326 Chapter 12 The Sections Go Their Own Ways
harmless emotional release, which it sometimes
was and did. However, religious meetings, secret
and open, provided slaves with the opportunity to
organize, which led at times to rebellions and
more often to less drastic ways of resisting white
domination. Religion also sustained the slaves’
sense of their own worth as beings made in the
image of God, and it taught them, therefore, that
while human beings can be enslaved in body, their
spirits cannot be enslaved without their consent.
Observing that slaves often seemed happy and
were only rarely overtly rebellious, whites per-
suaded themselves that most blacks accepted the
system without resentment and indeed preferred
slavery to the uncertainties of freedom. There was
much talk about “loyal and faithful servants.” The
Civil War, when slaves flocked to the Union lines
once assured of freedom and fair treatment, would
disabuse them of this illusion.
As the price of slaves rose and as northern
opposition to the institution grew more vocal, the
system hardened perceptibly. White Southerners
made much of the danger of insurrection. When a
plot was uncovered or a revolt took place, instant and
savage reprisals resulted. In 1811, Charles Deslondes
led a rebellion of several hundred slaves, armed with
tools, who burned a handful of plantations and
marched toward New Orleans before being routed by
the United States Army. Over fifty slaves were slaugh-
tered immediately; a tribunal of plantation owners
ordered the execution of several dozen more. Most
were decapitated, their heads left to rot on poles
along the Mississippi as a grim warning. In 1822,
after the conspiracy of Denmark Vesey was exposed
by informers, thirty-seven slaves were executed and
another thirty-odd deported, although no overt act
of rebellion had occurred.
The Nat Turner revolt in Virginia in 1831 was
the most sensational of the slave uprisings; fifty-seven
whites lost their lives before it was suppressed. White
Southerners treated runaways almost as brutally as
rebels, although they posed no real threat to whites.
The authorities tracked down fugitives with blood-
hounds and subjected captives to merciless lashings.
After the Nat Turner revolt, interest in doing away
with slavery vanished in the white South. The southern
states made it increasingly difficult for masters to free
their slaves; during 1859 only about 3,000 in a slave
population of nearly 4 million were given their freedom.
Slavery did not flourish in urban settings, and
cities did not flourish in societies where slavery was
important. Most southern cities were small, and within
them, slaves made up a small fraction of the labor
force. The existence of slavery goes a long way toward
explaining why the South was so rural and why it had
so little industry. Slaves were much harder to superviseThis slave burial service, painted by John Antrobus in 1860, reflects an inversion
of power relations, a slave preacher leads the mourners while the white overseer
and the plantation owners watch uneasily, shunted (literally) to the sides.
Most owners felt responsibilities toward their
slaves, and slaves were dependent on and in some
ways imitative of white values. However, powerful
fears and resentments, not always recognized, existed
on both sides. The plantation environment forced the
two races to live in close proximity. From this circum-
stance could arise every sort of human relationship.
One planter, using the appropriate pseudonym Clod
Thumper, could write, “Africans are nothing but
brutes, and they will love you better for whipping,
whether they deserve it or not.” Another, describing
a slave named Bug, could say, “No one knows but
myself what feeling I have for him. Black as he is we
were raised together.” One southern white woman
tended a dying servant with “the kindest and most
unremitting attention.” Another, discovered crying
after the death of a slave she had repeatedly abused, is
said to have explained her grief by complaining that
she “didn’t have nobody to whip no more.”
Such diametrically conflicting sentiments often
existed within the same person. And almost no whites
had difficulty exploiting the labor of slaves for whom
they felt genuine affection.
Slaves were without rights; they developed a dis-
tinctive way of life by attempting to resist oppression
and injustice while accommodating themselves to the
system. Their marriages had no legal status, but their
partnerships seem to have been loving and stable. Even
families whose members were sold to different masters
often maintained close ties over considerable distances.
Slave religion, on the surface an untutored form
of Christianity tinctured with some African infusions,
seemed to most slave owners a useful instrument for
teaching meekness and resignation and for providing