thus, ex-slave Henry Bibb was thankful for his

escape to safety in America’s northern neighbor, a country where

he was “regarded as a man, and not as a thing...and where man

ceases to be property of his fellow man.”286 In order to

discourage slaves from fleeing to Canadian freedom, however, many

slave owners circulated horrific tales about this country “to

terrify men from going North,” as former slave George Ross of

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Maryland testified. One favorite tall tale, Ross notes, was that

“Canada was a very cold country, that nobody could live in but

those brought up in it…”287 Another ex-slave, Henry Williamson of

Maryland, was told repeatedly by whites that Canada was “a cold

and dreary country.”288 Additionally, ex-slave J. W. Lindsay of

Tennessee was informed by his master that “Canada was 9000 miles

off, that it was so cold there that we couldn’t do any thing.”289

Most runaway slaves (app. 80-90%) during the period of 1831-

1861 were young and unmarried black males, since enslaved black

women faced greater obstacles to flight, as historians John Hope

Franklin and Loren Schweninger note:

Young slave women were less likely to run away because they had often begun to raise families by their late teens and early twenties. With youngsters to care for, it became difficult to contemplate either leaving them behind or taking them in an escape attempt. Lying out in the woods or fleeing to more distant points would only mean suffering, danger, and hardship for their children. As several historians have pointed out, although slave women desired freedom as much as slave men and were often as assertive and aggressive on the plantation as male slaves, the take of uprooting and carrying children in flight “was onerous, time-consuming, and exhaustive.” As a result, a smaller proportion than among men decided to run away.290

290 John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 212.

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Nevertheless, as historian Deborah Grey White notes, the fear of

losing their children to the slave trader did lead some slave

women to attempt flight, which a number did successfully, though

with great difficulty and hardship.291 Many slave narratives,

moreover, recount the often unsuccessful bid of young, single and

childless female slaves to flee the cruelty of their masters and

mistresses.292

Therefore, as White also points out, “truancy seems to have

been the way many slave women reconciled their desire to flee and

their need to stay.” These “short-term absences” often occurred

following severe beatings or unwanted sexual advances by their

masters. The truant slave woman often hid within a few miles of

the plantation on which she lived in order to gain a brief but

needed respite from the daily horrors of slavery. She normally

returned home within a few days or weeks, out of sheer hunger or

deep longing for family members.293 Former slave Solomon Northrup,

for example, related the story of the young slave girl Celeste,

who evaded captivity for “the greater part of the summer” by

hiding in the swamps. Due to the many dangers present in such a

wild environment, however, Celeste “finally concluded to abandon

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her lonely dwelling” and returned to her master’s plantation. She

was “suitably” punished for such intransigent behavior, of

course.294 Such truant behavior also affected the plantation’s

overall productivity, since “for industrial purposes a slave

absent was no better than a slave sick.”295

“One of the most impressive forms of slave self-assertion

has remained largely unsung,” remarks historian Eugene D.

Genovese, that of the “surprising number” of slaves who refused

to “submit to the whip.” In some cases, enslaved women who were

receiving a whipping from their overseers “turned the tables” on

these vicious white thugs and administered beatings of their own!

Genovese also remarks that overseers “then had to suffer

additional humiliation from masters who refused to discipline the

women and rebuked them instead.”296 On a less humerous note,

former slave Amy Chapman of Alabama related a horrifying account

of one slave woman’s retribution on her master who had beaten her

“near ‘bout to death”: she threw his infant child into a boiling

vat of lye! Additionally, the plantation mistress who attempted

to rescue the child burned her arms severely in the process!297

Lastly, in utter desperation, some enslaved black women resorted

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to arson or even murder – such as Celia, the teenage slave girl

mentioned earlier – as the ultimate act of defiance against the

plantation system that so cruelly and brutally ruled their

lives.298 Plantation mistress Mary Boykin Chesnut, for example,

recorded several incidents in which slaves murdered their masters

and mistresses, including Boykin’s own cousin Betsey Witherspoon.

These events in turn caused this horrified Georgia mistress to

reassess her own treatment of her slaves. “I always felt that I

had never injured any one black especially,” she wrote, “and

therefore feared nothing from them – but now!”299

This is the context, therefore, in which black female

resistance to white Southern religion should be viewed: it was

part of an overall pattern of enslaved black women’s defiance of

planter-driven repression – however “paternalistic” it may or may

not have been – in the late antebellum South. Regardless of the

“persona” these planters adopted following Nat Turner’s

insurrection of 1831, many enslaved black females, like their

male counterparts, viewed Southern religion as but one more tool

or “mechanism” of white slaveholders to enforce black

submission.300 This they steadfastly refused to do. Like former

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slave Henry Bibb, many enslaved African women also believed that

their masters’ “slaveholding religion” was “of the devil.”301

Indeed, Harriet Jacobs confirmed that her fellow enslaved blacks

were fully aware of the “true” nature of their masters’ Southern

religion, when they sang these verses to a hymn of their own

composition:

Ole Satan’s church is here below. Up to God’s free church I hope to go.

Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God.302

Ex-slave Henry Bibb, in fact, related his “first impressions”

regarding his new master, the Baptist deacon Francis Whitfield,

that “he was far more like what the people call the devil, than

he was like a deacon.”303

Accordingly, enslaved Africans devised a variety of

ingenious means – short of outright rebellion, which was no

longer possible after 1831 – to resist Southern religion’s

“diabolical” doctrines, as highlighted above. In all of these

efforts, they proved highly successful. For in the aftermath of

the American Civil War, a host of well-organized and well-

302 Jacobs, Incidents, p. 60.303 Bibb, Narrative, p. 68.

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attended black churches arose from the once clandestine “hush

harbors” and slave quarters of the Old South, as historian Eric

Foner recounts:

As under slavery, the church remained a central institution of black life after the

Civil War. Now, however, hundreds of thousands of blacks withdrew from

existing biracial congregation to establish their own churches, preferring to worship among themselves and with ministers of their own race. Throughout the South,former slaves pooled their meager resources to construct church buildings and pay salaries of black preachers…304

Black churches, moreover, quickly became the “centers of

community life.” Thus, as Foner also notes, “They housed schools,

social events and political gatherings, adjudicated family

disputes, and provided a base for the infrastructure – fraternal

orders, mutual aid societies, literary clubs, trade associations

– that sprang up during Reconstruction.” Lastly, beginning a 150-

year tradition of social activism, “the church soon entered

politics.” During the Reconstruction era (1865-1877),

approximately 250 black ministers and pastors, from both the

South and the North, held some manner of public office in the

Southern states during this time.305 This fight for the full 304 Foner, Forever Free, p. 87.

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dignity, equality, and civil rights of the African American

community – one lead largely by the black churches – was a hard-

fought and lengthy struggle; indeed, it is one which continues to

the present day.306

APPENDIX 1: Slave Narratives and Testimony

As noted above, I have extensively employed the narratives and

testimony of enslaved Africans as my principal primary sources

for the subject matter covered by this paper. Concerning the

importance of the slave narratives to posterity, historian Ann

Taves writes:

In a review published in 1849, Ephraim Peabody observedthat “America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization, -- the autobiographies of escaped slaves.” As Peabody went on to point out, “these narratives show how it [slavery] looks as seen from the side of the slave. They contain the victim’s account of the workings of this great institution.”307

For much of the twentieth century, however, most scholars had

turned to the planters’ accounts of the “peculiar institution” to

describe American slavery, since they “treated slaves primarily

as objects of white action rather than as subjects in their own

right, and largely ignored the behavior and beliefs of slaves

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themselves.”308 Accordingly, earlier scholars of American slavery,

such Ulrich B. Phillips and H. M. Henry, “accepted all overt

appearances of slave contentment” in the “beguiling remarks” of

the “southern patriarchs” in their journals; thus, they painted a

very benign picture of Southern slavery.309

In 1929, for example, Ulrich B. Phillips, who often

sympathetized with the lost cause and vanished lifestyle of the

Old South, challenged the uniformly negative picture of Southern

slavery as presented in slave narratives and testimony. Phillips

wrote: “Ex-slave narratives in general…were issued with so much

abolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity is

doubtful.”310 Ulrich’s “romanticized” and often uncritical view of

Southern slavery, however, have “fallen into disfavor,” as

historian C. Vann Woodward remarks:

The reasons for Phillip’s fall in current favor are clear enough. Born in Georgia in 1877, he grew up in a South dedicated to reviving in a new form the traditionof dependency and subordination the ante-bellum regime had shaped for the Negro. Defense of the new regime wasbuilt on a defense of the old, and both rested on the assumption of the inherent inferiority of the Negro race. Phillips fully cherished the values of both the new and the old regimes and shared their racial

310 See Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South, Introduction by C. Vann Woodward (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1963), p. 219.

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assumptions without imbibing the racial bitterness and malice growing up around him. His attitude was a paternalistic and indulgent affection toward what he regarded as a childlike and irresponsible people with many endearing traits. These attitudes were implicit – and often explicit – in what he wrote on the Old South.311

It is crucial, therefore, for modern historians to hear directly

from those who experienced first-hand the many ravages and

cruelties of “the peculiar institution.”

The overall reliability and accuracy of these slave

narratives, testimonies, and letters are generally beyond

question today, as historian James Blassingame has demonstrated

in the extensive introduction to his magisterial work Slave

Testimony.312 Additionally, as one recent editor of slave testimony

compiled during the 1930s by members of the Federal Writers’

Project notes:

Taken as a whole, the oral histories of America’s former slaves ring true. The very artlessness of the ex-slaves bestows authenticity upon their words. The same can almost be said of the interviewers, for few ofthat small army of field workers were skilled in the task given them. They were supplied with a list of

312 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, xvii-lxv. For a good overview of the general reliability of these slave narratives from a modern scholarly perspective, see Audrey Fisch, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 69-71, 115-16.

