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  3

  Slave Defiance

  BEGINNING IN 1791, a convulsion of violence swept away slavery and all it produced in the French colony of St-Domingue (see Chapter 4). Haiti emerged from the ruins. It was an exceptional event and nothing comparable happened in the entire history of slavery in the Americas. Yet both before and especially after 1791, slave owners everywhere could not escape the fear that they might be overwhelmed by their slaves. What happened in St-Domingue sent shockwaves throughout the Americas, and struck, tsunami-like, thousands of miles away, against the European foundations of the Atlantic slave system.

  Despite having its origins and development in the particularities of French revolutionary politics, the Haitian slave revolt seemed to prove that slave owners had been right all along. From the first days of Atlantic slavery they had feared their slaves, had worried about slave unrest and, even in peaceable times, rarely felt at ease in the colonial exile of slave societies. Some slave owners deluded themselves that they enjoyed the trust of their slaves, but most recognised that, whatever benefits were derived from slavery, they were more than counterbalanced by an inescapable anxiety. The most hard-headed and realistic of slave owners accepted the dangers: theirs was a volatile and unpredictable world, which could turn troublesome or violent at a moment’s notice – and without warning or signs of danger. This is not to claim that slaves were in a state of permanent rebellion, but rather that their owners could never fully trust them and lived in a pervasive climate of uncertainty.

  This was not unique to the Americas. The problems of keeping slaves in their place, of maintaining some semblance of control and discipline over them, had been recurrent features of any number of ancient slave societies. Slaves ran away, plotted, struck their masters, sometimes killed them, and even, in extremes, schemed to rebel. There is, for instance, ample evidence from antiquity of Roman slave owners advertising for the return of runaway slaves, and regular accounts of slave violence against their masters. It ranged from simple, angry blows (normally after one indignity too many) through to murder. Most spectacular of all, of course, were slave revolts, perhaps the best remembered being the Spartacus slave revolt, and its spectacularly gory suppression, of 74 BC. We learn of plots or vague rumours about slaves planning to take revenge, though often such plots were merely false alarms, more a result of slave owners’ febrile imaginations than of slave realities. Add all this together, and we begin to glean some sense of the persistent worries of people who owned slaves. However close their physical or social proximity, slaves lived beyond the understanding of their owners. The millions of slaves of the Americas loathed their bondage and lived out their lives trying to mitigate its worst features. They bore an enduring resentment against the people who held them in such miserable servitude.

  Africans had known a different life, before enslavement, however impoverished or simple it may have been. Those born into slavery in the Americas also knew about a life other than slavery: they heard about it from Africans, and they saw it enjoyed by free people in the world around them, from the poorest of labourers to the grandest of landowners. Slaves saw how free people lived. It was perhaps free people working most closely to slaves who highlighted the slaves’ bondage. However humble the lives of free people, and however mean their rewards, they were not treated like slaves. Their families and loved ones were not taken from them at the whim of a master – to disappear, for ever, when sold to another slave owner. The children of free people were also free, but children born to slave mothers were slaves. These were only the most obvious differences the enslaved could see between their own lives and the lives of others. Slaves lived in a world built around their uniquely inferior station: different at all levels from free people at large.

  At its simplest, but most crucial, slaves were the material possessions of their masters. They were objects inherited and bequeathed, items of trade both in daily commerce and in legal status. They always had a price on their heads. That had been their status from the moment of African enslavement, or from their birth into American slavery, and it grated painfully against their obvious humanity. While others may have viewed them as objects, they regarded themselves differently. They were people anxious for a different life. Long before the Western world adopted the language of the rights of man and the vernacular of equality in the late eighteenth century, slaves yearned for something different. They wanted to be like others. Instead, they were forced to devise means of coping with the burdens of slavery imposed by their masters. Slaves needed a protective coating against life’s indignities and injuries, and that protection took the form of slave defiance. At all points of Atlantic slavery, from Africa to the American frontier and even into Europe’s heartlands, slaves offered defiance. It was a defiance that evolved into a complex slave culture of coping with, deflecting and challenging their bondage. Long before the friends of African freedom began to agitate for black freedom, the enslaved themselves had created their own strategies of resistance. In time, their defiance was to prove the crucial final factor in bringing down slavery itself.

  Slave owners everywhere recognised that slaves detested their bondage, and would do what they could to challenge, change or cope with it. They knew that their slaves would try to escape, plot, flare up in anger, drag their feet at work, deceive – and even rebel. And throughout the history of slavery in the Americas – from the African coast to the American plantations – slave owners tried to cover all those eventualities.

  Violence lay at the heart of Atlantic slavery. Africans were enslaved through acts of violence, in warfare, slave raids and kidnapping. They were prisoners in Africa and as they were force-marched to the Atlantic coast, they were normally restrained, their every move scrutinised in case they attempted to escape. When herded into the barracoons on African beaches, in the gloom of a cell in an African slave fort, and finally below decks on board a slave ship, the Africans’ initial experiences of slavery was as a prisoner to alien people. None were more alien than the white people they first encountered on the coast.

  Some tried to escape as they were moved to the coast, from the canoes that took them out to the slave ships, or even overboard (if they dared) from the slave ship itself. Such escapes were always daunting and dangerous: daunting when the slaves were removed from their native region, and dangerous when confronted by armed jailors or sailors – not to mention the perils of the sea itself. However fierce the determination to flee, Africans faced enormous risks. Despite all this, many persisted.

  Violence, from first to last, was the lubricant of slavery. Every slave had entered the Atlantic slaving system via a series of terrifying acts of brutality, and the reality and threat of violence continued to hang over them long after they stumbled ashore in the Americas. They were seized, incarcerated and transported via an overlapping sequence of violent experiences, and they faced capricious, individual acts of violence, from captors, merchants and sailors. This was their baptism into the world of slavery. The slave ships provided the manpower required for agricultural work in the Americas, but they also taught the harshest of lessons for the Africans. Not one of the eleven million African survivors of the Atlantic crossing could have been left in any doubt about the power of their oppressors. Nor could they doubt what happened to those who sought to dispute or challenge that power. Every African survivor entered the Americas – whether it be Brazil, the Caribbean or North America – familiar with the violent power of the men who now controlled their lives. Life on a plantation might seem, at first glance, to have been an improvement on the torments of a slave ship. But the first lessons of enslavement, in Africa and at sea, had already taught the Africans what they faced: what they could and could not do – and what would happen to them if they tried and failed to challenge their masters. It was a brutal apprenticeship for what was to follow.

  Although the slave ships functioned as tightly run prisons, they were regularly beset by slave uprisings. Perhaps one ship in ten had slave upheavals, especially on the Africa
n coast. When revolts failed, however, the punishments were exemplary and public. Executions and dismemberment of the victims took place so that others could see what happened to rebels. The Atlantic slave ships developed their own ‘bloody code’ to rival the most savage of European penal systems, all in addition to the terrifying daily experience of being on a crowded slave ship. Such reprisals were to be repeated across the slave colonies in the aftermath of slave revolt. Yet, time and again (and despite knowing what might happen to them), Africans on the slave ships resisted: attacked their tormentors, killed individual sailors, sought to take over the vessel – lashing out as best they could against the hellish world that took them (they knew not where) across the ocean for months on end. Most of this seaborne slave resistance was crushed – or ended in disaster – and only a handful of such revolts succeeded. At first sight, the millions of Africans landed in the New World may have looked like a defeated people: cowed, battered and forlorn. Yet their subsequent resistance was remarkable and their defiance, which had periodically flared on their recent travels, was to recover and come to characterise slave life across the Americas. But it was a defiance tempered by the awareness of what was possible.

  Slavery varied enormously across the Americas, from one region and from one occupation to another. In addition, slaves did not live a static working life, but generally changed jobs as they passed from childhood, to maturity, to old age. The same person might experience a variety of different roles during their working life: from a child picking up stray cane, through to an old man guarding the animals, or an old woman looking after a gaggle of slave children. For all that, slaves everywhere at all ages and in all types of labour developed their own ways of coping with the indignities that came with their daily toil. Some jobs seemed easier – better – than others. Working in a master’s household might seem an improvement on being a member of a field gang, but, even there, life had its tribulations: the sexual approaches of the resident males, the inescapable vigilance of the mistress of the house. Slaves working in towns and cities were exposed to the random and unpredictable insults and assaults of others. These, and much more besides, were not merely the slings and arrows of plebeian misfortune: they were the particular fate of all slaves. To cope, they all needed to adapt; to learn how best to cope with life’s blows and insults. Every slave had to develop his or her own defence and resilience. This did not mean being cowed (though some clearly were), nor did it involve necessarily turning the other cheek (though that too was sometimes needed). What was required was an attitude, a way of looking at the world, that enabled them to persevere in the teeth of endless oppression. They also had to be resolute in safeguarding their own interests, and of those of their loved ones. Sometimes this required an angry reaction, sometimes a sullen withdrawal or a dawdler’s approach to work. Sometimes, however, this involved something altogether more serious and dangerous.

  Slave owners lived out a pretence that they exercised complete control over their slaves and that their slaves were totally subservient to them. This was an article of faith among slave owners and was frequently discussed, from classical Greece to the peak years of African slavery in the Americas. It was, however, an impossible ideal, which was in permanent conflict with the slaves’ own will and their refusal to submit totally to their owners’ powers. The simplest, but risky, solution for many slaves was to escape; to run away – to become a fugitive and seek freedom, or at least an escape from the tyranny of slavery. Slaves had escaped in Africa en route to the coast. They escaped from the slave ship (though that normally involved a suicidal dive overboard). And they ran away from their owners in all the American slave societies of which we know. Desperate slaves escaped from a brutal owner or master, sometimes returning after a few days. Often they headed to a loved one held on a distant property. Newspapers were dotted with advertisements for fugitive slaves, and often made clear that the owner had a good idea where the fugitive was heading: to a wife, husband, lover, parent.[1] For that, the runaway often needed help along the way; sanctuary on a distant property, food and drink from other slaves secretly helping them on their night-time travels. Striking out on their own posed enormous practical difficulties: of simple concealment, of nourishment, of knowing the directions and finding places of safety and security – especially when hunted by angry or vengeful owners or their agents, by slave catchers with dogs.

