Witness to Slavery
In this powerful letter from April 1864, you can read many reports of the various curses of slavery as well as Thomas Jackson’s first hand experiences with “Contrabands” – Blacks who had taken their freedom illegally. It also includes one of the most valuable items in the whole collection.
You can view a small picture card that shows a very famous photo of the branded slave Wilson Chinn, posed alongside some of the tools that were used for “disciplining” slaves. He was already known to historians to be a former slave from Louisiana whose forehead had been branded with the initials of his owner, Volsey B. Marmillion.
Although the photo has been reproduced many times to illustrate slavery, both in civil war histories and in abolitionist literature, very little was known about the background of this man. However, in researching this collection, we discovered that Thomas Jackson had actually met him in person and, on the back of our particular card, he had written out the agonizing story of Wilson Chinn’s background.
This letter also provides a specific example of how well-meaning white people would be severely punished if they were found to be even trying to educate slaves. In many southern states, everything was done to keep the Blacks in their place and to avoid influences that might lead to an uprising.
Reading Penna March April 18. 1864
Dear Cousin
I should have written to you again before now, but I am very much engaged all day & when I come home in the evening, get supper & look over my daily newspapers I am too sleepy then to attend to anything. During all the 34 years I have been in America I never knew such busy times as we have now.
The increase of business on the Rail Road passing through Reading has been most extraordinary last year. The rail road is 96 miles long running from Philadelphia to Pottsville in the anthracite coal region of Penna, and has a double track & a down grade up to Philadelphia the whole distance. The quantity of coal carried on that rail road in 1862 was 2,058,887 tons and in 1863 it was 3,065,261 tons. an increase of one million six thousand three hundred & seventy four tons. The increase in the consumption of coal gives some idea of the increase in population, manufactures & business of all kinds.
The treatment of the slaves in our southern states has been cruel in the extreme. This war is fully exposing the wrongs & horrors of the house of bondage, and working a wonderful change in public opinion among the reading & reflecting portion of the Northern people. They see now that the devilish system of American slavery had become so infamously bad that it deserved the just vengeance of the almighty, and that this vast war is a well deserved punishment visited upon a whole people for crimes but little less than called down fire from high heaven upon Sodom & Gomorrah.
Source: The Thomas Jackson collection
I inclose you some photographs of white slaves that have escaped to liberty & come North. I have seen and spoken to them all. The children are from New Orleans. Have been under the care of Northern teachers who went to New Orleans & established schools for the “contrabands” soon after our Union forces took the city. They are very bright beautiful and intelligent children & so white that no one would ever suspect that they had a drop of African blood in their veins. Two of the little girls are exceedingly beautiful & interesting children when spoken with & their innocent hilarity encouraged.
I also met Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana.
Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana.
I had a long conversation with this man. He is a very honest simple good hearted ,good man. More intelligent than laborers usually are. He was methodist preacher among his fellow slaves. And because he spoke of their wrongs, his owner branded him on
the forehead and made him wear the pronged iron collar and leg shackles, night and day for a whole year & put an iron gag in his mouth when he was not at work. This I know to be true.
Source: The Thomas Jackson collection
Mary Longhurst whose likeness I send you is a young married woman. Her husband was a slave also & escaped about the same time she did. I had this “contrabands” story from her own lips & wrote it down. It is too long to send you entire, but I will give you an extract.
“My name was Mary Kimbler. I was born the slave of Roland Kimbler of Madison county Virginia. He is my Father. My mother was then & now is the white slave of Roland Kimbler. I am now about 23 years old. My Father & owner was about 60 years old when I left him. He is the Father of more slaves beside me. Some by nearly black mothers are pretty dark complexioned. I was always treated as a slave. Was put to all kinds of hard work in the house and in the field, and not allowed to make the least attempt at education.
The slave holders wives always use the white slaves much worse than they do the black ones, because they always know, or think, that master is the Father of them.
