"THE SLAVE HAS SPOKEN FOR HIMSELF": The Slave Narrative as Historiographical Lens

[Editor's Note 1: As one certainly has noticed, in the previous months there has been a regrettable slowdown in the content provided by the site. Time management in and of itself is worthy of its own post, but needless to say, the busyness of our final semesters of coursework have diverted attention from posting on the website. Hopefully it has been some consolation to everyone that our Twitter account has remained relatively up-to-date.]

[Editor's Note 2: In lieu of the exciting news that 12 Years a Slave, the film adaptation of Solomon Northrup's 1853 slave narrative, won the Oscar for the Best Picture of the Year, I'd like to offer a suggestion as to how these rich resources - a number of which can be found at UNC's Documenting the South database - maybe be used for historiographical purposes.] 

William L. Sheppard, "The First Cotton Gin," 19th cent.

Peter Wood once admitted to anxiety regarding his source base when he began his research on slavery in colonial South Carolina. Bracing himself for the possibility that what was necessary for his work may “scarcely” exist, Wood instead discovered that slave voices proved “more than ample” through myriad primary sources.[1] Often, studying slavery requires a large mount of reading in the lines, such as utilizing the records of the Royal African Company to illuminate the morbid nature of the Middle Passage for saltwater slaves and examining probate records to gauge the economic optimism owners viewed the reproductive capabilities of their female human property.[2] Most valuable to historians, though, are the narratives left by escaped or emancipated former slaves who detailed their experiences whilst in the throes of the peculiar institution. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a close reading of a slave narrative – in this case, the narrative of James Williams – can act as a historiographical lens to recent scholarship on American slavery.

James Williams’ Narrative detailing his life as a slave – originally in Virginia and later in Alabama – was disseminated by the American Anti-Slavery Association (AASS) in 1838. Williams, the son of a saltwater father and a mother rumored to be the daughter of a plantation owner, escaped from bondage, running away to Pennsylvania and ultimately Great Britain.[3] Although the AASS commenced a concerted Southern print campaign in 1835, Southerners did not constitute the Narrative’s target audience. The AASS sought to enlighten Northern minds about the unique cruelties of American slavery.[4] “We have not studied the dreadful economy of the cotton plantation,” lamented the AASS editors, “and know but little of the secrets of its unlimited despotism” (xx). While slavery as an institution dwindled during the nineteenth century in the North, racism persisted, and the editors believed presenting “an unexaggerated picture of slavery” might appeal to sensibilities of Christian charity.[5]

While James Williams was not a victim of the internal slave trade, he still experienced a similar diasporic ordeal similar to the poor souls forced to matriculate westward from the Upper South.[6] In the summer of 1833, Williams’ master George Larrimore moved his slaves from this plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia to new land purchased in Alabama. On arrival in the Deep South, Williams was selected as the plantation’s driver, “with orders to apply the whip unsparingly to everyone, whether man or woman, who faltered in the task” of picking cotton (43). The overseer under which Williams labored, a cruel man named Huckstep, gratuitously used the bullwhip, “the universal equivalent by which the system of converting pain to production could be measured.”[7] The ability to parcel pain to other slaves accentuated the unique place of the driver within the plantation regime; in the words of the late Eugene Genovese, “They were the men in between.”[8] Williams’ position of limbo is best illustrated by the jealous and angry reactions displayed by the loved ones of those he is forced to punish. Williams’ own brutal whipping – an “agony” that “seemed to cut to [his] very heart” – at the hands of Huckstep resulted from a slave “indignant that his wife should be whipped” after Williams spared punishment from another field hand named Sarah (66-7). Instances of disciplinary brutality constituted jarring interruptions to the “gloomy monotony” of fieldwork, itself another “forms of extended, repetitive torture” (53).[9] The rhythm of the planting season dictated James Williams’ existence, as well as those of the slaves under his supervision.[10]

In addition to demonstrating the wanton nature of plantation life, the episode of James Williams’ whipping also serves as an example of slave resistance. In an act of compassion, Williams refused to whip a pregnant slave named Sarah. Williams shrewdly waited until Huckstep had turned his back to feign the lashing. “I struck at the tree instead of the woman,” Williams explained, “who, understanding my object, shrieked as if the whip at every blow was cutting into her flesh” (66). Resistance within the plantation system took other forms as well. A mountainous slave named Big Harry refused to cow to Huckstep’s efforts at intimidation. Demanding punishment, Huckstep once instructed Harry to “put down his hoe and come to him” Williams recounts Harry’s refusal and how the slave “swore he would kill the first man who tried to lay hands on him.” In response, Huckstep “shrunk away from this enraged bondsmen” (57).

