We've talked a lot about women in
this antebellum era, 19th century roughly or first half of the 19th century roughly. We've talked a little bit about the
experiences of free Black women, for example, but we need to focus now on enslaved women and women
as enslavers. This is a significant part of the experience of women during this period, so we need to talk directly about the system of slavery and women's roles, various roles,
within that. Let us begin by talking about the
influence of slavery on our economy, the economy of
the United States at that time. We tend to think of slavery and the plantation system in relation to cotton.
That is certainly what became the primary crop and income stream from the
plantation system. We'll talk in a minute about some other
crops and sources of wealth from plantations, but cotton certainly
becomes the most important. It's the most important export
from the United States during the middle of the 19th century. We know from documents and evidence from the time that
in Britain, which is still a major manufacturing center for textiles, 80%
of the cotton used as a raw material in those processes in Britain
came from the United States. The value, and these are all in today's numbers, is
200 million dollars a year. It's huge, a huge export. One
of the biggest exports. Well, really the biggest export from the United States to any nation.
This … That's the value of the crop, the raw material that is being
produced on these plantations and other farms. We also have to look at the economic
value. This is kind of hard to talk about this way, but literally the
value of the enslaved people because they are being
treated as a commodity. Within the … Because they are being
bought and sold and they have a value. Their labor has value. We … Scholars, economists,
and historians have developed some numbers,
some estimates about this. That the value of enslaved people on the eve of the Civil War
in 1860 at that point was 3 billion dollars. It's huge.
It's actually much more than the value of the cotton
that is being produced. It is much more than
what's being invested in infrastructure, including the railroad
system, which is vast at this point, and all these factories as part of
industrial production in the United States. Three times the
amount of money … The value of enslaved people at that time
was 3 times the amount of money invested in banks and 7 times the
value of all currency in circulation, so all the cash that is circulating in the United States at this time.
It's 12 times the value of the cotton crop itself. Cotton is
the most important export, but people, the laborers, the enslaved
laborers are worth in that economic system 12 times as much.
Here's kind of this gobsmacking number: the value of
enslaved people in 1860 is 48 times what the federal
government at that time was spending, so it's colossal. It is the foundation of the national
economy at this point because you have enslaved
people producing cotton. Their value and the value of
the product of their labor is being exported to Britain. It's being exported to the North to the textile mills there, which is then producing the economy to
a large degree of the North. It's really this foundation of the U.S.
economy, this enslaved labor and the value of enslaved people
within that system. For example … It's property! People are something that can be inherited.
We have the example--[clears throat] excuse me--of Stephanie Jones-Rogers who's done
this research and found that among enslaving families, families
that enslaved people, daughters could inherit
and did inherit the control of those enslaved people more
than they would have inherited land, which still traditionally
would have been inherited by an eldest son. You had … We
still had this idea of coverture, of women's legal and economic
rights being subsumed under the husband or the
father. Married women could circumvent that to protect
what was seen as their property in human beings.
They were able to inherit enslaved people. We see
this, for example, with George Washington and Martha Washington
somewhat earlier. That many of the enslaved people in the Washington
family were owned through Martha and inherited by her children. They
were not owned by George Washington. This is a fairly common thing
in the early 1800s. Then you had this
change--this is another reform that we were talking
about last time-- that some states passed women's property
acts that allowed married women to own their own property. It's really a
big shift in this idea of coverture. You have these women like this … We have this image here
of Mary Boykin Chesnutt who lived at Mulberry
Plantation in South Carolina. A person … She or
women like her would have been the direct slave owners. her children would have
inherited them from her, not through their father. We can
look at an example of a plantation. Whitney Plantation
in Louisiana is one of the most famous because it is
extremely well preserved and is now a museum with many, many
visitors every year. It is on what's called the German
Coast in Louisiana. It was built in 1752 as an indigo
plantation. Indigo is a crop that was fairly common in the Deep South. It
was really common in the Carolinas even in the early colonial period
because of climate and the terrain. It is a blue
dye. It is what is … Why blue jeans are blue comes
from indigo, the use of indigo in the early 1800s. It was highly
prized in Europe as well as in the United States as well
as in other cultures. Indigo has a long history in India.
There are varieties in Central America. It's highly prized because
it produces a very vibrant, deep, beautiful blue that is color fast.
Until chemical dyes arose later in the 1800s, it was one
of the few types of natural plant dyes that was that vibrant
and strong. It was very … Once it's processed, it's relatively lightweight
and compact, and so it's less expensive to ship to export.
