THE VICISSITUDES OF SLAVE LIFE.
Death of old Master’s son Richard, speedily followed by that of old
Master--Valuation and division of all the property, including the
slaves--Sent for to come to Hillsborough to be valued and divided--
Sad prospects and grief--Parting--Slaves have no voice in deciding
their own destinies--General dread of falling into Master Andrew’s
hands--His drunkenness--Good fortune in falling to Miss Lucretia--
She allows my return to Baltimore--Joy at Master Hugh’s--Death
of Miss Lucretia--Master Thomas Auld’s second marriage--The new
wife unlike the old--Again removed from Master Hugh’s--Reasons for
regret--Plan of escape.
I must now ask the reader to go back with me a little in point of
time, in my humble story, and notice another circumstance that entered
into my slavery experience, and which, doubtless, has had a share in
deepening my horror of slavery, and my hostility toward those men and
measures that practically uphold the slave system.
It has already been observed that though I was, after my removal from
Col. Lloyd’s plantation, in _form_ the slave of Master Hugh Auld, I was
in _fact_ and in _law_ the slave of my old master, Capt. Anthony. Very
well. In a very short time after I went to Baltimore my old master’s
youngest son, Richard, died; and in three years and six months after my
old master himself died, leaving only his daughter Lucretia and his son
Andrew to share the estate. The old man died while on a visit to his
daughter in Hillsborough, where Capt. Auld and Mrs. Lucretia now lived,
Master Thomas having given up the command of Col. Lloyd’s sloop and was
now keeping store in that town.
Cut off thus unexpectedly, Capt. Anthony died intestate, and his
property must be equally divided between his two children, Andrew and
Lucretia.
The valuation and division of slaves among contending heirs was a most
important incident in slave life. The characters and tendencies of
the heirs were generally well understood by the slaves who were to be
divided, and all had their aversions and their preferences. But neither
their aversions nor their preferences availed anything.
On the death of old master I was immediately sent for to be valued and
divided with the other property. Personally, my concern was mainly
about my possible removal from the home of Master Hugh, for up to this
time there had no dark clouds arisen to darken the sky of that happy
abode. It was a sad day to me when I left for the Eastern Shore, to be
valued and divided, as it was for my dear mistress and teacher, and for
little Tommy. We all three wept bitterly, for we were parting, and it
might be we were parting forever. No one could tell amongst which pile
of chattels I might be flung. Thus early, I got a foretaste of that
painful uncertainty which in one form or another was ever obtruding
itself in the pathway of the slave. It furnished me a new insight into
the unnatural power to which I was subjected. Sickness, adversity, and
death may interfere with the plans and purposes of all, but the slave
had the added danger of changing homes, in the separations unknown
to other men. Then too, there was the intensified degradation of the
spectacle. What an assemblage! Men and women, young and old, married
and single; moral and thinking human beings, in open contempt of
their humanity, leveled at a blow with horses, sheep, horned cattle,
and swine. Horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children--
all holding the same rank in the scale of social existence, and all
subjected to the same narrow inspection, to ascertain their value in
gold and silver--the only standard of worth applied by slaveholders to
their slaves. Personality swallowed up in the sordid idea of property!
Manhood lost in chattelhood!
The valuation over, then came the division and apportionment. Our
destiny was to be _fixed for life_, and we had no more voice in the
decision of the question than the oxen and cows that stood chewing at
the hay-mow. One word of the appraisers, against all preferences and
prayers, could sunder all the ties of friendship and affection, even
to separating husbands and wives, parents and children. We were all
appalled before that power which, to human seeming, could bless or
blast us in a moment. Added to this dread of separation, most painful
to the majority of the slaves, we all had a decided horror of falling
into the hands of Master Andrew, who was distinguished for his cruelty
and intemperance.
Slaves had a great dread, very naturally, of falling into the hands
of drunken owners. Master Andrew was a confirmed sot, and had already
by his profligate dissipation wasted a large portion of his father’s
property. To fall into his hands, therefore, was considered as the
first step toward being sold away to the far South. He would no doubt
spend his fortune in a few years, it was thought, and his farms and
slaves would be sold at public auction, and the slaves hurried away to
the cotton-fields and rice-swamps of the burning South. This was cause
of deep consternation.
The people of the North, and free people generally, I think, have less
attachment to the places where they are born and brought up, than had
the slaves. Their freedom to come and go, to be here or there, as they
list, prevents any extravagant attachment to any one particular place.
