Negroes to Hire: Slave Life in Missouri

if you want to get that i samuel g bigger staff of the county of clinton in the state of missouri have this day sold and delivered unto john h trice of the county and state of foreseed a negro boy slave named george age about five years i became interested in the whole area of archaeology as a result of conversations i had as a youngster with my grandmother she would always tell me as a youngster she would say jimmy do you realize there were two george washington's one crossed the potomac and the other one crossed the missouri river and they were both famous and i said wait a minute grandma one cross that's george washington first president united states who's the other one son that's your great grandfather his name was george washington too he was a slave soldier and a farmer he was born someplace in virginia she would suggest rappahannock county virginia and that he was given as a wedding gift by his slave master to his daughter and uh and husband who in turn migrated to platte county missouri to farm hemp well why would they do that why would they come to missouri from virginia i thought they didn't have slaves in missouri grandma yes they did well this is what he told me when i was about your age he said folks in virginia they used up the dirt they knew nothing about uh rotating crops and those kinds of things i said mary all right but you all have to excuse me i don't talk so good cause i'm been feeling poorly for a spell and i ain't so young no more i'm 91 years old long me when i think back what i used to do why miss olivia my metris used to put a glass pump full of water on my head and then had me walk around the room and i would dance so smooth like i don't spill nerium drop that was in st louis where i was born you see when i was born my mama belonged to owen cleveland and old poly cleveland and they was the meanest two white folks would ever live because they was always beating on the slaves old polly whipped my little sister what was only nine months old just cause she cried like all babies do and it killed my sister the farms was a lot different from down here in texas they call them plantations down here but up in st louis they was just farms and that's just what they was because we raised wheat barley rye oaks corn and fruit there was no cotton growing up there the houses was built with brick and heavy wood because it show was cold in the winter time missouri slavery was different from from slavery in the deep south and one of the primary ways that it was different is that the number of slaves owned on each holding the number was much smaller than it was in the south in fact you know even in the largest slave holding counties along the missouri river the average slave holding would be at the most seven per holder the lack of of large plantations and the preponderance of of small slave holdings really dramatically altered the experience of slavery those white people in missouri didn't have many slaves they just had four slaves my mother myself another woman and an old colored man called uncle joe the slave master especially when you had only a couple slaves would have to work right alongside with the slaves as such and so this made it somewhat different in the south you generally hear about uh overseers or or uh or black overseers that they call drivers but you don't see much of this in missouri especially i mean in missouri even in callaway county except for a few large holdings i was born in missouri lawrence county about fourteen years before the civil war near zacantel our white folks was considered well to do master didn't have no overseer he had two or three small forms but he see it after the [ __ ] and mules himself said he didn't want him drug round and all bruised up especially had a tremendous impact on slaves community and family lives and the reason for this is that most historians will point to the slave family and the slave community and slaves religious lives as as being the thing that really helped slaves to survive their enslavement and in missouri those things were a lot harder to come by in the sense that the average slave was only living on a missouri farm with a few other slaves sometimes their own children perhaps other family members but but not large slave quarter communities with lots of slave cabins and slaves coming home from the field at night and being able to interact with one another and and have a very rich community life a very rich cultural life most missouri slaves did not have that opportunity once i became a professional archaeologist i said platt county missouri i live in kansas city missouri that is not too far i wonder if anything exists where he where my great grandfather was once enslaved about 1988 i uh did some research and found out that uh lo and behold there are some living descendants of my great-grandfather's slave master living in platte city missouri we met one sunday afternoon at the platte county courthouse great grandson of slave meets ancestors of slave master this was apparently a pretty big newsworthy event it also it also got out that i was a practicing archaeologist with the intention of finding uh the exact location where my great grandfather was enslaved and and do a professional dig there to make some kind of interpretation of of of uh what life was like when he was when he was enslaved 150 years ago a tour of the location of of the farm site where my great grandfather was manumitted i was also pleasantly surprised that the big house was still and not intact but it was in what we consider pristine archaeological ruin the slave quarters uh with my archaeologically trained eye i could i could even at first meeting i could see the foundations of where slave quarters were i saw the root cellar which was important which was an important part of of any of any farm of that era my wildest dreams had come true i was born march 23 1850 in kentucky somewhere near louisville i was bought to missouri when i was six months old along with my mama who was a slave owned by a man named shaw who had allotted her to a man named graves who came to missouri to live with his daughter when a slave was allotted somebody made a down payment and gave a mortgage for