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questions to ask told to write down the answers as nearly verbatim as possible, and by and large that is what they did. The result is a remarkably eloquent prose.313

Certainly, this does not imply that there exist no factual

difficulties with the slaves’ own accounts of the “peculiar

institution” or in the methodologies employed to obtain and

record them.

Concerning the WPA testimonies collected during the 1930s

mentioned above, for example, historian Norrece T. Jones remarks

that many of the former slaves “spent only their earliest years

in bondage.” Therefore, many of the memories of this formative

period in their lives may have faded or even been tainted by

conversations with other former slaves. Enslaved children,

moreover, “seldom felt paternalism’s harsh and brutal side” as

did older black slaves. Additionally, most of the WPA

interviewers were white and some even Southerners themselves. “It

is scarcely surprising,” adds Jones, “that a nunber of black

hesitated to speak of the harsher features” of slavery “or the

cruelty of their former [white] owners.” Lastly, “self-

censorship” may have occurred among both male and female black

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witnesses concerning matters of a very personal or “intimate”

nature, such as “incidents of rapes, white parentage, and family

seperations.”314

Nevertheless, the testimony of former slaves utilized in

this paper do not derive from a single type of source material,

such as the WPA interviews or even the more famous “slave

narratives” of the pre-Civil War era themselves. As the subtitle

of Blassingame’s magisterial work Slave Testimony indicates,

historians have at their disposal “two centuries [worth] of

letters, speeches, interviews, and autobiographies” by former

black slaves. Many of these primary source documents were

recorded or composed during the timeframe addressed by this paper

(1831-1861). These include letters from escaped slaves to their

former owners, newspaper interviews with or speeches by ex-

slaves, and even most to the famous slave narratives themselves

(e.g., those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs).

Additionally, this primary source material comes from a variety of

regions in the Old South and is thus not limited by the

experience of former slaves in a particular state or county.

Southern slavery was a “heterogeneous institution,” as a number

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of scholars rightly point out, and thus slave testimony as to

conditions in one region may not apply equally to another.315

Furthermore, many of these former slaves were illiterate, both

during and after slavery; therefore, it is doubtful that their

perceptions of slavery were influenced by the written accounts of

other former slaves, especially those of well-known and widely

published authors (e.g., Frederick Douglass or Henry Bibb).

Many ex-slaves, moreover, were at great pains to proclaim

the truthfulness of their narratives and to fully document their

charges against Southern slavery, recognizing that many of the

horrific events they described were beyond belief for their

mostly Northern audiences. Former slave Solomon Northup, for

example, wrote:

Having been born a freeman, and for more than thirty years enjoyed the blessings of liberty in a free State – and having at the end of that time been kidnapped andsold into Slavery, where I remained, until happily rescued …after a bondage of twelve years – it has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes wouldnot be uninteresting to the public…I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation– only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person. My object is, to give a candid and truthfulstatement of the facts: to repeat the story of my life,without exaggeration, leaving it for others to

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determine, whether even the pages of fiction present a picture of more cruel wrong or a severer bondage.316

Accordingly, Northrup’s slave narrative Twelve Years a Slave contains

a lengthy “appendix” of letters and documents authenticating much

of his testimony.

Moreover, Octavia V. Rogers Albert stressed her motivation

for compiling an edition of slave narratives in quasi-religious

terms, one which allowed little room for falsification:

I believe we should not only treasure these things, butshould transmit them to our children’s children. That’swhat the Lord commanded Israel to do in reference to their deliverance from Egyptian bondage, and I verily believe that the same is his will concerning us and ourbondage and deliverance in this country. After thirty-three centuries the Jews are more faithful to the observance of the facts connected with their bondage and deliverance than we are in those touching ours, although our deliverance took place scarcely a quarter of a century ago.317

Accordingly, her work (originally published under the title The

House of Bondage) contains an introduction by Bishop Willard F.

Mallalieu, D.D. also authenticating her testimony.

The white editors of these slave narratives also stressed

the overall veracity of the former slaves, especially since many

of these narratives – as in the case of that of Solomon Northup –317 Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, pp. 70-1.

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were recorded within a few short years of their authors’ escape

from slavery. Editor David Wilson, for example, wrote in his

“Preface” to Northup’s slave narrative:

Many of the statements contained in the following pagesare corroborated by abundant evidence – others rest entirely upon Solomon’s assertion. That he has adhered strictly to the truth, the editor, at least, who has had an opportunity of detecting any contradiction or discrepancy in his statements, is well satisfied. He has invariably repeated the same story without deviating in the slightest particular, and has also carefully perused the manuscript, dictating an alteration whenever the most trivial inaccuracy has appeared.318

Additionally, as noted above, this white editor included many

letters and documents in the appendix to Northrup’s testimony to

ensure the veracity of the former slave’s experiences under the

“peculiar institution.”