On the other hand, the slave was a fixture; he had no choice, no goal,
but was pegged down to one single spot, and must take root there or
nowhere. The idea of removal elsewhere came generally in shape of a
threat, and in punishment for crime. It was therefore attended with
fear and dread. The enthusiasm which animates the bosoms of young
freemen, when they contemplate a life in the far West, or in some
distant country, where they expect to rise to wealth and distinction,
could have no place in the thought of the slave; nor could those from
whom they separated know anything of that cheerfulness with which
friends and relations yield each other up, when they feel that it is
for the good of the departing one that he is removed from his native
place. Then, too, there is correspondence and the hope of reunion,
but with the slaves all these mitigating circumstances were wanting.
There was no improvement in condition _probable_--no correspondence
_possible_--no reunion attainable. His going out into the world was
like a living man going into the tomb, who with open eyes, sees himself
buried out of sight and hearing of wife, children, and friends of
kindred tie.
In contemplating the likelihoods and possibilities of our
circumstances, I probably suffered more than most of my
fellow-servants. I had known what it was to experience kind and even
tender treatment; they had known nothing of the sort. Life to them
had been rough and thorny, as well as dark. They had--most of them--
lived on my old master’s farm in Tuckahoe, and had felt the rigors
of Mr. Plummer’s rule. He had written his character on the living
parchment of most of their backs, and left them seamed and callous;
my back (thanks to my early removal to Baltimore) was yet tender. I
had left a kind mistress in tears when we parted, and the probability
of ever seeing her again, trembling in the balance as it were, could
not fail to excite in me alarm and agony. The thought of becoming the
slave of Andrew Anthony--who but a few days before the division had
in my presence seized my brother Perry by the throat, dashed him on
the ground, and with the heel of his boot stamped him on the head,
until the blood gushed from his nose and ears--was terrible! This
fiendish proceeding had no better apology than the fact that Perry had
gone to play when Master Andrew wanted him for some trifling service.
After inflicting this cruel treatment on my brother, observing me, as
I looked at him in astonishment, he said: “_That’s_ the way I’ll serve
you, one of these days”; meaning, probably, when I should come into
his possession. This threat, the reader may well suppose, was not very
tranquilizing to my feelings.
At last the anxiety and suspense were ended; and ended, thanks to a
kind Providence, in accordance with my wishes. I fell to the portion
of Mrs. Lucretia, the dear lady who bound up my head in her father’s
kitchen, and shielded me from the maledictions of Aunt Katy.
Capt. Thomas Auld and Mrs. Lucretia at once decided on my return to
Baltimore. They knew how warmly Mrs. Hugh Auld was attached to me, and
how delighted Tommy would be to see me, and withal, having no immediate
use for me, they willingly concluded this arrangement.
I need not stop to narrate my joy on finding myself back in Baltimore.
I was just one month absent, but the time seemed fully six months.
I had returned to Baltimore but a short time when the tidings reached
me that my kind friend, Mrs. Lucretia, was dead. She left one child,
a daughter, named Amanda, of whom I shall speak again. Shortly after
the death of Mrs. Lucretia, Master Andrew died, leaving a wife and one
child. Thus the whole family of Anthonys, as it existed when I went to
Col. Lloyd’s place, was swept away during the first five years’ time of
my residence at Master Hugh Auld’s in Baltimore.
No especial alteration took place in the condition of the slaves, in
consequence of these deaths, yet I could not help the feeling that I
was less secure now that Mrs. Lucretia was gone. While she lived, I
felt that I had a strong friend to plead for me in any emergency.
In a little book which I published six years after my escape from
slavery, entitled, “Narrative of Frederick Douglass,”--when the
distance between the past then described, and the present was not so
great as it is now,--speaking of these changes in my master’s family,
and their results, I used this language: “Now all the property of my
old master, slaves included, was in the hands of strangers--strangers
who had nothing to do in accumulating it. Not a slave was left free.
All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest. If any one
thing in my experience, more than another, has served to deepen my
conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with
unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to
my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from
youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had
peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great-grandmother
in his service. She had rocked him in his infancy, attended him in
his childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from
his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She
was nevertheless a slave--a slave for life--a slave in the hands of
strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren,
and her great-grandchildren, divided like so many sheep, without being
gratified with the small privilege of a single word as to their or
her own destiny. And to cap the climax of their base ingratitude, my
grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived my old master and
all his children, having seen the beginning and end of them, and her
present owner--his grandson--finding she was of but little value--
her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete
helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs--took her to the
woods, built her a little hut with a mud chimney, and then gave her the
_bounteous_ privilege of supporting herself there in utter loneliness:
thus virtually turning her out to die. If my poor, dear old grandmother
now lives, she lives to remember and mourn over the loss of children,
the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of great-grandchildren. They
are, in the language of Whittier, the slave’s poet:
‘Gone, gone, sold and gone,
To the rice-swamp dank and lone;
Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings,
Where the noisome insect stings,
Where the fever-demon strews
Poison with the falling dews,
Where the sickly sunbeams glare
Through the hot and misty air:--
Gone, gone, sold and gone,
To the rice-swamp, dank and lone,
From Virginia’s hills and waters--
Woe is me, my stolen daughters!’
“The hearth is desolate. The unconscious children who once sang
and danced in her presence are gone. She gropes her way, in the
darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her
children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the
screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door;
and now, weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the
head inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human
existence meet, and helpless infancy, and painful old age combine
together, at this time,--this most needed time for the exercise of
that tenderness and affection which children only can bestow on a
declining parent,--my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of
twelve children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a
few dim cinders.”
Two years after the death of Mrs. Lucretia, Master Thomas married his
second wife. Her name was Rowena Hamilton, the eldest daughter of Mr.
William Hamilton, a rich slaveholder on the Eastern Shore of Maryland,
who lived about five miles from St. Michaels, the then place of Master
Thomas Auld’s residence.
Not long after his marriage, Master Thomas had a misunderstanding with
Master Hugh, and as a means of punishing him, he ordered him to send me
home. As the ground of the misunderstanding will serve to illustrate
the character of Southern chivalry and Southern humanity, fifty years
ago, I will relate it.
Among the children of my Aunt Milly, was a daughter named Henny. When
quite a child, Henny had fallen into the fire and had burnt her hands
so badly that they were of very little use to her. Her fingers were
drawn almost into the palms of her hands. She could make out to do
something, but she was considered hardly worth the having--of little
more value than a horse with a broken leg. This unprofitable piece of
property, ill-shapen and disfigured, Capt. Auld sent off to Baltimore.
After giving poor Henny a fair trial, Master Hugh and his wife came
to the conclusion that they had no use for the poor cripple, and
they sent her back to Master Thomas. This the latter took as an act
of ingratitude on the part of his brother, and as a mark of his
displeasure, he required him to send me immediately to St. Michaels,
saying, “if he cannot keep Hen., he shan’t have Fred.”
Here was another shock to my nerves, another breaking up of my plans,
and another severance of my religious and social alliances. I was now
a big boy. I had become quite useful to several young colored men, who
had made me their teacher. I had taught some of them to read, and was
accustomed to spend many of my leisure hours with them. Our attachment
was strong, and I greatly dreaded the separation. But regrets with
slaves were unavailing: my wishes were nothing; my happiness was the
sport of my master.
My regrets at leaving Baltimore now were not for the same reasons as
when I before left the city to be valued and handed over to a new owner.
A change had taken place, both in Master Hugh and in his once pious and
affectionate wife. The influence of brandy and bad company on him, and
of slavery and social isolation on her, had wrought disastrously upon
the characters of both. Thomas was no longer “little Tommy,” but was a
big boy, and had learned to assume the airs of his class towards me. My
condition, therefore, in the house of Master Hugh was not by any means
so comfortable as in former years. My attachments were now outside of
our family. They were to those to whom I imparted instruction, and to
those little white boys, from whom I received instruction. There, too,
was my dear old father, the pious Lawson, who was in all the Christian
graces the very counterpart of “Uncle Tom”--the resemblance so perfect
that he might have been the original of Mrs. Stowe’s Christian hero.
The thought of leaving these dear friends greatly troubled me, for I
was going without the hope of ever returning again; the feud being most
bitter, and apparently wholly irreconcilable.
In addition to the pain of parting from friends, as I supposed,
forever, I had the added grief of neglected chances of escape to
brood over. I had put off running away until I was now to be placed
where opportunities for escape would be much more difficult, and less
frequent.
As we sailed down the Chesapeake bay, on board the sloop Amanda, to
St. Michaels, and were passed by the steamers plying between Baltimore
and Philadelphia, I formed many a plan for my future, beginning and
ending in the same determination--yet to find some way of escape from
slavery.