The First 400

By D L Patterson

 The First 400 illuminates the reality that debt peonage, convict leasing, sharecropping, and militarized policing were the spawns of antebellum slavery proving that the gist of this heinous practice has a shelf life which extends much further than Emancipation.  From the account of possibly the first black autistic savant, an exploited blind musical genius and composer compared to Mozart and Beethoven who played at the White House and who Mark Twain dubbed an "archangel", to the runaway slave girl who spent seven years in a crawl space in her grandmother's attic to evade re-enslavement and ensure the safety of her children, The First 400 both laments a host of tragedies while serving to chronicle numerous heart felt triumphs.  It also chronicles much of the relationship between America's long time love affair with racial bigotry and that cancer's undeniable influence and control over U.S. political policy and a caustic and suppressive social order.      

• Language: English
• Publisher: D L Patterson
• Release date: Dec 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393660262

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© 2019 All Rights Reserved

D. L. Patterson

PROLOGUE

Writing this book has been both a privilege and a challenge and numerous members of my family, as well as friends, have provided much needed moral support in their own undeniable way.  There would have been no way to complete this task without Marva, my wife of 27 years. Her love, unconditional support, and remarkable endurance have been invaluable as I can be quite insufferable at times.  Thanks to my son Emanuel and my daughter Christina for maturing into the caring and loving people Marva and I always prayed you would grow to be.  Thanks to my brother Bill and sister Mary for their love and support as we all endured our difficulties growing up in what I’ll only benignly describe as a less than ideal environment.  Thanks to the myriad of civic activists and particularly my friend Crystal Jones who works with Marva and I at various times to confront the ongoing social ills that plague us continually.  And most of all thanks to the Living God who provides grace and mercy through our Lord and Savior Yeshua, Jesus the Christ, without whom none of this could have been possible.  I pray you take as much enjoyment in the reading of this work as I did in writing it. 

Agape´ 

CHAPTER ONE

Slavery: The Reports of Its Demise Were Greatly Exaggerated

Imagine being a member of the only race of people in the United States of America whose introduction to the land of the free was by way of forced immigration.  Envision what it must have felt like when one’s great, great grandparents were being literally ripped from their homeland and shipped in large cargo vessels, confined to insanely cramped quarters months on end and having to endure inhumane, life threatening conditions.  Picture them being separated (often violently) from their wives or husbands, children, parents, and other loved ones.  If perchance they were able to survive the journey, by what barometer is desperation measured when people endure the helpless and hopeless daily mandate to provide unpaid grueling physical labor from sunrise to sunset (at times even working through the night), their compliance intermittently procured by way of the lash?  How many men and women fell asleep, collapsing from exhaustion while putting in 16-18 hour days only to be shockingly awakened as the gears of moving machinery detached a hand or arm, or had their backs mercilessly cut to ribbons by a bullwhip for grabbing a mere morsel of bread because they were being systematically starved perhaps for a slave owner’s amusement?  Imagine embarking on a merciless journey where these poor souls were forced to suffer for what must have seemed like an eternity being stuffed in areas littered with mucus, blood, urine, and excrement resembling slaughterhouse conditions? 

Once they arrived, how many male slaves were forced to choose between placidly enduring the indignity and shame of watching their wives and daughters being raped or dare to engage in vehement protest and face being savagely beaten or even killed?  Those of us who are members of this race of people are more than cognizant of the fact that this is anything but hyperbole, it is the undeniably tortured past of our ancestors forced into slavery in the Americas.

"I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation." 

