SLAVE CULTURE
they succeeded in forging a semi-independent culture, centered on the family
and church. This enabled them to survive the experience of bondage with- out
surrendering their self-esteem and to pass from generation to genera- tion a
set of ideas and values fundamentally at odds with those of their masters. THIS
CULTURE DREW ON AFRICAN HERITAGE. African influences were evi- dent in
the slaves’ music and dances, style of religious worship, and the use of herbs
by slave healers to combat disease
THE SLAVE FAMILY
The United States, where the slave population grew from natural increase
rather than continued importa- tion from Africa, had an even male- female ratio,
making the creation of families far more possible. the law did not recognize the
legality of slave marriages. The master had to consent before a man and
woman could “jump over the broomstick” (the slaves’ marriage ceremony), and
families stood in constant danger of being broken up by sale.
most adult slaves married, and their unions, when not dis- rupted by sale,
typically lasted for a lifetime. To solidify a sense of family continuity, slaves
frequently named children after cousins, uncles, grand- parents, and other
relatives. Nor did the slave family simply mirror kinship patterns among whites.
Slaves, for example, did not marry first cousins, a practice common among
white southerners. Most slaves lived in two- parent families.
THE THREAT OF SALE
one slave marriage in three in slave-selling states like Virginia was broken by
sale. Many children were separated from their parents by sale. Accord- ing to
one estimate, at least 10 percent of the teenage slaves in the Upper South were
sold in the interstate slave trade. Fear of sale permeated slave life, especially in
the Upper South.
it (THE GOVT)divided slaves only once, at age ten, the point at which they
became old enough to enter the plantation labor force.
A public notice, “Sale of Slaves and Stock,” announced the 1852 auction of
property belonging to a recently deceased Georgia planter.
. It listed thirty-six indi- viduals ranging from an infant to a sixty-nine-year old
woman and ended with the proviso: “Slaves will be sold separate, or in lots, as
best suits the purchaser.”
GENDER ROLES AMONG SLAVES
Slave men and women experienced, in a sense, the equal- ity of powerlessness.
Slave men could not act as the economic providers for their families. Nor could
they protect their wives from physical or sexual abuse by owners and overseers
or determine when and under what con- ditions their children worked. Slave
men chopped wood, hunted, and fished, while women washed, sewed, and
assumed primary responsibil- ity for the care of children. Some planters
allowed their slaves small plots of land on which to grow food to supplement
the rations provided by the owner; women usually took charge of these “garden
plots.”
SLAVE RELIGION
A distinctive version of Christianity also offered solace to slaves in the face of
hardship and hope for liberation from bondage.
Even though the law prohibited slaves from gathering without a white person
present, every plantation, it seemed, had its own black preacher. Usually the
preacher was a “self-called” slave who possessed little or no for- mal education
but whose rhetorical abilities and familiarity with the Bible made him one of the
most respected members of the slave community . Especially in southern cities,
slaves also worshiped in biracial congrega- tions with white ministers, where
they generally were required to sit in the back pews or in the balcony. Urban
free blacks established their own churches, sometimes attended by slaves.
To masters, Christianity offered another means of social control.
SLAVE REVOLTS
The first, organized by the Virginia slave Gabriel in 1800,
It was followed eleven years later by an
uprising on sugar plantations upriver from New Orleans. Somewhere between
200 and 500 men and women, armed with sugarcane knives, axes, clubs, and a
few guns, marched toward the city, destroying property as they proceeded. The
white population along the route fled in panic to New Orleans. Within two days,
the militia and regular army troops met the rebels and dispersed them in a
pitched battle, killing sixty-six and the principal leaders were executed
The best known of all slave rebels was Nat Turner, a slave preacher and
religious mystic in Southampton County, Virginia, who came to believe that God
had chosen him to lead a black uprising.
Turner traveled widely in the county conducting religious services. On August
22, he and a handful of fol- lowers marched from farm to farm assaulting the
white inhabitants. Most of their victims were women and children,
By the time the militia put down the uprising, about eighty slaves had joined
Turner’s band, and some sixty whites had been killed. Turner was subsequently
captured and, with seventeen other rebels, condemned to die. Nat Turner’s was
the last large-scale rebellion in southern history.
Turner’s rebellion sent shock waves through the entire South. “A Nat Turner,”
one white Virginian warned, “might be in any family.” In the panic that followed
the revolt, hundreds of innocent slaves were whipped and scores executed.
“The blood of Turner and his innocent victims,”
Instead of moving toward emancipation, the Virginia legislature of 1832 decided
to fasten even more tightly the chains of bondage. New laws pro- hibited
blacks, free or slave, from acting as preachers
, strengthened the militia and patrol systems, banned free blacks from owning
firearms, and prohibited teaching slaves to read. Other southern states
followed suit.
A MAJOR CHANGEE
1831 marked a turning point for the Old South. In that year, Parliament launched
a program for abolishing slavery throughout the British empire
