Old Age, Mastery, and Resistance in American Slavery

Leonard Black "lived a slave for more than twenty years" in Maryland before successfully escaping in 1837. Ten years later, Black published an antislavery memoir, in which he recounted the abuse he had endured, the horrors of family separation, and the instability created by being "placed out" to different enslavers. Black's situation settled when he was returned to his first enslaver, a physician who resided in Anne Arundel County, but stability did not signify improvement. Black specifically noted how the advancing age of his "old master" led to worsening conditions for them all: "We were slaves yet, and the old man grew poorer and poorer the older he grew, and withal cross, much to our discomfort." With declining conditions and fearing punishment from an ailing man, Black took flight while he still could. Although nearly captured by a search party made up of the "old master, his two sons, and many other people," Black was grateful to discover it was the old man who came closest to finding him. The ravages of aging had taken their toll on more than just his finances. Despite being just across the road, he was unable to spot Black: "The only reason the old man did not see me was because he was near-sighted, and forgot to pull his spectacles down over his eyes." Black swiftly dropped to his knees, crawled to a safe location, and set out on the road to freedom.¹

In Black's description of his escape from bondage, the declining powers of his enslaver were framed as giving impetus to—and directly aiding—his resistance. In continually referring to his enslaver as old, emphasizing the man's white hair, failing health, and poor vision, Black conjured up an image of a weak old man who was incapable of exerting control over a young and vigorous rebel. This image of declining power would have been familiar to both Black and white Americans, in the North and the South. In Exum v. Canty (1857), the Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals accepted that "[f]eebleness and infirmity are the natural consequences of age," while another antebellum writer recorded sadly, "You can hardly bear to see a man, with whom you have been acquainted in his better days, after he has lost his bodily activity, his hearing, his seeing, his memory, and all of his sociability. These are the usual effects and consequences of old age, in a greater or less degree."² Black, of course, was happy to see it was an "old man" who stood in his way to freedom. The comparative framing of the aged enslaver's diminishing force with Black's youthful activism reveals how enslaved people understood their enslavers' claims to mastery as dynamic and contestable on account of an inevitable descent down the "steps of life."³ Slaveholding authority in the antebellum South was based on public demonstrations of dominance and power, but enslaved people understood that the process of aging destabilized mastery and could personally diminish "masters." They applied this knowledge when crafting individual and collective strategies for survival and forms of resistance, both temporary and permanent.

Historians have long stressed the significance that enslavers accorded to public expressions of authority, honor, and independence, as well as the wider importance of these ideals to the dynamics of slavery and social order in the antebellum South.⁴ Few have considered, however, how the performance of mastery came under pressure as enslavers aged.⁵ Recent work on the violence and exploitation of slavery has reiterated the terrifying power that enslavers, both men and women, wielded, and the harm it wrought on enslaved people.⁶ Walter Johnson, for example, describes enslaved people in the U.S. South as having to navigate the "carceral landscape" and outlines the power of the slave-holding class, notwithstanding enslaved people's efforts to resist. Edward E. Baptist's work on the "pushing system" likewise presents an image of consistent exploitation by rapacious enslavers.⁷ This research ensures that the brutalities of slavery are at the forefront...