Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery (1998–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Judgement Day: 1831-1865 - full transcript
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Woman: ♪ your country ♪
♪ how came it yours? ♪
♪ Before the pilgrims landed ♪
♪ we were here. ♪
♪ Your country ♪
♪ how came it yours? ♪
♪ Before the pilgrims landed ♪
♪ we were here. ♪
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Man: "At the close of the first
revolution in this country
"with Great Britain
"there were but 13
states in the union.
"Now there are 24
"and the whites are dragging us
around in chains and handcuffs
"to their new states
and territories
"believing we were
made by our creator
to be an inheritance to them
and their children forever."
"The whites want slaves
and want us for slaves.
But some of them will curse
the day they ever saw us."
"God will cause them to
rise up one against another
"to be split and divided
and oppress each other
with sword in hand."
David Walker.
Man: "The master was fixin'
to tie them up and whip 'em.
"They say, 'master, you
ain't gonna lick me.'
"they runs down to the river.
"The overseer, he sure
thought he could catch 'em
"when they get to the river.
"But before he can get to them
"they rise up in the
air and fly away.
"They fly right back to Africa.
I think that happened
on Butler island."
Shad hall, a slave of Georgia.
Narrator: In the sea
islands of Georgia
the slave community at
Butler island and St. Simons
was almost as old as the nation.
The labor of these
enslaved men and women
made the Butler family
one of the richest in
the United States.
In 1830, Pierce Butler
was waiting to inherit
his share of the family fortune.
He was a 20-year-old
Philadelphia socialite
and had never seen the
family plantation
that preserved his affluence.
Butler traced his lineage to
the founding of the Republic.
His grandfather,
major Pierce Butler
was a signer of the constitution
and wrote its fugitive
slave clause.
The younger Butler had
little interest in politics.
But like other men of his class,
he rested easy in the knowledge
that the democracy his
grandfather helped create
was firmly in the
grasp of slavery men.
Man: You come to Washington, the
seat of the government of the nation
that sees itself as the freest
nation on the face of the earth
and in that capital,
what you see is, uh...
Slave auctions,
slaveholding pens
groups of slaves being
marched through the streets
on their way to Virginia
or farther south
so that slavery
is very much in evidence
in the nation's capital.
And not a few foreign visitors
make note of the fact
that they come to the
seat of American freedom
and they are struck by the
presence of American slavery.
Narrator: Although 75% of Southern
whites did not own slaves
the new president Andrew
Jackson was a slaveholder
as were four of the six
presidents preceding him.
Men loyal to slavery
dominated the supreme court
and the presidential cabinet.
Within a few years
their influence in the
house of representatives
would prevent petitions
against slavery
from even being
read on the floor.
Man: "The relation which now
exists between the two races
"has existed for two centuries.
"It has grown with our growth
"and strengthened
with our strength.
"It has entered into and
modified all our institutions
"civil and political.
"We cannot permit it to be
destroyed, come what will
should it cost every
drop of blood."
John c. Calhoun,
senator, south Carolina.
Narrator: Money invested
in slavery was by far
the largest concentration
of capital in the country.
By 1830, two million African
Americans were enslaved
in the United States...
Worth over a billion
dollars to their owners.
By comparison, annual
federal revenues
were less than 25 million.
Man: The vast majority
of the world's cotton
was being produced and
exported in the south.
They were sort of like Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait with oil
at certain points
in this century.
They had it all and
everyone else wanted it
and this gave them
a tremendous amount of
economic power in the world
and of course all this
rested on slave labor.
And the cotton was shipped
by northern ships
and it was financed by
northern insurance companies.
The cotton trade was the
basis of shipbuilding
of shipping, maritime
enterprise, banking, insurance
as well as the early factories
which will be developing
in this period
transforming the
cotton into textiles.
So there were many thousands
or hundreds of thousands
of northerners
whose livelihoods depended
directly on slavery.
So what that says is that
African-American slavery
can march right along with
the nation as it progresses.
And African-American enslavement
is part of the progress of America...
Of white America.
Narrator: For America, progress
meant westward expansion.
President Andrew Jackson
forced cherokees, choctaws
and other tribes off
their ancestral lands.
25 million acres were seized
from the Indian nations
to make room for
more white settlers
more cotton... more slaves.
Woman: "I was meditating
upon some means of escape."
"I had my secret hopes, but I
must fight my battle alone."
"The war for my life had begun
"and I resolved not
to be conquered.
"My master had power
and law on his side.
I had a determined will."
Harriet Jacobs.
Man: One cannot argue
that slaves were content.
You might have ten slaves one
night when you go to bed.
The next morning you
can almost be bankrupt
if the slaves... if those ten slaves...
Have left.
That could be as much as
$20,000-or $30,000-worth
of investment there
and they just disappear.
Narrator: Any attempt to escape
bondage was an act of rebellion.
Runaways were hunted
by local patrols
and professional slave catchers.
In edenton, north Carolina
Harriet Jacobs was 21 years
old when she decided to run.
She hid under
floorboards, in the swamp
and finally in her
grandmother's house.
Jacobs: "A small shed had been
added to my grandmother's house
"years ago.
"Between the boards and the
roof was a very small garret.
"To this hole I was conveyed.
"The air was stifling,
the darkness total.
"The garret was only nine feet
long and seven feet wide.
"The highest part was
only three feet high.
Rats and mice ran over my bed."
Narrator: For a window,
she made a small hole.
Through it, she watched
almost every day
the master who had beaten her
and stalked her sexually
since she was 15
and she saw her children, whom
she couldn't take with her
but whom she dared not leave.
Relatives brought
her food in secret
and cared for her
son and daughter.
Jacobs: "I lived in that dismal hole
almost deprived of air and light
"with no space to move my
limbs for nearly seven years
yet I would have chosen this
rather than my lot as a slave."
Man: Who better
to define freedom
than a slave?
A slave probably never loses
sight of the idea of freedom
or when he or she does
is probably the moment
when they are doomed.
Our sense of freedom was
something spiritual.
It was like a fire inside of us.
Narrator: Free African Americans
were one of the greatest
threats to slavery:
182,000 in the south, 137,000
living in the northern states.
In churches, newspapers,
antislavery meetings
and negro conventions, they
openly denounced racial bondage
and worked to overthrow it.
Horton: Slavery in the south
had an impact on the life
of every black person
in the country
no matter where that
black person was.
It was almost impossible that
if you were a free black person
you wouldn't have a
friend or a relative...
Mother, father, son, daughter...
In slavery
and so you had that very
personal connection.
Narrator: In Boston, David Walker
had never been anyone's property.
He made a good living as
a used-clothing merchant
but his father had been a slave
and in 1829, Walker launched
his own private war
on slaveholders.
Walker: "America is more our
country than it is the whites.
"The greatest riches
in all America
"have arisen from our
blood and tears.
"And will they drive us
from our property and home?
"They must look sharp
for this very thing will bring
swift destruction upon them."
David Walker.
Narrator: Walker's "appeal to the
colored citizens of the world"
violently condemned
American slavery and racism
and called for slaves to rise
up against their masters.
Racial bondage,
prophesied Walker
was an abomination
which would call divine wrath
down upon the country.
Walker said, "no black
people are Americans
"and they deserve to
be not only freed
but treated as citizens
of this country."
He utilized the rhetoric
of the nation...
The rhetoric of
Liberty, of equality
the declaration of
independence...
And threw it back in the
face of white America
charging the nation
with being hypocrites
with violating their
own professed ideals.
Narrator: Walker smuggled
his "appeal" into the south
by sewing it into the
coats of black sailors.
Its fiery rhetoric
announced a radical shift
in the struggle to
abolish slavery.
Southern officials put a
price on Walker's head:
$1,000 dead, $10,000
if taken alive.
Man: Three states
Georgia, Louisiana
and north Carolina
as a direct result
of Walker's appeal
passed legislation making
it a crime to teach slaves
or in fact blacks...
Free or slave...
From being able to
read and write.
And the south will now
begin, after the early '30s
to limit civil liberties
in a major way
eliminating freedom of the
press, freedom of speech
as a result of the
abolition movement.
Narrator: David Walker died
under mysterious circumstances.
Two years later, in 1831
when nat Turner's slave
revolt in Virginia
left more than 55 whites dead
Southern officials blamed it on
publisher William Lloyd Garrison
and his Boston newspaper,
the liberator.
At age 26, Garrison
was impoverished.
He slept in his
tiny press office
and was ridiculed for
hiring a black apprentice.
His antislavery newspaper was in
continual danger of going under.
But Garrison's passion
to destroy slavery
soon made him notorious
among slavery's supporters.
Like other abolitionists
he threatened an
American way of life.
Man: Garrison was also one of
the few white abolitionists
who shouldered up
to David Walker
and actually... he serialized
parts of Walker's appeal
in the liberator in 1831
after Walker's death.
Garrison believed that
through "moral suasion"...
As it was called at the time...
By an onslaught of persuasion
that southerners over time
could be convinced of the
sin of slaveholding.
Man: "Before god, such a
glaring contradiction
"as exists between our
creed and practice
"the annal of 6,000
years cannot parallel.
"I am ashamed of my country.
"I am sick of our
unmeaning declamation
"in praise of Liberty
and equality;
"of our hypocritical cant about
the unalienable rights of man.
We are guilty, all guilty,
horribly guilty."
William Lloyd Garrison.
Narrator: Black activists
gave Garrison money
sold subscriptions and
filled his newspaper
with their own
antislavery writings.
Three out of four
subscribers were black.
The liberator became the voice
of the abolition crusade.
Abolitionists, white and black
trained themselves to be
professional agitators.
They preached their
antislavery message
in open fields and churches,
in cities and villages.
But as their assault
on slavery intensified
so did the backlash
from northern whites.
A mob dragged Garrison
through Boston streets
at the end of a rope.
In alton, Illinois,
rioters murdered
white antislavery
publisher Elijah lovejoy
and destroyed his
printing press.
Washington: What the abolitionists
didn't realize was how deeply embedded
in the social, economic
and political structure
slavery was.
They didn't realize how
powerful the slavocracy was.
And they didn't realize
how much racism had embedded
the fabric of American life.
Man: Most white Americans
knew that slavery was wrong.
The way they reconciled
themselves to it was
that... to think that
it could be abolished
would bring worse
consequences on the country.
One is that it would
disrupt the constitution.
It would perhaps
unleash civil war;
that it would unleash a large
mass of free black people
who were regarded as not
assimilable in the society;
that it would lead
to calamities.
Garrison: "Dear beloved mother:
"Satan has come
down in great wrath
in the city of brotherly love,
knowing his time is short."
William Lloyd Garrison.
Narrator: In Philadelphia
the new abolitionist meeting
place, Pennsylvania hall
had only been open three days
when the national antislavery
convention of American women
gathered there.
As women speakers
took the podium
they could hear an
angry mob outside.
Woman: "Do you ask what has
the north to do with slavery?
"The spirit of slavery is here
and has been roused to wrath
"by our abolitionist
speeches and conventions
"for surely Liberty would not
foam and tear itself with rage.
Cast out first the spirit of
slavery from your own hearts."
Angelina grimke weld.
They were bringing
women to the platform
and having women speak in public
which was a brand-new affair
and a threat to the order
as people understood it.
And perhaps most notably
they brought black
abolitionists on to platforms
speaking in public
telling their own stories
in their own voices.
All of this now, to
many white northerners
was a threat to the social
order as they understood it.
Narrator: The next day
the black and white
women held their ground
but that night, as they
emerged from the building
linked arm-in-arm,
the mob stoned them.
Garrison: "The mob now
increased to several thousand
"and got in the hall by dashing
open the doors with their axes.
"They then set fire
to this huge building
and in the course of an hour,
it was a solid wall of flame."
Narrator: For abolitionists,
the message was clear...
Demands for racial equality
threatened not only the
slaveholding south
but the privileges of
whiteness in the north.
Woman: We think of
the jacksonian era
as the era of the common man
and in a sense it was the
era of the common man
as long as the common
man was white.
And so here we have a great
distinction between whiteness
giving citizenship or
standing or almost personhood
and no matter how rich you are
if you're black, you
are not a person
or you're not a citizen.
And in the 1830s,
over and over again
in places like Pennsylvania
new legislation inserts
the word "white"
into the regulation of voting.
So this is the, I would
say, the great watershed
of where whiteness makes
the big difference
in becoming a citizen.
Ignatiev: The racial system...
The system of white preferment
in employment, in political
access, in citizenship...
Came to embrace
virtually all so-called white
people in this country
who did, in fact, have a stake
in the advantages of
racial supremacy.
They had access to jobs
from which even free
negroes were excluded.
They had the right to vote.
So definitely white
people gained
from the system of
racial supremacy.
Without that
"white" itself would have
been a meaningless category.
It would have been simply
a physical description
like "tall."
Man: "In all social systems,
there must be a class
"to do the menial duties
"to perform the drudgery of life
"that is, a class requiring
but a low order of intellect.
"Its requisites are vigor,
docility, fidelity.
"Such a class you must have
"or you would not
have that other class
"which leads progress,
civilization and refinement.
"Fortunately for the south
she found a race adapted
to that purpose."
James Henry Hammond,
senator, south Carolina.
Narrator: By 1838, Pierce
Butler of Philadelphia
and his brother
John had inherited
the Butler family plantations on
the altamaha river in Georgia.
Ownership included
730 human beings...
Slaves who grew sea island
cotton on St. Simons
and rice on Butler island.
At age 28, Pierce Butler
a man with a taste
for high living
was now one of the richest
men in the country.
His new wife was
english-born Fanny kemble
an actress of
international acclaim.
Kemble believed in abolitionism
and even tried to publish
an antislavery tract.
Butler stopped her
fearing it would bring the
mob to their doorstep.
Their mansion was
only six blocks
from the ruins of
Pennsylvania hall.
There's some controversy over
whether or not Fanny kemble knew
where her future husband's
wealth came from.
There certainly was
no controversy
over the fact that she
knew he was very wealthy
and that was very
attractive to her.
And many Philadelphia families
were attached to the
plantation south
by marriage, by inheritance.
Narrator: In December 1838
kemble made the ten-day
journey to the sea islands
with her husband and their
two young daughters
to see the source
of their wealth.
She hoped to persuade Pierce to
gradually emancipate his slaves
as some slaveholders had.
But she was entering
into a world
for which nothing in her
life had prepared her.
Kemble: "We now approached the low
reedy banks of Butler island.
"The wharf began to be crowded
"with negroes shouting, laughing
and clapping their hands...
"A usual expression of
savages and children...
"To express their
ecstasy at our arrival.
"They seized our clothes and our
hands and almost wrung them off.
"I believe I was
almost frightened
"and it was not until we were
safely housed and the door shut
"that we indulged in
a fit of laughing
quite as full on my part of
nervousness as of amusement."
Narrator: Although
kemble brought with her
all the racial anxieties
and prejudices of her time
she was drawn to the people
in this place she
called "negroland."
She kept a very careful
journal while she was there.
She got acquainted,
especially with slave women
who gradually came to trust
her because she was different
from any white person that
they had ever seen before.
Narrator: The Butler rice plantation
was the largest in Georgia
one of the biggest in
the United States.
Here on her husband's estate
kemble expected to find the
people well cared for.
Dusinberre: Well, one
evening, nine women came in
and she thought, well, she had
been getting these stories
about how many
miscarriages they had had
and how many children had died
so she thought, "well, this
evening I'll ask them all.
I'll ask every
single one of them."
Kemble: "Nanny has
had three children.
"Two of them are dead.
"She came to implore
that the rule
"of sending them into the fields
three weeks after giving birth
"might be altered.
"Leah, Caesar's wife,
has had six children.
"Three are dead.
"Sarah, Steven's wife...
"This woman's case and history
were alike deplorable.
"She had had four miscarriages
"had brought seven
children into the world
"five of whom were dead
and was again with child."
Narrator: On Butler island, chronic
malaria sickened the mothers
and created miscarriages
and weak infants.
More than half the
enslaved children died
before the age of six.
Kemble: "I stood in
profound ignorance
"sickening with the
sight of suffering
"which I knew not
how to alleviate.
"And I beg you to bear in mind
"that the negroes on Mr.
Butler's estate
are generally
considered well off."
Narrator: 280,000 people were
enslaved in Georgia in 1838...
Almost half the
state's population.
Effective slave management...
The science of caring for
and working negro slaves...
Was widely discussed in
agricultural journals.
In this essay, Butler
overseer roswell king, Jr.
Offered readers expert advice
on proper diet and medical
treatment for negroes.
But kemble discovered king
and his father had raped
numbers of slave women
at Butler island.
Kemble: "Betty, frank's wife, was
taken from him by the overseer
"the all-efficient and
all-satisfactory Mr. King
"and she had a son by him.
"I do not know how long
"Mr. King's occupation of
frank's wife continued.
This outrage was notorious
among the slaves."
Narrator: Frank was "headman
frank," the black driver
second only to the
white overseer.
A skilled planter
frank supervised other black
drivers and their work gangs.
He assigned daily jobs according
to the overseer's instructions.
Serious infractions
against the system
like stealing or running away
were punishable by
"a cool 100 lashes."
On another plantation,
Georgia slave Charles ball
saw punishment even
more disturbing.
Charles ball witnesses a house
servant, as he finds out
who's being brutally lashed.
She's tied... her legs and her
arms are tied to the ground.
She's stripped to the waist.
The owner beats her brutally,
and she's bleeding
and then he goes into the house
and he brings back a candle
and he lights the candle
and he's dripping the wax on
the wounds of this woman.
But what he also found striking
was that as she's being whipped
he looks at the house
and he sees that the planter's
daughters are looking out
and watching this as well.
Woman: ♪ hush, little baby ♪
♪ don't you cry ♪
♪ for you'll be an angel ♪
♪ by and by... ♪
Horton: Suppose you were a child
growing up on a plantation.
The people who raise you
your surrogate mother, your
mammy, is a black woman.
This is a person that raises you
from the time you are this high
until adulthood.
What is the impact on this child
of having his surrogate
mother become his property?
What is the impact of
having his best friend
who is a black slave child,
come to him one day and say
"do you know that your
father has sold my father?"
What is the impact of
that on the white child?
Kemble: "I am getting
perfectly savage
over all these doings
"and really should
consider my own throat
"and those of my
children well-cut
"if some night the people were
to take it into their heads
to clear off scores
in that fashion."
Narrator: At Butler island,
the preacher, Cooper London
secretly asked kemble for bibles
to teach the people to read...
Something they both knew
was against the law.
When kemble asked him how
he'd learned to read
he kept silent.
Kemble continued to bring
her husband slave petitions
for more food, for rags
for a longer resting
period after childbirth.
The men, forced to pull their
own plows, asked for mules.
Finally, Pierce Butler
had enough of petitions.
Kemble: "Today I have had a
most painful conversation
"with Mr. Butler, who
has declined receiving
"any of the people's
petitions through me.
"Whether he is wearied
with these supplications
"or whether he has been annoyed
"at the number of horrible
stories of oppression
"which cannot be done away
with by his angry exclamations
"of 'why do you
believe such trash?
"Don't you know the niggers
are all damned liars? '
I do not know."
"This is no place for me
"since I was not
born among slaves
and cannot bear to
live among them."
Jacobs: "I long to draw in a
plentiful draught of fresh air
"to stretch my cramped limbs
"to feel the earth
under my feet again.
"My relatives are on the
lookout for a chance of escape
but none seemed tolerably safe."
Harriet Jacobs.
Narrator: On a night in 1842
friends at last smuggled
Harriet Jacobs north
to Philadelphia by sea.
Her son was safe with
her free grandmother.
Her daughter was
already in New York.
After seven years in hiding,
Harriet Jacobs was free.
Jacobs: "The next morning, I was
on deck as soon as the day dawned
"to see the sun rise for the
first time on free soil.
"We watched the reddening sky
and saw the great orb come
up out of the water."
"Soon the waves began to sparkle
and everything caught
the beautiful glow."
"We had escaped from slavery
and we supposed
ourselves to be safe."
Horton: Once you're free
that's not the end
of your problem.
You've got to work, you've
got to have a place to live.
You have to have very
practical things.
These are people coming
out of the south.
So what do you do in terms of
dealing with northern winters?
Very practical kinds of things...
Clothing.
Were you going to
stay in that city?
Were you going to try
to move farther north?
Blight: When blacks came to the north
and lived in black communities
in Philadelphia or
Boston or in New York
or out west, even in Cincinnati
they found themselves living
in largely all-black enclaves.
They found themselves
living in communities
where they created
their own churches
where they struggled to
create their own schools
where they occasionally,
as in New York
would create orphanages
where they also tended...
They tried to create
mutual relief associations
to try to provide people
with insurance policies
with the ability to buy land
if they wanted to move
out to rural areas.
Narrator: In most
northern cities
colored Americans were
denied the right to vote
testify against whites,
sign a binding contract
or attend white schools.
But even this segregated
freedom was jealously guarded.
Runaways kept a lookout
for slave catchers.
They found jobs and raised money
to purchase loved
ones out of slavery.
Chorus: ♪ come unto me ♪
♪ all ye that labor... ♪
Narrator: By 1840, over a
thousand antislavery societies
had risen up in the free states
with black and white
membership numbering 200,000.
Abolitionist women
and men were sending
thousands of petitions
to congress
demanding an end to the
slave trade in the capital.
Abolitionists boycotted slave-
grown rice, sugar and cotton.
Antislavery slogans and emblems
were seen on everything
from sugar bowls to
children's primers.
But it was the powerful voices
of fugitive slaves in the north
that infused the movement
with new urgency.
Blight: Well, the slave
narratives were in some ways
an argument with America.
They were an argument with
the system of slavery.
These were ways now
that a former slave could not
only publish his own story
to release his own identity
to sort of gain a kind of order
over the chaos of
his or her own life
but it was a way now
to directly challenge
the people who had owned him
with a free voice,
from a free place.
Woman: "When I was a slave,
I hated the white people.
"When I was ten years
old, we was all sold.
"I said, 'oh, god,
my mother told me
"'if I asked you to make my
master and mistress good
"'you'd do it.
"'They didn't get good.
"'God, maybe you can't do it.
"Kill them.'
"you see, I know what it is
"to be taken in the
barn and tied up
and the blood drawed out
of your bare back."
Sojourner truth.
Horton: And it's very important
for these people...
For white people who live
in small towns, isolated
who may really have never seen,
certainly never seen a slave
may not have ever seen
a black person...
To have a real living, breathing
person stand before them
and say, "I was a slave.
"This was my life.
This is what slavery is like."
Narrator: In 1845, the narrative
of Frederick douglass
quickly became an
international bestseller.
Douglass, a fugitive from
Maryland, risked recapture
by becoming an outspoken leader
in the abolitionist cause.
Douglass: "We hold slavery to
be a system of lawless violence
that it never was lawful
and never can be made so."
Frederick douglass.
Narrator: It was not only slavery
that douglass and other abolitionists
were calling into question
but the belief
that the constitution protected
the right to own human beings.
Douglass: "The constitution
of the United States
"inaugurated 'to form
a more perfect union
"and secure the
blessings of Liberty'
"could not well have been
designed at the same time
"to maintain and perpetuate
"a system of rape and
murder like slavery.
Not one word can be found to
authorize such a belief."
Foner: The abolitionists,
you might say
invented a new and
different constitution
a different reading
of the constitution
very much informed by the
declaration of independence
and its affirmation
of human equality
and posited it as an alternative
to the dominant vision
of America as a white society
which was so prominent
in this period.
So that the abolitionists,
you might say
reinvigorated the rhetoric
of the American revolution
which stated that
this was an asylum
for Liberty for all mankind
but that rhetoric had not
been put into reality
by the founding fathers.
They had created a society
of white entitlement.
Narrator: In 1847, in
Rochester, New York
douglass founded the north star,
his own antislavery newspaper.
In the antislavery bookstore
above his offices
worked another fugitive from
slavery, Harriet Jacobs.
Man: ♪ donney got
a ramblin' mind ♪
♪ donney got a ramblin' mind ♪
♪ donney done jumped the fence ♪
♪ gone on down the line. ♪
Narrator: In January 1848
the discovery of gold in
California's American river
created what one
newspaper called
"a revolution in the
ordinary state of affairs."
Many white southerners
saw the new territory
as a last link in a great
slaveholding Republic
that would stretch to
the pacific shore.
Within a year, 80,000 pioneers
made the trek to the gold coast.
Many masters brought
their slaves.
By one estimate
African Americans sent
home from California
over three-quarters
of a million dollars
to buy loved ones
out of bondage.
When Californians petitioned
congress to be a free state
Southern leaders threatened
to quit the union and
form their own country.
The price for saving the union
would be the rights
of black people.
In 1850, in return for
a free California
Southern leaders in
congress demanded
a tough new fugitive slave law.
No black person, fugitive
or freeborn, would be safe.
Horton: Under this law, a
person, white or black
could be deputized on the spot
to help in the recovery
of a fugitive slave.
So that if you
were on the street
and a marshal was
chasing a fugitive
that marshal could deputize you
and you would have
to participate
in the recapture
of that fugitive
under penalty of
imprisonment and fine.
Narrator: Special
commissioners were appointed
to try suspected runaways.
Those accused were
denied a trial by jury
and the right to testify.
Commissioners
received ten dollars
for every person
returned to slavery...
Only five dollars if the man
or woman was acquitted.
Bright: It now made the
federal government
and northern citizens
complicitous in the process of
retrieving and retaining slaves
back to their masters.
It is the first time really
in the lives of many
white northerners
that the slavery issue,
the slavery problem
kind of comes home to
their neighborhoods
comes home to their communities.
It means now, to harbor
a fugitive slave
or even to be aware
of a fugitive
is to be committing a felony.
Narrator: In New York, Harriet
Jacobs was trying to make a new life
when her former
master's daughter
armed with the new law,
came north to kidnap her.
Jacobs: "It was the beginning
of a reign of terror
"to the colored population.
"Many families who had lived
in the city for 20 years
"fled from it now.
"Many a wife discovered a secret
she had never known before...
"That her husband
was a fugitive.
"Many a husband discovered
"that his wife had fled
from slavery years ago
"and the children of his love
were liable to be seized
"and carried into slavery.
"I seldom ventured
into the streets.
"I went as much as possible
"through back
streets and byways.
All that winter I lived
in a state of anxiety."
Man: "I found my way to
Boston, I got employment.
"I worked hard, but I didn't
tell anybody I was a slave.
"One night, I heard someone
running behind me.
"Almost before I could speak,
I was lifted off my feet
by six or seven others, and
it was of no use to resist."
Anthony burns.
Narrator: In 1854, the arrest of
Anthony burns triggered a showdown
between Boston abolitionists
and the federal government.
Abolitionists swore
never to allow a fugitive
slave to be taken.
The south, perhaps
understandably
said, "look, this our
constitutional right.
"It's in the constitution
"that we have a right to get
our fugitive slaves back.
How can illegal groups of
northerners prevent this?"
Narrator: As news of
burns' arrest spread
hundreds of white citizens met
at Boston's faneuil hall.
Black citizens gathered in the
basement of tremont temple.
The white meeting is going on
debating about what they
should be doing and so on
when the word comes
that the blacks are
attacking the courthouse
and the white meeting
empties out.
Pretty soon they're all
around the courthouse
trying to break in to
get Anthony burns out.
Man: "There was but room
for one to pass in.
"I glanced at my black ally.
"He did not even look at
me, but sprang first.
"We found ourselves face-to-face
with six or eight policemen
"who laid about them with their
clubs, driving us to the wall.
"I did not know until
the next morning
"that one of the marshal's
deputies, a man named batchelder
had been killed."
T.w. Higginson.
Narrator: The mayor ordered two
artillery companies into the streets.
President Franklin Pierce
sent in the U.S. marines.
Boston abolitionists
were already notorious
for invading courthouses and
jails to free captured runaways.
President Pierce was determined
to show Southern supporters
he would enforce their
fugitive slave law anywhere
even in the so-called great
abolitionist headquarters
of Boston.
Over the next three days
the crowd of protesters
grew to 7,000.
They surrounded the courthouse
and threatened the troops
who guarded burns.
Black waiters refused
to serve the soldiers.
Douglass and others
refused to apologize
for deputy marshal
batchelder's death.
Douglass: "For a white man to
defend his friend unto blood
"is praiseworthy,
but for a black man
"to do precisely the
same thing is a crime.
"We hold that when batchelder
undertook to play the bloodhound
he forfeited his right to live."
Frederick douglass.
You could think what you wanted
about slavery hundreds
of miles away
but when an individual
comes to your community...
A black individual
fleeing marshals
who are going to try to grab him
and send him back to slavery...
It puts slavery
on a human level.
It made people have to choose.
Narrator: On June 2, Anthony
burns was convicted
of being a fugitive slave.
When the captain of
the watch was ordered
to bring burns out of the
courthouse to send him back
he resigned in protest.
Horton: The streets are ringed,
are lined, with people
who have come in from the
outlying areas into Boston
from worcester and
other distant places.
Shopkeepers have draped their
windows in black crepe
and there is a coffin that
hangs across the street
with the message
"here lies Liberty."
Man: "I feel my investment in life
here is worth many percent less
"since Massachusetts
deliberately
"restored Anthony
burns to slavery.
"My thoughts are
murder to the state.
My thoughts involuntarily go to
plotting against the state."
Henry David Thoreau.
Narrator: 50,000 citizens
crowded the streets.
Companies of U.S. marines,
local militia and artillery
marched Anthony
burns to the wharf
and onto a ship
bound for Virginia.
The showdown was over, but some
southerners asked themselves
if the recapture of one man
was worth hundreds of troops
the enormous expense of $50,000
and the life of a
deputy marshal.
Two months later, on
the fourth of July
William Lloyd Garrison publicly
burned the fugitive slave law.
Then, as the crowd said "amen"
he burned the
constitution itself.
It was "a covenant
with death," he said
"an agreement with hell."
Narrator: In the 1850s, Americans
had begun to measure progress
in miles of track laid.
Southern states were
building railroads
faster than Germany,
France or england.
Cotton financed the
railroads of the south.
It purchased the
African Americans
who became laborers and
cargo for the iron road.
Man: "When the cars began to start
and the conductor cried out
"the colored people cried
out with one voice
"as though the heavens and
earth were coming together.
"As the cars moved away
"we heard the weeping and
wailing from the slaves
"as far as human
voice could be heard
"and from that time
to the present
"I have neither seen nor
heard from my two sisters
"nor any of those who
left clarkson depot
on that memorable day."
Jacob stroyer.
Narrator: In 1854,
America was poised
to build a railroad
across the continent
west through the
Kansas territory.
Whether that railroad
would pass through
a Kansas free state or
a Kansas slave state
was a question Americans
north and south
were now ready to
settle with blood.
The Kansas-Nebraska bill,
passed by congress
declared that whoever
settled Kansas
could choose slavery or
freedom for the new state.
Blight: To a lot of northerners
their conception of the future
of the west was held together
by this geographical guarantee
that slavery could never exist
above the 36'30" parallel.
The Kansas-Nebraska act now in
1854 erases that 34-year-old vow
which had the sanction
of the constitution.
It now meant that the settlement
of this vast territory of
the west and the northwest
was open to slavery.
It was open to the possibility
of three, four, five, six,
eight new slave states.
Narrator: From northern states
thousands of pioneers set
out to settle Kansas.
The new england
emigrant aid company
financed the settlement
of entire villages.
In Brooklyn, New York
abolitionist preacher Henry
ward beecher raised funds
to give rifles to the
free-soil settlers.
From Missouri, Georgia and
other Southern states
white settlers came to Kansas
armed to the teeth for
the slavery cause.
Man: "If Kansas is not made a
slave state, it requires no Sage
"to tell that without some
very extraordinary revolution
there will never be
another slave state."
The sovereign squatter
newspaper, Kansas, 1856.
Narrator: But most northerners
who came to the plains
did not want to end
slavery nationwide.
They simply did not want to
compete with it in Kansas
and they didn't want to
work alongside black people
slave or free.
Their movement was
called "free soil."
Free soil meant free
states for free white men.
Horton: Is the future
of America going to be
America as white man's country
or America as a country in which
there are multiple races?
One of the ways you can ensure
that America is in the
future white man's country
is to make sure that that
west was as white as possible
as free as possible from blacks,
whether these blacks were slave
or whether these
blacks were free.
Narrator: Settlers who only
came hoping to build farms
discovered they were
homesteading a battlefield.
Two opposing territorial
governments emerged on the plains
one pro-slavery, the
other free-soil.
Each government
outlawed the other
and both pushed to exclude
free African Americans.
Man: "Cousin Sidney
"we heard that five men had
been killed by free-state men.
"The men were butchered...
Ears cut off
"and bodies thrown
into the river.
"The murdered men, pro-slavery
"had thrown out
threats and insults
"yet the act was barbarous and
inhuman, whoever committed by.
"Since yesterday I have learned
"that those who committed the
murders were a party of browns.
The war seems to have
commenced in real earnest."
Edward bridgeman.
Narrator: In 1856, a raiding party
led by John brown and his sons
avenged the burning of the
free-soil town of Lawrence
with the blood of
five pro-slavery men.
At age 56, brown was one
of the few white men
who didn't want an
all-white Kansas.
He was a fiery abolitionist
who hated slavery
believing, as one
acquaintance put it
that he was made by god to break
the jawbone of slaveholders.
As white men killed white
men in "bleeding Kansas"
David Walker's prophecy
of an American apocalypse
seemed close at hand.
On the fourth of march 1857
the new president, James
Buchanan, promised the nation
that the U.S. supreme court
would at last settle the
question of slavery
in the United States...
Where it could go and
where it could not.
Dred Scott, a slave
from Missouri
had sued for his
freedom on the grounds
that his master had once taken
him to free northern soil.
In his opinion for the court,
chief justice Roger b. Taney
resolved to decide
African-American destiny
once and for all.
Taney: "Dred Scott was not
a citizen of Missouri
"and not entitled as such
to sue in its courts.
"We think they were not
intended to be included
"under the word 'citizens'
in the constitution
"and can therefore claim none
of the rights and privileges.
"They were considered
as a subordinate
"and inferior class of beings,
subjugated by the dominant race
"and altogether unfit to
associate with the white race.
"It is obvious they were
not even in the minds
"of the framers of
the constitution
"when they were
conferring special rights
upon the citizens."
Mr. Chief justice Roger b. Taney
for the United States
supreme court, 1857.
No black person could be
a citizen of the united
states, said taney.
This is a country, "the
family of America"
as he called it, was white.
And the south had a
perfect right, he said
under the constitution,
to expand slavery
into all the territories
of the United States.
Franklin: In other words, taney
said that slavery existed
wherever the owner wanted
to take his slave.
And then he made that
very famous statement
that a black man has no rights
that a white man has to respect.
Narrator: 1857, the year
of the dred Scott decision
was a time of financial panic
brought on by
overextended credit
overbuilding of railroads
and over-speculation
in western lands.
One of those who faced
disaster was Pierce Butler.
Butler had ended his
marriage to Fanny kemble
in a scandalous public
divorce in 1849.
Kemble returned to the theater
supporting herself by reading
from Shakespeare onstage.
Butler was still famous
for his extravagance.
He once lost $24,000 in
a single hand of cards.
By the time of the panic,
he was already in debt.
To protect the family's interest
trustees were given
control of his estate.
After the stock market
collapse in 1857
it was rumored Butler had
gone through an inheritance
worth over $700,000.
To appease creditors
the trustees sold the Butler
family mansion in Philadelphia.
Then they traveled
south to Georgia
to assess the slave property.
"Allotment a" was
Pierce Butler's share
of over 900 slaves at Butler
island and St. Simons.
"Allotment a" totaled 476
men, women and children
with a market value
estimated at over $260,000.
By February 1859, the Butler
island people had to know
that something
terrible was coming.
Headman frank was listed
as "superannuated"...
Too old for the block.
So was the preacher,
Cooper London
who 20 years before had
asked Fanny kemble
to send back bibles and prayer
books from Philadelphia.
Pierce Butler did not want to
put his people on the block
but in February, 429
men, women and children
including a child
named for the master
were loaded onto railway
cars and steamboats
and shipped to ten broeck
racetrack in Savannah.
It would be the largest
sale of human beings
in the history of
the United States.
And as soon as times get tough
and he said he was going to
lose his 500 acres or better
because of taxes and hard
times, the first thing he did
he was going to sell
his supposedly family
member, which was you.
Your skin was black, so
you were going to be sold
to make up the difference.
You were sold for as
cheap as 200 bucks
to as high as $2,000
but you were sold to save
whatever he needed to save.
He wasn't going to sell
his mother and father and
his sister and brother.
He was going to sell you and I.
Narrator: Days after the
Butler island people
arrived for inspection, a
cold drizzle began to fall.
Man: "The affair was regarded
with unusual interest
"throughout the south.
"Nothing was heard of for days
"in barrooms and public houses
but talk of the great sale
"criticism of the affairs of Mr.
Butler, and speculation
as to the probable prices
the stock would bring."
Mortimer Neal Thompson.
Narrator: Thompson came
to Savannah from New York
disguised as a slave speculator
to record the event for
the New York tribune.
Thompson: "None of these Butler
slaves had ever been sold before.
"On the faces of all was an
expression of heavy grief.
Some appeared to be resigned to
the hard stroke of fortune."
Narrator: By the first
day of the auction
the drizzle had
become a hard rain.
Desperate fathers and husbands
tried to convince
benevolent-looking planters
to bid for them and
their families.
Bailey: You think love would
be different than it is now?
Their phrase was
"try to keep the family
together at all costs"
and that's what they tried for.
That's what they prayed for, to
keeping the family together.
And they'd do anything to
keep the family together
practically anything to do it.
Thompson: "The women never spoke
to a white man unless spoken to
and then made the conference
as short as possible."
"Through all the insults to
which they were subjected
they conducted themselves
with perfect self-respect."
"The children were of all sizes,
the youngest being 15 days old."
"The buyers, who were present
to the number of 200
"clustered around the platform.
The wind howled through the open
side, the rain came pouring in."
"They were sold in
families, but let us see.
"The man and wife might be sold
"to the pine woods
of north Carolina
"their brothers and
sisters scattered
"through the cotton
fields of Alabama
"and the rice
swamps of Louisiana
while the parents might be
left on the old plantation."
"Who can tell
"how closely intertwined
are a band of 400 persons
"living isolated from
all the world besides?
"Do they not naturally
become one great family
each man a brother unto each?"
Narrator: At ten broeck racetrack,
no legendary powers of flight
could save the Butler
island people.
For two solid days
remembered for generations
as "the weeping time"
the heavens broke
as husband after wife, brother
after sister, child after mother
ascended the dreaded block
to be called off individually
or in family lots
as stated in the catalog.
The New York herald reported
that only after the last slave
was sold did the rain stop.
Months after the great
sale in Georgia
dangerfield newby, a free man
learned that his own wife and
children were soon to go
under the auctioneer's hammer
in brentville, Virginia.
Woman: "Dear husband, I want you
to buy me as soon as possible
"for if you do not get
me, somebody else will.
"Dear husband, you know
not the trouble I see.
"It is said master
is in want of money.
"If so, I know not what
time he may sell me
"and then all my bright hopes
of the future are blasted
"for there has been
one bright hope
"to cheer me in all my troubles
"for if I thought I
should never see you
"this earth would have
no charms for me.
"Do all you can for me, which
I have no doubt you will.
Your affectionate
wife, Harriet newby."
Narrator: Dangerfield
newby had no money.
But that fall, he joined up
with 21 other abolitionists
in a conspiracy against the
government of the United States.
They would invade
the federal arsenal
at Harper's ferry, Virginia, and
use the weapons to free slaves
throughout the
Virginia countryside.
As newby saw it
this was his last chance to
save his wife and six children.
The conspiracy's leader
was John brown...
A wanted man with a
price on his head.
After the fighting in Kansas
he circulated secretly among
black and white abolitionists
collecting money,
weapons and volunteers
to attack the federal arsenal.
His extraordinary plan
suited the mood of many
black abolitionists.
Some were already
preparing themselves
for what they called "the
irrepressible conflict."
Blight: There is an increasing
sensibility among abolitionists
by the late 1850s
though they do not
know how to plan it
that slavery is only
going to be destroyed
through some kind of violence.
Narrator: Besides
dangerfield newby
there was Osborne Anderson
from chatham, Canada.
From oberlin, Ohio,
came Lewis leary.
Leary's Irish grandfather
and his free black
great-grandfather
had fought in the revolution.
Leary recruited his nephew
college-educated John a.
Copeland, Jr.
Both had already risked their
lives to rescue a fugitive
from the hands of
Kentucky slave catchers.
And there was shields green,
himself a fugitive slave.
Of the 16 white raiders,
some were quakers.
Some had fought alongside
brown in Kansas.
Three were brown's own sons...
Owen, Oliver and Watson.
But missing from the roster
was the man brown wanted most at
his side... Frederick douglass.
Brown had tried to
recruit him and failed.
Horton: In order for John brown's
raid to have been successful
he would have had to overcome
not only local
military authority
not only state militia, but
ultimately the U.S. army.
I mean, slavery was protected by the U.S.
government
not just by some local officials
and douglass knew this.
Douglass: "I told him,
and these were my words
"that he was going into
a perfect steel trap
and that once in, he would
never get out alive."
Man: "On Sunday, October 16
"captain brown called his
men down to worship.
"He read from the Bible
"and then offered up a
fervent prayer to god
"to assist in the
liberation of the bondsmen
in that slaveholding land."
"Every man there assembled
seemed to respond from
the depth of his soul."
"At 8:00 on Sunday evening,
captain brown said
'men, get your arms, we will
proceed to the ferry.'"
Osborne Anderson,
Harper's ferry raider.
Narrator: At first, they moved
swiftly with military precision.
The armory, the federal arsenal
and hall's rifle works
were captured without a shot.
A squad recruited black
men willing to fight
from neighboring plantations.
But brown waited in
the town too long
and his men were discovered.
Riders galloped to
spread the word
that the nightmare of nat
Turner's rebellion years ago
had now descended
on Harper's ferry.
Anderson: "As the sun Rose, the
panic spread like wildfire.
"Men, women and children
"could be seen leaving their
homes in every direction
"impelled by fear.
"The judgment day could not
have presented more terror
in its awful and
certain punishment."
Osborne Anderson.
Narrator: By morning, there was
full-scale war in the streets.
Farmers and militiamen
poured into the town.
Some of brown's men were pinned
down at the rifle works.
Others barricaded themselves
in the firehouse.
Along the river, in the streets
the raiders were
hunted and shot down
their bodies mutilated.
Anderson: "Of the men
shot on the rocks
"when the party were compelled
to take to the river
"some were slaves.
"They suffered death before they
would desert their companions
and their bodies fell
into the waves beneath."
Osborne Anderson.
Narrator: In 36 hours
it was finished.
Troops led by colonel Robert e.
Lee
and lieutenant j.E.B. Stewart
stormed the firehouse.
Of the 22 raiders,
ten were dead.
John brown's sons Oliver
and Watson were dead.
Lewis leary was dead.
Osborne Anderson and
four others escaped.
Seven more were captured
and would stand trial
among them John copeland,
shields green and John brown.
For slaveholders, the raid was
proof of a northern conspiracy
to invade the south and
destroy its institutions.
But more shocking
were the bodies
strewn along the riverbanks
and in the streets
of Harper's ferry...
Proof that white men and black
were willing to die
to end slavery.
Woman: "In the name
of the young girl
"sold from the warm clasp
of a mother's arms
"in the name of the slave mother
"her heart rocked to and fro
"by the agony of her mournful
separations, I thank you.
"You have rocked the
bloody bastille
"and I hope that
from your sad fate
great good may arise to
the cause of freedom."
Frances Ellen Watkins.
Narrator: On December 2,
John brown, 59 years old
sat on his coffin and
rode to the gallows
convicted of murder,
insurrection and treason.
Across the north, bells tolled.
In churches, public
meetings and in newspapers
he was proclaimed a
Christian martyr.
The charges of treason
against John copeland and
shields green were dropped.
According to the
dred Scott decision
they were not citizens and
therefore not traitors.
But on charges of murder
and conspiring to
incite insurrection
they were sentenced to death.
Man: "My fate, so far as
man can seal it, is sealed
"but let not this fact
occasion you any misery
"for remember the cause
in which I was engaged;
"remember it was a holy cause
"one in which men in every
way better than I am
"have suffered and died.
"Farewell, good-bye.
"Serve your god and
meet me in heaven.
Your son and brother
to eternity."
John a. Copeland.
Narrator: Dangerfield newby was
one of the first men to die
in the fighting at
Harper's ferry.
When his body was recovered,
Harriet newby's love letters
were found crumpled
in his pocket.
A year later in 1860, south
Carolina seceded from the union.
The next year, civil war began.
The "irrepressible conflict"
had come at last.
Douglass: "Freedom to the slave should
now be proclaimed from the capital
"and should be seen above
"the smoke and fire
of every battlefield.
"Let the slaves and free colored
people be called into service
"and formed into a
liberating army
"to march into the south
and raise the banner
of emancipation."
Frederick douglass.
Narrator: Across the country, black
men rushed to join the union army
but were turned away.
For president Abraham Lincoln
this was a war to save the
union, not to end slavery.
Lincoln feared offending the
sensibilities of northern whites
as well as the border
slavery states
who remained loyal to the union.
In 1862, congress at
last outlawed slavery
in the nation's capital.
A year later, faced with
the need for more troops
and pressure from abolitionists
Lincoln took the first
steps toward emancipation.
Douglass: "An immense assembly
convened in tremont temple.
"We were waiting and listening
as for a bolt from the sky.
"8:00, 9:00, 10:00 came...
Still no word.
"At last a man exclaimed in
tones that thrilled all hearts
'it is coming, it
is on the wires.'"
narrator: The "emancipation
proclamation" freed only slaves
in states and parts of states
still loyal to the confederacy.
A million slaves within the
union territory were not freed.
But douglass and
others were convinced
this was the beginning
of the end of slavery.
In 1863, the union army
began accepting free African
Americans and runaway slaves
into its ranks.
Over 180,000 would take
up arms in the struggle.
As union soldiers
fought their way south
they were met by thousands
of escaping slaves.
Sergeant George hatton
was stationed near
jamestown, Virginia
where the first African
slaves had come ashore
over 200 years before.
There, he saw how much
the fortunes of freedom
and slavery had turned.
Hatton: "We captured
several colored women
"that belonged to Mr. Clayton
"who had given them a
most unmerciful whipping.
"On the arrival of Mr.
Clayton in camp
"the commanding officer
determined to let the women
have their revenge."
Narrator: The white
commanding officer
first ordered Mr. Clayton
tied up and flogged
by a black soldier
in company "e"...
A man who had once been
Clayton's property.
Hatton: "After some 15 or
20 well-addressed strokes
"the ladies, one after another
"came up and gave
him a like number
"to remind him they
were no longer his
"but under the protection
of the star-spangled banner
"and guarded by
their own patriotic
"though once down-trodden race.
"Oh, that I had the tongue
to express my feelings
"while standing on the
banks of the James river
"on the soil of Virginia,
the mother state of slavery
as a witness of such
a sudden reverse."
Sergeant George w.
Hatton, company "c"
first regiment, U.S.
colored troops.
Narrator: The nation's healing
would be long in coming.
Over 600,000 Americans died
in the fight over slavery...
As many deaths as in all of
America's other wars combined.
When the civil war was
over, slavery was dead.
Three new amendments
to the constitution
outlawed slavery and promised
that no American would be denied
the rights of citizenship
on the basis of race.
Four million enslaved
Americans were now free.
Jacobs: "Dear Mrs. Cheney
"I would like to write to you
a line from my old home.
"I am sitting under the old
roof, 12 feet from the spot
"where I suffered all the
crushing weight of slavery.
Thank god there is no more
need of hiding places."
Harriet Jacobs.
Narrator: Jacobs was
one of thousands
who came back to the counties
where they had been slaves.
Like their former masters,
they, too, began the business
of remaking their
lives in a new land.
The road to freedom they
all started down now
would be longer, more
difficult, and more painful
than they could imagine,
but they began.
Jacobs: "I cannot tell you
how I feel in this place.
"The change is so great I
can hardly take it in.
"I was born here.
"I have hunted up
all the old people
"done what I could for them.
"Many of them I have
known from childhood.
"Many will learn to
act for themselves.
"I never saw such a
state of excitement.
"My love to miss Daisy.
"I send her some
Jasmine blossoms.
Tell her they bear the
fragrance of freedom."
Harriet Jacobs.
Narrator: Their struggle to be free,
to be us, was only beginning.
Man: "Here's the idea:
Freedom is worth it all."
Moses Mitchell, ex-slave.
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They came to a new world
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Woman: ♪ your country ♪
♪ how came it yours? ♪
♪ Before the pilgrims landed ♪
♪ we were here. ♪
♪ Your country ♪
♪ how came it yours? ♪
♪ Before the pilgrims landed ♪
♪ we were here. ♪
Africans in America
has been made
possible by a Grant
from the national endowment
for the humanities
expanding America's
understanding of who we were
who we are and who we will be.
They were torn from
homes and families
yet they never let go of their
courage and perseverance
and our nation is
stronger because of it.
That's why africans in America
is proudly brought to you
by bankers trust,
architects of value.
A home is more than
four walls and a roof.
It's safer streets...
Better schools...
Stronger communities...
The American dream.
The fannie Mae foundation...
Helping Americans on the
path to home ownership.
McDonald's is proud to support
this presentation of
africans in America.
Additional funding
is provided by:
And the annual financial support
of pbs viewers like you.
Man: "At the close of the first
revolution in this country
"with Great Britain
"there were but 13
states in the union.
"Now there are 24
"and the whites are dragging us
around in chains and handcuffs
"to their new states
and territories
"believing we were
made by our creator
to be an inheritance to them
and their children forever."
"The whites want slaves
and want us for slaves.
But some of them will curse
the day they ever saw us."
"God will cause them to
rise up one against another
"to be split and divided
and oppress each other
with sword in hand."
David Walker.
Man: "The master was fixin'
to tie them up and whip 'em.
"They say, 'master, you
ain't gonna lick me.'
"they runs down to the river.
"The overseer, he sure
thought he could catch 'em
"when they get to the river.
"But before he can get to them
"they rise up in the
air and fly away.
"They fly right back to Africa.
I think that happened
on Butler island."
Shad hall, a slave of Georgia.
Narrator: In the sea
islands of Georgia
the slave community at
Butler island and St. Simons
was almost as old as the nation.
The labor of these
enslaved men and women
made the Butler family
one of the richest in
the United States.
In 1830, Pierce Butler
was waiting to inherit
his share of the family fortune.
He was a 20-year-old
Philadelphia socialite
and had never seen the
family plantation
that preserved his affluence.
Butler traced his lineage to
the founding of the Republic.
His grandfather,
major Pierce Butler
was a signer of the constitution
and wrote its fugitive
slave clause.
The younger Butler had
little interest in politics.
But like other men of his class,
he rested easy in the knowledge
that the democracy his
grandfather helped create
was firmly in the
grasp of slavery men.
Man: You come to Washington, the
seat of the government of the nation
that sees itself as the freest
nation on the face of the earth
and in that capital,
what you see is, uh...
Slave auctions,
slaveholding pens
groups of slaves being
marched through the streets
on their way to Virginia
or farther south
so that slavery
is very much in evidence
in the nation's capital.
And not a few foreign visitors
make note of the fact
that they come to the
seat of American freedom
and they are struck by the
presence of American slavery.
Narrator: Although 75% of Southern
whites did not own slaves
the new president Andrew
Jackson was a slaveholder
as were four of the six
presidents preceding him.
Men loyal to slavery
dominated the supreme court
and the presidential cabinet.
Within a few years
their influence in the
house of representatives
would prevent petitions
against slavery
from even being
read on the floor.
Man: "The relation which now
exists between the two races
"has existed for two centuries.
"It has grown with our growth
"and strengthened
with our strength.
"It has entered into and
modified all our institutions
"civil and political.
"We cannot permit it to be
destroyed, come what will
should it cost every
drop of blood."
John c. Calhoun,
senator, south Carolina.
Narrator: Money invested
in slavery was by far
the largest concentration
of capital in the country.
By 1830, two million African
Americans were enslaved
in the United States...
Worth over a billion
dollars to their owners.
By comparison, annual
federal revenues
were less than 25 million.
Man: The vast majority
of the world's cotton
was being produced and
exported in the south.
They were sort of like Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait with oil
at certain points
in this century.
They had it all and
everyone else wanted it
and this gave them
a tremendous amount of
economic power in the world
and of course all this
rested on slave labor.
And the cotton was shipped
by northern ships
and it was financed by
northern insurance companies.
The cotton trade was the
basis of shipbuilding
of shipping, maritime
enterprise, banking, insurance
as well as the early factories
which will be developing
in this period
transforming the
cotton into textiles.
So there were many thousands
or hundreds of thousands
of northerners
whose livelihoods depended
directly on slavery.
So what that says is that
African-American slavery
can march right along with
the nation as it progresses.
And African-American enslavement
is part of the progress of America...
Of white America.
Narrator: For America, progress
meant westward expansion.
President Andrew Jackson
forced cherokees, choctaws
and other tribes off
their ancestral lands.
25 million acres were seized
from the Indian nations
to make room for
more white settlers
more cotton... more slaves.
Woman: "I was meditating
upon some means of escape."
"I had my secret hopes, but I
must fight my battle alone."
"The war for my life had begun
"and I resolved not
to be conquered.
"My master had power
and law on his side.
I had a determined will."
Harriet Jacobs.
Man: One cannot argue
that slaves were content.
You might have ten slaves one
night when you go to bed.
The next morning you
can almost be bankrupt
if the slaves... if those ten slaves...
Have left.
That could be as much as
$20,000-or $30,000-worth
of investment there
and they just disappear.
Narrator: Any attempt to escape
bondage was an act of rebellion.
Runaways were hunted
by local patrols
and professional slave catchers.
In edenton, north Carolina
Harriet Jacobs was 21 years
old when she decided to run.
She hid under
floorboards, in the swamp
and finally in her
grandmother's house.
Jacobs: "A small shed had been
added to my grandmother's house
"years ago.
"Between the boards and the
roof was a very small garret.
"To this hole I was conveyed.
"The air was stifling,
the darkness total.
"The garret was only nine feet
long and seven feet wide.
"The highest part was
only three feet high.
Rats and mice ran over my bed."
Narrator: For a window,
she made a small hole.
Through it, she watched
almost every day
the master who had beaten her
and stalked her sexually
since she was 15
and she saw her children, whom
she couldn't take with her
but whom she dared not leave.
Relatives brought
her food in secret
and cared for her
son and daughter.
Jacobs: "I lived in that dismal hole
almost deprived of air and light
"with no space to move my
limbs for nearly seven years
yet I would have chosen this
rather than my lot as a slave."
Man: Who better
to define freedom
than a slave?
A slave probably never loses
sight of the idea of freedom
or when he or she does
is probably the moment
when they are doomed.
Our sense of freedom was
something spiritual.
It was like a fire inside of us.
Narrator: Free African Americans
were one of the greatest
threats to slavery:
182,000 in the south, 137,000
living in the northern states.
In churches, newspapers,
antislavery meetings
and negro conventions, they
openly denounced racial bondage
and worked to overthrow it.
Horton: Slavery in the south
had an impact on the life
of every black person
in the country
no matter where that
black person was.
It was almost impossible that
if you were a free black person
you wouldn't have a
friend or a relative...
Mother, father, son, daughter...
In slavery
and so you had that very
personal connection.
Narrator: In Boston, David Walker
had never been anyone's property.
He made a good living as
a used-clothing merchant
but his father had been a slave
and in 1829, Walker launched
his own private war
on slaveholders.
Walker: "America is more our
country than it is the whites.
"The greatest riches
in all America
"have arisen from our
blood and tears.
"And will they drive us
from our property and home?
"They must look sharp
for this very thing will bring
swift destruction upon them."
David Walker.
Narrator: Walker's "appeal to the
colored citizens of the world"
violently condemned
American slavery and racism
and called for slaves to rise
up against their masters.
Racial bondage,
prophesied Walker
was an abomination
which would call divine wrath
down upon the country.
Walker said, "no black
people are Americans
"and they deserve to
be not only freed
but treated as citizens
of this country."
He utilized the rhetoric
of the nation...
The rhetoric of
Liberty, of equality
the declaration of
independence...
And threw it back in the
face of white America
charging the nation
with being hypocrites
with violating their
own professed ideals.
Narrator: Walker smuggled
his "appeal" into the south
by sewing it into the
coats of black sailors.
Its fiery rhetoric
announced a radical shift
in the struggle to
abolish slavery.
Southern officials put a
price on Walker's head:
$1,000 dead, $10,000
if taken alive.
Man: Three states
Georgia, Louisiana
and north Carolina
as a direct result
of Walker's appeal
passed legislation making
it a crime to teach slaves
or in fact blacks...
Free or slave...
From being able to
read and write.
And the south will now
begin, after the early '30s
to limit civil liberties
in a major way
eliminating freedom of the
press, freedom of speech
as a result of the
abolition movement.
Narrator: David Walker died
under mysterious circumstances.
Two years later, in 1831
when nat Turner's slave
revolt in Virginia
left more than 55 whites dead
Southern officials blamed it on
publisher William Lloyd Garrison
and his Boston newspaper,
the liberator.
At age 26, Garrison
was impoverished.
He slept in his
tiny press office
and was ridiculed for
hiring a black apprentice.
His antislavery newspaper was in
continual danger of going under.
But Garrison's passion
to destroy slavery
soon made him notorious
among slavery's supporters.
Like other abolitionists
he threatened an
American way of life.
Man: Garrison was also one of
the few white abolitionists
who shouldered up
to David Walker
and actually... he serialized
parts of Walker's appeal
in the liberator in 1831
after Walker's death.
Garrison believed that
through "moral suasion"...
As it was called at the time...
By an onslaught of persuasion
that southerners over time
could be convinced of the
sin of slaveholding.
Man: "Before god, such a
glaring contradiction
"as exists between our
creed and practice
"the annal of 6,000
years cannot parallel.
"I am ashamed of my country.
"I am sick of our
unmeaning declamation
"in praise of Liberty
and equality;
"of our hypocritical cant about
the unalienable rights of man.
We are guilty, all guilty,
horribly guilty."
William Lloyd Garrison.
Narrator: Black activists
gave Garrison money
sold subscriptions and
filled his newspaper
with their own
antislavery writings.
Three out of four
subscribers were black.
The liberator became the voice
of the abolition crusade.
Abolitionists, white and black
trained themselves to be
professional agitators.
They preached their
antislavery message
in open fields and churches,
in cities and villages.
But as their assault
on slavery intensified
so did the backlash
from northern whites.
A mob dragged Garrison
through Boston streets
at the end of a rope.
In alton, Illinois,
rioters murdered
white antislavery
publisher Elijah lovejoy
and destroyed his
printing press.
Washington: What the abolitionists
didn't realize was how deeply embedded
in the social, economic
and political structure
slavery was.
They didn't realize how
powerful the slavocracy was.
And they didn't realize
how much racism had embedded
the fabric of American life.
Man: Most white Americans
knew that slavery was wrong.
The way they reconciled
themselves to it was
that... to think that
it could be abolished
would bring worse
consequences on the country.
One is that it would
disrupt the constitution.
It would perhaps
unleash civil war;
that it would unleash a large
mass of free black people
who were regarded as not
assimilable in the society;
that it would lead
to calamities.
Garrison: "Dear beloved mother:
"Satan has come
down in great wrath
in the city of brotherly love,
knowing his time is short."
William Lloyd Garrison.
Narrator: In Philadelphia
the new abolitionist meeting
place, Pennsylvania hall
had only been open three days
when the national antislavery
convention of American women
gathered there.
As women speakers
took the podium
they could hear an
angry mob outside.
Woman: "Do you ask what has
the north to do with slavery?
"The spirit of slavery is here
and has been roused to wrath
"by our abolitionist
speeches and conventions
"for surely Liberty would not
foam and tear itself with rage.
Cast out first the spirit of
slavery from your own hearts."
Angelina grimke weld.
They were bringing
women to the platform
and having women speak in public
which was a brand-new affair
and a threat to the order
as people understood it.
And perhaps most notably
they brought black
abolitionists on to platforms
speaking in public
telling their own stories
in their own voices.
All of this now, to
many white northerners
was a threat to the social
order as they understood it.
Narrator: The next day
the black and white
women held their ground
but that night, as they
emerged from the building
linked arm-in-arm,
the mob stoned them.
Garrison: "The mob now
increased to several thousand
"and got in the hall by dashing
open the doors with their axes.
"They then set fire
to this huge building
and in the course of an hour,
it was a solid wall of flame."
Narrator: For abolitionists,
the message was clear...
Demands for racial equality
threatened not only the
slaveholding south
but the privileges of
whiteness in the north.
Woman: We think of
the jacksonian era
as the era of the common man
and in a sense it was the
era of the common man
as long as the common
man was white.
And so here we have a great
distinction between whiteness
giving citizenship or
standing or almost personhood
and no matter how rich you are
if you're black, you
are not a person
or you're not a citizen.
And in the 1830s,
over and over again
in places like Pennsylvania
new legislation inserts
the word "white"
into the regulation of voting.
So this is the, I would
say, the great watershed
of where whiteness makes
the big difference
in becoming a citizen.
Ignatiev: The racial system...
The system of white preferment
in employment, in political
access, in citizenship...
Came to embrace
virtually all so-called white
people in this country
who did, in fact, have a stake
in the advantages of
racial supremacy.
They had access to jobs
from which even free
negroes were excluded.
They had the right to vote.
So definitely white
people gained
from the system of
racial supremacy.
Without that
"white" itself would have
been a meaningless category.
It would have been simply
a physical description
like "tall."
Man: "In all social systems,
there must be a class
"to do the menial duties
"to perform the drudgery of life
"that is, a class requiring
but a low order of intellect.
"Its requisites are vigor,
docility, fidelity.
"Such a class you must have
"or you would not
have that other class
"which leads progress,
civilization and refinement.
"Fortunately for the south
she found a race adapted
to that purpose."
James Henry Hammond,
senator, south Carolina.
Narrator: By 1838, Pierce
Butler of Philadelphia
and his brother
John had inherited
the Butler family plantations on
the altamaha river in Georgia.
Ownership included
730 human beings...
Slaves who grew sea island
cotton on St. Simons
and rice on Butler island.
At age 28, Pierce Butler
a man with a taste
for high living
was now one of the richest
men in the country.
His new wife was
english-born Fanny kemble
an actress of
international acclaim.
Kemble believed in abolitionism
and even tried to publish
an antislavery tract.
Butler stopped her
fearing it would bring the
mob to their doorstep.
Their mansion was
only six blocks
from the ruins of
Pennsylvania hall.
There's some controversy over
whether or not Fanny kemble knew
where her future husband's
wealth came from.
There certainly was
no controversy
over the fact that she
knew he was very wealthy
and that was very
attractive to her.
And many Philadelphia families
were attached to the
plantation south
by marriage, by inheritance.
Narrator: In December 1838
kemble made the ten-day
journey to the sea islands
with her husband and their
two young daughters
to see the source
of their wealth.
She hoped to persuade Pierce to
gradually emancipate his slaves
as some slaveholders had.
But she was entering
into a world
for which nothing in her
life had prepared her.
Kemble: "We now approached the low
reedy banks of Butler island.
"The wharf began to be crowded
"with negroes shouting, laughing
and clapping their hands...
"A usual expression of
savages and children...
"To express their
ecstasy at our arrival.
"They seized our clothes and our
hands and almost wrung them off.
"I believe I was
almost frightened
"and it was not until we were
safely housed and the door shut
"that we indulged in
a fit of laughing
quite as full on my part of
nervousness as of amusement."
Narrator: Although
kemble brought with her
all the racial anxieties
and prejudices of her time
she was drawn to the people
in this place she
called "negroland."
She kept a very careful
journal while she was there.
She got acquainted,
especially with slave women
who gradually came to trust
her because she was different
from any white person that
they had ever seen before.
Narrator: The Butler rice plantation
was the largest in Georgia
one of the biggest in
the United States.
Here on her husband's estate
kemble expected to find the
people well cared for.
Dusinberre: Well, one
evening, nine women came in
and she thought, well, she had
been getting these stories
about how many
miscarriages they had had
and how many children had died
so she thought, "well, this
evening I'll ask them all.
I'll ask every
single one of them."
Kemble: "Nanny has
had three children.
"Two of them are dead.
"She came to implore
that the rule
"of sending them into the fields
three weeks after giving birth
"might be altered.
"Leah, Caesar's wife,
has had six children.
"Three are dead.
"Sarah, Steven's wife...
"This woman's case and history
were alike deplorable.
"She had had four miscarriages
"had brought seven
children into the world
"five of whom were dead
and was again with child."
Narrator: On Butler island, chronic
malaria sickened the mothers
and created miscarriages
and weak infants.
More than half the
enslaved children died
before the age of six.
Kemble: "I stood in
profound ignorance
"sickening with the
sight of suffering
"which I knew not
how to alleviate.
"And I beg you to bear in mind
"that the negroes on Mr.
Butler's estate
are generally
considered well off."
Narrator: 280,000 people were
enslaved in Georgia in 1838...
Almost half the
state's population.
Effective slave management...
The science of caring for
and working negro slaves...
Was widely discussed in
agricultural journals.
In this essay, Butler
overseer roswell king, Jr.
Offered readers expert advice
on proper diet and medical
treatment for negroes.
But kemble discovered king
and his father had raped
numbers of slave women
at Butler island.
Kemble: "Betty, frank's wife, was
taken from him by the overseer
"the all-efficient and
all-satisfactory Mr. King
"and she had a son by him.
"I do not know how long
"Mr. King's occupation of
frank's wife continued.
This outrage was notorious
among the slaves."
Narrator: Frank was "headman
frank," the black driver
second only to the
white overseer.
A skilled planter
frank supervised other black
drivers and their work gangs.
He assigned daily jobs according
to the overseer's instructions.
Serious infractions
against the system
like stealing or running away
were punishable by
"a cool 100 lashes."
On another plantation,
Georgia slave Charles ball
saw punishment even
more disturbing.
Charles ball witnesses a house
servant, as he finds out
who's being brutally lashed.
She's tied... her legs and her
arms are tied to the ground.
She's stripped to the waist.
The owner beats her brutally,
and she's bleeding
and then he goes into the house
and he brings back a candle
and he lights the candle
and he's dripping the wax on
the wounds of this woman.
But what he also found striking
was that as she's being whipped
he looks at the house
and he sees that the planter's
daughters are looking out
and watching this as well.
Woman: ♪ hush, little baby ♪
♪ don't you cry ♪
♪ for you'll be an angel ♪
♪ by and by... ♪
Horton: Suppose you were a child
growing up on a plantation.
The people who raise you
your surrogate mother, your
mammy, is a black woman.
This is a person that raises you
from the time you are this high
until adulthood.
What is the impact on this child
of having his surrogate
mother become his property?
What is the impact of
having his best friend
who is a black slave child,
come to him one day and say
"do you know that your
father has sold my father?"
What is the impact of
that on the white child?
Kemble: "I am getting
perfectly savage
over all these doings
"and really should
consider my own throat
"and those of my
children well-cut
"if some night the people were
to take it into their heads
to clear off scores
in that fashion."
Narrator: At Butler island,
the preacher, Cooper London
secretly asked kemble for bibles
to teach the people to read...
Something they both knew
was against the law.
When kemble asked him how
he'd learned to read
he kept silent.
Kemble continued to bring
her husband slave petitions
for more food, for rags
for a longer resting
period after childbirth.
The men, forced to pull their
own plows, asked for mules.
Finally, Pierce Butler
had enough of petitions.
Kemble: "Today I have had a
most painful conversation
"with Mr. Butler, who
has declined receiving
"any of the people's
petitions through me.
"Whether he is wearied
with these supplications
"or whether he has been annoyed
"at the number of horrible
stories of oppression
"which cannot be done away
with by his angry exclamations
"of 'why do you
believe such trash?
"Don't you know the niggers
are all damned liars? '
I do not know."
"This is no place for me
"since I was not
born among slaves
and cannot bear to
live among them."
Jacobs: "I long to draw in a
plentiful draught of fresh air
"to stretch my cramped limbs
"to feel the earth
under my feet again.
"My relatives are on the
lookout for a chance of escape
but none seemed tolerably safe."
Harriet Jacobs.
Narrator: On a night in 1842
friends at last smuggled
Harriet Jacobs north
to Philadelphia by sea.
Her son was safe with
her free grandmother.
Her daughter was
already in New York.
After seven years in hiding,
Harriet Jacobs was free.
Jacobs: "The next morning, I was
on deck as soon as the day dawned
"to see the sun rise for the
first time on free soil.
"We watched the reddening sky
and saw the great orb come
up out of the water."
"Soon the waves began to sparkle
and everything caught
the beautiful glow."
"We had escaped from slavery
and we supposed
ourselves to be safe."
Horton: Once you're free
that's not the end
of your problem.
You've got to work, you've
got to have a place to live.
You have to have very
practical things.
These are people coming
out of the south.
So what do you do in terms of
dealing with northern winters?
Very practical kinds of things...
Clothing.
Were you going to
stay in that city?
Were you going to try
to move farther north?
Blight: When blacks came to the north
and lived in black communities
in Philadelphia or
Boston or in New York
or out west, even in Cincinnati
they found themselves living
in largely all-black enclaves.
They found themselves
living in communities
where they created
their own churches
where they struggled to
create their own schools
where they occasionally,
as in New York
would create orphanages
where they also tended...
They tried to create
mutual relief associations
to try to provide people
with insurance policies
with the ability to buy land
if they wanted to move
out to rural areas.
Narrator: In most
northern cities
colored Americans were
denied the right to vote
testify against whites,
sign a binding contract
or attend white schools.
But even this segregated
freedom was jealously guarded.
Runaways kept a lookout
for slave catchers.
They found jobs and raised money
to purchase loved
ones out of slavery.
Chorus: ♪ come unto me ♪
♪ all ye that labor... ♪
Narrator: By 1840, over a
thousand antislavery societies
had risen up in the free states
with black and white
membership numbering 200,000.
Abolitionist women
and men were sending
thousands of petitions
to congress
demanding an end to the
slave trade in the capital.
Abolitionists boycotted slave-
grown rice, sugar and cotton.
Antislavery slogans and emblems
were seen on everything
from sugar bowls to
children's primers.
But it was the powerful voices
of fugitive slaves in the north
that infused the movement
with new urgency.
Blight: Well, the slave
narratives were in some ways
an argument with America.
They were an argument with
the system of slavery.
These were ways now
that a former slave could not
only publish his own story
to release his own identity
to sort of gain a kind of order
over the chaos of
his or her own life
but it was a way now
to directly challenge
the people who had owned him
with a free voice,
from a free place.
Woman: "When I was a slave,
I hated the white people.
"When I was ten years
old, we was all sold.
"I said, 'oh, god,
my mother told me
"'if I asked you to make my
master and mistress good
"'you'd do it.
"'They didn't get good.
"'God, maybe you can't do it.
"Kill them.'
"you see, I know what it is
"to be taken in the
barn and tied up
and the blood drawed out
of your bare back."
Sojourner truth.
Horton: And it's very important
for these people...
For white people who live
in small towns, isolated
who may really have never seen,
certainly never seen a slave
may not have ever seen
a black person...
To have a real living, breathing
person stand before them
and say, "I was a slave.
"This was my life.
This is what slavery is like."
Narrator: In 1845, the narrative
of Frederick douglass
quickly became an
international bestseller.
Douglass, a fugitive from
Maryland, risked recapture
by becoming an outspoken leader
in the abolitionist cause.
Douglass: "We hold slavery to
be a system of lawless violence
that it never was lawful
and never can be made so."
Frederick douglass.
Narrator: It was not only slavery
that douglass and other abolitionists
were calling into question
but the belief
that the constitution protected
the right to own human beings.
Douglass: "The constitution
of the United States
"inaugurated 'to form
a more perfect union
"and secure the
blessings of Liberty'
"could not well have been
designed at the same time
"to maintain and perpetuate
"a system of rape and
murder like slavery.
Not one word can be found to
authorize such a belief."
Foner: The abolitionists,
you might say
invented a new and
different constitution
a different reading
of the constitution
very much informed by the
declaration of independence
and its affirmation
of human equality
and posited it as an alternative
to the dominant vision
of America as a white society
which was so prominent
in this period.
So that the abolitionists,
you might say
reinvigorated the rhetoric
of the American revolution
which stated that
this was an asylum
for Liberty for all mankind
but that rhetoric had not
been put into reality
by the founding fathers.
They had created a society
of white entitlement.
Narrator: In 1847, in
Rochester, New York
douglass founded the north star,
his own antislavery newspaper.
In the antislavery bookstore
above his offices
worked another fugitive from
slavery, Harriet Jacobs.
Man: ♪ donney got
a ramblin' mind ♪
♪ donney got a ramblin' mind ♪
♪ donney done jumped the fence ♪
♪ gone on down the line. ♪
Narrator: In January 1848
the discovery of gold in
California's American river
created what one
newspaper called
"a revolution in the
ordinary state of affairs."
Many white southerners
saw the new territory
as a last link in a great
slaveholding Republic
that would stretch to
the pacific shore.
Within a year, 80,000 pioneers
made the trek to the gold coast.
Many masters brought
their slaves.
By one estimate
African Americans sent
home from California
over three-quarters
of a million dollars
to buy loved ones
out of bondage.
When Californians petitioned
congress to be a free state
Southern leaders threatened
to quit the union and
form their own country.
The price for saving the union
would be the rights
of black people.
In 1850, in return for
a free California
Southern leaders in
congress demanded
a tough new fugitive slave law.
No black person, fugitive
or freeborn, would be safe.
Horton: Under this law, a
person, white or black
could be deputized on the spot
to help in the recovery
of a fugitive slave.
So that if you
were on the street
and a marshal was
chasing a fugitive
that marshal could deputize you
and you would have
to participate
in the recapture
of that fugitive
under penalty of
imprisonment and fine.
Narrator: Special
commissioners were appointed
to try suspected runaways.
Those accused were
denied a trial by jury
and the right to testify.
Commissioners
received ten dollars
for every person
returned to slavery...
Only five dollars if the man
or woman was acquitted.
Bright: It now made the
federal government
and northern citizens
complicitous in the process of
retrieving and retaining slaves
back to their masters.
It is the first time really
in the lives of many
white northerners
that the slavery issue,
the slavery problem
kind of comes home to
their neighborhoods
comes home to their communities.
It means now, to harbor
a fugitive slave
or even to be aware
of a fugitive
is to be committing a felony.
Narrator: In New York, Harriet
Jacobs was trying to make a new life
when her former
master's daughter
armed with the new law,
came north to kidnap her.
Jacobs: "It was the beginning
of a reign of terror
"to the colored population.
"Many families who had lived
in the city for 20 years
"fled from it now.
"Many a wife discovered a secret
she had never known before...
"That her husband
was a fugitive.
"Many a husband discovered
"that his wife had fled
from slavery years ago
"and the children of his love
were liable to be seized
"and carried into slavery.
"I seldom ventured
into the streets.
"I went as much as possible
"through back
streets and byways.
All that winter I lived
in a state of anxiety."
Man: "I found my way to
Boston, I got employment.
"I worked hard, but I didn't
tell anybody I was a slave.
"One night, I heard someone
running behind me.
"Almost before I could speak,
I was lifted off my feet
by six or seven others, and
it was of no use to resist."
Anthony burns.
Narrator: In 1854, the arrest of
Anthony burns triggered a showdown
between Boston abolitionists
and the federal government.
Abolitionists swore
never to allow a fugitive
slave to be taken.
The south, perhaps
understandably
said, "look, this our
constitutional right.
"It's in the constitution
"that we have a right to get
our fugitive slaves back.
How can illegal groups of
northerners prevent this?"
Narrator: As news of
burns' arrest spread
hundreds of white citizens met
at Boston's faneuil hall.
Black citizens gathered in the
basement of tremont temple.
The white meeting is going on
debating about what they
should be doing and so on
when the word comes
that the blacks are
attacking the courthouse
and the white meeting
empties out.
Pretty soon they're all
around the courthouse
trying to break in to
get Anthony burns out.
Man: "There was but room
for one to pass in.
"I glanced at my black ally.
"He did not even look at
me, but sprang first.
"We found ourselves face-to-face
with six or eight policemen
"who laid about them with their
clubs, driving us to the wall.
"I did not know until
the next morning
"that one of the marshal's
deputies, a man named batchelder
had been killed."
T.w. Higginson.
Narrator: The mayor ordered two
artillery companies into the streets.
President Franklin Pierce
sent in the U.S. marines.
Boston abolitionists
were already notorious
for invading courthouses and
jails to free captured runaways.
President Pierce was determined
to show Southern supporters
he would enforce their
fugitive slave law anywhere
even in the so-called great
abolitionist headquarters
of Boston.
Over the next three days
the crowd of protesters
grew to 7,000.
They surrounded the courthouse
and threatened the troops
who guarded burns.
Black waiters refused
to serve the soldiers.
Douglass and others
refused to apologize
for deputy marshal
batchelder's death.
Douglass: "For a white man to
defend his friend unto blood
"is praiseworthy,
but for a black man
"to do precisely the
same thing is a crime.
"We hold that when batchelder
undertook to play the bloodhound
he forfeited his right to live."
Frederick douglass.
You could think what you wanted
about slavery hundreds
of miles away
but when an individual
comes to your community...
A black individual
fleeing marshals
who are going to try to grab him
and send him back to slavery...
It puts slavery
on a human level.
It made people have to choose.
Narrator: On June 2, Anthony
burns was convicted
of being a fugitive slave.
When the captain of
the watch was ordered
to bring burns out of the
courthouse to send him back
he resigned in protest.
Horton: The streets are ringed,
are lined, with people
who have come in from the
outlying areas into Boston
from worcester and
other distant places.
Shopkeepers have draped their
windows in black crepe
and there is a coffin that
hangs across the street
with the message
"here lies Liberty."
Man: "I feel my investment in life
here is worth many percent less
"since Massachusetts
deliberately
"restored Anthony
burns to slavery.
"My thoughts are
murder to the state.
My thoughts involuntarily go to
plotting against the state."
Henry David Thoreau.
Narrator: 50,000 citizens
crowded the streets.
Companies of U.S. marines,
local militia and artillery
marched Anthony
burns to the wharf
and onto a ship
bound for Virginia.
The showdown was over, but some
southerners asked themselves
if the recapture of one man
was worth hundreds of troops
the enormous expense of $50,000
and the life of a
deputy marshal.
Two months later, on
the fourth of July
William Lloyd Garrison publicly
burned the fugitive slave law.
Then, as the crowd said "amen"
he burned the
constitution itself.
It was "a covenant
with death," he said
"an agreement with hell."
Narrator: In the 1850s, Americans
had begun to measure progress
in miles of track laid.
Southern states were
building railroads
faster than Germany,
France or england.
Cotton financed the
railroads of the south.
It purchased the
African Americans
who became laborers and
cargo for the iron road.
Man: "When the cars began to start
and the conductor cried out
"the colored people cried
out with one voice
"as though the heavens and
earth were coming together.
"As the cars moved away
"we heard the weeping and
wailing from the slaves
"as far as human
voice could be heard
"and from that time
to the present
"I have neither seen nor
heard from my two sisters
"nor any of those who
left clarkson depot
on that memorable day."
Jacob stroyer.
Narrator: In 1854,
America was poised
to build a railroad
across the continent
west through the
Kansas territory.
Whether that railroad
would pass through
a Kansas free state or
a Kansas slave state
was a question Americans
north and south
were now ready to
settle with blood.
The Kansas-Nebraska bill,
passed by congress
declared that whoever
settled Kansas
could choose slavery or
freedom for the new state.
Blight: To a lot of northerners
their conception of the future
of the west was held together
by this geographical guarantee
that slavery could never exist
above the 36'30" parallel.
The Kansas-Nebraska act now in
1854 erases that 34-year-old vow
which had the sanction
of the constitution.
It now meant that the settlement
of this vast territory of
the west and the northwest
was open to slavery.
It was open to the possibility
of three, four, five, six,
eight new slave states.
Narrator: From northern states
thousands of pioneers set
out to settle Kansas.
The new england
emigrant aid company
financed the settlement
of entire villages.
In Brooklyn, New York
abolitionist preacher Henry
ward beecher raised funds
to give rifles to the
free-soil settlers.
From Missouri, Georgia and
other Southern states
white settlers came to Kansas
armed to the teeth for
the slavery cause.
Man: "If Kansas is not made a
slave state, it requires no Sage
"to tell that without some
very extraordinary revolution
there will never be
another slave state."
The sovereign squatter
newspaper, Kansas, 1856.
Narrator: But most northerners
who came to the plains
did not want to end
slavery nationwide.
They simply did not want to
compete with it in Kansas
and they didn't want to
work alongside black people
slave or free.
Their movement was
called "free soil."
Free soil meant free
states for free white men.
Horton: Is the future
of America going to be
America as white man's country
or America as a country in which
there are multiple races?
One of the ways you can ensure
that America is in the
future white man's country
is to make sure that that
west was as white as possible
as free as possible from blacks,
whether these blacks were slave
or whether these
blacks were free.
Narrator: Settlers who only
came hoping to build farms
discovered they were
homesteading a battlefield.
Two opposing territorial
governments emerged on the plains
one pro-slavery, the
other free-soil.
Each government
outlawed the other
and both pushed to exclude
free African Americans.
Man: "Cousin Sidney
"we heard that five men had
been killed by free-state men.
"The men were butchered...
Ears cut off
"and bodies thrown
into the river.
"The murdered men, pro-slavery
"had thrown out
threats and insults
"yet the act was barbarous and
inhuman, whoever committed by.
"Since yesterday I have learned
"that those who committed the
murders were a party of browns.
The war seems to have
commenced in real earnest."
Edward bridgeman.
Narrator: In 1856, a raiding party
led by John brown and his sons
avenged the burning of the
free-soil town of Lawrence
with the blood of
five pro-slavery men.
At age 56, brown was one
of the few white men
who didn't want an
all-white Kansas.
He was a fiery abolitionist
who hated slavery
believing, as one
acquaintance put it
that he was made by god to break
the jawbone of slaveholders.
As white men killed white
men in "bleeding Kansas"
David Walker's prophecy
of an American apocalypse
seemed close at hand.
On the fourth of march 1857
the new president, James
Buchanan, promised the nation
that the U.S. supreme court
would at last settle the
question of slavery
in the United States...
Where it could go and
where it could not.
Dred Scott, a slave
from Missouri
had sued for his
freedom on the grounds
that his master had once taken
him to free northern soil.
In his opinion for the court,
chief justice Roger b. Taney
resolved to decide
African-American destiny
once and for all.
Taney: "Dred Scott was not
a citizen of Missouri
"and not entitled as such
to sue in its courts.
"We think they were not
intended to be included
"under the word 'citizens'
in the constitution
"and can therefore claim none
of the rights and privileges.
"They were considered
as a subordinate
"and inferior class of beings,
subjugated by the dominant race
"and altogether unfit to
associate with the white race.
"It is obvious they were
not even in the minds
"of the framers of
the constitution
"when they were
conferring special rights
upon the citizens."
Mr. Chief justice Roger b. Taney
for the United States
supreme court, 1857.
No black person could be
a citizen of the united
states, said taney.
This is a country, "the
family of America"
as he called it, was white.
And the south had a
perfect right, he said
under the constitution,
to expand slavery
into all the territories
of the United States.
Franklin: In other words, taney
said that slavery existed
wherever the owner wanted
to take his slave.
And then he made that
very famous statement
that a black man has no rights
that a white man has to respect.
Narrator: 1857, the year
of the dred Scott decision
was a time of financial panic
brought on by
overextended credit
overbuilding of railroads
and over-speculation
in western lands.
One of those who faced
disaster was Pierce Butler.
Butler had ended his
marriage to Fanny kemble
in a scandalous public
divorce in 1849.
Kemble returned to the theater
supporting herself by reading
from Shakespeare onstage.
Butler was still famous
for his extravagance.
He once lost $24,000 in
a single hand of cards.
By the time of the panic,
he was already in debt.
To protect the family's interest
trustees were given
control of his estate.
After the stock market
collapse in 1857
it was rumored Butler had
gone through an inheritance
worth over $700,000.
To appease creditors
the trustees sold the Butler
family mansion in Philadelphia.
Then they traveled
south to Georgia
to assess the slave property.
"Allotment a" was
Pierce Butler's share
of over 900 slaves at Butler
island and St. Simons.
"Allotment a" totaled 476
men, women and children
with a market value
estimated at over $260,000.
By February 1859, the Butler
island people had to know
that something
terrible was coming.
Headman frank was listed
as "superannuated"...
Too old for the block.
So was the preacher,
Cooper London
who 20 years before had
asked Fanny kemble
to send back bibles and prayer
books from Philadelphia.
Pierce Butler did not want to
put his people on the block
but in February, 429
men, women and children
including a child
named for the master
were loaded onto railway
cars and steamboats
and shipped to ten broeck
racetrack in Savannah.
It would be the largest
sale of human beings
in the history of
the United States.
And as soon as times get tough
and he said he was going to
lose his 500 acres or better
because of taxes and hard
times, the first thing he did
he was going to sell
his supposedly family
member, which was you.
Your skin was black, so
you were going to be sold
to make up the difference.
You were sold for as
cheap as 200 bucks
to as high as $2,000
but you were sold to save
whatever he needed to save.
He wasn't going to sell
his mother and father and
his sister and brother.
He was going to sell you and I.
Narrator: Days after the
Butler island people
arrived for inspection, a
cold drizzle began to fall.
Man: "The affair was regarded
with unusual interest
"throughout the south.
"Nothing was heard of for days
"in barrooms and public houses
but talk of the great sale
"criticism of the affairs of Mr.
Butler, and speculation
as to the probable prices
the stock would bring."
Mortimer Neal Thompson.
Narrator: Thompson came
to Savannah from New York
disguised as a slave speculator
to record the event for
the New York tribune.
Thompson: "None of these Butler
slaves had ever been sold before.
"On the faces of all was an
expression of heavy grief.
Some appeared to be resigned to
the hard stroke of fortune."
Narrator: By the first
day of the auction
the drizzle had
become a hard rain.
Desperate fathers and husbands
tried to convince
benevolent-looking planters
to bid for them and
their families.
Bailey: You think love would
be different than it is now?
Their phrase was
"try to keep the family
together at all costs"
and that's what they tried for.
That's what they prayed for, to
keeping the family together.
And they'd do anything to
keep the family together
practically anything to do it.
Thompson: "The women never spoke
to a white man unless spoken to
and then made the conference
as short as possible."
"Through all the insults to
which they were subjected
they conducted themselves
with perfect self-respect."
"The children were of all sizes,
the youngest being 15 days old."
"The buyers, who were present
to the number of 200
"clustered around the platform.
The wind howled through the open
side, the rain came pouring in."
"They were sold in
families, but let us see.
"The man and wife might be sold
"to the pine woods
of north Carolina
"their brothers and
sisters scattered
"through the cotton
fields of Alabama
"and the rice
swamps of Louisiana
while the parents might be
left on the old plantation."
"Who can tell
"how closely intertwined
are a band of 400 persons
"living isolated from
all the world besides?
"Do they not naturally
become one great family
each man a brother unto each?"
Narrator: At ten broeck racetrack,
no legendary powers of flight
could save the Butler
island people.
For two solid days
remembered for generations
as "the weeping time"
the heavens broke
as husband after wife, brother
after sister, child after mother
ascended the dreaded block
to be called off individually
or in family lots
as stated in the catalog.
The New York herald reported
that only after the last slave
was sold did the rain stop.
Months after the great
sale in Georgia
dangerfield newby, a free man
learned that his own wife and
children were soon to go
under the auctioneer's hammer
in brentville, Virginia.
Woman: "Dear husband, I want you
to buy me as soon as possible
"for if you do not get
me, somebody else will.
"Dear husband, you know
not the trouble I see.
"It is said master
is in want of money.
"If so, I know not what
time he may sell me
"and then all my bright hopes
of the future are blasted
"for there has been
one bright hope
"to cheer me in all my troubles
"for if I thought I
should never see you
"this earth would have
no charms for me.
"Do all you can for me, which
I have no doubt you will.
Your affectionate
wife, Harriet newby."
Narrator: Dangerfield
newby had no money.
But that fall, he joined up
with 21 other abolitionists
in a conspiracy against the
government of the United States.
They would invade
the federal arsenal
at Harper's ferry, Virginia, and
use the weapons to free slaves
throughout the
Virginia countryside.
As newby saw it
this was his last chance to
save his wife and six children.
The conspiracy's leader
was John brown...
A wanted man with a
price on his head.
After the fighting in Kansas
he circulated secretly among
black and white abolitionists
collecting money,
weapons and volunteers
to attack the federal arsenal.
His extraordinary plan
suited the mood of many
black abolitionists.
Some were already
preparing themselves
for what they called "the
irrepressible conflict."
Blight: There is an increasing
sensibility among abolitionists
by the late 1850s
though they do not
know how to plan it
that slavery is only
going to be destroyed
through some kind of violence.
Narrator: Besides
dangerfield newby
there was Osborne Anderson
from chatham, Canada.
From oberlin, Ohio,
came Lewis leary.
Leary's Irish grandfather
and his free black
great-grandfather
had fought in the revolution.
Leary recruited his nephew
college-educated John a.
Copeland, Jr.
Both had already risked their
lives to rescue a fugitive
from the hands of
Kentucky slave catchers.
And there was shields green,
himself a fugitive slave.
Of the 16 white raiders,
some were quakers.
Some had fought alongside
brown in Kansas.
Three were brown's own sons...
Owen, Oliver and Watson.
But missing from the roster
was the man brown wanted most at
his side... Frederick douglass.
Brown had tried to
recruit him and failed.
Horton: In order for John brown's
raid to have been successful
he would have had to overcome
not only local
military authority
not only state militia, but
ultimately the U.S. army.
I mean, slavery was protected by the U.S.
government
not just by some local officials
and douglass knew this.
Douglass: "I told him,
and these were my words
"that he was going into
a perfect steel trap
and that once in, he would
never get out alive."
Man: "On Sunday, October 16
"captain brown called his
men down to worship.
"He read from the Bible
"and then offered up a
fervent prayer to god
"to assist in the
liberation of the bondsmen
in that slaveholding land."
"Every man there assembled
seemed to respond from
the depth of his soul."
"At 8:00 on Sunday evening,
captain brown said
'men, get your arms, we will
proceed to the ferry.'"
Osborne Anderson,
Harper's ferry raider.
Narrator: At first, they moved
swiftly with military precision.
The armory, the federal arsenal
and hall's rifle works
were captured without a shot.
A squad recruited black
men willing to fight
from neighboring plantations.
But brown waited in
the town too long
and his men were discovered.
Riders galloped to
spread the word
that the nightmare of nat
Turner's rebellion years ago
had now descended
on Harper's ferry.
Anderson: "As the sun Rose, the
panic spread like wildfire.
"Men, women and children
"could be seen leaving their
homes in every direction
"impelled by fear.
"The judgment day could not
have presented more terror
in its awful and
certain punishment."
Osborne Anderson.
Narrator: By morning, there was
full-scale war in the streets.
Farmers and militiamen
poured into the town.
Some of brown's men were pinned
down at the rifle works.
Others barricaded themselves
in the firehouse.
Along the river, in the streets
the raiders were
hunted and shot down
their bodies mutilated.
Anderson: "Of the men
shot on the rocks
"when the party were compelled
to take to the river
"some were slaves.
"They suffered death before they
would desert their companions
and their bodies fell
into the waves beneath."
Osborne Anderson.
Narrator: In 36 hours
it was finished.
Troops led by colonel Robert e.
Lee
and lieutenant j.E.B. Stewart
stormed the firehouse.
Of the 22 raiders,
ten were dead.
John brown's sons Oliver
and Watson were dead.
Lewis leary was dead.
Osborne Anderson and
four others escaped.
Seven more were captured
and would stand trial
among them John copeland,
shields green and John brown.
For slaveholders, the raid was
proof of a northern conspiracy
to invade the south and
destroy its institutions.
But more shocking
were the bodies
strewn along the riverbanks
and in the streets
of Harper's ferry...
Proof that white men and black
were willing to die
to end slavery.
Woman: "In the name
of the young girl
"sold from the warm clasp
of a mother's arms
"in the name of the slave mother
"her heart rocked to and fro
"by the agony of her mournful
separations, I thank you.
"You have rocked the
bloody bastille
"and I hope that
from your sad fate
great good may arise to
the cause of freedom."
Frances Ellen Watkins.
Narrator: On December 2,
John brown, 59 years old
sat on his coffin and
rode to the gallows
convicted of murder,
insurrection and treason.
Across the north, bells tolled.
In churches, public
meetings and in newspapers
he was proclaimed a
Christian martyr.
The charges of treason
against John copeland and
shields green were dropped.
According to the
dred Scott decision
they were not citizens and
therefore not traitors.
But on charges of murder
and conspiring to
incite insurrection
they were sentenced to death.
Man: "My fate, so far as
man can seal it, is sealed
"but let not this fact
occasion you any misery
"for remember the cause
in which I was engaged;
"remember it was a holy cause
"one in which men in every
way better than I am
"have suffered and died.
"Farewell, good-bye.
"Serve your god and
meet me in heaven.
Your son and brother
to eternity."
John a. Copeland.
Narrator: Dangerfield newby was
one of the first men to die
in the fighting at
Harper's ferry.
When his body was recovered,
Harriet newby's love letters
were found crumpled
in his pocket.
A year later in 1860, south
Carolina seceded from the union.
The next year, civil war began.
The "irrepressible conflict"
had come at last.
Douglass: "Freedom to the slave should
now be proclaimed from the capital
"and should be seen above
"the smoke and fire
of every battlefield.
"Let the slaves and free colored
people be called into service
"and formed into a
liberating army
"to march into the south
and raise the banner
of emancipation."
Frederick douglass.
Narrator: Across the country, black
men rushed to join the union army
but were turned away.
For president Abraham Lincoln
this was a war to save the
union, not to end slavery.
Lincoln feared offending the
sensibilities of northern whites
as well as the border
slavery states
who remained loyal to the union.
In 1862, congress at
last outlawed slavery
in the nation's capital.
A year later, faced with
the need for more troops
and pressure from abolitionists
Lincoln took the first
steps toward emancipation.
Douglass: "An immense assembly
convened in tremont temple.
"We were waiting and listening
as for a bolt from the sky.
"8:00, 9:00, 10:00 came...
Still no word.
"At last a man exclaimed in
tones that thrilled all hearts
'it is coming, it
is on the wires.'"
narrator: The "emancipation
proclamation" freed only slaves
in states and parts of states
still loyal to the confederacy.
A million slaves within the
union territory were not freed.
But douglass and
others were convinced
this was the beginning
of the end of slavery.
In 1863, the union army
began accepting free African
Americans and runaway slaves
into its ranks.
Over 180,000 would take
up arms in the struggle.
As union soldiers
fought their way south
they were met by thousands
of escaping slaves.
Sergeant George hatton
was stationed near
jamestown, Virginia
where the first African
slaves had come ashore
over 200 years before.
There, he saw how much
the fortunes of freedom
and slavery had turned.
Hatton: "We captured
several colored women
"that belonged to Mr. Clayton
"who had given them a
most unmerciful whipping.
"On the arrival of Mr.
Clayton in camp
"the commanding officer
determined to let the women
have their revenge."
Narrator: The white
commanding officer
first ordered Mr. Clayton
tied up and flogged
by a black soldier
in company "e"...
A man who had once been
Clayton's property.
Hatton: "After some 15 or
20 well-addressed strokes
"the ladies, one after another
"came up and gave
him a like number
"to remind him they
were no longer his
"but under the protection
of the star-spangled banner
"and guarded by
their own patriotic
"though once down-trodden race.
"Oh, that I had the tongue
to express my feelings
"while standing on the
banks of the James river
"on the soil of Virginia,
the mother state of slavery
as a witness of such
a sudden reverse."
Sergeant George w.
Hatton, company "c"
first regiment, U.S.
colored troops.
Narrator: The nation's healing
would be long in coming.
Over 600,000 Americans died
in the fight over slavery...
As many deaths as in all of
America's other wars combined.
When the civil war was
over, slavery was dead.
Three new amendments
to the constitution
outlawed slavery and promised
that no American would be denied
the rights of citizenship
on the basis of race.
Four million enslaved
Americans were now free.
Jacobs: "Dear Mrs. Cheney
"I would like to write to you
a line from my old home.
"I am sitting under the old
roof, 12 feet from the spot
"where I suffered all the
crushing weight of slavery.
Thank god there is no more
need of hiding places."
Harriet Jacobs.
Narrator: Jacobs was
one of thousands
who came back to the counties
where they had been slaves.
Like their former masters,
they, too, began the business
of remaking their
lives in a new land.
The road to freedom they
all started down now
would be longer, more
difficult, and more painful
than they could imagine,
but they began.
Jacobs: "I cannot tell you
how I feel in this place.
"The change is so great I
can hardly take it in.
"I was born here.
"I have hunted up
all the old people
"done what I could for them.
"Many of them I have
known from childhood.
"Many will learn to
act for themselves.
"I never saw such a
state of excitement.
"My love to miss Daisy.
"I send her some
Jasmine blossoms.
Tell her they bear the
fragrance of freedom."
Harriet Jacobs.
Narrator: Their struggle to be free,
to be us, was only beginning.
Man: "Here's the idea:
Freedom is worth it all."
Moses Mitchell, ex-slave.
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