The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 16
It is the lot of the slave, to be exposed, in common with other men, to all the calamities of chance and all the caprices of fortune. But unlike other men, he is denied the consolation of struggling against them. He is bound hand and foot; and his sufferings are aggravated ten fold, by the bitter idea that he is not allowed to help himself, or to make any attempt to escape the blow, which he sees impending over him. "This idea of utter helplessness, is one-of the most distressing in nature; it is twin-sister to Despair.
Major Thornton, by over exertion and imprudent exposure, brought on a fever, which in a short time, assumed a very unfavorable aspect. It was the first,time he had been sick for many years. The alarm and even terror, which the news of his danger excited at Oakland, was very great. Every morning and evening, we collected about the house to learn how our master did; and mournful were the faces, and sad the hearts, with which we heard the. bitter words, "no better." "The women, at Oakland, had always been treated with peculiar indulgence, such as their sex and weakness demands, — but demands so often without obtaining it. Major Thornton's illness gave an instance how full of gratitude is the female heart, and at what a trifling expense, one may purchase its most zealous affection. All the women on the place, were anxious to be employed, in some way, in ministering to the comfort of their suffering master. The most disagreeable duties were eagerly. performed; and if ever man was tenderly and assiduously nursed, it was major Thornton. But all this care, all our sympathy, our sorrow and our terrors, were of no effect. The. fever raged with unabated fury, and seemed to find new fuel in the strength of the patient's ‘constitution. But that fuel was soon exhausted; and in ten days, our master was no more.
When his decease became known, we looked upon each other in silent consternation. A family of helpless orphans, from whom death had just snatched their last surviving parent, could not have felt a greater destitution. Tears rolled down the cheeks of the men; and the lamentations of the women were violent and wild. His old nurse, in particular, wept, and would not listen to any consolation. She had good reason. At his father's death she had been sold, with the other property, to satisfy the creditors. But major Thornton had re-purchased her, out of his very first earnings; he had made her the head-servant of his household, and had always treated her with great tenderness. The old woman loved him like her own child, and lamented her "dear son Charley," as she called him, with all the pathetic energy of a widowed and childless mother. We all attended the funeral, and followed our dead master to the grave. The hollow sound of the earth as it fell upon the coffin, was echoed back from every bosom; and when this last sad office was finished, we. stood over the spot, and wept together. Doubt not the sincerity of our sorrow! It was for ourselves we were lamenting. Major Thornton was never married; and he left no children whose rights the laws acknowledged. If he had intended to make a will, his sudden' death prevented him; and his property passed to a troop of cousins for whom, I suspect, he did not entertain any great affection. At all events, I had never seen any of them at Oakland, nor could I learn from the other servants, that either of them had ever made a visit there. It was thus that we became the property of strangers, who had never seen us, and whom we had never seen.
These heirs-at-law were poor as well as numerous, and seemed very eager to turn all the property into money, so as to get their several shares with the least possible delay. An order of court, or whatever the legal process might be called, was soon obtained; and the sale of the slaves was advertized to take place at the county court-house. The agent to whom the care of the estate was intrusted, made the necessary preparations. Of course, it was not thought expedient that we should know what was going on, or what our new owners intended to do with us. The secret was carefully kept lest some of us should run away.
The day before that which had been appointed for the sale, we were collected together. The able bodied men and women were handcuffed and chained in a string. A few old grey headed people and the younger children were carried in a cart. The rest of us were driven along like cattle — men, women and children together. Three fellows on horseback, with the usual equipment of long whips, served at once, as guards and drivers.
I shall not attempt to describe our affliction. It would be but the repetition of an oft-told tale. Who has not read of slave-traders on the coast of Africa? Whose heart ‘has not ached at picturing the terrors and despair of the kidnapped victims? Our case was much the same. Many of us had been born and reared at Oakland, and all looked upon it as a home, — nay more, as a city of refuge, where we had always been safe from gratuitous insults and aggressions. From this home, we were now snatched away, without a moment's warning; and were driven chained to the slave-market to be sold to the highest bidder.
Is it strange that we were reluctant to go? Had: we been setting out, of our own accord, to seek our fortunes, we could not have broken, all at once, all the ties that bound us to Oakland, without some throbs of natural grief What then, must have been our anguish to leave it as we did?
