A Nation under Our Feet

Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

Steven Hahn

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780674254282
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people—an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration.Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework—looking out from slavery—to understand twentieth-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.

PART I

“The Jacobins of the Country”

1

OF CHAINS AND THREADS

I build my house upon de rock,

O yes, Lord!

No wind, no storm can blow dem down,

O yes, Lord!

March on member, Bound to go;

March on member, Bound to go;

March on member, Bound to go;

Bid ’em fare you well.

“Bound to Go”

The whispering began even before the November election, and it spread rapidly in the weeks and months that followed. The “Black Republican” Abraham Lincoln had been elected President, and in the quarters, in the woods, on the roads, and at the county seats the slaves passed the word and considered what it meant. Some were absolutely convinced that freedom was at hand; indeed, on a plantation just outside Petersburg, Virginia, seventeen slaves marked Lincoln’s inauguration by proclaiming that they were free and marching off of their master’s property. For others, hopeful anticipation of great changes to come grew as news of the Civil War swept “like [a] whirlwin’” among them. Enough activity was soon to be detected, enough unrest was soon to be found, that anxious whites throughout the slave states began to circulate rumors and stories of insurrectionary plots and disturbances. Kate Stone, who lived with her widowed mother and siblings on their large cotton plantation in Louisiana, thus blamed the “trouble” among the house servants in June of 1861 on the “excitement in the air,” and confided that “the Negroes are suspected of an intention to spring on the fourth of [July].”¹

Independence Day 1861 proved more memorable for Abraham Lincoln’s address assuring white southerners that he wished only to preserve the Union and omitting any mention of the institution of slavery. But northern armies had already set foot on Confederate soil, and when intelligence of the Yankees’ whereabouts reached them, slaves often chose to follow their own interpretation of Lincoln’s intentions and seek protection and freedom within Union lines. At first, young men figured disproportionately in their numbers, reflecting both the opportunities and hazards that flight from their owners entailed. Increasingly, however, entire families arrived, some “belonging to the same owner” and some hastily united from forced separations. After the Union army invaded the coast of South Carolina and then the lower Mississippi Valley, the flow of slaves taking flight swelled, encompassing many plantations and farms as well as multiple generations who frequently departed their places suddenly with their few articles of property, “their blankets, feather beds, chickens, pigs, and such like,” representing “the net result of all their labors.” Nearly 150,000 of the men eventually donned blue Yankee uniforms and fought to secure the defeat of the Confederacy and the liberation of their people.²

Many of the slaves who remained on their holdings for much, if not all, of the Civil War sought to advance the tide of change nonetheless. If their owners had fled in the face of Union forays, they took charge of the “abandoned” estate, farmed it on their own account, and kept order by their own rules and customs. If their owners, or owner’s family, stayed, they looked to rearrange the balances of power and authority. They slowed the pace of work, devoted more time to their provision crops, ignored the master’s commands, moved about as they wished or could, and generally tried to tend to their own affairs. John Houston Bills, owner of three plantations in Tennessee, was accordingly driven to distraction by 1864, as his diary amply registered: “My Negroes all at home, but working only as they see fit, doing little”; “some disposition amongst the servants to serve the federals rather than work on the farm”; “My people preparing cotton land for themselves at Cornucopia”; “Early this morning my man Jerry and Harriet his wife, their children, Simon and Mary with Vira 3 children Jerry[,] Hattie and … also Victoria and child and Angelina and child all off by RR there appears to be a general stampede”; “Negroes all going off with returning troops, some come back to urge others to go and they are easily persuaded”; “the females have quit entirely or nearly so [at Hickory Valley], four of the men come and go where and when they please”; and “many of my servants have run away and most of those left had as well be gone, they being totally demoralized and ungovernable.” Little wonder that some wartime slaveholders ultimately offered their slaves small wages or shares of the crop to keep them at work and the operations afloat.³

The rapid circulation of news and rumor, the complex ties of family and kinship, the contests over the deployment of labor, the accumulation of petty property, the customs and institutions of internal authority and discipline—these were the means by which African-American slaves tried to give shape to the great struggle over the Union and slavery. They were, of course, the materials of day-to-day “resistance,” lent wider field and consequence by civil war. But they were something more as well. They were the stuff of the slaves’ “politics.”

