Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 2

Part One

The Nineteenth Century

BEVERLY GREENE BOND

In March 1825 a black woman known in the legal documents only as Matilda brought a complaint in Tennessee Fourth Circuit Court, meeting in the Gallatin Courthouse (Sumner County), against a white man, John Crenshaw. Matilda (through her next friend Stephen Crenshaw) accused John Crenshaw of assault and battery, and false imprisonment and asked the court for $1,000 in damages.¹ She alleged that Crenshaw forcefully seized and held her prisoner from February 10 to February 20. Matilda further charged that her captivity was without any reasonable or probable cause and contrary to Tennessee state law and custom. Crenshaw countered that Matilda’s case had no merit because she was his slave and had been his slave when he held her and that therefore, she had no right to bring the suit against him. The case centered on the decision Virginia slaveholder David Crenshaw had made in 1794 to act on his conviction of the impropriety of slavery by emancipating fifteen of his slaves and their issue. The deed of manumission, based on a 1782 Virginia manumission act, used the process of gradual emancipation to determine when each slave would be freed. Crenshaw freed some of his slaves within a few months, but for others freedom came on Christmas Day of the year they came of age.

However, in 1801 David Crenshaw and his family joined the westward migration of white farmers and planters out of Virginia, eventually settling in Sumner County in Middle Tennessee. Though David Crenshaw continued emancipating his slaves according to the schedule he had established years earlier, he and some members of his family seemed to have had a change of heart about the impropriety of slavery—especially female slavery. Matilda’s mother, Delpha, was emancipated in 1806, two years after the birth of her daughter. But they remained in Crenshaw’s household a few years longer before establishing a separate household. Delpha had another daughter, Serena, in 1806. Court documents do not describe the relationships between Delpha, her daughters, and her former owner and his family, but John Crenshaw’s seizure of Matilda and his effort to claim her as his slave suggest that by the 1820s, Delpha’s issue was considered far too valuable to set free. Although antislavery advocates were still active in eastern Tennessee, by the 1820s, enterprising farmers and planters were pushing westward, taking cotton and black slavery into the fertile Mississippi River delta. The circuit court ruled in Matilda’s favor and rejected John Crenshaw’s subsequent appeal of the verdict. The judge’s charge to the jury was that if they believed that Delpha is the person mentioned in the Deed of Manumission and that the plaintiff Matilda is her child[,] then the plaintiff is a free woman [and you] must find a verdict in her favor.²

Matilda v. Crenshaw (1825), the original case against John Crenshaw, Crenshaw v. Matilda (1827), his unsuccessful appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, and Matilda v. Crenshaw (1833), Matilda’s successful suit to recover wages plus court costs for the two years Crenshaw held her captive while the first case made its way through the courts, all affected one woman, her family, and the white families who claimed her as property. But the cases reveal the interconnectedness of race, class and gender at a time of social, economic, and political change in nineteenth-century Tennessee.

The chapters in part 1 focus on women’s experiences in nineteenth-century Tennessee. The first two, by Beverly Greene Bond and Gary T. Edwards, center on antebellum issues of gender, race, and class. Bond’s opening essay on antebellum enslaved women is a companion piece to her essay in volume 1 on antebellum free black woman. Antebellum free black woman Milly Swan is one of Delpha’s daughters, but fictive rather than biological kin. Both Delpha and Milly’s mother Anna Swan came or were brought from Virginia in the post–Revolutionary War years, and perhaps Anna was emancipated in much the same way as Delpha.³ But the women in Bond’s chapter in this volume were not among the emancipated or the issue of the emancipated. They spent their lives negotiating the boundaries of slavery across the state of Tennessee. However, these women were as likely to challenge their enslavement in bold, assertive and sometimes violent ways as to create substantive lives and communities within the institution. Bond examines the ways in which the legal framework for slavery, brought into the Tennessee territory by migrants from the parent colony/state of North Carolina, shaped the lives of enslaved women and teases out elements of enslaved women’s lives from public documents and nineteenth- and twentieth-century slave narratives. Tennessee’s three grand divisions allowed for a variety of experiences over the relatively short sixty-eight years of black slavery in the state. Finding the voices of enslaved women can be difficult, since they left few contemporary accounts of their experiences. But the recent sesquicentennial Civil War commemorations remind us that Tennesseans remain attached to this history of slavery and freedom. And we need clear memories of all sides of the story.

Gary T. Edwards opens a window onto the lives of women in yeoman farm families who moved across the state of Tennessee in the early 1800s. The women in Edwards’s contribution are not from the state’s planter elite but instead are plainfolk. Edwards notes that while the majority of white women in the Old South came from these farm households, their lives and experiences have not been as thoroughly examined as those of their elite sisters. Resources on these women are as limited as those on enslaved women, but Edwards is able to sketch the contours of their lives by focusing on three critical aspects—on migration into Tennessee (or out of the state to the western territories), on female-headed households, and on household textile production. He examines the lives of these yeowomen on their own terms and in so doing uncovers an important aspect of female life in the antebellum South.

Laura Mammina’s chapter looks at gender and class implications in the interactions between Union soldiers and Confederate women in Civil War Middle Tennessee. These are women from the other side of the Matilda v. Crenshaw case. They are women whose words would be deemed creditable simply because they are white ladies. And in fact two creditable women do provide testimony (in depositions, not in person) on opposite sides of the case—one for Matilda’s continued enslavement and the other for recognition of her freedom. But how do these ladies react to the pressures of an occupying army in the violent conflict that would decide slavery’s fate in Tennessee? Mammina examines the range of responses to encounters between Confederate women and Union or Confederate soldiers to show that ideas of proper gender roles profoundly affected how soldiers and women behaved and what they thought about each other.

