BLACK RESISTANCE
Slavery in the United States

The slave trade was people living, lying, stealing, murdering and dying.

The slave trade was a Black man who stepped out of his hut for a breath of fresh air and ended up, ten months later, in Georgia with bruises on his back and a brand on his chest.

The slave trade was a Black mother suffocating her newborn baby because she didn't want him to grow up a slave.

The slave trade was a kind captain forcing his suicide-minded passengers to eat by breaking their teeth.

The slave trade was a bishop sitting on an ivory chair on a wharf in the Congo and extending his fat hand in wholesale baptism of slaves who were rowed beneath him, going in chains to the slave ships.

The slave trade was a greedy king raiding his own villages to get slaves to buy brandy.

The slave trade was a pious captain holding prayer services twice a day on his slave ship and writing later the famous hymn, 'How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds.'

The slave trade was deserted villages, bleached bones on slave trails and people with no last names.

The slave trade was Caesar Negro, Angelo Negro and Negro Mary.

- Lerone Bennett
Before the Mayflower

Africa to America
Most of the Negro slaves came from an area bordering a 3,000-mile stretch on the west coast of Africa. They came, chained two by two, left leg to right leg, from a thousand villages and towns. They came from many racial stocks and many tribes, from the spirited Hausas, the gentle Mandingos, the creative Yorubas, from the Ibos, Efiks and Krus, from the proud Fantins, the warlike Ashantis, the shrewd Dahomeans, the Binis and Sengalese.

Slaves were purchased from brokers at the forts and factories or in open markets. One famous trader has described an open market on the Slave Coast.

"As the slaves come down to Fida from the inland country, they are put into a booth, or prison, built for that purpose, near the beach, all of them together; and when the Europeans are to receive them, they are brought out into a large plain, where the surgeons examine every part of every one of them, to the smallest member, men and women being all stark naked. Such as are allowed good and sound are set on one side and the others by themselves. 'Slaves so rejected are there called Mackrons: being above 35 years of age, or defective in their limbs, eyes or teeth, or grown grey, or have the venereal disease, or any other imperfection. These being so set aside, each of the others, which have passed as good, is marked on the breast, with a red- hot iron, imprinting the mark of the French, English or Dutch companies....In this particular, care is taken that the women, as tenderest, be not burnt too hard.'

The newly-purchased slaves, properly branded and chained, were rowed out to the slave ships for the dreaded Middle Passage across the Atlantic. They were packed like books on shelves into holds which in some instances were no higher than eighteen inches..."

The plantations

For most slaves life was a nightmare of drudgery. An ex-slave said it seemed the fields stretched 'from one end of the earth to the other.'

Men, women and children worked. Women cut down trees, dug ditches and plowed. The old and the ailing worked; old men and women fed poultry, cleaned the yard, mended clothes and cared for the young and the sick. Male and female, the quick and the halt worked the traditional hours of slavery--from can (see) to can't (see).

On most plantations, a horn ('dat ole fo' day horn') or bell sounded about four in the morning. Thirty minutes later, the field hands were expected to be out of their cabins and on their way to the fields. Stragglers and late-sleepers were lashed with the whip. An ex-slave in Virginia recalled seeing women scurrying to the fields 'with their shoes and stockings in their hands, and a petticoat wrapped over their shoulders, to dress in the fields the best way they could.'

Overseers and drivers, armed with whips, drove the work force, which was divided into hoe gangs and plow gangs. The overseer might also carry a bowie knife and a pistol. He often rode a horse, accompanied by a vicious dog.

There were no docile slaves

"Slaves did all of these," Bennett says, "and more."

They did them so often that it is nothing short of amazing, he says, that the myth of the docile Negro persists.

There were repeated insurrections and there is solid evidence that the South lived in constant fear of the 'docile' slaves. Bondsmen ran away in droves. They fled to Canada and Mexica and to Florida and Louisiana before these territories became a part of the United States of America; they fled to the Indians and joined them in their wars against the White man.

