Black Women's Narratives of Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction
by Carla Wilson
Reprinted from Workers
Vanguard No. 841, 4 February 2005.
Most stories of black women's lives under slavery have never been told.
Slave masters routinely brutalized black girls and women, justifying their
dehumanizing treatment by labeling them "sexual savages." Stripped,
beaten, raped and forced to work as "breed sows," black women
suffered a double burden under slavery because of their sex. Men wrote the
majority of published accounts of slave life, the most well known being the classic Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass. These slave narratives were often
produced under the guidance of the anti-slavery movement, using "moral
suasion" against slavery to influence a church-going audience, and
therefore avoided the topic of sexual oppression so as not to shock the
Victorian audiences they approached for aid.
More than one hundred book-length narratives were written before the
end of the American Civil War. The mere existence of former slaves' writings
and oratory indicted the theories of racial and mental inferiority that justified
the slave system. In this way, the act of exposing the horrors of slavery
became vital to the struggle against it. During the 19th century, journalists,
schoolteachers and local historians interviewed former slave women, and in the
1920s and 1930s
more than two thousand former slaves were interviewed by the Works Progress Administration
Federal Writers' Project and by researchers at Fisk and Southern Universities.
Most of the Slave Narrative Collection was kept in typescript in the Rare Book
Room of the Library of Congress for nearly 40 years. This wealth of oral
history was frequently dismissed as spurious, but after the civil rights
movement, and even more recently, due to film documentaries like PBS's Unchained
Memories, they have found wider interest.
Two valuable slave accounts by women document the period leading up to
the Civil War and through the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. One is a work
of immense historical research, thoughtfully written by retired English
professor Jean Pagan Yellin. Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas
Books, 2004) expands on the events and people that shaped Jacobs' own Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Harvard University Press,
1987). As recently as two decades ago, Jacobs' autobiographical sketch was
considered an obscure work penned by white abolitionist and editor Lydia Maria
Child. With Jacobs' authorship authenticated in the mid 1980s, hers became the
first recognized slave narrative by a black woman.
The other story, The Bondwoman's
Narrative (Warner Books, 2002), is a semi-fictional work that dates from
the 1850s. Discovered at an auction by Harvard African American Studies scholar
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the only person to even bid on the manuscript, the book
spent months on the New York Times best-seller list when it was published
in 2002.
The fact that a black woman and former slave in the 19th century
authored a novel has played a role in generating vigorous interest in this work of
fiction. Its authentication meant that a black literary tradition existed much
earlier than acknowledged. It also has much to do with the energetic quest for
the identity of the author led by Gates, who rescued the book from historical oblivion.
The Bondwoman's Narrative represents an
important work because it deals effectively with the role of sexual and
physical oppression of black women under slavery. Moreover, unlike many
published slave narratives, this book is a manuscript in the author's own
handwriting, offering a unique window into the mind of a female slave. Caste,
color and class—linked to widely-practiced miscegenation of master and
slave—are at the core of this sentimental, gothic-style novel. An intriguing
aspect of the story is the snobbery based on skin-color privileges and
expectations of preferences in plantation life.
The main character of The Bondwoman's Narrative is Hannah, a North Carolina house
slave serving as handmaid to a mistress passing for a white woman. She is well
treated, observant and literate, attentive to every secret of her mistress. When
Hannah's mistress1 passing as a white woman is about to be exposed as a
fraud, Hannah convinces her to escape North. They fail, and land in prison. Once
captured, they are left at the mercy of the executor of the estate of the
racist master,
who had killed himself after learning he married a black woman.
The executor is a singular force for evil in the tale—the blackmailer
of the mistress as well as a slave speculator who trades on the value of
light-skinned females, thought to be passing. As an estate manager, he searches
through papers to expose the lineage of women and force them onto the
"fancy market" in New
Orleans' high-toned bordellos. Eventually, the
mistress dies from shock when faced with being sold. Hannah is then given to a
government official's wife in Washington,
D.C., whose ignorance and
impetuosity strike a portrait in which the slave is in a more decisive role.
