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 text , 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] The Liberator reported in July 1855, "A beautiful mulatto girl was hanged in Eutaw, Alabama last Friday, for murdering child—the circumstances as follows: Her master was a young man and overseer; he had seduced the girl, and then bought her. When the child was three years old, he married a lady of small fortune, and bought a plantation for himself. The lady soon ascertained that her husband was the father of the child, and at once became indignant towards it, and at the slightest offence would cruelly abuse it. The mother bore it with patience for a while, but seeing her mistress get no better, she knocked the child's brains out with an axe, went to the Court House, told the circumstances, gave herself up, and was committed to prison." [22] According to Modern Medea (1999), a re-examination of the Margaret Garner case in history and legend, "In November 1859 on the Georgia plantation of Charles Colcock Jones, a slave named Lucy came under suspicion for giving birth to and then smothering her newborn with assistance from a black midwife. For twelve days Lucy denied even bearing a child, until a physician's examination confirmed that she had. Farmhands then recovered the infant's decomposing body, and Lucy and her midwife were brought to a hearing before the local magistrates. Both women insisted the infant was stillborn and hours of interrogation failed to shake their story. Because Lucy admitted the birth and her deceit, the magistrates summarily convicted her of 'concealment' and ordered eight days' imprisonment accompanied by 'corporeal punishment to the amount of ninety stripes, inflicted at intervals of two and three days, one third at a time'—a brutally severe penalty." [23]
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." [24] Thus, self destruction was arguably a means to avoid a different kind of destruction of self. [21]
According to Francis Scott Key, in the early days of the District of Columbia, an enslaved woman "on learning that she had been sold, promptly grabbed a meat cleaver and hacked off one of her hands, rendering her unfit for sale in the eyes of the slave trader." [25] 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." [26] 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." [27]
The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies 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 Europeans during the era.
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.
Lucy Delaney was an African American seamstress, slave narrator, and community leader. She was born into slavery and was primarily held by the Major Taylor Berry and Judge Robert Wash families. As a teenager, she was the subject of a freedom lawsuit, because her mother lived in Illinois, a free state, longer than 90 days. According to Illinois state law, enslaved people that reside in Illinois for more than 90 days should be indentured and freed. The country's rule of partus sequitur ventrem asserts that if the mother was free at the child's birth, the child should be free. After Delaney's mother, Polly Berry, filed a lawsuit for herself, she filed a lawsuit on her daughter's behalf in 1842. Delaney was held in jail for 17 months while awaiting the trial.
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.
Charles Ball was an enslaved African-American from Maryland, best known for his account as a fugitive slave, Slavery in the United States (1836).
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 their enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
Bethany Veney, was an American writer whose autobiography and slave narrative, Aunt Betty's Story: The Narrative of Bethany Veney, A Slave Woman, was published in 1889. Born into slavery on a farm near Luray, Virginia, as Bethany Johnson, married twice, first to an enslaved man, Jerry Fickland, with whom she had a daughter, Charlotte. He was sold away from her and she later married Frank Veney, a free black man. She was sold on an auction block to her enslaver, George J. Adams, who brought her to Providence, Rhode Island, and later to Worcester, Massachusetts. After the American Civil War, Veney made four trips to Virginia to move her daughter and her family and 16 additional family members north to New England.
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 slave owners 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.
Freedom suits were lawsuits in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States filed by slaves against slaveholders to assert claims to freedom, often based on descent from a free maternal ancestor, or time held as a resident in a free state or territory.
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.
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 practiced on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
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.
Abolitionist children’s literature includes works written for children by authors committed to the movement to end slavery. It aimed to instill in young readers an understanding of slavery, racial hierarchies, sympathy for the enslaved, and a desire for emancipation. A variety of literary forms were used by abolitionist children’s authors including, short stories, poems, songs, nursery rhymes and dialogues, much of it written by white women. Pamphlets, picture books and periodicals were the primary forms of abolitionist children’s literature, often using Biblical themes to reinforce the wickedness of slavery. Abolitionist children's literature was countered with pro-slavery material aimed at children, which attempting to depict slavery as a noble pursuit, and slaves as stupid and grateful, or evil.
Dorcas Allen was an American mother who killed two of her four children when the family was jailed by slave traders in 1837.