Negroes and the Gun Read online

  Slave masters often found it simply more profitable to assign Negroes to unsupervised tasks or to allow trusted slaves to hire themselves out or even run their own businesses. One planter in prewar Vicksburg, Mississippi, actually bragged that his boys were so enterprising and such prodigious savers, that he had borrowed money from them himself. One slave couple was reported to have accumulated thousands of dollars’ worth of property, including two tracts of land held in trust for them by a white attorney. Another slave named William Hitch, who lived and worked in town away from his master, commented that he had been essentially “free since he was a boy” because his owner allowed him total control in hiring out his time.

  Some slaves from this class used their accumulated capital to buy their freedom. Others remained in place, building resources, and in some instances, aided by their owners, passed their assets on to heirs. In some places this dynamic gave rise to the “nominal slave,” whose relative freedom was alternately a blessing and a curse for whites.

  Many whites considered the freer rein given to nominal slaves a hazard. In 1859, Vicksburg papers editorialized that the “class of Negroes now among us who are pretended to be owned by a white men [are] a pest and annoyance of the town.” These “quasi-slaves” were derided as “vicious and insolent . . . keepers of half-wild horses, cattle and dogs.”

  This often-unsupervised slave culture facilitated trading of both alcohol and guns. Court records in Warren County, Mississippi, reveal more than one hundred cases alleging illegal trading by whites with slaves. Many of these are sales of alcohol. But some cases, like the prosecution of Christian Fleckenstein, provide rich evidence about illicit trading of firearms.

  Fleckenstein was a threadbare merchant and widely rumored seller of contraband to slaves. Suggesting the division of interests between slavers and the merchant class, one local slave owner, fed up with Fleckenstein’s illicit trade, set a trap to build a case against him. The planter sent one of his slaves into Fleckenstein’s store with three dollars and clear instructions. The slave returned with a bundle containing liquor and a gun.

  Fleckenstein was arrested and tried. The litigation is an interesting insight into the slave world and the difficulty owners had in simultaneously controlling their slaves and extracting their full economic value. The court charged the jury that Fleckenstein should be found guilty unless he could produce a note giving the slave permission from his master to purchase the gun and the alcohol. The court was willing to acknowledge that a master might plausibly send a slave on an errand to buy either item.

  Fleckenstein, of course, had no such proof and was convicted. On appeal, his conviction was reversed on technical deficiencies in the indictment. Fleckenstein continued trading with slaves and evidently was joined by a handful of other “disreputable groceries.” Over time, the low trade generated fat profits that allowed the disreputable grocers to build sturdy brick homes.

  Another incident in Vicksburg suggests that blacks had access to firearms through theft or through a loose trading culture well before the sting operation on Christian Fleckenstein. In 1835, white Vicksburgers pursued a private remedy against the abundant gambling, drinking, and prostitution in “the Kangaroo,” a local haven for slaves, nominal slaves, and free blacks. After heated conversations and the passing of resolutions, a group representing the good people of the town marched in military formation to one of the hangouts in the Kangaroo. The show of force was repelled when the blacks launched a volley of gunfire that killed one man. Whites sent for reinforcements and ultimately prevailed, apprehending and hanging five occupants of the house.

  There is no explicit detail on where the Negroes of the Kangaroo got their guns. But the indications that many of them were armed suggests a level of access to firearms beyond the random opportunity to steal one. The “nominal” slave class, with assets and broad trading opportunities, probably had access to guns and would have been a source of guns for Negroes with more limited opportunities.15

  Another hint about the nature of slaves’ access to firearms appears at the end of the Civil War in an 1865 debate of a white vigilance committee about disarming the freedmen in and around Somerton, South Carolina. In what seems to be an unusual objection for the time and place, Lauren Manning, a lowland planter, opposed disarming newly minted freedman, arguing that “some of his slaves carried weapons for the protection of the plantation before the war, and now these men had been made free and therefore had a right to carry arms.”16 Manning’s objection was overruled, and the vigilance committee set out with some vigor to disarm local Negroes. But Manning’s statement that his slaves had carried firearms confirms that slaves sometimes accessed guns in ways that may seem surprising today.