But the tears of the men, the sobs of the women, and the cries and terrors of the poor children, availed us nothing. Our conductors cracked their whips, and made a jest of our lamentations, Our sorrowful procession moved slowly on; and many a sad lingering look, we cast behind us. We said nothing; and our melancholy reflections were only interrupted by the curses, shouts, and loud laughter of our drivers.
We lodged, that night, by the road side; our drivers sleeping and keeping watch by turns. The next day, we _ reached the county court-house, and at the appointed hour, the sale began. The company was not very numerous, and the bidders seemed extremely shy. Many of our late master's neighbors were present. One of them remarked that several of us were fine stout fellows, but, for his part, he should be afraid to buy any of the Thornton hands, for we had been so spoiled by our late master's foolish indulgence, that one of us would be enough to spread discontent through a whole neighborhood. This speech was ‘received with evident applause, and it had its intended effect. The auctioneer did his best, and harangued most eloquently upon our healthy, sound and plump condition. "As to the overindulgence, that gentleman speaks about," he added, "a good cow-hide and strict discipline will soon bring them into proper subordination; — and from what I have heard of that gentleman's own management, he is the very person who ought to buy them." A slight titter ran through the company, at this sally of the auctioneer's, but it did not seem to make the bidding much brisker. We went off at very moderate prices. Most of the younger men and women, and a large proportion of the children were bought by a slave-trader, who had come on purpose to attend the sale. It was very difficult to get a bid for several of the old people. Mr Thornton's nurse, who, as I have mentioned, had been his house-keeper, and a person of no little consequence at Oakland, was knocked off for twenty dollars. She was bought by an old fellow, well known in the neighborhood for his cruelty to his servants. He shook his head as the auctioneer's hammer struck the table, grinned a significant smile, and said he believed the girl was yet able to handle a hoe; — any how, he would get one summer's work out of her. The old lady had scarcely held up her head since the death of her master; but she forgot all her sorrows, she forgot even to deplore the lot that seemed to await her, in her anger at being sold at so small a price. She turned to her purchaser, and with an indignant air, told him that she was both younger and stronger than folks thought for, and assured him that he had made the best bargain of any of the company. The old fellow chuckled, but said nothing. It was easy to read his thoughts. He was evidently resolving to hold the old woman to her word.
Some of the old and decrepit slaves could not be sold at all. They were not worth purchasing, and nobody would take an offer. I do not know what became of them.
The slave-dealer who had purchased most of the children, declined buying such of the mothers as were past the age of child-bearing. The parting of these mothers from their children, was a new scene of misery and lamentation. The poor things, snatched a little while before, from the home of their birth and their infancy, and now, torn from the mothers that bore and nursed them, clasped their little hands, and shrieked with all the unrestrained vehemence of infant agony. The mothers wept too; but their grief was more subdued. There was one old woman, the mother, she said, of fifteen children. One little girl, about ten or twelve years old, was all that remained to her. The others had been sold and scattered, she knew not whither. She was now to part from her youngest and only remaining child. The little girl clung to her mother's dress with all the terror of one who was about to be kidnapped, and her screams and cries might have touched a heart of stone. Her new master snatched the child away, hit her a cut with his whip, and bade her hold her "cursed clatter." A slave-trader, however he may have the exterior of a gentleman, is in fact, the same ferocious barbarian, whether on the coast of Guinea, or in the heart of the ‘Ancient Dominion.'
When our new master had completed his purchases, he prepared to set out with his drove. He was one of a 
The drove was presently put in motion. Our purchasers, with two or three assistants, rode beside us on horseback, armed with whips, as usual. The journey was slow, sad and wearisome. We travelled without any good will; the poor children harassed with the weight of their chains, and unaccustomed to fatigue; and all of us, faint for want of food; — for our new master was an economist, who spent as little on the road, as possible.:
I will not dwell upon the tedious monotony of our sufferings and our journey. Suffice it to say, that after travelling for several days, we crossed the noble and wide-spreading Potomac, and late at night, began to enter the federal city. Perhaps I ought to say, the place where the federal city was to be, — for Washington, at that time, seemed only a straggling village, scattered over a wide extent of ground, and interspersed with deserted fields, overgrown with bushes. There were some indications however, of the future metropolis. The Capitol, though unfinished, was rearing its spacious walls in the moonlight, and gave promise of a magnificent edifice. Lights gleamed from the windows. The Congress perhaps was in session. I gazed at the building with no little emotion. "This," said I to myself, "is the head quarters of a great nation, the spot in which its concentrated wisdom is collected, to devise laws for the benefit of the whole community, — the just and equal laws of a free people and a great democracy!" — I was going on with this mental soliloquy, when the iron collar about my neck touched a place from which it had rubbed the skin; and as I started with the pain, the rattling of chains reminded me, that these just and equal laws of a free people and a great democracy' did not avail to rescue a million[1] of bondmen from hopeless servitude; and the cracking of our drivers' whips told too plainly that within a stone's throw of the Temple of Liberty — nay, under its very porticos — the most brutal, odious and detestable tyranny found none to rebuke, or to forbid it. What sort of liberty is it whose chosen city is a slave-market? — and what that freedom, which permits the bravado insolence of a slave-trading aristocracy to lord it in the very halls of her legislation?