Escape proved the most blatant expression of resistance. Williams’ decision to run away was unplanned; only after neighboring overseers convinced Huckstep to intensify his already dreadful treatment of Williams was the decision of flight made. “I ran as far as I could for the woods,” Williams stated, fleeing to a rival geography of brush, trees, cane, and vines.[11] Williams’ pursuers deployed “weaponized dogs” to capture the runaway. “The deep bay of bloodhound” filled Williams with fear, but fortuitously the dogs had previously been used by the driver, and did not attack him (84).[12] “The very creatures whom a moment before I had feared would tear me limb from limb,” Williams recalled, “were now leaping and licking my hands, and rolling on the leaves around me” (86). After dispatching the dogs to hunt deer, Williams found aid from natives in Creek country, remarkable luck considering that by the nineteenth century, Native Americans participated in slave captive taking as “an economic pursuit.”[13]After passing into Georgia, a hunter spotted Williams and raised an alarm. White Southerners considered runaway slaves dangerous, capable at any moment of stirring their bonded brethren to revolt, or worse, revolution akin to what occurred in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century.[14] In his efforts to evade capture by the hunter, Williams reentered Alabama, “travelling away from freedom” (92). Following the North Star, William again made for the North, finding his way to Augusta, swimming across the Savannah River into South Carolina, traversing the Carolina piedmont, through the Blue Ridge mountains into Virginia, eventually stopping for a month in Richmond, around 50 miles from the plantation he was born on in Powhatan County. This leg of Williams’ journey took, by his estimation, between two and three months, during which he sustained himself on nothing but peaches and apples. From Richmond, Williams continued north, swimming across a half-frozen Shenandoah River into Maryland before finally reaching Pennsylvania – and freedom – on December 5, 1837.

Williams’ month-long stay in Richmond also speaks to the importance of slave communities. Williams sought out an old friend from his early years in Charlottesville to avoid being recognized as a runaway because of his disheveled appearance. Neighbors often provided help to runaways in various forms: “food, shelter, intelligence about where to hide or who was hunting them.”[15] Escapes such as Williams’ rarely succeeded without “substantial help” from other slaves.[16]

The experiences and observations presented by Williams prove stereotypical of most slave communities: the role of religion, kinship networks’ wide dispersal, and gendered responsibilities within slave communities.  Slave Christianity served as a coping mechanism for the ordeals of slavery; not surprisingly, black preachers like Uncle Solomon acted as community leaders.[17] Indeed, Uncle Solomon’s faith buoyed the hopes of slavery’s demise. “The Bible said so,” William recorded Solomon’s reassurances, “there would be no more whippings and fighting, but the loin and the lamb would lie down together and all would be love” (74). Before being moved to Virginia, Williams married, yet he and his wife lived on different plantations. “Marriage held out a promise of permanence,” and Williams never gave up hope of returning to his family. When his escape leads him to close proximity to his family, Williams anguishes over the fact he cannot reach out to them, because of “the dread of being discovered” (96). Lastly, Williams took note of slave women’s second shift, the reality that “nighttime was less neatly ‘off’ time for bondwomen than for men.”[18] Not only did women participate in fieldwork, they also, according to Williams, “were compelled to card, spin and weave cotton for their clothing in the evening” (47).[19]

While the Narrative of James Williams fails to offer insight about the complicated legal status of slaves as well as any extensive commentary regarding slave healing practices – shocking when one considers the gratuitous violence included in the narrative – Williams’ work not only serves as a testament to the human spirit, but also an excellent lens by which to examine historiographical themes of plantation life, resistance, and community.[20] “What it is to be a slave!” Williams exclaims in the conclusion to his narrative. Thanks to his words, historians are closer to understanding exactly that (99).

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[1] Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1996), xv-xvii. James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838), xix. Hereafter, citations taken from the slave narrative will be recorded parenthetically.

[2] Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

[3] Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 7. On master-slave sexual relation, see Stephanie H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

[4] David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3

[5] Joanna Pope Melish argues that “New England whites ‘racialized’ themselves and people of color by emancipation and post-Revolutionary dislocation in their own region.” See, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 5-6. See also, Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998), 228-55.

[6] Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 26.

[7] Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dream: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013), 174.

[8] Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 379.

[9] Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 173.

[10] Kaye, Joining Places, 44-6.

[11] Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7.

[12] Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 235.

[13] Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 247.

[14] On Haiti, refer to Laurent DuBois, Avengers of the New World: The story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004). On slave insurrections, and fear thereof, see Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 46-72 and Wood, Black Majority, 308-26.

[15] Kaye, Joining Places, 135.

[16] Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 654.

[17] Ibid, 255-79.

[18] Camp, Closer to Freedom, 80.

[19] Morgan, Laboring Women, 146-65.

[20] Ariela Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).