Fleeing Death, Seeking Life - authors of 'Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation' - Interview

We cherish their stories. The runaways. those proud, hopeful, courageous men, women and children who surrendered their lives to darkness, to swamps, to the illumination of stars. Nearly 150 years after emancipation, we continue to embrace their strength and rely on their example. Their hymns remain our anthems.

Yet how much do we know of their achievement? When did the cost of enslavement become too great for them to bear? In the recently published book Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (Oxford University Press, 1999), John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke professor of history emeritus at Duke University, and Loren Schweninger, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, describe the cruelties that distinguished America's peculiar institution and the responses of those who fled this captivity.

It is a seminal work: the first book dedicated to the subject of escape. By scrupulously analyzing the records available from this period, the scholars have created a vivid documentation of human beings in crisis. Both the enslaved and the enslavers are allowed truly to exist, and through this unflinching approach to the unspeakable, the distortions and mythology repeated for generations at last lose their resonance.

So that we might benefit further from the insight that kindles this book, American Visions asked Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to discuss Runaway Slaves with its authors.-- S.F.

Dodson: Let me begin by noting that conventional scholarship has treated the phenomenon of runaway slaves as essentially a Southern-to-Northern migration process. Everyone is familiar, of course, with the North Star and the Drinking Gourd, with Harriet Tubman and her efforts on behalf of runaway slaves, and with the famous Underground Railroad.

Your new book, Runaway Slaves, takes a fresh look at the topic and arrives at some rather startling revelations. When did you start working on this project, and what did you hope to achieve when you began?

Franklin: I began work on it about 22 years ago. I had been fretting about the interpretation of runaway slaves for some time before that, as I worked through the materials on other projects. I was not satisfied either with the description of runaway slaves and the phenomenon of runaway slaves or with the things that flowed from it--such as that it was a South-to-North movement and that it was conducted by these people who were conductors on the Underground Railroad and so forth.

As I took another look at it, I saw some other things occurring. And Loren Schweninger--my former student and my colleague, now my co-author--was looking at another phenomenon in the South: all kinds of restlessness, all kinds of disturbances and problems that he can describe better than I can and that were moving in the same general direction that I was moving in.

Dodson: Loren, what was your area of interest--the topic that led you to the book?

Schweninger: During the late 1980s and the early 1990s, I had begun a project to collect petitions to county courts and state legislatures concerning slavery in the South. While traveling around to the various states and county courthouses, I came across a number of documents that dealt with slave resistance and violence on the plantation--disruption and confusion. I found civil court cases that dealt with the breaking up of families and the distribution of estates and slaves as property. When I was through, I had collected about 18,500 petitions, about 125,000 pages of documentary evidence.

Just as I was winding up the collection process, John Hope asked if I wanted to co-author a book on runaway slaves. That was in early 1994. I had a substantial amount of material, and of course he had been collecting boxes and boxes of material, too. He had collected runaway slave notices, as well as correspondence, while I had collected the civil court cases and petitions to Southern legislatures. Our sources came together; it was exciting to begin.

Dodson: One of the things that certainly some groups of folks will say, and that used to be a fairly common question raised in African-American scholarship, is that these are the records of the masters and that one certainly cannot expect to find an accurate interpretation of the black experience--and from a black perspective--in these kinds of records.

Franklin: Let me say first of all that I am not certain that we were concerned with the black perspective; we were concerned with the black experience. I don't think that there is any question that we have that, clear and unequivocal.

Just let me give you an example. It is possible to use the sources that exist, and many of them are sources from so-called white people--planters and that sort of thing. Now, if they advertise for a runaway, a person who has left their plantation, they are going to advertise in the press and they will post it on the courthouses and so forth. They want their slave back, and they are not going to lie about the slave's appearance and disposition and all of the rest of it. They want to provide information that will make it possible for people to identify that slave and report him or her back to the owner or the owner's representative.

So they will describe him in detail: his complexion, his height, his weight; her talents, her ability to read and write or not to read and write; the scars that were on the person; the branding, if there was branding; the disposition, the personality of the person--whether he or she had a downcast look or whether he or she was aggressive and kind of a con person. All of that is there, and they want to be as explicit, clear and accurate as possible to make it possible for them to apprehend their slave. So the use of sources, wherever they are, and by whomever they are written, is important here.

Dodson: I pose the question because in some respects there is a tendency, certainly among popular audiences, to be reluctant to read sources written by anyone other than black folk. My own experience, especially while going through a lot of the slavery-related documents, is that when read critically, the documents reveal more than the writers intend to tell you.

Franklin: Yes. For example, sometimes an owner will say that his slaves ran away, and he might even confess: "I don't know why they ran away. I haven't whipped them in six weeks." That's a plea to the public that he treated the slaves well, and it's a confession that the slaves have been punished properly in recent times.

Schweninger: At the same time, the runaway notices were marvelous. We analyzed them in one chapter and broke down the variables within the notices. We went through about 8,400 notices, and we selected out 2,000 in the first decade of the 19th century and just before the Civil War to analyze.

There were any number of court documents--literally several thousand, though they all didn't concern runaways that were written or dictated by African Americans. In one section of Runaway Slaves, we have a three-page essay on Joseph Antoine. Antoine came from Havana, where he had been emancipated. He arrived in Virginia and fell in love with a slave woman.

He went with the slave woman's owner to Fort Vincennes in Indiana in the 1790s; was signed into indenture; stayed with his wife, who was still a slave, for seven years; and just before the indenture was to end, the couple that held the indenture--the owner and his wife--sold him to New Orleans. Because he could speak Spanish, he spoke with the governor of Louisiana in 1803 and was released. As he and his wife were heading back toward Kentucky, they were assaulted. They ran away and she died. He wrote two petitions from a jail in Louisville in 1804.

There were any number of documents written by African Americans that were of that sort, so it's not as if this is all from the master class, by any means.

Franklin: There's another kind of petition, too, written by African Americans--particularly those who might have been serving on a ship, or they might have been on land. They were accused of being slaves, and they were seized as runaways, but they really weren't slaves. They would petition also that they were not slaves. They would sometimes send for affidavits from the communities in which they lived that would show that they were not slaves--were not runaways.

Dodson: There's a rich documentary source a body of documentary material--that you have been able to draw on to put together a comprehensive overview and assessment of the runaway slave phenomenon as it manifested itself, particularly in the South.

Your subtitle, Rebels on the Plantation, implies that perhaps they did not actually run away. Do you want to speak to that a little bit--both to the subtitle itself and to the scope of the book as you have presented it?

Schweninger: Well, we found that, in fact, there were varying degrees of responses of slaves to enslavement. Among many, that response was to leave the plantation for a few weeks or to lie out in the woods or in the swamps for a few months. Others would strike out for a city or a town or run away farther South to follow loved ones. Some tried to blend in with free people of color and to pose as a free person of color. Still others would strike out for the North. The vast majority of runaways were fairly shortly caught, brought back and punished. Some were jailed and then brought back and punished.

We studied the plantations along the Savannah River between Georgia and South Carolina. There are some good studies of that, too, and we looked at primary as well as secondary sources. On a number of plantations, there would be several runaways each year. Out of 40 slaves, three or four, two or three, would run away. On a number of plantations, no one succeeded in becoming free. Some died on the run.

On the plantation of [James] Henry Hammond, a famous South Carolinian, none of the slaves succeeded in running away, even though the slaves on the plantations helped the runaways--gave them food and provisions. They would hide them on other plantations. Hammond said that managing slaves was "like a war without the glory." So he, the planter, looked at it as a continual war that nobody was winning.

But what we found--I think, one of the most important findings--is that the success rate was minimal. A tiny, tiny percent made it to freedom, and the vast majority were caught and returned.

Dodson: Which kind of raises the question of what constitutes success in the context of the runaway slave experience. Is it the individual freedom of the person trying to get away, or is it the relationship that that activity, and those activities by those individuals, ultimately had on the system of slavery itself?

Franklin: It's the latter, I think, more than the former. The success, under the circumstances, is rather unusual. But the effort is ongoing. You mentioned the subtitle, Howard, and its reference to people who did not leave the plantation. The Rebels on the Plantation: That's probably not exactly what we meant. If you ran away or if you attempted to run away, you were rebelling, and there were those who stayed and who rebelled.

What we're trying to describe is an unhappy situation that ranges all the way from the many altercations slaves had with their owners or with the overseers to what one might call the success of actually running away, and we were concerned with all the gradations in between, including, as Loren described, lying out for days and weeks at a time, sending back messages, making demands that they be treated better.

For example, one owner was in Philadelphia on business, and his wife wrote him several times while he was there, describing conditions on the plantation. This was at harvesttime, and she wrote him that Sam and Mary and John had run away and that they have said they won't come back unless they have better hours, unless they get better clothing and so forth. He wrote back and said: Promise them anything. We've got to get the crops out of the field. Just tell them yes.

Dodson: Which suggests in some very significant ways that the myth that the system of slavery was a total institution, in which the slave population was powerless, simply was not true.

Franklin: It simply was not true--absolutely. And it was not true that it was peaceful either. The plantations were not peaceful, and one of the things that we tried to do in the book is to show how the management itself tended to break down under the pressure of the slaves.

Dodson: Your book offers some rather new perspectives on the whole phenomenon of resistance in slavery, and specifically in the South, during the period from the 1790s through the 1860s. The runaway slave activity is presented as the dominant phenomenon in the resistance activities of the enslaved blacks.

Franklin: I would say it was the dominant phenomenon. Certainly rebellion, like the Nat Turner Rebellion, is not the dominant phenomenon, and I would think that the Underground Railroad is not the dominant phenomenon either.

This is not a book that undertakes to rebut the Underground Railroad, but what happens if you get into a situation where you are having difficulty with your owner? You might get into an altercation with the owner or with the overseer. You might get into a fight. Now, you are not going to say, "I wonder when the Underground Railroad is going to come and get me and spirit me away?" You are going to get away as soon as you can. That's what's happening. In other words, running away is an ad hoc conduct, primarily. You run away when the time is right or when you need to. Because of the circumstances, you run away.

Dodson: Let me just press that. Who were the runaways, and why did they run?

Schweninger: They were mostly men--80 percent in our statistical analysis. Four out of 5 were men between the ages of 13 and 29. It was more difficult for women, especially those with children, to take their children along. And it was difficult for young men, too, usually, to leave. It varied in different states, but a substantial proportion of the runaways, about 3 out of 4, ran away alone, without kin and loved ones. They ran away for a wide range of reasons: seeking to find loved ones; brutal treatment; violence; confrontation, as Professor Franklin mentioned, on the plantation with an owner or an overseer. Some were influenced by those who had already run away.

One thing we haven't mentioned is that there were far more groups of outlying slaves than historians have suggested prior to this book.

Dodson: These are maroon communities, to use the conventional language?

Schweninger: Right. People know about the Dismal Swamp, or they know about some parts of South Carolina. But there were any number of counties where petitioners wrote in, saying that there were outlying slaves. One person in Halifax County in North Carolina wrote, saying: We're fearful of these slaves roaming about, and there's nothing we can do to stop them. There are groups of runaway slaves.

They passed laws saying that an outlaw slave could be shot on sight and so on. But there were these groups all around: in the lower Mississippi River Valley and Mississippi and Louisiana and Florida, in South Carolina and Georgia. Slaves ran away to join those groups. They ran to cities to try to hire themselves out. So their motives for running were far-ranging.

And it is interesting that many of the owners wrote that they did not understand why their slaves had run away. Their perception was different, of course, than the slave's perception. They didn't comprehend the variety of reasons, though some owners did. Can you add to that, John Hope?

Franklin: Some didn't want to be slaves. And the remarkable thing about this is that freedom was touted as the most important, the most precious thing that a human being could have. You get that in all of the revolutionary documents, the revolutionary doctrines. You get it all the way through: Freedom is the thing. Well, if it is the thing, why does one think that slaves would be immune, even to the desire that swells up?

Slaves were given their freedom for performing some remarkable deed, like rescuing the owner's child from a burning house or a runaway horse or something like that. They were told: "Oh, you're so good, you can be free. We'll set you free." So freedom is the ideal.

And even when it was not held up, slaves knew that that was the ideal way, so why would anyone think that they did not want it? That doesn't make any sense. They wanted it because it was preached as a great prize, and they sought it, too. They did indeed.

RELATED ARTICLE: Collective Resistance

At times "outlaws" ... gathered together in bands of runaways wreaking havoc on plantations and farms. Living in isolated, heavily wooded, or swampy areas, some of these groups maintained their cohesiveness for many years, a few for more than a generation. Most, however, found it difficult to sustain themselves without being constantly on the move. Members of fugitive gangs made forays into populated farming sections for food, clothing, livestock, and trading items. Sometimes they bartered with free blacks, plantation slaves, and nonslaveholding whites, and in a few instances, white outlaws joined the outlying gangs of blacks, though this was rare. In virtually every state there were gangs of ten to twenty outlying slaves. The largest bodies of maroons, as they were sometimes called, reached only a few hundred members (with the exception of those in the Great Dismal Swamp between North Carolina and Virginia, which numbered several thousand). Despite their ephemeral nature, runaway gangs were a constant source of fear and anxiety for whites.

In the aftermath of the War for Independence, Governor Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina informed the legislature that there was a serious problem concerning armed fugitive slaves who were active in the southern portion of the state, especially along the Savannah River. Some of them had fled to the British during the War for Independence and were now carrying on guerilla warfare. During the 1790s, runaways in Virginia and the Carolinas hid in woods and swamps during the day and emerged at night to commit "various depredations" on farms and plantations. In 1800, one South Carolina slave owner bitterly admitted that three of his own blacks were part of a fugitive gang. He offered $500 for the return of Cyrus, Hercules, and Tom. Cyrus and Hercules had been out for three years, he confessed, pillaging various farms and plantations along the Ashley River. Now Tom had joined them, he said, and the three were secluded somewhere in the area of the "Wappoo-cut and Ashley ferry."

In each subsequent decade during the nineteenth century, outlying groups could be found in various states. In 1816, another South Carolina governor pointed to the difficulty in discovering the exact location of "runaway negroes" concealing themselves in the swamps and marshes adjacent to the Combahee and Ashepoo rivers. Armed, using hit-and-run tactics, able to disappear along creeks, inlets, bays, marshes, islands, and waterways, they stole from slaveholders "with impunity." Their familiarity with the surrounding area "furnished them easy opportunities to plunder, not only the planters in open day, but the inland coasting trade without leaving a trace of their movements by which they could be pursued."

Bands of runaways sometimes became so emboldened that they sent entire communities into panic. During the summer of 1821, an "insurrection" broke out in Onslow County, North Carolina, when "a number of outlawed and runaway Slaves and free Negroes" banded together. Located between the White Oak and the New rivers in the southeastern portion of the state, the long estuaries and forested sections provided good cover. The outlying slaves "daily increased in strength and numbers," William L. Hill, head of a militia unit, said. Their bold acts of defiance became so alarming that "no inhabitant could feel himself at any moment secure in his life, person or property, from the plunder, rapine, and devastation committed by them, daily and nightly in every comer of the County." Local inhabitants feared for their lives to such an extent that they fled their homes. Daily reports circulated about "violence and depredations" that the runaways committed "upon the persons and property of defenseless and unprotected families." They were well armed, cunning, daring, and desperate, Hill said. In broad daylight, they ravaged farms, burned houses, broke into stores, and "ravished a number of females." It took Hill's two-hundred-man militia unit twenty-six days searching through "Woods, Swamps & Marshes" to subdue the "Outlaws."

A similar situation existed in central Florida at about the same time. In a fourteen-page memorial to the Territorial Governor William P. Duval, the new Legislative Council warned of the "existing evils" following the acquisition of the region from Spain of "great numbers of negroes belonging to the planters, availing themselves of existing disorder" and running away only to take "refuge among the Indians." They were beyond the reach of their owners, and some of them were escaping to the island of Cuba, "from whence in all probability they will never be recovered." This memorial was presented about 1823, but for many years, even during the Seminole Indian War (1835-42), groups of runaway slaves remained at large, periodically raiding plantations and farms. "I have ascertained beyond any doubt, not only that a connection exists between a portion of the slave population and the Seminoles," an Army officer wrote in 1837, "but that there was, before the war commenced, an understanding that a considerable force should join on the first blow being struck."

At the same time, runaways in Mississippi and Alabama formed outlying encampments. In 1829, the Woodville Republican carried an article about "a gang of runaway negroes encamped about two miles from the village of Pinkneyville' in southwestern Mississippi. Among the fugitives were slaves from plantations along the Mississippi in Louisiana. A patrol was immediately formed, raided the camp, and one of the slaves--the French-speaking William, who already had a scar from a gunshot on his shoulder--was mortally wounded. In 1836, residents along the Chattahoochee River in Alabama ,feared that a band of hostile Creek Indians were "collecting all the force they can among themselves, and from the negroes," to attack in Georgia. In the same year, a large party of Indians "barbarously murdered" many inhabitants of a community in western Georgia, Major General William Irwin wrote Governor Clement C. Clay of Alabama. "I cannot withhold from Your Excellency my fears on account of the negroes--there are large bodies of them in this place and neighbourhood who have had uninterrupted intercourse with the Indians for a great length of time and may have matured some plan of cooperation." Most of the plantations had been abandoned, and many slaves were left "without any white authority over them." Apparently, his fears were well founded. The following year in Macon County, Alabama, a group of fifty or sixty white families complained that sections along the Cuba Hatchee River were "remarkable for the extent and impervious nature of their swamps and the morasses," and were excellent hideouts for groups of Indians and camps of "armed Negroes."

During the same decade and the 1940s, groups of armed runaways in various areas remained close to populated farming areas and cities. The gangs who hid out in the cypress swamp near New Orleans raided farms and plantations along the Mississippi River. In 1837, a runaway leader, said to be responsible for killing several whites, was executed. In 1844, a group of runaways, "part of a gang," was chased and attacked by whites near Hanesville, Mississippi; and two years later, "a considerable gang of runaway negroes" was surprised by a posse in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. During the 1940s, in Halifax County, North Carolina, on the border with Virginia, armed runaways stole seventy-five hogs from a single farmer. He was targeted because "he hunted for them," a group of farmers testified, and the slaves "sent him word, that if he would not hunt for them again--they would not Kill any more of his hogs--but if he did, they should Kill him.

In Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and other states, outlying slaves gathered in remote and isolated areas. In 1856, a North Carolina newspaper said that a gang of runaways had so intimidated local "negro hunters" that they refused to "come with their dogs unless aided from other sources." In Williamsburg District, South Carolina, an outlying slave attacked and robbed a white traveler not two miles from the town of Kingston in the middle of the day. The incident exposed the vulnerability of whites to groups of runaways who were constantly committing acts that jeopardized "the peace and safety of the people." The slave responsible for the "daring and atrocious act of high way robbery" was captured, jailed, and sentenced to death, but shortly before he was to be hanged, he "escaped by violence from the Gaol of the district."

Despite such activities, however, it was extremely difficult for gangs of runaways to sustain themselves over long periods of time. Their dilemma was how to steal from farmers and without evoking a response or patrols. The more pillaged, the more likely they were to arouse groups of white men to search out their encampments. Those who did sustain themselves for any length of time hid out in densely areas that were virtually inaccessible to anyone unfamiliar with the terrain. Even whites who knew these areas feared entering them. Even when few in number, gangs of outlyers struck fear into the hearts of white inhabitants.

This excerpt is taken from Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (Oxford University Press, 1999), by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger. Reprinted by permission.

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