It was a very valuable crop. In the Carolinas, people grew rice in the
very low-lying areas and indigo on the higher ground that wasn't quite
so swampy. That would have been similar in places in Louisiana
like Whitney Plantation. Initially, Whitney Plantation is an
indigo plantation, but then it shifts to sugar. Again, we think
about cotton as being this primary produce of the
plantation system and the enslaved labor system,
but sugar was actually almost as lucrative, especially a
little bit earlier in the 1800s. For example, at Whitney Plantation,
we know that there were over 100 enslaved people producing
over 400,000 pounds of sugar every season, so every year. It's highly lucrative. This is an …
one of the larger plantations. We know that the majority of people producing crops in
the South, in the southern states or southern colonies, were not
these large plantation owners, but there were these exceptionally
large ones with 100 or more enslaved people. We know that Whitney
Plantation was owned by a woman-- a widow of one of the grandsons
of the original builder, Ambroise Heidel. She's another one of those exceptional
women that is actually owning the property itself. Unfortunately,
we just had Hurricane Ida just the other day in 2021. It destroyed some of these buildings.
This right hand image is from the Whitney Plantation website of
slave quarters of the housing for enslaved people. Several of those were
destroyed by the hurricane, and the others were damaged. I'm
hoping that they're able to rebuild those because they're an
important part of the story of the plantation experience for
men and women in this plantation context. That's sort of this economic picture
of the role of these crops and this plantation system and enslaved labor
in the economy. We can look at that in terms of demographics
as well. These are maps based on data from the censuses,
the federal censuses, that had already started in this early period every 20 years or so, in this case. Now
they're every 10 years. These are … This is data pulled from
these 20 year increments, 30 to 20 year increments. It shows
not only the expansion of the United States during
this period, but the expansion of slavery.
The color ramp here, this sort of rusty red through yellow, is
the enslaved population in each county. You can see in
1790 at the upper right, it is present in most
of the states, but concentrated in this mid-Atlantic
to Southern region and more so on the coast,
generally speaking. Then you can see over the
next few increments that slavery disappears from the Northern
states almost entirely and expands in the South
into new states and territories. It really moves west.
It moves all the way into western Texas and really
up to that Missouri … Mississippi River border in Arkansas
and Missouri, for example. The number of people,
we can extrapolate, goes … is greatly expanding because of these
more and more counties having significant numbers of enslaved
people--in some cases, outnumbering white people. It just gives
us a picture of the predominance of slavery in a
huge portion of the United States geographically and
demographically during this time period up until the Civil War. One of the most important ideas
about or events of the history of slavery in the United
States is the slave trade. We know that enslaved
people are brought from Africa to the United States, as well
as many other locations in Central and South America, on ships. This is what's known
as the Middle Passage. It is the source of imported
enslaved people. Over time, the United States
and other nations banned this importation through
the 1800s, the 19th century. Britain is one of the first, even though
they are very deeply involved in the slave trade through
providing ships and captains for this transportation of enslaved
people across the Atlantic. Once the United States
bans this importation, we see this development of
domestic slave trading. This transatlantic importation is
banned in the United States in 1808. That's really early in the 19th century.
It's important to know that it still went on in terms of smuggling,
but the numbers are very low. The numbers of ships
and the numbers of people still being imported, enslaved people being
imported, just drops dramatically because of enforcement of this law. People in the South turn to the
domestic trade in enslaved people. What that means is enslaved
people are having children who are under the U.S. system
of slavery born enslaved. It is not something that happens later
in life. It is intrinsic to them as being born from an enslaved woman.
This is not the case of slavery in Africa typically or in other areas of
the world. This is very distinctive to slavery in the United States, in
addition to being a race-based system of slavery. You have
this antebellum period where you have domestic increase
or maintenance of the enslaved population. You have the trade in
enslaved people internally rather than
importing from outside. You have these slave
trade routes, these domestic trading routes,
both over land and by sea shown on this map from around 1810
to 1860. These are the most typical routes. They might follow rivers or
gone completely over land. We know from the documents that we have,
the data that we have that this reflects the experience of approximately
1 million enslaved people being sold within the United States.
