Suicide, infanticide, and self-mutilation by slaves in the United States was documented, although it remains an understudied aspect of slavery in the United States.
Suicide, infanticide, and self-mutilation by slaves in the United States was documented, although it remains an understudied aspect of slavery in the United States.
Overall suicide rates of black slaves in the United States are believed to have been comparatively low, in part due to cultural beliefs common to both Africa and African-American communities. [3] Africa has the lowest suicide rate of any continent, and the suicide rate of African-descended Americans is a fraction of that of European-descended Americans. [3] When an enslaved person did die by suicide, it was often due to "deterioration in their circumstances or unfulfilled expectation." [4] Researchers have found that as a rule, "when slaves did choose suicide, the reasons for it were almost always directly connected with their condition of servitude." [5]
The highest rates of suicide amongst enslaved people brought to Thirteen Colonies and United States appeared to have occurred during and immediately after the Middle Passage. [6] The proximate psychological cause of these suicides was the "trauma of captivity" leading to either "anxiety and self-mutilation or depression and stupor." [7] Suicide rates among this population appear to have been slightly higher among men, those who were alone without others from their community, and older people. [8] A "disproportionate amount" of the suicides that occurred in the immediate wake of being trafficked appear to have been individuals who had been high-status members of their communities back home. [6] An example of this may be found in 1898 account of the people who were illegally trafficked to the United States on the Wanderer , which stated that a number of survivors later committed suicide under the belief that "if they would jump into the sea and drown themselves they would be carried back to Africa by the good spirits...among them being one called King Mingo, who decoyed two children to St. Simon's beach, during the absence of his mistress, and all three of them jumped from a high bluff into the swift current and were drowned." [9]
In one accounting, suicides described in slave narratives were majority male, with drowning being the most common method. The proximate cause of suicides described in slave narratives was typically either past or future "punishment" by violence, failed escape, or forthcoming sale, [10] including being "threatened with separation from a spouse and children as a result of being sold to another slave owner." [11]
A type of slave suicide that scholars speculate may have existed but that cannot be readily studied is "suicide by slave owner" (as per suicide by cop). [12]
European slavers of the 19th century maintained a number of folk beliefs about which ethnic groups were most likely to commit suicide or use certain methods to kill themselves. [13] The Ibo of Nigeria were asserted to be especially likely to kill themselves if abducted into slavery. [7]
Mary Gaffney, interviewed for the WPA Slave Narrative Collection, described a slave who murdered his pregnant wife. The slave owner put him "in jail at night and in the daytime he had to wear chains around his legs. He never could go to any more dances or have not another free day there on the plantation...they told me he finally got hold of some wire and hung his self before freedom." [14]
The most famous case of infanticide in American slavery was that of Margaret Garner, who killed two of her children rather than see them delivered to slavery in the Deep South. Garner's story inspired Toni Morrison's novel Beloved and her libretto for an opera called Margaret Garner . [15]
Similar crimes appear throughout slave narratives and in contemporary newspaper reports. In 1828, Annice was executed by the state of Missouri for deliberately drowning five children, two of which were her own. [16] In 1837, Dorcas Allen and her four children were put up for sale by her old owner's wife's new husband. While in James H. Birch's pen, she killed two of her four children rather than see them sold south. District Attorney Francis Scott Key advised Nathan Allen, husband of Dorcas and father of the children, to raise money to try to buy their freedom. With contributions from figures like John Quincy Adams it was done and Allen and her surviving children were freed. [17] In 1831, an enslaved woman in Tennessee reportedly drowned three of her children after being "chastised" by her legal owner. [18] In 1848, a man killed his wife and child with a pocket knife and tried to kill himself while "confined in one room" by a slave trader using the Covington, Kentucky jail. [19] On Thursday, September 2, 1852, "A negro woman belonging to George M. Garrison, of Polk county, Tenn., killed four of her children by cutting their throat while they were asleep...and then put an end to her own existence by cutting her throat. Her master knows of no cause for the horrid act, unless it be that she heard him speak of selling her and two of her children and keeping the others." [20] [21]
According to historian Walter Johnson, 25 percent of interstate slave trades destroyed a first marriage and 50 percent destroyed a family, "many of these separating children under the age of 13 from their parents. Nearly all of them involved the dissolution of a previously existing community." [22] Thus, self destruction was arguably a means to avoid a different kind of destruction of self. [21]
In 1829 an enslaved man who was part of a coffle being transported South by Virginia trader Jourdan M. Saunders "got possession of an axe, and cut off all of the fingers of his right hand." [23] In 2003, a woman living in Maysville, Kentucky, recalled her great-grandmother telling her about "a slave mother so bereft at her forced separation from her daughter, who was being sold downriver, that she cut off her hand in despair". [24]
The slave narrative is a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved persons, particularly Africans enslaved in the Americas, though many other examples exist. Over six thousand such narratives are estimated to exist; about 150 narratives were published as separate books or pamphlets. In the United States during the Great Depression (1930s), more than 2,300 additional oral histories on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program. Most of the 26 audio-recorded interviews are held by the Library of Congress.
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Although the European slave trade with Africa began in the 15th century, trade with the Americas did not begin until the 16th century, and lasted till the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States refers to the institution of slavery that existed in the European colonies in North America which eventually became part of the United States of America. Slavery developed due to a combination of factors, primarily the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies, which had resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by European colonists during the era.
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 Middle Passage was the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the triangular slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were then traded for slaves with rulers of African states and other African slave traders. Slave ships transported the slaves across the Atlantic. The proceeds from selling slaves were then used to buy products such as furs and hides, tobacco, sugar, rum, and raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe to complete the triangle.
Slavery in Canada includes historical practices of enslavement practised by both the First Nations until the latter half of the 19th century, and by colonists during the period of European colonization.
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown about Clotel and her sister, fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834 at the age of 20, published the book in London. He was staying after a lecture tour to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Set in the early nineteenth century, it is considered the first novel published by an African American and is set in the United States. Three additional versions were published through 1867.
Margaret Garner, called "Peggy", was an enslaved African American woman who killed her own daughter and intended to kill her other three children and herself rather than be forced back into slavery. Garner and her family had escaped enslavement in January 1856 by traveling across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Garner's defense attorney, John Jolliffe, moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law. Garner's story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and its subsequent adaptation into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998).
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.
Solomon Bayley was a formerly enslaved African American who is best known for his 1825 autobiography entitled A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave in the State of Delaware, North America. Published in London, it is among the early slave narratives written by enslaved people who gained freedom before the American Civil War and emancipation. Bayley was born into slavery in Delaware. After escaping and being recaptured, he bought his freedom, including his wife and children. He worked as a farmer and at a sawmill. In their later years, he and his wife emigrated in 1827 to the new colony of Liberia, where he worked as a missionary and farmer. His short book about the colony was published in Delaware in 1833.
Living in a wide range of circumstances and possessing the intersecting identity of both black and female, enslaved women of African descent had nuanced experiences of slavery. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that "the uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Beginning as early on in enslavement as the voyage on the middle passage, enslaved women received different treatment due to their gender. In regard to physical labor and hardship, enslaved women received similar treatment to their male counterparts, but they also frequently experienced sexual abuse at the hand of enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by and enslavement of Native Americans roughly within what is currently the United States of America.
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.
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.
A scramble was a particular form of slave auction that took place during the Atlantic slave trade in the European colonies of the West Indies and the domestic slave trade of the United States. It was called a "scramble" because buyers would run around in an open space all at once to gather as many enslaved people as possible. Another name for a scramble auction is "Grab and go" slave auctions. Slave ship captains would go to great lengths to prepare their captives and set prices for these auctions to make sure they would receive the highest amount of profits possible because it usually did not involve earlier negotiations or bidding.
Annice was the first female slave known to have been executed in Missouri. She was hanged for the murders of five children, two of whom were her own.
Enslaved women were expected to maintain the enslaved populations, which led women to rebel against this expectation via contraception and abortions. Infanticide was also committed as a means to protect children from either becoming enslaved or from returning to enslavement.
Slave marriages in the United States were typically illegal before the American Civil War abolished slavery in the U.S. Enslaved African Americans were legally considered chattel, and they were denied civil and political rights until the United States abolished slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights for enslaved people.