Hannah is made to read letters and draft replies for her barely literate mistress. After
shrilly demanding a new face powder be fetched from the store, the mistress
finds it turns her face black. In the aftermath of this makeup malfunction, the
mistress is ridiculed throughout Washington
and leaves for the North Carolina
plantation, where she punishes Hannah by throwing her in with the field slaves.
Hannah is confronted with being a field hand
and taken as a sexual partner to a darker-skinned black man with several female
mates. Earlier asked to assist fellow slaves seeking freedom in the North,
Hannah had told them, "their scheme looked wild and unpromising and that I
feared the result would be unfortunate." She counsels those in flight that
they will only face bloodhounds and slave patrols, then bloody torture for
their failure. In contrast, in reaction to her own dilemma, her response is swift:
"To be driven into the fields beneath the eye and lash of the brutal
overseer, and those miserable huts, with their promiscuous crowds of dirty,
obscene and degraded objects, for my home I could not, I would not bear
it." She flees within 48 hours of being sent into the fields and huts, passing
for a white boy, then a white woman, en route to freedom in the North. The impetus for her escape underscores
the influence of racial disdain within the slave community and the inculcation
of racist dogmas employed as justification
for the "peculiar institution."
Incidents in the Life of an Anti-Slavery
Heroine
Yellin's A Life was heralded by less fanfare, but this biography
powerfully reveals author and activist Harriet Jacobs as a remarkable fighter
for the oppressed. Using a pseudonym, Linda Brent, Jacobs wrote her story while
in domestic service with a prominent liberal New York family. Links between literacy,
black self-sufficiency and political consciousness are key themes in Jacobs'
evolution from fugitive slave, to author, to activist teacher of new freedmen
at the Jacobs School
for black Civil War "refugees" in Alexandria, Virginia.
The story of Harriet Jacobs is the story of an active abolitionist fighter who
lived through the Civil War, struggled to implement the promises of Radical
Reconstruction and witnessed the betrayal of these promises.
Born in 1813, Harriet Jacobs did not know she was a slave until her
sixth year, when her mother died and she was willed to an infant girl. Her
father lived only six years longer and Jacobs fondly recalls that, although he
was illiterate, he became a skilled carpenter, trusted enough by his owners to
work on houses in the country and town. From him, she and her younger brother,
John, learned to prize education and freedom. Jacobs' slave life in Edenton, North
Carolina, reflected the hierarchy of slave
society—whites ruled over blacks, free black people ranked above slaves, but
the status of slaves depended heavily on their masters, their skin color and
their work as domestic labor or as field hands. Her parents were classified as
mulattoes, and her grandmother, Molly, a slave who operated the town's
Horniblow's Tavern, worked as a cook, seamstress and wet nurse, living freely
on site. Harriet learned from her grandmother how to sew as a youngster, and
her mistress taught her to read and spell—skills that would eventually help
transform her life.
When Harriet turned twelve, her life altered dramatically when she and
her brother were sold to Dr. James Norcom. At the same time, her father was moved
out to a plantation far from Edenton. Harriet found herself left to the whims
of Norcom, a sexual tyrant who stalked her in an effort to make her his concubine.
"He told me I was his property; that I must be subjected to his will in all things. My soul revolted against
the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the
slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect
her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by
fiends who bear the shape of men," Jacobs wrote.
Her account, published in 1861, revealed
unspeakable acts of sexual coercion at a time when practically no one dared to
speak of such things. She threw harsh light on the sexual brutality underlying
reproduction of the slave system, where the violation of black women by white
men stood side by side with the separation of families as a calculated,
measured provocation aimed not only at women, but at the black men who necessarily
reacted with deep humiliation and rage. As labor historian Jacqueline Jones has
observed in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (Vintage, 1986): "Whites
often intervened in more direct ways to upset the sexual order that black men
and women created for themselves, thereby obliterating otherwise viable
courtship and marriage practices.... Masters frequently practiced a form of
eugenics by withholding their permission for certain marriages and arranging
others." A master might prohibit a marriage for any highhanded reason,
forbidding a male slave to seek a wife elsewhere, since their offspring would not belong to him but to
the wife's slaveowner. Jacobs, for example, had fallen in love
with a free black carpenter who proposed to marry her, but Norcom
refused the lover's effort to buy her out of slavery. It is impossible to know
how commonplace Jacobs' story might have actually been.
For young Harriet, a desperate act of rebellion meant encouraging and
accepting the advances of Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a youthful white lawyer of
the town's aristocracy who ranked above Norcom in social standing. She bore him
two children over several years. As a pro-slavery advocate in the North Carolina
legislature of 1830, he joined in pushing through a wave of repressive measures
aimed at control of free blacks and whites as well. New laws imposed strict
penalties against teaching slaves to read or write, the harboring of runaway
slaves and aiding runaways or emancipating them.
Less than three weeks after the North Carolina legislature's measures
passed, the Nat Turner Revolt occurred in 183 1 in Southampton County, Virginia.
Deeply religious from childhood, Nat Turner was a skilled preacher and
possessed some influence among local slaves. He planned attacks with a band of
approximately 60 followers. After killing the family of Turner's owner, the
band spread the revolt, in two days killing a total of 55 white people. The
revolt was soon crushed; 13 slaves and three free blacks were hanged
immediately. Turner himself escaped into the woods, but was captured, hanged,
skinned and a purse made of his skin. Dozens more blacks were also killed in
retaliation. The news traveled sixty miles downstream to Edenton and the
repression that followed was roused with fifes blaring and drums sounding as
white mobs formed roving bands of armed slave patrollers imposing martial law.
Fearful that Turner's revolt would inspire others to arms, slave
masters put Edenton under round-the-clock patrols, with house-to-house
searches. Jacobs recalls how the fear of Turner's revolt prompted slave
owners to conclude "that it would be well to give the slaves enough of religious
instruction to keep them from murdering their masters." Worried that any
congregating of blacks meant seeds planted for insurrection, the slave masters
reduced to rubble the meetinghouse blacks had built communally that served as
their church; the congregation was forced to attend the white churches.
Harriet's own situation became more precarious as she grew sick and
tired of trying to avoid sexual servitude under Norcom. Finally she fled to a
crawlspace concealed beneath her grandmother's roof—a cell roughly seven feet
wide, nine feet long and three feet high. There she would spend the next seven
years, only leaving the house once. She subsequently escaped to the North in
June 1842 and ended in the care of Philadelphia's
Vigilant Committee, but as with many who traveled the Underground Railroad, she
never divulged her route.
Abolitionist Fighter
Once in the free states
of the North, Jacobs lived in constant trepidation, fearing Norcom and his heirs would seek
to claim their
"property." Her immediate focus was on finding her children, who had been sent North as servants to their
father's kin. At first, Jacobs avoided the abolitionist circles, after an initial encounter in Philadelphia included a
warning from Reverend Jeremiah Durham that she should avoid revealing her
sexual history because some might treat her with "contempt." Later, she joined her brother, John S.,
who had escaped Norcom before her and had
become a well-known anti-slavery activist. He often shared platforms
with abolitionist Frederick Douglass and also worked on the North Star. Eventually
becoming a frequent letter contributor to the New York Daily Tribune, she
gained courage to write her autobiography and later served as a correspondent
for William Lloyd Garrison's the Liberator, as part of activist circles
in Rochester, New York
and Boston. Her
views were no doubt shaped by her involvement with organized reformers from the
anti-slavery and women's rights struggles in Rochester.
These abolitionists were part of a broad, bourgeois social
radicalization among the 19th-century heirs to the Enlightenment, Protestant
religious ideals and the American Revolution. Although opposition to slavery
was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately
before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy
Tappan brothers of New York
and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement
by the middle of the decade. Garrison understood that the Constitution was a
pro-slavery document but thought that the institution could be done away with
peacefully through "moral suasion." The movement split in the 1840s
around the questions of women's rights and how to end slavery. Garrison
believed the pro-slavery U.S. Constitution should be abolished and that the
North should expel the South. Another wing, represented by eminent men like the
Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within their organization, was
against women's rights and wanted to orient struggles toward political work in
Congress. On the left wing of the abolitionist movement were militant
ex-slaves, free blacks and white abolitionists— revolutionary fighters like Frederick
Douglass and John Brown who became convinced that the fight must be against the whole system of
slavery, by armed force, including arming black slaves. Douglass and the
insurrectionist wing were thoroughgoing egalitarians and, therefore, were also
the most consistent supporters of women's rights.
