Beginning with the Seven Years War between Great Britain and France 1756-73 [and more importantly the year or more of Indian raids leading up to the conflict in the English colonies, white slaves and other categories of non-free, non-African people, were bound to serve for fewer years and under less harsh conditions. This accelerated with the American War of Independence from 1776-1783, and the War of 1812, during which the young nation found itself in need of white fighting men, as relying on Indian allies was increasingly a recipe for disaster.

The parallel development is that the increasing numbers of African slaves and home bred black and mixed-race servants were increasingly treated more harshly, and, as always, never had a reasonable chance at redemption. Therefore, if one wishes to understand the life of the 16th century and early 17th century white servant in Colonial America, he can do no better than to examine the lives of those poor souls who inherited his burden as he was freed up to drive the Native American enemy to extinction through scouting, hunting, fighting, lumbering, and farming.

Where the escaped white servant would be hunted by Indians, the escaped black slave would be hunted by the grandsons of former white servants who had driven the Indians across the Appalachians and the Mississippi, and who were bound by law to apprehend any escaped slave or serve a period of forced indenture. Furthermore, since competing with slave holders in the agricultural market was difficult for the lone homesteader, the reward for returning an escaped slave could be a windfall for a poor white squirrel hunter on his hardscrabble farm.

William Robinson was born the property of super-rich Thomas Cowens in Wilmington North Carolina in about 1848. I have used William’s extensive recollections to reconstruct the fragmentary lives of otherwise anonymous slaves in The Defiant One, Lick of the Black Snake, The Rail Splitter, and James Anderson’s Son. What follows are a handful of quotes from his memoir.

“My book reveals in every chapter either the pathetic moan of slaves in almost utter despair…praying God for deliverance from cruel bonds, the auction block, and years of unrequited toil for those who had no right to their labor.”

“'William, never pull off your shirt to be whipped. I want you to die in defense of your mother; for once I lay in the woods eleven months for trying to prevent your mother from being whipped.'”

“…but just outside the door they wet their fingers with saliva and made ‘crocodile tears’ and passed on pretending to be crying, and saying, ‘Poor Massa Tom is gone.’ Of course they didn’t say where he had gone.”

“Mother and three of the children had fallen to Scott Cowens—the Meanest of all the Cowens family. He was a drunkard and a gambler, for he had taken three different women’s sons, between the ages of twelve and fourteen years, and gambled them off and came back home without them, leaving the parents in anguish…he threatened mother very strongly...before she could answer him he knocked her from the porch to the ground. This was more than I could endure [William was about 11 years old]. An axe handle was on the opposite side from which mother fell. He stood over her, cursing and kicking her, and I knocked him down with the axe handle.”

This event precipitated William’s running away. He escaped from his masters twice, was sold numerous times and witnessed many cruelties. He dealt with a dizzying variety of masters, was herded around with great gangs of slaves, and was marched north into Virginia, where he eventually became a slave to a slave trader in Richmond, Master Lee, where we pickup his story again.

“Master Lee told me that a man named Jake Hadley, who lived in Greenville, Tennessee, had my mother, two brothers and a sister…I assisted Peter around the pen. Peter looked after the slaves and did all the whipping. I cleaned the office and was errand boy. Most of my work was about the office. During the time I was there [working for Master Lee in Richmond] I saw thousands of slaves bought and sold. I saw one woman who had five children; she and two children, one a nursing baby, and a girl about eleven years old [likely bound for the sex trade], were sold to negro traders, while the husband and other three children were bought by a farmer who lived somewhere in east Virginia. The farmer went with the father and three children to see the mother and other children leave for Mississippi. As the boat pulled out from shore and the husband and wife bade each other good bye, the woman, with one loud scream, made a sudden leap and landed in deep water, with her baby clasped in her arms and the little girl handcuffed to her…They were not picked up until the next day.”

