A Slave Family in Arkansas

The Slave Family in ArkansasAuthor(s): Carl H. MoneyhonReviewed work(s):Source: The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 24-44Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40026272 .Accessed: 25/04/2012 16:18

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The Slave Family in Arkansas

CARL H. MONEYHON

THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY is central to the history of the United States and especially the South. As Ira Berlin recognizes in his recent study, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, slavery shaped Americans 'definition of race. Since race remains a major force in our society today, understanding the basis of our racial thought continues to be critical. The earliest scholars of slavery tended to look at it as an institution the slaveholders made, but in the last thirty years researchers have turned toward understanding slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. What might be called revisionist historians have examined in detail the development of the various social dimensions of the slave community.1

This new scholarship, however, has had little impact on our understanding of slavery in Arkansas. Orville Taylor's Negro Slavery in Arkansas remains the standard work and was exemplary for its time. Published in 1958 before recent research developments, it contributes little to the current discussion of the nature of slave life.2 This study seeks to rectify that deficiency with a look at one aspect of the slave community, the family. The slave family has been of particular interest to scholars, since understanding it has been considered critical to explaining the basic dynamics of the master-slave relationship and thus the character of the institution.

Carl H. Moneyhon is professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. 'Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North

America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), see especially the prologue.

2 Orville W. Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1958).

THE ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY VOL. LVIII, NO. 1, SPRING 1999

THE SLAVE FAMILY IN ARKANSAS 25

Serious scholarly study of the slave family began with the work of one individual, E. Franklin Frazier, who published The Negro Family in Chicago in 1932 and The Negro Family in the United States in 1939. Frazier, concerned with what he considered to be the instability of the African American family in the 1930s, located the roots of that instability in slavery. He concluded that the slave family was little more than an accommodation

Arkansas Star, October 8, 1840. Courtesy Special Collections Division, University of Arkansas Libraries.

to the institution. It never had the capacity to tie together households into units of common interest and purpose. The reason for this failure, Frazier hypothesized, was that the slave family could not be protected by its adult members and, often dispersed by owners, seldom existed over any length of time.3

3E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 95-98.

26 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Later historians, such as Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins, followed in Frazier's wake, agreeing with him that even where the slave household existed it lacked cohesiveness. The frequent breakup of families by masters prevented the development of strong bonds among family members. In the end, Stampp and Elkins concluded, as Frazier had, that the slave family reflected little more than the slave owner's desire to create stability within the plantation community. These conclusions became the textbook history for a generation and even the basis for public policy. Daniel P. Moynihan's book, The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action, published in 1965, integrated this analysis into his explanation of modern problems of the African American family and his proposal for their solutions.4

Scholarship in the 1970s, by looking at the slave family from the viewpoint of the slaves, developed a different and revisionist interpretation. Examining new sources that ranged from the reminiscences of ex-slaves to plantation records, historians found an institution not simply shaped by the interests of the master but also by the interests of the African American slave community. They discovered stability rather than instability. The idea that slaves sought to create two-parent nuclear families that then became the vehicle for the formation of a larger and uniquely African American culture first appeared in 1972 in John Blassingame's Slave Community. It received subsequent support in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's controversial Time on the Cross and Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll. Herbert Gutman carried the idea further in his Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, concluding that the two-parent family was the norm among slaves.5

4 Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), see particularly 340-346 and 363-364; Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), see especially 101-102 and the notes to these pages and 128-129; Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965).

5 John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross, 2 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1974); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1 750-1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 118, 123. See also Richard H. Steckel, "Slave Marriage and the Family," Journal of Family History 5 (Winter 1980): 406-421, and Herman R. Lantz, "Family and Kin as Revealed in the Narratives of Ex-Slaves," Social Science Quarterly 60 (March 1980): 667-675.


By the 1990s the revisionist model had displaced that of Frazier, Stampp and Elkins. Scholars then began developing a more complicated understanding of the slave family that put a brake on revisionism. Ann Malone's 1992 study of slavery in Louisiana found the slave family to be a very difficult institution about which to generalize. She concluded that it was mutable, adapting to the many different circumstances created by the socio- economic environment within which it existed. In an even more recent study that focused on slavery in Loudon County, Virginia, Brenda E. Stevenson discovered conditions in an Upper South community that made the family stability that revisionists had discovered elsewhere practically nonexistent. In Loudon County the labor concerns of planters led to the more frequent sale and rental of men, women, and children away from their families. African American cultural concerns differed as well, with some blacks attempting to develop alternative family forms to cope with local conditions. The result was a community with more numerous exceptions to the standard nuclear family that revisionists had hypothesized as the norm.6