  Still, the intuition that theft accounted for a substantial portion of slave access to firearms remains sound. When the slave couple Loveless and Pink ran off with their three children from Leon County, Florida, in the mid-1830s, they stole master Cornelius DeVane’s shotgun and all the provisions they could carry.17 Fugitive slave Henry Bibb not only stole his master’s gun but later wrote a book about his adventures that describes the gun theft this way: “For ill treatment we concluded to take a tramp together. . . . Before we started I managed to get hold of a suit of clothes the Deacon possessed, with his gun, ammunition and bowie knife.”18

  Theft also was the source of the guns used by two young runaways who were pursued by patrollers on horseback. When the horsemen closed on them, the slave boys opened fire with a brace of pistols, ending the pursuit and escaping. And on the Manigault plantation in coastal Georgia, overseers confirmed that slaves were stealing and hoarding ammunition when they discovered a cache of shot and powder hidden by a slave named Ishmael who confessed his plans to run off.19

  Other episodes leave us wondering more intently about the source of slave armament. Cryptic reports of armed bands of escapees suggest multiple thefts or stockpiling in preparation for escape. A mass slave escape from southern Maryland in 1845 is indicative. The fugitives, numbering between seventy and eighty, were led by a free Negro named Bill Wheeler. On a stifling hot July evening, the unsupervised men snuck off and then assembled as a body, marching in discipline, carrying pistols, blades, and farm tools improvised into weapons. With a semblance of military planning that defies intuitions of spontaneous escapes, the group separated into two companies and proceeded along alternate routes. Eventually, the larger group was corralled outside Rockville, Maryland. The blacks closed ranks and exchanged gunfire with their pursuers. Several Negroes were wounded, two of them stood trial, and one was executed.

  A similar incident occurred the same year when ten slaves escaped from Hagerstown, Maryland. On their way to Pennsylvania, they confronted an equal-sized white posse. As the pursers closed in, the slaves “drew themselves up in battle order” and attacked with pistols and tomahawks. Eight of the fugitives managed to escape, leaving behind two of their own dead and several wounded whites.20

  In 1848, forty-seven blacks armed with guns and knives fled Kentucky bound for Ohio. Before reaching the Ohio River, they were surrounded by three hundred armed whites. The fugitives stood and fought in two separate skirmishes but ultimately surrendered. Many of the escapees were put on trial for sedition and insurrection. Three were convicted and hanged. Several others were saved by their masters, on the argument that the benefit of more hangings was less than the value of the men as property. Armed fugitives had more success in 1855 when a group of six runaways from Virginia deployed pistols and knives to fight off bounty hunters who detained them in Maryland. Here the full group managed to get away.21

  The escape story of Reverend Elijah P. Marrs is particularly instructive, in that it contains an explicit admission of gun theft. Marrs was born into slavery in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1840. He rose to become a revered clergyman, educator, and standout in Reconstruction-era politics. During the early stages of the Civil War, Marrs risked retribution at the hands of Shelby County rebels for reading and writing letters for
local slaves. As the war progressed, the danger mounted for the “Shelby County Negro clerk,” and he soon decided to run off to the Union Army.

  In the late summer of 1864, Marrs organized a group of twenty-seven slaves who set out for Union lines. Confirming the surmise that theft was a source of guns for slaves, Marrs reports that his group was “armed with . . . war clubs and one old rusty pistol, the property of the captain.”22

  It is not clear whether Elijah Marrs’s group actually fired their solitary gun or whether they gained some advantage by brandishing it. Researchers say that brandishing guns without firing them is the most common form of armed self-defense today.23 Although it is impossible to know how often slaves benefited from brandishing guns, if the modern trend applied, those episodes would far exceed incidents of actual gunfire, and those nonshooting defensive gun uses would likely go unrecorded.

