Negroes and the Gun Read online

  Bailey fled to the high corn and crawled down low. Covey lost the scent. Exhausted and hungry, Bailey spent the day in the woods, at the edge of the fields, deciding whether to run back to St. Michaels to a whipping, surrender to Covey for a whipping, or stay in the woods and starve.

  That night, Bailey roamed the fields and woodlots until he came to the little cabin of Sandy Jenkins, who is recorded either as a free black or a slave who enjoyed a degree of independence, living in his own place with a free black woman. Sandy let Bailey wash up and shared his simple dinner as they talked about what to do.

  Sandy was at least a generation older than Bailey. He had longer experience with the violence of slavery. He also was the keeper of secrets. While Sandy’s wife cleaned up, man and boy walked out into the darkness. Sandy said Bailey must surrender to Covey. He also promised Bailey something that seems fanciful today, but less so then.

  Deep into the woods, where the light from the cabin fire was lost, Sandy worked under the moonglow, scratching and probing. Then, on his knees, clawing into the black loam, he tugged up a root from the breathing forest.

  Years later, after he had escaped from slavery, thrown off the name Bailey, and become what the New York Times called the “foremost man of his race,” Frederick Douglass recounted how wise old Sandy had bestowed on him “a certain root, which, if I would take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me.”

  Looking back, it is pleasing to speculate about the magic of the root and the forces of destiny that were taking hold. What we can say for sure is that the next encounters between the “Nigger-breaker” and the nascent abolitionist, orator, writer, publisher, and freedom-movement pioneer Frederick Douglass were to be profoundly different from what had passed before.

  Away for several days now, with only a brief appearance and a retreat into the corn, Douglass returned to the Covey farm early on the Sunday, buoyed gingerly by the promise of Sandy’s root magic. Walking toward the main house, he spied Covey, dressed for church. His temperament reflecting his destination, Covey acknowledged Douglass calmly and gave him instructions for a bit of work that would not take long. Douglass finished the work and spent the remainder of the day contemplating the magic of the root, the wonder of the Sabbath, and the other mysteries that had pacified Covey since their last meeting.

  Like countless Mondays before and since, the warmth and charity of the Sabbath had faded by the next morning. It was not yet daylight when Douglass was lured into the stable with instructions to tend the horses. He was climbing down from the loft when Covey entered with a rope, lassoed him, and yanked him to the floor. Douglass later recounted it this way:

  Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected, that Covey seemed taken all aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers.

  Covey called out to his cousin, Hughes, for help. Hughes waded in just long enough to get a strong kick in the ribs from Douglass and was out of the fight. Covey went for a stick, but Douglass intercepted him and flung him by the neck back to the ground. Covey yelled for help to Bill, another rented slave. Bill objected that he was a valuable working man whose master would not want busted up.

  From there, it was just Douglass and Covey, fighting like men until they were spent. And like most episodes of violence, the aftermath was crucial. Here, the odds shifted sharply against Douglass. Violence against whites, even in self-defense, was a hazardous bet for slaves. With the legal status of mules, they were treated accordingly by American courts. And it is a compelling intuition that, except for self-defense in the course of a successful escape, violence against whites would more likely just delay injury or death than prevent it.5

  Douglass himself wondered why Covey did not have him taken to the constable and “whipped for the crime of raising my hand against a white man in defence of myself.” The answer, he thought, was that Covey had a reputation as a breaker of Negroes, and his brand would suffer if he were forced to send a defiant sixteen-year-old to the public whipping post.

  Whether it was this or something grander and preordained that accounted for Covey’s reticence, is impossible to know. What we do know is that Douglass was transformed. Filthy and sweating, Covey dragged himself up out of the mud and admonished that he “would not have whipped him half so much” if Fred had not resisted. Douglass saw it differently. “He had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him.”

  For Douglass this was the turning point in his life as a slave that kindled his quest for freedom, and marked his passage into manhood. “I was nothing before. I was a man now. . . . And determined to be a FREEMAN! . . . I resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”6

  Frederick Douglass was far from the first to fight. And given the danger that even vaguely suspected aggression might trigger severe punishment, it is evidence of the power of the self-defense impulse that slaves fought back with some frequency. A study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criminal convictions shows that violence against masters lead the next closest category of slave crimes (theft) by a factor of three.7

  For episodes that made it to the courts, slave self-defenders typically met quick, severe punishment. This is illustrated in early Missouri court records, where the aftermath of slave violence was predictable. Punishment was swift in 1818 for a St. Louis slave who stabbed and killed his owner in order to avoid a whipping. He was tried, in a fashion, and quickly hanged. It happened again in 1828, when John Tanner’s slave, Moses, somehow acquired a gun and shot and killed Tanner. Missouri courts were unsympathetic to Moses’s claim that Tanner had “acted disgracefully” toward Moses’s wife. Denied the prerogatives of honor that might be extended to a white man, Moses was summarily tried and hanged.

