African American Slavery

 

    The Africans who were kidnapped were referred to as African Americans because of the role they played in bringing wealth to the southern states even though they did not become citizens of this country until the 14^th Amendment was passed in 1868. In 1808 federal legislation was passed that made it illegal to import captive people from Africa into the U.S. Like all bans it was violated to some degree. However, most of the black people in the country by 1868 were naturalized citizens. The involuntary labor black people provided in the fields planting and harvesting cotton and tobacco along with other crops was invaluable. While at the same time the southerners built a pampered lifestyle of opulence. The African women suffered from being raped continuously and had children by their owners. Their families often broken up and traded to other rich landowners. Some of the slave owners were kind and others practiced cruel forms of oppression. Most were malicious. In order to prevent rebellion, a hierarchy created a separation between the slaves. Some served in the households, a higher position, while others toiled in the fields, a lower ranking position. Laws prevented them from learning how to read. Needed to keep them as ignorant as possible to prevent rebellion. An age of “neoslavery” existed after the Civil War in which they served in the shadow of involuntary servitude. Modern-day slavery, also known as the aforementioned neo-slavery, referred to as institutional slavery that has continued to occur through vagrancy laws against black people. Many acts of discrimination have held black people hostage to the insidious legacy of racism.

    Captive Africans from Angola, in southwestern Africa, suffered the journey from their country in the cargo hold of a Portuguese slave ship. They were bound for a life of slavery in Mexico. Approximately half of the kidnap victims died while on the ship. The remaining captives were taken to Point Comfort near the port of Jamestown, the capital of the English colony of Virginia, by a ship called the “Dutch man of war.” The governor and cape merchant purchased the captives in exchange for food for the kidnappers. Even though people of African descent were present in North America since the 1500s, free and enslaved, the sale of the 20+ African people set the stage for what became of slavery in the United States. After that transaction, the white settlers in the colonies defined status by race and class. Freedom was limited to preserve the operation of slavery and to ensure power for the white colonists and southerners at a later date.

    The prisoners, crammed in the ships’ hauls, wore shackles around their arms and legs made of iron that tore at their skin. They spent months at sea before arriving at America. The unfortunate children usually made up 26 percent of the captives which was advantageous because they filled the ship’s small spaces. As a result, the kidnappers could increase the size of their cargo. The forced migration was known as the Middle Passage (Elliot, 2019).

    Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved author said “I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils s I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death to relive me” (Elliot, 2019, para. 7). The captives faced extreme heat, thirst, starvation and violence while aboard the slave ships. Approximately 15 percent of the captives died before reaching land. Suicide attempts were very common. The captains put netting around their ships to prevent loss of the human cargo. A loss of human cargo, a loss of profit. The white working class crew members also committed suicide or ran away at port to break from the brutality. Sometimes the captives expressed resistance by refusing to eat or jumping overboard to mutiny. The kidnapped did not know what was in store for them, how long they would be on the ships, what would happen to them when they reached land.

    The slave trade ensured political power, a social standing and wealth for churches and European settlers. They made money by slave trading and buying and selling the commodities the slaves produced. The entrepreneurs secured political positions which determined the destiny of the nation.

    The Virginia law in 1662 declared the status of the children born to enslaved women was the same of their mother. Enslaved women gave birth to generations of children who ended up as commodities. Families of black people were often torn apart when parts of the family were sold to other rich landowners. African people were enslaved for life.

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable

Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of

Happiness.”

 

   While the colonists fought against the British for their freedom, they sustained slavery and avoided the matter stated in the Constitution. The enslaved people took advantage of every opportunity to assure their freedom. Many were not successful. They served in the military during the Revolutionary War either for the British or the other European settlers. Emancipation enacted in some states such as Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey provided some of the enslaved freedom with contingencies. For example, in New York, if children were born after July 4, 1799, they became legally free after their 25^th birthday if they were women and 28 if they were men. The rationale was that slaveholders kept the enslaved during their most productive years. The introduction to the cotton crop in the Deep South called upon a need for more slaves (Elliot, 2019). Before the Civil War, almost 4 million slaves worked the fields in the South. Only a few slaves accepted their lack of freedom or enjoyed life on the plantation. As one ex-slave put it, “No day dawns for the slave, nor is it looked for. It is all night – night forever.” For many slaves the night of slavery only ended in death, (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2023, para. 2).

 

    George Washington enslaved 317 black people. Life at Mount Vernon was like it was at a lot of other plantations. Family members were separated across different farms due to their work assignments. The 317 Africans enslaved at Mount Vernon worked in various areas. Some worked with skilled trades, while others worked in the fields and the lucky ones worked as butlers, waiters and cooks. They worked 14 hour days in the summer from the time the sun rose until it set. Washington wanted the slaves to be as productive as possible. Their diet consisted of cornmeal and salted fish which they harvested themselves. With what little spare time they had some slaves kept gardens, raised poultry and foraged. A one room log structure with a wooden chimney served as their home. While many enslaved people who worked as house servants and craftsmen lived in barracks style quarters (Wiencek, 2022).

 

    The crops grown in the South before the Civil War included sugar, rice and corn. Cotton ended up being the main money-maker. Millions of acres was turned to cotton production after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. More cotton lands became cultivated, especially in Mississippi and Texas. The need for more slaves escalated. By 1860, a male slave cost between $1,000 to $2,000. A female sold for a few hundred dollars less. The majority of slaves were field hands which included men, women and children. Their owners decided when the child would work in the field, usually between 10 and 12 years of age.

