Continuing our review of an Omnibus homework assignment, the instruction says:

Session VIII: Writing
A Slave Letter
Pretend you are a slave who lives far away from your family. Write a letter to your wife/husband/ children. Tell them how you are, how you are doing, what your plans are, etc. Or for variation, pretend that you live in the South. You are a faithful Christian and your family has a couple of servants that help with work around the house. Write a letter to a relative or friend in the North who thinks that all slaves are mistreated and beaten. Explain how your family treats your slaves well and your view of slavery in general. (Eds. Douglas Wilson & G. Tyler Fischer, Omnibus III: Reformation to the Present [Lancaster, PA: Veritas Press, 2006], 179)

As noted, this “Pretend you are a slave” lesson assumes five conditions:

1. A literate slave
2. A married slave who enjoys the freedom to plan his life but lives far away from his family
3. Slaves as “servants that help with work around the house”
4. Northerners who believe false propaganda about slavery
5. A positive view of race-based chattel slavery

Today we shall consider the second assumption on this list, and like yesterday I will cite historians approved by Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church, Moscow, to demonstrate his faithlessness to the historical record.

A married slave who enjoys the freedom to plan his life but lives far away from his family

Omnibus instructs the student to “Pretend you are a slave who lives far away from your family. Write a letter to your wife/husband/ children. Tell them how you are, how you are doing, what your plans are, etc.” This instruction posits three circumstances in the slave’s life:

1. Freedom, or autonomy: “Tell them . . . what your plans are. . .”
2. Marriage: “your wife/husband”
3. A far-away family: “who lives far away from your family”

1. Slave freedom, or autonomy
   Omnibus instructs their students, “Tell them . . . what your plans are. . .” Here the Omnibus editors almost mock their pupils, who do not know that a slave by definition is the property of another and therefore has no right to make plans:

   They could be sold, borrowed, traded, raffled, mortgaged, or transported to another place at any time; they could be distributed to heirs or wagered in card games. Slaves were subject to the will and whims of their owners or, in their absence, any white person capable to giving commands. The slightest indication of disobedience by a slave of any command, moral or immoral, precipitated some form of threat or punishment. Slave owners were answerable only to their consciences and pocketbooks.¹

   *   *   *

   Like slave masters everywhere, Southerners sought to instill a sense of inferiority in their slaves, who—in fear, trembling, and awe—were expected to embrace their masters as absolute others.²

   *   *   *

   A good master might give his slaves breaks to rest or go swimming, but he could not give them that sense of controlling their own time and labor which might have made even the longest hours and most arduous work seem reasonable and pleasant. For the slaves the workday remained an absolute. . .³

   *   *   *

   William Henry Holcombe of Natchez said much too much when he described three captured runaways, chained together by an overseer who was returning them: “Mr. Davis remarked that if those creatures were his, he would sell them, rather than subject them to the torture necessary to ‘break them in’.—They belonged to his brother.” He might have noted that, sold or not, someone had to “break them in.”⁴

   Omnibus fails history when it says, “Tell them . . . what your plans are.” Slaves made no plans. They existed according to the good pleasure of their owners, who planned their existence for them. A southern slave could only expect cruelty, oppression, and privations for the remainder of his or her life.

2. Slave Marriage
   The slavocracy permitted slaves to marry. However, as a point of law the regime did not confer legitimacy on those marriages because slaves were private property. The slaveholders’ economic interests outweighed any of the slaves’ interests and the owners needed the unconditional flexibility to sell slaves individually, married or not:

   Nowhere did slave marriages win legal sanction, and therefore families could be separated with impunity.⁵

   *   *   *

   Legalization of slave marriages would grant the right of contract to slaves and thereby destroy the master’s patriarchal control: “It would amount to a revolution in the status of the slave as great as a transfer of allegiance from one prince or state to another would effect in the condition of a free people.”⁶

   *   *   *

   To reflect this legal technicality, slaveholders amended the terms of the marriage vow for slave marriages:

   If many whites demanded broomstick weddings as the form appropriate to slaves, others did so to avoid the embarrassment of having to perform a Christian ceremony that had no status in law and could not include the usual words “Till death do you part.”. . . The great trouble with the slave wedding ceremonies, even the most solemn, elaborate, and dignified, lay in the inevitable collapse of the essential Christian message during the exchange of vows. The slaves knew very well that weddings were supposed to reach a climax with “Till death do you part,” and they were bound to react grimly to the absence of such words in their own ceremonies. Not many blacks could have thought it clever when a white minister offered “Until death or distance do you part.” Matthew Jarrett, an ex-slave from Virginia, remarked on the usual practice:

   We slaves knowed that them words wasn’t bindin’. Don’t mean nothin’ lessen you say, “What God has jined, caint no man pull asunder.” But dey never would say dat. Jus’ say, “Now you married.”⁷

   Slave marriage was a sham by design, to accommodate this last point:

3. A far-away family
   The Omnibus lesson stipulates, “Pretend you are a slave who lives far away from your family. . .” However, the assignment does not say how the slave got separated from his family or where his family lived, which would be useful information. For example, would this pretend-slave write the letter to his family on the African continent from whence slavers kidnapped him, or would he write the letter to his family in the US? Admittedly, the former is preposterous and the latter allows only a few possibilities:

   1. You ran away from your owner, leaving your family behind, and you do not plan to notify anyone of your whereabouts; or
   2. You bought your freedom but could not purchase your family’s; or
   3. The auction block separated you from your family.