I was married about two years ago to Abraham Longhurst the slave of Thomas Fletcher living about a mile from my Father. My husband is about half black. In the fall of 1862, when there was a talk of the Union army coming into Madison county, our owners took all our clothing from us, shoes and every thing but what we had on, & locked them up for fear we should run away to the Union camps.
My husband ran away to reach the Union army before Christmas 1862. He was in the woods & mountains nearly two months altogether. After he had found the Union camps he came back for me. Then we started both together and after being out in the winter, hiding by day and walking at night a long time & bearing much hardships, cold & hunger & often in danger of being taken, we reached the Union Army at Winchester. about the last of February 1863. But we could never have got there if the other slaves had not fed and hid us as we came along. All the colored folks help one another to get off to the Union men.”
I have three colored men at work for me now. Two of them nearly full blooded negroes. One of them was owned by a man in Virginia who had a machine shop and iron foundry. Owned over 30 men slaves & had nearly all his work done by them, according to the great Southern doctrine; which is the sole cause and foundation of the rebellion; “That it is far better for capital to own labor than to hire it”. That is the great & only thing that the south is now fighting for. But more of this presently.
My “contraband” engineer is a real smart fellow & can handle our steam engine, go to the anvil, the vice, or the lathe & do a job of repairing as well as any man I ever had about it. He has a wife and 4 children with him here. They all escaped together. He tells me that when the Union army was coming towards his masters place he told his slaves that the Northern soldiers would kill them all & chop off their heads, arms, and legs & do awful things, and then he ran away & left his slaves and all he had behind him. Many of the slaves were afraid & hid away “like partridges” (his own words). But the Union men came & hurt nobody, and then the slaves all came out & went off together to the Union army & his master lost nearly every thing he had slaves and all.
When I pay these poor fellows there full wages every week, it would do any true Englishman’s heart good to see their happy faces, dark as they are, showing such full & pleasing satisfaction, such warm gratitude for the kind treatment and just payment for their labour. They will hold their money out in their hand, look at it and laugh most joyfully. One will say “Oh! I never spected to see this. I never thought I’d be free to get my own pay for myself. Master used to hire me out by the year to the farmers for $. 150 dollars a year, my keep, two suits of coarse clothes and one pair of shoes a year. One year he got. 175 dollars, but, de lord bless you sir, I never seed any ov it, cept a dollar he guve me at christmas. never more an that dollar a whole year, and hard work, hard blows & kicks into de bargain.
Day use us bad down dar sir. If day ever find fault with any on us sir, de blow allis cum first sir, and de words arter, and den we have to jump around sir I tell he”. –
The black engineer is a stiller & much quieter man. Evidently a deep thinker & close observer. Quiet & still as he is, Nothing going on near him escapes his attention. When he first came into our walk he watched every thing going on with such a quiet earnestness, that it seemed a natural instinct in him to want to understand every thing quietly for himself, & in his own way, without asking questions of any body. And after a while he would lend a hand or do a job at almost any thing as if he had been long used to it. When he gets his wages and hears the laughing remarks of the other, he will say with a quiet Smile. “Well thank God I used allis to think I’d be free sometime. I used to feel as if I’d sure to get my wages for myself then, and I know’d that my chillen ‘ud be free too then. Thank de lord it come at last and I’m not a old man yet either”. He is about 45 years old, as near as he can tell, and a very strong, bony & hardy man.
They may call him nigger because he is black & has a wooly head. But there is intellect in it & of a high order too. If when he was a boy he had been properly educated & then allowed to choose the occupation he had the most liking for, he would have been has good a workman at any trade he took hold of as ever entered a shop. But all the slave states have laws severely punishing any attempt to educate a colored person, male or female. and they were always rigidly enforced.
Only a few years ago a northern young woman went to Virginia as private teacher in a planters family to educate his legitimate white children. Not knowing the law & her danger she got at teaching some of the young slaves privately. After awhile she was found out at it, prosecuted under the Virginia laws, convicted and sentenced to ten years solitary confinement inprisonment at hard labour. She was a very well educated and most respectable girl of good family. The sentence was considered here far too severe even under their most infamous laws & there was considerable stir made about her in the free states. After a great deal of trouble & the exertion of every possible means & influence that could possibly be brought to bear in her favor, Governor Wise of Virginia pardoned her on condition that she returned to the north & never entered a slave state again.
