In the history of slavery in the United States, a slave pass was a written document granting permission for an enslaved person to move around without escort by an enslaver.
In the history of slavery in the United States, a slave pass was a written document granting permission for an enslaved person to move around without escort by an enslaver.
A typical slave pass was a handwritten document that listed the names of the enslaved and the enslaver, the destination of the slave, and the duration of time for which they had been released. [1] A slave who had been granted a slave pass had to have it on hand "at all times" and show it, on demand, to any white person who asked to see it. [2] One of the reasons for anti-literacy laws was to prevent slaves from writing their own passes, as described in a Mississippi runaway slave ad of 1814 for Jim, who was described as "talkative and has a good address, but is much marked by the whip, is a great thief, can read and write, may forge a pass as a free man." [3]
One of the rationales for anti-literacy laws outlawing the education of slaves was to prevent the enslaved from forging slave passes. [4] According to historian Ryan Quintana, slave passes were a tool of social control:
"...passes importantly extended planter authority and claims of ownership over mobile enslaved bodies, and provided an important differentiation between slaves who had run away from plantations and those simply, and obligingly, beyond the plantation's walls. Slave passes were, in effect, written extensions of planter power. They acknowledged a planter's liability for an enslaved person's actions while outside of the plantation boundaries, and simultaneously maintained the planter's abstract claims of property ownership over enslaved persons' bodies. Tickets, then, transformed slaves into abstracted, embodied extensions of their owners' desires granting them the legal rights to move to and fro and into places that might otherwise have been deemed dangerous. With a ticket, a slave could travel up and down South Carolina's numerous waterways, visit neighboring plantations, and even enter stores and markets to conduct trades for their owners and, some feared, for themselves...given the variety of slaves' activities, both on and off the plantation, passes were necessarily and intentionally vague."
— Quintana, 2018
This vagueness often annoyed slave patrollers, who would have to cede to the limits of the slave pass in order to avoid violating the property rights of slave owners. [5]
In 1857, De Bow's Review published a copy of the rules that guided the management of a rice plantation in South Carolina; the document referred to slave passes as tickets and stated:
No one is to be absent from the place without a ticket, which is always to be given to such as ask it, and have behaved well. All persons coming from the Proprietor's other places should show their tickets; to the Overseer, who should sign his name on the back; those going off the plantation should bring back their tickets signed.
In Alabama, the penalties for forging a slave pass were 39 lashes with a whip if the culprit was a free person, and 50 or 100 lashes for an enslaved person, depending on whether it was a first or second offense. [6] In 1853, the Montgomery and West Point Railroad required "negroes traveling alone" to carry two passes, "showing permission of their owners to pass over the road, one of which passes will be retained by the conductor." [7]
The Rev. Calvin Fairbank wrote to William Lloyd Garrison in 1851 after visiting Louisville, saying:
My visit here at this time has taught me a new lesson in slavery. Slaves are all obliged to be at home by 10 o'clock P.M. and if found out after that time without a pass they are taken to the watch-house and whipped.
Granting slave passes could be financially beneficial for enslavers, who could collect unearned income by hiring out their enslaved individuals to other employers. As Moses Grandy explained in his 1844 slave narrative:
He gave me a pass to work for myself; so I obtained work by the piece where I could, and paid him out of my earnings what we had agreed on; I maintained myself on the rest, and saved what I could. In this way I was not liable to be flogged and ill used. He paid seventy, eighty, or ninety dollars a year for me, and I paid him twenty or thirty dollars a year more than that. [8]
Mary Gaffney, interviewed for the WPA Slave Narratives Project, recalled:
back there in Mississippi I'se saw slaves wear bells because they would get a pass and not come home when Maser would tell them to and for being contrary. Them bells was fixes on a brace so'es the slave could not hold the clapper or get them off. [9]
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
Slave patrols—also known as patrollers, patterrollers, pattyrollers, or paddy rollers—were organized groups of armed men who monitored and enforced discipline upon slaves in the antebellum U.S. southern states. The slave patrols' function was to police slaves, especially those who escaped or were viewed as defiant. They also formed river patrols to prevent escape by boat.
Moses Roper was an African American abolitionist, author and orator. He wrote an influential narrative of his enslavement in the United States in his Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery and gave thousands of lectures in Great Britain and Ireland to inform the European public about the brutality of American slavery.
