I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives

Introduction

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 aroundthewharves,seekinganorthboundboat.Suspiciousworkersconfronted 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. Likealmosteverymemoirbyanescapedslave,Jackson’saccountsought 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 2 | I Belong to South Carolina onlydeedstoself-ownershipbutalsodeedstoacollectiveproperty—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. Thesevenlifestoriespresentedhereconcerntheslaveexperienceinall itsmanifestations:fromplantationculturetourbanservitude,fromsexual 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 would demand fewer slaves.* Indeed, in 1850 South Carolina’s average farm size was the *For a good overview of the astounding profitability of rice and cotton in South Carolina, at least during the eighteenth century and early decades of the nineteenth century, see Walter Edgar, “To Raise Something for Sale,” in Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 265–323. Introduction | 3 largest in the United States.* Moreover, the expertise of Africans familiar with rice cultivation was much sought after, and South Carolina, more than many other states, imported...