Bound for Canaan (3 page)

1800
TO
1830

1

Josiah Henson's earliest memory was of the day that his father came home with his ear cut off. He, like his parents, had been born into slavery, and knew no other world beyond the small tract of tidewater Maryland where he was raised. He was five or six years old when the horrifying thing happened, probably sometime in 1795. “Father appeared one day covered in blood and in a state of great excitement,” Henson would recall many years later. His head was bloody and his back lacerated, and “he was beside himself with mingled rage and suffering.”

Henson was born on June 15, 1789, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, on a farm belonging to Francis Newman, about a mile from Port Tobacco. His mother was the property of a neighbor, Dr. Josiah McPherson, an amiable alcoholic who treated the infant Henson as something of a pet, bestowing upon him his own Christian name. In accor
dance with common practice, McPherson had hired out Henson's mother to Newman, to whom Henson's father belonged. Newman's overseer, a “rough, coarse man,” had brutally assaulted Henson's mother. Whether this was an actual or attempted rape, or the more mundane brutality of daily life, Henson does not make clear. Perhaps he didn't know. Whatever the cause, Henson's father, normally a good-humored man, attacked the overseer with ferocity and would have killed him, had not Henson's mother intervened. For a slave to lift his hand “against the sacred temple of a white man's body,” even in self-defense, was an act of rebellion. Slaves were sometimes executed, and occasionally even castrated, for such an act. Knowing that retribution would be swift, Henson's father fled. Like most runaways, however, he didn't go far, but hid in the surrounding woods, venturing at night to beg food at nearby cabins. Eventually, hunger compelled him to surrender. Slaves from surrounding plantations were ordered to witness his punishment for their “moral improvement.” One hundred lashes were laid on by a local blacksmith, fifty lashes at a time. Bleeding and faint, the victim was then held up against the whipping post and his right ear fastened to it with a “tack.” The blacksmith then sliced the ear off with a knife, to the sound of cheers from the crowd.

What the real sentiments of the slaves watching this punishment might have been no one can say. Perhaps they cheered in a desperate effort to reassure their masters that they, unlike Henson's father, were docile and trustworthy, and harbored no thoughts of rebellion. Or perhaps with relief, seeing a “troublemaker,” whose deed had caused their masters to become more vigilant and harsh in an effort to forestall further rebellion, now getting his just deserts. Or perhaps, to people so brutalized by their own degradation, the cruelty may even have seemed a form of gruesome entertainment. Afterward, Henson's father became a different man, brooding and morose—“intractable,” as slave owners typically described human property that no longer responded compliantly to command. Nothing could be done with him. “So off he was sent to Alabama. What was his after fate neither my mother nor I ever learned.”

Following his father's disappearance, Henson and his mother returned to the McPherson estate. Even after years of freedom, Henson would remember the doctor as a “liberal, jovial” man of kind impulses, and he might well have lived out his life in passive oblivion as a slave had not it been for another stroke of fate that abruptly changed his life yet
again. One morning, when Henson was still a small child, McPherson was found drowned in a stream, having apparently fallen from his horse the night before in a drunken stupor. McPherson's property was to be sold off, and the proceeds divided among his heirs. The slaves were frantic at the prospect of being sold away from Maryland to the Deep South, where it was well known that overwork, the grueling climate, and disease shortened lives. Even sparing that, an estate sale commonly meant that parents would be divided from children, and husbands from wives, lifelong friends separated from one another, a relatively benign master suddenly exchanged for a cruel one. For female slaves, the future might mean rape and permanent sexual exploitation. The only thing that those about to be sold did know was that the future was completely uncertain, and that they had not the slightest power to affect their fate.

In due course, all the remaining Hensons—Josiah's three sisters, two brothers, his mother, and himself—were put up at auction. The memory of this event remained engraved in Josiah's memory until the end of his life: the huddled group of anxious slaves, the crowd of bidders, the clinical examining of muscles and teeth, his mother's raw fear. His brothers and sisters were bid off one by one, while his mother, holding his hand, looked on in “an agony of grief,” whose meaning only slowly dawned on the little boy as the sale proceeded. When his mother's turn came, she was bought by a farmer named Isaac Riley, of Montgomery County, just outside the site of the new national capital at Washington. Then young Henson himself was finally offered up for sale. In the midst of the bidding, as Josiah remembered it, his mother pushed through the crowd, flung herself at Riley's feet, and begged him to buy the boy as well. Instead, he shoved her away in disgust.