The next two chapters, by Antoinette Van Zelm and Cynthia Sadler, focus on the female body, public spectacle, and imagery. Van Zelm examines the experiences of African American women in Tennessee during the Civil War and Reconstruction by looking at their participation in public celebrations of emancipation. She shifts our focus back to the enslaved women in Bond’s contribution to this volume and the antebellum free women of color in volume 1. Bond’s essay introduces us to Margaret Lee, who, seventy years before the constitutional end to slavery, petitioned the Superior Court of Tennessee’s Washington District for recognition her freedom as a birthright, not as a gift or a purchase. She was the Massachusetts-born daughter of free black citizens of the new republic who had been violently stripped of this heritage of freedom when she was kidnapped not from the shores of Africa but from a wharf in Boston. In van Zelm’s Emancipation Day sisterhood chains and July Fourth revelries, African American women are finally given an opportunity to publicly proclaim a heritage of liberty (even donning costumes representative of this ideal) that Margaret Lee had asserted was her birthright. Van Zelm identifies the participation of Tennessee women in these celebrations as a decidedly gendered emancipation experience; women’s involvement, though always secondary to that of men, had the potential to reinforce ties of sisterhood that could provide support for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Cynthia Sadler shifts our focus to a different set of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century revelries. The Memphis Mardi Gras, Cotton Carnival, and Cotton Makers’ Jubilee entertained spectators, promoted urban economic interests (particularly western Tennessee’s premier agricultural crop—cotton), and built the city’s image as the region’s cultural and merchandising center. But the celebrations also perpetuated markedly different ideas of race, gender, and class from the Emancipation Day and July Fourth revelries that Van Zelm describes. Van Zelm’s celebrants exalt in their freedom from slavery with costumed representatives of Liberty and commemorate the powerful ties of sisterhood connecting and strengthening African American women. But the revelers in Sadler’s celebrations encapsulate regional iconic images of the Old South and New South—the genteel plantation owner, the white southern belle, the nurturing mammy, and the dutiful male black servant. Sadler also looks at a third Memphis celebration—the Cotton Makers’ Jubilee. Although this festival develops as a countercelebration to the Cotton Carnival, in its early years the Jubilee’s images of African American women (with the exception of the queen) are less servile but more sexualized.

Kelli Nelson takes a deeper but differently focused look at the exaltation of the Old South in the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s memorialization of Confederate soldiers. Nelson concentrates on how East Tennessee chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy contributed to a shift in that region’s memories of the Civil War. She theorizes that the UDC fostered an alternative view of the Civil War in Tennessee. By tapping into sentiments generated by reunions of Civil War veterans, industrialization and racial amalgamation, and national patriotism, UDC memorials and monuments situate the Civil War in a narrative of the states’ rights struggle of heroic Confederate soldiers, strong southern ladies, and faithful black slaves. These public memorials and monuments and the UDC’S youth education programs reinforced pro-Confederate Civil War memories especially among the generation of white Tennesseans who could not recollect or did not know of their ancestors’ pro-Union activities.

In the final chapter of part 1, Sarah Silkey looks at the generation of black women born into post–Civil War and postslavery Tennessee. These women did not just assume that they had a right to freedom, education, and economic opportunity. They assumed that if they presented themselves as respectful and appropriately clad middle-class persons, then they also had a right to be treated as ladies. They could sit in the ladies car on trains, dine in restaurants with other Tennesseans of similar status, and be protected from insults or physical assaults. But, as Silkey reveals, this was not the case in late nineteenth-century Tennessee. Silkey uses the experiences of Ida B. Wells to reveal the coalescence of race, class, and gender in this struggle not to just be respectable but to be granted the privileges of respectability. Silkey emphasizes the importance of Tennessee society’s treatment of African American women as ladies in an era when women were the visible symbols of their individual households and their race as a whole.⁴

In the contributions in part 1, we are introduced to enslaved women who struggle to locate public and private spaces where they can express their personhood, to free white women who challenge traditional perceptions of womanhood, and to black and white women who use their presence in public spaces to frame or reframe social and political ideology. These are all Tennessee women whose lives reflect their times.

NOTES

1. In common law, a next friend is a person who represents another person who is legally unable to represent himself or herself.

2. Matilda v. Crenshaw, 12 Tenn. (4 Yer.) 299 (1833). A record of this case can also be found in Supreme Court Trial Cases, 1796–1955, RG 170, MT box 184, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville. Some of David Crenshaw’s slaves still lived in his daughter Elizabeth Crenshaw Brown’s household in 1825, suggesting that he had abandoned his convictions about the impropriety of slavery or that these were slaves that he did not have the power to emancipate. Statements in a March 1833 action before the Supreme Court of Tennessee indicate that John Crenshaw assumed Matilda was a slave because his father, David Crenshaw, had given her to him. In fact, at some point David Crenshaw joined his son in his legal fight against Matilda. Elizabeth Brown’s husband, W. T. Brown, attempted to send some of his wife’s slaves down the River, but they were stopped at Nashville. Matilda won another case against John Crenshaw in which she sought to recover the profits for her labor he had gained while holding her as a slave. See John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 18–19. See also James W. Ely Jr., A History of the Tennessee Supreme Court (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 30–31.

3. See Beverly Greene Bond, Milly Swan Price: Freedom, Kinship, and Property, in Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times, vol. 1, ed. Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and Beverly Greene Bond (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 48–49.

4. See also Cherisse Jones-Branch, Mary Church Terrell: Revisiting the Politics of Race, Class, and Gender, in Tennessee Women, 68–92, and Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, The Pursuit of Gender Equality: Tennessee’s Audacious White Feminists, 1825–1910, and ‘Lift Every Female Voice’: Education and Activism within Nashville’s African American Community, 1878–1920, in this volume.