  Some evidence of nonshooting, defensive gun uses under slavery survives because it involved famous Negroes. Consider the long practice of Harriet Tubman, storied conductor of the Underground Railroad, who reportedly guided more than seventy slaves out of bondage. There are no accounts of Tubman exchanging gunfire with slave catchers. But she is widely reported and depicted carrying a rifle, a musket, or a pistol. Some modern researchers, queasy about the notion of a gun-toting Tubman, argue that her guns were unloaded—a theory hard to square with Tubman’s scouting for the Union Army.

  Tubman was not the only guide on the Underground Railroad to carry a gun. Lesser-known black abolitionist John P. Parker not only carried guns in his forays south, but also claimed to have used them in what he described as “warfare” with slaveholders. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Parker had settled in Ripley, Ohio, where he harbored scores of fugitives, brawled, brandished guns against slave-hunting gangs, and “never thought of going uptown without a pistol in my pocket, a knife in my belt, and a blackjack handy.” One account credits Parker with making Ripley “as important an escape route as any in the nation.” Parker was clearly not the only armed conductor in the vicinity of Ripley. Fugitive slave Francis Fredric recounted escaping through Ripley, where he was “well-guarded by eight or ten young members with revolvers.”24

  Fig. 2.2. Harriet Tubman, conductor of the Underground Railroad. (Woodcut ca. 1865.)

  In the mid-1850s, Parker aided in a daring raid into Kentucky, under the planning of white abolitionist minister John Rankin. A group of runaways was stranded on the riverbank in slave territory. Parker reports that Rankin asked him to come to their typical meeting place and bring every gun he owned. Parker wrote later,

  I had been told to bring all my firearms, which I did, including an old musket. I knew something serious was up, because this was the first time I’d ever been called on to come, armed with anything but small arms. . . . I can still see the pale face of Reverend Rankin as he sat in the center of this council of war, arguing for his plan of rescue. . . . To go heavily armed . . . and take the group forcibly from anyone who got in the way.

  That night, a squad of seven men spread across three boats and armed with everything they had, landed in slave territory and retrieved the shivering clutch of runaways.25 The scene repeats in the story of John Henry Hill, who escaped to and continued to agitate from Canada. Hill reports engaging in a gunfight with his master before fleeing Richmond, Virginia, armed with “a brace of Pistels.”26

  William Still, a freeborn Negro, hailed as the “father of the Underground Railroad,” produced a remarkably textured eight-hundred-page account of fugitive slave escapes, including episodes that fulfill the longing for the detail that is missing in so many accounts of fugitive slaves wielding guns. Working through the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, Still aided hundreds of escaping slaves and eventually began interviewing them and recording their stories. One of the most iconic images of Negroes with guns during slavery appears in Still’s account of the escape of Barnaby Grigby, Mary Elizabeth Grigby, Frank Wanzer, and Emily Foster. They were fugitives from Virginia who stole their master’s “best horses and carriage” and fled north on Christmas Eve 1855. They made it as far as Maryland without incident. Then, as they entered the Cheat River Valley, a group of “six white men and a boy” thought them suspicious, perhaps the subjects of a reward, and aimed to apprehend them. Still records their story this way:

  The fugitives verily believing that the time had arrived for the practical use of their pistols and dirks, pulled them out of their concealment—the young women as well as the young men—and declared they would not be taken! One of the white men raised his gun, pointing the muzzle directly towards one of the young women, with the threat that he would “shoot” etc. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” she exclaimed, with a double barreled pistol in one hand and a long dirk knife in the others, utterly unterrified and fully ready for a death struggle. The male leader of the fugitives by this time had “pulled back the hammers” of his “pistols,” and was about to fire! Their adversaries seeing the weapons, and the unflinching determination on their part of the runaways to stand their ground, “spill blood, kill, or die,” rather than be “taken” very prudently “sidled over to the other side of the road” leaving at least four of the victims to travel on their way.27

  The worry about the veracity of such oral accounts is diminished by a corresponding newspaper report that “Six slaves . . . from Virginia came to Hoods Mill . . . and some eight or ten persons gathered round to arrest them; but the Negroes drawing revolvers and bowie knives, kept their assailants at bay, until five of the party succeeded in escaping. . . . The last one . . . was fired at, the load taking effect in the small of the back [and was captured]. He ran away with the others the [next] evening.”28

  Fig. 2.3. Fugitives defy slave catchers, from William Still’s account of the 1855 Barnaby Grigby escape. (From William Still’s The Underground Railroad [Philadelphia: Porter & Coats, 1872], p. 125. Courtesy of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.)

