Thirty Years a Slave - From Bondage to Freedom: The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter

By Louis Hughes and William L. Andrews

Louis Hughes was born as an enslaved person in Virginia and at age twelve was sold away from his mother, whom he never saw again. Sold to a wealthy slaveowner, who had a home near Memphis and plantation nearby in Mississippi, Hughes was held in bondage as an enslaved house servant for three decades. Near the end of the Civil War, he escaped to the Union lines with the paid help of two Union soldiers. Hughes later returned to the plantation to liberate his wife, and the couple made their way to safety in Canada. After the war, they traveled to Chicago and Detroit, eventually settling in Milwaukee as free people. There Hughes became relatively comfortable as a hotel attendant and as an entrepreneur laundry operator.

Self-educated and eloquent, Hughes wrote and privately published this memoir in 1897. It is a compelling first-hand account of his enslavement and treatment from slaveowners. No reader can be unmoved as Hughes tells about his five attempts to escape or having to stand by helplessly while watching his wife being whipped. He also recounts the joy of finally reuniting with his brother, whom he had not seen since they were little children in Virginia. Hughes's story is a testimony to the human spirit and his courageous act of self-liberation in the face of oppression, injustice, and terror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781603060783

Louis Hughes

LOUIS HUGHES (1832-1913) was an African American enslaved person born in Virginia. He was enslaved for over thirty years, spending most of that time in Tennessee. During that time, he learned in secret how to read and write. Thirty-three years after gaining freedom at the end of the Civil War, he wrote his memoir Thirty Years a Slave, published in 1897. It is considered an essential text for understanding the experience of slavery in western Tennessee. Hughes died in Milwaukee in 1913.

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Louis Hughes

Thirty Years

a

Slave

From Bondage to Freedom

The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the

Plantation in the Home of the Planter

with a new foreword by

William Andrews

NewSouth Books

Montgomery | Louisville

NewSouth Books

P.O. Box 1588

Montgomery, AL 36102

Copyright 2002 by NewSouth, Inc. Foreword copyright 2002 by William L. Andrews. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-091-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-078-3

LCCN: 2002151747

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

Contents

Foreword

Author’s Preface, 1896

1 - Life on a Cotton Plantation

2 - Social and Other Aspects of Slavery

3 - Slavery and the War of the Rebellion

4 - Rebellion Weakening—Slaves’ Hopes Strengthening

5 - Freedom After Slavery

Publication History

Index

About the Author

Foreword

by William L. Andrews

The autobiographical narratives of former slaves comprise one of the most influential and inspiring traditions in all of American literature. We know not where one who wished to write a modern Odyssey could find a better subject than in the adventures of a fugitive slave, wrote one literary critic in 1849 after reviewing such classic antebellum texts as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) and Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), both of which were international best-sellers. The narratives of famous fugitives from bondage, epitomized by Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, who escaped from slavery by shipping himself in a wooden box to freedom, and Harriet Jacobs, who hid for seven years in a crawl space in her grandmother’s attic before her flight, thrilled readers in the pre-Civil War era and continue to fascinate us today, as evidenced by the many current reprints of the autobiographies of these heroic individuals.

Scholars recognize that the antebellum slave narrative tradition provides the grounding, and often the actual subject matter, of some of the most widely read novels in American history, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1883), William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Yet knowledge and appreciation of the African American slave narrative remains far from complete, primarily because so little attention has been paid to the many first-person narratives of slavery published after the formal abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865.

Few realize that almost as many narratives by former slaves were published after the Civil War as appeared before it. Part of the reason for the eclipse of the post-Civil War slave narrative, with the exception of Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), lies in the fact that, unlike Up From Slavery, the majority of slave narratives after 1865 were published by the people who wrote them, not by commercial publishing houses, religious denominations, or reform societies. Almost all of the famous antebellum slave narrators had the backing of antislavery societies and other reformers who, in the mid-nineteenth century, commanded various publishing enterprises that enabled them to advertise and circulate books and publicize the comings and goings of notables like Douglass, Wells Brown, and Box Brown both at home and abroad.

