Selling slaves DURING the Civil War

Factual Questions
1

My mother has a static ridden cassette of a cassette of a cassette of a reel-to-reel (etc.) from the 1950s of her ‘Grandma Becky’ (who was her step-great grandmother, great-aunt and great-great aunt- welcome to Alabama) recalling her childhood. Grandma Becky was born (according to the census records) in 1855 and died in 1955 just shy of her hundredth birthday and her voice was weak and raspy but you can generally make out what she’s saying.

Grandma Becky’s father was a quite prosperous farmer (and very old) when she was born and owned about 20 slaves. In the cassette she mentions a man coming to their farm when she was a child AFTER the Civil War started offering to buy any slaves they wanted to sell. The price he offered was payable in cloth, coffee, sugar, etc.- goods worth perhaps $20 before the war (but many times that when you could get them after the blockades began) for slaves that would have sold for several hundred dollars each before the war. According to Grandma Becky, he was “runnin’ [the slaves] down to Havana” where they still had some value, nobody in the south being foolhardy enough to pay good money for them by this point. Her father did not sell any of his slaves (in fact one lived with the family so long my mother remembers her and some of her descendants continue working for some of his descendants til this day) but forever looked down on some of his neighbors who did.

I have tried to find documentation of these types of transactions but haven’t been successful. She specifically said ‘Havana’, and I know that slavery was legal in Cuba and much of the rest of South America until the 1880s, but slave imports were illegal. (Of course they were illegal in America for 50 years before the last shipment came from Africa.) I’m curious if there would have been enough of a profit margin in American slaves to do this, if it was common, if there are primary sources, etc… I’ve tried all manner of keywords but haven’t found anything. I’ve particularly wondered if this was an “all over Dixie” thing or perhaps it was just some crackpot neighbor with a Ralph Kramden type scheme. I’m not sure what year this would have been, but the farm she grew up on was close to a river that afforded easy (if long distance) access to Mobile Bay which was the last major harbor bottled (August 1864).

Has anybody heard of this or can anybody recommend reading on the very late slave trade in the United States?

2

The Emancipation Proclamation applied only the areas of the South that were in active rebellion. I don’t remember the details, but for some states, at least, it specified on a county-by-county basis which ones did or did not meet that specification.

So in the border states, and anywhere not specifically covered by the Proclamation, slavery still persisted, legally, until shortly after the war. Could your ancestor have lived in one of those areas? IIRC the 15th Amendment wasn’t ratified until some months after the war ended.

3

That would be the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery throughout the United States.

4

It also depends on what is meant by “after the Civil War.” After the Civil War began, there were still places in the North (and, of course, the South) where slavery was legal. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to areas in the South, but there was slavery in “northern” states like Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

Assuming this was before the Battle of Mobile Bay (August 1864), it was possible for blockade runners to get out to Cuba without being caught. So there was a window of over three years where a slave trader could get in to Mobile through the blockade, make the trades, and bring the slaves back to Cuba. It probably one a small operation, though, due to the risk. But if you managed to bring in $20 of goods and get a slave you could sell in Cuba for $200, you could do quite well.

5

Cuba was, I believe the last place to abolish slavery. It’s possible that this man was buying slaves just before the 13th Amendment took effect, paying in relatively cheap goods that were very rare in the area, and then selling the slaves at a profit. It actually makes sense, now that I think about it. I wonder if the gentleman kept any records, though. He may have operated like a criminal, keeping nothing written down. If there are records of this, they’re most likely in Cuba, or else they are recorded in family records. This is really interesting, though.

6

Yes, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, but isn’t it likely that slavery continued to exist, in isolated pockets, for many years after its passage? I understand that Northern troops helped liberate the slaves (from slavery into sharecropping, in many cases), but it seems likely that some plantations escaped or circumvented their attention.

Or not?

7

The problem after the Civil War was not people maintaining slavery without detection, but rather legal tricks referred to as “Black Codes” that kept blacks in a state of slavery.

8

My wording may have been clumsy. This was during the Civil War, not after the war. My guess would be that it would have been late enough that intelligent Southerners knew they couldn’t hold out (in May 1861 slavery was probably business as usual) but early enough that Mobile wasn’t corked by the Union blockade and a ship had a reasonable chance of getting out.

Things I do know that lend some credence: Mobile to Havana is a fairly easy voyage (about 600 nautical miles) and Havana was a very busy port for the Confederacy and blockade runners. (The Trent Affair involved a British ship sailing from Havana.) If I had to make a quasi-educated guess, I would think that this happened in the summer of 1863 after Vicksburg and Gettysburg had sealed the south’s doom and every southerner with bat brains knew it wasn’t going to end with a resounding rebel victory. (Grandma Becky gave no dates more specific than “during the war”- the interviewer, a family member, was specifically asking her what she remembered about the war and she told about this and Union troops coming to search for supplies [they took a horse and peaches but left them a mule and a cow- this probably would have been Wilson’s expedition in spring 1865.)