  The scenario repeats in 1859, in the town of Buchanan, where a young slave who had been sold off to a slave trader managed to conceal a pistol, shoot the trader, and escape. He was apprehended and swiftly hanged. It happened again in 1863, when a slave named Henry shot his master after being threatened with a whipping. The shooting occurred in July. Henry was hanged by the end of August.

  In another variation on the theme, a free Negro in St. Louis shot and killed a deputy and wounded another in an attempt to keep one of his neighbors from being carted back to slavery. The effort failed on all counts. The fugitive was hauled off in a yoke, and the free black Samaritan was burned at the stake by a mob.

  Negro violence yielded slightly better results in 1843 in Boone County, Missouri. There, a group of five slaves plotted to kill their master, who had threatened to whip the lot of them. With axes and the advantage of numbers, they hacked Hiram Beasley to death and ran off. Two of them were apprehended and hanged, but the others escaped.8

  In an exceptional North Carolina case, State v. Negro Will, a slave sentenced to death for killing his overseer had his conviction reduced to manslaughter by the North Carolina Supreme Court. For the time and place, it was an extraordinary recognition of a Negro’s basic self-defense interest. Will killed the overseer in a conflict over a garden tool. His title challenged, Will decided no one would have the thing. He snapped the handle and stomped off. Inflamed by this defiance, the overseer, Baxter, chased Will down and emptied his revolver at him. When Baxter came in close, Will sprang forward and killed him with a knife. Will’s owner was convinced it was self-defense and paid two leading Nor
th Carolina lawyers $1,000, approximately Will’s cash value, to represent him.

  Negro Will was an exceptional case. More emblematic of the times is the North Carolina court’s far harsher assessment in State v. John Mann, which overturned the conviction of a slaver who shot his Negro girl as she attempted to flee. The case underscored the basic principle that masters were not criminally liable for violence against their slaves, bolstering the intuition that slave self-defense was more of a desperate last act than a viable survival strategy.9

  In this sort of environment, it is hard to say that Douglass’s fight with Covey and countless other episodes of slave resistance were fully rational acts. But how then to classify them? It is common across history to celebrate doomed fights against impossible odds as the essence of heroism. But those fighters generally have champions among poets and storytellers in cultures hungry for such heroes. The black tradition of arms will yield many folk who fought desperately against long odds. But query whether there is space in our culture to think about them as anything more than victims.

  For Frederick Douglass, looking out from the middle of the nineteenth century, there was slim reason to believe that Negro resistance in the fight for freedom would ever be celebrated within the American story. Even after he had achieved fame, some fortune, and international acclaim, Douglass was still stigmatized by the United States Supreme Court as part of a class who held no rights that the white man was bound to respect.10

  Despite that blighted logic, or perhaps because of it, Douglass’s rise from less than nothing is actually the most American of stories. At age twenty, or nineteen, depending on whether we credit Douglass’s guess or biographers’ research, he stole away from slavery out of Baltimore, disguised as a sailor. He would become one of America’s most formidable abolitionists, so talented as an orator and writer that incredulous racists would charge that his claim of escaping from slavery was a fraud.11

  Douglass was one of the earliest and most prominent blacks to wrestle publicly with the role of violence in the freedom struggle. Even in his early career, still under the sway of pacifist abolitionists who “discovered” and advanced him, Douglass had difficulty translating pacifist appeals to the conscience of slavers into something that resonated for Negroes.

  The terror of slavery and the fugitive slave laws ultimately pushed Douglass to advocate not just armed self-defense but overt political violence and slave insurrection. By the middle of the nineteenth century, having broken away from William Lloyd Garrison’s pacifist abolitionists, Douglass offered a bold prescription for the man-hunters who were licensed by the final and most damnable of the fugitive slave laws. Speaking to both fugitives and freemen, Douglass advocated, “A good revolver, a steady hand and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap. . . . Every slave hunter who meets a bloody death in his infernal business is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race.”12

  Fig. 2.1. Fighting the Mob in Indiana, an artist’s rendering of Frederick Douglass fighting a proslavery mob (1843). (Courtesy of Documenting the American South, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.)

  In some sense, it was inevitable that Douglass’s advice spilled over from self-defense into political violence. Putting aside debates of higher law, slave hunters were not criminals. Their nefarious craft was explicitly authorized by the Constitution of the United States, enshrined in Article IV, Section 2, and embellished subsequently by statute, in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. This was still deficient, said slavers, because it was weak on federal enforcement and permitted free-state laws that interfered with slave recapture and exposed man-hunters to assault and kidnapping charges.

  The final and harshest fugitive slave law was rendered by the Compromise of 1850, which aimed to ease the tensions over whether new states would enter the union slave or free. With the nation pulsing under the fever for westward expansion, the Compromise of 1850 brought California into the union as a free state, let voters in other new states decide about slavery for themselves, and put federal law enforcement squarely behind the recapture of slave property.

  In later generations, black leaders would assess political violence from inside the fence. Nominally citizens, nominally right-bearers, and ultimately outnumbered, blacks would largely reject violence as a tool for achieving political goals. The better bet was to shame America into fulfilling the promise of its founding ideals.