“This is now the year 1860. I was twelve years of age and had been a runaway twice in that time. I saw a man coming with a black horse and buggy… Mr. Lee could refrain no longer, so he said ‘William, this is Mr. Hadley, the man who has your mother, brothers and sisters.’ And for once I saw that seemingly heartless man, who separated thousands of husbands from wives, mothers and children, sisters and brothers, touched to the very core, for he drew his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, instead of his nose, as he pretended to be doing. Mr. Hadley was a very kind fatherly acting man. As a general thing all Jew slave owners were more lenient to their slaves than any other nationality…”

Mister Hadley took William west into Tennessee. A few years later he was liberated by General Thomas, who personally accepted William’s transfer from the Confederate Army to the Union Army. When he returned to Mister Hadley’s house in his new Union uniform to rescue his mother, his Jewish master threatened him with a shotgun, but backed down from the squad of leveled muskets. William hacked down the bedroom door behind which ‘Massa Jake’ had locked his mother, and freed her from the rope which the ‘fatherly’ man had used to tie her to a bureau. William served thereafter in numerous battles as a Union Soldier including Antietam, Chancellersville, Missionary Ridge and the Wilderness. After the war he went to college and became a minister. Eventually, in 1904, he published From Log Cabin to Pulpit, or Fifteen Years in Slavery.

Elizabeth was born in 1818, a slave to Colonel* A. Burwell, and his cruel wife. At the age of 4 she was tasked with caring for a baby. When she rocked the crib too vigorously and the baby fell out, she called for her mistress and attempted to use a shovel to scoop the baby back into the crib. For this she was severely beaten with a whip. Her mistress told her that she ‘would never be worth her salt’, so she grew into a defiant industrious woman in order to prove her wrong. Her father was sold out west and was never seen again. Mrs. Burwell scolded her mother for crying and told her to find another husband. Elizabeth knitted socks and worked at other occupations from the age of four.

At age 14 Elizabeth was loaned to the eldest Burwell son, a Presbyterian minister, who had married a poor woman. Elizabeth did all of the work and managed the finances for her master and mistress; maid, landscaper, cook, accountant, and so on.

At age 18 her owners moved from Virginia to Hillsboro North Carolina. There they employed the local schoolmaster, a Mister Bingham, to ‘subdue her stubborn pride’. He overpowered her as she fought, stripped down her dress, tied her with a rope, and beat her bare body with a rawhide whip until blood ran. When she complained to her master—the local minister—he beat her with a chair.

The following week Mister Bingham attacked her again. She fought him off by biting his finger, so he beat her bloody with a stick.

The following week the schoolmaster attacked her again and she fought. He beat her bloody but then broke down in tears and confessed that beating her was a sin. Afterwards he would never beat her or another ‘servant’ again.

After the schoolteacher lost the stomach to beat her, her owner, the minister, cut an oak club at the woodpile and beat her with it. Elizabeth fought the minister, but God’s earthly advocate ‘proved stronger’ than the lowly slave girl, and she was beaten so badly that she could not walk for five days. The beating was so savage, however, that her white trash mistress [who had arranged the beatings out of jealousy for Elizabeth’s appearance, as she was ‘regarded as fair-looking for one of my race’] pleaded with her husband not to beat her again.

The bitch was probably afraid he would kill the woman who did all of the work and that she’d have to get her hands dirty. According to Elizabeth the town of Hillsboro was scandalized by her treatment, though she does not state whether the neighbors disapproved of the punishments, or simply the fact that it took two armed men to finally beat one petite woman into submission. After reading other accounts from North Carolina, I’m guessing that the locals lost respect for the Burwell’s based on their inability to break Elizabeth’s spirit, and their poverty, attested to by their unwillingness to kill the back-talking slave girl.

The Burwells might have lost the stomach for beating Elizabeth. But there was more cruelty to come. The minister and his wife arranged for her to be raped by a man who to her was so detestable that she wrote, “I spare the world his name”. For four years Elizabeth was pimped out to this man, who impregnated her. Elizabeth declined to give any humiliating details about her use as a sex slave. She had this to say about the results of the experience, “…the child of which he was the father was the only child I ever brought into the world. If my poor boy ever suffered any humiliating pangs on account of his birth, he could not blame his mother, for God knows that she did not wish to give him life; he must blame the edicts of the society which determined it no crime to undermine the virtue of girls in my position.”

