| One reason to study the material culture
of any society is to draw a richer image of what everyday
life was like in years past. For example, the elaborate
buttons and elegant buckles excavated at Poplar Forest,
one of Thomas Jefferson’s plantations, suggest that
some slaves had access to the larger market. In the same
way, ask your students to use Solomon’s trial record
to re-create slave life away from the quarters. What did
enslaved Virginians do on their day off? To what extent
did Sunday morning religious services slip comfortably
into recreational activities? How did potential rebels
like Gabriel use these leisure moments to recruit followers?
A few astute students may even notice who is absent from
this document. How often do women appear as incipient
rebels in these depositions? In addressing that question,
they will be using what historians call negative evidence:
observing the peculiar absence of something one expects
to find in a document but does not.
Other sorts of artifacts can help students contextualize
slave rebelliousness. Herbert Aptheker, who has done
more than any other scholar to rescue the enslaved from
the insidious myth of docility, famously said that,
“Slavery was the cause of slave rebellions.”
At bottom, that is certainly true. Yet that blunt statement
does little to explain why large-scale slave conspiracies
were more prevalent in some parts of the Americas than
in others, or why slave rebellions were virtually absent
from the English mainland colonies in the seventeenth
century, but quite common in the eighteenth. Most of
all, it says little about the type of person who instigated
slave revolts.
For an answer to that, return briefly
to Solomon’s trial. One does not have to be Sherlock
Holmes to deduce what Gabriel and Solomon did for a
living, since their followers were to meet at the “Blacksmith
Shop in the Woods.” But ask your students to explain
what Gabriel’s soldiers planned to use as weapons.
This may take some investigation, since a scythe is
hardly a common farm implement today. Yet as plantation
blacksmiths, artisans like Gabriel and Solomon worked
with materials like scythes all the time, so reshaping
long scythes into short but deadly swords was literally
all in a day’s work. Moreover, although the vast
majority of slaves in the Old South were illiterate—specialists
guess that only five percent of slaves could read—the
vast majority of enslaved artisans (and drivers) could
read, albeit with some difficulty, and were able to
sign their names.
"A.W." to "deer frind," 20 September 1800, courtesy of the Library of Virginia
Also, since most students, even those in college, tend
to conflate slavery with cotton, this document serves
as a powerful reminder that black workers performed
every task imaginable. As Donald R. Wright reminds us,
the cotton kingdom existed only in the last four decades
of the 250 years that Africans and their descendants
were enslaved in what is now the United States. And
with one notable exception—Nat Turner—the
men who led slave conspiracies were not field hands
and they did not harvest cotton.
Artifacts like hammers, anvils, and carpentry tools
tell their own stories, since they were the instruments
slave laborers used to build the urban South. Yet these
artifacts also hide part of their past, for they were
not only used by black hands to forge the elegant ironwork
gates still seen today in Charleston, but were themselves
crafted by black hands. Slaves were rarely allowed to
acquire property beyond the odd table or chair, but
as these tools suggest, one form of privilege that was
often passed down to the next generation was a skill
(and one that in some cases was brought from Africa).
In the Southern states, the sons of craftsmen became
craftsmen, and often the daughters of domestics became
domestics. Certainly urban slaves enjoyed better material
conditions than field hands, since few masters wished
shabbily dressed domestics to open their doors or prepare
their food. “City air makes free,” medieval
peasants once said, and African Americans in North America
did not disagree. “A city slave is almost a freeman,
compared with a slave on a plantation,” Frederick
Douglass observed, and it is no accident that several
historians have erroneously identified Gabriel as a
freeman.
The metal “slave” or “free Negro”
badges that cities like Charleston required black artisans
to purchase are striking artifacts. But the artifacts
that perhaps best illustrate the tendency of skilled,
urban bondmen to plot for their freedom are two buildings
-- the Charleston Workhouse and the City Jail, built
on Magazine Street in 1768 and 1802, respectively. The
Workhouse, formally known as the House of Correction,
was an imposing brick structure that symbolized public
control in the crowded city. Although it collapsed following
an earthquake in the late nineteenth century, the boarded-up
Jail, which shared its architectural style, yet stands
as a monument to white fears of the state’s black
majority (click
here for a picture of the Old Jail building). The
Workhouse “whipping room,” constructed of
double walls filled with sand to muffle the screams
of inmates, housed a crane, “on which a cord with
two nooses runs over pullies.” The warden chained
the feet of slaves to bolts in the floor, and then hoisted
the crane until their bodies were “stretched out
as much as possible.” Slaves took the beating,
but masters paid a price too: Each visit to the Workhouse
cost twenty-five cents.
Seen today, even in a small picture, the Charleston
Jail, with its broken battlements and Bastille-like
entrance, is a terrifying artifact of a not-too-distant
past. Artifacts like clay pipes and wooden bowls may
tell us much about how enslaved Americans spent their
off hours, but crueler artifacts—shackles, slave
badges, and the Workhouse itself—remind us just
what those who risked their lives in the cause of liberty
were up against.
| For more information
about the New York African Burial Ground,
Gabriel's Rebellion, and other sources for
material culture, visit our Additional
Resources Page. |
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