Ma . . . Did Not Make a Good Slave

African American Women and Slavery in Tennessee

BEVERLY GREENE BOND

Cornelia (no surname recorded) was in her mid-eighties when Ophelia Settle Egypt interviewed the former slave for Fisk University’s Social Science Institute. Cornelia described her birthplace of Eden, Tennessee, as a small town, somewhere between Nashville and Memphis, . . . on a branch of the Memphis River.¹ Her owner, a Mr. Jennings, was a well-polished southern man, a good man married to a woman of the same mold. Like the yeoman farmers in Gary Edwards’s contribution to this volume, Jennings was a subsistence farmer of modest means who raised corn, oats, hay, and fruits. Although Cornelia did not specify how many slaves he owned, she remembered that there were four family units who lived in four cabins. Cornelia’s household included her father, Bob; her mother, Fannie; her mother’s unmarried sister, Mary; Cornelia; and three siblings.² Several of her father’s brothers lived on neighboring farms, and relatives of the Jennings family also owned property and businesses nearby.

Cornelia’s narrative opens a window onto the lives and labors of enslaved women on small farms in Tennessee. She spent her first twenty years in bondage. Her recollections of her mother, her aunt, and the other enslaved women on the Jennings farm are clear and vivid. Cornelia remembered their temperaments, their relationships with each other, and their interactions with their owners. Aunt Caroline, a big mulatto woman, was quiet and good-natured and never made a fuss. Aunt Mary was older and steady in her ways. Both women seemed to have accepted their particular roles as slaves within the Jennings household. But Cornelia’s mother, Fannie, struggled to fit into the narrow space between what was expected of her as an enslaved woman and her own sense of self. The end result, according to her daughter, was that she simply did not make a good slave.

FORMER SLAVE SEATED ALONGSIDE A PORTRAIT OF HIS MOTHER, VIOLA, WARREN COUNTY, TENNESSEE, CIRCA 1900.

Courtesy of Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville.

To Cornelia, Fannie was the smartest black woman in Eden. As a field hand she could outwork any nigger in the country. In the Jennings household she excelled at cooking, washing, ironing, spinning, and nursing. And when she finally retired to her cabin, she cared for her husband and children. But her daughter also remembered a woman who had her faults as a slave. She fussed, fought, and kicked all the time. . . . [S]he was a demon. She said that she wouldn’t be whipped and when she fussed, all Eden must have known it. She was loud and boisterous, and it seemed to me that you could hear her a mile away. . . . She was too high-spirited and independent. I tell you, she was a captain.³

And those who got in her way risked Fannie’s wrath. She fussed at her husband for his reticence: Bob, I don’t want no sorry nigger around me. I can’t tolerate you if you ain’t got no backbone. And she railed at her daughter’s quiet nature: I’ll kill you, gal, if you don’t stand up for yourself. . . . Fight, and if you can’t fight, kick. If you can’t kick, then bite. . . . Don’t be abused, Puss.⁴ Fannie taught her daughter by example. On one occasion, Fannie physically fought her mistress when the woman tried to beat her with a stick. Cornelia remembered the women wrestling in the kitchen for half an hour before Mistress, seeing that she could not get the better of ma, ran out in the road, with ma right on her heels. In the road, my mother flew into her again. The thought seemed to race across my mother’s mind to tear mistress’ clothing off her body. . . . She caught hold pulled, ripped and tore. Poor mistress was nearly naked when the storekeeper got to them and pulled ma off.⁵ When he asked the slave woman why she was attacking her mistress, she responded, Why, I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her dead if she ever strikes me again.

Fannie did not only refuse to let her mistress whip her; she also stopped the men her owner hired to punish her for assaulting her mistress from whipping her. She swooped upon them like a hawk on chickens. I believe they were afraid of her or thought she was crazy. . . . Her body was made strong with madness[,] . . . [and] [s]he was a good match for them. Fannie’s owners finally decided to hire her out but to keep her children—including a young baby—on the farm. Fannie, however, threatened to kill the baby rather than be separated from it.⁶

Enslaved women like Fannie are far from the faithful servants extolled in the Lost Cause imaginings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Kelli Nelson’s contribution to this volume. Women like Fannie understood slavery as a condition of labor, not a negation of self. Their performances of black womanhood were characterized by hard work at unrelenting and often nongender-specific tasks as well as by the negotiation of relationships with their owners. These women sought to establish boundaries between their owners, themselves, and their families. And, as best they could, they prepared their daughters, nieces, and other enslaved women and girls for the rigors of female slavery.

But what particular expectations might an enslaved woman have for life in Tennessee? Were they more or less likely than enslaved women in other southern states to be separated from their families by sale or the vicissitudes of their owners? What kinds of labor did they do in a state with such a diversity of geography and climate? How did they manage the nongender-specific duties of servitude—men’s work in the fields—the women’s work of their owner’s household, and the care of their own homes, families, kin, and relations? And what about women like Fannie who did not make good slaves? How did these female captains negotiate bondage?

Although there was little if any gender specificity in the local and state statutes that framed their lives, historians agree that slavery was different for men and women.⁷ In southern agricultural systems, the labor of enslaved women was considered as valuable as that of enslaved men, since both sexes often worked side by side in the fields at the same or complementary tasks. In Tennessee, as in some other states, enslaved women constructed roads and railroads, served as domestics on riverboats, worked in textile mills, salt manufacturing, and in gold, iron, and coal mining, and did domestic chores (cooking, washing, ironing, sewing, weaving, etc.) in households in rural and urban communities.⁸ Enslaved women also reproduced the southern labor force.⁹ As historian Catherine Clinton has noted, "Slavery was a system of production, and its significance to the antebellum South remains undisputed. However, the fact that slavery fostered a distinctive system of reproduction in the plantation South during the first half of the nineteenth century merits more attention."¹⁰ The relationships enslaved women developed within their own households and communities created the social spaces that facilitated their own survival and that of their families. But how much can we discover about their personal joys and struggles and about how their lives influenced and were influenced by the times in which they lived?