Elizabeth Keckley went on to be a successful seamstress, being the personal dress maker to the wives of the two most powerful [and in my opinion most evil] men of 19th Century America, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. Her son was killed fighting for the Union. After writing her book she was persecuted by the Lincolns, the press, and black leaders. She would eventually die in 1907 in poverty in a house for the destitute that she had founded.

*No wonder the South did so well battle-for-battle in the Civil War. Every second slave owner seemed to be an officer decades before the war began. The need to suppress and recover slaves obviously called for a paramilitary society. Also note that Elizabeth referred to herself and other chattel as both a servant and slave. A close reading of black slave narratives makes it clear that whites were being enslaved under the term ‘servant’ up until the 1830s.

If the reader is surprised that Abraham Lincoln’s survivors persecuted former slave Elizabeth Keckley for having the audacity to relate aspects of her service to Mary Todd Lincoln in her book Behind the Scenes [which reflected positively on the Lincolns] then you might want to consider the American Christ’s own words about the suitability of African American opinion.

“I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people….”

If one looks at Washington D.C. monumental iconography as an anthropologist, then it is obvious that The Lincoln Memorial is the temple of a God—a deified autocrat on the Imperial Roman model. Elizabeth failed to worship her society’s martyred god-emperor, and paid the apostate’s price; her words stricken from the record, and her body and soul cast out among the wretched.

“The farm on the other side of us belonged to a man named Wilkerson; he had seventy five or a hundred slaves, and he, also was a cruel man. Every day, in going for the cows I would have to pass his farm. I heard him say to one of the rail splitters, ‘if you don’t have your task of rails split tomorrow I will hit you one hundred lashes.’ The man told him he was doing all he could do and would die before he would take a single lick. I made it my business the next day to go after the cows about the time for him to go out; I saw him and four or five other men; he asked the rail splitter if he had his task completed. The man answered in the negative; he then ordered him to pull off his shirt, which the man did, then tied his pants around his waist with his suspenders. The reason the slaves would so readily pull off their shirts was so they could not easily hold them by, their flesh being moist they could not easily hold them. When his master told him to cross his hands he began to fight, knocking white men down as fast as they could come to him. Finally they made five or six other rail splitters, working near by, help take him. There were saw-logs from five to six feet through, all round; some of the colored men caught him by the head and hands, while others had hold of his feet, and they bent him back over one of the saw-logs while he was fighting and cursing. His master seized the maul, which the man had been using to split rails with, and struck him across the abdomen; bent over in the position he was the lick sounded like a pop-gun, and the man’s intestines ran out, and he died across the log; murdered because he could not perform the task imposed on him.”

Throughout history and under the American chattel system most slaves have chosen not to escape, not to resist, not to fight, and not to defend their fellow slaves. Horizontal compliance has always been an effective means of controlling human behavior. It is currently called peer pressure.

Throughout history and under the American chattel system most slaves have chosen to discourage fellow slaves from escaping, resisting, and fighting, often serving as informants against plotting slaves.

“The next morning after I was sold they brought a man to the traders’ pen to be whipped.”

“This man would not allow the overseer to whip him. He had chains on him that looked as though they were welded on. They took him upstairs in the big building where there were about seven or eight hundred men, women and children. It was about noon and they left him handcuffed while they went to dinner. He explained to us why they were about to whip him. He had gone to church without a pass on two occasions and refused to allow his master to whip him for so doing. His master declared he would whip him or kill him. They took his irons off and ordered him to strip himself of all of his clothing. He promptly did so. His master said, ‘you might just as well have done this at home and you might have gotten off with a few hundred lashes.' But to their surprise, when they told him to lie down, he began to knock men down right and left, with his feet and hands. Many went down before him. Then they picked out ten or twelve strong colored men, made them run in upon him, and though he knocked many of them down they were too many for him, so they overpowered him, and with straps fastened him taut upon the floor to six strong rings. These rings were arranged in two rows of three rings each, opposite each other and covering a space something over six feet in length.”