Lastly, as James Blassingame himself also notes: “One

indication of the general reliability of the edited accounts is

that antebellum southern whites challenged so few of them.”319 A

telling example of this “silence” on the part of Southern whites

is the series of unanswered letters written in 1852 by former

slave Henry Bibb to his ex-master, the Rev. Albert G. Sibley,

concerning the latter’s cruelty to Bibb and his family. Sections

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of these are well worth quoting as evidence of Bibb’s reliability

as a witness to the horrors of Southern slavery and the hypocrisy

of Southern religion. In the letter dated October 7th, Bibb

wrote: “My brothers Granville, John, and Lewis, all unite in

corroborating the above facts: and if you dare to deny a single

word of it let us hear from you and we will furnish undoubted

proof.” He then added the following P.S.: “If you do not answer

this soon you may expect to hear from me again.”320 Bibb then sent

a follow-up letter dated November 4th, in which he wrote:

Sir, you will perceive that I have not done with you: as I promised in my last letter that if you did not answer soon the charges brought against you through my letters, that you might expect to hear soon from me again; and as the truth is all against you, silence seems to be you only defense…Now if you have any thing to say in reply I should be glad to hear from you, if not I shall continue to preach in this way against yourslave holding religion…

Bibb, it should be noted, had earlier verified the Reverend

Sibley’s “postal address” and made certain none of Bibb’s own

relatives were still enslaved on his former owner’s estate, so as

to avoid any retaliation on the part of Sibley.321 Nevertheless,

this white minister and planter refused to respond to these

letters or to challenge any of Bibb’s charges against him.

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Accordingly, as Bibb himself noted, “silence” seemed to be

Sibley’s “only defense.”

APPENDIX 2: A “Heterogenous Institution”

The principal focus of this paper is the large Southern

plantation, one which contained scores (20 plus) of agricultural

and household slaves. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that

Southern slavery was a “heterogeneous institution,” as historian

Peter Kolchin notes:

The slaves faced a wide diversity of conditions. Some lived on large plantations and toiled under the watchful eyes of overseers and drivers, while others, on small farms, worked beside their owners; some had resident masters with whom they came in frequent contact, while others labored for absentee proprietors whom they rarely saw…Slaves served as preachers, carpenters, blacksmiths, house servants, drivers, and agricultural laborers, and grew a wide variety of crops, including cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, wheat, corn and hemp. They faced variations in region and climate as well as in treatment and in owner disposition…Such diversity has contributed to sharp disagreements among historians over the nature of Southern slavery, about which virtually every assertioncan be challenged with counter-examples.322

An even greater division within American slavery existed between

plantation slaves and those who lived in an urban environment, as

322 Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 99.

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historian Richard C. Wade has fully documented.323 The latter,

however, falls outside of the scope of this paper.

To complicate matters further, some free blacks in the

antebellum South also owned slaves, thus playing a “small yet

281 Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, pp. 128-29.282 Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters, p. 57.283 Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, p. 129.284 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 696. On occasion, runaway slaves who were captured during their desperate escapes chose to commit suicide rather than return to slavery. Thus, ex-slave Mingo White testified that, “Ever once in a while slaves would run away to de North. Most times dey was caught an’ brought back.” White continued that, “Sometimes dey would git desp’rit an’ would kill demse’ves ‘fore dey would stand to be brought back. One time dat I hear of a slave that had ‘scaped and when dey tried to ketch him he jumped in de creek an’ drown hisse’f.” Quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 103.285 Kolchin, American Slavery, pp. 157-58. Nevertheless, as Kolchin also notes, “aneven larger number of fugitives remained in the South…Most runaway slaves hid out within a few miles of their homes.” Ibid., p. 158. Harriet Jacobs, in her desperate quest for freedom, combined both methods of escape. Initially, she hid for over seven years in a small “garret” – three feet high, nine feet long, and seven feetwide – in her grandmother’s shed, not far from Mr. Flint’s plantation. Later, Jacobs managed to obtain passage to Philadelphia, where she still was requiredto practice constant vigilance and frequent deception in order to maintain hertentative freedom. Jacobs, Incidents, pp. 91-116, 125-51.286 Bibb, Narrative, pp. 3, 11.287 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, pp. 405-6.288 Drew, ed., Refugees from Slavery, p 93.289 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 401.291 White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, pp. 73-4.292 Thus, ex-slave Charlotte Brooks of Louisiana recounted the failed attempt at freedom by a slave girl named Nellie Johnson and her subsequent punishment,as related to her by a fellow slave named “Aunt Jane”:

