A Disease in the Public Mind (5 page)

John Saffin responded in turn with a crude poem that made him one of the first Americans to argue that racial inferiority justified slavery.

THE NEGROES CHARACTER

Cowardly and cruel are these blacks innate

Prone to revenge, imp of inveterate hate

He that exasperates them, soon espies

Mischief and Murder in their very eyes

Libidinous, deceitful, false and Rude

The spume issue of ingratitude

The premises consider'd, all may tell

How near good Joseph they are parallel.
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Four decades passed before another American spoke out against slavery—and made a difference in the way many people perceived it.

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John Woolman was a twenty-two-year-old clerk in a dry goods store in Mount Holly, New Jersey. One day in 1742, he looked up from his desk,
where he was adding up the day's receipts, when his employer said, “John, I've sold Nancy to this gentleman. Draw up a bill of sale for her.”

His employer and the man beside him were both Quakers—the same faith into which John Woolman had been born. Quakers believed they should try to live as if every man and woman were a priest, with a direct relationship—and responsibility—to Jesus Christ and his teachings. Reading the Bible and meditating on the sacred words often brought a message from God—“a new light”—into their lives.

John Woolman got out a fresh sheet of paper and his quill pen. But something seemed to paralyze his arm. He could not write a word. What was happening to him? Why was a voice in his soul telling him that selling Nancy was
wrong
?

Nancy was a black slave who worked in his employer's house. Woolman did not know her well. In 1742, thousands of American Quakers owned slaves. Neither Woolman nor anyone else knew about the Germantown Quakers of 1688.

Suddenly John Woolman heard himself saying, “I believe slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion.”

Both the buyer and the seller told Woolman this was a “light” that had not yet reached them. Would he please write the bill of sale? With great reluctance, John Woolman completed the document. By evening, Nancy was gone from Mount Holly. For the next few weeks John Woolman remained deeply troubled. In his journal he reproached himself for not asking to be excused from writing the bill of sale “as a thing against my conscience.”
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Born on a farm in the Rancocas River valley in western New Jersey, John Woolman was a happy child who responded to the beauty of nature and a growing sense of God's presence in his soul. By the time he began working in Mount Holly, he had decided to devote himself to preaching God's word as it was revealed to him.

A few months later, when another Quaker asked Woolman to draw up a bill of sale for a slave, he refused. This man confessed that keeping a slave disturbed his conscience too. The men parted with “good will,” Woolman noted in his journal.
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Slavery continued to trouble John Woolman. One day a close friend said he was drawn by the Spirit to make a journey to Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to preach. He asked Woolman to join him. Woolman found the journey very upsetting. In the southern colonies, tens of thousands of slaves toiled on large plantations. New Jersey had only about ten thousand slaves. Most worked on relatively small farms, where the owner usually labored beside them.

Whenever Woolman and his friend stayed with southerners who “lived in ease on the hard labor of their slaves,” Woolman found it difficult to accept the food and drink he was offered. Again and again he felt compelled to “have conversation with them in private concerning it.” When he revealed his growing conviction that slavery was a sin, many of his hosts politely told him to mind his own business. A few became angry.

Woolman confided to his journal his fear that slavery was casting “a gloom over the land” with consequences that would be “grievous” to future generations. Most colonists—including most Quakers—continued to ignore him. In 1750, Britain's Parliament officially sanctioned the slave trade. The city of Liverpool, which was making millions of pounds from the business, commissioned an artist to portray a black slave as part of their official seal.

John Woolman kept trying to stir consciences. He wrote a pamphlet,
Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes
, and a fellow Quaker read it to the Philadelphia Meeting. It was an earnest argument against slavery as an injustice and a violation of the principles of the Christian religion.

With marriage and children, Woolman's responsibilities grew. He worked as a tailor, investing his profits in an orchard. But he spent part of every year traveling to preach against slavery. “What shall we do when God riseth up?” he asked at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends.

In Rhode Island, Woolman discovered that Thomas Hazard, son of one of the richest men in the colony, had become so troubled by the question Woolman was raising that he had freed all his slaves. His father, who owned far more slaves, was outraged and threatened to disinherit him. In 1758, when Woolman again addressed the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the Quakers appointed a committee to begin working to abolish slavery in the colonies.

The committee decided to visit Newport, Rhode Island, and John Woolman was invited to join them. It was an agonizing experience. Rhode Island's ships and seamen brought thousands of slaves from Africa each year. The sight of the pens and chains aboard the slave ships made Woolman physically ill. In his journal he told of feeling like the biblical prophet Habakkuk when he saw people do things of which Jehovah disapproved. “My lips quivered . . . and I trembled in myself.”
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Woolman petitioned the Rhode Island legislature to abolish the slave trade. The Newport Quakers, spurred by Thomas Hazard, expressed a cautious “unity” with the idea. The legislature ignored the petition. But Thomas Hazard vowed to devote the rest of his life to fighting for the abolition of slavery.

Back home in New Jersey, Woolman continued the struggle. To bear witness, he stopped using sugar when he realized it was produced by slaves in the West Indies. He called blacks his brothers and sisters, and reminded people that God was indifferent to the color of a person's skin. When he realized most of the clothes worn by colonists were dyed with indigo produced by slaves, he wore only undyed garments. This meant he wore white all year.

In 1772 John Woolman went to England, hoping to enlist English Quakers in a campaign to outlaw the slave trade in the entire British empire. He appeared at the London Yearly Meeting of Ministers and Elders, the most respected body in Quakerdom. More than a few members were rich, and many of them were distinguished scientists and thinkers.