Henson was bought by Riley's neighbor Adam Robb, who kept a tavern at the site of present-day Rockville, then just a country crossroad. “He took me to his home, about forty miles distant, and put me into his negro quarters with about forty others, of all ages, colors, and conditions, all strangers to me,” Henson recalled. “Of course nobody cared for me. The slaves were brutalized by this degradation, and had no sympathy for me. I soon fell sick, and lay for some days almost dead on the ground. Sometimes a slave would give me a piece of corn bread or a bit of herring.” Robb, annoyed at being burdened with a useless slave, offered to sell the boy cut-rate to Riley. The planter agreed, although, as Henson would put
it, he made clear that he didn't want to be stuck with “a dead nigger,” and promised to pay Robb a small sum for him in horseshoeing only if Josiah lived.

Isaac Riley, who was to shape the remainder of Henson's life in slavery, was probably only about twenty years old when he took ownership of him. Isaac Riley's father, Hugh Riley, was one of the largest land and slave owners in Montgomery County. Isaac would inherit from him, and from his sisters, about four hundred acres of farmland mostly in present-day Bethesda, along with three tobacco houses, around twenty slaves, and at least one lot in George Town, as it was then written. “The natural tendency of slavery is to convert the master into a tyrant, and the slave into the cringing, treacherous, false, and thieving victim of tyranny,” Henson opined. “Riley and his slaves were no exception to the general rule.” Like most of Montgomery County at the turn of the nineteenth century, the gently rolling, lightly wooded hills of Isaac Riley's farm were planted mainly with wheat and other food crops, as well as tobacco, as the continuing presence of the drying sheds on the county tax rolls indicates. Nearly every farm in the county, probably including Riley's, also had a flock between six and twenty sheep, three or four dairy cows, and a dozen or so hogs. Farmers hauled grain to one of the local grist mills to get flour and corn meal custom ground, and shipped bushels of it to George Town; and to Washington, then still hardly more than a sprawling construction site; and even as far away as Baltimore.

Isaac Riley, according to Henson, was “vulgar in his habits, unprincipled and cruel in his general deportment.” In the autobiography that he produced years later, with the assistance of a Boston abolitionist, for a primarily white, religious, Victorian audience, Henson was circumspect when referring to sex. But when he spoke of Riley's addiction to “the vice of licentiousness,” he was probably referring to a propensity for sexually exploiting his female slaves. Henson's mother might well have been one of them. Henson never explicitly said so, but in spite of his evident attachment to his mother, she dropped completely out of his narrative after their purchase by Riley. Once again under her care, however, the boy, who was suffering as much from shock as from physical illness, rapidly recovered. His earliest jobs were carrying buckets of water to the older men at work in the fields, holding a horseplow for weeding between rows of corn and, when he grew taller, taking care of Riley's saddle horse. Eventually he was
put to hoeing in the fields. Notwithstanding a staple diet mainly of corn meal and salt herring, he grew up to be an uncommonly robust boy, and a natural leader among Riley's slaves.

Henson would eventually become one of the most famous fugitive slaves of all, and one of the best-known African Americans of his time. He would become a conductor on the Underground Railroad, help found a community for refugee slaves in Canada, and travel to Europe, where he would even be introduced to Queen Victoria. But all that lay far in the future. Indeed, the small, terrified boy who stood transfixed by his father's torture and humiliation really had no future at all, to speak of. No future, that is, except the illiteracy, ignorance, and impotence that were the lot of the vast majority of slaves, unending days of toil, and the omnipresent threat of sudden, savage punishment. The lesson of loyalty was not lost on him. As he grew, Henson would craft himself into the ideal slave, a paradigm of loyalty, ever trusting and ever trusted, beyond reproach and therefore, he hoped, beyond punishment. He would never give a master cause for the kind of cruelty that his father had suffered, nor for selling him away to the unknown lands to the west, from which it was said that no slave returned.