To speak of the slaves’ politics may seem a contradiction in terms, for the slaves had no standing in the official arenas of either civil or political society. As chattel property and legal dependents, they were subject to the sovereign authority of their masters and thereby lacked, at least theoretically, the very essence of political beings: the ability to express and act according to their individual and collective wills. Southern slaveholders and their representatives, in fact, extolled the institution of slavery as the best guarantor of social and political stability precisely because it rendered the laboring class politically inert. They could scarcely acknowledge, let alone dignify, the disruptive or communal behaviors of their slaves as worthy of the name political, for by doing so they would undermine their own claims of absolute power. And yet the slaves did express and act according to their individual wills, fashion collective norms and aspirations, contest the authority of their owners on many fronts, build institutions to mobilize their resources and sensibilities, produce leaders who wielded significant influence, and, in ways we have still to appreciate fully, press on the official arenas of politics at the local, state, and national levels. To be sure, the slaves’ politics composed a web of fragile threads, delicately devised and easily broken, that cannot be readily marked or measured. Masters and slaves necessarily conducted their political battles in a manner befitting the relationship that linked them: with stealth and indirection, with postures and fictions, with choreographed rituals and competitive scrambles. And with explosive force. Nonetheless, by the late 1850s these battles helped to bring the South and the nation into crisis, and when the Civil War broke out, the slaves’ political experience not only came to notable effect; it would also be dramatically transformed.

Slavery in the antebellum South was marked by great variations. In 1860, roughly four slaves in ten lived in the upper and border South, where farms rather than plantations generally predominated and mixed agriculture assumed considerable importance. Among them, nearly four in ten could be found in areas in which free people of color, slave hiring, and urban life were alike consequential. Farther south, most slaves worked on cotton plantations, but thousands of others worked on sugar or rice estates or on units given over to diversified farming; perhaps one in five throughout the Deep South resided on what could be regarded as a yeoman farm. A small group of slaves in rural districts and a larger one in towns and cities plied the skills of tradesmen, and an elite of sorts supervised the activities of field hands on some of the bigger agricultural holdings.⁴ Yet wherever they may have labored, all slaves in the antebellum South had one thing in common: they were chained to their owners as individuals.

Slavery, quite simply, was a system of extreme personal domination in which a slave had no relationship that achieved legal sanction or recognition other than with the master, or with someone specifically designated by the master. Nothing was more central to the character of the institution or more debilitating to the slaves as human beings and political actors. Although jurists and legislators in most southern states sought, certainly by the late antebellum period, to provide minimal statutory protections to some relations among slaves—especially between mother and child—their efforts came to little effect. The slaves, therefore, were left peculiarly vulnerable and were encouraged to depend on and identify with their owners as a strategy of survival. As a result, slavery undermined the solidarities of the enslaved in a manner fundamentally different not only from the experience of free laborers but also from that of most other servile laborers.⁵ Consequently, the slaves’ struggle to form relations among themselves and to give those relations customary standing in the eyes of masters and slaves alike was both the most basic and the most profound of political acts in which they engaged.

As in the West African societies from which they originally came, and as in most rural societies in the preindustrial world, kinship relations composed the social and political foundation of the slaves’ world, and the slaves pressed from the first to construct them as means of achieving stability and resisting slavery. It was not an easy undertaking, for a combination of law, masterly prerogative, and demography often conspired against them. Neither legal codes nor other official institutions ever offered protection to slave marriages or other consanguineous relations; only the relation of mother and child had legal bearing, because it defined the heritability of enslavement. Slaveowners might accept, perhaps even encourage, slave marriages and might show reluctance to break up families through sale or inheritance, but this reflected an ethics of sovereignty rather than a prescriptive right, and it was an ethics frequently observed in the breach, especially when the burdens of debt or generational property transmission came to be felt. In the formative period of southern slave society, moreover, as staple agriculture developed and intensified, purchasers of African slaves widely preferred males to females and thus created a marked sexual imbalance in the slave population. This, together with the high rates of slave mortality and morbidity that routinely stalked the rise of plantation systems, undermined the early establishment and elaboration of family ties.⁶

The southern slave population began to reproduce itself naturally sometime around the middle of the eighteenth century, and a structure of kinship relations, expectations, and practices gradually took shape, bolstered subsequently by the closing of the African slave trade and the prevalance of crop cultures (principally cotton, tobacco, and grains) that weighed somewhat less heavily on the material conditions of slave laborers than sugar culture did elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. By the antebellum era, it appears that slaves commonly lived in simple families, often nuclear in character, and had built complex and geographically extensive kinship networks, thanks in part to exogamous marriage patterns. On large plantations with deep generational roots, kinship could eventually have linked an individual slave to more than three-quarters of those resident.⁷ Fictive kinship arrangements, deployed chiefly to serve as buffers against the many perils of slave life, helped tie other slaves to consanguineous kin groups, while kinship titles came to denote social hierarchies among slaves of a given community whether they were blood relations or not. The former Maryland slave Frederick Douglass thus recalled that the mechanics on Colonel Edward Lloyd’s eastern shore plantation “were called ‘uncles’ by all the younger slaves, not because they really sustained that relationship to any, but as a mark of plantation etiquette, as a mark of respect, due from the younger to the older slaves.” When the northern teacher Elizabeth Hyde Botume arrived on the coast of South Carolina soon after Union occupation to minister to the very large black population, it took her “months before [she] learned their family relations.” “The terms ‘bubber’ for brother, and ‘titty’ for sister, with ‘nanna’ for mother, and ‘mother’ for grandmother, and ‘father’ for all leaders in church and society were so generally used,” she marveled, “I was forced to believe that all belonged to one immense family.”⁸

