Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Summary
The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle…You are a slave, a being in whom another owns property.
Former slave James W.C. Pennington, 1849Upon leaving a Louisiana sugar plantation during his travels through the southern states in 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect and newspaper reporter for the New York Daily Times, struck up a conversation with the “talkative and communicative” slave named William who was charged with driving his buggy to his next destination. In the course of their journey of some twenty miles together, the two men broadly discussed various issues of local and national interest, including sugar cultivation, slavery, and master–slave relations in the Deep South. Interestingly, however, the very first thing William said to Olmsted as he stepped into the carriage was the seemingly irrelevant reassurance “that he was not a ‘Creole nigger’; he was from Virginia,” having been sold and shipped to Louisiana via the domestic slave trade as an adolescent.
Not being mistaken for a Louisiana-born slave was obviously of profound importance to the thirty-three-year-old forced migrant even though he had lived in Louisiana for twenty years, learned to speak French fluently, and admitted no desire to move back to Virginia anymore because he had already “got used to this country” and fully adapted to the “ways of the people.” Yet however assimilated William may have seemed in the Louisiana slave society that had become his new home, cracks in his identity were clearly evident, as he proudly continued to identify himself first and foremost as an outsider, a Virginian, even confiding to Olmsted his opinion that “the Virginia negroes were better looking than those who were raised here” and that there “were no black people anywhere in the world who were so ‘well made’ as those who were born in Virginia.”
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- Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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