Court proceedings, wills and deeds, federal census data, and the diaries, journals, and books written by white slaveholders provide insight into the experiences of the state’s enslaved women. Some accounts of the lives of these Tennessee women also appear in other published works. Louis Hughes included his wife Matilda’s story in his autobiography, Thirty Years a Slave, from Bondage to Freedom: The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter. Sally Thomas’s story is included in John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South; and the stories of Charlotte and Evelyn are recounted in Elizabeth Avery Meriwether’s Recollections of 92 Years, 1824–1916. Tennessee women also contributed interviews to the New Deal–era Federal Writers’ Project. These interviews appear in the Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas volumes and are valuable resources for an examination of female slavery in Tennessee. Interviews collected in 1929 and 1930 by Ophelia Settle Egypt for Fisk University’s Social Science Institute and published in Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves also provide insight into the ways in which women negotiated the institution of slavery.

Although the experiences of enslaved women in Tennessee mirrored those of similarly bound women in other slaveholding states, slavery in Tennessee was also shaped by the state’s geography, economy, and political development. Tennessee was once a section of Britain’s Carolina colony. Carolina claimed the lands south of Virginia and north of Georgia from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River. After the Revolutionary War, North Carolina ceded her lands west of the Unaka Mountains and east of the Mississippi to the United States. The Tennessee territory lay within the federal government’s territory south of the Ohio River. As early as the 1760s, white farmers, planters, industrialists, townspeople and traders brought African American slaves into the Tennessee territory in a forced migration that continued until the end of the Civil War in 1865.¹¹ One formerly enslaved woman, Susanna, summarized this movement in this way: When white folks got a notion to move to Tennessee or anywhere, they just taken the colored folks up, and course my grandmother had to go, too. They traveled in wagons in those days, but my grandmother don’t remember nothing about her parents. Sylvia Watkins’s mother, Mariah, was sold in Virginia when she was a girl and, along with sixty other slaves, was driven to Tennessee by a slave trader like a bunch of cattle. Mariah and two of Sylvia’s sisters were put on a block, sold and carried to Alabama. Sylvia never saw her parents or her sisters again.¹² Between 1778 and 1780, enslaved blacks were with white settler John Sevier at the Nolichucky settlement, other slaves accompanied James Robertson into the Cumberland Valley, and still others moved with John Donelson from Fort Patrick Henry to the Cumberland bluffs. Andrew Jackson’s purchase of Nancy from Micajah (no surname) was recorded in the records of the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions in Jonesboro, Tennessee, for the November 1788 term.¹³ Other African Americans were brought into the state through extralegal means. Some were stolen from their owners, transported to the Tennessee territory before promised emancipations could be executed, or kidnapped.

In 1795, on the eve of Tennessee statehood, Margaret Lee petitioned the Superior Court of the Washington District of the Tennessee territory for recognition of her freedom and the freedom of her two young children, Maria and Abraham. Unlike most slaves who made appeals for manumission in the nineteenth century, Lee did not claim freedom based on a provision in a former owner’s will. Nor did she present evidence to show that she had purchased freedom for herself and her children. Instead, Lee claimed that she had been kidnapped from Boston, Massachusetts, twenty years earlier. Just after sunset one evening in 1774, Margaret, the daughter of Massachusetts residents Descinda and Thomas Lee, who altho’ of a black hue, had the Happiness to be born free citizens people, and as such, enjoyed all the benefits of freedom, was abducted from the Boston wharf by Samuel Latin. Despite her screams and cries for help, Margaret was bound and held captive in the hold of Latin’s vessel. When she was finally allowed to come on deck, "the Land which she had been accustomed to dwell in was now vanished from her sight. . . . Every revolving day now hightened [sic] her sorrows, till at length her Destiny was fixed, Villainy triumphed, and her misery became complete:—the vessel having escaped the Dangers of the Sea, your petitioner [Margaret] was landed in the state of maryland [sic], and there doomed to Servitude."¹⁴ Samuel Latin eventually sold young Margaret to George Johnson, who sold her to Francis Hawkins, who, in turn, sold her to Dutch Boyles—all of Maryland. Finally, she was sold to Samuel Gammon of Sullivan County (north of Washington, Tennessee). By 1795, Margaret had for twenty years, . . . suffered a Life of Servitude, in a Country where she had inherited from her Parents, Liberty. She had also borne two children, although she did not identify their father(s). This was not the life Descinda and Thomas Lee had anticipated for their daughter, who was, most likely, the third generation of free women in her family. Her grandmother had somehow managed to become free just as black slavery was becoming the norm in colonial America; her mother, Descinda, was born free, as was Margaret, who now found herself struggling to reclaim her valuable inheritance of Liberty. There are no court records to tell us how the Washington Superior Court ruled on Margaret Lee’s petition. Yet we hear Margaret’s desperation in the words of her petition.¹⁵ What had her life been like since she was brought to the northeastern corner of the territories? And what would young Maria’s life be like if the court ruled against Margaret?

Margaret Lee filed her petition for freedom a few months before Tennessee was admitted to the union as the fifteenth state.¹⁶ In the absence of official documentation, we can only suppose that if she was successful, she may have returned to her childhood home in Boston or possibly she and her children remained in Tennessee as a part of the state’s tiny population of free African Americans. The legal structure for Tennessee slavery was already firmly in place when Margaret sought to reestablish her valuable inheritance of freedom and bequeath this to her children.