Young and old ran, Mulattoes and pure Blacks, Uncle Toms (in the modern sense) and radicals ran. Following the North Star, some made their way to the North and on to Canada.

Some succumbed to slavery's endless assault but some refused to be broken.

Many were sent to 'professional Negro breakers' and were broken. Many persisted hardened in their resistance.

"They poisoned masters and mistresses with arsenic," Bennett reports, "ground glass and 'spiders beaten up in buttermilk.' They chopped them [slaveholders] to pieces with axes and burned their houses, gins and barns to the ground."

"The court records of the slavery period, Bennett says, yield ample evidence that a large number of slaves refused to play the game of slavery: they would neither smile nor bow. Some bowed but would not smile. Many, perhaps the majority, went through the ritual of obeisance. And these, according to some historians, carried on a passive resistance: "They worked no harder than they had to, put on deliberate slowdowns, staged sitdown strikes and fled to the swamps en masse at cotton picking time. They broke implements, trampled the crops and 'took' silver, wine, money, corn, cotton and machines."

Women resisted

'Fight, and if you can't fight, kick; if you can't kick, then bite,' one slave advised her daughter. A sizable minority of 'fighting, mule-headed' women refused to 'take foolishness' from anybody.'

Woman in hiding

"I had to pick one hundred and fifty pounds of cotton every day or get a whipping. One night I got up just before day and run away.

"I stayed in the woods. Sometimes I'd go so far off from the plantation I could not hear the cows low or the roosters crow. I slept on logs. I had moss for a pillow; and I tell you, child, I wasn't scare of nothing. I could hear bears, wild-cats, panthers, and every thing. I would come across all kinds of snakes--moccasin, blue runner, and rattlesnakes--and got used to them.

"One night a mighty storm came up; and the winds blowed, the rain poured down, the hail fell, the trees was torn up by the roots and broken limbs fell in every direction; but not a hair on my head was injured, but I got as wet as a drowned rat. Next day was a beautiful Sunday, and I dried myself like a buzzard.

"Many times I'd find out where the hands on the place were working, and if the overseer was away I'd get something from them. I had a flint-rock and piece of steel, and I could begin a fire any time I wanted. Sometimes I'd get a chicken and would broil it on the coals and would bake ash-cake.

"The weather was beginning to turn cold, and I made me a moss bed just like a hog, and I kept warm at night. But many times I used to sleep in the chimney-corners on the plantation next to my marster's."

Major revolts and escapes

 

Celia

Sometime in 1850 Robert Newsom, a slaveholder, purchased Celia, who was at the time approximately fourteen years of age.

Shortly after purchase, he raped Celia and from the beginning, Newsom regarded her as both his property and his concubine.

For five years, he made repeated sexual assaults on her. She gave birth to two children, one, probably both, fathered by him.

When a slave called George became her lover, she tried to effort to stop Newsom's sexual advances by first asking daughters of the slaveholder for help, to no avail.

She then asked Newsom himself to stop and warned that she'd hurt him if he continued. Celia directly confronted him sometime on or immediately before June 23, 1855. Newsom brushed aside her request and, as if to emphasize his right to sex with her, informed Celia that 'he was coming to her cabin that night.'

Celia threatened to hurt him if he made further sexual demands of her. After her confrontation with him she obtained a large stick, which she placed in the corner of her cabin.

At approximately ten o'clock later that night,...Newsom ...walked the sixty or so paces to Celia's cabin. He entered the cabin. There was a confrontation.

As Newsom approached her, Celia retreated before him into a corner of the house. With one hand she raised the stick and brought it down against his head... Afraid that an angered Newsom would harm her, she raised the club with both hands and once again brought it crashing down on Newsom's skull, thus killing him.

To dispose of the body she burned it in the fireplace in her cabin.

Copyright © 2001-, Terry Muse
Revised: December 29, 2001
URL: http://black_and_hispanic.tripod.com/blackhistory/
Contact: Terry Muse