Impressive as it was for the slaves to have won room for family formation and the construction of kinship networks, it is easy to exaggerate the stability and resiliency of these relations. On farms and small plantations, fewer than half of the slaves at any one time lived in “standard nuclear families” (both parents and children), and even on larger plantations, the developmental cycle of birth, aging, and death made for periods of social and familial imbalance, at times casting slaves into a succession of different family settings. Slave sales were for the most part local, and likely stretched rather than broke family ties, but the antebellum cotton boom promoted an interregional migration that sent more than three-quarters of a million slaves from the upper and seaboard South to the lower South and Southwest between 1820 and 1860, perhaps 60 percent of whom went by means of the slave trade. According to the most careful estimate, one in three first marriages in the upper South may have been broken by such forced separations, and slave children who lived in the upper South at the beginning of this period stood about a 30 percent chance of being sold to the lower South before the end of it. Family relations and kinship networks were perpetually being severed and reconstituted, whether owing to sale, estate division, or the long-distance movement of entire plantations. In the end, what may have mattered most was not so much the duration of these relations and networks as the obligations and responsibilities imposed so long as they did endure.⁹

These obligations and responsibilities created the sort of ties among slaves—generational and spatial—that could counterbalance the individuating dependencies that slavery was meant to enforce. They gave slaves support in daily contests of will with owners and managers, and in negotiating the personal travails that could have left them isolated and exposed. They augmented slaves’ sources of sustenance, and aided them in fending off the many fears and destructive behaviors that the system encouraged. And they helped to bring sanctions against those who violated developing norms. Which is to say that the obligations and responsibilities of kinship were crucial to the achievement of the slaves’ short-term political objectives: to protect themselves and each other from the worst of the regime’s violence and exploitation; to carve out spheres of activity in which they could provide for themselves and establish relations and values suitable to a world without enslavement; and to turn a system based on the absolute power and personal domination of the master into one based on reciprocities, even if between parties with resources acknowledged to be vastly unequal.¹⁰

The struggle to achieve these objectives revolved around the activity so central to the lives of slaves that it has often been taken for granted: work.¹¹ Rural slaves spent most of their waking hours in the fields plowing, planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, and processing crops; tending to livestock; digging ditches; making and repairing fences; and cutting logs. The length of their workday, the pace and organization of their labor, and the range of their duties varied as to the staple crop and the size of the plantation or farm, but was everywhere subject to the discretionary authority of masters who, if they bothered to explain it (and few did), saw the involuntary labor of their slaves as a just return for the subsistence, protection, and direction they provided. So sweeping did some masters regard this authority that in the records of their agricultural operations the laborers—”hands”—became literal extensions of themselves. “Plowed ten acres,” “planted the old willow field,” “hoed fifty rows cotton,” they might write. The slaves, not surprisingly, viewed matters differently. By their lights, the labor they performed represented an accommodation to the coercive power of their owners, and they sought not only to limit the reaches and damages of that power but also to draw some distinction between the time and services they “owed” the master and the time and rewards they could claim for themselves. Whereas the masters might regard concessions made in the ensuing contests as adjustments to the “inferior” abilities and sensibilities of their slaves, the slaves would regard such concessions as “rights” that could then become a basis for further rounds of “negotiation.”¹² Over time, the labor system became increasingly complex and contradictory.

The slaves, to be sure, had limited manuevering room and incurred substantial risks. On the largest cotton, tobacco, and sugar plantations (those with fifty or more slaves), they were organized into gangs based on strength, skill, sex, and age, and placed under the direct supervision of a black driver or white overseer. The “main gang,” “first gang,” or “plow gang” generally consisted of adult males and of women between child-bearing and old age; the “second” or “hoe gang” was composed disproportionately of women of child-bearing age and older teenagers; and the “trash” gang included a mix of pregnant and nursing women, older men and women, and children doing their first rounds of field work. Where special skills were required of slaves, as in the processing of sugar, more of the field labor was performed by women, since skilled labor was almost exclusively the province of men. A...