Chapter I: Preface

The author offers to the public this little book, containing his personal recollections of slavery, with the modest hope that it will be found to present an impartial and unprejudiced view of that system. His experience taught him that all masters were not cruel, and that all slaves were not maltreated. There were brutal masters and there were mean, trifling lazy slaves. While some masters cruelly whipped, half fed and overworked their slaves, there were many others who provided for their slaves with fatherly care, saw that they were well fed and clothed, and would neither whip them themselves, nor permit others to do so.

Having reached the age of twenty-nine before he could call himself a free man, and having been peculiarly fortunate in all his surroundings during the period of his slavery, the author considers himself competent to deal with all concerned, fairly and without prejudice, and he will feel more than repaid for his labor, if he can throw even some little new light upon this much mooted question. He believes that we are too far removed now from the heart burnings and cruelties of that system of slavery, horrible as it was, and too far removed from that bloody strife that destroyed the system, root and branch, to let our accounts of it now be colored by its memories. Freedom has been sweet indeed to the ex-bondman. It has been one glorious harvest of good things, and he fervently prays for grace to forget the past and for strength to go forward to resolutely meet the future.

The author early became impressed with the belief, which has since settled into deep conviction, that just as the whites were divided into two great classes, so the slaves were divided. There are certain characteristics of good blood, that manifest themselves in the honor and ability and other virtues of their possessors, and these virtues could be seen as often exemplified beneath black skins as beneath white ones. There were those slaves who would have suffered death rather than submit to dishonor; who, though they knew they suffered a great wrong in their enslavement, gave their best services to their masters, realizing, philosophically, that the wisest course was to make the best of their unfortunate situation. They would not submit to punishment, but would fight or run away rather than be whipped.

On the other hand there was a class of Negroes among the slaves who were lazy and mean. They were as untrue to their fellows as to themselves. Like the poor whites to whom they were analogous in point of blood, they had little or no honor, no high sense of duty, little or no appreciation of the domestic virtues, and since their emancipation, both of these inferior blooded classes have been content to grovel in the mire of degradation.

The “poor white” class was held in slavery, just as real as the blacks, and their degradation was all the more condemnable, because being white, all the world was open to them, yet they _from choice_, remained in the South, in this position of _quasi_ slavery.

During the slave days these poor whites seemed to live for no higher purpose than to spy on the slaves, and to lie on them. Their ambitions were gratified if they could be overseers, or slave drivers, or “padrollers” as the slaves called them. This class was conceived and born of a poor blood, whose inferiority linked its members for all time to things mean and low. They were the natural enemies of the slaves, and to this day they have sought to belittle and humiliate the ambitious freeman, by the long catalogue of laws framed with the avowed intention of robbing him of his manhood rights. It is they who cry out about “social equality,” knowing full well, that the high-toned Negro would not associate with him if he could.

If there had been no superior blooded class of blacks in the South, during the dark and uncertain days of the war, there would not have been the history of that band of noble selfsacrificing heroes, who guarded with untiring and unquestioned faith, the homes and honor of the families of the very men who were fighting to tighten their chains. No brighter pages of history will ever be written, than those which record the services of the slaves, who were left in charge of their masters’ homes. These men will be found in every case to have been those, who as slaves would not be whipped, nor suffer punishment; who would protect the honor of their own women at any cost; but who would work with honesty and fidelity at any task imposed upon them.

The author’s recollections begin with the year 1842, and he will endeavor to show how slaves were reared and treated as he saw it. His recollections will include something of the industrial conditions amidst which he was reared. He will discuss from the standpoint of the slave, the conditions which led to the war, his status during the war, and will record his experiences and observations regarding the progress of the Negro since emancipation.

It is his belief, that one of the most stupendous of the wrongs which the Negro has suffered, was in turning the whole army of slaves loose in a hostile country, without money, without friends, without experience in home getting or even self-support. Their two hundred and fifty years of unrequited labor counted for naught. They were free but penniless in the land which they had made rich.

But though they were robbed of the reward of their labor, though they have been denied their common rights, though they have been discriminated against in every walk of life and in favor of every breed of foreign anarchist and socialist, though they have been made to feel the measured hate of the poor white man’s venom, yet through it all they have been true; true to the country they _owe_ (?) so little, true to the flag that denies them protection, true to the government that practically disowns them, true to their honor, fidelity and loyalty, the birthrights of superior blood.

H. C. BRUCE,
WASHINGTON, D. C.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

Correct Date of Birth.--Reasons Ex-Slaves Cannot give their Ages.--Childhood Days in Slavery.--Emigration to Missouri in 1844.--Return to Virginia in 1847.--Life in the New Country.--Hunting, Fishing and Playing.--Treed by Wild Hogs.--Narrow Escape from Abolitionists at Cincinnati, Ohio, and Service as a Slave for Seventeen Years Thereafter as a Result 11

CHAPTER II.