These sophisticated Londoners goggled at John Woolman. “His dress was as follows,” one wrote. “A white hat, a coarse raw linen shirt, his coat, waistcoat and breeches of white coarse woolen cloth, with yarn stockings.” He presented to the Meeting his introduction from his brethren in New Jersey. It was read aloud. According to one account of the ensuing scene, Dr. John Fothergill, a noted physician, rose to suggest in an icy voice that Woolman's “service”—the concern that had brought him across the ocean—was accepted without any need for him to speak, and he should go home as soon as possible.

Any other man might have slunk out the door, but John Woolman—firmly, calmly, without a hint of anger or reproof in his voice—rose and
began explaining why he had come to England. When he finished, there was a long embarrassed silence. Dr. Fothergill broke it by rising and asking John Woolman to forgive him.
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This was the beginning of a series of heartfelt welcomes that Woolman received from English Quakers as he trudged north from London through the summery countryside to the town of York. There he spoke again on the evils of the slave trade. But toward the close of his speech, his normally smooth sentences became confused. By that night he was complaining of dizziness and weakness. The following day, everyone realized John Woolman had smallpox.

His English hosts nursed him tenderly, but the disease, one of the worst killers of the time, was inexorable. About 2:00 a.m. a week later, Woolman awoke and asked for a pen. On a piece of paper he wrote: “I believe my being here is in the wisdom of Christ.” A few hours later he was dead.

In the eyes of the world, John Woolman died an eccentric failure. But within fourteen years his friend Thomas Hazard would persuade the Rhode Island legislature to prohibit the importation of slaves. Anthony Benezet, inspired by Woolman's pamphlet to the Philadelphia Meeting, founded a school for black children and wrote a series of blazing denunciations of slavery and the slave trade. In the decades after his death, Woolman's journal was reprinted dozens of times, reaching tens of thousands of readers.

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Thus far we have not paid much attention to the black men and women who were the victims of this oppressive global system. How did they respond to the cruelties of what was soon called “the Middle Passage” across the Atlantic from Africa? For weeks, they were chained in a ship's hold with about as much space as a corpse had in a coffin. Since profit was the purpose of the voyage, they were fed only enough to maintain life. No one bothered to dispose of the feces and urine from their bodies, creating a stench below decks that few passengers or crew members could inhale for more than a few minutes.

It should surprise no one to learn that the captives found these conditions unendurable. Not a few slaves committed suicide by jumping overboard
during the few minutes each day that they were permitted to come up on deck. Others found ways to break their chains and launched shipboard insurrections, sometimes using weapons smuggled to them by female slaves, who were allowed more freedom aboard the ship. Occasionally the rebels succeeded in capturing the ship and returning to Africa. Most of the revolts were suppressed with murderous fury.

About 10 percent of the slave ships experienced insurrections. One English captain, writing in 1700, told how he searched every corner of his ship each day, looking for pieces of wood or metal that could be used as weapons, and occasionally discovering a concealed knife. He insisted such vigilance was the only way to head off sudden death.
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A good example of the slaves' resourcefulness was a near eruption on a ship captained by twenty-five-year-old John Newton in 1751. A slave who was brought up on deck because he had oozing ulcers on his body managed to steal a marlin spike and pass it through the deck grating to the slaves below. In an hour, twenty slaves had broken their chains and loosened the bulkhead doors of the hold. Captain Newton thanked God (he was deeply religious) that he had a full crew aboard. His sailors were able to smash the uprising in a few violent minutes.

As time passed, many slave ships bought insurrection insurance. But this practice led to another abuse. Some captains, fearful that sick slaves would communicate their illness to others on the ship, threw the diseased Negroes overboard and claimed payment for them from the insurance company. There were few limits to the cruelties that slave ship captains felt they could perpetrate without fear of retribution.
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•      •      •

In America, recently arrived slaves were often rebellious, especially when they encountered slaves from the West Indies, where brutal treatment made revolts frequent. In 1712, two slaves from the islands led a revolt in New York that began by setting a building on fire. They killed nine white men who were trying to extinguish the blaze. The insurrection was quickly suppressed.

More formidable was a rebellion in South Carolina in 1739. By this time the colony had been importing slaves so rapidly that in some districts blacks
outnumbered whites by large majorities. In the West Indies, the ratio was often 10 to 1. But each West Indian island maintained at least one regiment of British troops to keep order. There were no professional soldiers in South Carolina. This may have emboldened a group of slaves from the African kingdom of Kongo to launch a revolt.

Their leader was a slave named Jemmy, who could read and write. Around him he gathered about twenty other slaves, all from Kongo. They were Catholics, like most of Kongo, thanks to centuries of contact with Portuguese traders. Lately the country had been racked by a civil war, which had led to the capture and enslavement of Jemmy and his friends.

Sunday, September 9, was the day after a Catholic feast day celebrating the birth of the Virgin Mary. With the hope of divine blessing, Jemmy and his followers marched on a store on the Stono River, southwest of Charleston, chanting “Liberty!” They killed the owners of the store and seized enough weapons and ammunition to make them a formidable force. Their destination was Spanish Florida, where they expected to receive a warm welcome from fellow Catholics, who were on the brink of a war with the British and Americans.

Hoping to gather recruits and find more weapons, the rebels burned a half dozen plantations and killed at least twenty whites who tried to resist them. By this time the South Carolina government had mustered about a hundred well-armed men on horseback. They overtook the slaves on the Edisto River, where a fierce fire fight erupted. It ended in the rout of the rebels, but not before they had killed twenty whites. A handful of Jemmy's men retreated about thirty miles, where they were overtaken by a group of Chickasaw and Catawba Indians, hired by the South Carolinians. Also in this final fight were some loyal slaves, who were apparently eager to destroy the rebel remnant.
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