The Jacobs' move to Rochester
coincided with her brother John's hiring by the abolitionists' Anti-Slavery
Office and Reading Room. Jacobs stayed with her brother's friends, Isaac and
Amy Post, frequent hosts to executive sessions of the Western New York State
Anti-Slavery Society. A major feature of their work in the winter of 1849 was
mounting protests against school segregation. At the time, the threat of a
national compromise over slavery also loomed, as abolitionists countered
pro-slavery arguments against expanding slavery to territories seized in the
1848 Mexican War. Nonetheless, Congress passed the Compromise of 1850, which maintained slavery in
these areas.
Measures included a more brutal version of the Fugitive Slave Law, which made it a crime for federal
marshals not to arrest an alleged runaway slave and for anybody to assist
a runaway, while also denying a suspected
runaway any legal rights.
Amid this climate, Jacobs finally got her freedom when her close friend
and employer negotiated the purchase of her freedom for three hundred dollars.
She concludes her autobiographical account a freedwoman. According to Yellin,
the draft text ended with a tribute to John Brown, but Lydia Maria Child, her
editor, convinced Jacobs to drop it. Was this editorial measure a reflection of
continuing debate among the pacifist Garrisonians over what course to take in
the unfolding conflict?
It was certainly to Jacobs' credit, and an
indication of her political allegiances, that she recognized the
significance of Brown's October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers
Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). In the battle that followed,
Brown was wounded and ten of Brown's men—including two of his sons—were killed.
Militarily defeated and hanged in punishment, Brown's political mission to
destroy slavery by force of arms was spectacularly brought to conclusion by
more than 200,000 freed slaves who fought in the Civil War.
At the outset, the "war between the states" was being fought
only to "preserve the Union," and
President Abraham Lincoln only opposed the extension of slavery. Karl Marx
understood that the Civil War was at root a "conflict between the system
of slavery and the system of free labor." Abolitionists sought to transform
the war into a war of emancipation. Frederick Douglass insisted: "Let
the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed into a
liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of
Emancipation among the slaves." It took two years of ignominious defeats
led by politically unreliable Union Army generals to convince Lincoln of the necessity of freeing the
slaves. After it became clear that the North could not win in any other way, he
declared on 22 September 1862 all slaves in the Confederacy would be free on
the first of January, 1863. Almost as important as freedom itself was the
government's decision to form regiments of black soldiers. About 180,000 black
soldiers served in the Union Army and as many as 29,000 men joined the Union
Navy. This helped to turn the tide of battle. The Civil War and Reconstruction
broke the class power of the slave South. It was the last great
bourgeois revolution, the second American Revolution; the 13th, 14th and 15th
Amendments were the legal codification of the revolutionary gains won at
riflepoint by the interracial Union Army. The war and its aftermath ushered in
the most democratic period for black people in U.S. history, underlining that a
truly egalitarian radical vision of
social reconstruction ultimately could not be fulfilled by a capitalist ruling
class.
Civil War Years
Harriet Jacobs' role in the anti-slavery struggles and in the emerging
Freedmen's Bureau was that of a
political field worker. In October 1861, after Union General William Tecumseh
Sherman led his troops in an attack on Confederate Fort Walker on Hilton Head Island, a decisive step was made in the Civil
War. Sherman's army drew behind it hundreds of
former slaves who set up camps on the Sea Islands along the Carolina Coast.
Union authorities set up a Department of the South, taking over some 195
plantations, employing 10,000 former slaves to raise cotton and auctioning land
off to Northerners and a few freedmen with a bit of money.