2

North American slavery was born in the moist, flat tidewater country along Chesapeake Bay, and the lower Delaware, James, and Rappahannock rivers, where tobacco growing first made English settlement profitable. The first twenty African slaves were sold to the settlers at Jamestown, in 1619, by the captain of an errant Portuguese trading vessel. However, colonists continued to farm their ever-expanding plantations with an indiscriminate assortment of enslaved Indians from the dwindling coastal tribes, and indentured white laborers, as well as black Africans. The whites sold themselves (or were kidnapped) into what was, in effect, contract slavery in return for passage to America; although they were subject to the same restrictions and punishments as nonwhites, and could be resold during their term of servitude, they eventually had to be freed. The Indians died in staggering numbers from imported diseases that wiped out
eighty percent or more of entire native communities. Gradually, the balance shifted toward the almost exclusive exploitation of black Africans. Slaves, unlike indentured whites, steadily continued to multiply their master's wealth, like well-invested money. And a slave, once “tamed” and trained to cultivate the crop that was the economic engine of the mid-Atlantic colonies, was a human tool that would last for decades. It was also, of course, harder for black slaves to slip away unnoticed and disappear into the free white population.

As tobacco production expanded from twenty thousand pounds in 1619 to thirty-eight million pounds in 1700, and then tripled again by the end of the eighteenth century, the demand for slave labor steadily grew. Between 1680 and 1750, the number of black slaves increased from about 7 percent to 44 percent of the population in Virginia and from 17 percent to 61 percent in South Carolina, where rice-growing in the coastal counties also lent itself to plantation economics. Slavery was by no means confined to the South. The number of black slaves in Connecticut grew from thirty in 1680 to fifteen hundred in 1715, and eventually to more than sixty-five hundred on the threshold of the Revolution. “The Negro Business is a great object with us,” Joseph Clay of Savannah, Georgia, wrote, in 1784. “It is to the Trade of the Country as the Soul to the Body.”

To be sure, commercial trade in all kinds of human beings was commonplace in seventeenth-century England. Bristol, London, and other ports exported large numbers of white indentured servants and prisoners of war. In 1652, for instance, 270 Scots who had been captured at the battle of Dunbar were put on the market and sold in Boston. Shipping kidnapped children and adults was also a thriving business. In 1617, a single agent, one William Thiene, exported 840 people, and in 1668 there were three ships at anchor in the Thames full of kidnapped children. By the end of the century, however, all other forms of the commerce in human flesh were dwarfed by the African trade. Between 1680 and 1700 alone, three hundred thousand slaves were shipped westward to the Americas in English vessels alone.

Slaves came in many varieties, and were marketed accordingly. Buyers in British America preferred sinewy and durable Fantis and Ashantis from the Gold Coast. The French, given a choice, tended to favor Dahomans. A reputed disposition to suicide undercut the export value of Ibos and Efiks.
Naturally “genteel and courteous” Senegambians were widely sought after for indoor work, while Mandingos were credited with exceptional skill at manual crafts, like barrel making and smithery. Angolans were alleged to be endemically lazy, and so commanded the lowest prices of all.

In Africa, slaves might be acquired in any one of several ways. Some were born into slavery, or sold into it by their own kings for imported commodities like weapons, factory-made textiles, and glassware. Some were captives of war, and others were kidnapped from their homes by roving bands of native slave hunters. Sometimes entire villages were surrounded and marched or carried by river to the coast. Still others were bred specifically for export by coastal traders. At the coast, slaves were processed for sale through established depots, or “factories,” operated by one or another European trading company, or in some cases native Africans, or sold directly to foreign ships engaged in the trade. Olaudah Equiano, the son of a slave-owning tribal elder, was kidnapped as a child from his home in eastern Nigeria by slave hunters sometime in the 1750s. As the servant of a British naval officer, he eventually learned English and became one of the earliest slaves to recount his experiences in print, in his 1792 autobiography. His first sight of European slave traders aboard a ship terrified him beyond words. “I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I was sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.”