Aunt Jane said that when she came out here a pretty woman was brought here by the name of Nellie Johnson. Nellie was sold to a

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significant role in the annals of the peculiar institution as

slave masters,” as historian Larry Koger has shown.324 Thus, “in

Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, free blacks

owned more that 10,000 slaves, according to the federal census of

1830.”325 Koger also notes that free black mastership entailed notmighty bad man. She tried to run away to her old Virginia home, but the white men caught her and brought her back. Aunt Jane told me Nellie was almost white, and had pretty, long, straight hair. When they got her back they made her wear men’s pants for one year. She said they put deer-horns on her head to punish her, with bells on them. Aunt Jane said once while she was passing on the levee she saw Nellie working with the men on the Mississippi River, and she had men’s clothes on then.

Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 11.293 White, Ar’n’t I a Women?, pp. 74-5.294 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 244-46.295 Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery, quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, pp. 105-06.296 Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, p. 619. For an example of one such incident involving a “fighting, mule-headed” woman and her overseer, see Sterling, ed.,We Are Your Sisters, pp. 56-7.297 Quoted in Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 105.298 In general, see White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? pp. 77-9 and Kolchin, American Slavery, pp. 159-60. On the question of slave arson on the plantation estates (as well as in the cities and towns), see Genovese, Roll, Jordon, Roll, pp. 613-15. As noted above, the teenage slave Celia brutally murdered her master, the lustful Robert Newsom, in order to end the years of sexual and physical abuse that shehad endured at the hands of her owner. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave, pp. 34-7.299 Boykin Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, pp. 139-40, 145-48, 151-52.300 Consequently, notes Episcopal archivist John Sykes, “for most of the formerslave community, the Episcopal Church remained linked with slavery.” Indeed, he adds, many freed slaves “remembered the Church more as master than mother.”Sykes, “’As for me and my family,’” p. 13.301 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, p. 55. A fitting epithet for this “diabolical” Southern religion and its “demonic” followers was provided by black editor and author Octavia V. Rogers Albert of Louisiana. Albert, after

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only “benevolent wardship” of kin and friends but also

“‘commercial’ investment in slaves as labor and capital.” He

writes:

In South Carolina [for example], free Negro masters were similar to white slave owners. Both exploited the

recording the testimony of “Uncle John” of Georgia concerning the horrors witnessed by a friend at the Confederate prison at Andersonville, wrote:

Not only the bloody ground at Andersonville will condemn the Christians in these Southern States in the general judgment, but what must we say of the millions of poor, innocent slaves that have been murdered here in this Christian land for two hundred andfifty years! “Their blood be upon you and your children!” “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.”

Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 47.305 Ibid. See also Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree, pp. 333-51, and Kolchin, American Slavery, pp. 222-23. Colonel Douglass Wilson, a decorated blacksoldier of the Civil War, summed up the overall achievement of black freedmen during Reconstruction and its aftermath as follows:

One thing, however, I can tell you without fear of successful contradiction, and that is that no

People similarly situated have ever made the progress in every department of life that our people have made, since the world began. Why, just think of it! Twenty-seven years ago we did not own a foot of land, not a cottage in this wilderness, not a house,not a church, not a school-house, not even a name. We had no marriage-tie, not a legal family – nothing but the public highways, closely guarded by black laws and vagrancy laws, upon which to stand. But to-day we have two millions of our children inschool, we have about eighteen thousand colored professors and teachers, twenty thousand young men and women in schools of highergrade, two hundred newspapers, over two million members in the Methodist and Baptist Churches alone, and we own over three hundred million dollars’ worth of property in this Southern country. Over a million and a half of our people can now read and write. We are crowding the bar, the pulpit, and all the trades, and every avenue of civilized life, and doing credit to the age inwhich we live.

Albert, American Slaves Tell Their Stories, p. 78.

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labor of slaves with the desire for profits. Quite often, the colored artisans bought slaves who were employed in their trades. Others bought slaves to be hired out and then kept the wages of their bondsmen. They also established a master-slave relationship whichdemanded subservience from their slaves. The documents I have examined showed Negro masters selling rebelliousslaves or placing disobedient bonds-men in the local

306 Thus, sociologist George P. Rawick directly links the lineage of the modernblack church to the earlier clandestine religious gatherings of enslaved blacks in the “hush harbors” or in the slave quarters:

The slaves’ religious ceremonies emphasized tightened the social bonds among people. In the

religious meetings the people in the slave quarters gathered to gether to discuss the events of the day, to gain strength from the communal reality to face their individual realities, to celebrate the maintenance of life in the midst of adversity, and to determine the communal strategies and tactics. Out of these meetings came the modern black church and the many black lodges which play such an important in the modern Afro-American community, and which continue to function as important social institutions both for accommodation and for struggle.

Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, p. 37. In general, see C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1990). For the role of the black churches in the fight against legal segregation and for black civil rights during the twentieth century in particular, see Juan Williams and Quinton Dixie, This Far by Faith: Storiesfrom the African American Religious Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), which isthe companion book to the acclaimed PBS series of the same name.307 Ann Taves, “Sexual Purity and Sexual Shame: Religious Themes in the Writings of Harriet Jacobs,” in Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, p. 209.308 Kolchin, American Slavery, x.309 Jones, Born a Child of Freedom, p. 4.311 Ibid., iii-iv.313 Hurmence, ed., My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk About Slavery, xiii.314 Jones, Born a Child of Freedom, pp. 5-6. In general, see Paul D. Escott, “The Art and Science of Reading WPA Narratives,” in Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., edds., The Slave Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 40-48.315 See Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 99.

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jail or in the workhouse. Yet black slaveholding had a benevolent side…[Nevertheless] the survey of the local documents could not demonstrate the dominance of the benevolent or kinship aspect of black slaveholding.326

This paper, however, will focus solely on the issue of white

slaveholding and the usage of religion by these white slave

owners to justify black bondage.

APPENDIX 3: The Bible and Slavery

Two noted historians of slavery, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and

Eugene Genovese, have argued that during the first half of the

nineteenth century, Southern slaveholders and clergymen did

“progress” from an “acceptance” of slavery as a “necessary evil”

to a “commitment” to slavery as “an abstract model of necessary

social order.” Indeed, the latter came to view the Southern

slave-based economy and society, with its “paternalistic”

hierarchical structure, as “the best possible bulwark against the

corrosive and un-Christian impact of [northern] industrial

316 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 17-18.318 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 15.319 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, xxiii.320 Ibid., p. 54.321 Ibid., pp. 54-5.323 See Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-1860 (New York: Oxford Uinversity Press, 1964).

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society and its cruel and morally irresponsible market in human

labor-power.” In the minds of these Protestant “divines,” “the

South, then, stood as God’s bastion against all the isms that

were threatening Christian civilization.” Thus, argued James

Henley Thornwell, president of the “immensely influential” South

Carolina College, the socioeconomic and political upheavals that

occurred in Europe during the revolutions of 1848-1849 were the

responsibility “not merely of Abolitionists and Slaveholders;

they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans,

Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated

freedom on the other.” This “evolution” in the Southern concept

of slavery, the Genoveses argue, one which included the alleged

biblical (and thus divine) sanction of slavery, helps to explain

the ferocity with which many southerners defended “their way of

life” during the American Civil War. (See Fox-Genovese and

Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order,” pp. 211-12, 215-

23.)

Nevertheless, much of this abstract “religious discourse”

concerning the “religious foundations of social relations”

occurred only among the Southern Protestant theological “elite,”

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as part of their overall argumentation against Northern

theologians and abolitionists (cf., ibid., pp. 217-19); very

little of it appears to have “trickled down” in any coherent or

substantive manner to the lower clergy and, especially, to the

laity (cf., ibid., pp. 216-17). Moreover, though learned in the

social sciences and classical philosophy – especially the

writings of pagan philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who did

support slavery, these Protestant “divines” were strangely

ignorant of the Christian tradition regarding slavery as it had

developed in Europe over the past two millennia. For example,

none of the Church Fathers, such as St. Augustine of Hippo

mentioned below, appeared in the writings of these intellectually

elite defenders of slavery. (This ignorance of Church tradition

is a theological weakness of Protestantism in general – both past

and present!)

Additionally, the Protestant religious establishment was

remarkably selective in its choice of biblical passages that it

quoted in defense of the “peculiar institution.” As ex-slave

Fredrick Douglass noted, these clerical defenders of Southern

slavery “throw in the background what-ever in the bible could be

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construed into opposition to slavery, and bring forward that

which they could torture into its support.”327 At a minimum, the

Bible demands humane and just treatment of those enslaved. Thus,

one such “neglected” biblical passage was Col. 4:1, which reads:

“Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal;

knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven (KJV).” Confer also

Eph. 6:8-9, in which Paul states, “knowing that whatsoever good

thing any man doeth, the same shall be received of the Lord,

whether he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same things

unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in

heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him [my

italics].” Additionally, Paul gave the following advice to a

Christian slaveholder to whom the Apostle was returning a runaway

slave named Onesimus, who was also a Christian, to receive

Onesimus “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved,

specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh,

and in the Lord [my italics]?” (Philemon 16). Of course, Christ’s

own “golden rule” (Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31) – “Therefore all things

whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to

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them: this is the law and the prophets" – militated against any

ill treatment of slaves by their masters.

