“Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters”

“‘Me come say ha-do . . .’ and then they all troop off as noiselessly as they entered, like a procession of sable dreams.” 

Opposition to slavery in the American colonies began with the Quakers in Pennsylvania in the 1680s. For the next hundred years the problem of slavery was discussed in “instructions” issued at monthly meetings: “. . . we have thought proper to make our advice and judgment more public, that none may plead ignorance of our principles therein; and also again earnestly exhort all, to avoid in any manner encouraging that practice, of making slaves of our fellow creatures.”

    Malachy Postlethwayt (c.1707–1767), writer on economics and publicist) argued that the advantages of African and West India trade “are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on. . . . that Traffic only affording our Planters a constant Supply of Negroe-Servants for the Culture of their lands . . . owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes; who, as they were the first happy Instruments of raising our Plantations; so their Labor can only support and preserve them, and render them still more and more profitable to their Mother-Kingdom. . . . But I never heard it said that the Lives of Negroes in the Servitude of our Planters were less tolerable than those of Colliers and Miners in all Christian Countries.”

   Condemnation of slavery by European and North American religious leaders and philosophers during the 1700s fueled arguments about human rights and God-given law. But as a practical matter, “The issue of slavery, as if formed in the eighteenth century, was based on fear, defense, and profit—not morality. (Great Issues in American History) As they came to recognize the problems of a large slave population, most Southern colonies tried to impose a highly restrictive import duty to discourage if not prohibit the importation of slaves. The British, over a period of fifty years, struck down these attempts, which encouraged Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration to include in his indictment of the king the statement, ‘He [the king] has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce,’ an assertion that was eliminated in the final version because it offended New England merchants and certain Southern planters.” 

   The Revolutionary War, fought to protect the universal “natural rights of men,” caused many Americans to see slavery as a violation of those rights.

   Thomas Paine became one of the most influential voices for the abolition of slavery in colonial America. In 1775 he published an essay on African slavery.

   “. . . . Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war,” wrote Paine. “But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without further design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is an height of outrage against Humanity and Justice, that seems left by Heathen nations to be practiced by pretended Christians. How shameful are all attempt to colour and excuse it!

   “As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the Governments whenever they come should, in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery. . . .”

   On April 14, 1775, the first anti-slavery society in America was organized in Philadelphia. Paine became a member.

   Antislavery protests after 1817 were led by the American Colonization Society. The American Antislavery Society, founded in 1833, supported William Lloyd Garrison’s crusade against slavery. 

   Antislavery politicians founded the Liberty Party in 1840.

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It is believed generally among historians that the idea of the abolition of slavery grew out of the philosophical sea change in Anglo-European thinking labeled the “Enlightenment.” 

   Peter Gay described the Enlightenment as “A loose, informal, wholly unorganized coalition of cultural critics, religious skeptics, and political reformers from Edinburgh to Naples, Paris to Berlin, Boston to Philadelphia . . .united on a vastly ambitious program . . . of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all freedom in its many forms . . .” 

   There are scholars such as Hilary Beckles who suggest that there was an “‘indigenous anti-slavery movement’ among Africans in America. That is, abolitionism was as much a BLACK response to slavery as a European phenomenon, and hence the concentration on the abolition movement in the standard literature as a WHITE, European movement is only part of the story.” 

   Paul E. Lovejoy explains that “Institutions of servitude, including slavery, that were acceptable in Africa and to which many Africans had been exposed even before their own enslavement were no longer acceptable in the Americas.” The conditions in America “were such that the ideological framework that countenanced slavery was transformed into abolitionism.”

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   The names of Americans who supported the abolitionist movement during the years before the Civil War—Elijah P. Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Wendell Phillips—have become legendary. One name, Fanny Kemble, remains in relative obscurity. She was the wife of a plantation owner on Butler’s Island, Georgia. Yet some say she had as much to do with the abolition of slavery as the celebrated Harriet Beecher Stowe.

   The condition of the slaves at Butler Place on Butler’s Island was far different from those seen by Stowe at Brentwood Plantation in Kentucky. 

   Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was inspired by stories of runaway slaves and tales of the Underground Railroad she had heard while living in Cincinnati, and by a mystical vision; Kemble experienced firsthand absolute human degradation on Butler’s Island. During the critical year of 1863, when England was on the verge of recognizing the Southern Confederacy, Kemble published in London and New York her memoir, A Residence on a Georgia Plantation. 

   Critics and historians still argue the authenticity of Kemble’s book and the influence it had in England’s decision to not recognize the Confederacy. 

   “But, fact or fiction,” wrote Margaret Armstrong in Fanny Kemble, a Passionate Victorian, “its worst enemies could not deny that the horrid story was interesting. . . . Mrs. Kemble’s account of plantation life was accepted at its face value, as the statement of an eye witness and a dreadful indictment of slavery.”

   Before her marriage to Pierce Butler, Fanny, the niece of the noted tragedienne Sarah Siddons, had been an actress who charmed audiences with her beauty and talent in England and America. Appalled by the conditions she found in the slave quarters on Butler’s Island, Fanny shocked her husband and the plantation’s overseer by entering hovels in which slaves lived and attempting to improve the intolerable conditions she found there. But her fearless ministry only antagonized her husband who resented her “northern” prejudices, and who saw himself as a wise and benevolent ruler of contented subjects. 

   In a letter Fanny wrote from Butler Place in 1840 she said: “I found an old negro named Friday lying on the floor of the damp, dark, filthy room; his glazed eyes and rattling breath told me that he was dying. . . . There he lay—the worn out slave whose life had been spent in unrequited labor for me and mine, without one physical alleviation, one Christian solace, one human sympathy—panting out his last breath like a forsaken beast of burden rotting where it falls. As I bent over him, blinded with tears of unavailing pity, there was a quivering of the eyelids and falling of the jaw—and he was free. How I rejoiced for him; and how, as I turned to the wretches who were calling to me from the inner room, I wished they were all gone with him, freed by death, from bitter, bitter bondage.”