I could fill quires of paper with the tales of the horrible cruelties & inhuman outrages committed by the rebel slave mongers.
One of my colored “contraband” workmen tells a pitiful story of the wrongs done him when he was a slave. Among them he says, That about 16 years ago, when he as a young man, his owner permitted him to marry a slave girl belonging to a neighbor. They were regularly married by a baptist minister “exactly same as white folks” says he. His owner allowed him to see his wife one night a week. But about two years after his marriage, this neighbor sold his wife and their child to a slave trader, and the poor woman & her little one were sent to New Orleans after a most painful parting with her husband. The poor fellow could never be induced to marry again, minister or no minister.
He has been a truly pious member of the baptist church over 18 years & says he knows the lord will bring him & his wife together again and he is now doing all he can to get a home ready for her. He has only heard from her once since they were parted. But he says she is some where above New Orleans & he knows that General Banks’s union army will give her a chance to get off & she will. He has been a teamster in the Union service for two years & got lamed for life by the kick of a horse, otherwise he says he should surely have been with the union army now in the far South looking out for his wife & daughter. Poor fellow I hope his great & firm faith may be fully rewarded. There are many thousands of similar cases.
I know one villainous Englishman now in Georgia working for the rebels, who bought two fine looking young slaves. A man & his wife who had not been long married. A slave dealer came along & offered him 1500 dollars for the young wife, and the cruel scoundrel sold her away from her husband in spite of all the poor fellows supplications to be sold along with her & on his knees imploring him for Godsake not to part them. But the cold hearted scoundrel was deaf to all entreaty & dead to all the finer feelings of humanity which we suppose would influence any one, not quite a fiend, and the poor woman was dragged in chains away from her husband for ever for no crime but being “guilty of a skin not colored like our own” or a lineage not so purely white as her anglo american owner.
We in common with nearly all Christendom, consider slavery to be a curse and a great outrage upon all the rights of man, which we hold so dear for ourselves; we know that you have not prospered half so well with it as you would have done without it. We know that it is the deadly foe of freedom, & we wish the great west to be the land of liberty, the home of the free for ever & its rich soils never to be tilled by the hand or trodden by the foot of a slave”.
Such was our language to the slave holders. Such were our offers made in all kindness & good faith. But the haughty man stealer spurned us with the greatest insolence and contempt & proclaimed that the only true & proper relation between capital and labour was that capital should own labour & not hire it. That all masters should own workmen and workwomen, black or white, and their families also, and feed and care for them as they do for horses & mules. And they claimed the right to take their slaves every where, as we do horses & mules, and they demanded that we admit that damnable principle as holy just and proper, or they would force it upon us until (as Toombs of Georgia said) they could call the roll of their slaves in the shadow of Bunker Hill monument. We remonstrated & they fired on our flag. We refused their demands & they bombarded the United states Fort Sumter, and commenced a war for slavery carrying it on ever since it began according to the slave holders creed of cruelty & blood.
They made it a rule to butcher all our black servants & teamsters they could take before we freed a slave or armed a negro. Since we proclaimed freedom to their slaves they kill or re-enslave all our colored soldiers they can take, & hang their white officers. We have undoubted evidence of their surprising and taking a whole company of colored soldiers & slaughtering the whole of them after they had surrendered.
The rebel president Davis has declared by public proclamation that all colored men taken in arms against them will be put to death, & their officers threaten to hang ten of our white men for every one we hang of theirs if we retaliate. These are the fiends that are fighting for “independence”. These are the men whom your “Southern aid societies” are assisting in the perpetration of the most enormous villainy ever attempted since the creation.
(End of page 6. Further pages missing)
Extract from Letter from Reading Penna March April 18. 1864