Tennessee’s early statutes on black slavery and freedom were based on those of North Carolina. The institution was firmly established in that colony by the mid-1700s but hit its lowest ebb in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.¹⁷ The 1790 federal census reported that African American slaves made up 25.5 percent of North Carolina’s population, while, despite emancipations for wartime valor, free blacks made up only 1.3 percent of the state’s population. Of the 35,691 settlers who had crossed the mountains into the Tennessee territory by 1790, about 10.6 percent (3,778) were black—9.6 percent enslaved and 1 percent free. When the territory became a state six years later, there were 77,262 Tennesseans, of whom 10,613 were slaves. Slaves made up 12.5 percent of the population in eastern Tennessee, and 20 percent of the population in western Tennessee, which as settlers moved further west toward the valley of the Mississippi River, would later become middle Tennessee. Of Tennessee’s three grand divisions, East Tennessee had the smallest slave population and West Tennessee had the largest. By 1860, nearly 40 percent of the population in West Tennessee was enslaved, a little more than half of whom were women. Much of this enslaved population was concentrated in the cotton-producing counties of Haywood, Fayette, and Shelby.¹⁸

According to historian Caleb P. Patterson, Slavery increased very rapidly in the first two decades of the history of the state. From 1790 to 1800 there was an increase of 297.54 percent, and from 1800 to 1810 an increase of 229.31 percent. This expansion slowed to 79.06 percent between 1810 and 1820 but increased again in the antebellum period between 1820 and 1860 owing to the 1818 Chickasaw Cession and the opening of the lands between the Tennessee River and the Mississippi River, the introduction of the cotton gin, and the expansion of cotton cultivation in the rich lands of the Mississippi delta.¹⁹

The North Carolina—and later Tennessee—statutes concerning slavery, according to historian Lester Lamon, involved several layers of legislative statutes, city ordinances, judicial interpretations, and informal practices.²⁰ The 1715 North Carolina Slave Code required slaves to carry passes from their owners when they left the plantation and prohibited gatherings, even for religious worship. A more rigid set of laws, passed in 1741, prohibited slaves from raising livestock or carrying guns, although owners could allow one slave to carry a gun to hunt for or protect the household. However, the owner had to identify the slave in a written statement that had to be presented to the chairman of the county court. The 1741 law also prevented slaves from killing livestock belonging to any person without the permission of the owner or owners and attached particularly harsh penalties for violators. For the first offense, authorities could sever both ears and publicly whip the offender; the second offense could result in death. There was little if any gender specificity in these codes; however, since the late 1600s, slavery in the British colonies had been based on the status of the mother at the time of the child’s birth. Provisions for hereditary slavery through the mother prevented the extension of freedom to the children of free men, whether the man was white, black or Native American. North Carolina law also penalized any white female servant who bore the child of a negro, mulatto or Indian.

And if any white servant woman shall during the time of her servitude, be delivered of a child, begotten by any negro, mulatto or Indian, such servant, over and above the time she is by this act to serve her master or owner for such offence, shall be sold by the church wardens of the parish, for two years, after the time by indenture or otherwise is expired. And the money arising thereby applied to the use of the said parish; and such mulatto child or children of such servant to be bound by the county court, until he or she arrive at the age of thirty-one years.²¹

In North Carolina and in Tennessee, slaves were legally both property and persons. As property, they had no rights to ownership of other property, civil marriage, freedom of movement, or control over their time, labor, or offspring. As persons, they could contract and sue for their freedom, represent their owners in some transactions, be held responsible for criminal behavior, and claim the privilege of trial by jury.²² Owners could not abuse or murder their slaves without just cause, yet even the suggestion of involvement in a conspiracy or planned rebellion was considered a felony punishable by death. Overall, the North Carolina, and later the Tennessee, slave codes were designed to protect the safety of the community and to guard individual property rights.²³

But the statutes regulating slavery in Tennessee changed over the sixty–plus years from statehood to the Civil War. Enterprising settlers moved across the state, covering rich farmland with cash crops like tobacco and cotton and utilizing what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of African American laborers. Slaveholders in the Atlantic Coastal South, assuming that their agricultural production would require a smaller labor supply, sold their surplus human property down river to farmers and planters in Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. Even slaves from northeastern states like New York and New Jersey, which had adopted gradual emancipation laws, might find themselves transported further south as the date of their final manumission neared. Private acts of manumission as a result of an individual’s meritorious service, testamentary emancipations by individual owners, and personal or familial purchases resulted in slight increases in the number of free blacks between 1790 and 1830. However, this population growth slowed in the 1840s and 1850s as state laws made all forms of manumission more difficult. The process required the posting of a $500 emancipation bond and, sometimes, an additional $500 bond to petition for permission to remain in the state. Later, manumission was linked to removal from the state and, by the 1850s, transport to Africa. Statewide, only one-third of free blacks lived in Middle and West Tennessee towns and cities, the largest concentration being in Middle Tennessee. However, two-thirds of all free blacks lived in East Tennessee. In urban areas across the state, most free blacks resided in their own independent households, with or near their white employers, in quarters on the outskirts of towns, or in areas where other urban residents chose not to live.²⁴ In rural communities, free blacks occasionally lived on farms or plantations with enslaved spouses or in their own separate households. Wherever they resided, free black women worked at the same low-skilled or unskilled tasks as enslaved women, although women like Millie Swan Price (Memphis) or quasi-free Sally Thomas (Nashville) managed to sustain their households as washerwomen or domestics.²⁵

The legal status of free blacks deteriorated in the 1830s in response to growing concern about insurrections and rebellions.²⁶ Free blacks were prohibited from migrating into or traveling through the state for more than twenty days without risking fines and imprisonment. If they had entered the state before 1836 (or been born free in the state) they could file a petition to remain with the courts in the county where they resided and post a $500 bond guaranteeing their good behavior. Free black men who had been entitled to vote under the state’s first constitution were denied this right when the constitution was revised in 1834.