The work of Malone and Stevenson stands as a caution against oversimplifying our portrait of the slave family. Both have demonstrated that the slave family may have differed across time, region, economic condition, and a wide variety of other factors. Their work suggests it is critical to examine the slave family within varied contexts if we are to understand its dynamics. This conclusion has been reinforced by Ira Berlin, who has emphasized slavery as a remarkably changeable institution that slaves and masters altered through time.7

In examining the slave family in the differing environments in which slavery existed, Arkansas offers particularly advantageous ground since it was different from most of the rest of the slave South in the 1 850s. First of all, it was still part of an economic frontier experiencing rapid economic growth that was attracting large numbers of new settlers. In 1850 the overall population of the state had been 209,897; by 1860 it had reached 435,450, a 107 percent increase. Much of that growth had been caused by a steady immigration of people from other slave states, particularly Tennessee, but

6 Ann P. Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), xii, xi.

Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 2-3.


also Mississippi, Louisiana, and even the Carolinas. As these people poured onto the lands of Arkansas, they tried to replicate the economies they had left behind. Farm land in cultivation increased from 781,530 acres in 1850 to 1,983,313 by 1860, an increase of 154 percent. As would be expected of these particular migrants, they devoted much of that land to growing cotton, and between 1850 and 1860 the cotton harvest increased from 65,344 to 367,393 bales, a rate of growth of about 400 percent. By 1860, at $16,165,292, the value of the cotton crop was greater than the value of any other agricultural commodity.8

As the new settlers came, they brought their slaves with them. From 47,100 slaves in 1850, the number increased to 111,115 in 1860, making Arkansas the twelfth largest slaveholding state in the Union. Despite this rapid growth, however, Arkansas remained, at the end of the 1850s, a land of relatively small slaveholdings, a fact that added to the peculiar character of slavery in the state. Plantations of considerable size with hundreds of slaves had developed in some counties along the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, but elsewhere slaves typically were held by masters who owned under twenty slaves. In fact, in 1860 an estimated 50 percent of all slaves in Arkansas were on holdings of under 20 slaves, a figure considerably higher than the 38.0 percent in the Lower South. In many ways slavery's state of development most closely resembled that in Texas at the same time, where 54.4 percent of slaves lived on smaller holdings.9

In this world of rapid economic expansion yet relatively small slaveholdings, slave families clearly developed. An examination of manuscript census returns for 1 860 suggests that, at least on plantations, the practice of slaves living together in what appear to be family organizations of some sort was pervasive. These groupings included men and women, men and women with children, and even groups of children housed together. It

8 U.S. Bureau of the Census, A Compendium of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872), 8, 688; see Gerald T. Hanson and Carl H. Moneyhon, Historical Atlas of Arkansas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), figure 36.

Carl H. Moneyhon, The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 67; Clement Eaton, History of the Old South: The Emergence of a Reluctant Nation, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 253; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 194.


is also clear from the correspondence of slaveowners that they usually considered these households as families, at least within the slaveholders' understanding of the black family.

10

While family units seem to have existed among Arkansas slaves, little is known about them, how they were formed, what functions they served within the slave community, or how stable they were. Taylor's Negro Slavery in Arkansas had little to say about the slave family. Written within the framework of Frazier and Stampp's model, it emphasized the power of the master in defining slavery (and defined the family as primarily a creation of the master).11

At least in part, Taylor's work was limited by the evidence. Scholars have been able to use extensive plantation records and the correspondence of slaveowners to provide details about the slave family in other states, but for Arkansas such evidence barely exists. As a result, almost all of what we can know about the lives of slaves in Arkansas comes from interviews with former slaves carried out by the Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. While some four volumes of interviews conducted in Arkansas have been published, unfortunately only seventy- eight persons who had actually experienced slavery in the state are to be found in those volumes and in volumes for neighboring Texas and Oklahoma. Nonetheless, these provide considerable information on family life that, if used cautiously, lend insight into the character of the state's slave families.12

10Moneyhon, Impact of the Civil War, 66-67. The conclusion concerning the existence of family-based households comes from an examination of the slave returns in the 1 860 manuscript census for Arkansas. Census takers were supposed to simply register the number of slaves on a plantation by age and sex, but in many cases they listed the slave individually by sex and age, although not by name. In the latter cases they appear to have gone through the quarter by house, listing a man, woman, and children, then moving on to the next house. That these groupings represented families or even households is not certain, but the pattern is highly suggestive that they did.