“Then his master, with four or five other men, came up to see him whipped, one man with his tally book, and a negro with his black snake whip and paddle; they brought their demijohn of whiskey, each one taking a drink before they began their bloody work. They even gave the negro who was compelled to do the whipping, a drink. After they were well drunk the whipping began. One man would count out until he counted nine, then with the tenth he would cry ‘tally’. When the whipping first began he would not say a word, but after a while as they cut his back all to pieces, he would cry out, “pray master,” and in this way he pleaded for mercy until he grew so weak he could not utter a word. They gave him three hundred lashes, then washed his back with salt water and paddled it with a leather paddle about the size of a man’s hand, with six holes in it. [The paddles that Pennsylvania school teachers beat children with in the 1970s were ventilated with holes to increase the sting.] As they paddled him it sounded as a dead thud; you could hardly hear him grunt as each lick fell upon him. He was whipped from head to foot, and the floor where he was lying was a pool of blood when the brutal work was ended. His master congratulated the negro whipping master for the way he accomplished his part of the work, gave him another big drink of whiskey and ordered him to untie the man.”

“They all went down stairs and the other colored people who were in the room put the man’s clothing on him. This was late in the afternoon. The next morning when I awoke I saw the men and women kneeling around in a circle, praying, groaning, and crying. I walked up and looked to see what the trouble was, and I found the man they had whipped the day before cold in death. He was swollen so that his clothing had bursted off. A jury of white men came up and held a mock inquest. I never heard what the verdict was. The colored men came with a mule cart, rolled him up in a sheet and took him to his last resting place.”

If the above account strikes you as a matter of race, than your mind has been properly prepared for servitude. The above was about power, plain and simple. Between a half dozen and a dozen white men and 13 black men subdued and beat to death a single black man while at least 200 black men looked on. That was twenty two one with two hundred looking on; using a small group to control a large group by punishing and killing an individual. In this way, since the dawn of civilization, we have been threatened with the peril of being human, so that we will instead be a component of a manageable social organism; a group.

“At the end of three weeks the gang of three hundred and fifty was made up and we were chained and started for Richmond, Virginia. In this gang was a woman named Fannie Woods. She had two children, the oldest about eight years, the other a nursing baby. She was not handcuffed as the others were, but tied above the elbow so she could lift the nursing baby in her arms. She led the older one by the hand. The first half of the day the little boy kept up pretty well; after that he became a hindrance in the march. [The daily march was fifteen hours. Even at a crawl this is 10 miles longer than the 18-mile daily march of a Roman Legion.]

“The trader came back several times and ordered her to keep up. She told him she was doing the best she could. He threatened each time to whip her if she did not keep up, and finally he ordered a negro, a strong muscular man six feet in height, who went along to give us water and help drive, to untie her, made her give the baby to another woman, then ordered her to take off her waist. They buckled a strap around each wrist and strapped her to a large pine tree less than ten feet from the rest of us, and with the black snake whip [favored over cowhide by overseers in the Wilmington area] the colored man was made to hit her fifty lashes on her bare back. The blood ran down as water but she never uttered a sound. She was ordered to put on her waist. They retired her and told her to see if they could keep up.

“After a few miles farther they sold the little boy she was leading to a man along the way. I heard the wails of the mother and the mourning of the other slaves on account of her sorrow, and heard the gruff voice of the trader as he ordered them to shut up. We marched until nine or ten o’clock, when we came to a boarding house that was kept especially for the accommodation of negro traders. This was a large log house of one room, about eighteen by twenty feet [That’s 350 people in a fast food joint, or ten times comfortable.], with staples driven in all around the room and handcuffs attached to chains about four feet long. They would handcuff two or three slaves to each chain. In the summer they had nothing but the bare floor to lie upon; in the winter straw was put on the floor. There was a very large fireplace in the room.