  But under slavery, the calculation was different. Negroes were excluded entirely from the system, branded as an inferior cast with no basic human rights, let alone political ones. So the appeal of political violence, desperate and doomed as it might be, is understandable. There was little reason to worry about maintaining some strategic boundary between political violence and self-defense.

  For much of his activism, this was Douglass’s calculation. And for many Negroes, it had long been so. Many fugitives were pressed either to fight or to return to bondage. Whether you called it self-defense or political violence mattered little. And starting early on, fugitive and freeman, these Negroes fought.

  From the beginning, free blacks were a threat to slave culture and an important resource for fugitives. Associations of free blacks date to the beginning of the American state. Some were formal, like the Philadelphia Free African Society, formed in 1787 as white America framed its Constitution. Other groups were less organized and more thinly recorded, often just clusters of caring neighbors, clear-eyed about the utility and morality of violent self-defense. In 1804, one of these groups in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, interdicted a slave catcher, stripped him naked, “and beat him soundly with hickory switches.” In most cases, though, folk were more effectively armed.

  In 1806, near Dayton, Ohio, a gun was Ned Page’s most important possession. Ned and his wife Lucy were technically free people, brought from Kentucky under circumstances that extinguished claims to them as property. So said Ohio. But words in law books often don’t translate into reality. If things happened fast enough, decisive action would trump the parchment barriers of Ohio law.

  The Pages were laid over in a makeshift tavern when two armed men entered intent on hauling them back south in chains. Ned Page pulled a pistol from his pack, squared up his sights and threatened to kill rather than be taken. A clutch of friends surrounded him in support. The slave catchers were apprehended and charged with breach of the peace.

  In 1810, armed black men rode to the rescue in Jefferson, Ohio, after an informer set slave catchers onto a family of fugitives. The capture was easy. The return was not. The kidnappers had the family yoked and headed south when they were intercepted by a group of fifteen to twenty “colored men armed with guns pistols and other weapons.” The two sides maneuvered to a standoff and the Southerners agreed to the offer of a white attorney to present their claim to the authorities. The local magistrate rejected the slavers’ claims and released the Negroes. In a final insult, the slave hunters were charged with assault. They posted bail and rode off, forfeiting their bond.

  Many early episodes where fugitives got their hands on guns shifted quickly into primitive combat. This accords with the firearms technology of the time. When Frederick Douglass advised blacks to acquire a good revolver, practical applications of that multishot technology were only a few decades old, made viable by Sam Colt’s percussion-cap revolver in 1836 and Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson’s more efficient cartridge system in 1851. Before that, armed self-defense generally involved single-shot or, more rarely, multi-barrel guns, sparked by flintlocks or percussion caps. Except where people had multiple guns, additional fighting meant contact weapons. John Reid’s resistance in 1820 is illustrative.

  Reid was a fugitive slave living in Kennett Township, Pennsylvania. He was sitting by the fire in his cabin when armed slave catchers began breaking through his door. Reid grabbed his gun, and shouted, “It is life for life!” The first man through the door was Samuel Griffith, Reid’s owner come to claim him. Reid shot Griffith dead. The second man through was Rei
d’s former overseer, Peter Shipley. His firearm spent, Reid killed Shipley with a club strike to the head. Reid was charged with murder. But the antislavery sentiment in the area was such that the jury acquitted him on the murder of Griffith and convicted him of a lesser charge in the death of Shipley.13

  So where did nineteenth-century Negroes get their guns? The answer varies substantially by place. Free blacks and fugitives who escaped to the North could acquire guns through a variety of legitimate channels, constrained mainly by their resources. But Southern blacks had to navigate the first generation of American arms-control laws, explicitly racist statutes starting as early as Virginia’s 1680 law, barring clubs, guns, or swords to both slaves and free blacks.

  It is a fair intuition that that slaves obtained guns mainly by theft. But there are indications that some slaves were actually entrusted with guns by their masters. Slave-state gun-control laws actually reflect this. An eighteenth-century Maryland law commanded that “no Negro or other slave, within this province, shall be permitted to carry any gun or any other offensive weapon, from off their Masters land, without license from their said master.” A similar Georgia law declared that no slave could possess a firearm except where accompanied by “a white person of at least 16 years old, or while defending crops from birds.”14

  In some cases, slave access to firearms entirely defies modern intuitions. Court records from prewar Vicksburg, Mississippi, show that some slaves had direct access to the market for firearms, alcohol, and other contraband, through trading with white merchants who were periodically arrested and prosecuted for selling to blacks.

  One of the exacerbating factors in this illegal trade was the practical limit on the kind of oversight that masters could exercise over their slaves. Some bondsmen found relative freedom in the unavoidable circumstances of their work. Many of the wagon and carriage drivers around Vicksburg enjoyed a great deal of autonomy because it was impractical to supervise them as they chased fares and hauled cargo.