   If you were a slave who was separated from your family, then one cause towered above all others as the primary reason for your separation — the auction block:

   Nonslaveholders often were horrified the first time they saw slaves sold. John S. Wise, taken to a sale by his uncle, noted that “bucks” (unmarried black males ages eighteen to twenty-five) were offered first. Potential buyers examined their eyes, hearing, and teeth, “ran their hands over the muscles of their backs and arms,” and felt their legs. Next were young unmarried women, and some of the questions asked of them were “indecent and shocking.” Members of the crowd exclaimed with delight over the value of slaves: “Niggers is high.” But when one slave family was offered, only the mother was sold; no one bid on her husband and two children. Her new owner told her to cheer up and promised she would find a new husband and have more children.⁸

   *   *   *

   John A. Quitman said that he had witnessed the separation of a family only once. It was enough. “I never saw such profound grief as the poor creatures manifested.” Mary Boykin Chestnut remarked to a visiting Englishwoman as they passed a slave auction, “If you can stand that, no other Southern thing need choke you.”⁹

   *   *   *

   One Norfolk slave woman gave a heartrending account to a newspaper reporter: “I had twenty children. My Master and Missus sold them all; one of my girls was sold to buy my Missus’ daughter a piano.” Then she added with considerable emotion, “I used to stop my ears when I heard her play it; I thought I heard my child crying out that it was brought with her blood.”¹⁰

   *   *   *

   Lou Smith, an ex-slave from South Carolina, recalled a woman who had one child after another sold away from her. Finally, she poisoned her next child and swore to have no more. The other slaves knew what she had done but protected her.¹¹

   *   *   *

   Is it possible that no slaveholder noticed the grief of the woman who told Fredrika Bremer that she had had six children, three of whom had died and three of whom had been sold: “When they took from me the last little girl, oh, I believed I never should have got over it! It almost broke my heart!” Could any white southerner pretend not to know from direct observation the meaning of Sojourner Truth’s statement: “I have borne thirteen chillun and seen ‘em mos’ all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard. . .” Whatever the whites admitted to others or even themselves, they knew what they wrought. And the slaves knew that they knew. A black woman, speaking to Lucy Chase, recalled her first husband’s being sold away from her: “White folks got a heap to answer for the way they’ve done to colored folks! So much they won’t never pray it away!”¹²

   *   *   *

   Even Douglas Wilson, in his two defenses of the southern slavocracy, admitted the master class perpetrated these crimes against the slave class:

   The separation of families that sometimes occurred was deplorable. These were sad realities in the Southern system.¹³

   *   *   *

   This is one of the places where the Christian Church in the South fell short. The fact that the civil government (for example) did not prohibit the separation of slave families did not mean that the church could not discipline slaveholding members who did such a thing.¹⁴

   But Mr. Wilson dissembles. He knows that the southern church sanctioned slavery and that the church, like the regime, had no tolerance for anyone who would crimp the slaveholders’ total control. Slaveholders destroyed slave families with the church’s tacit approval, if not its blessing. “Deplorable” and “fell short” strike me as disingenuous.

*   *   *

Conclusion

No one needs to pretend. The historical record contains thousands of these horror stories. If you were a slave living far away from your family, then it was almost certain that your owner sold you or your loved ones to another plantation, and it was equally certain that you would never see each other again. The Omnibus general editor — Douglas Wilson — knew this historical fact when he compiled the textbook but he withheld it. His students would do well if they wrote a letter about that.

¹ Ervin L. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1995), 4–5.
² Elizabeth Fox-Genovese & Eugene D. Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 86.
³ Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 61.
⁴Ibid., 71–72.
⁵ Ibid., 32.
⁶ Eugene D. Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 112.
⁷ Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 480–81.
⁸ Ervin L. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1995), 6.
⁹ Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 455–56.
¹⁰ Ervin L. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1995), 149 (emphasis and “brought” original).
¹¹ Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 497.
¹² Ibid., 458.
¹³ Douglas Wilson & Steve Wilkins, Southern Slavery As It Was (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 1996), npn.
¹⁴ (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2005), 53.