In Slavery and the Making of America, we tell this complex story through the lives and words of the slaves themselves, looking at slavery from the vantage point of the enslaved. We follow individuals from African freedom to American slavery and beyond to freedom again. In the process, we seek to illustrate the inextricable link between American freedom and American slavery. This is a story of intense violence and determined resistance. People were not easily enslaved. Slavery was a coercive system sustained by the mobilization of the entire society, and its maintenance rested on the use of unimaginable violence and the constant threat of violence. It is also an inspiring story about those who would not allow their spirits to be broken by the violence of slavery, those who found ways to create families and communities, and those few who managed to escape to freedom. The story told here goes beyond the life of slavery as a legal institution, to the time after the Civil War when the nation struggled to determine the meaning of freedom for black Americans. It shows the ways that new systems of racial control came to replace the old rules of the slave system and how the system of legal segregation, called Jim Crow, came into existence in the South.

The history of slavery is central to the history of the United States, and so this is also a story about the values and events that shaped American society. White Americans committed to freedom and God-given rights found it necessary to justify their economic system based on slavery. Some could not, and they became part of an enduring campaign to abolish slavery from the country and the world. Others rationalized the contradiction with theories of racial inferiority, arguing that black people were particularly well-suited for enslavement, that they benefited from enslavement or that slavery was necessary for their control. Although slavery was abolished nearly a century and a half ago, the racism rooted in the nation’s attempts to justify it remains with us today as the legacy of American slavery.

75-77

Isabella had experienced the horror of slavery early in her life. She had been too young to remember when several of her ten or twelve siblings were sold away, but she did remember her mother Mau-mau Bett’s reaction when her master died. With tears in her eyes, knowing that the remaining members of the family would soon face sale on the auction block, the slave mother told her young daughter to have faith in God. Isabella, only ten years old at the time, remembered that her mother tried to ease the pain of their impending separation by explaining that no matter where they might be sent, the family would always be under the same moon and stars, and God would always be looking out for them. When times were bad, she told Isabella, she must pray to God to make her new masters good. The auction that separated her from her mother and youngest brother severely tested Isabella’s faith, and sometime later, she became discouraged. When it was obvious that her prayers were not working, and her masters “didn’t get good,” the pragmatic young Isabella spoke to God again. This time she said, “God, maybe you can’t do it. Kill them.”

Isabella was a slave until New York’s legislature finally abolished slavery completely in the state in 1827. By then, she was thirty years old, a wife, and the mother of four children. On the eve of her emancipation, however, she learned that her master had sold her five-year-old son, Peter. The buyer then gave the boy to his brother who, skirting the law, had given Peter as a wedding present to another relative, a man named Fowler, who was leaving New York for Alabama. Isabella feared that once in the South, her child would be beyond the reach of New York’s emancipation provision and face a lifetime of slavery. She was away from home when her son was sold; when she returned, he was gone. The distraught Isabella confronted her mistress, but the woman dismissed her concerns. “A fine fuss to make about a little nigger!” she told Isabella. “Why, haven’t you as many of ’em left as you can see to?” Isabella was furious. In her grief, she became determined. “I’ll have my child again” she vowed. Isabella soon gained the aid of Quakers who directed her to go to the Court House and tell her story to the grand jury. She received a sympathetic hearing at the Court House, and a judge issued a writ for the man who had given Peter away, but the writ was served erroneously on the man’s brother. In the meantime, after finding that he might face a one-thousand dollar fine and fourteen years in prison, the man who had evaded the writ made his way to Alabama to retrieve Isabella’s son. He returned about six months later, but kept the boy instead of giving him up to his impatient mother. She sued for his release, but as the court system was working its way slowly, she appealed to another lawyer whom she was told would work quickly and doggedly for her. She raised what money she could and gave it to the lawyer who sent a bounty hunter after her son and his master. The following day, the lawyer called her to identify her son.

The boy had been so abused and badly beaten in slavery in Alabama that, afraid to displease his master, he denied having a mother in that area. When she saw him, Peter refused to acknowledge her, and claimed that his scars had been caused by accidents. The terrified boy pleaded not to be taken from his master, but the judge ruled that he should be returned to his mother. When she was finally able to quiet his fears, Isabella found that her child’s body was covered with sores and scars. Fowler had beaten him, he said. When she asked how Fowler’s wife, Eliza, her master’s sister, had reacted when he was abused in this way, he replied: “Sometimes I crawled under the stoop, mammy, the blood running all about me, and my back would stick to the boards; and sometimes Miss Eliza would come and grease my sores, when all were abed and asleep.” The painful memories of slavery, of temporarily losing her son, and of Pete’s brutal treatment in the South fueled the power and passion of Isabella’s later work as an antislavery speaker and women’s rights advocate. By then she had changed her name to Sojourner Truth.

101-103

Charles Ball was one of those enslaved in frontier Georgia during the mid- 1820s. This was the second time he had been enslaved there. After his agonizing first escape and service in the War of 1812, he had been discharged from the army in the fall of 1814 and had returned to Baltimore to work. His wife died a few years later, but he continued to live and work in Maryland. In about 1818 he had married a free black woman, and they eventually had four children. He saved his money, bought a small farm, and supported his family by selling his produce and dairy products at the Baltimore market. One day in the mid-1820s, after the fugitive Ball had lived for nearly twenty years without a master, the sheriff and two other men came to his door. They said they had a writ for his arrest, bound him, and took him to jail, where he was confined with other blacks who told him they had been purchased by a Georgia trader. Although Ball at first had not recognized him, one of the men who came for him was his former mistress’s brother. She had remarried and moved to Louisiana, and her brother had decided to claim ownership of Charles Ball. The brother took Ball to his plantation in Georgia, and one day Ball overheard him contending that he had bought Ball in Maryland. Understanding then that the man had no legal claim to him, Ball sought out a lawyer and sued for his freedom. Unfortunately, as a slave, Ball could not testify in court, and after hearing the master’s story, the judge decided the case in the master’s favor.