By contrast, very few authors of slave narratives after 1865 had access to the financial resources and the ready-made audiences that black autobiographers could attract before slavery’s abolition. Once slavery was gone, stories about human bondage did not move America’s reading class as they had previously. In fact, by the 1880s the New South’s plantation school of fiction writers had so sanitized and sentimentalized the Old South’s peculiar institution that some critics wondered if northern readers, enchanted by the myth of the plantation as a realm of beneficent masters and grateful slaves, had forgotten what the war had been all about. By 1892, when Frederick Douglass saw the last version of his autobiography into print, his Boston publisher informed him that Life and Times of Frederick Douglass had been virtually stillborn, insofar as sales were concerned. If Frederick Douglass himself, backed by a distinguished Boston publishing house, could not interest American readers in his autobiography in the 1890s, what chance did less established, indeed unknown, African Americans who had once been enslaved have of achieving a readership for their stories?

We know little about the origins or the reception of post-Civil War slave narratives such as Thirty Years a Slave; From Bondage to Freedom; The Institution of Slavery As Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter; Autobiography of Louis Hughes. We also know little about Hughes himself beyond what he tells us in his narrative. Nevertheless, the Autobiography of Louis Hughes deserves to be reread, for the very reason that its author was not a celebrated fugitive from slavery, nor was his memory of slavery one that would have seemed commercial to a white publisher. By paying a Milwaukee printer to publish the Autobiography of Louis Hughes, the former Deep South slave turned Wisconsin businessman was free to write about his experience in the South and the North in his own way. What he wrote identifies Hughes in several ways as more representative of the African American rank-and-file, both before and after slavery, than Douglass or most of the other celebrated fugitive slaves whose antebellum narratives have dominated our understanding of what slavery was like.

Hughes’s recollections of slavery stem from the point of view of a house slave, a relatively privileged figure who, because he did not have to endure the crushing routine of field work, had both time and opportunity to observe the workings of slavery as it affected virtually everyone on the plantation. Without stinting on the cruelties and mistreatment that he and others suffered at the hands of masters, mistresses, and overseers, Hughes also takes us into areas of slave life where few antebellum narratives go. From Hughes we learn in revealing detail how a slave cabin was furnished, how and what slaves cooked, how they made their clothes, cared for their children, worshiped, celebrated, mourned, and tried to flee their enslavement. While antebellum slave narratives tend to place larger-than-life individuals in the foreground, the better to exalt their heroic individualism, post-Civil War slave narratives like Hughes’s focus more on slave communities and the means by which they sustained black people until they eventually gained their freedom.

Like most post-Civil War slave narratives, Hughes’s Autobiography portrays slavery as a kind of crucible that tested his patience, forbearance, and tenacity of purpose but never succeeded in demoralizing him or degrading his sense of self-worth and his desire for freedom. Balancing his relative good fortune as a house servant are his trials at the hands of his ill-tempered, bullying mistress, Mrs. McGee, who seems to take perverse pleasure in daily physical abuse of her personal servants. Living in daily contact with whites gave Hughes the opportunity to portray slave holders with considerable insight. At a time when the plantation school of New South writing was idealizing the Old South’s slaveocracy, Hughes shows us men and women whose pretense of gentility and noblesse oblige masks a pathological self-centeredness that renders them maddeningly, and pathetically, dependent on their own delusions. As the Confederacy’s prospects worsen, the McGees, more childlike than adult, refuse to see that their power and prerogative to dictate to others are soon to end.

As his narrative closes, Hughes and his wife Matilda seem much better prepared for a life of freedom, in which taking care of oneself is a chief desideratum, than any of the slave holders. Arriving in liberated Memphis on Independence Day, 1865, the Hughes family quickly adapt to the new economy, finding jobs and, by economy as well as hard work, securing the means not only to support themselves but to go in search of family members separated during slavery. Hughes’s account of his and Matilda’s reunions with lost loved ones testifies to the resilience and determination of African Americans who, despite their former enslavement, capitalized on their freedom both economically and socially, by establishing businesses, securing schooling, and reestablishing families, friendships, and communities.

Recalling one of the most grisly punishments perpetrated by slave holders on unsuccessful escapees from slavery, Hughes writes, It is difficult at this day for those not familiar with the atrocities of the institution of slavery to believe that such scenes could ever have been witnessed in this or any other civilized country. One way that Hughes ensures his own credibility as a historian of slavery is by the directness and evenhandedness of his prose. At the same time that he records his joy over his freedom he acknowledges that it was sad to see the changes that had come to the white folks.

Anyone who reads The Autobiography of Louis Hughes will see that this narrative was not written to defame whites or declaim its narrator’s heroism. Its purpose seems to have been to speak for a generation of black Americans who, perceiving the spread of legislated, cradle-to-grave segregation across the states of the former Confederacy, sought to remind the nation of the horrors of its racial history.

Freedom and human rights had been all that Louis and Matilda Hughes had needed to take their rightful place as productive citizens in a post-slavery America. The Autobiography of Louis Hughes underscores the need for maintaining the same freedom and the same rights and opportunities for black people as America headed into a turbulent new century.

William L. Andrews is the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) and To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1986). He is coeditor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997) and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), and is the general editor of North American Slave Narratives, A Database and Electronic Text Library (http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/neh/neh.html).

Author’s Preface, 1896

The institution of human slavery, as it existed in this country, has long been dead; and, happily for all the sacred interests which it assailed, there is for it no resurrection. It may, therefore, be asked to what purpose is the story which follows, of the experiences of one person under that dead and accursed institution? To such question if it be asked, it may be answered that the narrator presents his story in compliance with the suggestion of friends, and in the hope that it may add something of accurate information regarding the character and influence of an institution which for two hundred years dominated the country—exercising a potent but baneful influence in the formation of its social, civil and industrial structures, and which finally plunged it into the most stupendous civil war which the world has ever known. As the enlightenment of each generation depends upon the thoughtful study of the history of those that have gone before, everything which tends to fullness and accuracy in that history is of value, even though it be not presented with the adjuncts of literary adornment, or thrilling scenic effects.

Chapter 1.

Life on a Cotton Plantation.

Sold in a Richmond Slave Pen.

I was born in Virginia, in 1832, near Charlottesville, in the beautiful valley of the Rivanna river. My father was a white man and my mother a negress, the slave of one John Martin. I was a mere child, probably not more than six years of age, as I remember, when my mother, two brothers, and myself were sold to Dr. Louis, a practicing physician in the village of Scottsville. We remained with him about five years, when he died, and, in the settlement of his estate, I was sold to one Washington Fitzpatrick, a merchant of the village. He kept me a short time when he took me to Richmond by way of canal-boat, expecting to sell me; but, as the market was dull, he brought me back and kept me some three months longer, when he told me he had hired me out to work on a canal-boat running to Richmond, and to go to my mother and get my clothes ready to start on the trip. I went to her as directed, and, when she had made ready my bundle, she bade me good-bye with tears in her eyes, saying: My son, be a good boy; be polite to every one, and always behave yourself properly.

It was sad to her to part with me, though she did not know that she was never to see me again, for my master had said nothing to her regarding his purpose and she only thought, as I did, that I was hired to work on the canal-boat, and that she should see me occasionally. But alas! We never met again. I can see her form still as when she bade me good-bye. That parting I can never forget. I ran off from her as quickly as I could after her parting words, for I did not want her to see me crying. I went to my master at the store, and he again told me that he had hired me to work on the canal-boat, and to go aboard immediately. Of the boat and the trip and the scenes along the route I remember little—I only thought of my mother and my leaving her.

When we arrived at Richmond, George Pullan, a nigger-trader, as he was called, came to the boat and began to question me, asking me first if I could remember having had the chickenpox, measles or whooping-cough. I answered, yes. Then he asked me if I did not want to take a little walk with him. I said, no. Well, said he, you have got to go. Your master sent you down here to be sold, and told me to come and get you and take you to the trader’s yard, ready to be sold. I saw that to hesitate was useless; so I at once obeyed him and went.

A Slave Market.

The trader’s establishment consisted of an office, a large show-room and a yard in the rear enclosed with a wall of brick fifteen feet high. The principal men of the establishment were the proprietor and the foreman. When slaves were to be exhibited for sale, the foreman was called to the office by means of a bell, and an order given him to bring into