By 1830, enslaved persons made up over 21 percent of Tennessee’s population, and the federal census provided the first gender breakdown of the black population. Enslaved women were nearly 10.5 percent of the state’s 681,903 residents. By 1860, this number had risen to 12.6 percent. Men comprised a slightly smaller percentage of the slave population through the antebellum period: 10.3 percent in 1830 and 12.3 percent in 1860.

State and local statutes concerning slaves became more restrictive in the 1830s. Any slave found away from his or her owner’s household without a permit could be arrested and punished by local patrols or confined to the county jail.²⁷ The same might also apply to a free black woman or man who could not show proof of his or her status. Enslaved women were more likely to be truants (absent from the owner’s household without a pass for days, weeks, or months—but with no intention of permanently leaving the neighborhood) than runaways. Truancy was a way for enslaved women to challenge the conditions of their enslavement without abandoning their kin and friends. David Gillespie charged that his slave, Jane, often ran about the community at night and that she had, on one occasion, absented herself for several months. But Jane always came back or was captured by the local patrols. She generally secreted herself in the forest around Gillespie’s farm in Maury County, probably trying to stay close to her child. Eighteen-year-old Hannah ran away after she was hired by her owner’s estate to an employer in Memphis. She tried to elude the authorities by seeking refuge in the familiar network of connections on rural farms and plantations in Shelby County. Her owners thought Hannah might be lurking in the neighborhood of Germantown or Holly Springs, Mississippi. Since most owners knew that truant women had not gone very far from home, their concern was probably more with the seeming inability to control their slaves and the loss of their labor than with the absence of a particular woman.²⁸

Although the majority of long-term runaway slaves or free African Americans unable to provide proof of their status were men, the Memphis Enquirer and other Tennessee newspapers occasionally carried notices similar to this one for the enslaved woman named Silvy.

Jailed in Hardeman County, Tn.—a Negro woman about 40 years of age who calls herself SILVY, says she belongs to James Allen of Lincoln Co., Kentucky, and that she left her home on the first of January last, and went to Nashville—from thence to Memphis, by water. She was taken up at Bolivar and confined in jail. She has a pass or instrument of writing signed by Pelina Allen, stating that her time was her own for 12 months &c. The owner of said slave is requested to come forward, prove property, pay charges and take her away, or she will be dealt with as the law directs.²⁹

Polly faced a similar fate, although her situation was tied to another issue confronting Tennesseans in the mid-1830s, Indian removal. Many African Americans in the southeast claimed to have ties to the Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, or Seminole nations but whether enslaved to or kin of people in these nations, their removal was fraught with peril: "A Negro woman supposed to be a runaway was taken up on the Mississippi River among the emigrating Creeks. She says her name is Polly, and that she belongs to an Indian named Billy. She is of light complexion, and about 25 years of age. She has been tendered to the civil authorities at Memphis, but not received; and for the present will be found on board the steamboat Farmer."³⁰

State statutes concerning the transfer of slaves from one owner to another also impacted the lives of enslaved women. In the early years of Tennessee settlement, most slaves lived in small family units, and were seldom sold, except to settle estates. In March 1816, when William Bradshaw advertised the sale of property to settle the estate of John M. Armstrong of Madison County, he noted that along with Armstrong’s house in Columbia and property on the Duck River, he would be selling one negro woman and child. Thirty years later, when the estate of Mr. Holland (no given name mentioned) was assessed and organized for sale, George Gordon listed the slaves by family groups or households in what seemed to be an effort to preserve these relationships. Gordon maintained these same groupings when he divided all of the slaves into three lots to be offered for sale. For example, Press, his wife, Harriet, and their children Madison, Amy, Pricilla, and Alfred were priced individually but listed together in lot number 1, as were Fanny and her children George, Ransom, and Gabriel.³¹

Although Gordon listed Holland’s slaves in family groups, each individual was identified by age and monetary value. This, of course, facilitated separations if prospective buyers were unwilling to take a whole family. Forty-six-year-old Press was valued at $400 and forty-one-year-old Harriet at $300, but their twenty-year-old son Madison (like most young men in his age group) was worth $700. Eight-year-old Amy and six-year-old Priscilla were each valued at $325 and one-year-old Alfred was worth $100. The highest valued individual in the Holland group was thirty-six-year-old Pleasant, who was listed at $800. His daughters, Martha (sixteen years old) and Malinda (fourteen years old), were valued at $600 and $550. Like other young women in their age group, the girls were considered laborers and breeders—healthy young women who were just entering their childbearing years. Former slave Boston Blackwell told WPA interviewers about a slave auction he witnessed in Memphis (probably in the 1840s) on his way to Arkansas. He recalled hearing "a girl bid off for eight hundred dollars. She was about fifteen, I reckon. I heered [sic] a woman—a breeding woman—bid off for fifteen hundred dollars."³²