Sherman's occupation of Port Royal, South
Carolina, became a starting point for the
abolitionists and slaves to work together on Southern terrain. Historians have
called this "Port Royal Experiment" a "dress rehearsal
for Reconstruction." As W.E.B. DuBois later observed in Black Reconstruction in America (Atheneum, 1983): "The Negroes were willing
to work and did work, but they wanted land to work, and they wanted to see and
own the results of their toil. It was here and in the West and the South that a
new vista opened. Here was a chance to establish an agrarian democracy in the
South." It became clear to Jacobs that it was in places like Port Royal that the future of her people would be
determined. She looked at reports from Port Royal and turned her eyes toward Washington. In the
spring of 1862, Lincoln had not yet issued his
Emancipation Proclamation, but in states that remained loyal to the Union, Congress had designated as "contrabands of
war" any men, women and children escaping from Southern masters.
Jacobs' moving report of "Life Among the Contrabands,"
printed in the Liberator, details the chaos among these
"refugees." She spent the spring and summer in Washington, setting up hospitals with the
newly established Freedmen's Association. Her work often entailed a struggle
against the civilian and military hierarchy in the refugee camps. The
government-appointed superintendent of "contrabands" registered and
hired people out as workers, with little attention to their needs. Jacobs spent
her mornings in a small ground-floor room where "men, women and children
lie here together, without a shadow of those rites which we give to our poorest
dead. There
they lie, in the filthy rags they wore from the plantation. Nobody seems
to give it a thought. It is an
everyday occurrence, and the scenes have become familiar."
Later that year, she moved to Union-occupied Alexandria and while distributing supplies of
clothing and food, Jacobs began to envision a sustained mission. She would
produce several letters over the next four years of work, articulating the
freedmen's dreams for equality, land, education, jobs and housing. In lengthy
letters to Lydia Maria Child she reported what she'd seen of black life,
confident her writings would be printed in the abolitionist press. With Alexandria under Union occupation the people still
suffered humiliations: "In return for their kindness and ever-ready
service, they often receive insults, and sometimes beatings, and so they have
learned to distrust those who wear the uniform of the U.S.," she
notes. And, allowing herself a moment of outrage: "Oh, when will the white
man learn to know the hearts of my abused and suffering people!" By
midsummer, the federal superintendent in Alexandria
was replaced, with improvements instigated from her collaboration with the
Freedmen's Association.
In the summer of 1864. as Union Armies drew closer to taking Richmond, black "refugees" were drafted in
response to threats on Alexandria,
joining Union forces to defend the city against the Confederacy. Jacobs and her
daughter Louisa organized the first commemoration of British West Indian
Emancipation, featuring the presentation of a flag to the Colored Hospital—
named L'Ouverture for the Haitian liberator—that had recently opened as a
receiving place for the Colored Division of the Ninth Army Corps. She presented
the flag to the surgeon in chief, addressing
herself to black men in Union blues:
"Soldiers, what we have got came through the strength and valor of
your right arms. Three years ago this flag had no significance for you, we
could not cherish it as our emblem of freedom. You then had not part in the
bloody struggle for your country, your patriotism was spurned; but to-day you
are in arms for the freedom of your race and the defence of your country—to-day
this flag is significant to you. Soldiers you have made it the symbol of
freedom for the slave."
The Alexandria
celebration was
among many commemorations at which black fighters began to forge a sense of struggle not only for an end to
slavery, but also to claim equal rights as American citizens.
Through the remaining days of the war, Jacobs
volunteered in Alexandria
as a visiting relief worker in the camp and in the hospitals. Freedmen there
had already begun building a school and meetinghouse, which she pushed to find
funding for at the first congress of the Women's National Loyal League. Jacobs
coordinated aid with the goal of opening a free school under black leadership,
volunteering her daughter Louisa and Virginia Lawton, the daughter of old
Boston friends, as two "colored teachers." Jacobs School's
doors opened to seventy-five
students in January 1864. Given her name recognition among readers of Incidents,
the school was featured in the reform press, with Alexandria becoming a regular stop on tours
of the conquered South. A photo of Jacobs among her charges was carefully taken
to publicize the ability of former slaves to become exemplary citizens. At the
time, the photo hung prominently in the offices of the Frcedman's Record, By
the end of March 1865, Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau, putting it
in charge of relief and oversight for former slaves in the South.