Harriet Ann Jacobs

From the start of the Transatlantic Slave trade to present day, America has found creative ways to make enormous profits off the blood, sweat, and tears of black people.  Initially, those who fulfilled the role of indentured servants both black and white, were only supposed to be indebted to those they served for a finite time and were then to be released and typically given their freedom along with 50 acres of land and other needful supplies including in many instances a firearm for the protection of them and their families.  Unfortunately for those servants of color, the white aristocracy came to the realization that they had major leverage over blacks who were: (a) not technically afforded the privilege of the Crown as it relates to temporary servitude because they were neither Christian nor formerly British citizens, and (b) unable to venture anywhere and blend in given that their dark skin would easily betray them as outsiders.  Thus the idea was born to not only convert the status of these workers of color from servant to slaves, but eventually slaves in perpetuity.  This would be the ideal remedy for the New World guaranteeing America what proved to be a perpetually wage free labor force for many generations to come, replete with the sanction of both Federal and State governments as well as, with a few strategically placed and creative justifications, their bibles.

While we have witnessed throughout the centuries more ridiculous justifications of the practice of slavery and deflection from its evils than one can imagine, I still marvel at the constant efforts to reshape the narrative.  It is interesting to note that Snopes, which is ironically a periodical presented as a left leaning online repository heavily funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, published an article entitled 9 facts about slavery they don’t want you to know and curiously labeled the following assertion as possibly true.  In the August 17, 2016 narrative we are reintroduced to the often repeated notion that the first slave owner in America was actually a black man.  The writer David Emery then offers a divergent preface by saying that Anthony Johnson is not the first slave owner in American history but among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a servant legally sanctioned by a court.  Notice the misleading characterization of this piece as it begins by forwarding the idiom it was possibly true that Johnson was the first slave owner but then does a 180 degree pivot and advances the idea that he was not.  There is clearly a significant difference between being the first and being among the first.  Emery provides a prime example of the grammatical gymnastics we’ve become accustomed to.  The gist of the story is that in 1654 a black man named Anthony Johnson had a contract with an indentured servant named John Casor (also black) who was to be released from his duty, but Johnson decided to extend his length of servitude.  Casor reportedly left Johnson’s estate anyway and became employed by a free white man by the name of Robert Parker.  Johnson then sued Parker for the return of Casor and in 1655 a ruling by a Virginia court proclaimed that Johnson could in fact hold Casor indefinitely which apparently according to Emery in effect made Johnson among the first slave owners, but in reality not the first. 

Emery’s sleight of hand account relative to Johnson possibly being North America’s first slave owner is shared by perhaps many earnest but very much mistaken orators of the first slaveholder story.  Some I’m sure would wish it true to help assuage, to some degree, the uneasiness of white guilt.  Although the essence of the Johnson, Casor, and Parker account is actually true, and there were in fact a few black slave owners in early America, there numbers were quite low in comparison.  There are two other cases which precede the Casor incident making the hard argument that this is neither the first case of slavery in the colonies nor was the first slave owner a black man.  The judicial decision cited by Wikipedia giving rise to this new labor paradigm occurred in 1640, a decade and a half prior to Johnson v. Parker.  Just over twenty years after the first blacks were reportedly shipped to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, a black servant named Emmanuel along with six other white servants planned and executed a daring escape.  Although the written account only names four others, Christopher Miller, John Williams, Peter Willcocke, and Richard Cookson, all of the escapees were caught and brought back after having fled to Maryland, and the five men all had various punishments meted out to them by the court.  Though each of the white servants were given additional years of servitude, Emmanuel was not, however he was the only one sentenced to be branded with an R on his face.  Some have speculated that he was already a servant for life saying that the branding on the cheek suggests a punishment indicative of a sentence of lifelong service.  This could conceivably be true although it does not appear that the judicial record concludes that definitively.  The first precisely recorded instance which appears to officially usher in the advent of slavery in the colonies according to Reddit was the case of a black indentured servant by the name of John Punch, who along with two other white indentured servants escaped from their Caucasian master Hugh Gwyn the same year (1640).  A Dutchman by the name of Victor and a Scotsman named James Gregory were the other two servants who accompanied Punch in the escape according to reports.