Although enslaved women’s productive labor was critical to farmers and planters, some slaveholders placed a higher value on a black woman’s fertility and sexuality than on her labor. The breeding woman and the fancy woman commanded the highest prices in the slave markets. According to Sylvia Watkins, who was born in Bedford County in Middle Tennessee, if a marster had a big boy and another had a big gal, the marsters made them live together. If’n the woman didn’t have any chillum, she was put on the block and sold and another woman bought. You see, they raised the chillum to make money on, just like we raise pigs to sell. In another instance, William B. Porch filed suit against one of his brother’s creditors, who had seized Porch’s slave Julia and her child, Maria. Porch had loaned the woman to his brother, but the creditor took her to satisfy one of the brother’s debts. William Porch told a Middle Tennessee court that the Negro woman is peculiarly valuable to your orator [Porch] as she is young, healthy and likely to raise him a large family of likely and valuable children. Another ex-slave recalled a man in Nashville, on the Granny White Pike, and he had a regular farm of slaves; he’d just raise them to sell.³³

Efforts to preserve family relationships found very little support in a society where slave marriages were not legally protected and where the enslaved were important financial assets. Enslaved women and their children were sold together or individually to the highest bidder to settle estates, to serve as collateral for or to satisfy debts, to fund purchases, or—as one ex-slave noted—to send their [the owner’s] boy to school to be a doctor. Like the breeding women, those with particular skills—cooks, seamstresses, nurses, some house servants—commanded higher prices. But enslaved women sometimes made their own decisions about whether to remain in relationships, especially when these had become abusive. Although he had no direct knowledge of the incident, one ex-slave told interviewers about his parents’ separation: He and Mother just got mad in a quarrel and separated. He tried to get her back, and the white folks tried to get her to take him back, but she wouldn’t do it ’cause he drawed back to hit her with a chair; and he’d never done that before.³⁴

A woman might also be sold away from her kin as a punishment for some wrong or slight. Although Millie Simpkins did not describe the circumstances of her sale or how her family reacted, she remembered that she was sold ‘cause I was stubborn. She never saw her husband again. Thomas Rutling, an ex-slave from Wilson County, was sold away from his mother as a very young child. He remembered that his mother was in the habit of running away and concealing herself in the woods, . . . [although] she never remained long before she was found, brought back, and whipped. But whippings were useless and she was sent further south. Rutling remembered how the steps looked to our sitting room door, where I was when she kissed me and bade me goodbye, and how she cried when they led her away.³⁵

David Gillespie of Maury County separated twenty-three-year-old Jane from her child when he made her removal from the state or as close to the Tennessee border (he did not specify which border) as possible a condition for her sale. Gillespie, whose neighbors described him as a severe master, was afraid of Jane, and he was determined to get her as far away from himself and his household as possible. In his eyes, she was wicked and vicious so much so indeed that he determined to dispose of her lest she should do him some great and irreparable damage. Gillespie went on to describe Jane as a vengeful woman whom he knew to be capable when exasperated of perpetrating the most atrocious crimes. He thought she might burn down his house or inflict some serious injury on him or his family, particularly his wife, who seemed to be the focus of Jane’s wrath, or do some irreparable mischief. Jane, a habitual truant, had, according to Gillespie, taken up with a man he believed to be a mean negro. Gillespie was determined to sell her, even for several hundred dollars less than other female slaves in her age category were selling for in the mid-1840s, and he had no reservations about separating her from her child.³⁶

Asserting the right to control black women sometimes went beyond managing their labor. Interracial sexual relationships, although generally ignored by early writers on Tennessee history, were evident across the state.³⁷ Sexual relationships between master and slave involved degrees of subjugation and exploitation. One ex-slave, identified only as Mr. Reed, recalled the sexual coercion in these relationships when he stated that plenty of [female] slaves . . . went with the old marster. They had to do it or get a killing. They couldn’t help it. Some of them would raise large families by their owner.³⁸ Sometimes, the women in these relationships were able to negotiate relatively secure lifestyles for themselves and their children. In the early 1800s—while living in Virginia—Sally Thomas had two sons by her owner’s brother. After the owner and his wife died, Sally and her sons accompanied a new owner to Nashville, where she was allowed to hire herself out as a laundress. Ten years later, Sally had a third son by John Catron. In 1837, President Andrew Jackson appointed Catron to the United States Supreme Court. We cannot know whether Sally Thomas’s sexual relationships, like those described by Mr. Reed, were suffered or accepted. However, according to historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Sally Thomas was treated differently from other female slaves on the Thomas plantation in Virginia, and she used her connections with Catron to protect her sons and provide an adequate lifestyle for them.³⁹

Ex-slaves testified to the existence of interracial sexual associations, but few white men publicly acknowledged their liaisons with enslaved women. However, evidence of these relationships can be found in testamentary emancipations of the women and their children, emancipations that were occasionally coupled with a bequest of money or property. For example, in his will, Andrew Rembert of Shelby County freed Janet and her children and directed the executors of his estate to provide each child with three hundred dollars to be managed by their mother until they came of age. The money was to be paid one half in hand and the other half twelve months after my death, and Janet could use the money to relocate to another state or country if she chose to do so. Rembert did not describe his relationship with Janet, but his actions suggest deep personal feelings and a sense of responsibility for the woman and her children, as well as confidence that she was capable of handling her own affairs and making her own decisions. The will of Dr. Caesar Jones, also from Shelby County, suggests the existence of another long-term interracial relationship. When Jones died in 1850, he freed eighteen of his slaves, mostly women and children. Matilda Mead and her children were also bequeathed $2000. Jones’s brother Chamberlayne was directed to invest the money in state stocks and use the interests to support Mead and her family.⁴⁰ However, interracial sexual relationships generally did not result in the emancipation of the enslaved women or their children. American slavery was based the legal premise that children followed the status, enslaved or free, of their mothers at the time they were born. Allowing the widespread manumission of the children of white slaveholders would have undermined the institution of slavery and, in Tennessee, challenged a general trend toward making emancipation and free black residence in the state more, not less, difficult.

