I Belong to South Carolina

Susanna Ashton

Description

2010 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Out of the hundreds of published slave narratives, only a handful exist specific to South Carolina, and most of these are not readily available to modern readers. This collection restores to print seven slave narratives documenting the lived realities of slavery as it existed across the Palmetto State's upcountry, midlands, and lowcountry, from plantation culture to urban servitude. First published between the late eighteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, these richly detailed firsthand accounts present a representative cross section of slave experiences, from religious awakenings and artisan apprenticeships to sexual exploitations and harrowing escapes. In their distinctive individual voices, narrators celebrate and mourn the lives of fellow slaves, contemplate the meaning of freedom, and share insights into the social patterns and cultural controls exercised during a turbulent period in American history. Each narrative is preceded by an introduction to place its content and publication history in historical context. The volume also features an afterword surveying other significant slave narratives and related historical documents on South Carolina. I Belong to South Carolina reinserts a chorus of powerful voices of the dispossessed into South Carolina's public history, reminding us of the cruelties of the past and the need for vigilant guardianship of liberty in the present and future.I Belong to South Carolina is edited and introduced by Susanna Ashton with the assistance of Robyn E. Adams, Maximilien Blanton, Laura V. Bridges, E. Langston Culler, Cooper Leigh Hill, Deanna L. Panetta, and Kelly E. Riddle.

Sujets

• Cultural
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Sullivan's Island
• Universidad Clemson
• Sociedad Antiesclavista Estadounidense
• Carolina del Sur
• Plantations in the American South
• The Old Plantation
• The Slave Community
• Robert Smalls
• Black Loyalist
• Antebellum South Carolina
• Ashley River (South Carolina)
• South Carolina Lowcountry
• University of South Carolina
• American Anti-Slavery Society
• Slavery in the United States
• General officer
• Clemson University
• Sullivan's Island, South Carolina
• Slave name
• Slave rebellion
• Slavery
• South Carolina
• Slave narrative
• History of the Americas
• African American
• General
• Université de Clemson
• United States
• Old South
• Université de Caroline du Sud
• Olaudah Equiano
• FL
• Black
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• GA
• Caroline du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 02 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611171679
• Langue: English

Extrait

I Belong to South Carolina
I Belong to South Carolina
S OUTH C AROLINA S LAVE N ARRATIVES

Edited by
S USANNA A SHTON
with the assistance of Robyn E. Adams, Maximilien Blanton, Laura V. Bridges, E. Langston Culler, Cooper Leigh Hill, Deanna L. Panetta, and Kelly E. Riddle
2010 University of South Carolina
Cloth and paperback editions published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:
I belong to South Carolina : South Carolina slave narratives : the lives of Boston King, Clarinda, A runaway, John Andrew Jackson, Jacob Stroyer, Irving Lowery, and Sam Aleckson / edited by Susanna Ashton ; with the assistance of Robyn E. Adams . . . [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-900-3 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-57003-901-0 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Slave narratives-South Carolina. 2. Slaves-South Carolina-Biography. 3. Slavery-South Carolina-History-Sources. I. Ashton, Susanna, 1967-
II. Adams, Robyn E.
E185.93.S7I2 2010
303.3 620922757-dc22
[B]
2009051095
ISBN 978-1-61117-167-9 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Editorial Method
Introduction
Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher (1798)
Clarinda: A Pious Colored Woman of South Carolina (1875)
Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave (1838)
The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina , by John Andrew Jackson (1862)
My Life in the South , by Jacob Stroyer (1885)
Life on the Old Plantation in Ante-Bellum Days, or a Story Based on Facts by the Reverend I. E. Lowery (1911)
Before the War and after the Union: An Autobiography , by Sam Aleckson (1929)
Afterword-the Slave Experience in South Carolina
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks for research and reference assistance are owed to the library staff at Swarthmore Friends Historical Library, especially Christopher Densmore, who helped trace Clarinda to 1837. Allen Thigpen of Sumter shared very useful information about the history of I. E. Lowery for which I am grateful. The reference and the interlibrary loan specialists at Clemson University Library were patient and obliging throughout the long course of this project, and the scholars at the Maine Historical Society were invaluable in helping trace the history of the anonymous author of Recollections of a Runaway Slave .
Drafts of various parts of this work were read and greatly improved by Joe Mai, Mike LeMahieu, Rhonnda Thomas, James Burns, Stephanie Barczewski, Aga Skordzka, and Elizabeth Rivlin. Editorial assistance from Misry Soles, Charis Chapman, Russell Hehn, and Leslie Haines also helped move this project to completion.
This project was made possible by special grants from the College of Arts, Architecture and Humanities at Clemson University. Finally, but most important, the Clemson University-wide program for the pursuit of creative inquiry in the classroom inspired the creation of this special team investigation and made it happen by funding the year-long course and expenses associated with the necessary research and writing.
EDITORIAL METHOD
The goal for editing these texts was simply to make alterations only when helpful to contemporary readers and yet not unnecessarily diminish the tone and historical phrasing particular to these narratives. Silent changes were made in some small instances to remove misleading punctuation and to correct spelling or printing errors that rendered words incomprehensible. Various versions of Sumpter, Sumter, Sumpterville, and Fort Sumpter were left as they were in each narrative to reflect the practices of different eras and regions. No changes were made to dialect phrases or words already within quotation marks, nor were capitalization practices altered to reflect contemporary sensibilities. This is particularly notable with the terms negro, negroes, Negro, and Negroes, which were left precisely as the original printed manuscript read.
In order to convey the significance of the serial reading experience-most important for Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave, which initially appeared in the Advocate of Freedom and later in the Emancipator , and also for the memoirs of Boston King, whose narrative was originally published in the Methodist Magazine -the installment breaks are indicated. In the case of the Reverend I. E. Lowery, whose memoir consists of an initial serialized narrative published by a friend in conjunction with his own later additions and stories in book form, the complete 1911 edition of the text appears, and thus the breaks in the initial sections of the serialized version are not indicated.
While the lives of Boston King, Clarinda, A Runaway, John Andrew Jackson, and Sam Aleckson are presented here in their entirety, Jacob Stroyer s narrative and that of I. E. Lowery are trimmed to emphasize their individual life stories and also to focus attention on the narrative thrust of these works. Thus a long chapter of Stroyer s narrative that concerns generalized anecdotes and impersonal recollections of slavery was excised, as was an appendix assembled by Lowery that excerpts and summarizes newspaper articles, letters, and other documents attesting to the positive relationships between white and black southerners. Omitting these sections should assist readers in focusing on the compelling personal testimony these people provide about the South Carolina slave experience.
Introduction