That is approximately 25% of the enslaved population in 1860. It's a ... It's a huge number. Primarily,
the movement of these people is from the upper South--
Virginia, Maryland, etc.--to the lower South, the Deep South is what we
would call that today-- Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas,
Florida--and then west into Mississippi, Louisiana, and then ultimately Texas once
that becomes a territory and a state. You have these major slave
trading markets developing in Richmond, Virginia, in Washington, DC, which eventually becomes
the capital of the United States. In the capital
is a slave market. Then in New Orleans. You have people being
transported to these markets to be sold centrally.
We know that around 500,000, around half of that
number of 1 million, or excuse me, yeah ... Half of the 1 million enslaved people being sold in the U.S. were sold
in New Orleans alone. This is a huge focal point for
this domestic slave trade. We know that coming down the
Mississippi River, as you can see by this these red pathways
coming down toward Natchez which was another major slave trading, slave auction site, and
then ultimately to New Orleans is really where we get this term
"being sold down the river." This slang for being ... facing a consequence or being betrayed,
"you're being sold down the river," that comes from this
domestic slave trade. How was this experienced
by enslaved people? They are forced to walk, for the most part, these hundreds
if not thousands of miles. They might be transported partly by
ship or on wagons, but often walking along routes that are called coffles. They parallel roads today
in some cases. They're separated from
their families. There was no right by enslaved people
to stay with their families. Marriages were not recognized
legally. Certainly, the right to keep your children
with you was not a right that enslaved people had.
Children are sold away from their parents and husbands and
wives are separated this way. It's hugely disruptive to
people's experiences and particularly for women as mothers in this time. It's hugely disruptive.
We have evidence of this from people who experienced it.
In the 1930s as part of the Works Projects Administration from the
New Deal that Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted during the Great Depression, you have the WPA seeking out survivors of slavery and interviewing them. We have oral
histories from people who remember what it was like to be enslaved. Here's
an example: Betty Cofer from North Carolina remembering seeing
slaves being taken, enslaved people being taken away from the plantation. Some of them being able to
take their babies with them, but then once they are sold
away, you never see your family again. She's describing
how one of these people being sold away from the plantation
where she was was her aunt. Never heard from her
ever again. We have this severing of family ties, severing of genealogical information.
Black people today often find it very difficult if not impossible to trace
their families because there are no records. There are no last names.
Their families were not able to stay together.
Really an impactful experience among Black people, Black
enslaved people during this time. Then we have women at the
same time that they might be losing their own children
are having to take on child care within plantations. They are nursing white babies, breastfeeding their white
babies of the enslavers. They are doing lots of domestic work
in the kitchens. They are ladies' maids. They're cleaning. We might
think of this as easier. We typically think of enslaved people as laboring in the fields growing
cotton and indigo and rice, but many women in particular were employed in this way in
the domestic sphere. It seems like it would be easier, but
there are some major threats to their safety beyond just the work
itself. For example, you are a lady's maid or a nursemaid.
You are sleeping on the floor of the woman of the house. You are under surveillance.
You have no privacy ever. You are vulnerable within the context
of the house to sexual violence by men in particular. We have many known cases of enslaved
women being raped and having, then, mixed-race
babies. This is a well-known danger that women
were in. They're doing easier work, but their
lives are not easier. We have, speaking of this danger, this testimony
by Harriet Jacobs. She wrote this extremely influential and important book
"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." This is her memoir of
her own experience. She talked about the men that she was subject to and how this one in particular was
sort of crafty. Sometimes he was very stormy and terrifying and
other times he was gentle, but either way he was corrupting her. She says, "He peopled
my young mind with unclean images. I felt disgust and hatred of him, but he
was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him--where
I saw a man 40 years my senior daily violating the most sacred
commandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must be subject
to his will in all things." He has complete control over her,
but her body as well. There is no shadow of
law to protect her. He as the owner of enslaved people, the
owner of the property, the physical property, has complete control
and legal rights in most cases. There were very few times or situations--
sorry about that--where it was illegal to mistreat Black people, enslaved people.
Usually it was the other way around. That Black people were severely
punished if not put to death for any harm coming to white people. Harriet Jacobs talks about, then, there is no protection from
this violence or even death. The mistress of the house, the
white woman who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no other
feelings towards her but those of jealousy and rage.
We have this picture of the Black enslaved woman
being subject to sexual violence and other violence by the
white owner, the white man, and the white man's wife
only feeling jealousy of this Black woman being sexually
assaulted and assaulted other ways. It's a really sort of tortured,
sort of terrible existence, frankly, for all involved. Really,
we get a sense of the danger that Black women who were
enslaved had in the domestic context, in addition to the dangers of working in the fields
in the agricultural context. What did Black women
do to respond to this? We have this term. Historians,
other scholars use this term agency. It is the ability to act independently to make
your own choices based on your own will. We have to look at how did women in particular, enslaved
women, enact their agency? We can talk about this as
everyday resistance. It is not running away.
