On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865

5 “Mah pappy belong to a neighbor”: Marriage and Family among Missouri Slaves

5 / “Mah pappy belong to a neighbor”: Marriage and Family among Missouri Slaves Mary Bell, a former slave, remembered life during slavery as extremely difficult for her parents, Spotswood and Orry Rice. The Howard County, Missouri, couple began their marriage in 1852, but spent the first twelve years of it living on separate slaveholdings. Benjamin W. Lewis, a large tobacco planter and manufacturer who commanded sixty-five slaves in 1860, owned Spotswood Rice, and a forty-three-year-old small-slaveholding spinster named Kittey Diggs owned Orry and their children. Mary Bell described her parents as helping one another endure the “hard times” of slavery. Spotswood was allowed to visit his wife and children “two nights a week”—on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Her father often came to them bloodied from beatings he had received at the hands of the slave driver on his master’s plantation. Orry would tend to his wounds, wash his clothes, and send him back to suffer more abuse. After a particularly severe beating, Spotswood ran away and hid near his family’s cabin while watching for a chance to escape to freedom. Mary’s mother begged him not to leave in spite of the violence he continually suffered and the emotional toll that separation was taking on the family. The local slave patrol thwarted Spotswood’s attempts to make good on his escape, and he eventually turned himself over to a local slave trader hoping that he might help him secure a kinder owner. The man promptly returned Spotswood to his master, although he gained freedom through enlistment in the Union army six months later.1 Spotswood Rice remained devoted to his wife and children throughout his many years of tribulation, and his dedicated pursuit of their best “mah pappy belong to a neighbor” / 199 interests did not falter once he achieved his freedom. Like many other recently enslaved soldiers, he focused his energies on bringing his wife and children out of bondage. He arranged for Orry and most of the children to come to St. Louis, where he served as a military nurse at Benton Barracks . After their arrival, Orry labored as a laundress and the children attended school for the first time. Spotswood, who was literate, became licensed as a preacher in the African Methodist Church and over the years served a number of congregations throughout Missouri and Kansas . The former slave couple, who began their long partnership living apart, boosted their family into the black middle class through education , hard work, and sheer force of will.2 The story of Mary Bell’s family differs in significance ways from how historians typically have described enslaved families. Since the 1970s, scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding slave family and household structures. Some of the earliest scholarship focused on the experiences of slaves living on plantations and pointed to the family, the slave quarter community, and religion as the three most important factors that mitigated the harshest aspects of slavery. Many of these early studies emphasized the agency of slaves with less attention to the ravages that slavery inflicted on individuals, families, and communities. Some suggested that a majority of American slaves spent much of their childhood living in stable two-parent households and benefited from the support of a slave quarter community as they struggled to maintain these crucial social ties. Historians have muddied the picture presented in the early scholarship by examining the diverse experiences of American slave families, recognizing that region and demographics often influenced the structure of families and households. Although the two-parent resident family was the preferred type, the percentage of families living together differed according to place and changed over time. For example, as Louisiana’s slave society matured and stabilized in the decades before the Civil War, the two-parent resident family emerged as the dominant structure of slave households, while during this same period, families in Appalachia faced devastating dislocation from the ravages of the interstate slave trade and the depravations that resulted from the marginal economics of many mountain slaveholdings. Historians also have enriched and expanded the understanding of slave families and communities by exploring slaves’ marriages, mobility, gendered work patterns, household structures and economies, ownership of property , and political activities. There is still no consensus on the composition and strength of antebellum slave families, but some scholars have 200 / “mah pappy belong to a neighbor” made a concerted effort to...