3 - Changing Places
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Summary
During certain seasons of the year…all the roads, steam-boats, and packets, are crowded with troops of negroes on their way to the great slave markets of the South.
Captain Basil Hall, 1829Ceceil George, an ex-slave born in South Carolina in 1846, had never been outside of Charleston District before her master died and the heirs sold her and her family members “like a gang of chickens” to a sugar planter in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. “We all cried [when we had to] leave de old country,” she told interviewers from the Louisiana Writers’ Project. “But we had more tears to shed.” The journey itself was a traumatic experience; the former bondswoman recalled how she and the other slaves were transported by their new master to Louisiana “on de ship,” cruising around Florida and up the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans. She distinctly remembered the sight of the ocean, which to her represented not simply a route of travel but also a vast and impenetrable barrier that separated her old home from her new one. Although shipping newly purchased slaves from East Coast slave markets to Louisiana along the coastal route was considered by late-antebellum slaveholders to be an expedient and efficient method of transport, Ceceil and her relatives were convinced that the underlying motive for traveling by sea was primarily to disorientate bondspeople to discourage future escape attempts. “Dey made us go by de sea because den we can’t go back,” she explained. With each nautical mile, the only world Ceceil’s family had ever known slipped further and further away, the steamship leaving no physical points of reference in its wake for the slaves to ever be able to retrace their journey back to South Carolina again. Arrival at their destination only compounded their anxiety because the enslaved migrants’ first impressions of their new home in the Deep South were, to put it mildly, negative. “God help us,” Ceceil exclaimed to her interviewers. “We come to de most wicked country dat our God’s Son ever died for. De old people used to cry; dear Lawd, how dey grieved. Dey never thought dey’d have to live in a heathern country.”
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- Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South , pp. 94 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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