I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives

“Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave” (1838)

“Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave” (1838)
Introduction Susanna Ashton and Maximilien Blanton “Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave” tells the story of a young man who, in the winter of 1837, escaped from slavery near Charleston, South Carolina. While the narrator never identifies himself by name, he more than compensates for that omission by providing the reader with precise accounts of persons, places, and events. These details render his story credible even at its most incredible and violent moments—moments that might otherwise have been seen by skeptical audiences as abolitionist exaggeration. This issue of credibility is at the core, both logistically and thematically, of this harrowing tale of human suffering. While “Recollections” merits attention in its own right as a gripping narrative , it also represents a specific turn in the construction and reception of slave narratives in the 1830s. This text, which has not been reprinted since before the Civil War, was produced and published in the epicenter of controversies over the accuracy and value of slave narratives. The manner in which this story was shaped was thus at the forefront of new ways by which the very character of slave narratives could be understood. The facts of the author’s life are fairly simple. He claims to have been born near Four Holes swamp, “about 25 miles up in the country from Charleston .” Born around 1808, he never knew his parents, his only family being the 125-odd slaves on the Smith plantation, where he would live until he was fourteen years of age. The author guesses to be about twenty years old at the time his narrative was taken down. His life story ends with his escape north. He jumps a train to Charleston and stows away amid cotton bales on 50 | I Belong to South Carolina a boat bound for Boston. While he says little about his experiences there after finding safety, the fact that his narrative was transcribed by sympathetic activists in Maine suggests that he might have been on his way north to Canada or perhaps to England by the time it was published. The content of his narrative, however, is anything but simple. “Recollections ” offers a grim look at the system of slavery in the South Carolina lowcountry in the early nineteenth century. Its attack on the institution of slavery is made even more compelling by the fact that many of the specific people named were prominent South Carolinians, thus demonstrating that even the most elite South Carolinians were complicit in an intrinsically debased and evil system. Named, for instance, are several members of the state senate, such as Isaac Bradwell and Col. (William) Billy Mellard, who seem to have to some degree shared their slaves, as the narrator was leased to both of them. Other wealthy and important people are mentioned, such as Davy Cohen, son of Mordecai Cohen, perhaps the most influential Jew of Charleston, who owned a vast expanse of land in and around Charleston but who was notable in the narrator’s mind for having had a man nearly beaten to death for stealing a few pieces of wood.* The narrator’s willingness to accuse so many planters in such specific terms could only have been understood as a challenge to the honor and integrity of southern slaveholders. While “Recollections” testifies to an individual life story, it also reads as a litany of brutality and torture peppered with details so awful and so memorable that the specificity of the names and places mentioned must have been understood as necessary grounding for the rest of the text. The particular impetus for grounding this story deeply in truth, however, must be understood within the venue and time in which it was published. Facts could never be simple for slave narratives in the antebellum era; there was too much at stake to allow slave testimony to remain uncontested. This focus on substantiating the facts of a slave narrative was especially pertinent during the summer of 1838 due to a scandal that changed the course of the abolitionist strategies in presenting and framing slave narratives as effective tools in their battles. “Recollections” is thus of special historical significance because it appeared at a critical juncture for the abolitionist testimonial *See a collection of relevant pamphlets reprinted from the Charleston News and Courier in Barnett Abraham Elza, The Jews of South Carolina: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Ann Arbor: University...