Feeling doubly aggrieved, Ball awaited his chance for escape. As punishment for questioning his master’s claim to him, he was given extra work, whipped often, and locked in a cabin by himself each night. One especially dark night, the overseer neglected to properly latch the door, and Ball seized his opportunity. Hiding in a swamp, he was confronted by a slave patrol, bound, and taken to a tavern. When his master arrived to reclaim him, he decided to offer Ball for sale to the gathering at the tavern, and he was sold for $580 to a man with a small plantation at a distance of two-days’ walk. His new owner, saying he did not whip his slaves, soon demonstrated his own method for them. He required Ball to watch as a woman was stripped, tied to a post under a high pump, and had cold water poured over her. After she became unconscious, the master had her removed to her bed, where she would recover after a few days. Watching this torture, Ball decided not to wait to suffer a similar fate. One night shortly thereafter, he ran away, hoping to go south and join the Seminoles in Florida.

Once again Charles Ball found himself traveling at night, this time following the road east toward Savannah. Deciding that no one would suspect a man heading to Savannah of being a runaway, he took a ride with a black man carting a load of cotton to town and hired himself out at the waterfront. He managed to get a job loading a Philadelphia-bound ship and confided in a black crew member from New York, saying he had been kidnapped from Baltimore and was a fugitive. The man was reluctant to help him, for fear of trouble from the captain, but assured Ball that he would not betray him should he stow away. As he loaded the ship, Ball prepared a place for himself in the hold, and just before the ship sailed, hid among the cotton bales.

Reaching Philadelphia, Ball was aided by a Quaker who recognized him as a runaway, took him to a home in the black community, and provided him with a suit of clothing and some money. After two weeks in Philadelphia, Ball decided to return to Maryland, sell his farm, and bring his wife and children to the North. In Maryland he found a white man living in his house. Questioning the man and a black neighbor, he pieced together the story of what had happened to his wife and children. Shortly after Ball had been taken to Georgia, a small group of white men disguised in black-face appeared at their cabin door late at night. They tied up the neighbor who was staying with the family and kidnapped Ball’s family. Ball had no idea where they had been taken and knew his master had offered a $150 reward for his capture. All Charles Ball could do was return to Philadelphia, imagining the hardships his wife and children endured as they were sold and joined the growing stream of slaves traded farther south.

133-135

In the 1850s, Thomas Fitzgerald, a free African American in Chester County, Pennsylvania, informally became a part of the Underground Railroad, though he was never part of an organized group. Chester County, located in southern Pennsylvania near the border of Maryland, had a continual stream of fugitive slave traffic, and the Fitzgerald farm became a popular stopping place for those on the run. A Fitzgerald descendent wrote, “Great-Grandfather Thomas noticed that his barn began to attract a lot of strangers.” Occasionally, when black travelers asked for overnight lodging in the barn, Fitzgerald offered them a room in the house, but the strangers never accepted. Nor did they remain for the morning breakfast he always offered, although after their departure, he always “thought one of his cows gave a quart less milk than usual.”

Fugitives often turned to fellow blacks, slave or free, for help, and while there were exceptions, they generally received aid. Reportedly, Thomas Fitzgerald and his family “were not joiners of reform movements but they were stubborn in what they believed to be right.” They believed slavery was wrong, and like so many other little-known blacks, “without fanfare . . . met the issue squarely when it confronted them.” It was this kind of help that a slave named Fed depended on for his successful escape. Fed had been born in Virginia but was sold away from his mother when he was ten years old, weighed and sold “by the pound” to a Georgia trader because his owner needed money to help construct his new house. Fed was cruelly used by his Georgia master, who punished him for one infraction by kicking him in the face, breaking his nose and dislocating his eye. As he grew older, Fed made two unsuccessful escape attempts before he managed to evade capture and make his way by foot through the Louisiana swamps and up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Missouri.

In St. Louis, a black cook on a river steamer gave Fed food and information about the city. He took refuge in the outhouse of a black minister, afraid to make himself known to the minister lest he place him in danger. After crossing the river to Illinois, Fed found a black man named Caesar who lived in the neighborhood. Caesar gave him food and shelter for the night, advised him about the countryside, and told him what to say if confronted by a white man. He also gave Fed the name and location of a black friend from North Carolina farther along his escape route who would give him assistance. After a few close calls, he arrived at the home of Caesar’s friend, who took him in and wrote out a “free pass” for him in the name of John Brown. After traveling another week, Fed, now Brown, happened upon the brother of the minister whom he had met in St. Louis, who took him home, gave him some food, and directed him to a rural black community where he would be safe for a while. Brown spent two weeks there and then set off for Indianapolis. In that city, a black man looked closely at him, recognized him, and told him that he was in great danger. His master had covered the region with advertisements for his apprehension, complete with a drawing that was a good likeness of him. Though it was dangerous, the man took Brown home with him and told him about the local Underground Railroad. Finally after more than nine months of travel and much informal aid, the man directed Brown to one of the station managers of the Underground Railroad thirty miles away. Reaching the town the following morning, Brown sought out the black man who was his contact, and the man directed him to his first stop on the Underground Railroad. The Quaker family to which he was directed hid him for a few days and then escorted him to another safe house. In this way, he was passed along until he found safety in Michigan. Brown worked in Michigan for a few years, settled briefly in Canada, and then made his way to England and the antislavery lecture circuit, where he told enthusiastic audiences about the trials of slavery and his adventures on the Underground Railroad.