In 1846 John Andrew Jackson escaped from a Sumter, South Carolina, plantation. He made his way to the docks of Charleston, where he lurked around the wharves, seeking a northbound boat. Suspicious workers confronted the black man, demanding to know, Who do you belong to? Aware that he could not persuasively identify himself as either a freeman or a Charleston slave, Jackson dodged the question by replying simply, I belong to South Carolina. As Jackson later explained in The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (1862), It was none of their business whom I belonged to; I was trying to belong to myself.
Jackson s careful words highlight precisely the conundrum this collection seeks to illuminate. While Jackson made it to Boston by hiding in a cotton bale and eventually published his memoir from England, he remained both claimed and unclaimed as South Carolina property. Despite the year-old Civil War, he was a runaway when he wrote, still liable at any time to be seized and forcibly returned to bondage as stolen property under the legal sanction of his nation s fugitive slave laws. Jackson s memoir marked an achievement of self-ownership, to be sure. However, his double meanings could not be fully realized until now, for even a century and a half later John Andrew Jackson remains largely unknown and unclaimed by the public history of South Carolina.
Like almost every memoir by an escaped slave, Jackson s account sought to make the extraordinary suffering of slavery both a collective and a personal horror. When he asserted that he belonged to South Carolina he was stating an individual truth, as he had been born a slave in the state. Yet he was cognizant too of the broader issue at hand. He was trying to belong to himself while also trying to belong to a broader South Carolina identity that would not claim him. His family, his labor, and his suffering were not only deeds to self-ownership but also deeds to a collective property-South Carolina. His life narrative, an account of terrible violence and injustice, was a testament to reversing the language of ownership. His narrative staked his claim to belong to South Carolina, while his life s work went on to assert that, imaginatively at least, South Carolina belonged to him.
Taking Jackson s claim as the title of this collection is part of this project s aim to reinsert seven nineteenth-century slave narratives back into the history of the region and the nation. These stories most certainly belong to the state, but also, as Jackson s narrative demonstrates, they lay waste to any easy notion of belonging or ownership. These narratives and the individuals who recounted them belong to South Carolina only inasmuch as South Carolina belongs to them.
The seven life stories presented here concern the slave experience in all its manifestations: from plantation culture to urban servitude, from sexual exploitation to religious awakening. They depict artisan apprenticeship and brutal fieldwork. The authors of four of these narratives (King, Lowery, Aleckson, and Stroyer) make reference to working with racehorses or even as jockeys when they were children.
These stories tell of daring escapes and equally daring attempts simply to stay put. They both mourn and celebrate the lives of people surviving enslavement. The upstate, central, and coastal regions of South Carolina are all depicted in these tales. Indeed, forced or voluntary migration is a recurring theme in all of these narratives, for many of these individuals crossed townships, states, countries, and oceans-always seeking to define their homes on their own terms.
The culture of slavery in South Carolina was historically distinct from the cultures of slavery elsewhere in the American colonies (and, later, in the American states). South Carolina s semitropical climate and historic ties to the British West Indies, especially the island of Barbados, created a society in which immensely profitable large-scale agriculture demanded a huge labor force working in plantation groups to raise indigo, rice, or cotton, as opposed to the small-scale farm crops that wou