  Equally prominent in William Still’s account of slave escapes is the Conflict in the Barn, an image depicting Robert Jackson and his little band of fugitives with guns fighting for their freedom and their lives against a band of border-country slave catchers. Jackson was a fugitive from Virginia, traveling under the alias of Wesley Harris. He had run off after fighting with his overseer, who attempted to whip him for some trifle. Jackson resisted, grabbed the whip, and gave the white man a taste of his own lash. When Jackson’s master heard about it, he decided to sell off Jackson at the next offense.

  The mistress of the house had embraced Jackson as a favorite and warned him of her husband’s plans. When Jackson learned that another slave—a fellow named Matterson—and his two brothers, were planning to run off, he conspired to go with them. On the next dark moon, they struck out. It took them two days to reach Maryland. A friendly Negro there warned them of slave catchers scouring the border and advised them to hide. They headed to the countryside and took shelter in the barn of an ostensibly friendly white farmer who “talked like a Quaker,” and promised to help them travel northward to Gettysburg.

  Something about the Good Samaritan did not sit right with Jackson, and that sixth sense was a sound barometer. In the morning, eight armed men including a constable descended on the barn, asking questions, demanding to see travel passes, and determined to take the Negroes to the magistrate. Jackson warned, “if they took me they would have to take me dead or crippled.” Then one of Jackson’s companions spied the farmer who had betrayed them and “shot him, badly wounding him.” The constable seized Jackson by the collar, and Jackson responded with pistol fire. He recounted later:

  I at once shot him with my pistol, but in consequence of his throwing up his arm, which hit mine I fired, the effect of the load of my pistol was much turned aside; his face, however, was badly burned besides his shoulder being wounded. I again fired on the pursuers, but do not know whether I hit anybody or not. I then drew a sword I had brought with me, and was about cutting my way to the door, when I was shot by one o
f the men, receiving the entire contents of one load of a double barreled gun in my left arm.

  With the help of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, Jackson survived his wounds. William Still reports that the committee “procured good medical attention and offered the fugitive time for recuperation. . . . And sent him on his way [to Canada] greatly improved in health and strong in the faith that he who would be free, himself must strike the blow.”29

  Fig. 2.4. An artist’s rendering from William Still’s account of fugitive slave Robert Jackson’s 1853 fight for freedom. (From William Still’s The Underground Railroad [Philadelphia: Porter & Coats, 1872], p. 50. Courtesy of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.)

  Certainly many acts of resistance did not involve firearms. Sometimes the fugitive himself was the main weapon. In Fairfax, Virginia, for example, two slaves were sentenced to death for a barehanded assault on slave patrollers. The record is richer surrounding the 1844 abduction of “Big Ben” Jones from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Jones was literally a giant, nearly seven feet tall and correspondingly strong. Jones had escaped from Maryland almost fifteen years earlier. Undeterred by time, his master and four accomplices found Jones in a forest clearing, splitting logs. They approached with pistols and bludgeons and demanded his surrender. Jones feigned submission but then with fists, feet, and his ax, laid into his abductors, taking down two of them before he was overcome. Finally beaten into submission, Jones was hauled into the back of the carriage that could be tracked, said witnesses, by the stream of blood dripping from the floorboards.30 We are left just to wonder whether a gun would have made a difference.

  Many Negroes were better prepared than Big Ben Jones, and their reported acts of armed resistance meant that the exhortations of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass were no empty rhetoric. Douglass was less a policy advocate than a reporter of the facts on the ground. In a published speech in 1857, Douglass celebrated recent acts of armed self-defense: