Slavery can be traced back to antiquity, in Sumerian city states and the Egypt of the pharaohs, as well as in ancient Rome and elsewhere. Slavery has therefore always been a fact of life that no one at the time questioned and therefore its users did not have to apologise for. It is surprising, in fact, that the slave trade did not develop as a real economic industry, since Europe had long been accustomed to black servants. A Venetian named Gonzaga bought black boys for ‘entertainment at European courts’ and, according to him, black slaves could also be used for domestic work and, at best, fed on ‘kitchen waste’.
By the time Columbus sailed to the Caribbean islands in 1492, Europe was importing 1000 black slaves a year, and with the discovery of the Americas, slavery became a profitable business. The first white settlers in the Caribbean initially used mainly native Indians for hard labour, but they were not used to hard work and died in large numbers, and were also affected by the various diseases that Europeans brought to the New World.
Bishop Bartolome de las Casas therefore proposed to King Charles V of Spain that African blacks be used for labour instead of Indians, and was given permission to import 12 black slaves for every Caribbean colonist. Lorenzo de Gomenot took over this business operationally and, under the agreement, 4 000 black slaves were brought to the islands of Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico each year.
This was one of the first famous commercial treaties, granting the holder the exclusive right to supply the colony with slaves. But Gomenot, apparently unaware of the precious document in his hands, sold his right for 25,000 ducats to a Genoese syndicate, which obtained a monopoly on the slave trade off the coast of Guinea.
But the Spanish were not the only ones to take up this lucrative business. The Dutch had already brought 15 430 slaves to Brazil in 1623 and in 1646 the first black slaves arrived in New Amsterdam, the oldest Dutch colony at the very tip of Manhattan. Over the entire period of slavery, up to three million slaves were transported to Brazil, up to half a million to Cuba and four million to America by 1861. In the case of the Americas, it was often attributed to natural reproduction, but many slaves were brought there directly from Africa or via Cuban ports.
The period of slavery also brought some very interesting people to the surface. One of them was Daniel Botefeur, a Lutheran from Hanover, who was particularly active in Cuba, and made his fortune in Gambia through medical examinations, which were used by captains and slave traders to determine whether slaves were physically healthy and free from hidden physical defects and epidemic diseases.
Botefeur was rich enough to buy ships and transport slaves from Africa to Havana. There, he married into a wealthy Creole family and bought two coffee plantations and a large plot of land on the coast where his slave ships landed, and became the owner of a trading house in Havana. He was extremely wealthy, considered a kind of American Monte Cristo, and was mainly involved in the smuggling of slaves from Cuba to America. In 1821, during one such smuggling operation near Charleston, he suffered a heart attack and died.
But the mass smuggling of slaves still had a long way to go. After the first tentative steps, the first European settlements slowly began to take root on the Caribbean islands and along the east coast of North America. Soon, they encountered a problem: labour shortages in the tobacco and sugar cane plantations. So new labour had to be brought in from Africa.
The Dutch were the first to reap the rewards, driving the Portuguese from two important trading posts off the coast of Guinea, Fort Elmine and Fort St Anthony, and securing two footholds for the transport of slaves to the New World. The French were not to be outdone and their trading post of St Louis was built on the Senegal River, followed by the English with their Capa Coast post on the coast of Ghana. Black slaves, who numbered around 100,000 in North America by the mid-18th century, thus made possible the rapid economic development of the New World, based on tobacco and sugar cane plantations, through their loss of freedom.
Many European ships, laden with cloth, rum, iron objects and glass beads, set sail from Europe, and later from the Americas, towards the Black Continent. Their owners traded these items to slave traders, who were predominantly of Arab origin, or to local kings in small African countries for African slaves, who were then transported to the Caribbean islands, Boston, Newport or Charleston, to be sold.
A series of hastily constructed fortresses in European countries, stretching from the Cape Verde Islands to the Bay of Biafra, testified to a vibrant slave trade. European traders had white representatives in them, negotiating with local chiefs or Arabs for the quantity and price of ‘black ivory’.
In 1786 alone, the English transported 53,000 slaves across the Atlantic, the French 23,000, the Dutch 11,000 and captains from the English colonies in America 6,300. Today, it is estimated that around 10 million slaves were transported to the Americas – until the slave trade was banned there.