Happy Days Spent Till Thirteen Years Old.--The Old Millpond and the Trusted Old Slave Miller.--Slave Children Treated Tenderly and Kindly.--Overseer’s Brutality Checked by Old Mistress.--Whipped on Account of a Lie Told by a Poor White Man.--Status of Poor White Trash.--Fewer Liberties Than Slaves.--No Association or Intermarriage with the Ruling Class.--Hauled to the Polls and Forced to Vote as the Master Class Directed.--Poor Whites as Well as the Slaves Freed by the War.--Both Classes Equally Illiterate.--The Old Master Class and the Colored People Can Live in Peace, were it not for the Poor White Trash 24

CHAPTER III.

Runaway Negroes.--Cause and Effect.--Some Dangerous to Capture.--Mean Masters and Good Ones.--The Good and the Mean Slave.--The Unruly and Fighting Class, Who Would not Submit.--Inferior and Superior Blood and How Divided.--The Typical Poor Whites Have Inferior Blood in Their Veins.--Superior Blood in Slave Veins.--How Superior Blooded Slaves Took in Their Situation and Spent Life in Their Master’s Service and are the Better Class of Colored Citizens To-day.--Blood Will Tell, Regardless of the Color of the Individual in Whose Veins it Flows 32

CHAPTER IV.

Visit to the Old Home, July, 1893.--Great Changes Since 1849.--Plantations Deserted.--Masters and Slaves Gone.--Land Returned Almost to Primeval Condition.--Few Old Inhabitants Found.--Old Major Still Active at Ninety-five Years.--That old Public Highway, that was the Pride of the Community.--Its Old Bed Cut in Gullies or Grown up in Forest.--What Railroads Have Done for that Country and the South 43

CHAPTER V.

Extent to Which Education Has Stamped Out Belief in Superstition, Voodooism, Tricking and Conjuring Among Colored People.--More Dense the Ignorance the More Prosperous the Business of the Conjurer.--All Pains and Aches Due to Tricking.--Conjurers Boast of Their Ability to do the Impossible, and How They Were Feared.--A Live Scorpion Taken Out of a Man’s Leg.--A Noted Old Conjurer Places His “Jack” Under the Master’s Door Step, Which Prevents Him from Carrying His Slaves out of the Country.--Slaves in Missouri not Believers in Voodooism Much.--Indians Believe in Spirit Dance, Colored in Voodooism and the White People in Witchcraft 52

CHAPTER VI.

Carried to the Cotton Fields of Mississippi in 1849.--Cotton Picking Under a Mean Overseer and Method of Treatment.--Good Masters Even in That State.--Master Decides to Carry His Slaves Back to Missouri, Which Causes Great Rejoicing.--Handshaking When they Reached Brunswick, Mo.--Work in a Tobacco Factory.--Positive Refusal to go with Master to Texas in 1855.--His Anger, but Final Acquiescence.--Pleasant Life in Tobacco Factories Because Master did not whip his Slaves nor Allow it to be Done by Others.--White and Colored preachers.--Rev. Uncle Tom Ewing and his Objectionable Prayer.--Virtue and Marital Relations Encouraged by Masters Among Slaves.--High Toned Slaves.--Death by Suicide rather than Disgrace 60

CHAPTER VII.

Status of Free Negroes in Missouri Prior to the War.--Had but Little More Liberties than Slaves.--Guardians to Attend to their Business.--Could not Leave Home without a Pass.--Free Davy an Exception.--Respected and Treated like a Man by all who Knew Him.--Blood will Tell and he had Superior Blood.--Free Born People Considered Themselves Better than Those Freed by the War.--Bitter Feeling Between the two Classes ended Several Years after the War.--The War Freed Both Classes.--Rev. Jesse Mills and Rev. Moses White, Ex-Slaves and Failure to get Assignments.--Rev. W. A. Moore and J. W. Wilson, Ex-Slaves Occupying good Charges 76

CHAPTER VIII.

Life on a Farm and Master hard to Please.--Slaves Raised their Own Crop which Master sold for Them.--Good Old Father Ashby Treated his Slaves Kindly while Rev. S. J. M. Beebe was the Meanest Master in the Neighborhood.--Chas. Cabell, Called Hard Master.--Personal Experience Shows he had a Lazy lot of Slaves.--Ill-treated beast of Burden and Ill-treated Slaves are much Alike.--Dan Kellogg as a Free Sailer Before the War and as a Rebel Bushwhacker During it 82