Radical
Reconstruction Overturned
Harriet and Louisa Jacobs later went to Savannah, where, Yellin notes, "both
control of the schools and control of the land were at stake." Against local government
resistance, they opened the Lincoln School, a black-run institution, and
attempted to set up an orphanage and home for the elderly. Military rule
ended just before Jacobs and her daughter
arrived and, though posing as a protector,
the Union Army also would be wielded to aid the city's powerful elite and
stymie black efforts at freedom. The land question features in many of Jacobs'
dispatches because the land with freedmen's settlements where schools were
located was soon turned over to their old masters. Louisa's Lincoln School survived, but by January 1866, all freedmen were
ordered to sign contracts for their labor.
The brief labor contracts, Jacobs wrote, "are very unjust. They
are not allowed to have a boat or musket. They are not allowed to
own a horse, cow, or pig. Many of them already own them, but must sell them if they remain on the
plantations." The black population was disarmed. Backed by the Freedmen's
Bureau, "free labor" meant that most blacks worked in cotton production,
suffering working conditions akin
to slave exploitation of prewar years. In exchange for backbreaking field work, the freedmen gave the
former masters two-thirds of the crop, kept a third, then saw rations and
rent deducted, resulting in a cycle of debt
bondage.
However, Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary
transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on land and
slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, black men and women, formerly slaves,
exercised political rights for the
first time in the South. Before the defeat of Reconstruction, many political
offices in the South were held by
black men.
Reconstruction not only brought about voting rights for black men and even
many poor illiterate Southern white
men but also ushered in the establishment of the South's first public schools,
liberalized the South's barbaric penal code and reformed the planters' property
tax system. These measures allowed for real prospects for schooling, land and
jobs for black freedmen. But northern capitalists betrayed the promise of
Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed, aided by forces such as
the Ku Klux Klan. In 1877, the last of the Union troops were withdrawn from
Southern occupation, marking a compromise that put Rutherford B. Hayes in the
White House. From this defeat of Reconstruction grew the postwar
Southern system of sharecropping, poll taxes,
chain gangs, lynch law and "separate but equal"—i.e., unequal—Jim Crow facilities.
During Reconstruction, Jacobs and other
female abolitionists working as teachers risked their lives to
participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage—their fight for
free
quality education was put front and center. But the sharpest debate raged
over the question of land ownership. Freedmen and destitute white Unionist
Southerners wanted the secessionists' estates confiscated, as at Port Royal, and distributed to them. Triumphant Northern
rulers, however, would not permit an attack on "property rights,"
particularly as Northerners and Northern banks were grabbing up a good deal of
Southern property. Intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor was
allowed as the only way to rebuild the Southern economy, rather than industrial
development or capital investment in modernization of agriculture.
This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression
of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This
racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the
main historical obstacle to the development of political class consciousness among the American
proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism
itself, to break the fetters on blacks, women and all the
oppressed.
Jacobs served with valor in the anti-slavery battles through Radical
Reconstruction, but her story also
fell victim to its defeat. At the time of her death in 1897, her
name was barely remembered in the Boston
abolitionist circles she once frequented. Even in her obituary, the Jacobs School and her relief
work during the Civil War and Reconstruction
were completely omitted. As the
years passed, the memory of Jacobs faded and photos and records of her Alexandria school were
lost. Even her book came to be seen as Child's.
Anyone who has ever wondered how black
people managed to struggle and survive the hideous tortures meted out during
slavery and afterward would gain a lot from reading these books. They offer inspiration
to a new generation of fighters facing the daunting task of toppling the
dominance of capitalist exploitation and sexual oppression today. Though the
Civil War smashed slavery, the dreams of men and women like Jacobs remain to be
realized. Finish the Civil War—For black liberation in a workers' America!
