My Bondage and My Freedom
Col. Lloyd’s plantation, in _form_ the slave of Master Hugh, 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
his death, my old master himself died, leaving only his son, Andrew,
and his daughter, Lucretia, to share his estate. The old man died while
on a visit to his daughter, in Hillsborough, where Capt. Auld and Mrs.
Lucretia now lived. The former, having given up the command of Col.
Lloyd’s sloop, was now keeping a store in that town.
Cut off, thus unexpectedly, Capt. Anthony died intestate; and his
property must now be equally divided between his two children, Andrew
and Lucretia.
The valuation and the division of slaves, among contending heirs, is an
important incident in slave life. The character and tendencies of the
heirs, are generally well understood among the slaves who are to be
divided, and all have their aversions and preferences. But, neither
their aversions nor their preferences avail them 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, which,
after that of my grandmother, was the most endeared to me. But, the
whole thing, as a feature of slavery, shocked me. It furnished me anew
insight into the unnatural power to which I was subjected. My
detestation of slavery, already great, rose with this new conception of
its enormity.
That was a sad day for me, a sad day for little Tommy, and a sad day
for my dear Baltimore mistress and teacher, when I left for the Eastern
Shore, to be valued and divided. We, all three, wept bitterly that day;
for we might be parting, and we feared we were parting, forever. No one
could tell among which pile of chattels I should be flung. Thus early,
I got a foretaste of that painful uncertainty which slavery brings to
the ordinary lot of mortals. Sickness, adversity and death may
interfere with the plans and purposes of all; but the slave has the
added danger of changing homes, changing hands, and of having
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 intellectual beings, in open
contempt of their humanity, level 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
slaves! How vividly, at that moment, did the brutalizing power of
slavery flash before me! Personality swallowed up in the sordid idea of
property! Manhood lost in chattelhood!
After the valuation, then came the division. This was an hour of high
excitement and distressing anxiety. Our destiny was now 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 haymow. One word from
the appraisers, against all preferences or prayers, was enough to
sunder all the ties of friendship and affection, and even to separate
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 the dread of separation, most painful to the majority
of the slaves, we all had a decided horror of the thought of falling
into the hands of Master Andrew. He was distinguished for cruelty and
intemperance.
Slaves generally dread to fall into the hands of drunken owners. Master
Andrew was almost a confirmed sot, and had already, by his reckless
mismanagement and profligate dissipation, wasted a large portion of old
master’s property. To fall into his hands, was, therefore, considered
merely as the first step toward being sold away to the far south. He
would spend his fortune in a few years, and his farms and slaves would
be sold, we thought, at public outcry; and we should be hurried away to
the cotton fields, and rice swamps, of the sunny south. This was the
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 have
the slaves. Their freedom to go and come, to be here and there, as they
list, prevents any extravagant attachment to any one particular place,
in their case. On the other hand, the slave is a fixture; he has no
choice, no goal, no destination; but is pegged down to a single spot,
and must take root here, or nowhere. The idea of removal elsewhere,
comes, generally, in the shape of a threat, and in punishment of crime.
It is, therefore, attended with fear and dread. A slave seldom thinks
of bettering his condition by being sold, and hence he looks upon
separation from his native place, with none of 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 intend to rise to
wealth and distinction. Nor can those from whom they separate, give
them up with 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 there is, at least, the hope of reunion, because
reunion is _possible_. But, with the slave, all these mitigating
circumstances are wanting. There is no improvement in his condition
_probable_,—no correspondence _possible_,—no reunion attainable. His
going out into the world, is 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 reign of Mr. Plummer’s
rule. The overseer had written his character on the living parchment of
most of their backs, and left them callous; my back (thanks to my early
removal from the plantation to Baltimore) was yet tender. I had left a
kind mistress at Baltimore, who was almost a mother to me. She was in
tears when we parted, and the probabilities of ever seeing her again,
trembling in the balance as they did, could not be viewed without alarm
and agony. The thought of leaving that kind mistress forever, and,
worse still, of being the slave of Andrew Anthony—a man who, but a few
days before the division of the property, 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. This cruelty, too, was of a piece
with his general character. After inflicting his heavy blows on my
brother, on observing me looking at him with intense astonishment, he
said, “_That_ is the way I will serve you, one of these days;” meaning,
no doubt, when I should come into his possession. This threat, the
reader may well suppose, was not very tranquilizing to my feelings. I
could see that he really thirsted to get hold of me. But I was there
only for a few days. I had not received any orders, and had violated
none, and there was, therefore, no excuse for flogging me.
At last, the anxiety and suspense were ended; and they 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, when the savage
Aunt Katy was adding to my sufferings her bitterest maledictions.
Capt. Thomas Auld and Mrs. Lucretia at once decided on my return to
Baltimore. They knew how sincerely and warmly Mrs. Hugh Auld was
attached to me, and how delighted Mr. Hugh’s son would be to have me
back; and, withal, having no immediate use for one so young, they
willingly let me off to Baltimore.
I need not stop here to narrate my joy on returning to Baltimore, nor
that of little Tommy; nor the tearful joy of his mother; nor the
evident saticfaction(sic) of Master Hugh. I was just one month absent
from Baltimore, before the matter was decided; and the time really
seemed full six months.
One trouble over, and on comes another. The slave’s life is full of
uncertainty. I had returned to Baltimore but a short time, when the
tidings reached me, that my friend, Mrs. Lucretia, who was only second
in my regard to Mrs. Hugh Auld, was dead, leaving her husband and only
one child—a daughter, named Amanda.
Shortly after the death of Mrs. Lucretia, strange to say, Master Andrew
died, leaving his wife and one child. Thus, the whole family of
Anthonys was swept away; only two children remained. All this happened
within five years of my leaving Col. Lloyd’s.
No alteration took place in the condition of the slaves, in consequence
of these deaths, yet I could not help feeling less secure, after the
death of my friend, Mrs. Lucretia, than I had done during her life.
While she lived, I felt that I had a strong friend to plead for me in
any emergency. Ten years ago, while speaking of the state of things in
our family, after the events just named, 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 youngest to
oldest. If any one thing in my experience, more than another, 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 infancy,
attended him in 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 left 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 and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now
very old, having outlived my old master and all his children, having
seen the beginning and end of all of them, and her present owners
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, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put
up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of
supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning
her out to die! If my poor old grandmother now lives, she lives to
suffer in utter loneliness; 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 the slave’s poet,
Whittier—
Gone, gone, sold and gone,