While all three received 30 lashes, the Dutchman and Scotsman merely received four year extensions of their original service agreements while the Virginia courts decreed that Punch was to serve the remainder of his natural life as a slave.  That said, one could argue that whether you believe the story of Emmanuel and the face branding as adequately chronicling the initial instance of antebellum slavery or you favor the clearly articulated legal decision (in my estimation) involving John Punch, the evidence in either case proves that either of these incidents easily precedes the Casor ruling by about 15 years.  So the fact of the matter is that in 1640 (not 1655) one can either accept the face branding of Emmanuel as an unofficial start to slavery, or the Virginia court’s issuance of a ruling which initiated the first discernable legal precedent regarding slavery.  In either instance at least 15 years prior to Johnson v. Parker, there was fashioned a previously non-existent line of demarcation utilizing race (and thus racism) to establish the slavery precedent which thereby shaped this sector of judicial case law in American courts.  Both the Casor and Punch cases are also retold in the book Racial Classification and History edited by Nathaniel Gates, the cases involving John Punch and Emmanuel are also chronicled in the Encyclopedia Virginia. 

Although there have been a number of books and documentaries which chronicle the fact that slavery was actually just the first tier of misery for the black race in America and that additionally even a cursory examination shows us this evil institution was actually reimagined rather than eradicated following the mirage of emancipation, we still as a nation merely gloss over the actual data.  Works such as the poignant 13th by Ava Duvernay and its predecessor Slavery by Another Name by Pulitzer Prize winning author Douglas A. Blackmon seem to illustrate this stark reality more succinctly than it appears America has the ability and perhaps even the desire to digest.  Blackmon’s work, which was transformed into a documentary of the same name by Sam Pollard and narrated by actor Lawrence Fishburne, illustrates many alarming and inconvenient truths.  One of my prime directives in constructing this narrative is not to focus on the many particular horrors of slavery which have been well chronicled by other exceptional works such as Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom.  I look to hone in a bit more on how this horrendous practice lasted much longer than two and a half centuries by a number of specific mutations.  Slavery didn’t really end with the veneer of emancipation of the slaves in 1863, particularly in the South.  Just as Michelle Alexander crystallized for us the reality that the original structure of Jim Crow was retooled and repackaged as the New Jim Crow utilizing the asphalt plantations within the matrix of the prison industrial complex, Blackmon and Pollard (as well as Duvernay) showed us a similar parallel. 

The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation which provided the illusion that the slaves had been set free, actually only paved the way for a new form of oppression, this slavery by another name was indeed still slavery in the form of both convict leasing and debt peonage.  Even though debt peonage had technically been outlawed since the end of the Civil War, we must keep in focus there is an expansive gulf that exists for blacks between publicly declared rights and the practical application of them.  The reality that blacks had no rights a white man was bound to respect, the narrative proffered in the Dred Scott v Sanford decision, was still in full effect.  The new modus operandi was just as insidious, brutal, and in some cases even more deadly than its patriarch.  While this may be nearly impossible for some to believe, consider that this redesigned model often featured even less consideration for blacks in the sense that the first slave system in many cases considered the slave an investment.  Killing slaves indiscriminately was lost money where as with convict leasing the cost was so nominal and the pool of prisoners so large you could work one inmate to death today or kill them outright and have another one tomorrow.  This system induced the elevation of virtually all minor misdemeanor infractions to the level of felonies resulting in wholesale jailing of blacks (usually at hard labor), but not nearly as much for whites.  You could be jailed for spitting, drinking, speaking loudly around white women, walking alongside a railroad, and any number of asinine infractions designed to constantly replenish the south’s restructured pool of free black labor.  The implementation and refinement of this process increased exponentially around 1874 when federal protections for blacks, begun just eight years earlier at the start of Reconstruction, practically ceased and the advances initiated in racial, social, and economic equality for blacks were abruptly reversed. 

