What Is Slavery? by Stevenson Brenda E

Author:Stevenson, Brenda E. [Stevenson, Brenda E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780745671512
Google: 0jtUCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0745671519
Goodreads: 23745293
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

As such, they did not hesitate to impose “controls” on free people of color whom they believed were moving outside their designated places. Anti-black race riots were not unusual in the early to mid-nineteenth century. There were, for example, at least five in Philadelphia between 1832 and 1849 and others in Cincinnati, New York, Boston, and the nation's capital.187 Physical violence and forced removal were not the only tactics employed. The use of racial epithets, such as the hated term “nigger,” was common as a way to diminish free blacks who dared suggest they lived beyond the margins of society. Characterization of blacks as buffoons through minstrelsy became a popular form of entertainment, and stereotypical images of blacks in political cartoons published in newspapers, broadsides, and on posters were grist for the mill.188

In the Upper South, the location of the largest numbers of free people of color, state legislation in both the early national period and the antebellum era was extremely constricting. Virginia serves as a good model. There, free people of color could not migrate into the state, vote, marry across the racial line, hold elected office, testify against whites, be part of the militia, own weapons, or, after 1806, legally remain in the state if freed after that date.189 As in all slave states and territories, free blacks in Virginia had to prove that they were, indeed, “free” by carrying with them formal documentation of their free status. “Free papers” and registration in countywide free black ledgers were necessary if one hoped not to be imprisoned or even sold into slavery. Legislation that restricted the social and economic location of free people of color in Virginia only grew as the decades passed. The heyday occurred, not surprisingly, after the Nat Turner slave rebellion of August 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia that left approximately sixty whites dead. This event was only one that occurred in the new nation which whites took as indicative that greater restrictions should be placed on the slave and free black presence.

On the night of January 8, 1811, for example, Charles Deslondes, a mulatto probably from Haiti, but perhaps from Jamaica, along with approximately 500 other armed slaves, some of whom had fought in the Haitian Revolution, marched toward New Orleans. They turned their working tools into weapons and carried handmade flags and beat drums. Raiding and killing while advancing toward the port city, they soon faced a local militia. A battle ensued and that left the rebels defeated. The revolt lasted three days, but lingered for decades in the minds of white slaveholders.190 So, too, did the thwarted Denmark Vesey slave revolt of June 1822 in Charleston, South Carolina and the 1829 publication of David Walker's Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America, in which the free black man from North Carolina sanctioned violence to end slavery. These events in the South,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.