Although state statutes outlawed miscegenation and voided interracial marriages in 1822, a few black women, slave and free, continued to live as the housekeepers, concubines, or unofficial wives of white males. These arrangements did not always garner the kind of special treatment Sally Thomas, Janet Rembert, or Matilda Mead received. As one ex-slave recalled, The white men who had children by slaves would treat them just like the rest. They mighta liked them a little better, but they didn’t want to show it.⁴¹ Another ex-slave from Robertson County observed that the master was mean to them slave women, even if he was going with them. If his wife find it out, he would have to sell her. He would sell his own children by slave women just like he would any others, just since he was making money.⁴² The wives of some slaveholders recognized that the mixed-race children on their farms or plantations were their husband’s offspring and retaliated in whatever way they could. One slaveholder’s wife would not have one of them for a house servant. She would get one right black and wouldn’t have none of the [mixed-race children] in there looking as white as her."⁴³

White men who openly flaunted their sexual relationships with enslaved women risked the anger of their aggrieved wives and families and the quiet condemnation of the community. In 1835, Davidson County resident Winnefrid Richmond filed for divorce from her husband, Braddock Richmond. She claimed that he had deserted her, even when she was sick and afflicted, spending long periods of time in Nashville where he had a blacksmith shop[,] and that she suspected that he was seeing other women. She soon discovered that her suspicions were correct and that her husband had actually been living for the last two years in open adultery with one of his or rather . . . [her] female slaves named Polly. He has, in fact, literally made the house occupied by Polly his home; he has eat[en] there and slept there, and has in numerous instances violated the matrimonial vow, not only with said slave Polly but in all probability, with other females. Braddock Richmond was Winnefrid’s second husband and, when they married, she had seven slaves (including Polly) loaned to her for her lifetime by her father. After her death, the seven slaves would become the property of her children. Winnefrid feared that Braddock, who was using the slaves and her land to support himself and his own children and stepchildren from two previous marriages, would take the slaves (including Polly) to Illinois and free them. One can only wonder which of these situations angered Winnefrid Richmond most—the public and personal humiliation resulting from Braddock’s sexual relationship with Polly or the possibility that he would abscond with all of her children’s inheritance (including Polly).⁴⁴

Seventeen years later, in a similar case, Livingston (Overton County) resident Nancy McGhee filed a petition to divorce her husband, George McGhee, charging that he had committed adultery with two enslaved women, Harriet and Lucinda. In their twenty-two years of marriage, Nancy McGhee had borne four children and always . . . conducted herself toward him as a kind and dutiful wife, [and] never been guilty of anything inconsistent with her matrimonial vows. On the other hand, George McGhee had had several affairs, not only with Harriet and Lucinda (both of whom had borne his children) but also with a young white woman who had been placed in the McGhee household by her parents. George McGhee drank heavily and abused Nancy, and she feared that he would lose the property (including the still-enslaved Lucinda and her two mulatto children) that was to go to their children. When she discovered that George was involved with Harriet, Nancy caused said negro Harriet to be sent off[,] not though until she had become fully satisfied that Harriet was pregnant by . . . McGhee and had delivered his child. The transcripts on this case suggest that Nancy McGhee sold the children of both Harriet and Lucinda to pay George’s debts and, although she did not admit it, to punish the women.⁴⁵

Although other slaves suspected that women who had interracial sexual relationships and the children of these relationships might be the recipients of special treatment, they also knew that these women had little choice. They might gain their freedom in their master’s will, but they could just as easily become the targets of their mistress’s anger. For women like Polly, Harriet, and Lucinda who were the property of the beleaguered mistress, the punishments were compounded by the loss of what was most important to them—their children.

Separations from parents (particularly mothers) or from children seemed to hold the most painful memories for many ex-slaves. One interviewee recalled seeing them sell women away from little children, and women would be crying, and they’d slap ’em about crying. Another noted that the meanest thing they [slaveholders and slave traders] did was selling babies from the mother’s breast, but all of them didn’t do that. . . . It just seemed that some of them would buy a woman with children just to sell her. Robert Falls told about his mother who was sold three times before I was born. The last time, when old Goforth sold her to the slave speculators . . . and they were taking them, driving them like a pack of mules, to market from North Carolina into South Carolina, she began to have fits. You see, they had sold her away from her baby. The speculators could not console the distraught woman, so they took her back to her owner and demanded that he return the money they had paid for her.⁴⁶

African American labor and family and community life changed as westward migration accelerated and agricultural production became more intensive.⁴⁷ In her research on the southern Appalachian region, historian Wilma Dunaway found that, for Tennessee, the percentage of enslaved Appalachians remained relatively stable, with small population increases between 1820 and 1860. In 1860, only 18 percent of Appalachian households as a whole were slaveholding, but in Appalachian Tennessee, about 25 percent of households owned slaves.⁴⁸ These farming households were generally small slaveholders owning from one to nineteen slaves, but they owned three-fifths or more of the farm acreage. Dunaway also found that one of every six farm laborers in eastern and middle Tennessee was a slave.⁴⁹ The percentages were higher in the cotton-producing areas of western Tennessee.

Most slaveholding households in eastern Tennessee produced grains, livestock, and small amounts of tobacco, cotton, and hemp.⁵⁰ In small slaveholding households (those with fewer than twenty slaves), owners personally supervised labor forces that could include black and white workers as well as members of the slaveholding family. Rachel Cruze recalled how her owner, Major William Holden, managed the slaves on his plantation at Strawberry Plains in Knox County. "Ole Major [who was also Rachel’s white grandfather] did most of his overseeing with his horse and buggy, and I always sat on the seat beside him, and if he got down to walk around a little he handed me the lines—just as though I could have done anything with that horse if he had a mind to act up. You see, Ole Major had a bad leg—he always walked