Totally irrelevant but I was surprised how different slavery in Cuba was to slavery in the U.S., both incomparably better and incomparably worse. The worse aspects were the conditions- unlike the U.S. many plantation owners were absentee and owned vast expanses of land that they rarely if ever visited (they may even live in Spain or elsewhere) and so to make sure the slaves didn’t escape the armed overseers (some of them slaves themselves) often chained and locked up slaves at night even after years of servitude. Many died from suffocating in locked quarters. (Chains weren’t that common a factor in the U.S. other than sales/transports, etc., after the slaves were acclimated to the plantation.) Slaves had far shorter life expectancies and were far more likely to be malnourished in Cuba.

On the upside, Cuba had (due to a Spanish cardinal who detested slavery and did his best to end it [he failed but did get some reforms made]) a policy that didn’t exist in America. All slaves had the legal right to purchase their freedom on an installment plan and to make it easier for them the Catholic church served as intermediary. The slave essentially gave a 5% downpayment on himself which the local church held, and then continued to pay in 5% inclements (or whatever else he could get). After he had paid for more than 50% of himself (such an odd concept), he was allowed to leave his master’s plantation for halftime and work for wages, though he still had to return x number of days/nights to his master depending on how much of his freedom had been purchased. The second half of purchase usually went much quicker since the slave was earning more wages.
When the slave had paid 105% of his appraised value at the beginning of his self-purchase, the church gave 100% to the master and the slave was free. The remaining money went to the church for its services as basically a handling fee (though I don’t think anybody could say the church was profiteering off the matter- they probably incurred that much by way of expenses). Since this took years the slave was usually worth less by the time of freedom than he had paid for himself (i.e. a 22 year old slave is appraised at $700 [made-up-figure] so he pays $735 for himself over a 12 year period, by which time he is 34 and worth $550) which benefitted the master or at least adjusted for inflation. While hardly a progressive thing by 21st century mindsets to let people put themselves on lawayay, it nevertheless enabled thousands of slaves to purchase their freedom and by the time of the U.S. Civil War Cuba had a major free black population.

So actually come to think it may not be so irrelevant afterall. If more slaves were purchasing their freedom, the market for (smuggled) imports might have been ripe.

9

BTW, Brazil (which imported more African slaves than any other country- well over 30% of the total brought to the Americas and between 6-7 times as many as were brought to the United States) abolished slavery around the same time Cuba did (technically a little a later but in practice a little before).

10

Sampiro, keep the stories coming as you continue to explore your “Roots.” BTW, what are your sister’s observations on your personal Kunta Kinte oddessy?

11

A group of die-hard Confederates fled to Brazil after the Civil War and attempted to set up a colony there.

12

I’ve never encountered this particular tale in a fair amount of reading about emancipation and its aftermath. It’s a bone-chilling thought–the idea that one could cheat emancipation by reviving the Middle Passage (in reverse) and shipping slaves out of the country.

The more common scenario was that masters in areas about to be occupied by the Union would ship their slaves deeper behind Confederate lines. In Been in the Storm So Long, Leon Litvack tells the story of a number of slaves who were relocated to Texas. But I don’t remember stories of any being shipped out of the country.

From a slave trader’s point of view, the difficulty with overseas shipment would be that if you were caught, you’d not only be arrested and lose the cargo, but you’d probably be executed. The Lincoln administration had made it clear in the Gordon case that captured slavers could expect no mercy. The fact that no small-time slavers were caught during the years of the Civil War blockade makes me think that slave export couldn’t have been widespread.

Which is not to say that it didn’t happen at all. Or that people didn’t attempt to make it happen, only to see their schemes miscarry at some point. It’s an interesting oral history tale, not inherently implausible. I wouldn’t know how to investigate it further–the type of person who would plan an illegal slaving scheme during the chaos of the Civil War probably wouldn’t leave a whole lot of records.

13

Whether transported abroad of not, slaves were sold during the Civil War, in the usual manner as before. In fact, proices on the eve of secession were at the highest ever recorded, IIRC. Even late in the war, some wild-eyed speculators were buying slaves.

14

I haven’t shared it with her yet. I’m saving it for her birthday. This really has me wanting to have my DNA checked just as a matter of curiosity- personally I think it’d be cool as hell to learn I had an African ancestor but, who knows.