    The cotton picking season, usually in August, consisted of a time of very hard work and fear concerning the slaves. Solomon Northup described what picking cotton was like on a plantation located along the Red River in Louisiana:

    “An ordinary day’s work is two hundred pounds… The hands are required to be in the  cotton field as soon as it is light in the morning, and, with the exception of ten or fifteen minutes, which is given them at noon to swallow their allowance of cold bacon, they are not permitted to be a moment idle  until it is too dark to see… The day’s work over in the field, the baskets are ‘toted,’ or in other words, carried to the gin house, where the cotton weighed. No matter how fatigued and weary he may be… a slave never approaches the gin-house with his  basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short of weight… he knows that he must be whipped. And if he has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will measure the next day’s task accordingly” (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2023, para. 14).

    They could only return to the crude home after they finally finished working for their master to tend to their family needs. The lives of the enslaved came under the control of a variety of customs, rules and laws known as the slave codes. Slaves could not travel without a written pass and they were forbidden to learn how to read and write. They could be searched at any time and could not buy or sell anything without a permit. They were subjected to a nightly curfew.

    When they sought marriage, they had to seek permission from the master. Slaves could marry others living at the plantation they were working or at neighboring ones. Their marriages carried no legal standing (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2023).

   

    Slaves were punished for not working fast enough, for arriving late to the fields, for defying authority, for running away, and a multitude of other reasons. Various forms of punishment were inflicted on them: whippings, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away from the plantation. Flogging or whipping was the most common form of punishment. Often the slaves were attached to the ground and their back was flogged.

    “In Twelve Years a Slave, Northup reported one instance in which a young slave woman named Patsey was brutally whipped for visiting a neighboring plantation without permission:

    “The painful cries and shrieks of the tortured Patsey, mingling with the loud and angry curses of Epps [the slave master whipping her] loaded the air. She was terribly lacerated — I may say, without exaggeration, literally flayed. The lash was wet with blood.... How did the slaves react to the whippings, the endless labor for others’ profit, the lack of freedom? Some like Nat Turner rebelled. In 1831, he led a slave revolt that left nearly 60 white persons dead in Virginia. Such insurrections were relatively rare in the South. White people outnumbered slaves in most places, possessed firearms, and could call on the power of the government to suppress rebellions. Nevertheless, slaves everywhere found other ways to resist their bondage. They sabotaged tools and crops, pretended illness, and stole food from the master’s own kitchen. The most effective way that a slave could retaliate against an owner was to run away. It is estimated that 60,000 black people fled slavery before the Civil War.

    “Solomon Northup attempted to run away but failed. Then, in 1852, a white carpenter with abolitionist sentiments met Northup and learned about his kidnapping. The carpenter wrote several letters to New York state officials on behalf of Northup. In response, the governor of New York sent an agent carrying documents proving that Northup was a free black man. After a court hearing in January 1853, a Louisiana judge released Northup from his bondage. He finally returned home to his wife and children” (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 2023, paras. 19 – 22).

    Congress ratified the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution on December 6, 1865 outlawing slavery in the United States. That did not end the hardships faced by many black people in the South. The Old South continued to amass sins which infuriated the Republicans. To make a mockery out of the 13^th Amendment they implemented Black Codes. Black people were not permitted to own land or weapons, break work contracts with white employers or establish any independent business, use rude gestures or mutinous speeches. South Carolina went as far as only allowing black people to only work as farmers and house servants. Florida ordered 39 lashes for blacks who tried to attend white assemblies and the same punishment occurred when black people were caught publicly smoking cigars in Alabama. Insolent servants were fined $50 under Alabama’s Black Code. Black children over two years of age were torn from their families and apprenticed to whites until maturity if their parents did not teach them white-approved “habits of industry and honesty” (Newton, 2005, pg. 4).

     Law enforcement joined in the Southerners efforts to destroy the black people. May of 1866 the Memphis police led white rioters and killed 46 freedmen, and two white Republicans. Approximately 80 blacks were wounded and 90 black homes, 12 schools and four churches were burned to the ground. In July of 1866 New Orleans police led another massacre in which 34 blacks were killed and 200 wounded. Throughout the Dixie area individual lynchings, murders and assaults upon freedmen increased dramatically. The Ku Klux Klan operated in full force against the black people. The Klan and other white supremacists threatened, murdered, assaulted and tortured many people who were a threat to the southern way of life and continued to do so for many years. The Confederate flag was represented at the January 6^th, 2021 attack on the Capitol in the U.S. that was instigated by POTUS.

    Douglas A. Blackmon provided his readers with a rendition of a specific black person’s life named Green Cottenham in his book “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” In 1908, he faced vagrancy charges in Alabama. Other southern state legislatures followed the same format which was enforced by local sheriffs and constables. High unemployment rates among southern men, primarily black men, led to the outlawed vagrancy charges and the public looking for free labor. The court found twenty-two year old Cottenham guilty and ordered him to spend 30 days of hard labor. Because of his inability to pay a variety of fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, and witnesses, his sentence increased to approximately one year of grueling labor.

    Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves, was sold. The county had an agreement with the U.S. Steel Corporation. The young man was turned over to them for the duration of his sentence. The subsidiary of the steel company, Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company paid $12. a month for Cottenham’s fine and fees. It was entirely up to the company’s managers what they did with Cottenham and the other thousand of black men.

    He was plunged deep into the darkness of a mine referred to as Slope No. 12 at the edge of Birmingham called the Pratt Mines. He was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and had to spend every waking hour digging and loading coal. The requirement of the removal of eight tons of coal must be met or he faced a whipping. The catacombs of darkness were filled with desperate men covered in sweat and coated with coal dust. The scene resembled hell even for a child of slaves.

    During the 1920s, many black people were lynched. White Supremacists continued to assault, kill and torture African Americans until current day when they feel threatened by civil right actions and when black people rise politically and economically. Their actions have held people of color in a prison laced with hatred. Native Americans also faced the same vagrancy laws and had to serve hard labor. People of color faced many acts of discrimination and genocide.