Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South

1 Networkers

chapter 1 Networkers S o i went out trusting in the lord,” wrote Solomon bayley of his family’s trials, “but i should soon have fainted in mind, if it had not been for the encouragement i met with, both from God and man.” that was how the enslaved cooper framed networking. on Virginia’s eastern Shore in the 1790s, he had begun a family of his own after his father and siblings were sold away by a slaveholder who lived across the chesapeake bay. he planned to go to court in delaware, as had his father and siblings, to sue that man for his freedom. delaware was hearing pleas from slaves like himself who had been taken across state lines against anti-slave-trade laws. but any precipitous action, such as an escape attempt or contact with a lawyer , might leave his wife, thamar, and his daughter, margaret, without him, if he were sold in retaliation. courts were not the sole option. methodists were then sowing seeds of a new faith, and thamar’s owner was among the converted. circuit riders were appearing regularly, preaching the good news, and residents saw the work of the holy Spirit in the spiritual increase that followed. bayley had been born again too, and he would reach out to fellow methodists in hopes that they would protect his family from separation. the gospel preaching to which bayley and so many of his neighbors responded emphasized sin and the urgency of salvation. many were also moved by antislavery appeals. bayley worshiped side-by-side with whites on the same spiritual basis, but thamar’s owner clung to his financial interest in human property.1 as bayley and so many others enslaved in the early american republic discovered , God was in the details of their everyday experiences and associations . Slavery was transforming from an institution bounded by plantations and focused on staple crop production into a slave market society in which the enslaved were tied to nearly all available human and material resources. the enslaved were networkers as well as workers. rather than rely primarily on a network of family, slaves like bayley integrated themselves into webs of strategic associations and accessed those resources through them. they made strategic plans based on local circumstances and calculations. the coastal upper South of the nineteenth century was rich in human and material resources , but slaves’ ability to procure status, security, goods, information, and allies was only as good as the network they cultivated and in which they participated.2 the bayley family had been established on the delmarva peninsula since the seventeenth century, yet the local knowledge they had accumulated over the generations did not prepare them for the ordeals they faced in the 1780s and 1790s. Solomon bayley was born a slave in delaware about 1770. he had “a religious character, remarkably humble, patient of wrong, poor as to worldly possessions, but rich in faith and in many other christian virtues.” “a self-taught penman,” he would through his writings relate a succession of strategies he used to cultivate and maintain a network to protect his family . the Kent county native was moved to the eastern Shore of Virginia by the 1790s, around the time delaware enacted manumission laws designed to prevent such removals. his ancestors had been americans for at least three generations, and not long after his removal to Virginia, he had married and was helping raise the fifth generation of american bayleys.3 like frederick douglass’s ancestral bailey family on maryland’s eastern Shore, the enslaved bayleys of delaware and the Virginia eastern Shore could recall ancestors stolen from africa. bayley remembered his great-grandmother as a “Guinea Woman,” born around 1679, who survived the middle passage, arriving in the chesapeake around 1690. She became the mother of fifteen children while serving a Virginia family remembered for their abuse. When Networkers 23 24 Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom the owners died, she recalled the “great distress and dispersion” as the property in people was divided among heirs and sold off to meet the financial obligations of the deceased. Some of her descendents were removed to delaware, including the ancestors of Solomon’s father, abner bayley.4 networking was a way in which enslaved people like bayley sought to order their world, and they did so through strategic ties and sets of exchanges. it was a political activity as well...