Slaves on a Cotton Farm

From Africa to Georgia

This post is an excerpt from The Silence of Sorrowful Hours.

Ethan’s grandmother Sukey was brought to Amer­ica from West Africa in 1781. She had a black earth complexion and round features, and the auctioneer de­scribed her as “good-looking enough” and an “ordinary size”. When she arrived in Savannah, she was thirty pounds lighter than when she left her home. Sukey never regained the weight, and she never recovered from the grief and rage she breathed in when she was sold from the auction block along with kegs of brandy, bales of cotton, and furniture. 

Master James Cartwell, the owner of a cotton plantation thirty miles west of the port, had his foreman take her from the market along with twelve other Africans. As they rode away, she felt sadder than the day her mother died, her proud mother, stronger than most men and better looking than any woman. The farther the wagon took them, the more she suspected she would never see the ocean again. The smell of salt water had been in her nostrils all her life.

Sukey didn’t mind the plantation except for the sum­mer heat with no ocean breeze to give relief. Once she got used to it, she didn’t mind picking cotton; it wasn’t the worst way a person could spend her time. At first it tore up her hands, but after a month, they were as tough as a puma’s paw. She wasn’t chained like some or branded like a slave who’d been brought from South Carolina, and some of the folks she worked with spoke a dialect close to hers.

Although she could have had an easier life as a house slave – she had the comport­ment and intelligence for it – she didn’t want to speak English, she didn’t want to become a Christian, and she didn’t want to work close to White people. She preferred life with people like herself. Even in the inclement seasons, Sukey would rather be outdoors under the camphor tree than in a cabin or barn. People would leave her alone when she sat under that tree; its seeds were poisonous and most people had a bad reaction to it. 

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest

The Silence of Sorrowful Hours is in the mix for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. It's a complicated submission process, and there are several levels it must "pass" to get to the final stage of judging. I'm praying I'll make it all the way. I'll let you know, of course!
Preparing all the parts of the submission was daunting. Waiting until the contest opened - literally watching the computer screen as it counted down to one minute past midnight Eastern time - was hair-raising. I wanted a shot of bourbon and I can't stand the taste of it!
It was important to be among the first to submit because it's an international contest for English-language novels and they only accept the first 5,000 entries.
I won't know if "Silence" has made it to the second stage until February 24th. Glad I have a stack of valium on hand. :-)
Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

Women Abolitionists

The above engraving, “Am I not a Woman and a Sister?”, appeared in an 1837 tract by George Bourne. It highlighted the connections between the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements and became ubiquitous in leaflets, posters, and pamphlets.

As white and black women became more active in the abolitionist movement in the 1830s, they took key roles as lecturers, petitioners, and meeting organizers. They knew illustrative representations were more likely to draw support for their cause, so, in appealing for interracial sisterhood, they used a variety of images portraying the female activist theme in newspapers and broadsides, as well as on handicraft goods sold at fund-raising fairs.

The abolitionist and women's rights advocate Isabella Baumfree was born around the turn of the nineteenth century. Enslaved until she was an adult, she was freed in 1827 by the New York Gradual Abolition Act. She worked as a domestic for eighteen years. Then, in 1843, she came to understand that God was calling her to travel around the nation – sojourn – and preach the truth of his word. She became Sojourner Truth. Her calling cards read:

Ye wives and ye mothers, your influence extend--
Ye sisters, ye daughters, the helpless defend--
The strong ties are severed for one crime alone,
Possessing a colour less fair than your own.

  

An abolitionist as well as a suffragist, Susan B. Anthony referred to Harriet Tubman as a "most wonderful woman". Tubman escaped slavery and helped to establish the Underground Railroad.

A biographer of Tubman wrote, “Harriet was now left alone, . . . She turned her face toward the north, and fixing her eyes on the guiding star, and committing her way unto the Lord, she started again upon her long, lonely journey. She believed that there were one of two things she had a right to, liberty or death.”

After making her own escape, Harriet Tubman returned to the South nineteen times to bring over three hundred fugitives to safety, including her own aged parents.

Next blog will continue the subject of 'Women and Abolition".

Slave vs. Enslaved

From the beginnings of slavery in British North America in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony at Jamestown, nearly 240 years passed until the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution officially ended slavery in 1865.

Although some Quakers held slaves, no religious group was more outspoken against slavery from the 1600’s until slavery's end. Quakers were among the earliest to protest the African slave trade, the perpetual bondage of its captives, and the practice of separating enslaved family members by sale to different masters.

Anthony Benezet (Antoine Bénézet), 1713 - 1784, a Quaker of French Huguenot descent, emigrated with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1731, four years after he had joined the Religious Society of Friends. In Philadelphia, Benezet urged that the British ban on slavery should be extended to the colonies (and later to the independent states) in North America. Using the Biblical maxim, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," Benezet worked to convince his Quaker brethren that owning slaves was not consistent with Christian doctrine.

In 1742 Benezet began teaching at the Friends' English School of Philadelphia. During this time, he came to realize that the emancipation of slaves was not enough, but that education to prepare them to lead independent, productive lives was required. In 1850, he added to his schedule night classes for slaves. While continuing his classes for slaves, in 1754, Benezet set up his own school, the first public girls' school on the American continent. Then, in 1770, he founded the Negro School at Philadelphia.

Benezet founded the first anti-slavery society, the “Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.” Reflecting on the name of Benezet’s society, it’s interesting to note that many 21^st century African Americans no longer refer to their ancestors as slaves, but as people who were enslaved. To me, a slave is not an individual human, but chattel; it is a state of being as perceived by the slave owner. An enslaved person is a free individual who has been forced into a position where he is alleged to be chattel, a position he does not accept as his being. Before Abolition, the great majority of Africans in America were not slaves, but were enslaved.

Support for Abolition in Churches

Although the Church of England was united in its denunciation of slavery, the American Anglican (Episcopal) Church showed affability toward slavery interests consistent with its support of existing social and economic conditions. When the British Parliament resisted abolition, the Church of England pressured the government, and slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. The French government followed suit in 1848. The American Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t signed until September 22, 1862, one-and-a-half years after the start of the Civil War.

In the American South the religious defense of slavery was vigorous and widespread.  What is not generally known is that slavery had many supporters in the North, too. Some Northern religious writers defended slavery, but support for abolition inevitably made it onto the agendas of meetings of most official church bodies. However, antislavery resolutions passed in church assemblies tended to be symbolic and lukewarm.

The strongest religious support for the abolition of slavery was in the Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian and Quaker churches along with some Baptists – less so in Unitarian, Episcopalian, or Catholic churches. Quakers were the strongest in their support for abolition, but they were torn between their objection to slavery and their pacificism. While they didn't produce firebrand preachers speaking out against slavery, they were active in the Underground Railroad.

In the case of the Baptists and Methodists, the Northern and Southern churches were in opposition about the legitimacy of slavery. In 1844, the Methodist Church passed a resolution requesting Bishop James O. Andrew of Georgia to step down while he remained a slave owner. When he would not, the church split between Northern and Southern conferences. At the 1845 General Conference of the Baptist Church, Northern members opposed the appointment of missionaries who held slaves, which resulted in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention.