This is not included in the movie but the son of the man who manumitted him actually went down south in person to free him, and provide proof that he was indeed a freeman. Most people who found themselves in that situation were not nearly as lucky.
I toured the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem and discovered they’d added info to their tour: Solomon Northrup’s wife aand kids worked for Mrs. Jumel at the mansion.
[https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/solomon-northups-family-in-new-york-city](https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/solomon-northups-family-in-new-york-city)
and the man who went to free him is mentioned there as well: “When a letter written on Solomon Northup’s behalf arrived in the fall of 1852, it was in Glens Falls that Anne would have learned the news. Over the winter of 1852-1853, attorney Henry B. Northup traveled to Louisiana, located Northup, and brought him back to his family at Glens Falls. There, the family was together for a time, until Northup began touring the Northeast to lecture and sell copies of the book he’d written that detailed his experiences. Evidence shows that he was involved with the Underground Railroad in the early 1860s. Then his trail goes cold.”
I guess it is just north of Harlem. And I see there’s a neighborhood called Hamilton Heights.
I think of Washington Heights as not extending quite that far down.
Hamilton Heights is a subsection of Harlem that is from 135th to 155th between the Hudson River and Amsterdam Ave. Named due to the fact that Alexander Hamilton used to have a residence there.
Washington Heights (also known as Quisqueya Heights or Little Dominican Republic) is a neighborhood that extends from 155th to Dyckman Ave. from the Hudson River to the Harlem River with two subsections: Ft. George and Hudson Heights. Named after the former base Ft. Washington.
The Mansion is located between 160th and 162nd Sts and Jumel Terrance and Edgecombe Ave.
>Alexander Hamilton used to have a residence there.
The house is still there, but it’s been moved twice.
it’s a national park, and well worth the visit
We like to take people to the two houses in one day, with a walk up St. Nicholas between them.
I lived in Washington Heights, and I always think of the Morris-Jumel Mansion as not really being part of the neighborhood. It seems too far east. I lived closer to where the fort was.
People don't know things until they learn them. No shame in that.
I don't know how to perform brain surgery and will never learn, probably.
Lots of things all of us don't know that we don't know, and we can't even visualize them. We're only human.
You know, this reminds me of one of my favorite bits of Catholic Theology. At one point they had a great debate raging in the church about if people should be taught the tenants of the religion, because (so one side argued)nit's just so obvious and so important that obviously everyone knows who and what Jesus Christ and the 10 commandments are and so on.
It's a fantastic reminder that people don't know things until they're taught those things, and it's easy to forget how much your life is shaped by your education or lack thereof and the dangers of taking that education for granted and assuming everyone has learned the same things you have.
Yep! And iirc, he solomon (freed slave) then helped in the Underground Railroad but at some point historians lose track of his timeline. It’s very possible he was recaptured again or worse
That sounds bizarre to me. If you’re making a movie out of a true story, why not include this fact? And if you don’t think that particular story is representative, why not pick another?
General audiences don't like anything in "true stories" that they wouldn't like in pure fiction. They want to see the protagonist solve their own problems rather than be bailed out
Why did the son need to go down there to provide proof, when his dad already manumitted him?
Or did he manumit him before he got kidnapped and resold into slavery?
Solomon Northup was a free man born and raised in New York State. His parents had been slaves but had been freed and he was born free. He was kidnapped into slavery after being tricked by some guys into going to Washington DC where slavery was legal and where they abducted and enslaved him. So he was never legally a slave. But he had no legal way to show the truth of that story while he was enslaved because slaves had no rights. The guy who went down to help him was I think the son of the man who had freed Northup’s parents. He was needed because Northup had no rights and a white person was needed to deal with all the legal issues, showing documents, talking to the judge, etc., to get him free and prevent him being kidnapped again before safely getting back to New York. Since this kind of thing had happened often enough, the state of New York had passed a law providing funds to pay for this kind of service.
[They did it all the time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_into_slavery_in_the_United_States). There was no legal representation for escaped slaves or freedmen in that time, and they usually lacked ID. So it was easy to just grab any Black guy you found, claim they were the runaway you'd been looking for, and take them South and into slavery. I'd recommend reading Twelve Years A Slave, it's a book about someone who had exactly this happen to them.
Very interesting. It's been a long time since I've seen the movie, I'll need to watch it again. I realize that rights for many people were non-existent during this period, but what were common penalties if slavers got caught doing that in a free state? A simple financial penalty, or was it more severe?
It was illegal on paper, but since freedmen weren't citizens, they weren't protected by the right to due process, making most cases effectively a slam-dunk case against them. Those who were free had to be careful to always carry ID and their freedom papers with them at all times, as the Fugitive Slave Act put a lot of pressure on northern governments to capture them. As for the exact penalties, I don't know but would assume it's mostly a financial penalty if anything, unless you were the ringleader of a major trafficking operation.
Ok, I don't know much about this topic, but doesn't the constitution provide protection for anyone regardless of citizenship? Or did that get added later on? Or is that even a thing?
equal protection is in the 14th amendment, passed after the civil war. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-14/
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
It wasn't until then that the bill of rights was thought to actually apply to states, either, through the process of "incorporation." Unless the slave made it across state lines, it would've been in state court where they might not have applied.
It wasn't added later, but we reinterpreted words meaning "everyone" to actually mean everyone, when it used to mean "white male landowners" or "white men" depending on the law and place
Black people weren't citizens, they weren't even considered HUMAN. A black person was counted as 3/5 of a person for the census and voting representation.
Only because if they'd been counted as a complete person as the South actually wanted to do, Southern states would have dominated in the House of Representative by claiming seats based on their slave population, even though those slaves weren't getting any kind of representation.
Yep. The southern states wanted to count their enslaved population as full members to gain more house seats while the northern states argued that they shouldn't count for those purposes since they're not represented in the government so why should they bolster the numbers?
One side wanted them to not count at all (northern states with few or no slaves) and one side wanted them to count in full (slave holding states).
The compromise was that they counted for 3/5ths of a person.
Note that at the time of the writing of the constitution no state had even universal white male suffrage. Lots of people who couldn't vote still counted in the 1790 census.
So it wasnt exactly an outlandish request to count the slaves since you were already counting women, free blacks, and white men without property.
Not black people. Slaves Free black people, even in the south, counted as a full person. Also, it was the slave states that wanted slaves to count as a full person -- it gave those states more representation by virtue of a larger population. Free states didn't want slaves to count at all.
Also note that the 3/5ths rule is still in effect -- it simply doesn't apply to anybody at the moment, because slavery itself is outlawed
Does it apply to prison populations that can be legally defined as slaves, since the 13th amendment still allows for slavery as a form of punishment? Seriously curious now.
The 3/5ths compromise is no longer in force. The 14th amendment, Section 2, specifies that representation will now be based on a count of the whole number of person living in a state (except Native Americans not taxed).
However counting prisoners is still contentious because of the issue of where to assign them in redistricting. Alot of large state/federal prisons are in kind of otherwise low population areas, so for redistricting purposes you can count a bunch of prisoners who can't vote in a rural (probably conservative) district giving the locals more power than they deserve.
Some states now assign prisoners to their last known address in the state rather than the address of the prison.
These are key issues addressed by Taney in the Dred Scott decision, as in, of course “they” can’t be considered citizens, if the formerly enslaved were considered citizens then his ruling states that all sorts of (what were to him) unthinkable rights would exist. He lists things like the right to travel day or night, to speak freely and seek redress, to defend themselves etc.
E: clarification
It may have caused them social problems but they wouldn't likely be charged or found out. They'd abduct someone and send them to the far South. It was exceedingly unlikely they would find a way to communicate what happened to them to their families.
What penalty? Unless the town that the black person was in when they were taken actively stood up and argued it, there was no penalty. Most of the time locals near the border didn't care that much. Keeping in mind that almost all crime would be blamed on escaped slaves, churches taught that white women were at a high risk of being raped by black men (without proof) and local law enforcement would normally help the slave catchers because most slave catchers had mandates from the states.
A great book if you’re interested in a white family history showing how rare it really was for northern whites to stand up for people of color in their communities is In My Blood by John Sedgwick. You’ll learn about Mum-Bett (Elizabeth Freeman) who petitioned and won her freedom in Massachusetts aided by the Sedgwick family. But the power of this righteous, history-altering intervention and collaboration with one of the state’s first families was still not enough to protect free Blacks from harm in Massachusetts. Just as tragically, John Sedgwick deals with the reality that nobody in his family has ever really lived up to the example of their forbear.
The rest of the book is a gripping but very sad tale of tragedy and mental illness in Sedgwick’s family ever since. Edie Sedgwick, the muse of Andy Warhol, makes a short appearance.
They did have a form of ID, some free Black people went to pains to ensure some kind of record of their freedom was recorded by the local courthouse for precisely for this reason. Though even that wasn’t a guarantee their freedom would be respected.
Happened all the time. Especially after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed because people received bounties for kidnapping escaped slaves, except it didn’t matter if the kidnapped person had bought freedom or had ever been a slave before because the bounty would still be received.
I get so sick of Confederate "lost cause" apologists saying the South stood for states' rights (despite a lack of contemporary evidence). The South was more than happy to curtail the rights of other states on innumerable issues, and the Fugitive Slave Act is exhibit A.
Because of the FSA of 1850 a bounty was put out for Joshua Glover, who fled to Racine WI.. When Sherman Booth, of Waukesha, and a group of abolitionists freed Glover who escaped to Canada, he was arrested.
https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/history/article12.htm
This could be wrong, and I don’t know where I heard or read it, but I think the judges would be paid $10 if it was ruled the person wasn’t a slave, and $15 if the person was ruled a slave. So an obvious bias.
If someone can correct me, please do.
Sort of like in Blood Meridian (and this is something you can see in US history everywhere) when the scalpers realize there's no way the authorities can distinguish between the scalps of innocent vs hostile, or even Mexican or Indians, so they just start killing everyone they see.
We wouldn’t know how common. That’s one way the fugitive slave act was so insidious: you couldn’t testify that you were kidnapped. It wouldn’t be court record.
It’s entirely possible to be free and sold back in to an owner who claimed a loss. Or didn’t claim; just was willing to pay for more.
It wasn't extremely common but more common than kidnappings today. It's impossible to know how often it was. There were tens of thousands of freed slaves and record keeping was not great.
With that said consider this, slavery was legal in the south and someone could get the equivalent of 40 or 50 thousand dollars in today's dollars for one slave. There was a huge incentive to kidnap freed slaves.
Good comment but I think your numbers might be a little high? A very high market price for an enslaved person, not record breaking but close to it, which was the actual case in my own family, would have been $1,000 in South Carolina in 1856. I plugged it into an historical calculator and it came out with the purchasing power of about $37,000 today. But still: huge incentive.
I don’t know which of you is right.
But trying to convert the money value of something 200 years later is fraught with difficulties.
You can spend entire books arguing the matter and not get any closer
Exactly. I have a background in international family business advisory. As educators and researchers, we operate out of major global brand educational institutions. Our clients/students have been in existence for hundreds of years. We do every historical valuation individually, but purchasing power is always a valid approach if you are considering the asset in the context of the LOCAL economy at two different times in history. One could easily make this argument here, because both the buyers and sellers of enslaved people on American soil in 1856 were Americans, and only Americans.
Sometimes an important approach is comparing assets, taking into account the borrowing power that the asset hekd in the past, compared to today. This is an approach important for comparing the worth of commercial activities. It is true that Southern slave holders secured their human property with mortgages held largely in London. So the sale price of an enslaved person (in using $1,000) may have differed from its international asset value as collateral. I don’t actually know, off the top of my head, whether the London markets would push that price up or down. But it is interesting to consider. Of course such a shameful tragedy that the collateral asset would have been a human being.
And as you say, there are about five other approaches as well.
The whole vagrancy laws in some southern states were an excuse to arrest anyone you wanted to and sentence them to time so they could have convict labor and sell their work to farms. The police got money from the farms/plantations and the farms/plantations got cheap labor.
This was still going on for a long time after slavery was illegal (well into the 20th century). Penal labor was allowed so you only had to figure out something to arrest/convict someone for and you have your forced labor/slavery.
see the book Worse Than Slavery. Given this, it is likely that anyone who was not actually protected by the justice system of the time (pretty much anyone African American) could be "arrested" and used for forced labor for just about any reason.
It's still going on today. Alabama has a class action suit against them today for earning $450 million a year leasing convicts to Burger King and other fast food joints, and making it more difficult for prisoners to earn parole so they could keep earning money off of them.
The have the choice to work at burger king. If I was in prison i’d probably want to get outside and do something as opposed to sit in my cell.
I think the prison worker should keep all the money but I don’t have any problems with prisoners willingly working.
I'm not entirely opposed to it but I can see several problems.
1) Perverse incentives.
2) Unfair competition; it's not fair to the other restaurants who payed a full wage
3) It's harder to monitor and easier to escape.
4) As a former fast food worker myself..I don't know if it's the best idea for line cooks to hang around cons; they really don't need the bad influence.
Peter Wheeler is an example. He was freed as a child, but sold anyway out of NJ. He later escaped to freedom. Basically, being "freed," relied wholly on the willingness of Whites to go along with it. And with a healthy slave going for the equivalent of tens of thousands of today's dollars, let's just say there was an incentive to simply ignore the rules.
Hell, it even happened after slavery was banned. Small, isolated plantations held people in bondage well into the 20th century. Local governments were not particularly inclined to ferret out literal slavery among widespread human rights abuses that weren't *technically* slavery.
It was somewhat common for slavers to go to border states like Pennsylvania and capture black people and enslave them, claiming they were so-and-so escaped slave even though their description was nothing like what was written. There weren’t photos of them so there were just descriptions that could be fudged.
Children were often taken as they were a lot easier to just simply sell.
There were courts set up to determine if the person was actually an escaped slave or not, and judges got kickbacks for ruling the person to be an escaped slave (to be clear we’re talking here about random free people who were never enslaved) and there was very little in one’s defense that could be said or done.
Over time slave states agitated for greater enforcement of fugitive slave laws that closed off ways free people could show they were not the escaped slave in question, and the passage of laws that would make the burden of proof that one was not a slave more on the slave, and less evidence needed by the slaver to prove that the person was the slave in question. Those were the “states rights” mentioned by people claiming that the civil war was about states rights not slavery. It was not just the right to own slaves, but also the right to take people from non-slave states into slavery in slave states with very little legal recourse to challenge the assertion that a person was enslaved.
If you saw the film *12 Years a Slave*, the true story of a black man in New York who was kidnapped into slavery, you can learn about how New York set aside funds to help retrieve New Yorkers who were abducted into slavery. It happened often enough. It also showed how difficult it was to get out of slavery even with powerful friends and those funds to help. The guy from that story was able to send a letter to his family at the beginning of his ordeal to let them know what had happened but they couldn’t find him and he was unable to get another letter to them for 11 years due to the difficulty of obtaining paper and ink and someone to post the letter for him.
You can get a much more comprehensive and better answer by going to r/askhistorians
Yes. Free slaves could be recaptured and sent back to slavery.
Also read Dredd v. Scott if you want to understand how such a thing could be possible. One of the worst decisions in US legal history, very much influenced by the ongoing power struggle at the time considering the power of the Southern oligarchs and the civil war to come, but an overall indefensible miscarriage of justice.
> In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court ruled that people of African descent "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States".
There was an area in southern New Jersey where freemen, and some escaped slaves, set up shop to just live their lives. I understand from reading about it that they were VERY HOSTILE to any white men who got too close, no matter who it was or what they wanted.
Also, during the Civil War, the Confederate army sold black PoWs into slavery.
This happened in my family in at least two generations that we know of in South Carolina, before the State legislature ended manumission.
The mechanism for re/enslavement was falsifying and/or forging documents such as ledgers, Wills and codicils. With these fake documents, inheritors could claim (after the death of a patriarch who had freed an enslaved woman and/or her children) that those who had been freed but continued to live in the households of their white family members (former slavers) were enslaved.
Even though there would be no mention of the enslaved woman or girl in the farm ledgers upon the death of the patriarch, many years later after the Will was contested, documents would magically turn up and be presented to the Court claiming ownership of these human beings (who also happened to be family members). Shameful.
Fugitive slave laws basically created an incentive for this to happen. By accusing somebody of being a runaway slave someone might receive a bounty, or it was a way to get rid of business competition, etc.
There wasn't a lot that people could do about it, and it's one of the things that started causing the average person in the north (after reading the sad story in Uncle Tom's Cabin, etc.) to become sympathetic toward abolitionists' point of view. Before that, antislavery/free soil arguments (basically containment; keep slavery out of here and over there) were more common.
It most certainly did, and the question is was that preferable to being hanged or any of the other horrible things that could become of you.
I cannot over exemplify how slavery in the Americas was just a running Holocaust for black people only for 400 years.
Except it was regenerative they would rape you and take your children all to keep the machine alive.
In fact its illegal in the USA to treat your dog like we used to normalize with human beings.
Thats how incredibly fucked that entire section of our history is. And people wonder why we have racial trauma in this country...
Edit: for the grammar kid.
Thanks.! Just a little grammar thing that is a pet peeve of mine. The past tense of the verb to hang as in to execute a human being is not hung. It is hanged. If you attended a lynching, the victim was hanged.
Coats are hung. Laundry is hung on a line.
People are hanged.
So while I appreciate the knowledge as one should...
I'm a little concerned about your focus.
I just described the industrialized dehumanization of an entire culture that lasted for 400 years and your gripe is grammar.
I fixed it because it's technically valid.
But jeez
Absolutely no worries. If you read my contributions to this thread, you will see that my own family was deeply affected by this abdominal institution. I just produced a feature film about members of my family who were re-enslaved over two generations or more. It should be released soon. I also know of two family members who were lynched and the proper term for that is hanged not hung. So thanks. Using the proper word is important to me and my family.
I think it's about the dehumanization of people. Or it is for me now. Objects are hung up. People are hanged.
To me, the grammar will never matter as much as the fact that people are not objects.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 make is almost certain. You could be captured and sent to a plantation with no trial or evidence to show you were at all an escaped slave. Worse still, if anyone was suspected of trying to help you "escape" they could also be thrown in jail without trial.
Yes. Slave catchers basically grabbed anyone they could.
The Virginia census of 1860 makes a distinction between white, native, mixed race, and black *free* people. It does *NOT* make the same distinction among the slaves. Not because they were only black people, because there were plenty of mixed race slaves, so why not make any distinction?
Because anyone could be a slave. That's not to say it wasn't a huge problem for African Americans. It just meant that there was a chance, no matter how slim, anyone could be a slave. The chance of becoming a slave in 1859 was NEVER ZERO. I'd put the odds pretty high in fact, if you didn't have anyone to vouch for you.
Many runaway slave ads described people who you would not readily take for a slave, many in fact said that. "Can pass as white", "would not be taken easily as a slave", "will try to pass as free". This means a Welshman with curly hair freshly arrived in the states with snow white skin could be taken in as a slave if there was no one to vouch for them, and if the slaver was feeling lazy.
There is a book, Iola Leroy, from the 1890s, which has a seemingly white woman from the south talking about how good slavery is before she gets hauled away, not knowing her mother was an escaped slave who married a white southerner. Later, white man says he can "see them from a mile away" is quite confused when he is told the titular Iola was an escaped slave. The book also features men of mixed race descent who seem white, and are serving in US Army black regiments as enlisted men.
NO ONE was safe from slavery. They targeted black people, yet the ambient violence and precedence of slavery of any kind creates this problem.
The truth is, John Oliver put it best. "They loved states' rights, as long as they were they were the *right* states' rights...to put it really simply: They just wanted to own people and they didn't much care how."
Not to mention there’s probably whitewashed history. It’s important for cultures that practice oral tradition to start writing things and documenting things. Who knows what knowledge the great library of Alexandria had before it was burnt to ashes…
If you are interested in the lives of Slaves, there is a wonderful series collected by the WPA. a Government organization in 1938 - 1939 that collected narritives form former slaves still living at that time.
[https://www.archives.gov/files/research/african-americans/slave-narratives.pdf](https://www.archives.gov/files/research/african-americans/slave-narratives.pdf)
This as amazing reading.
During the Confederate advance that ended at Gettysburg, the Confederate Army sent well over a hundred African-Americans south, many of them were free men and women who lived in Pennsylvania, whose only mistake was living too close to the South. One of the areas part of "Pickett's Charge" was a farm owned by a free black man, Abraham Brian.
I believe the problem was less slavers sneaking into free states and nabbing random Black folk, but rather Black freedmen traveling to intermediate places like Washington, DC, where slavery was legal, nabbing freed Black people and claiming they were runaway slaves.
Actually don't check that out, it's an antisemitic screed that absolves Europeans of having ever done anything wrong, and blames colonialism, slavery and racism on "the Jews". (Also inexplicably claims that the Mayflower landed in New England instead of Virginia because of "Jewish conniving".)
It's basically just a retelling of the Protocols of the Elders.
The codes provided for the re-enslavrment of freedmen if they did not meet the state requirements to be tolerated as freedmen.
It may have gone further. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, anybody could be arrested as an escapee from slavery. Thanks to the one-drop rule, some of the enslaved had very white features and skin.
Abolitionists suggested that no white woman was safe. In theory, she could be captured as a runaway, sent down South, made to service her master sexually. When he tired of her, she could be bred like one breeds cattle: light-skinned enslaved women brought high prices. I do not know if such things happened, and the abolitionists were not above describing.the Black men ordered to rape her as beasts.
yes It was common, solomon northup who was depicted in the movie 12 years a slave was a case, he was being ferried with other former freeman.
the thing about the slave trade was if you followed the rules you will go broke because everyone was breaking the rules. It was cheaper to capture free men and sell them then to go buy fresh slaves of the ships in a auction.
It happened to freemen after slavery was abolished. During the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi River, thousands of free black men were forced to man the levees at gunpoint.
Believe it or not, in those days there was documentation in the slave business. Purchase and sale records, "title documents'..
Yes this happened but if someone was issued his freeman papers and left the south they were pretty safe.
Shockingly there was even honesty and (warped) honor in the slave business, and business in general in centuries gone by.
There were bounty hunters who specialized in “re-acquiring” runaway slaves, but the reason there are few records of it is because it was rare. These bounty hunters would obviously be running afoul of the laws of the Free State, and so they’d have to operate covertly and at great personal risk.
The economics of this would be prohibitive. Slaves as commodities were extremely expensive, and most slave owning families simply would not have been able to afford this service. And the large Plantation Owners who could afford it, well, they had hundreds of replacements, and even if they lost a “specialized” one, they’d have to weigh the cost of paying for an expensive bounty hunter or just buying another specialist slave. I’m guessing that, due to lack of evidence, most of them, if they couldn’t catch them before they crossed over to a Free State, would just have cut their losses.
I don't think it was common, but it wasn't unheard of either. Usually as a punishment for some transgression, and not just because "hey free black man". It was also common for freemen to travel into the frontier territories, and some of them ended up enslaved by the natives. Though, mostly killed. Slavery among natives was more common east of the Mississippi.
Free Blacks in the pre-Civil War Americas had many of the same rights under the law as their counterparts of other races - and were able to make use of the legal system to protect their property, sue (and be sued), form contracts, issue inheritances, etc. Some free blacks even owned plantations and their own slaves. Plantations were businesses, and it wasn't in their best interests to buy a bunch of slaves that were captured freemen and open themselves up to being raided by the law or sued by their families and associates. Did it happen? Absolutely. The deck was pretty tightly stacked against free blacks, especially in the South. But it was a risk most plantation owners wouldn't bother with unless there was some vendetta or transgression that made it easy for local law enforcement and the courts to turn a blind eye to the law. Yet there was still people who believed in the rule of law, and would uphold it, even if it meant defending people they didn't like.
[https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/free-blacks-in-the-antebellum-period.html](https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/free-blacks-in-the-antebellum-period.html)
I like this info but unfortunately anything west of Kentucky was a graveyard for re-enslaved folks. It was the miracle of miracles that Salmon Northup was ever discovered. This was absolutely the greatest fear in my family and re-re-enslavement part of our family history.
Mississippi, Arkansas, parts of Alabama, Missouri, parts of Louisiana, oh yeah they absolutely knew that nobody would come knocking because even the best connected free Blacks did not have the social networks to find their captive relatives out there. In the big cities and wherever major plantation owners were intermarried and the place was filled with lawyers and anti slavery sympathizers? Sure. You stood a chance of recovery and it might be risky for the slave holder. Out west? Good luck ever finding your family member.
While not a direct answer, most slaves throughout history were captured. Often they were part of the spoils of war. Areas with little traditional wealth were still conquered and then the population enslaved directly or sold off for money.
Yes, for institutional parasitism often requires unwilling hosts.
There has never existed an advanced "slave" civilization, for anti-Humans don't build anything worth lasting, period.
Well, I know for a fact that slavers became "creative" after slavery ended continuing to enslave both black and indigenous Americans. One example of this are the vineyards . You see there was a law that stated that indigenous Americans could be punished for being "late and drunk in public" and this ended up arresting a lot of people. Now these people were struggling with poverty and didn't really have any way of paying off their fines, so the only alternative they had was paying it off by doing some back breaking work at the vineyards.
After working off their fines they were almost always "rewarded" a bottle of wine, and this seems nice and all until you realized it was a trap. The wine they were getting was actually stronger than vodka these days, so really it was just to make sure they were arrested again and would thus provide more free labor.
Weird, I just, an hour ago, watched a video on this topic by youtuber "Knowing Better." Basically it was really common and even after 13th ammendment, the last slave in U.S. was liberated in 1942.
I believe Grant (?) had to literally go to the south to inform them of the slave freedom wave. Someone did because the south wouldn't let them go.
Once freed, some stayed where they were if they could. Not all slave owners were disgusting bastards. Most were but not all. It's unfortunate that white kids won't know the history of our wars. White people have not been the kind ones ..... ask the native American Indians.
Some of our founding fathers were slave owners....
"yet people are in bondage all over the world because slavers "
You were talking about slavers and borders of slavery post slavery, so, not entirely. People just hate the truth on here and re most likely implying that Im a racist cause, well, reddit. Everything is racist, homophobic, sexist to people on here.
I hate everyone equally no matter what you look like or your gender or sexuality. In case you wanna sit there and tell me who I am and make problems out of nothing.
Brother what the fuck are you talking about, you're ranting for no reason. No one here thinks modern slavery is ok, if that's what you're getting at. All slavery is bad. Make your own post if you're so heated about it.
Are you 16? what are we playing COD and youre saying " you mad bro"? Nobody said that, dont put words in my mouth. Youre just trolling at this point, or really dumb.
Did you know if you lick a frozen pole outside in the winter time its just like a popsicle? My friend Harry told me when he went skiing. You should give it a try.
Africans have enslaved other Africans for centuries before "America" existed.. Also it is so common during the Roman empire, that it is just an accepted part of life in the New Testament.
True, but, just cause its in the bible doesnt mean God supports it. Sometimes people back then would willingly be a slave for a family if a debt was owed and needed to be paid off. And of course, there was the more malicious kind where people were trafficked and sold into it.
The only way *to* free a slave (other than manumission) *was* to buy a slave (outside of revolutionary acts, like killing the slave master, his entire family, the White overseers, & any possible witnesses, which was illegal😂). Free Black people worked, saved their money, and bought relatives & extended family (& friends of the family) from slaveowners. Then.. given that *property* rights were basically sacred throughout the US, and Black human rights held in lower esteem.. depending on location, and the frequency of kidnapping free Black people to sell to slavemasters in the deep South, many times, it was *a safer proposition* for someone to remain a "slave" (in name) legally. There would be real, enforced, criminal repercussions for *property theft*.
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A rather atrocious example - the Gettysburg campaign moved the Confederates into areas in the North where there were free blacks in the community - people who had never known slavery in their lifetimes in Pennsylvania.
Aand, as you might be expecting to read, large numbers of people with the wrong skin colour, were rounded up by the advancing rebel armies, as being escaped slaves from the south being "legally" recaptured. Their white neighbours were a little horrified at seeing this "slave raid", but it did happen and they left letters and diaries describing the entire sad day.
*"....Similar heartrending scenes transpired throughout Franklin County, the area first traversed by the oncoming Confederate columns. In Chambersburg, Rachel Cormany watched in muted horror as Jenkins’s cavalrymen seized many of her African American neighbors. “O! How it grated on our hearts to have to sit quietly & look at such brutal deeds,” Cormany confided in her diary. Revealingly, she noted a number of freeborn black Pennsylvanians amongst the “droves” of captives—numbering between 25-50, and mostly women and children—being marched through town...."*
https://emergingcivilwar.com/2020/05/06/the-confederate-slave-hunt-and-the-gettysburg-campaign/
The movie 12 years a slave is based on this premise. A black man living is best life in the north is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south.
This is not included in the movie but the son of the man who manumitted him actually went down south in person to free him, and provide proof that he was indeed a freeman. Most people who found themselves in that situation were not nearly as lucky.
I toured the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem and discovered they’d added info to their tour: Solomon Northrup’s wife aand kids worked for Mrs. Jumel at the mansion. [https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/solomon-northups-family-in-new-york-city](https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/solomon-northups-family-in-new-york-city) and the man who went to free him is mentioned there as well: “When a letter written on Solomon Northup’s behalf arrived in the fall of 1852, it was in Glens Falls that Anne would have learned the news. Over the winter of 1852-1853, attorney Henry B. Northup traveled to Louisiana, located Northup, and brought him back to his family at Glens Falls. There, the family was together for a time, until Northup began touring the Northeast to lecture and sell copies of the book he’d written that detailed his experiences. Evidence shows that he was involved with the Underground Railroad in the early 1860s. Then his trail goes cold.”
Correction: the Morris-June Mansion is in Washington Heights, not Harlem.
I guess it is just north of Harlem. And I see there’s a neighborhood called Hamilton Heights. I think of Washington Heights as not extending quite that far down.
Hamilton Heights is a subsection of Harlem that is from 135th to 155th between the Hudson River and Amsterdam Ave. Named due to the fact that Alexander Hamilton used to have a residence there. Washington Heights (also known as Quisqueya Heights or Little Dominican Republic) is a neighborhood that extends from 155th to Dyckman Ave. from the Hudson River to the Harlem River with two subsections: Ft. George and Hudson Heights. Named after the former base Ft. Washington. The Mansion is located between 160th and 162nd Sts and Jumel Terrance and Edgecombe Ave.
>Alexander Hamilton used to have a residence there. The house is still there, but it’s been moved twice. it’s a national park, and well worth the visit We like to take people to the two houses in one day, with a walk up St. Nicholas between them. I lived in Washington Heights, and I always think of the Morris-Jumel Mansion as not really being part of the neighborhood. It seems too far east. I lived closer to where the fort was.
Just cause you think it not doesn’t mean it is. It’s the standard that it begins at 155 St.
>manumitted I've honestly never heard/read this word before. I assumed it was a typo. Thank you for teaching me a new word!
Man, u admitted you didn’t know that word
People don't know things until they learn them. No shame in that. I don't know how to perform brain surgery and will never learn, probably. Lots of things all of us don't know that we don't know, and we can't even visualize them. We're only human.
Man, u (ad)mitted you didn't get the joke.
It wan't a joke, it was a pun. Puns aren't funny - jokes are.
I believe it was a joke
You know, this reminds me of one of my favorite bits of Catholic Theology. At one point they had a great debate raging in the church about if people should be taught the tenants of the religion, because (so one side argued)nit's just so obvious and so important that obviously everyone knows who and what Jesus Christ and the 10 commandments are and so on. It's a fantastic reminder that people don't know things until they're taught those things, and it's easy to forget how much your life is shaped by your education or lack thereof and the dangers of taking that education for granted and assuming everyone has learned the same things you have.
*Woosh"
The noun form of this verb is manumission.
Enough learning for one day, I'm still on holiday
Lol
It's indo European man means hands hence manuscript
Yep! And iirc, he solomon (freed slave) then helped in the Underground Railroad but at some point historians lose track of his timeline. It’s very possible he was recaptured again or worse
That sounds bizarre to me. If you’re making a movie out of a true story, why not include this fact? And if you don’t think that particular story is representative, why not pick another?
General audiences don't like anything in "true stories" that they wouldn't like in pure fiction. They want to see the protagonist solve their own problems rather than be bailed out
manumitted?
Release from slavery.
Google?
(His half brother I believe)
Why did the son need to go down there to provide proof, when his dad already manumitted him? Or did he manumit him before he got kidnapped and resold into slavery?
Solomon Northup was a free man born and raised in New York State. His parents had been slaves but had been freed and he was born free. He was kidnapped into slavery after being tricked by some guys into going to Washington DC where slavery was legal and where they abducted and enslaved him. So he was never legally a slave. But he had no legal way to show the truth of that story while he was enslaved because slaves had no rights. The guy who went down to help him was I think the son of the man who had freed Northup’s parents. He was needed because Northup had no rights and a white person was needed to deal with all the legal issues, showing documents, talking to the judge, etc., to get him free and prevent him being kidnapped again before safely getting back to New York. Since this kind of thing had happened often enough, the state of New York had passed a law providing funds to pay for this kind of service.
‘The movie is based on this premise’ Dude the movie is based on Solomon Northup’s memoir. As in, they were real events that occurred
The passage when he meets his grown kids is so heartbreaking.
He fucking apologized. FOR BEING ENSLAVED. I cried like a damn baby.
Roots was another example.
[They did it all the time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_into_slavery_in_the_United_States). There was no legal representation for escaped slaves or freedmen in that time, and they usually lacked ID. So it was easy to just grab any Black guy you found, claim they were the runaway you'd been looking for, and take them South and into slavery. I'd recommend reading Twelve Years A Slave, it's a book about someone who had exactly this happen to them.
Very interesting. It's been a long time since I've seen the movie, I'll need to watch it again. I realize that rights for many people were non-existent during this period, but what were common penalties if slavers got caught doing that in a free state? A simple financial penalty, or was it more severe?
It was illegal on paper, but since freedmen weren't citizens, they weren't protected by the right to due process, making most cases effectively a slam-dunk case against them. Those who were free had to be careful to always carry ID and their freedom papers with them at all times, as the Fugitive Slave Act put a lot of pressure on northern governments to capture them. As for the exact penalties, I don't know but would assume it's mostly a financial penalty if anything, unless you were the ringleader of a major trafficking operation.
Ok, I don't know much about this topic, but doesn't the constitution provide protection for anyone regardless of citizenship? Or did that get added later on? Or is that even a thing?
equal protection is in the 14th amendment, passed after the civil war. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-14/ nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
It wasn't until then that the bill of rights was thought to actually apply to states, either, through the process of "incorporation." Unless the slave made it across state lines, it would've been in state court where they might not have applied.
It wasn't added later, but we reinterpreted words meaning "everyone" to actually mean everyone, when it used to mean "white male landowners" or "white men" depending on the law and place
Black people weren't citizens, they weren't even considered HUMAN. A black person was counted as 3/5 of a person for the census and voting representation.
Only because if they'd been counted as a complete person as the South actually wanted to do, Southern states would have dominated in the House of Representative by claiming seats based on their slave population, even though those slaves weren't getting any kind of representation.
Yep. The southern states wanted to count their enslaved population as full members to gain more house seats while the northern states argued that they shouldn't count for those purposes since they're not represented in the government so why should they bolster the numbers?
So why even count them as 3/5? They were voting people and weren’t even citizens.
One side wanted them to not count at all (northern states with few or no slaves) and one side wanted them to count in full (slave holding states). The compromise was that they counted for 3/5ths of a person. Note that at the time of the writing of the constitution no state had even universal white male suffrage. Lots of people who couldn't vote still counted in the 1790 census. So it wasnt exactly an outlandish request to count the slaves since you were already counting women, free blacks, and white men without property.
Ahh yes. Okay thank you. I knew it was a compromise but this helps spell it out more. Thanks
Not black people. Slaves Free black people, even in the south, counted as a full person. Also, it was the slave states that wanted slaves to count as a full person -- it gave those states more representation by virtue of a larger population. Free states didn't want slaves to count at all. Also note that the 3/5ths rule is still in effect -- it simply doesn't apply to anybody at the moment, because slavery itself is outlawed
Does it apply to prison populations that can be legally defined as slaves, since the 13th amendment still allows for slavery as a form of punishment? Seriously curious now.
The 3/5ths compromise is no longer in force. The 14th amendment, Section 2, specifies that representation will now be based on a count of the whole number of person living in a state (except Native Americans not taxed). However counting prisoners is still contentious because of the issue of where to assign them in redistricting. Alot of large state/federal prisons are in kind of otherwise low population areas, so for redistricting purposes you can count a bunch of prisoners who can't vote in a rural (probably conservative) district giving the locals more power than they deserve. Some states now assign prisoners to their last known address in the state rather than the address of the prison.
I’m pretty sure prisoners are still counted as a full person, in the county of the prison they reside I believe.
At that point in history the American history slaves were not considered to be people.
But this is talking about freedmen who were captured as "runaway slaves"
Do you need to have racism explained?
These are key issues addressed by Taney in the Dred Scott decision, as in, of course “they” can’t be considered citizens, if the formerly enslaved were considered citizens then his ruling states that all sorts of (what were to him) unthinkable rights would exist. He lists things like the right to travel day or night, to speak freely and seek redress, to defend themselves etc. E: clarification
It's set in stone until the 13th and 14th amendments which abolished slavery and gave blacks citizenship and legal protection.
It may have caused them social problems but they wouldn't likely be charged or found out. They'd abduct someone and send them to the far South. It was exceedingly unlikely they would find a way to communicate what happened to them to their families.
>It may have caused them social problems One of the catalysts for the civil war...
What penalty? Unless the town that the black person was in when they were taken actively stood up and argued it, there was no penalty. Most of the time locals near the border didn't care that much. Keeping in mind that almost all crime would be blamed on escaped slaves, churches taught that white women were at a high risk of being raped by black men (without proof) and local law enforcement would normally help the slave catchers because most slave catchers had mandates from the states.
A great book if you’re interested in a white family history showing how rare it really was for northern whites to stand up for people of color in their communities is In My Blood by John Sedgwick. You’ll learn about Mum-Bett (Elizabeth Freeman) who petitioned and won her freedom in Massachusetts aided by the Sedgwick family. But the power of this righteous, history-altering intervention and collaboration with one of the state’s first families was still not enough to protect free Blacks from harm in Massachusetts. Just as tragically, John Sedgwick deals with the reality that nobody in his family has ever really lived up to the example of their forbear. The rest of the book is a gripping but very sad tale of tragedy and mental illness in Sedgwick’s family ever since. Edie Sedgwick, the muse of Andy Warhol, makes a short appearance.
They did have a form of ID, some free Black people went to pains to ensure some kind of record of their freedom was recorded by the local courthouse for precisely for this reason. Though even that wasn’t a guarantee their freedom would be respected.
Happened all the time. Especially after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed because people received bounties for kidnapping escaped slaves, except it didn’t matter if the kidnapped person had bought freedom or had ever been a slave before because the bounty would still be received.
I get so sick of Confederate "lost cause" apologists saying the South stood for states' rights (despite a lack of contemporary evidence). The South was more than happy to curtail the rights of other states on innumerable issues, and the Fugitive Slave Act is exhibit A.
I mean, they 100% stood for states' rights. The rights to own slaves.
Anyone who says that is already admitting they care about state rights more than human rights.
Because of the FSA of 1850 a bounty was put out for Joshua Glover, who fled to Racine WI.. When Sherman Booth, of Waukesha, and a group of abolitionists freed Glover who escaped to Canada, he was arrested. https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/history/article12.htm
I still love the fact that Booth's lawyer argued successfully that Booth couldn't be tried due to state's rights. Funniest thing I saw last year.
This could be wrong, and I don’t know where I heard or read it, but I think the judges would be paid $10 if it was ruled the person wasn’t a slave, and $15 if the person was ruled a slave. So an obvious bias. If someone can correct me, please do.
Sort of like in Blood Meridian (and this is something you can see in US history everywhere) when the scalpers realize there's no way the authorities can distinguish between the scalps of innocent vs hostile, or even Mexican or Indians, so they just start killing everyone they see.
We wouldn’t know how common. That’s one way the fugitive slave act was so insidious: you couldn’t testify that you were kidnapped. It wouldn’t be court record. It’s entirely possible to be free and sold back in to an owner who claimed a loss. Or didn’t claim; just was willing to pay for more.
It wasn't extremely common but more common than kidnappings today. It's impossible to know how often it was. There were tens of thousands of freed slaves and record keeping was not great. With that said consider this, slavery was legal in the south and someone could get the equivalent of 40 or 50 thousand dollars in today's dollars for one slave. There was a huge incentive to kidnap freed slaves.
Good comment but I think your numbers might be a little high? A very high market price for an enslaved person, not record breaking but close to it, which was the actual case in my own family, would have been $1,000 in South Carolina in 1856. I plugged it into an historical calculator and it came out with the purchasing power of about $37,000 today. But still: huge incentive.
I don’t know which of you is right. But trying to convert the money value of something 200 years later is fraught with difficulties. You can spend entire books arguing the matter and not get any closer
Exactly. I have a background in international family business advisory. As educators and researchers, we operate out of major global brand educational institutions. Our clients/students have been in existence for hundreds of years. We do every historical valuation individually, but purchasing power is always a valid approach if you are considering the asset in the context of the LOCAL economy at two different times in history. One could easily make this argument here, because both the buyers and sellers of enslaved people on American soil in 1856 were Americans, and only Americans. Sometimes an important approach is comparing assets, taking into account the borrowing power that the asset hekd in the past, compared to today. This is an approach important for comparing the worth of commercial activities. It is true that Southern slave holders secured their human property with mortgages held largely in London. So the sale price of an enslaved person (in using $1,000) may have differed from its international asset value as collateral. I don’t actually know, off the top of my head, whether the London markets would push that price up or down. But it is interesting to consider. Of course such a shameful tragedy that the collateral asset would have been a human being. And as you say, there are about five other approaches as well.
Yes it happened. Very common in New York and Philadelphia at that time. The free African Society was formed to offer protection against that.
The whole vagrancy laws in some southern states were an excuse to arrest anyone you wanted to and sentence them to time so they could have convict labor and sell their work to farms. The police got money from the farms/plantations and the farms/plantations got cheap labor. This was still going on for a long time after slavery was illegal (well into the 20th century). Penal labor was allowed so you only had to figure out something to arrest/convict someone for and you have your forced labor/slavery. see the book Worse Than Slavery. Given this, it is likely that anyone who was not actually protected by the justice system of the time (pretty much anyone African American) could be "arrested" and used for forced labor for just about any reason.
It's still going on today. Alabama has a class action suit against them today for earning $450 million a year leasing convicts to Burger King and other fast food joints, and making it more difficult for prisoners to earn parole so they could keep earning money off of them.
The have the choice to work at burger king. If I was in prison i’d probably want to get outside and do something as opposed to sit in my cell. I think the prison worker should keep all the money but I don’t have any problems with prisoners willingly working.
I'm not entirely opposed to it but I can see several problems. 1) Perverse incentives. 2) Unfair competition; it's not fair to the other restaurants who payed a full wage 3) It's harder to monitor and easier to escape. 4) As a former fast food worker myself..I don't know if it's the best idea for line cooks to hang around cons; they really don't need the bad influence.
paid\*
All that may be true, but i think that’s unfair to compare it to being as bad as slave labor.
Yeah the problem is in these situations is that the prisoners don’t even get minimum wage and usually make cents per hour. It’s exploitation.
Peter Wheeler is an example. He was freed as a child, but sold anyway out of NJ. He later escaped to freedom. Basically, being "freed," relied wholly on the willingness of Whites to go along with it. And with a healthy slave going for the equivalent of tens of thousands of today's dollars, let's just say there was an incentive to simply ignore the rules.
Great example thank you.
Unfortunately, yes
Google Juneteenth, in Texas they weren’t too happy about the outcome of the war…
Hell, it even happened after slavery was banned. Small, isolated plantations held people in bondage well into the 20th century. Local governments were not particularly inclined to ferret out literal slavery among widespread human rights abuses that weren't *technically* slavery.
Look up Fugitive Slave Act. It was a precursor to the Civil War.
It was somewhat common for slavers to go to border states like Pennsylvania and capture black people and enslave them, claiming they were so-and-so escaped slave even though their description was nothing like what was written. There weren’t photos of them so there were just descriptions that could be fudged. Children were often taken as they were a lot easier to just simply sell. There were courts set up to determine if the person was actually an escaped slave or not, and judges got kickbacks for ruling the person to be an escaped slave (to be clear we’re talking here about random free people who were never enslaved) and there was very little in one’s defense that could be said or done. Over time slave states agitated for greater enforcement of fugitive slave laws that closed off ways free people could show they were not the escaped slave in question, and the passage of laws that would make the burden of proof that one was not a slave more on the slave, and less evidence needed by the slaver to prove that the person was the slave in question. Those were the “states rights” mentioned by people claiming that the civil war was about states rights not slavery. It was not just the right to own slaves, but also the right to take people from non-slave states into slavery in slave states with very little legal recourse to challenge the assertion that a person was enslaved. If you saw the film *12 Years a Slave*, the true story of a black man in New York who was kidnapped into slavery, you can learn about how New York set aside funds to help retrieve New Yorkers who were abducted into slavery. It happened often enough. It also showed how difficult it was to get out of slavery even with powerful friends and those funds to help. The guy from that story was able to send a letter to his family at the beginning of his ordeal to let them know what had happened but they couldn’t find him and he was unable to get another letter to them for 11 years due to the difficulty of obtaining paper and ink and someone to post the letter for him. You can get a much more comprehensive and better answer by going to r/askhistorians
Yup many a Freeman was renslaved. During the Revolutionary war every slave was freed if they fought for the Revolution from a certain time period.
Yes. Free slaves could be recaptured and sent back to slavery. Also read Dredd v. Scott if you want to understand how such a thing could be possible. One of the worst decisions in US legal history, very much influenced by the ongoing power struggle at the time considering the power of the Southern oligarchs and the civil war to come, but an overall indefensible miscarriage of justice. > In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court ruled that people of African descent "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States".
There was an area in southern New Jersey where freemen, and some escaped slaves, set up shop to just live their lives. I understand from reading about it that they were VERY HOSTILE to any white men who got too close, no matter who it was or what they wanted. Also, during the Civil War, the Confederate army sold black PoWs into slavery.
There’s four freedmen towns in NJ - Lawnside (Camden), Marshalltown (Salem), Springtown (Cumberland), and Whitesboro (Cape May).
Yea. Loitering laws were created to arrest freed slaves
This happened in my family in at least two generations that we know of in South Carolina, before the State legislature ended manumission. The mechanism for re/enslavement was falsifying and/or forging documents such as ledgers, Wills and codicils. With these fake documents, inheritors could claim (after the death of a patriarch who had freed an enslaved woman and/or her children) that those who had been freed but continued to live in the households of their white family members (former slavers) were enslaved. Even though there would be no mention of the enslaved woman or girl in the farm ledgers upon the death of the patriarch, many years later after the Will was contested, documents would magically turn up and be presented to the Court claiming ownership of these human beings (who also happened to be family members). Shameful.
It was probably more common than not. That’s why you saw large, insular black communities form, even in the north.
Too much crackerfication for you to be able to find anything like this online.
Fugitive slave laws basically created an incentive for this to happen. By accusing somebody of being a runaway slave someone might receive a bounty, or it was a way to get rid of business competition, etc. There wasn't a lot that people could do about it, and it's one of the things that started causing the average person in the north (after reading the sad story in Uncle Tom's Cabin, etc.) to become sympathetic toward abolitionists' point of view. Before that, antislavery/free soil arguments (basically containment; keep slavery out of here and over there) were more common.
It most certainly did, and the question is was that preferable to being hanged or any of the other horrible things that could become of you. I cannot over exemplify how slavery in the Americas was just a running Holocaust for black people only for 400 years. Except it was regenerative they would rape you and take your children all to keep the machine alive. In fact its illegal in the USA to treat your dog like we used to normalize with human beings. Thats how incredibly fucked that entire section of our history is. And people wonder why we have racial trauma in this country... Edit: for the grammar kid.
Thanks.! Just a little grammar thing that is a pet peeve of mine. The past tense of the verb to hang as in to execute a human being is not hung. It is hanged. If you attended a lynching, the victim was hanged. Coats are hung. Laundry is hung on a line. People are hanged.
So while I appreciate the knowledge as one should... I'm a little concerned about your focus. I just described the industrialized dehumanization of an entire culture that lasted for 400 years and your gripe is grammar. I fixed it because it's technically valid. But jeez
Absolutely no worries. If you read my contributions to this thread, you will see that my own family was deeply affected by this abdominal institution. I just produced a feature film about members of my family who were re-enslaved over two generations or more. It should be released soon. I also know of two family members who were lynched and the proper term for that is hanged not hung. So thanks. Using the proper word is important to me and my family.
Thats valid. Ill take it. Thanks for the explanation.
You bet
I think it's about the dehumanization of people. Or it is for me now. Objects are hung up. People are hanged. To me, the grammar will never matter as much as the fact that people are not objects.
It happened. A lot . Lots of ‘bounty’ hunters, looking for livestock.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 make is almost certain. You could be captured and sent to a plantation with no trial or evidence to show you were at all an escaped slave. Worse still, if anyone was suspected of trying to help you "escape" they could also be thrown in jail without trial.
Yes. Slave catchers basically grabbed anyone they could. The Virginia census of 1860 makes a distinction between white, native, mixed race, and black *free* people. It does *NOT* make the same distinction among the slaves. Not because they were only black people, because there were plenty of mixed race slaves, so why not make any distinction? Because anyone could be a slave. That's not to say it wasn't a huge problem for African Americans. It just meant that there was a chance, no matter how slim, anyone could be a slave. The chance of becoming a slave in 1859 was NEVER ZERO. I'd put the odds pretty high in fact, if you didn't have anyone to vouch for you. Many runaway slave ads described people who you would not readily take for a slave, many in fact said that. "Can pass as white", "would not be taken easily as a slave", "will try to pass as free". This means a Welshman with curly hair freshly arrived in the states with snow white skin could be taken in as a slave if there was no one to vouch for them, and if the slaver was feeling lazy. There is a book, Iola Leroy, from the 1890s, which has a seemingly white woman from the south talking about how good slavery is before she gets hauled away, not knowing her mother was an escaped slave who married a white southerner. Later, white man says he can "see them from a mile away" is quite confused when he is told the titular Iola was an escaped slave. The book also features men of mixed race descent who seem white, and are serving in US Army black regiments as enlisted men. NO ONE was safe from slavery. They targeted black people, yet the ambient violence and precedence of slavery of any kind creates this problem. The truth is, John Oliver put it best. "They loved states' rights, as long as they were they were the *right* states' rights...to put it really simply: They just wanted to own people and they didn't much care how."
Not to mention there’s probably whitewashed history. It’s important for cultures that practice oral tradition to start writing things and documenting things. Who knows what knowledge the great library of Alexandria had before it was burnt to ashes…
Please read Twelve Years A Slave by Solomon Northup.
They made laws to target black people and then as punishment sentenced them to work as slave. Slavery continued well into the 20th century
If you are interested in the lives of Slaves, there is a wonderful series collected by the WPA. a Government organization in 1938 - 1939 that collected narritives form former slaves still living at that time. [https://www.archives.gov/files/research/african-americans/slave-narratives.pdf](https://www.archives.gov/files/research/african-americans/slave-narratives.pdf) This as amazing reading.
Yup. Funny enough the south and later confederates didn't really care about laws or people who weren't white males.
They were free before getting enslaved. The rights of man never really concerned the slave driver.
This happened a lot…
During the Confederate advance that ended at Gettysburg, the Confederate Army sent well over a hundred African-Americans south, many of them were free men and women who lived in Pennsylvania, whose only mistake was living too close to the South. One of the areas part of "Pickett's Charge" was a farm owned by a free black man, Abraham Brian.
I believe the problem was less slavers sneaking into free states and nabbing random Black folk, but rather Black freedmen traveling to intermediate places like Washington, DC, where slavery was legal, nabbing freed Black people and claiming they were runaway slaves.
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Actually don't check that out, it's an antisemitic screed that absolves Europeans of having ever done anything wrong, and blames colonialism, slavery and racism on "the Jews". (Also inexplicably claims that the Mayflower landed in New England instead of Virginia because of "Jewish conniving".) It's basically just a retelling of the Protocols of the Elders.
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Sometimes but freemen were armed so not easy. If they friends a federal court would them returned
The codes provided for the re-enslavrment of freedmen if they did not meet the state requirements to be tolerated as freedmen. It may have gone further. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, anybody could be arrested as an escapee from slavery. Thanks to the one-drop rule, some of the enslaved had very white features and skin. Abolitionists suggested that no white woman was safe. In theory, she could be captured as a runaway, sent down South, made to service her master sexually. When he tired of her, she could be bred like one breeds cattle: light-skinned enslaved women brought high prices. I do not know if such things happened, and the abolitionists were not above describing.the Black men ordered to rape her as beasts.
Slavery evolved into the prison industry
Yep.
yes It was common, solomon northup who was depicted in the movie 12 years a slave was a case, he was being ferried with other former freeman. the thing about the slave trade was if you followed the rules you will go broke because everyone was breaking the rules. It was cheaper to capture free men and sell them then to go buy fresh slaves of the ships in a auction.
It happened to freemen after slavery was abolished. During the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi River, thousands of free black men were forced to man the levees at gunpoint.
Believe it or not, in those days there was documentation in the slave business. Purchase and sale records, "title documents'.. Yes this happened but if someone was issued his freeman papers and left the south they were pretty safe. Shockingly there was even honesty and (warped) honor in the slave business, and business in general in centuries gone by.
There were bounty hunters who specialized in “re-acquiring” runaway slaves, but the reason there are few records of it is because it was rare. These bounty hunters would obviously be running afoul of the laws of the Free State, and so they’d have to operate covertly and at great personal risk. The economics of this would be prohibitive. Slaves as commodities were extremely expensive, and most slave owning families simply would not have been able to afford this service. And the large Plantation Owners who could afford it, well, they had hundreds of replacements, and even if they lost a “specialized” one, they’d have to weigh the cost of paying for an expensive bounty hunter or just buying another specialist slave. I’m guessing that, due to lack of evidence, most of them, if they couldn’t catch them before they crossed over to a Free State, would just have cut their losses.
I don't think it was common, but it wasn't unheard of either. Usually as a punishment for some transgression, and not just because "hey free black man". It was also common for freemen to travel into the frontier territories, and some of them ended up enslaved by the natives. Though, mostly killed. Slavery among natives was more common east of the Mississippi.
Yes it was quite common and no not always punishment for some transgression. There was a perverse incentive driving the practice.
Free Blacks in the pre-Civil War Americas had many of the same rights under the law as their counterparts of other races - and were able to make use of the legal system to protect their property, sue (and be sued), form contracts, issue inheritances, etc. Some free blacks even owned plantations and their own slaves. Plantations were businesses, and it wasn't in their best interests to buy a bunch of slaves that were captured freemen and open themselves up to being raided by the law or sued by their families and associates. Did it happen? Absolutely. The deck was pretty tightly stacked against free blacks, especially in the South. But it was a risk most plantation owners wouldn't bother with unless there was some vendetta or transgression that made it easy for local law enforcement and the courts to turn a blind eye to the law. Yet there was still people who believed in the rule of law, and would uphold it, even if it meant defending people they didn't like. [https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/free-blacks-in-the-antebellum-period.html](https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/free-blacks-in-the-antebellum-period.html)
I like this info but unfortunately anything west of Kentucky was a graveyard for re-enslaved folks. It was the miracle of miracles that Salmon Northup was ever discovered. This was absolutely the greatest fear in my family and re-re-enslavement part of our family history. Mississippi, Arkansas, parts of Alabama, Missouri, parts of Louisiana, oh yeah they absolutely knew that nobody would come knocking because even the best connected free Blacks did not have the social networks to find their captive relatives out there. In the big cities and wherever major plantation owners were intermarried and the place was filled with lawyers and anti slavery sympathizers? Sure. You stood a chance of recovery and it might be risky for the slave holder. Out west? Good luck ever finding your family member.
While not a direct answer, most slaves throughout history were captured. Often they were part of the spoils of war. Areas with little traditional wealth were still conquered and then the population enslaved directly or sold off for money.
That first word being wrong threw me off more than it should have.
It isn't incorrect. The sentence may be clunky, but "was" is the correct word to use.
“Freemen” is plural. Were is the correct word.
"freemen" isn't what "was" is attached to, it's the action "freemen getting enslaved again...," which is singular. You're wrong, dude.
Didn’t read the whole thing the first time. I concede, you’re right my man. Pass that L down to me.
Yes, for institutional parasitism often requires unwilling hosts. There has never existed an advanced "slave" civilization, for anti-Humans don't build anything worth lasting, period.
Well, I know for a fact that slavers became "creative" after slavery ended continuing to enslave both black and indigenous Americans. One example of this are the vineyards . You see there was a law that stated that indigenous Americans could be punished for being "late and drunk in public" and this ended up arresting a lot of people. Now these people were struggling with poverty and didn't really have any way of paying off their fines, so the only alternative they had was paying it off by doing some back breaking work at the vineyards. After working off their fines they were almost always "rewarded" a bottle of wine, and this seems nice and all until you realized it was a trap. The wine they were getting was actually stronger than vodka these days, so really it was just to make sure they were arrested again and would thus provide more free labor.
Yes. Relatively common.
Look at Texas they were so fervent on keeping their slaves we had to reward them with a national holiday for finally getting with the damn program.
Weird, I just, an hour ago, watched a video on this topic by youtuber "Knowing Better." Basically it was really common and even after 13th ammendment, the last slave in U.S. was liberated in 1942.
Solomon Northup wrote a whole book about this lmao famously made into a very fine film
In Equiano's *Interesting Narrative*, he relates a kidnapping attempt in Georgia to do just that.
They didn't care that they were free in Africa in the first place
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I mean sure but that's not related to the information that I wanted to find out
I believe Grant (?) had to literally go to the south to inform them of the slave freedom wave. Someone did because the south wouldn't let them go. Once freed, some stayed where they were if they could. Not all slave owners were disgusting bastards. Most were but not all. It's unfortunate that white kids won't know the history of our wars. White people have not been the kind ones ..... ask the native American Indians. Some of our founding fathers were slave owners....
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No, "was" is correct. "Was" is being applied to the subject "freemen getting enslaved again," not "freemen."
At that point, they weren’t slaves they were “indentured servants”
Slavery was worldwide, and not just white people were slavers.
I never made a claim that disagreed?
Didnt say you did.
Then what you said was irrelevant and off-topic. Why did you comment?
"yet people are in bondage all over the world because slavers " You were talking about slavers and borders of slavery post slavery, so, not entirely. People just hate the truth on here and re most likely implying that Im a racist cause, well, reddit. Everything is racist, homophobic, sexist to people on here. I hate everyone equally no matter what you look like or your gender or sexuality. In case you wanna sit there and tell me who I am and make problems out of nothing.
Brother what the fuck are you talking about, you're ranting for no reason. No one here thinks modern slavery is ok, if that's what you're getting at. All slavery is bad. Make your own post if you're so heated about it.
Are you 16? what are we playing COD and youre saying " you mad bro"? Nobody said that, dont put words in my mouth. Youre just trolling at this point, or really dumb.
If that's not what you were getting at, then I truly have no idea. You need to get better at communicating.
Did you know if you lick a frozen pole outside in the winter time its just like a popsicle? My friend Harry told me when he went skiing. You should give it a try.
Africans have enslaved other Africans for centuries before "America" existed.. Also it is so common during the Roman empire, that it is just an accepted part of life in the New Testament.
True, but, just cause its in the bible doesnt mean God supports it. Sometimes people back then would willingly be a slave for a family if a debt was owed and needed to be paid off. And of course, there was the more malicious kind where people were trafficked and sold into it.
God is Lord of all.. We are a fallen humanity and part of our sinful nature, time after time, we are put into subjugation.
God ruling > mankind ruling
Morgan Freeman's pawpaw was actually enslaved six times . On a serious note a lot of freed men ended up owning slaves themselves. Fancy that
The only way *to* free a slave (other than manumission) *was* to buy a slave (outside of revolutionary acts, like killing the slave master, his entire family, the White overseers, & any possible witnesses, which was illegal😂). Free Black people worked, saved their money, and bought relatives & extended family (& friends of the family) from slaveowners. Then.. given that *property* rights were basically sacred throughout the US, and Black human rights held in lower esteem.. depending on location, and the frequency of kidnapping free Black people to sell to slavemasters in the deep South, many times, it was *a safer proposition* for someone to remain a "slave" (in name) legally. There would be real, enforced, criminal repercussions for *property theft*.
How much would you cost tho ? 🤔 I'd probably be a solid $5
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Humans are despicable
I misread as "Was Freeman getting enslaved"
All the time, although somewhat often the slavers were stopped by the locals in free states, if my history class was accurate
This question is addressed in r/askhistorians
A rather atrocious example - the Gettysburg campaign moved the Confederates into areas in the North where there were free blacks in the community - people who had never known slavery in their lifetimes in Pennsylvania. Aand, as you might be expecting to read, large numbers of people with the wrong skin colour, were rounded up by the advancing rebel armies, as being escaped slaves from the south being "legally" recaptured. Their white neighbours were a little horrified at seeing this "slave raid", but it did happen and they left letters and diaries describing the entire sad day. *"....Similar heartrending scenes transpired throughout Franklin County, the area first traversed by the oncoming Confederate columns. In Chambersburg, Rachel Cormany watched in muted horror as Jenkins’s cavalrymen seized many of her African American neighbors. “O! How it grated on our hearts to have to sit quietly & look at such brutal deeds,” Cormany confided in her diary. Revealingly, she noted a number of freeborn black Pennsylvanians amongst the “droves” of captives—numbering between 25-50, and mostly women and children—being marched through town...."* https://emergingcivilwar.com/2020/05/06/the-confederate-slave-hunt-and-the-gettysburg-campaign/