Slaves on five ship decks
The ships used to transport slaves from Africa to America had to be properly built. Before slaves could be taken on board, the ship’s carpenter had to build a deck for the slaves between the upper deck and the lower deck, where goods were usually transported. He usually built four or five decks, no higher than 130 centimetres.
Today, we know from several descriptions and drawings the exact arrangement of the “human cargo”. Theophilus Conneau left the following account: “Two officers had to load the slaves onto the ship at sunset. The largest ones were placed on the bare floor where the ship was widest, and the children were arranged on the floor in the stern. When the lower deck was full, the slaves, who were of course chained, were spread out on the other decks, and the rest were placed on deck.”
If the weather was fine, those on board were covered with sailcloth, if it was bad, with oiled canvas. Before boarding, the slaves had to undergo a humiliating inspection, and then they were chained together in pairs. As long as the ship was in port, there was always the risk that slaves would rebel and try to escape. As soon as the ship was on the high seas, however, the only way for the poor to escape their desperate situation was to die, and so many slaves, if they had the chance, simply jumped into the sea, convinced that when they died they would return to their homeland and their people.
The behaviour of the captain and crew was mainly influenced by the fear of infection and the fear of slave revolt. The captain was alone on board with five officers and 30 sailors, so he was right to fear a revolt by some 500 slaves; if they managed to get on board, they could quickly take control of the ship.
Slave ships left the coast of Guinea at night, when singing, howling and crying could be heard. The voyage usually lasted up to five weeks, or three months if there was no wind. The slaves were brought on board twice a day to get a breath of air. At that time they were also given food; rice, millet and cornmeal, and fasting water for their thirst. And they all had to brush their teeth with wooden sticks and lubricate their bodies with oil. Clean and white teeth were supposed to be proof of a slave’s health in the slave market, and an oiled body was supposed to be a sign of physical strength. There were no toilets and slaves relieved themselves lying down, so that ships could be smelled from a distance.
After the initial chaos, the transatlantic slave trade was first regulated by a treaty between Great Britain and Spain, outlawing the slave trade in 1820. This made the profits from slave smuggling all the greater. Many of the young people who had earned their living as soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars were now unemployed and leaving in droves for the New World. If they had been there for 15 years, and had not been picked up by alcohol, disease or died during the slave revolts, they were usually able to become independent, ship captains or even ship owners. At best, they bought a plantation and a few slaves.
Among the typical victims of slavery, history counts a woman who was brought to America from Angola or the Congo in 1860 at a very young age, and who gave birth in 1868 to a boy who later became known as Esteban Montejo. In 1963, when he was more than 100 years old, he told his story, which was later described in the famous book El Cimarron, the Cuban name for escaped slaves.
The system of slave exploitation remained unchanged for decades after the official end of the slave trade. But nowhere was slavery ended for economic reasons.
One of the few successful slave revolts was the mutiny on the Amistad. In 1839, the son of a Sierra Leonean chief was captured by slave-hunters, sold to a Portuguese trader and Singbe ended up in Cuba. There, he and 50 other unfortunates were put on board the Spanish ship Amistad, which was to take them to the island of Principe.
One night, slaves stole the crew’s weapons and killed Captain Terrero and the cook. They then ordered the crew to steer the ship back to Africa. But they were tricked into steering the ship north-west, and after 63 days of sailing, they arrived on Long Island. There, the mutineers were disarmed and charged with piracy, and the ship’s owners demanded their property back.
But a professor at Yale University heard what was happening and managed to find someone among the dock workers who spoke the language of the Singbe tribe. Soon all the American newspapers were full of news about the Amistad. Opponents of slavery claimed that Africans had been kidnapped and that, as free people, they had the right to defend their freedom, even with violence. Negotiations and arguments continued throughout the winter, but the final decision was left to the US Supreme Court.
Former US President John Quincy Adams stood up for the Africans and, in an eight-hour address, persuaded the judges to declare them innocent. Singbe was thus able to return to Sierra Leone with the other Africans in 1842. This was one of the few stories with a happy ending at a time when the first opponents of slavery were beginning to emerge.
Having slaves meant being on the first rung of the ladder to wealth. Sensational riches could be extracted from American plantations, and this attracted private investors as well as the authorities. Slaves and sugar or slaves and tobacco rarely made poor people rich, but slavery made a whole range of wealthy people extremely wealthy. Or to put it simply, to make a fortune you had to invest a lot of money in the business to begin with.