11 The few pages that appear in a chapter titled "Jumping the Broomstick" recognize that slave marriages existed in practice, although not recognized in the law, but provide no further insight into the character of the slave marriage. See Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas, 189-193.

12 Many of the Arkansas interviews were made almost useless by interviewers who

appear to have been more interested in having the former slaves talk about white society and the Old South than about their own and their families' lives. The published interviews may be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography

3 0 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

In the view of most current scholars, the creation of families took place as the result of complex processes. Revisionist scholarship dashed the idea that families were the creations solely of masters seeking to encourage reproduction, secure a quieter and more pliable workforce, or ease their own consciences. Instead, these scholars have seen families as an outgrowth of slaves' own desires and interests. Recent studies of slave families elsewhere have recognized a more intricate interplay of concerns and have seen families as an accommodation of interests that could vary greatly from slaveholding to slaveholding. The latter appears to have been the case in Arkansas.13

Slaves paired off in ways as numerous as the couples themselves. Still, the process of courtship or choosing a mate shows something of the forces that were at work in the slave community and particularly the respective roles of the slave and master. In the cases for which evidence exists, the pairing of a man and woman seems usually to have been the result of a decision by the slaves themselves. The details of that process, however, are not clear. In some cases, the couple formed with little formality. Columbus Williams, a slave in St. Francis County, remembered that on his plantation, "[s]ometimes you would take up with a woman and go on with her." Williams continued, "[y]ou could court a woman and jus' go on and marry." Williams 's remembrance suggests that at least on his plantation the master made little effort to intervene in the process of selection.14 In other cases a more formal process occurred that indicates how important the slaves and slave families could be in the selection. Lou Fergusson from Hempstead County remembered that after a man decided that he would like to marry a

woman, he usually had to ask her mother for permission.15 Orville Taylor observed that no evidence exists to suggest that a master

ever forced a union between a slave couple. Still, in the end the master

necessarily had a say in what took place. The couple and their potential children were his property and the master's authority had to be maintained.

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1972). The Arkansas material appears in vols. 8-11, Arkansas Narratives, and are cited hereafter as AN. Some material also was located in the Oklahoma interviews, vol. 12, supp. 1, Oklahoma Narratives, and are cited hereafter as ON.

13 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 162-163; Blassingame, Slave Community, 77-103. 14 AN, vol. 1 1, pt. 7 (Williams), 157.

"AN, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Fergusson), 280.

THE SLAVE FAMILY IN ARKANSAS 3 1

After the slave couple on Lou Fergusson 's plantation had received the mother's permission to wed, the pair then went to the master for his approval. If he approved he then built a house for the couple. Sometimes a slaveowner may have played an even greater role, although the slaves' interest still was an important part of the process. Moses Jeffries recalled that on the plantation near Pine Bluff where he lived, if a man wanted a woman that he had seen on another plantation, he asked the master to buy her. Even if she was already another man's wife, the master could pay for her and bring her home. The master on Jeffries plantation would say, '"John, there's your wife. That is all the marriage there would be."16

The rituals associated with the slave marriage differed greatly from plantation to plantation, indicating that slaveowners probably held a variety of views on the character of such unions. In many cases the marriage took place with little ceremony at all. Columbus Williams remembered, "Marriage wasn't like now. . . . No license, no nothing. . . . Didn't have no ceremony at all." Other former slaves had similar recollections. Even though courtship on her plantation required the approval of the wife's family and the planter, Lou Fergusson recalled that after the planter approved the couple, "You moved in and there you was. You was married."17

In other cases the slave marriage involved a ceremony witnessed by the master and the rest of the members of the slave community. In the case of masters with strongly professed religious views, some sort of religious ceremony took place, often presided over by the master. Taylor reports a master near Little Rock who entered his slave couples' names in the family Bible. Harriett Payne of DeWitt recalled her master had the couple stand before him while he "read out of a book called the 'discipline' and say, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy strength, with all thy might and thy neighbor as thyself Then he'd say they were man and wife and tell them to live right and be honest and kind to each other."18

In addition to rituals governed by the master, ritual emerging from the slave community also played a role in some marriages. The most common remembered in Arkansas was the practice known as "jumping over the broomstick," in which the couple jumped back and forth over a broomstick.

16 AN, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Fergusson), 280, vol. 9, pt. 4 (Jeffries), 39; Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas, 192.

17 AN, vol. 1 1, pt. 7 (Williams), 157, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Fergusson), 280.

18Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas, 192-193; AN, vol. 10, pt. 5 (Payne), 302.


As Herbert Gutman has pointed out, this irregular marriage ritual was of unknown origins, although it may have connections with African witchcraft beliefs. However, what is significant is that it was a practice of the slave community usually carried out without the master's involvement. Such a practice again indicates the roots of the slave family in the African American community as well as in the desires of the individual slaveowner.19

Once formed, the slave family then played an important role within the slave community. John Blassingame has called the family "one of the most important survival mechanisms for the slave." Within the family the slave found "companionship, love, sexual gratification, sympathetic understanding of his sufferings; he learned how to avoid punishment, to cooperate with other blacks, and to maintain his self-esteem." The evidence does not indicate how fully the Arkansas slave family realized these benefits, but it does demonstrate clearly that strong husband and wife bonds existed and that parents did exercise a significant influence over their children.20

The ideal condition was that of the co-residential nuclear family. This was a family in which a couple resided together and reared their children. Some of these families exhibited considerable long-term stability. The family of William Baltimore, whose family belonged to a Dr. Waters, who maintained a large plantation in Jefferson County, included his mother and father, who had twelve children during their life together, but also one set of grandparents who lived near the family.21

The testimony of the slaves is clearest in its account of the feelings engendered between a man and wife within such families. Couples loved and respected each other and demonstrated strong attachment to their children. These accounts offer the clearest proof that the slave marriage ultimately became something much stronger than the slaveowner probably ever envisioned.

At least a few Arkansas slave children remembered something of the relationship between their mothers and fathers and provided direct testimony of how they attempted to protect one another within the system. Peter Brown, whose family was on a plantation near Helena, offered one of the most dramatic stories of a husband trying to protect his wife. When Brown's

19 AN, vol. 11, pt. 7 (Williams), 157, vol. 11, pt. 7 (Wilborn), 445; Gutman, Black Family, 275-278.

20 Blassingame, Slave Community, 78-79.

21 AN, vol. 8, pt. 1 (Baltimore), 97.


mother was made to work by the master, even though she was not able, possibly because she was pregnant, his father "stole her out." The two ran away, although only to a nearby canebrake. There the father's protective role became even more important when "one night a small panther smelled them and come on a log up over where they slept in a canebrake. Pa killed it with a bowie knife. Ma had a baby out there in the canebrake." Brown's father's action had made a point, at least according to what most likely was family tradition. After the birth of the child they went back and the owner did not make the wife work again.22

The Civil War and its aftermath provided some of the most powerful testimony to the value that the slaves placed on their families. Early in the war much of Arkansas became subject to raids by the Union Army and the state's planters began to move their slaves out of the way by taking them either to northwestern Louisiana or to Texas. In such circumstances slaves might take extreme measures to make sure that the family remained unbroken. In the case of the family of Eva Strayhorn, whose master abandoned his plantation near Clarksville and headed for Texas when the war broke out, little could be done when the male slaves, including Strayhorn 's father, were moved out. When Union soldiers entered the county, however, Strayhorn 's mother was able to make a choice to preserve her family. Encouraged to leave, she told the soldiers, "Henry is in the South and I'll never see him again if I leave the old home place for he won't know where to find me." She chose to remain a slave to preserve the family. Ultimately the women in the family joined the men in Texas.23

Former slaves' childhood memories indicate that the parents had feelings of deep affection for their children. Even the slaveowners recognized the strength of these attachments. James Gill of Phillips County remembered that when his family's master moved to Texas during the war, the entire family was sent despite an original intention only to send the adult slaves. "Ole mars," Gill remembered, "he knowed my mammy and pappy, dey wasn't gwine be satisfied widout all dere chillun wid 'em, so en course I was brung on to."24

Even within the limits imposed by the slave system, many parents were able to transmit their values to their slave children. These values persisted

12 AN, vol. 8, pt. 1 (Brown) 311. 23 ON, vol. 12, supp. 1 (Strayhorn), 303. 24 AN, Vol. 9, pt. 3 (Gill), 20 (quote), 19-26.


in the form of treasured memories of childhood. Most persistent among these values were freedom and the effort to secure whatever freedom could be taken. Joseph Badgett, although born at the very end of the antebellum era, recalled vividly his mother, part Indian, who "would fight." She was whipped for leaving the plantation without a pass, despite the fact that she could have had one. Badgett recalled however, that "she was too proud to ask. She never wanted to do things by permission." Such rebellion clearly became part of family tradition. Anthony Taylor remembered that after his grandfather and grandmother had been whipped, they fought back in their own way, neglecting "to feed the horse or to milk the cows - something like that."25

On the other hand, the slave children identified a variety of other attributes with their parents. Mittie Freeman of Ouachita County remembered her father, who had worked as a manager on one of his owner's farms, as a "gentleman; ... He had been brung up that-a-way." Mary Jane Kingbridge remembered her parents as being "very strict," and that she "was made to mind." Kingbridge's situation showed that her family had achieved a unique degree of independence, for she associated discipline not with her master but with her family.26

The children also took obvious pride in their parents' accomplishments. Charles Dortch, whose parents were slaves in Dallas County, remembered that his father was a carpenter, as well as a farmer, and that his mother worked as a cook and weaver. Mollie Barber, who lived on the relatively small plantation of Nathaniel Turner in Phillips County, warmly recalled that her mother "work 'round de house and in de fields too; seem lak she done 'bout ever 'thing." Likewise, even though she lost her father when he left during the war to join the Union Army, she remembered him as a man who was allowed to work in the evening to earn "out money" making boots and shoes. Fannie Borum also respected her father's ability to make money with his skills. Working as a ginner, he was rented out to neighbors who paid wages. She recalled of her father, "They trusted him. . . . On account of the money my father earned he was considered a valuable slave."27

25 AN, vol. 10, pt. 6 (Taylor), 261; vol. 8, pt. 1 (Badgett), 78; v. 8, pt. 1 (Brown), 311. 26 AN, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Freeman), 347; vol. 9, pt. 3 (Kingbridge), 159. 27 AN, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Dortch), 169-179; ON, vol. 12, supp. 1 (Barber), 29; vol. 8, pt. 2

(Borum), 183.


A more systematic study of naming practices would be useful, but it is evident that in many cases slaves purposefully passed their names on to the children, once again asserting their own influence over their families. Peter Brown, who was a slave on a plantation in Phillips County, was the grandson of Peter Bane, his father's father and recalled that he was "named after him." Other children, usually sons, also were given the surname of their fathers.28

While the nuclear family was present and played an important role among slaves, a variety of other types of families existed. An examination of the relative importance of the co-residential nuclear family is essential to our understanding of the character of the slave family within the state. Using the seventy-eight individuals who provided information in the WPA interviews it is possible to determine the numerical importance of the co- residential family. While the number involved is relatively small and not a true random sample, it does provide a representative cross section of the state's counties, since interviewees had resided in twenty-five of the fifty- seven that existed in 1860. When matched with information from tax rolls and census returns about the number of slaves their masters owned, it was also apparent that the seventy-eight came from a representative sample of slaveholdings (only forty-nine, however, could be placed with a specific owner, either because they did not identify their owner or the individual identified could not be located in the census of county tax rolls). Eight of the forty-nine were on holdings of fifty or more slaves, twelve on holdings from between 25 and 49 slaves, and twenty-nine in holdings less than 25. This reflects roughly the statewide distribution of slaveholdings.

The evidence provided by the former slaves indicates that, while a majority had lived in two-parent households, overall co-residential nuclear families were less common in Arkansas than in older slave states. Although not strictly comparable, the conclusions of Malone's study of Louisiana slave families offers the best statistics for measuring Arkansas against an older state. In Louisiana between 1 850 and 1 859, 77.9 percent of households with children were families with both parents present. In Arkansas, among the total sample, forty-four slaves or 59.5 percent came from family situations where the child remembered both parents being present at least up

1%AN, vol. 8, pt. 1 (Brown), 311; ON, vol. 12, supp. 1 (Bean), 46, (Harshaw), 169.


until the Civil War. Thirty of the children or 40.5 percent came from families where both parents were not present.29 (See table 1).

Table 1. Structure of Child-Rearing Families in Antebellum Arkansas

Single-Parent Family Two-Parent Family (Cases) (Percentage) (Cases) (Percentage)

30 405 44 59.5

The evidence further indicates that a wide variety of factors contributed to the existence of households other than that of the co-residential nuclear family. Some of these factors probably existed in slave communities throughout the South. Others, however, appear to be peculiar to Arkansas and may help to explain the greater proportion of single-parent slave families.

An examination of the thirty slave children brought up in non-nuclear households found that nine (30 percent) of the cases could not be explained. The twenty-one others, however, provided some indication of the cause of their situation. The smallest number, three cases (10.0 percent), were children brought up in families with only their mother present because the father was white. In all cases the father was either an overseer or the master. In one case the father played a role as protector, although he never freed the child. Augustus Robinson, slave and child of L. T. Robinson, who owned six slaves in Calhoun County, recalled that his father ultimately sold him to keep his wife from beating him. "She would have killed me if she could have got the chance," he remembered. Ultimately the father placed his son in the hands of an owner who took care of him. Apparently the father always

29Malone, Sweet Chariot, 41; Blassingame and Gutman offer widely divergent figures for the stability of the nuclear family based on marriage certificates issued by the Union Army and the Freedmen's Bureau in 1864 and 1865. Since these figures reflect destabilization produced by movement of slaves and their frequent deaths during the Civil War, I concluded that they were not comparable to my own findings. See Blassingame, Slave Community, 90, and Gutman, Black Family, 145-151.


acknowledged his parentage, introducing his son to friends saying, "Gentlemen, he's a little shady but he's my son."30

The death of a parent was another reason for non-nuclear families. In three instances (10.0 percent) one or both parents had died. Ellen Thompson from Howard County was left alone when her mother died in 1849. Likewise, Anthony Taylor, a child on the plantation of C. S. Bullock in Clark County, was left with his mother when his father "was exposed and died of pneumonia." In such cases the child often came into the hands of other members of the plantation community. Mattie Fritz of Monroe County was left alone when her mother died. Her father had been left behind in

Mississippi when her owner moved to Arkansas sometime before the Civil War. When her "dear mother" died, a woman that Fritz knew only as

"Mammy" stepped in to take care of her. Mammy was an older woman who

perhaps had already raised her own family.31 In six (20.0 percent) of the cases parents, though married, lived on

separate plantations. Many of these, although not all, were slaves on farms or small plantations. Ann May, one of Thomas May's nineteen slaves at Cabin Creek in Johnson County, remembered living on the farm "with the white folks." On a farm with so few slaves, May's mother apparently looked elsewhere for a mate, and she found him on a nearby plantation. "My father

belong to another family," she remembered, "a neighbor of ours." Charlie Norris, whose master, Tom Murphy, owned eleven slaves in Union County, also was raised in a situation where his mother was owned by one master, his father by another. The father of Julia Fortenberry, reared on a larger plantation belonging to Robert Tucker in Ashley County, also came from a different plantation. "I don't know how my father and my mother got together. I guess they just happened to meet up with each other," Fortenberry speculated. Nonetheless, the father visited his wife and child on Sundays and, it seems, occasionally at night. The couple had ten children but continued to live on separate plantations. The parents of John Jones in Arkansas County were similarly separated. Without question, the very

30 AN, vol. 10, pt. 6 (Robinson), 56; ON, vol. 12, supp. 1 (Williams), 389. 31 AN, vol. 10, pt. 6 (Thompson), 309, vol. 10, pt. 6 (Taylor), 259, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Fritz),

354.


process of developing a family within a limited African American slave

community was a difficult one.32 Overall, however, the most important factor destabilizing the family was

the sale of a member. Thirty percent of the non-nuclear families in the Arkansas sample were the product of slaveowners' actions. Paternalistic

planters may have hoped to keep their slave families together, but the evidence is fairly clear that few hesitated to break them up when they faced financial necessity. One former slave recalled that "ever' time dey need some

money, off dey sell a slave, jest like now dey sell cows and hogs at de auction place."33

In four (13.3 percent) of the families children were either sold away from one or more of their parents or separated from them in some other way. Virginia Sims, who had been a slave in Virginia, remembered being sold with her mother, "put up on a stump just like you sell hogs to the highest speculator." They were purchased by Tom Murphy, who brought them to Arkansas and settled them on his plantation in Jefferson County. Sims's father, however, was not sold and remained behind. When she was only eight, Mary Ann Kroebs was sold by her master to settle a debt and brought to Arkansas by her new master, Dr. Arthur Brewster. Adeline Blakely, on the other hand, was given away at the age of five to the master's daughter on her

marriage. Her new mistress was to be permitted to "raise me as she wanted me to be."34

In five (16.7 percent) instances one parent or both parents were either sold or moved off of the plantation for some reason. Situations varied, but a slave could be disposed of by a master whenever necessary. Mittie

Freeman, slave of the Williams family at Camden, lost her father when their master died and the father, who had worked as a manager for his deceased

owner, was moved to another plantation away from his family. When her father hit the manager of that plantation, the slave was sent to New Orleans

32 AN, vol. 10, pt. 5 (May), 66, vol. 10, pt. 5 (Norris), 219, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Fortenberry), 328, vol. 9, pt. 4 (John Jones), 149.

ON, vol. 12, supp. 1 (quote), 29-30; see also Moneyhon, Impact of the Civil War, 68-69.

34 AN, vol. 10, pt.6 (Sims), 163, vol. 8, pt. 1 (Blackwell), 168, vol. 8, pt. 1 (Kroebs), 253, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Frazier), 340, vol. 8, pt. 1 (Blakely), 182. Blakely's mother, nevertheless, remained a strong character in her memory. Using a brass ring and knotted string, the mother would interpret the premonitions of young whites in the community. Her daughter remembered her as having "a gift of telling fortunes."

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for sale. Sometimes such sales left a child without either parent. In the case of the woman Hannah, sold away from her children by Bill Newton of Johnson County, the mother asked another slave to take care of them: "Cindy, be a mother to my children, will you? I hate to leave them, poor little things, but I can't help myself."35

Sale, separation, death - all slave families were threatened by these things. They were more likely, for many reasons, to happen on small farms, however. A strong correlation appears to exist between the size of a slaveholding and a family's stability.36 The larger the holding an Arkansas interviewee had lived on, the more likely a co-residential family was to exist and survive. Family life on the smallholdings was much less stable. On holdings in excess of one hundred and between fifty and ninety-nine, all of those interviewed remembered being raised in a family where both parents were present. Among slaves from holdings of twenty to forty-nine, 55.6 percent of the former slaves remembered being raised in two-parent families, 44.4 percent were not. In the smaller holding (one to nineteen) 48 percent came from two-parent families and 52 from one-parent families. (See table 2).

Table 2. Structure of Child-Rearing Families in Antebellum Arkansas by Size of Slaveholding

Size of Holding Single-Parent Family Two-Parent Family (Cases) (Percentage) (Cases) (Percentage

100+ 0 0 3 100.0

50-99 0 0 5 100.0

20-49 8 44.4 10 55.6

1-19 13 52.0 12 48.0

35 AN, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Freeman), 346-347; ON, vol. 12, supp. 1 (Stayhorn), 5. 36 In carrying out this assessment, I broke down the sample into the same types of

holdings as Ann Malone, categories devised by Joseph K. Menn in his study of Louisiana slaveholders. In Arkansas none of the interviewees in the slave narratives came from plantations with more than two hundred slaves, but each of the lower categories have members.


This parallels Malone's findings for Louisiana, where family units on larger plantations tended to be more stable than those on smaller. In the Louisiana holdings with one hundred or more slaves, 80.9 percent of children were reared in two-parent families, while 19.1 were not. On holdings of fifty to ninety-nine slaves, the relative percentages were 72.1 and 27.9; for twenty to forty-nine it was 71.4 compared with 28.6; for one to nineteen it was 69.6 to 30.4.37 (See table 3).

Table 3. Structure of Child-Rearing Families in Antebellum Arkansas by Size of Slaveholding Compared with Louisiana

Size of Holding Single-Parent Family Two-Parent Family Arkansas Louisiana Arkansas Louisiana

100+ 0 19.1 100.0 80.9

50-99 0 27.9 100.0 72.1

20^9 44.4 28.6 55.6 71.4

1-19 52.0 30.4 48.0 69.6

These figures suggest that at least in part the instability of the slave family in Arkansas may have been aggravated by the developmental character of the state's economy and society. With the plantation just beginning to take hold, the larger number of small slaveholdings created a situation where fewer co-residential nuclear families could exist. On large plantations there were enough eligible partners that couples could be created on the plantation itself. But, as students of slavery elsewhere have noted, those held on smaller farms were far less likely to find mates close at hand.38

The small farm also provided a less stable economic environment for the slave family. In a developing economy with pronounced cycles of boom and bust, the smaller farmer would be more likely to run into economic troubles

37Malone, Sweet Chariot, 61. 38 See, for example, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle

Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 25-27; Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1 850- 1 890 (New York: Oxford, 1983), 31.


that might force the sale of a family member, and families divided among households faced sale and separation if any one of the members' masters hit hard times. As already seen, whenever farmers found money short, they tended to replenish their pocketbooks by the sale of slaves. For the small farmer that occasion probably happened more frequently than for their wealthier neighbors.

A comparison with figures for Texas, a state that was at a similar stage of economic development during this era, strengthens this hypothesis that destabilization might be a result of the developmental climate. In his examination of the slave family in Texas, Randolph B. Campbell found 60 percent of slave children in that state living in two-parent households. Likewise, though Louisiana overall appears to have a larger proportion of nuclear families, newly opened parishes showed rates more comparable to Arkansas's. Malone's figures for the Red River parishes, 73.8 percent from two-parent families, reflect a less stable situation than elsewhere in Louisiana. Both of these developing areas show stability rates much closer to Arkansas's 59.5 percent.39

That these developing economies on slavery's frontier could discourage the emergence of co-residential nuclear families by no means meant slaves were necessarily left bereft of nurturing or companionship. Slaves proved remarkably able to accommodate themselves to such circumstances in filling critical social needs. There is no indication that slave couples who lived on separate plantations felt any less strongly towards each other. When the Civil War ended, husbands and wives in these circumstances reconstituted their families as nuclear units. The father of John Jones of Arkansas County went to his wife, who had lived with their children on a separate plantation before the war, and took her and the rest of the family to live on land provided by his master. The family subsequently remained together and farmed in Lincoln and Jefferson Counties.40

At least in some cases parents entered into new marriages when old ones were broken and the new partner simply took over the role of the natural parent. Hulda Williams was the daughter of a slave and a plantation overseer. When her mother was moved to Jefferson County, she married a slave on the plantation of Wintry Bond. Her stepfather appears to have

39 Campbell, Empire for Slavery, 156; Malone, Sweet Chariot, 55.

40 AN, vol. 9, pt. 4 (Jones), 150.


become an important person in her life, and she remembered stories of his slavery that he shared with her. The reconstructed family, particularly her mother, exercised considerable control over her, and her family raised her to "mind their folks - my mammy was the boss, and she whip me for something when I was 27-year old!"41 In the case of the children of Hannah in Johnson County, a child of the stepparent remembered that "she took care of them and looked after them just like they were hers."42

Scholarship in other states has shown that, where both parents were not present, children's needs might be met by the single parent or other relatives, or even simply members of the community, who often played a major role in providing a source of authority rooted in the slave community. This clearly was true in Arkansas, although less is known about children reared in such circumstances than in others. In the few cases recorded, the people who stepped in to take care of the child appear to have become significant contributors to the young slave's life. In the case of Mattie Fritz of Monroe County, the older woman she came to know as Mammy provided at least a sense of security and self-esteem. Fritz remembered, "She was so good to me."43

For all the resilience exhibited by slaves individually and collectively, it is important not to sentimentalize the slave family or exaggerate its strength. Even an intact family could not shelter its members from harm. A male slave could not in the end protect the female from any predatory behavior on the part of the master. Anthony Taylor of Hot Spring County heard from his family that "if the boss man wanted to be with women that they had, the women would be scared not to be with him for fear he would whip them. And when they started whipping them for that they kept on till they got what they wanted."44 As with any institution involving human relationships, things were not always good. Not everyone honored the bonds they had created. When the war ended, some members of these families took the opportunity presented by the breakup to leave. In some cases this may have been to return to an earlier family, but the reasons for such abandonment are generally impossible to determine. George Washington Claridy of Howard County remembered that his father left during the war,

41 ON, vol. 12, supp. 1 (Williams), 391. 42 CW, vol. 12, supp. 1 (Stayhorn), 5. 4MjV, vol. 8, pt. 2 (Fritz), 354. 44 AN, Vol. 10, pt. 6 (Taylor), 261.


possibly to join the army, and "never did come back." Maggie Wesmoland, who had been a slave of the Holland family in the vicinity of Des Arc, reported that her father was sent to Texas as a refugee during the war, while the rest of the family remained in Arkansas. When the war ended he came back but then abandoned his family and went back to Mississippi, where the family originally had come from. Charlie Norris from Union County reported that his parents, who had been owned by different masters and lived on separate plantations, separated. After freedom, "they never did go back together." Each case is somewhat different, but it indicates clearly that not all slave families had achieved the strong relationships evidenced in earlier examples.45

Ultimately the WPA narratives provide significant insights into family life within the slave community, suggesting they might shed light on other aspects of slave life. They clearly show that the experience of the Arkansas slave family was more complex than revisionist scholarship has suggested. While the nuclear family was important, local conditions meant that such families were less stable than was the case elsewhere. The evidence suggests that this may have been due at least in part to the character of the state's economic development at this time. With a plantation economy just beginning to take off, the larger number of small slaveholdings provided a world in which the life of the slave family remained less stable. Nonetheless, in Arkansas as elsewhere in the South where more extensive studies have been carried out, it is clear that both the family and the alternative institutions created when the family fell apart played important roles in the socialization of children and the development of a slave world independent of that of the masters and provided a critical support for the formation of African American culture.

45 ON, vol. 12, supp. 1 (Claridy) 105, 103-107, vol. 1 1, pt. 7 (Wesmoland), 99; AN, vol. 10, pt. 5 (Norris), 219.

A Slave Family in Arkansas

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