I hate to admit it but after years of lampooning “the legions of the walking dead” I’m becoming a genealogy geek myself. My interest wanes substantially when it gets to before the era of people who were preserved in family history (that goes back to 1800), but even so it’s just odd the discoveries. (My mother’s family came here from Switzerland? I didn’t think anybody came here from Switzerland! Especially not in the 17th century.) Learning just how damned long they’ve stayed in the south and Alabama (on most sides my ancestors have lived south of Virginia since well before 1700) is odd, or seeing just how far back the insanity in the family goes on my grandmother’s side (half of her siblings were to be found in census of the Georgia and Alabama state mental hospitals in 1930- the other half weren’t grown) and how her paranoid father lied to the census taker. (Accounts of my grandmother’s father’s paranoia were innumerable- I don’t know if he was schizophrenic but he was definitely delusional- his census information is never even close to the same info twice save for his name and those of his children- he changes the ordinances of births, the ages, the birthplace of his parents [never the same twice- in reality his father was born in Georgia and his mother in Alabama but he lists them as everything from Virginia to Ireland to Wisconsin in the census], his occupation (he was a medical doctor and graduate of a medical college in Mobile- his wife was also a college graduate- but identified himself as a farmer in one census, a minister in another and his wife as illiterate in two of them), etc… I’m also amazed at how many of my ancestors owned slaves- apparently the dirt poor ancestors that I knew were a postbellum transition, and it’s amazing that my twin great-aunts didn’t talk about the slaves when they probably remembered some of them quite well.

One of the stories my great-aunts (the identical twins born in 1889 who reared my father when his parents split up) told was of a woman they called “Aunt Pig”, a light skinned old black woman they knew when they were little. They always spoke of her in the context of “Aunt Pig made the best sausage you ever tasted” so I assumed that’s how she got her name, but one of them casually pointed out “No, we called her Aunt Pig cause her mama cut off her nose when she was a girl so she looked like a pig. What was her real name sister? Petunia… no I wanna say Penelope… Porcia… naw, that was her oldest girl’s name… oh it was her name too?” while I’m [internally] going “WHO THE HELL CARES WHAT HER REAL NAME WAS! WHY’D HER MAMA CUT HER NOSE OFF!” Eventually one of them volunteered “Oh, her mama cut her nose off with a butcher knife when she warn’t but maybe eight, nine years old. She got along fine without it, her husband couldna loved her more, that was Uncle Brigg I know his name… he used to tell people her daddy was a hog and that’s why her nose was like that and she’d snort like a hog and they’d just laugh and laugh… sister what was Uncle Brigg’s sister named, the one married the preacher who got run over by the mailman? Naw, that was his other sister, she’s the one had the boy who got kilt in France in the war… this was the old colored woman who had the store and yadda yadda yadda” while again I’m WHY’D HER MAMA CUT HER NOSE OFF! “Was it an accident?”

Kitty: No.
Carrie: She went to do it.

silence

Why? Was she crazy?

Kitty: I didn’t know her
Carrie: Wouldn’t be good of us to judge her.

Did she ever say why her mama cut her nose off?

Kitty: Naw. Not’s I recall.
Carrie: Granma Cotton told us why.
Kitty: Aye, but Aunt Pig never did.

silence

WWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHYYYYYYY!

And the payoff of the very long go-round of the very-short story was this (told in my voice rather than K&Cs): When Pig was a girl she was light skinned and very pretty and a slave. Her mother cut off her nose so that she wouldn’t be attractive because “white mens didn’t always used to do colored women nice in them days”. She was mutilated as an act of love, then as an old woman became ‘Aunt Pig who makes sausage and is missing a nose’, which is disturbing on so many levels, but I’m now forced to wonder could Aunt Pig have been a slave in my family? Or hell, could she perhaps have been my family, because the light skin came from somewhere, and her mother obviously had reason to fear white men. But, c’est la vie- the nice thing about being told by aunts cooking you salmon about a slave whose mother cut off her nose as an act of love is that it was a wonderful image to counterbalance the moonlight and magnolias “slaves were member of the family” bullshit still taught in school in the 1970s- one mental image of a noseless old woman is worth a thousand minutes of footage of happy darkies singing in the field.

I have no idea how I got off on this thing. Apologies galore for rambling if not babbling.

15

Do you have Aunt Pig’s sausage recipe?

16

I know that it involved pepper, chicken or rabbit (really), and I’m guessing various nosedroppings.

17

Any Confederate blockade runner would have been subject to seizure anyway; but did the laws against the slave trade cover shipping slaves to or from Cuba and Brazil? The Gordon case was about importing slaves from Africa.

18

Maybe not. The anti-piracy law under which Gordon was hanged made no distinction as to destination, but it only applied to trafficing in people “not held to service or labour by the laws of either of the states or territories of the United States”.

So in other words, it was piracy for an American to transport slaves from Africa to Cuba, but apparently not from the United States to Cuba. (Before the Civil War there would have been no reason to do the latter, because the price of human beings was always higher in the United States.)

Of course, after 1/1/1863 the US could have argued that nobody in Alabama was “held to service” by an operative state law. I don’t know if they would have, but they could have.