  The Underground Railroad along which slaves from the US South were furtively moved to northern freedom became a highly complex, organised network that employed large numbers of helpers and sympathisers. But, as we shall see, even that could be disrupted, and the fugitive returned to southern bondage. Much more common, for slaves everywhere, were the personal, ad hoc and informal routes that enabled individuals to move away, on foot and by water, from their owners towards somewhere else – or someone else. They might hide in the bush, in inaccessible reaches of forests or mountains, in swamp lands and remote terrain, far from the reach of their owners and their agents. They might also try to pass themselves off as free people, claiming a false identity, background and skills. Fugitive advertisements carefully spelled out the runaways’ personal details; the slaves’ physique and features, their clothing, voice, human imperfections and their likely alibis. Runaways and their owners played out a game of bluff and counter-bluff, the one seeking freedom by flight, concealment and deception, the other simply trying to get their hands on their human property.

  Brazilian slaves ran away in huge numbers. Police records and newspaper reports tell a similar tale of young Africans particularly prone to escape – not surprising perhaps. They were young and energetic, had known a different life, and had not yet been ground down by the slave system. Brazilian runaways fled for a variety of reasons; from fear and anger, in search of distant loved ones, even in search of work elsewhere, especially in the burgeoning cities. Some fled to join the military (in Brazil’s frequent conflicts in the nineteenth century). Those living close to Brazil’s borders fled for the security of freedom elsewhere (French Guiana, Uruguay or Argentina, for example) much as US slaves from the South, especially the border states, escaped to the free states of the North or to Canada.

  Slaves escaped when they faced the threat of being sold – the ultimate risk and fear of slaves everywhere. Being wrenched from family, community, friends and loved ones, to be dispatched (often great distances), was to vanish. It had happened to Africans already; now, in the Americas, it was repeated whenever new economies sprang up and slave labour was required in distant locations. It happened in Brazil when slaves were moved huge distances from old industries to new ones, and it happened on a spectacular scale in the USA with the development of cotton in the South. Between 1790 and 1860, one US slave family in five was wrecked by enforced separation and sale. One child in three was forcibly parted from parents.[2] The shattering of slave families on such a scale was as brutal an emotional rupture as the original enslavement in Africa. Moreover, its threat continued to hang over every single slave in the Americas. Because they were property – material assets in an owner’s portfolio – they went the way of any other item when the owner died, remarried, moved away, bequeathed or sold their assets. Slave owners passed on slaves to children, who might then move elsewhere with them. They bought and sold their land and businesses, trading the slaves just like another item on their list of possessions. Wise planters tried not to uproot slave families, sometimes even heeding a slave’s request not to separate a spouse; some even brought them together by purchase. Slave owners knew that resentful and unhappy slaves were not good workers, and tried, if they could, not to disturb the local system. Often, however, they rode roughshod over such feelings: they were influenced not by sentiment, but by the numbers in their ledgers and business correspondence, and would shuffle their human assets to their best economic advantage. What made economic sense to a slave holder normally brought grief and anguish to their slaves. Many fled rather than face the consequences.

  It is, then, little su
rprise that slaves escaped. Some fled by sea, some simply vanished into the anonymity of towns and cities, while others headed for the bush. They fled from remote plantations and from the homes of city-dwelling slave holders. Sometimes, they were encouraged to flee by others around them. They also beat a path to the isolation of distant, inaccessible communities that sprang up in a number of slave colonies. ‘Maroon’ societies became a feature of slavery in South America and the Caribbean – though less so in the USA. Much depended on geography, of course. On the small, flat islands of the eastern Caribbean, hideouts were virtually impossible, but the bigger, mountainous islands – Jamaica, Cuba and Puerto Rico – offered plenty of scope for slave runaways. Fugitive slaves developed communities of freed people, keen to preserve their independence, and able to use geography and guerrilla tactics to hold off armed efforts by planters and the military to bring them to heel. The British conducted the unsuccessful First Maroon War in Jamaica before finally agreeing a treaty (1739) that confirmed Maroon independence. The French faced similar difficulties in the rugged mountains of St-Domingue. The best-known Maroon community, Maniel, was – like the Jamaican version before it – finally recognised in 1785 when the French accepted the impossibility of bringing it to heel. When the British finally defeated the Maroons of Trelawny Town in the Second Maroon War in Jamaica, 1795, the duplicitous British governor broke his promise to the Maroons and had them deported to Nova Scotia. A comparable group (of ‘Black Caribs’) in St Vincent was also defeated, finally, in 1797: they too were shipped out, to Honduras.[3]