Baptists, Quakers, Jesuits, Franciscans, bishops, parliamentarians, mayors, court councillors and nobles also wanted a piece of this lucrative business. Many Englishmen in the 18th century agreed to own slaves. Little black boys were popular companions, indeed fashion accessories, for English ladies; and those who were set free because of age or exhaustion only added to the number of poor in London, Bristol and Liverpool. According to one historian, out of 84 mayors of English cities, 64 were actively involved in the slave trade.
The wealthy plantation owners, who decided to return to England because they had already accumulated enough wealth, easily secured a seat in the English Parliament through their generosity and represented a very powerful and influential lobby there, which successfully blocked any change that could harm their slave ownership.
They had one common goal – when they had accumulated enough wealth, they wanted to leave the colonies by any means necessary, and they did not want to sell the plantations, but to lease and manage them to others. “The climate in our colonies is so unhealthy for English health that no one wants to live there voluntarily, much less settle there permanently.”
A different French approach
The French slavery system differed significantly from the British one, as France passed the “Code Noir” in 1685, a law that regulated the treatment of slaves. Slaves were still treated as cattle and could be subject to corporal punishment by their owner. But the Code Noir at least ensured that they were adequately, and not excessively, punished in court proceedings.
If they were sentenced to imprisonment, mutilation or death, it had to be in accordance with normal legal norms and procedures. French planters had to allow them to baptize their children, to marry them in a legally valid way, to feed and clothe them properly and to allow them to rest on Sundays.
Slaves on English plantations were not allowed to do any such thing. Ottaboah Cuguano recalls. “I saw a man being sentenced to 20 lashes because he wanted to go to Sunday mass instead of going to work.” Code Noir also forbade separating mothers from their children when selling.
But whatever the situation of the slaves, the plantations could not survive without them. To survive financially, a sugar cane plantation had to be at least 121 hectares in size, and each hectare needed one slave to work it. Sugar cane was planted in holes 15 centimetres deep and each slave was expected to dig 120 holes in a day with a hoe. The seedlings were left to mature for up to 18 months before they were cut down and taken to the mill, where they were squeezed of their juice using powerful rollers.
Thus began the torturous process of extracting sugar and rum. The raw sugar was then boiled in large barrels and, when the juice had thickened, the smaller barrels were filled with it and loaded onto ships. This work was extremely arduous and it is estimated that after three years, as many as a third of the slaves on the Caribbean islands had died.
Hard work on the plantations
The first plantation on the islands was established in Barbados in 1627. By 1820, the population had reached 700 000 and sugar production had risen to 80 000 tonnes. In the 1500 sugar cane plantations that existed in the late 18th century, the white population, which outnumbered the black population 1:12, tried to squeeze out as much as possible.
The penalties for offences were severe. Sometimes slaves were nailed to the ground with iron rods and burned alive, first their hands, then their feet, then other parts of their body, and finally their head. Often they were castrated or had a leg cut off for theft. They were put an iron mask on their head to stop them eating their owner’s sugar and hot wax was poured on their wounds. Flogging was the most merciful punishment, although the Code Noir limited it to 50 strokes.
It was not until the 18th century that more lenient sentences were introduced for slaves. Branding with a splintered iron, ear slashing and other brutal punishments were banned in the Caribbean in the 18th century, and flogging was recommended as the “only” educational punishment.
Plantation owners treated their slaves brutally, and there were few who realised that this was only detrimental to the profits generated by the plantation. One such slave owner was John Pinney, a plantation owner on the island of Nevis. “I take care of my slaves and I take care of my cattle, because common sense tells me that they are both the capital of the plantation and need care and attention.”
While he did not value his slaves more than his livestock, he was aware of the value of a healthy and able slave. He set up a kind of hospital for them in the stables, with a maternity ward, and employed someone who would know how to treat them. He gave his slaves days off work and gave them presents at Christmas. However, he did not allow them to be lazy, insubordinate or rude and always ordered floggings for such offences.
Although he treated his slaves better than other planters, he, like the others, lived in perpetual fear of rebellion. Slaves rebelled whenever possible, even when they had virtually no chance of success. The least they could do was to lie to the plantation owner, steal and deliberately harm him. The braver ones ran away and took refuge in the mountains, living like outcasts.
The most successful revenge was the poisoning of a planter. Some of the old slaves knew plant poisons from their African homelands and used them in the new one. In the same way, black girls took revenge on their white lovers or rapists. Black mothers often wanted to spare their children their own fate and killed their own children by the same or similar methods. As a result, infant mortality on plantations increased by a third.
But poisons were only a valve for slaves, they could not bring them freedom. They could only win it by rising up. Slave revolts had already begun in Barbados in 1649, Guadaloupe in 1656, Santo Domingo in 1679 and Jamaica in 1690, when 300 slaves attacked a planter’s house and killed the overseer next door.
Most of the rebellions were quickly put down by the owners, but in Jamaica the British were involved in a 50-year conflict with the rebellious slaves, which ended in a treaty with them in 1739, which gave them freedom and 1600 acres of land on which they could grow everything – except sugar cane. This first successful slave revolt resulted in a major slave rebellion in Santo Domingo, with one goal in mind – an independent black state.
Santo Domingo was the most productive island in the Caribbean, producing five times more sugar cane with the same number of slaves than, for example, Jamaica. But for the slaves, it was “the worst hell on earth”. Some 40,000 new slaves were brought there every year to replace the dead and infirm. Thus, there were always nearly half a million slaves on the island.
The French Revolution, with its slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity, promised change for slaves too. The mulattoes, born to free parents, were given political rights, but the plantation owners refused to recognise them, so they took matters into their own hands, gathered an army of slaves and tried to take control of the island.
The rebel leader Toussaint Louverture, the eldest son of an African chieftain, skilfully manoeuvred between the interests of France, Britain and Spain to force the British, who were interfering in the island’s affairs in order to take possession of the island, to leave Santo Domingo. In 1798 he became the de facto ruler of the island, pledging allegiance to France, although he did not fully trust it.
He was betrayed by his ideal, Napoleon Bonaparte himself, who opposed the island’s independence under black leadership and wanted to reintroduce slavery. Louverture strongly resisted and was taken prisoner by French superiority. The French took him to France and imprisoned him high in the French Alps, where he died in 1803 due to the unhealthy climate. His body was buried in a mass grave.
But Touissant Louverture’s successors did not stop fighting, and the French troops, which initially numbered 50,000, had to surrender in November 1803 due to fighting, tropical diseases and fever. But the new republic, which took the old Indian name Haiti instead of Santo Domingo, was still independent only on paper.
In the 17th century, the introduction of slavery in America brought with it all the repressive laws that underpinned the slavery system. In such a system, the master had absolute power over his property. In 1669, the Supreme Council of Virginia decided that “in the extreme case of a slave dying during the execution of his sentence, it cannot be considered a crime”. South Carolina also had a provision in its constitution that the owner had “absolute power and authority over his slaves”.
Soon, all black people, whether slaves or free, were subject to laws that had previously only applied to slaves. The social phenomenon of slavery thus formed the legal basis on which racist prejudices were based for centuries to come. In Virginia, the Slavery Act of 1705 restricted the right of slaves to assemble and forbade them to travel the country without proper papers. It also prevented slaves from appearing as witnesses in court unless they were testifying against each other.
The Maryland legislation of 1664 even coined a new legal term “durante vita”, meaning “for life”. This was an attempt to prevent free black women from marrying slaves by simply declaring them and their children born into the marriage slaves. The American States were full of such legislative nonsense.
Valuable labour
Shortly after emancipation from English colonial rule and independence in 1776, the slave trade was banned in all North American states. This was particularly the desire of the Quakers of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and Martin Luther of Maryland. They proclaimed that “the slave trade was contrary to the American Revolution and dishonourable to the American way of thinking”.
In 1788, New York banned the importation of slaves, with a fine of $100 for violators. Pennsylvania was very specific and banned the slave trade from “Europe, or to Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, or from any other place, or any other country”. This did not in any way discourage those who decided to break these laws.
After Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin at the end of the 18th century, the slave trade re-emerged in South Carolina, and other states did what South Carolina had done openly: smuggle slaves. In the first half of the 19th century, cotton monoculture dominated the southern states of the United States. Between 1815 and 1861, it accounted for as much as two-thirds of America’s total exports.
The cotton growers, the tobacco planters of Virginia and Kentucky and the rice farmers of South Carolina were all one in the same; the cheapest labour is slaves. It must be remembered that slave-owners in the Southern States constituted only one-fourth of the white population, the rest owning from one to ten slaves, half owning more than ten and the other half owning fewer than fifty. Thus, only a quarter constituted the “aristocracy of plantation owners”. This small class of the privileged considered themselves the true representatives of the Southern States.
Plantations were not unique to the United States. The first large plantations were established after 1800, mainly in western Cuba (Cuba Grande), in the southern United States and in southern Brazil between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo. But not all slaves were the same, but often differed in their position on the hierarchical ladder. Being a slave-artisan or a slave-foreman made a big difference. For slaves, working in the house meant that instead of working in the fields, they did business in the planter’s house. Older and married slaves were sometimes given a small garden by their owner where they could grow vegetables.
Daily life on the plantations was not enviable. In Liverpool, England, in 1850, a bale of cotton cost just 12 cents per pound. Because of high transport costs and brokerage commissions, the planter managed to pocket less than half the selling price in Liverpool, so both small and large planters were often heavily in debt. In fact, the greatest value of a plantation was its slaves. An eighteen-year-old slave bought for $650 in 1845 was worth $1000 five years later, and $2000 just before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Many planters therefore lived a Spartan life. The lavish dances and white women dressed in the latest Parisian fashions are thus just a fairy tale for film-goers.
The slaves often slept in their master’s modest house, sometimes even in the same room as him, and in the mornings white and black children played together in the courtyard. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two classes was often one of distrust and hatred. The relationship was marked by the fear that the master would have to sell the indentured servants elsewhere, thus separating them from family and friends, and by the master’s fear that the slave would rebel against him, poison him or kill him with a machete.
Selling slaves was a special ritual. Zamba was the son of a tribal chief who was sold for $600 in America. He described the sale in the following words:
“When we arrived in Charleston, we were disembarked and first we had to wash in cold water. Because we arrived almost naked, they gave us a sackcloth suit.
We were sold two days later. But even while we waited to see what fate would befall us, we were visited by interested buyers. On the day of the sale, the auctioneer came to us with a clerk. We were all examined and then divided into groups of 15 to 20 people. Some of us were singled out, and these were destined to be domestic servants for the masters, while those in the groups were assigned to work in the fields.
Many people thought that working in the master’s house was much easier than working in the fields, but they were wrong. The work in the fields ended when dusk fell and the house servants had to work until the planter’s family went to bed, which was often around midnight or later.
One supervisor told me that some planters were instructing their supervisors on what they could do in their free time. They were told to avoid having sex with black women, because they were supposed to be negligent and to work badly, steal and do things that were worse than all that and that had no place on the plantation. We were also visited by white ladies, who behaved in a manner totally unbecoming of ladies.
The sales process itself took some time, and prices ranged from USD 250 to USD 450 per person. For one group of 32 men, the new owner paid as much as $10,000. In the end, it turned out that the owner of the ship made $90 000 from the cargo. He was able to do this because he treated the slaves quite well and they were in good physical condition on the day of the auction. Otherwise, all shipowners were driven by greed and nothing else.
I later learned that a ship similar to ours, carrying about 750 slaves, arrived in Charleston with only 400 emaciated slaves alive, and they were in a desperate condition due to brutal treatment, inadequate food and bad air.”
Most slaves worked on cotton plantations. The harvest began there in late August. Each slave was given his own canvas sack and a large basket in which to put the cotton when the sack was full. The slaves had to be in the field when daylight broke, and with the exception of a 10- or 15-minute break during which they ate their meagre lunch, they were forbidden to stop work until dark. If there was a full moon, they worked until midnight. No matter how late it was, they were not allowed to stop work even at dinner time, unless ordered to do so by a supervisor.
The first opponents of slavery
But as the years, decades and centuries passed, times began to change for slaves too. The first abolitionists were American Quakers. In 1688, a group of Pennsylvania Quakers wrote a letter rejecting both the slave trade and slavery. “Just because they are black does not give us the right to enslave them…,” they wrote.
In the 1700s, the first Chief Justice, Sewall of Massachuetts, joined this view. Initially, the movement was mainly concerned with outlawing the slave trade and not too concerned with what should happen to those who were already slaves. Slavery was legally allowed on British soil.
The organised abolitionist movement in England itself depended entirely on the support of Parliament. But few parliamentarians were prepared to deal with slavery. The fight against it turned into an organised campaign in 1765, when a civil servant, Granville Sharp, met a black slave, Jonathan Strong, who was staggering down the street, beaten and almost blind. He took him to his brother, who was a doctor, and they managed to cure him.
Two years later, his owner, a planter from Barbados, learned that Strong had recovered. He kidnapped him and sold him to a planter in the Antilles. Strong was imprisoned, but somehow managed to inform Sharp of his sad fate, and he sued the planter for causing bodily harm. The planter responded by suing for interference with his right to own the slave. The public outcry was outraged and the planter withdrew the suit and Strong was released from prison.
The first major success for the abolitionists was the establishment of the West African colony of Sierra Leone, “to look after the poor blacks of London”. They bought a quarter of a million acres of land from a local black chief and settled 400 blacks and 60 Europeans. Half of the colony’s inhabitants died in the first year due to the unbearable climate. The timing of the settlement was unfortunate; the settlers arrived in their new homeland during the rainy season and immediately fell ill with tropical fever and dysentery, and food was scarce. It was only thanks to a generous injection of funds that another 100 whites and 4 000 blacks arrived three years later.
The second great abolitionist success was the passage of a law limiting the number of slaves on a ship to the ship’s tonnage. But it was not until 1807 that the English passed a law “abolishing, prohibiting and making unlawful every form of slave trade”. On 1 January 1808, the slave trade was banned throughout the British Empire.
The British Navy enforced the law, and violation was punishable by very heavy penalties, including the death penalty in 1824. However, the lack of enforcement ships meant that it was not successful, with only one in four slave ships being caught. In 1818, the slave trade was also banned by France.
In 1832, two events, independent of each other, brought a swift end to slavery in the British Empire. Planters in Jamaica began to ally themselves with the United States, where slavery was still flourishing in the southern states. Some 50,000 slaves also resisted. In America, the slave trade was a divisive issue. American officials, faced with the need for more and more slaves on the cotton plantations of the southern states, were keen to turn a blind eye when fast ships sailed for Cuba, which was then the largest slave market.
America also strongly resisted British pressure and refused to allow its ships to be inspected. As a result, many carriers started flying the American flag. In 1850, there were 434,495 free blacks and 3,204,313 slaves in America. Many had “earned” their freedom themselves or had been bought by their relatives with the consent of their master.
The French position on slavery was also unclear. Santo Domingo was then at the height of its slave-labour-led growth, and banning slavery would have threatened much of the French economy. The ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – applied in theory to slaves, but in practice it was very different.
The American predicament
Ever since the French Revolution, the question of what is better: slavery or freedom, has been a constant in America. The United States has taken great care to ensure that it has always had roughly equal numbers of states that did not allow slavery and those that did. This already delicate balance has been very difficult to maintain as more and more new countries have joined.
After 1830, territories between the Midwest and New York began to join the United States. Here lived small groups of settlers of Puritan persuasion who, in principle, rejected slavery. There were supporters and opponents of slavery in all the American states, and the quarrels between the two sides grew increasingly fierce.
The Southern states were particularly outraged by the system of aid to escaped slaves organised by various charitable organisations, known as the “Underground Railroad”, because it used terms used on the railways to organise escapes. Thus, the term station actually meant a safe house. The system operated successfully from the north through Ohio and Indiana to New York and New England in the east. Numerous philanthropists in the North raised money to help escaped slaves, and as many as 40,000 slaves successfully escaped between 1830 and 1860 alone.
The most famous person to help escaped slaves was Harriet Tubman. She went south 19 times and helped 300 slaves escape. She was never caught, although there was a large reward for her capture. Her decision to escape from slavery was a powerful demonstration of the plight of slaves. Henry Box Brown also decided to run away because his master refused to buy his wife. His escape was very dramatic.
“One day,” he later recounted, “while I was at work, the thought crossed my mind to climb into a crate to be shipped as cargo to one of the northern countries. Of course, I needed a suitable crate, and a carpenter friend made one for me. Then all that was needed was to get it to where the cargo was being prepared. It was only with great difficulty that I got permission to stay away from work for a few days.”
Meanwhile, the warehouse manager has already written to an acquaintance in Philadelphia, who has agreed to have the box addressed to him. The crate was narrow and cramped, and Box Brown struggled to get into it on 29 March 1849. Before that, he had drilled three small holes in it for air and supplied himself with a bottle of water. The warehouse keeper then nailed the box shut and stuck a label on it for fast delivery.
The train first arrived at Potomac Creek, where it was transferred to a steamer. There, he was placed upside down, so that Box Brown had to spend several hours with his head turned down. He felt nauseous and had the feeling that his eyes were going to pop out of their sockets. In this position, he listened to the sailors talking on deck and one of them even sat on the crate in which he was hidden.
Shortly afterwards, the box arrived in Washington, was loaded onto a wagon and taken to a warehouse, where it was dumped on the ground without warning. Box Brown hit his head on the wall of the crate and lost consciousness. The box was then loaded onto another wagon, which took it to Philadelphia to the address written on the box. At the destination, a crowd of people gathered around it and someone said they should open it to see if Box Brown was still alive. He was giddy, but he survived and became a legend.
In 1851, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a scathing critique of slavery, was published. In the next three years alone, 14 books were published in the Southern States, seeking to soften the harsh criticism of the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was not without commenting on the disgraceful conditions in which workers in the northern states of the United States had to work, conditions that were no better than slave labour on the tobacco plantations of the South.
The conflict came to a head when Abraham Lincoln, a well-known opponent of slavery, was elected President of the country in 1860. On 12 April 1861, the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, signaling the beginning of the Civil War. However, claims that slavery was the cause of the Civil War are mistaken. The real cause was the secession of the southern states, which the North wanted to prevent and thus ensure its uninterrupted control over the rich cotton crops of the southern states.
In 1863, Northern troops invaded Southern territory and encountered for the first time the slaves for whose freedom they were supposedly fighting. In doing so, they acted as conquerors have always acted throughout history. They burned plantations, killed slaves who refused to leave them and raped them indiscriminately. The destruction of plantations, where slaves often had small patches of land with vegetables and domestic animals, and which were an important means of subsistence, caused outrage and grief among slaves.
Soon, a huge wave of refugees began to pour northwards. Thousands of slaves camped along the roads, waiting for someone to shelter and feed them. The abolitionists were horrified. Freedom for slaves, yes, but millions to settle in the northern states? They did not want that. Officially, the so-called Fugitive Slave Act was still in force, under which any escaped slave had to be returned to his master. Even Northern soldiers sometimes destroyed slaves more than their former masters.
The abandoned plantations of the South could now be leased by white masters, employing former slaves and paying them a minimum wage of $5 a month. But there was not enough work for everyone, and the former slaves were dying of hunger and exhaustion. From 1863 onwards, the only way they could survive was to serve in the Northern army, and even there it became clear how deep-rooted the prejudice against black soldiers was. General Stevenson declared in 1863 that he “would rather see the North defeated than to see it victorious with the aid of negroes”. This outburst of racism led to his imprisonment, even though he was only saying what many of his colleagues thought.
The sight of former slaves in the armies of the northern countries sent southerners into a frenzy, and those who were captured were able to say goodbye to life immediately. An eyewitness recounted that on such occasions, the Southerners “would lose their minds, pounce on the captured black soldiers and slaughter them”.
The Abolition Proclamation did, however, bring freedom, at least formally, to 13 million former slaves. Four-fifths of them were illiterate and without land, money or work. Many slaves were thus confronted with problems they had never known before. Despite their defeat, the Southern states passed ‘black codes’ laws, whereby former slave owners tried to maintain their workforce by hiring them out as wage labourers or sharecroppers, while the North turned a blind eye.
These laws varied from country to country, sometimes enforcing both true serfdom and partial equality before the courts. The black population did not have the right to vote, and was formally recognised in 1870, much to the anger of the southern states. Blacks turned out to vote, and mostly voted Republican in memory of former President Lincoln.
Ku-klux-klan
The lack of democratic experience in the Southern states and the hope of a revival of the Southern dream of a comfortable white despotism of pre-war times resulted in the formation of the racist Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee in 1865, initially a circle of six veterans of the Southern army. They realised that it was possible to strike fear into the bones of superstitious blacks by weird white clothes with pointed hoods and even weirder rituals.