It is not becoming a fugitive slave. It's not running to the
North, to Canada, or even to Mexico. It is not fighting back physically.
We have examples of this. Frederick Douglass is one of the most famous
where he talks about physically fighting back, coming to blows, fist fights, for example, and running away.
Of course, Harriet Tubman is an exception to the Black woman
running away and then helping others run away as well. Most
enslaved women did not do this, especially if they had
children with them. They might run away temporarily,
become truant, sometimes to visit their husbands who
had been separated from them and sent to other plantations, or if they were able to do so, to see
their own children. They may run away temporarily, but it's not a
permanent state. They were not trying to escape. They would enact their agency
through what we call everyday resistance within the
context of where they were. They would sabotage. They would slow down their
work, go more slowly, break things, steal food, fake being sick, act dumb
and misunderstand things, secretly learning to read and write
because that was typically illegal for them to do. They would
attend meetings of Black people, secret meetings. Attend
secret church meetings, although on some plantations the owners
would provide a church for the enslaved people that they would have to go to. Visiting family without
permission. These are ways that they subverted the system to resist. Another way that not just Black women
but Black men, enslaved men, would enact their agency was
through cultural agency. We talked about church just now.
People from West Africa, where most enslaved people came from
from Africa originally during that Middle Passage time,
practiced all kinds of different religions other than Christianity. They may have practiced Vodun, animism,
or Islam if they were from more northern parts of Africa and
part of West Africa as well. Once they arrived in the United States,
these would have been suppressed actively by plantation owners, but
also because they're separated. It was often the strategy to separate
people from the same group that came on these ships so that they
could not get together, speak to one another, and perhaps
resist in a more violent and focused way. You would lose your family connections, your linguistic connections,
and these cultural connections, including religion, by being separated
and mixed with people from other parts of Africa. In the
early 1800s during that Second Great Awakening that we've talked about
before, you had many enslaved people converting, then, to Christianity.
Then once you had the ban on importation
of slaves, you had people on plantations and
in the enslaved context not having these
religions from Africa in their experience anymore. There was
more conversion to Christianity in later generations. Then particularly
in the Methodist and Baptist churches, they
developed the spiritual musical form, what we call spirituals.
It's an expression of faith. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," for
example, is one of the most famous. They could freely express
these ideas of hope, of struggling and of overcoming adversity. Stories from the Bible like
Moses leading his people to freedom from Egypt became symbols for
enslaved Black Christians. These are themes of suffering,
but then redemption and salvation and freedom. They are using their agency both within their own
perhaps secret meetings, as we see perhaps an example of on the
right here of this engraving, or within a more formal approved church
setting, as we see in this photo on the left from a plantation in Virginia.
Lots of different ways that enslaved people and particularly
enslaved Black women would have expressed themselves and
resisted the condition of slavery. Let us sum up. Slavery is the
economic engine of the United States by the
middle of the 1800s. Women were also participating
in enslaving Black people, in particular
through directly owning this, quote-unquote, property in human
beings. It's a little exception to the idea of coverture that
eventually became legalized. We had a shift
from the transatlantic slave trade to the domestic
slave trade, which then continues this tradition of separating
people from not only their culture and their language and their religion
but from their own families. We talked about enslaved women in
particular performing labor in lots of different spaces. Certainly, they are
participating in the agricultural activities on plantations, but also
in the domestic sphere of the plantation in12 what was
called the big house. Both of these contexts of labor were
violent and coercive and dangerous. The domestic context was
not necessarily safer. In particular, enslaved women were
vulnerable to sexual violence. We had the reading from Sharon Block
that compares two rape cases. Enslaved women are very
much vulnerable to rape in both the agricultural, but also domestic
context on plantations. Women … All enslaved people, various enslaved people, men, women, and children;
resisted slavery in different ways. Enslaved women, typically the patterns
of resistance were different because they didn't … they were
much less likely to run away permanently to become
fugitives and leave the immediate area. Typically they
would become truant only temporarily or enact this everyday resistance
of sabotage and faking illness, etc., that we talked about.
Women are deeply involved both as enslaved people and enslavers during this time period
of the antebellum era.