Vocab Slavery, Free Blacks, Abolition

Wade Hampton

A man from South Carolina who was the country’s leading slave owner, with over 1,000.

Staple/Cash Crops

Cotton, rice, corn, sugarcane and tobacco

Field Slaves

Slaves that had to clear new land, dig ditches, cut and haul wood, slaughter livestock, and make repairs to buildings and tools. They planted and harvested crops.

House Slaves

Domestics that provided services for their master's or overseer's families. They were constantly under the scrutiny of their masters and mistresses, and could be called on for service at any time. They had far less privacy than those who worked the fields.

Labor System

The task and gang system

Task System

This system gave slaves the option of possible free time once their tasks were accomplished

Gang System

In this system slaves worked from sun-up to sun-down, meaning they were in the fields by the time the sun came up and did not leave until it came down

Overseer

The person who directed the daily work of the slaves

Slave Diets

Slave diets were inadequate and barely met the demands of the slaves' heavy workload

Slave Housing

Slaves lived in crude quarters that left them vulnerable to bad weather and disease

Fannie Kimble

A visitor who wrote about the Slaves' homes on Butler Island

Slave Discipline

Slaves were punished for not working fast enough, for being late getting to the fields, for defying authority, for running away, and for a number of other reasons. The punishments took many forms, including whippings, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away from the plantation. Slaves were even sometimes murdered.

Slave Religion

Many slaves turned to religion for inspiration and solace, taking the limited scripture that was doled to them and making something of it. Some practiced African religions, including Islam, others practiced Christianity. Many practiced a brand of Christianity which included strong African elements. Most rejected the Christianity of their masters, which justified slavery. The slaves held their own meetings in secret, where they spoke of the New Testament promises of the day of reckoning and of justice and a better life after death, as well as the Old Testament story of Moses leading his people out of slavery in Egypt. The religion of enslaved African Americans helped them resist the degradation of bondage.

Child Mortality

The amount of children's deaths that occurred before age 20 were generally around 66% -- on one rice plantation it was as high as 90%

Sexual Exploitation

African American women had to endure this threat. There were no safeguards to protect them from being sexually stalked, harassed, or raped, or to be used as long-term concubines by masters and overseers. The abuse was widespread, as the men with authority took advantage of their situation. Even if a woman seemed agreeable to the situation, in reality she had no choice. Slave men, for their part, were often powerless to protect the women they loved.

Slave Codes

A set of laws that southern slaves were required to live by. The laws varied in each state. The basic idea was that slaves were considered property, not people, and were treated as such. Slaves could not testify in court against a white, make contracts, leave the plantation without permission, strike a white (even in self-defense), buy and sell goods, own firearms, gather without a white present, possess any anti-slavery literature, or visit the homes of whites or free blacks. The killing of a slave was almost never regarded as murder, and the rape of slave women was treated as a form of trespassing.

Henry “Box” Brown

A slave on a farm used for shipping. He decided to build a crate, pull air holes in it, mark this side up, add the postage, then climb in. He was carried away to freedom in Philadelphia by the Adams Express Co.

William and Ellen Kraft

Slaves who with money earned from William being hired out, purchased cloths as a young white man and his slave valet, bought tickets, boarded a train and traveled away to freedom.

Denmark Vesey

A respected free man and Methodist leader who organized other free and enslaved blacks. He led the most extensive black insurrection in American history in July 1822. He was executed because of this revolt.

Gabriel Prosser

An African American bondsman who planned the 1st major slave rebellion in U.S. history. His revolt caused many whites to fear the slave population throughout the South. He grew up as the slave of Thomas H. Prosser. Gabriel became a deeply religious man, strongly influenced by biblical example. In the spring and summer of 1800, he laid plans for a slave insurrection aimed at creating an independent black state in Virginia with himself as king. He planned a three-pronged attack on Richmond, Va., that would seize the arsenal, take the powder house, and kill all whites except Frenchmen, Methodists, and Quakers. After this revolt, he was arrested, tried, and hanged with about 34 of his companions.

Nat Turner

An enslaved man who led a rebellion of enslaved people on August 21, 1831. His action set off a massacre of up to 200 Black people and a new wave of oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of enslaved people. The rebellion also stiffened pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist convictions that persisted in that region until the American Civil War. He was born on Benjamin Turner’s Virginia plantation and was taught reading, writing, and religion. He was sold 3 times in childhood and hired out to John Travis. He said he was chosen by God to lead enslaved Africans on Benjamin Turner’s plantation to freedom.

James Henry Hammond

A senator and wealthy plantation owner from South Carolina. He made a speech in which he laid out his famous “mudsill theory”

Mudsill Theory

This theory stated that, “In all societies there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” This class makes it possible for the higher class to move civilization forward

George Fitzhugh

A Virginia lawyer and the author of 2 books and numerous articled advocating slavery, argued that “… the Negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chaos of free completion.” In other words, they were fortunate to be taken care of in the way they were.

James Boon

A North Carolina artisan who, despite his excellence as a carpenter, spent most of his time trying to remain fiscally solvent and whose property, what little there was, stayed in the hands of creditors. He is a good example of what being a free black meant in the Antebellum period.

Lunsford Lane

A man who self-purchased his freedom. He had raised income by curing and selling pipe tobacco in Raleigh, North Carolina. He purchased his freedom and that of his family. He published a slave narrative in 1842.

Pierre Chastang

A free black man who carried supplies for Andrew Jackson’s troops during the War of 1812 and, when yellow fever spread in Mobile in 1819, he cared for the sick and buried the dead. He was freed by popular subscription for these public services. When he died, he was lauded as a “highly esteemed and respected” member of the community.

Newport Gardner

An example of the unusual flexibility afforded in purchasing one’s freedom, doing so with winnings from a lottery.

Jehu Jones

A free black man who was the proprietor of one of Charleston, South Carolina’s finest white only hotels, amassing a fortune. He was also able to send his son away to Amherst College.

Tommy LaFon

A black businessman in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was a merchant, lender and a real estate investor who lived at the top of the New Orleans social structure and at his death had holdings valued at $500,000. He was a philanthropist who gave much to charity, so much in fact that on his death the Louisiana State Legislature commissioned a bust of his likeness to be set up in New Orleans.

Martin Delany

An affluent free black, who was a leading black physician and writer, having studied at Harvard Medical College. In 1852 he published the Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, a widely read essay on what he believed the future held for black people in the American country. He later served in the Union Army during the Civil War.

William Johnson

He was known as the “Barber of Natchez.” He left a 16-volume diary discussing his life. He was born to a slave woman and a white owner in 1809. Shortly thereafter, he was freed with his mother and at an early age went to work in a barbershop in Port Gibson, Mississippi. At the age of 19 he acquires a barbershop of his own in Port Gibson, before moving to Natchez, Mississippi, where he prospered. He also owned racehorses and other items that would indicate a level of discretionary spending had been obtained. He will ultimately own 3,000 acres of land and 25 slaves. His wealth allows him to become a lender, where he will loan money to white people, and an employer, hiring several whites, including an overseer for his slaves. He was kind to his slaves, but shared many white attitudes, including that of discipline, believing a lack of such was bad business. He was very careful regarding slave morals, especially as it pertained to slave women and white men. He enjoyed the theatre but stopped going over his distaste for the galleries. He also sent his children to private schools and became very well-traveled. Yet, he still lacked the basic standing of a poor white man.

Cyprian Richard

An affluent free black slave owner who purchased an estate in Louisiana with 91 slaves for $225,000.

Andrew Durnford

An affluent free black slave owner in Louisiana. He enjoyed great relations with his white neighbors, to the extent that he loaned them money ($26,000) and slave (52) to help get their crop in.

Benjamin Lundy

An early known abolitionist who was a New Jersey Quaker. He was unusual in that his form of abolition was not restricted to the North; he traveled throughout the South preaching anti-slavery doctrine. He was an individual of much courage and devotion and was able to convince some slave owners to manumit their slaves. As editor of the leading early abolitionist newspaper The Genesis of Universal Emancipation, he also worked and trained young William Lloyd Garrison.

Manumit

to release from slavery

William Lloyd Garrison

This man headed the best-known group of antislavery reformers. He wrote The Liberator and denounced all compromise and called for immediate emancipation on moral grounds. He was the total embodiment of moral indignation. His approach was to mount a sweeping crusade condemning slavery as sinful and demanding its immediate abolishment. He was widely viewed as the most hated man in the South with awards offered for his death. He was said to be “harsh with the truth and uncompromising with justice”

The Liberator

Written by William Lloyd Garrison, it denounced all compromise and called for immediate emancipation on moral grounds.

Gag Rule in Congress

A rule responding to the abolitionist petitions calling for abolition in the District of Columbia. This rule was imposed tabling all such petitions, leading many people to become concerned about the threat to free speech.

Theodore Weld

An evangelical minister, and his wife Angelina Grimke, joined Garrison in 1833 in forming the American Anti-Slavery Society. He wrote Slavery as it is which was a slave narrative exhibiting the hardships of slaves in the South. He viewed slavery as a moral issue and called the domination of one race by another as uncivilized: “Arbitrary power is to the mind what alcohol is to the body; it intoxicates.”

American Slavery as It Is

A slave narrative exhibiting the hardships of slaves in the South.

Angelina Grimke

Theodore Weld’s wife who joined him and Garrison in forming the American Anti-Slavery Society. She was one of the first women to speak up in public against slavery. She and sister Sarah, thirteen years her senior, taught some slaves to read and held prayer meetings with others, despite their parents’ admonitions against it. Weld also sought to persuade her family to abandon slavery, to no avail. She eventually turned to Quakerism like her sister.

Sarah Grimke

Angelina Grimke’s sister. The two sisters became the first women to speak in front of a state legislature as representatives of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Their ideas were so different from most of the ideas in the community that people burned their writings and angry mobs protested their speeches. She began to teach some of the enslaved people how to read until her father would not allow her to teach them anymore. She became a quaker in 1821.

American Anti-Slavery Society

Created by William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, and Angelina Grimke (weld’s wife). STAR

Frederick Douglass

the most outstanding black abolitionist. He was born the slave son of a white father in Maryland. He was separated from his mother at a young age and taken to another home where he witnessed the frequent beatings of other slaves, namely his aunt. In his memoirs he describes this period as one of brutal cold with little clothing to protect him and of having to sleep with his head and shoulders in a sack for warmth. When he was 8 he went to Baltimore to work as a house servant for the relative of his owner. Here he obtained a semblance of education via piecemeal (unsystematic) or wherever he could get it. With the assistance from a free black sailor, who loans him his uniform and papers, he escapes to Massachusetts where he joined Garrison in the fight against slavery. The two men eventually split. He wrote an autobiography, founded the antislavery newspaper, The North Star. He demanded not only for freedom but full social and economic equality for blacks and criticized the indifferent free blacks in the North explaining that they were chained together with the slaves in the South.

Sojourner Truth

One of the most powerful free blacks working effectively against slavery. She was a tall, deep voiced advocate of freedom, born a slave in New York and sold in auction at age 11. She worked hard throughout her life and was beaten often in spite of it. She bore the scars of slavery and was forced to walk with a cane. Once at an anti-slavery meeting she was wrongly accused of being a man. She remained an advocate of social justice long after emancipation by actively participating in the Woman's Suffrage Movement.

Charles Lenox Remond

Possibly the first black to rise to prominence in the anti-slavery movement. He was born in Salem, Mass. and was the son of a hairdresser. Initially he expressed pro-Garrison sympathies of uncompromised justice yet later championed violence and revolts. He was among the 1st 17 members of the American Anti-Slavery Society with Garrison and Weld and lectures against the "peculiar institution" until he died. His risk was everything to lose because he was born free and hadn't experienced slavery first-hand

David Walker

He was born in North Carolina and moved to Boston. He was a free black as his father was a slave but his mother was free. Slavery or freedom was passed via the mother. His mother passes onto him an indignation for slavery. He becomes involved with the movement while living in Boston. He began to argue that if the slave-owner would not free the slaves, then the slaves should take their freedom because after all, death was better than slavery. He issued "Walker's Appeal," which encouraged open slave rebellion; the single greatest fear in the South. He was found dead in June 1830, seemingly healthy. The question of poison was addressed, but never answered.

Henry Highland Garnett

This man was considered the "Thomas Paine of the abolitionist movement." He was born a slave in Maryland and escaped at the age of 10 with his family to New York. Upon receiving an education, he became a Presbyterian minister. In 1843, while attending the Buffalo Convention of Colored Citizens, he gave an eloquent address endorsing the idea of a National Slave Strike. He cried, "Awake, awake, millions of voices are calling you."

Harriet Tubman

The most famous conductor to emerge from the Underground Railroad. She risked death or worse by organizing trips into the South to liberate slaves and escort them North. Her expenses were usually paid for by free blacks in the North who had perhaps escaped along the same line at an earlier time and sent her back to look for their relatives. She was all business and no nonsense and would threaten to kill a slave that sought to turn back.

Leonard Andrew Grimes

An African-American abolitionist, pastor, and founder of Boston's Twelfth Street Baptist Church, also known as the Fugitives Church. He served as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, including his efforts to free fugitive slave Anthony Burns. During the Civil war this man lobbied for the creation of a black regiment, the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. When it went into place he recruited men to serve in the infantry regiment, one that distinguished intself in combat.