A plantation house is the main house of a plantation, often a substantial farmhouse, which often serves as a symbol for the plantation as a whole. Plantation houses in the Southern United States and in other areas are known as quite grand and expensive architectural works today, though most were more utilitarian, working farmhouses.
A slave catcher is a person employed to track down and return escaped slaves to their enslavers. The first slave catchers in the Americas were active in European colonies in the West Indies during the sixteenth century. In colonial Virginia and Carolina, slave catchers were recruited by Southern planters beginning in the eighteenth century to return fugitive slaves; the concept quickly spread to the rest of the Thirteen Colonies. After the establishment of the United States, slave catchers continued to be employed in addition to being active in other countries which had not abolished slavery, such as Brazil. The activities of slave catchers from the American South became at the center of a major controversy in the lead up to the American Civil War; the Fugitive Slave Act required those living in the Northern United States to assist slave catchers. Slave catchers in the United States ceased to be active with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Charles Ball was an enslaved African-American from Maryland, best known for his account as a fugitive slave, Slavery in the United States (1836).
The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. In 1830, enslaved African Americans represented 24 percent of Kentucky's population, a share that declined to 19.5 percent by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Most enslaved people were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington and in the hemp- and tobacco-producing Bluegrass Region and Jackson Purchase. Other enslaved people lived in the Ohio River counties, where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Relatively few people were held in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky, where they served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners systematically forcing slaves to have children to increase their wealth. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women and girls due to forced inter inbreeding with fellow slaves in hopes of producing relatively stronger future slaves. The objective was for enslavers to increase the number of people they enslaved without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
Moses Grandy was an African-American author, abolitionist, and, for more than the first four decades of his life, an enslaved person. At eight years of age, he became the property of his white playmate, James Grandy, and two years later, he was hired out for work. The monies Moses earned were collected and held until James Grandy turned 21. Moses helped build the Great Dismal Swamp Canal and learned how to navigate boats. It was that skill that led him to be made commander of several boats that traveled the canal and Pasquotank River, transporting merchandise from Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to Norfolk, Virginia. The position allowed him to be better fed, shod, and dressed. Able to keep a portion of his earnings, Moses arranged to buy his freedom twice, and twice, his enslavers kept the money and held him in slavery. An arrangement was made for an honorable man to buy him, and Grandy earned the money to buy his freedom a third time, this time successfully.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic Slave Trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practised on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
Following Robert Cavelier de La Salle establishing the French claim to the territory and the introduction of the name Louisiana, the first settlements in the southernmost portion of Louisiana were developed at present-day Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1702), Natchitoches (1714), and New Orleans (1718). Slavery was then established by European colonists.
The history of slavery in Mississippi began when the region was still Mississippi Territory and continued until abolition in 1865. The U.S. state of Mississippi had one of the largest populations of enslaved people in the Confederacy, third behind Virginia and Georgia. There were very few free people of color in Mississippi the year before the American Civil War: the ratio was one freedman for every 575 slaves.
Slavery was legally practiced in the Province of North Carolina and the state of North Carolina until January 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Prior to statehood, there were 41,000 enslaved African-Americans in the Province of North Carolina in 1767. By 1860, the number of slaves in the state of North Carolina was 331,059, about one third of the total population of the state. In 1860, there were nineteen counties in North Carolina where the number of slaves was larger than the free white population. During the antebellum period the state of North Carolina passed several laws to protect the rights of slave owners while disenfranchising the rights of slaves. There was a constant fear amongst white slave owners in North Carolina of slave revolts from the time of the American Revolution. Despite their circumstances, some North Carolina slaves and freed slaves distinguished themselves as artisans, soldiers during the Revolution, religious leaders, and writers.
Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas is a 2001 non-fiction book published by Harvard University Press by historian Sally E. Hadden. Hadden investigates the origins of slave patrols, that often enforced laws involving slaves, in the late seventeenth century in the American states of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina and the role these patrols had on the Ku Klux Klan after the American Civil War, an internal war following the secession of the Confederate States of America, which intended to uphold the enslavement of black people.
Torture of slaves in the United States was fairly common, as part of what many slavers claimed was necessary discipline. As one history put it, "Stinted allowance, imprisonment, and whipping were the usual methods of punishment; incorrigibles were sometimes 'ironed' or sold." Slaves in the United States were considered chattel, meaning they were legally treated as personal property, akin to livestock.