Soon the KKK became an association that terrorised former slaves. By 1868, it had branches in every southern state. Hundreds of blacks were killed, hanged and drowned in night marches, with huge crosses burning. KKK organisations continued to be founded after 1914.
So, on a wild night in 1915, a man named William Simmons and 16 companions climbed Stone Mountain in Georgia after the harvest. They surrounded a burning cross and vowed to breathe new life into the “invisible kingdom of the South”. Soon Simmons had 100,000 followers, and not long after, an incredible 5 million.
Its marches were welcomed by the public in some places, but the KKK failed to spread throughout the USA. This success was only temporary, however, as membership dwindled rapidly and the organisation even disbanded in 1944, before reactivating in the 1960s during the black struggle for civil rights.
Slavery caused wounds, especially in the US, that are still not fully healed today. In the mid-20th century, the famous black writer James Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son: “In New Jersey I learned what it meant to be black. That no one looks at you kindly and that you can expect a reaction just because of the colour of your skin. We are black Americans and our destiny is the destiny of this country. For a whole century, to be black was to be excluded from society, to be part of another people and to be paralysed by racial hatred.”
For almost a century, it has been impossible to break through these prejudices. The church, universities and the US military have all persistently discriminated against their fellow black citizens.
In 1900, Booker T. Washington founded the Negro Business League – a utopian attempt to have the black world controlled by black banks and to have black employees in companies with black owners. The attempt failed miserably because it was uncompetitive, with only funeral parlours and insurance companies with black owners doing well.
World War I was also a traumatic event for the black population of America. It was only here that it became clear that black soldiers were accepted as fellow citizens in wartime, but as aliens to the white population in peacetime. Black soldiers were constantly humiliated by white officers and, although trained for combat, were sent as labour battalions to build trenches and trenches. Black officers were forbidden to speak to white girls in France and French officers were advised not to associate with black officers.
Tensions between white and black soldiers also increased. In Texas, race riots broke out because white officers at Fort Moisnes refused to train black soldiers. In South Carolina, whites protested against ‘Black Jennies’. Fifteen black officers from the first black officers’ school in Arizona were told that they could not be accepted into the regular army after successfully completing their training. World War II was not much better, as black soldiers were rarely used in major military operations.
The journey of the black population in the USA to the status of equal citizens has been a long and very slow one. It was not until 1954 that the US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. This led to the formation of small groups that campaigned for black equality, including in education. This protest movement resulted in two organisations that advocated to resolve this inequality by peaceful means.
In 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested by police officers in Montgommery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. This upset the black community in the town so much that they decided to boycott the city bus company. Martin Luther King, then a 25-year-old Baptist minister, took over its organisation and in the following years it was he who led the movement for equal rights for all citizens.
On 1 February 1960, four black students sat down at a table in a whites-only Woolworth’s fast-food restaurant and refused to leave, despite being asked to do so by a security guard. Protests against racial discrimination followed and spread across the country, and in October of that year Woolworth had to make concessions in all its branches. But this was only the beginning. Shortly afterwards, six black male and female students enrolled in college in Arkansas, despite threats of lynching.
The town of Selma, where Luther King led his protest march to allow all blacks to register to vote, soon became a hellish battleground. Several black leaders were beaten by extremists, one even died, and President Johnson himself had to intervene. All this took its toll and Dr Luther King was assassinated on 4 April 1968.
Swedish economist Myrdal wrote: “The race problem is not only a great American failure, but also a great opportunity for the future of America, which can prove that white and black citizens can work together and that justice and equality are not just empty phrases.”
That was easy to say, but in practice it has taken several decades to make it happen, even though things are still not as they should be. It is not white extremists who are causing the problems this way, but the American white police, who are targeting unsuspecting black urban dwellers with surprising precision. The death of George Floyd, a black man, is just one example of the police’s heavy-handedness.
Incidentally, the US police are not what we think of as police. It is a real armed military with armoured vehicles, guns, ships, helicopters and other equipment. The NYPD alone has an annual budget of almost USD 6 billion and, as one police officer admitted: “If I don’t get to the police station after an eight-hour shift with at least one arrestee, I’m in trouble.”
The easiest thing to do, of course, is to arrest a black walker. If the arrest goes without a shot being fired, the arrestee is lucky, because the police have a “shoot first, ask questions later” rule. Equality of the races before the law is therefore a very relative thing.
