This is another talk I gave at LLI. The original presentation was made with Power Point.
Much of today’s talk has been lifted directly from Slavery in Missouri by Harrison Trexler. It is an excellent source, but it was published in 1914 and much of it would not be considered politically correct today. Everything I am saying today I found on the internet, so it has to be true.
Philippe Francois Renault is traditionally considered to have introduced Negro slavery to Missouri around 1720 when he brought 500 Negroes with him from Santo Domingoto work the lead mines. When Louisiana was purchased in 1803, there were between two and three thousand slaves within the present limits of Missouri. As the population of the state grew, so did the number of slaves. By 1860 the State contained 114,931 slaves and 3,572 free Negroes.
Unlike the Deep South the slave population of Missouri was very small.
In 1860, while South Carolina and Mississippi had more slaves than free citizens, Missouri had one slave for about every ten free citizens. There were only 36 counties in Missouri with 1,000 or more slaves. The typical Missouri slave holder owned less than 5 slaves, and anyone with more than 10 slaves was considered wealthy. There were only a handful of exceptions to this rule. According to the 1850 census, the largest slaveholder in Cooper county had 70 slaves, 29 of whom were over 15 years old. In 1860, the largest slaveholder in St. Genevieve county has 78 negroes and the largest in Boone County had 50.
PS: There is a wonderful site (Geostat Center) from the University of Virginia that allows you to create tables like the one above from historical census data.
Missouri had a surplus of slaves in the 1800s and slave trading was a lucrative business. Itinerant buyers from Southern markets would frequently visit smaller Missouri towns, while the larger one had permanent dealers. There were two such businesses in Lexington in 1861 and at least one in St. Joseph in 1856.
St. Louis became a considerable center for shipping gangs of slaves down the Mississippi.
A St. Louis clergyman wrote “Often have I seen gangs of negroes handcuffed together, two and two, going through the open street like dumb cattle, on the way to the steamboat for the South.” In one issue of the Republican three firms advertised for five hundred, one thousand, and twenty-five hundred slaves respectively.
The official negro auction block of St. Louis was the eastern door of the court-house. Said a citizen of Lexington, “I have often heard the auctioneer cry, ‘A good sound wench, sixteen years old, good to cook, bake, iron, and work. Warranted a slave for life.’ Crowds would flock to the court house to see the sight.
William Brown stated that it was not uncommon in St. Louis to hear a negress on the block thus described: “How much is offered for this woman? She is a good cook, good washer, a good obedient servant. She has got religion!”
The last slave auction in St. Louis was held on the steps of the Old Court House on January 1, 1861. It was disrupted by a crowd of about 2,000 antislavery demonstrators.
Slaves in Missouri were not evenly distributed.
In 1860 there was only one county in Missouri, Doulgas, that had no slaves, but most had very few. The majority of slaves was held on the fertile farmland along the Missouri River, also known as “Little Dixie”,and in the Missouri boot heel.
(I am still researching the role of slavery in the Missouri Bootheel.)
Little Dixie was known for its preservation of Southern Culture as
well as its slaves. Although some historians include as many as 17 counties in “Little Dixie”, Clay, Lafayette, Saline, Cooper, Howard, Boone and Callaway counties were its core. Even in Little Dixie the average slaveholder had fewer than eight slaves.
The cash crops of Little Dixie were cotton, tobacco and hemp. Tobacco and cotton played a minor part in the agriculture of Little Dixie.
(After giving this talk I have encountered material that suggest Tobacco, and perhaps cotton, played more of a role than I have indicated.)
Hemp was king.
Hemp was the great Missouri staple. As a hemp State Missouri
was second only to Kentucky, and the quality of her hemp was said
by J. C. Breckinridge to be even superior to that of his own State. Wrote one citizen of Platte County’; “From the first settlement of the county, hemp was the staple product. We became wealthy by its culture. No soil on earth, whether timber or prairie, is better adapted to hemp than Platte County. . . . But no machinery ever invented superseded the hand-break in cleaning it. . . . Negroes were, therefore, in demand, and stout men sold readily for $1,200 to $1,400.”
A citizen of Lexington recalls “I can remember how twenty or thirty negroes would work in line cutting hemp with sickles. It was then left to rot till January. Then it was broken and the pith removed by means of a heavy crusher which the slave swung up and down. He often received the lash if not breaking his one hundred pounds. I have seen a long line of wagons loaded with hemp extending from the river nearly to the court house.”
According to Robert Nelson in “A History of Hemp” “The work of breaking hemp was so dirty and laborious that few white men would do it. None but strong Negro men were capable of the work, and they too usually declined the job after they were emancipated. It was the task of the slave to break one hundred pounds of hemp a day, receiving one cent per pound for all broken in excess of that amount. Many slaves broke from a hundred and seventy-five to two hundred, some as many as three hundred pounds a day. The work seems to have been heavy, but the possibility of making a dollar or more a day made it popular with the ambitious slaves. It was estimated that three slaves could cultivate about 50 acres averaging 700 pound of fiber/acre.”