We passed up the street which led by the Capitol, and presently arrived at the establishment of Savage, Brothers & Co, our new masters. Half an acre of ground, more or less, was enclosed with a wall some twelve feet high, well armed at the top, with iron spikes and pieces of broken bottles. In the centre of the enclosure, was a low brick building of no great size, with a few narrow, grated windows, and a stout door, well secured with bars and pad-.locks. This was the establishment used by Messrs Savage, Brothers & Co as a ware-house, in which they stowed _ away such slaves, as they purchased from time to time, in the neighboring country, to be kept till they were ready to send them off in droves, or to ship them to the South. In common with all the slave-trading gentry, Messrs Savage, Brothers & Co had the free use of the city prison; but this was not large enough for the scale on which they carried on operations; so they had built a prison of their own. It was under the management of a regular jailer, and was very much like any other jail. The slaves were allowed the liberty of the yard during the day time; but at sunset, they were all locked up promiscuously in the prison. . This was small and ill-ventilated; and the number that was forced: into it, was sometimes very great. While I was confined there, the heat and stench were often intolerable; and many a morning, I came out of it, with a burning thirst and a high fever.
The states of Maryland and Virginia claim the honor of having exerted themselves for the abolition of the African slave-trade. It is true they were favorable to that measure, — and they had good reasons of their own for being so. They gained the credit of humanity, by the same vote that secured them the monopoly of a domestic trade in slaves, which bids fair to rival any traffic ever prosecuted on the coast of Africa. The African traffic, they have declared to be piracy, while the domestic slave-trade flourishes in the heart of their own territories, a just, legal and honorable commerce!
The District of Columbia, which includes the city of Washington, and which is situated between the two states above mentioned, has become, from the convenience of its situation, and other circumstances, the centre of these slave-trading operations, — an honor which it shares however, with Richmond and Baltimore, the chief towns of Virginia and Maryland. The lands of these two states have been exhausted by a miserable and inefficient system of cultivation, such as ever prevails where farms are large, and the laborers enslaved. Their produce is the same with the productions of several of the free states north and west of them; and they are every day, sinking faster and faster, under the competition of free labor to which they are exposed.
Many a Virginian planter can only bring his revenue even with his expenditures, by selling every year, a slave or two. This practice, jocularly, but at the same, time significantly known, as ‘eating a negro' — a phrase worthy of slave-holding humanity — is becoming every day, more and more common. A very large number of planters have ceased to raise crops with the expectation of profit. They endeavor to make the produce of their lands pay their current expenses; but all their hopes of gain are confined to' the business of raising slaves for the southern market; and that market is as regularly supplied with slaves from Virginia, as with mules and horses from Kentucky.
But the slave-trade in America, as well as in Africa, carries with it the curse of depopulation; and, together with the emigration which is constantly going on, has already unpeopled great tracts of country in the lower part of Virginia, and is fast restoring the first seats of AngloAmerican population to all their original wildness and solitude. Whole counties almost, are grown up in useless and impenetrable thickets, already retenanted by deer and other wild game, their original inhabitants.
- ↑ The slaves in the United States are now near three millions and a half. It ought perhaps to be added, that by the federal constitution the general government has no right to interfere with the question of slavery in the States. The legislature of each State is the sole judge of that question, within its own limits. Slavery however, is still tolerated within the District of Columbia, which includes the city of Washington, over which Congress has an exclusive right of legislation. It is to be hoped that the people of the free States will not be deterred by the insolent and ferocious spirit of the slave-holders, from doing themselves the justice to abolish slavery wherever it is within their power. Editor.