“We stopped at the boarding house. This was our first night’s stop after leaving Wilmington. The keeper of the boarding house tried to buy Fannie Wood’s baby, but there was a disagreement regarding the price. About five next morning we started on. When we had gone about a half mile a colored boy came running down the road with a message from his master, and we were halted until his master came bringing a colored woman with him, and he bought the baby out of Fannie Wood’s arms. As the colored woman was ordered to take it away I heard Fannie woods cry, ‘Oh God, I would rather hear the clods fall on the coffin lid of my child than to hear its cries because it is taken from me.’ She said, ‘good bye, child.’ We were ordered to move on, and could hear the crying of the child in the distance as it was borne away by the other woman, and I could hear the deep sobs of a broken hearted mother…

“We marched all day, and the second and third nights we stopped at the same kind of place as the first night. They were buying and selling all along the way, so when we reached Richmond about ten o’clock the fourth night, there were about four hundred and fifty of us, footsore, hungry and broken hearted…

“…The next morning…After our toilets were completed we were ordered into a little ten by twelve room; we went in, ten or twelve at once. There were five or six ladies in the gang I went in with. The traders, forgetting the sadness of their own mothers and sisters, paid no respect to us, but compelled each one of us to undress, so as to see if we were sound and healthy. I heard Fannie Woods as she pleaded to be exempt from this exposure. They gave her to understand that they would have her hit one hundred lashes if she did not get her clothes off at once. She still refused, and when they tried to take them off by force, fought them until they finally left them alone.”

Nothing else is known of the fate of Fannie Woods.

Also, note the paramilitary nature of slave trading.

Thomas was born in 1806 in Wilmington North Carolina near Cape Fear. He was owned by a certain Mister Jones. Mrs. Jones complained that Thomas was not eager enough to serve, so Mister Jones employed him as a clerk in his store. He swept the floor, prepared the goods for the day’s business, and hauled salt and sugar and other commodities for customers. His age is unclear, though he was certainly not yet into puberty.

The store was run by a Mister David Cogdell. Mister C. was kind to Thomas and other slaves. This earned him the ire of Mister Jones, who dismissed him. Mister Jones did not, however, have the patience and industry to work in the store, and soon removed himself, hiring a white boy named James Dixon to run it. James was learning how to read through a book. While he and Thomas did not get along, Thomas learned, through James’ boasting, that learning to read was the key to a fruitful life of ease, rather than one of drudgery like Thomas was destined to lead.

From that point on Thomas devoted himself to learning how to read. This involved many adventures, and eventually a strong interest in Christianity, centered as the services were upon a book. Thomas wished to elevate himself above the status of a ‘despised and desolate bondsman.’ He referred to his spelling book as ‘my constant friend’. He was tireless in his attempts to learn to read and write and his attendance at church meetings, called ‘The Love Feast’.

These transgressions brought down the wrath of Mister Jones.

His first beating ran to 90 lashes. His back was cut so bad that his coarse shirt caused him constant pain and had to be extracted from the wounds in his back, by being ‘ripped off’, causing him more pain than the actual whipping.

He was whipped again for ‘church-going’ with a whip that was still clotted with old blood when it was taken down to discipline him.

Again Thomas was whipped for going to church, and still he persisted with his desire to join in the ‘Love Feast’, despite the fact that ‘patrollers’ would attack the churchgoers.

Mister Jones finally tried to break Thomas with a whipping that brought him nearly to death, forbidding him to pray or go to church. Mister Jones was scolded by his wife for the savage beating and she saw to Thomas’ care. But Thomas still kept praying.

Mister Jones told Thomas that he would whip him again if he prayed and went to church. Thomas persisted with his belief in Jesus and told Mister Jones that he still wanted to go to heaven. He was whipped again for this back-talking and forbidden, on pain of more whippings, to pray or go to church.

Mister Jones found out from white friends that Thomas had gone to church again. The white men interceded on his behalf and reprimanded Mister Jones, a Mister McCauslin even stating that Christians made better slaves. Mister Jones persisted with the worst whipping yet, telling Thomas, “I swear that I will whip you to death.”

Thomas indicated that he would keep praying until he was whipped to death. Mister Jones then whipped him again—and then lost the stomach for it.

Mister Jones did not whip Thomas again. Thomas would go on to make enough money as a dockhand to buy a wife, raise a family, and pay for the freedom of his elderly parents. In 1848 he shipped his family north. A year later he finally made his escape, and wrote about his experiences in his book Experience of Uncle Tom Jones Who Was a Slave for Forty-three Years.