Those of you familiar with Missouri history know, that the battle of Lexington in 1861 was also known as the battle of the hemp bales.
Of course slaves were employed as domestics thought the state. In the City of St. Louis, this practice declined in the mid 1800s with the large influx of immigrants. Some have said that, in St. Louis, it was cheaper to hire an Irishman than to own a slave.
The majority of the Missouri slaves were agricultural workers on farms like that owned by the Dent family in St. Louis County.
At Whitehaven, Ulysses Grant worked side by side with his father in laws slaves; tending the farm, growing wheat, oats, Irish potatoes and Indian corn and raising horses, cattle and pigs. Grant, along with Dan, one of his wife’s slaves, took firewood by wagon to sell in St. Louis.
It was a common practice to hire out slaves. Slaves were widely used as boat hands. One traveler in 1858 stated that the crew and stokers on the boats were all slaves. Others noted that the deckhands were “colored: or that the boats generally had a cabin crew of about 20 “generally colored”.
As mentioned earlier, slaves worked the lead mines in the 1700s although this practice seems to have died out by the time of the civil war.
One practice apparently not that uncommon was for a master to allow a slave to hire himself out in return for a monthly fee. This was frowned upon by white society. The charter of Carondelet of 1851 empowered the city council “to impose fines, penalties and forfeitures on the owners and masters of slaves suffered to go at large or to act or deal as free persons.” A St. Louis editorial of 1824, stated “ Slaves hiring their own time of their masters, … take upon themselves at once the airs of freemen and often resort to very illicit modes to meet their monthly payments. . . . They become unsteady and vicious, and corrupt their associates, and perhaps at length resort to theft as an easier mode of paying their masters. This practice, is in fact, one principal source of the irregularity and crimes of slaves in this place.”
Under the code of 1804, slaves were considered personal property.
As such they could be seized in the execution of a lien or sold along with other personal property to settle an estate. The Missouri Supreme Court held in 1857 that “our system of slavery resembles that of the Romans rather than … the ancient common law. . . . Under the former law, slaves were ’things’ and not ’persons’; they were not the subjects of civil rights, and of course were incapable of owning property or of contracting legal obligations.” This being the case, the slave had no legal right even to the clothes on his back. He could make no valid contract, nor could he either sue or be sued. A slave was prohibited from buying or selling anything without his owners permission.
The police regulations of Governor Carondelet of 1795, under penalty of twenty-five lashes, prohibited a slave from selling without his master’s consent even the products of the waste land given him for his own use.
Slave marriage was never recognized by law and the owner could separate the parties as a corollary of his property right. On the other hand, the Catholic church regularly married slaves and held the tie to be as sacred as any other marriage.
Under the Code of 1804 a negro or mulatto could not be a witness in any case involving a white person.
The general criminal law of 1825 empowered the master to incarcerate his slave in the public jail, at his own expense, if the slave resisted his “lawful demands” or refused to obey him. The same law provided that a slave who assaulted his master would be whipped “not exceeding 39 stripes” if convicted before a justice of the peace, but the law gave the master no permission to punish him.
The slave was not to be fined or imprisoned, save at his master’s request. He was therefore punished physically in cases where a white man would be fined or incarcerated.
The Code of 1804 provided the death penalty without benefit of clergy for any Negro or other slave who conspired to rebel or to murder another person. In 1825, the punishment was limited to thirty-nine stripes if the slave simply conspired without committing the “overt act If the slave “unwittingly” entered the conspiracy and voluntarily confessed with “genuine repentance” before being accused of the crime, he might be pardoned, but the second offence was to be punishable by death in any case.
While there is nothing positive to be said about slavery, in general the lot of the slave in Missouri was not as hard as his brothers in the Deep South. The small number of slaves in the state and number of slaves per master was clearly a factor in their treatment.
According to Trexler, “When the young Virginian or Kentuckian and his negroes emigrated to far-off Missouri, they suffered in common the pangs of parting, and together went to develop the virgin soil amid common dangers and common hardships. Thus there undoubtedly grew up an attachment that the older communities had long since outgrown. … The slave not only worshipped at his master’s church and partook of the same sacraments as his master, but was ministered to by the same pastor and attended by the family physician.”
Prior to 1847 there was no law in Missouri regarding the literacy of blacks and evidence would suggest that a least some slaves were taught to read. The 1847 law stated that “no person shall keep or teach any school for the instruction of any negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing in this State” under a penalty of five hundred dollars or not more than six months’ imprisonment or both. The law was often broken by indulgent masters and at least some educators.
Although the Missouri slave was without any property rights, he was not absolutely at the mercy of his master. The constitution of 1820 required the legislature to pass laws “to oblige the owners of slaves to treat them with humanity, and to abstain from all injuries to them extending to life or limb. The definite principle was declared that “any person who shall maliciously deprive of life or dismember any slave, shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted for a like offence if it were committed on a free white person.” Furthermore, several decisions were rendered by the supreme court of Missouri which show that it was disposed to protect the slave against the arbitrary will of his master.
A law of 1825 required that a bond-man should be