The assessment that blacks were the primary target of this new slavery is easily buoyed by the fact that this convict leasing system was more often than not comprised of 85-90% black inmates.  They even fabricated what they called pig laws to bolster black incarceration.  In yet another instance of a former misdemeanor being elevated to a felony, a pig worth $1 formerly a minor offense became punishable by five years in prison in Mississippi.  The south was beginning the transition to an industrialized economy and needed the free labor that emancipation took from them to facilitate everything from mining iron ore, coal, and limestone, to fabricating the steel necessary to build railroads, to fetching clay for bricks in order to build factories and homes. 

Many of the overseers in this reconfigured slave system were again just as brutal and sometimes more so than those of the previous version.  Today’s New Jim Crow apparatus, which exploits the prison industrial complex’s inmate system to glean maximum corporate profits for meager earnings at best, is merely mimicking that which was the genesis of this construct, convict leasing and the supposedly outlawed peonage system.  In many cases, the targeted blacks were the victims of extremely cozy relationships between the southern elite, area constables, sheriffs, and corrupt court officials.  The unsuspecting were brought in, given stiff sentences for minor offenses along with fines that court officials already knew they couldn’t pay.  These fines were then cruelly converted to add additional time further extending the sentences of the ignorant and impoverished. 

Another diabolical aspect of this practice was that deceitful whites were now creating the very data they needed that allowed them to disingenuously argue that the innate criminality of blacks was real and far exceeded that of whites while at the same time purposefully and consistently creating the very circumstances that resulted in increased black incarceration.  After the United States Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision was handed down in 1896 which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation, the newly emboldened South instituted more repressive laws than ever against the black race.  We should collectively remove the rose colored glasses we wear that routinely assign the timeline of slavery to the period before 1863.  If we are honest and call it exactly as history portrays it, we know through the lens of these disclosures and others that slavery actually lasted closer to three centuries, almost into the mid 1900’s.  Despite the subtle mischaracterizations, convict leasing, if we consider the deceitful methods utilized to incarcerate these men (women and teens were victimized as well), we must concede that this is in fact slavery 2.0 and no manner of historical manipulation of the facts can erase this conspicuous truth.  There are those that would further argue that debt peonage, convict leasing, Jim Crow, and the new Jim Crow (mass incarceration) are merely branches from the same tree having firm roots in the traditions of antebellum slavery.  In fact, slavery experienced multiple mutations that never actually ended the practice but gave it a more tolerable, inconspicuous facade.  Making a hard argument against that declaration would be exceptionally difficult when it is clear that the clause in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which unequivocally permits slavery under the conditions of criminal conviction was not inserted accidentally.  The amendment, ratified in December of 1865, provided the proper leverage the south needed to reclaim the recently emancipated.

It should be further noted that according to documents detailing these events, Democrat Andrew Johnson’s revocation of special field order 15, the forty acres and a mule provision, happened in the fall of 1865.  So given the facts before us are we actually supposed to believe it to be mere coincidence that in the fall of 1865 emancipated blacks had the land that was given to them by the U.S. government taken back following the Lincoln assassination by the overtly racist Andrew Johnson and returned to former slave owners while simultaneously accepting that within a few months of this land confiscation in December of the same year, the 13th amendment was ratified?  The latter action essentially allowing for the former slaves to be subsequently (and unjustly) criminalized thereby providing a near perfect mechanism for their re-enslavement?  For what it’s worth here’s my hypothesis, the chances of these two events occurring in such close proximity being even remotely haphazard is about as good a bet as experiencing a snowstorm in Cancun.

Referencing once again the supposedly outlawed and debased institution of debt peonage, one wealthy farmer named John S. Williams, who was found to be engaged in this practice by federal investigators, feared being imprisoned for the mistreatment of black men in his possession who had been worked mercilessly, starved, and beaten.  After investigators left his property following their conversation with Williams his statement to his black foreman was, we have to get rid of these boys and he and the foreman proceeded to execute these men.  Some were bludgeoned, others were drowned in a nearby river, but all were murdered.  Both Williams and his foreman were found guilty of murder and died in prison; however illegal utilization of southern black labor lasted well into the 1940’s and in some isolated cases even beyond.  It was said that after Williams was convicted for the murder of these illegally detained black men, another white man would not be sentenced again for the murder of an African-American for a century. 

I don’t debate the fact that there have been millions of enslaved people who suffered horrific abuse and torment over the many, many centuries of human exploitation and greed, but black people (and even copper-colored Native Firsts) were the ones stolen from their families and communities and forced to be the method by which the United States grew its wealth and thus political power around the globe.  I also contend that the old tired argument that poses the question,  what about the fact that blacks sold their own kind into slavery? sort of takes a back seat to the reality that no one is forced to buy what any merchant is selling.  Additionally, many do not realize that the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of indigenous people from their homeland to areas of the country the government chose to send them, was in fact a series of displacements and not a singular event.  According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, in excess of 100,000 Native Americans were relocated to areas west of the Mississippi River.  Many tribes were subjected to displacement including the Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole among others.  Natives, as history plainly informs us, were also enslaved by colonialists.

'Address to Slavery' 

By Samuel Wright-The Weekly Anglo-African, February 18, 1860

Slavery, O Slavery! I cannot conceive

Why judges and magistrates do not relieve

My down-trodden people from under thy hand,

Restore them their freedom, and give them their land.

The loud voice of reason incessantly cries,

Ye lovers of Mammon, when will ye be wise?

How long will misanthropy reign in your hearts?

Behold the poor slaves, and consider their smarts.

Upon the plantation they labor and toil,

Exert all their strength to enrichen the soil,

While the sun pours upon them its hot scorching ray,

Without intermission the whole livelong day. 

Hope God by His power will save them at last,

And bring them as Israel in ages that’s past,

Out of the reach of proud slavery’s chain,

To enjoy the sweet comfort of freedom again

No one should be so naïve that they are unaware of the fact that the original practice of slavery was merely refashioned for appearances given the fact that the insatiable American appetite for gain acquired through free labor would not be quieted by something as inconsequential as public outcry.  Mother slavery merely gave birth to peonage and convict leasing.  Even sharecropping with its theft of proper compensation and exorbitantly high rates of interest for tools and materials kept poor blacks from escaping its firm grip; this too was the lovechild of American greed and antebellum slavery. 

CHAPTER TWO

A DEBT THAT TIME WON’T FORGET

Approximately a decade ago I can recall submitting an editorial to the Cleveland Plain Dealer detailing why reparations for slavery in North America were categorically justified.  I expressed how no one batted an eye when the Jewish people demanded reparations relative to the horrors they experienced via the holocaust (granted Germany was the culprit) during World War II and rightly so, but any discussion of redress for blacks because of American slavery is somehow viewed as taboo, categorized as a ridiculous proposition for us to even contemplate.  The recent trend however towards constructive discussion is somewhat encouraging but it remains to be seen if it has any staying power.  In any event, I remember there was a rather well versed gentleman who wrote a rebuttal to the article stating that its scope was too narrow, that there were historically many other nationalities that were enslaved other than blacks and they deserved both recognition of their enslavement and suitable redress as well.  He even commented that my analysis of the enslavement of Jews and black people was too abbreviated and inadequate.  What I believed was rather obvious was apparently more opaque than I realized.  The article I proffered was purposefully narrow in scope.  The piece was written to explicitly focus on the need for reparations to be forwarded to descendants of black slaves in the United States whose very purpose here to provide obligatory free labor became the foundation on which the robust economy of this country was built.  Although a number of other cultures enslaved in other lands at other times were actually brought to America as part of that immigrant contingent that was given land, loans, and other unearned commodities which were kept from blacks who deserved them, this is rarely mentioned as part of the comparative equation.