Clearly the Bible (especially the Old Testament or Hebrew

Bible) acknowledges the existence of slavery in the social order of

the day; there is little definitive evidence, however, that the

Scriptures sanction slavery – especially “chattel” slavery – as a

“divinely instituted” social construct. Indeed, there is marked

acknowledgement within both Testaments of the Bible of the need

for a just human social order “pleasing to God” to move away from

slavery, especially as it existed in the ancient world. Slaves,

once they developed skills in literacy, saw this fact for

themselves. Thus, in 1822 a favorite biblical passage of Denmark

Vesey and his fellow rebel slaves, who taught themselves to read,

was Exodus 21:16: “He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if

he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.”328

Furthermore, ex-slave Henry Bibb quoted from Christ’s own

“proclamation” of his messiahship (Luke 4:18-19) to his former

master, the Rev. Albert G. Sibley: “Break every yoke and let the

oppressed go free.”329

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The biblical injunction of “set[ting] at liberty them that

are bruised,” moreover, is followed by Jesus’ mission “to preach

the acceptable year of the Lord.” This is a clear reference to

the “Great Jubilee Year” discussed in Leviticus 25, which was to

occur every 50 years. During this time of “jubilee,” the

Israelites were to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land and

unto all the inhabitants thereof” (Lev. 25:10). This “liberty”

included a massive redistribution of land and people in order to

return Israelite society – as far as possible – to an egalitarian

state: “It shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every

man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his

family” (Lev. 25:10). Throughout this twenty-fifth chapter of

Leviticus, moreover, the Lord forcefully intones to the

Israelites that “ye shall not oppress one another” (Lev. 25:14,

17). Concerning slavery in particular, Leviticus 25: 38-43 states

the following:

I am the Lord your God. Which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, and to be your God. And if thy brother that dwelleth with thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant: But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubilee:

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And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return.For they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondsmen. Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour; but shall fear thy God (KJV).

Admittedly, these rules concerning slavery did not apply to the

“heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen

and bondmaids” (Lev. 25:44).

This “legal loophole” in the Great Jubilee Year, however,

was decisively closed with the coming of Christ into the world.

Jesus thus employed the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (Lk. 10:

30-37) to show that all men are “neighbors,” regardless of their

ethnicity, and are deserving of human and divine “mercy.”

Additionally, Christ’s own “Two Great Commandments” (Mk. 12:30-

31) include the command to “love thy neighbor as thy self” – with

no distinctions afforded to human socioeconomic and political

constructs. St. Paul, transcending his own Judeo and Greco-Roman

prejudices, ultimately proclaimed that, "There is neither Jew nor

Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor

female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Thus, in the truly

Christian vision of human social relations, there can be no place

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for slavery, especially “chattel” slavery, as practiced in the

Old South. (I am deeply indebted to Dr. Daniel Smith-Christopher,

Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University,

Los Angeles. Dr. Smith-Christoper gave a presentation on the

Bible’s “developing” view of slavery, which highlighted many of

the themes discussed above, as part of his overall introduction

to the Hebrew Bible at the Catholic Bible Institute in Fall 1998

at Loyola Marymount University, in which I was in attendance.)

In light of the above, I find the Genoveses’ thesis

concerning the development by Southern theologians of a

theoretical and “Bible-based” social system grounded in slavery,

one created in opposition to the “corrosive and un-Christian”

industrial economy of the North, somewhat overstated. If, as the

Genoveses point out, the ongoing battle with Northern theologians

led to “a hardening literalism in the interpretation of religious

discourse” (cf., ibid., p 216) on the part of their Southern

brethren, why were the latter so “lukewarm” concerning biblical

injunctions against the ill treatment of slaves? Some may have

attempted to “soften” Southern slavery “to make it correspond

more closely to Mosaic law and to the Christian model of social

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relations” (cf., ibid., p. 229); nevertheless, the overwhelming

testimony of slaves themselves indicate there was no “lessening”

of the brutality and humiliation of slaves at the hands of

Christian slaveholders. In fact, the opposite appears true (see

above)! Moreover, if, as the Genoveses point out, Southern

theologians – like T. R. R. Cobb of Georgia – were so “well read

in Christian doctrine and even in theology” (ibid., p. 226), why

were these Protestant “divines” so strangely silent on all of the

above anti-slavery passages in the Bible as well as the of the

teachings of the Church Fathers, who viewed slavery as a result

of human sin and not of divine origin (see below)? Additionally,

if the Southern religious elite were superior to their Northern

brethren in biblical scholarship and thus with the “intricacies”

of Hebrew social relations (ibid., pp. 223-24), why did they

overlook the important Jewish celebration of the Great Jubilee

Year, in which slaves were freed and returned home to their

families, one to which Christ himself alluded in reference to his

own messianic mission?

One cannot escape the conclusion, therefore, that many – if

not most – of the Southern defenders of slavery, both lay and

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clerical, quoted the Bible’s many references to slavery on a

highly selective basis for their own self-serving and cynical

ends; they did this not out of any grand or coherent “abstract

model of necessary social order” (ibid., p. 211). Indeed, the

vast corpus of slave testimony recording slaveholders’ or

clergymen’s defense of Southern slavery – and even the sermons of white

Southern preachers themselves – rarely present slavery in the South in

such a benign and theoretical fashion; always it is revealed in

the blatant and brutal power relationship of master over slave,

one demanding the utmost obedience, all of which was in perfect

accordance with the “divine will.” This is not “theology” in the

classical and academic sense of the word. Rather, such

manipulation of biblical texts and the social sciences is the

classic hallmark of oppressive regimes throughout history, which

cynically attempt to convince the oppressed – and perhaps even

324 Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985), p. 1.325 Ibid.326 Ibid., xiii.327 See Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, p. 311.328 See Johnson and Smith, Africans in America, pp. 287-88. For a more in-depth examination of this issue, see Starobin, ed., Denmark Vesey, pp. 19-22.329 Blassingame, Slave Testimony, p. 50.

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themselves – that God and history sanction their brutal social

orders.

APPENDIX 4: The Church Fathers and Slavery

Besides St. Augustine of Hippo (discussed above), another famous

early Christian theologian who regarded slavery as the product of

human sin, in opposition to the divine will, was the great

apologist Lactantius (c. 250-c. 325). In his Divine Institutes,

Lactantius presented "a vigorous riposte to pagan criticism and

persecution of Christianity" and even lived to see the ultimate

victory of the Christian faith over paganism with the conversion

of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in 312 AD.330 Utilizing

the pagans' own stages or "ages" of human history as illustrated

by the poets Hesiod, Ovid, and Virgil, Lactantius argued that

during the "age of Saturn" -- i.e., the proverbial "Golden Age"

-- man lived in perfect social harmony with his fellow man. "When

Saturn was king," he wrote, there existed a "lack of discord, and

of enmity or war. . . “During this "Golden Age," Justice

"throve," and the land was there "for all to share." Turning this

pagan myth on its head, however, Lactantius claimed that the "Age

330 See Lactantius, Divine Institutes, Translated with an introduction and notes by Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003).

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of Saturn" was, in reality, the "Age of Man under Divine Grace"

prior to the "expulsion" from the Garden of Eden; in fact, it was

a time when the pagan gods were not even worshipped (5.5.1-8)!

During the "Age of Jupiter" which followed, however, this

Edenic world "fell" into a state of injustice and evildoing.

"Jupiter put envy, hatred and cheating into human beings, so that

they should be as venomous as snakes and rapacious as wolves."

Motivated by "greed," he wrote, some managed to "seize the

property of others, diverting everything to private gain, and

what had previously been worked even by individuals for the

benefit of everyone was now piled up in the houses of a few."

"Servitude" was born when the few "withdrew the necessities of

life, gathering them in and keeping them firmly locked up, so

that the bounty of heaven became their bounty." The ruling elite

thereupon "raised themselves above the rest with trains of

henchmen, weapons, and special dress." This "Age of Iron and

Rust," Lactantius claimed, is in reality the direct results of

the "fall" from divine grace when mankind rejected the worship of

the one, true God and turned instead to the pagan gods. The

despicable lifestyle of humanity during this age was, in fact, a

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direct result of men imitating the equally despicable lifestyle

of the pagan gods (5.5.9-5.6.10)!

With the coming of Christ into the world, Lactantius

continued, the "Age of Justice" has begun to return. The hallmark

of the latter is "fairness." "God who created human beings and

gave them the breath of life," he wrote, "wanted all to be on a

level, that is, to be equal, and he established the same

conditions of life for everyone. . ." Slavery, therefore, is not

an acceptable "institution" in this divinely sanctioned order.

"No one is a slave with him, and no one is a master, for if 'he

is the same father of everyone' [Lucr. 2.992], so are we all his

children with equal rights." Any alteration of this egalitarian

state, therefore, is due to human and not divine action.

Lactantius continued, "No one is poor in God's eyes except for

the lack of justice, and on one is rich without a full tally of

virtues,. . .no one is most perfect except for having completed

every degree of virtue (5.14. 15-18)." Lactantius concluded this

brilliant foray into theological history with the following

admonition to his pagan audience:

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That is why neither the Romans nor Greeks could commandjustice, because they kept people distinct in differentgrades from poor to rich, from weak to strong, from laypower up to the sublime power of kings. Where people are not all equal, there is no fairness; the inequalityexcludes justice itself. The whole force of justice lies in the fact that everyone who comes into this human estate on equal terms is made equal by it (5.14.19-20).

Therefore, slavery – or any form of inequality for that matter –

is a human construct, contrary to the will of the Creator of

"heaven and earth." This egalitarian state of human social

relations is thus the "truly" Christian "model of necessary

social order."

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