the rest a chattel mortgage time don't change just the merchandise we lived in a kitchen a room and a log house joined onto the master's house there was most always something to do that doesn't mean that missouri slaves didn't have any community life they did have a community life they just were not able to experience it every day like a plantation slave in missouri slaves were often allowed to meet with one another on saturday night for example oftentimes the way that they met was at a party that had something to do with work they would have called it a work frolic so a corn husking or a barn raising in the evening when the work was done we would sit around and play marbles and sing songs we made our songs up as we went along sometimes there would be a corner chucking and that is when we had a good time bet we always chucked a lot of that corn first thing we look for uh which is uh customary and archaeology is uh uh we look for the privy yeah that wasn't hard to find we found the privy that belonged to the slave master and we also found two privys which were in association with the with uh with the slave quarters so the first thing i did was take samples you have to understand that basically these are outhouses but people have a tendency to throw everything in the world in an outhouse and over time over a period of time the privy becomes it becomes layered like a cake and you can do a cross section and you almost time you can almost you can almost have a timeline of occupation there and it doesn't smell as bad as you would think you know after all these after 125 30 years when i got the information back from the laboratory at the department of our department of anthropology university of kansas it suggested to me that the diet of both slave and slave masters family was almost identical it was almost identical atypical farm products corn wheat grain a lot of grain products swine cow a lot of chicken but i i couldn't see from a diet point of view that the diet of the slave master and the diet of the slave was that different well actually we found whiskey bottles in both in both privys now what that suggests i don't know you know but but i didn't see a i didn't i didn't see a big demarcation between uh the the stuff in the slave masters privy and the stuff we found in the slaves privy in every cabin there was beatles on on sundays you could have a good time one of the games we would play out in front of the cabin was swinging liza single this here game was played by having two rows line up and a man would dance up and down the line and swing each one we would all sing and pat our hands and feet to keep time for the dance before the civil war there was a a movement towards christianity among the slaves this movement was actually fairly strong very often you would have even among slave masters felt it was their duty to acquaint their slaves uh with the with the bible i never knowed sunday from monday except on sunday the white man come and we are called out under the bush arbor didn't have no work in the field that day and he stand up for us and preach i remember every preach day he said mind you not to steal for mrs amasa he was pretty strong on that part there were many instances of slaves working as preachers amongst other slaves and some masters were okay with this although oftentimes owners really tried to keep tabs on what was going on in these kinds of meetings after all nat turner was a slave preacher i mean this was the ultimate concern that they that slaves would be um you know talking about some kind of of um slave insurrection and that these ministers might be part of that or might be encouraging that um so oftentimes owners kept tabs on what was happening in these in these religious gatherings we lived on the edge of bowling a county old master's name was dal bulania there was a church but we didn't go much and we never had no kind of gatherings they wouldn't let the colored folks congregate no sir but the other thing that happened is that slaves went off on their own clandestinely and met in their own religious services out in the woods oftentimes in the summer they call them brush arbor services you left my papa in kentucky my papa never knowed where my mama went and my mama never knew where my papa went they never wanted mama to know because they know she would never marry so long she knew where he was my master wanted her to marry again raise more children to be slave mama said she'd never marry again to have children so she married my stepfather because he was sick and could never be a father that on plantations really the nuclear family was more prominent than you would have thought or at least during some period of a slave's life certainly slaves died slaves were sold away but on plantations slaves were generally encouraged to marry somebody else on a plane on the plantation with them in missouri that wasn't possible because the slave holdings were so small so if a slave woman lived on a farm she might live on the farm with her brother but she certainly couldn't marry him so she had to look somewhere else for a marriage partner they wasn't allowed to marry but if they seen you talking to somebody like you was making love whether you love them or not they make you live with them that was marrying each other all right but you ain't got no papers and things like that and she found that someone else on you know maybe the adjoining farm maybe two miles down the road she would have met her future spouse most likely at a community gathering one of those dances or perhaps at church slaves knew one another they knew other people in the community someone get mission from his master and give a hoe down call dance now anyone that went from all over the clothes plantations got mission from the master are overseas to go but they had to be home at a certain time but they would wish they hadn't went really for the whole system to work these these marriages and they were called abroad marriages at the time and historians call them that today as well marriages between people on on different slave holdings you know for for the system of slavery to work in missouri these abroad marriages had to be allowed because otherwise the slave population would not be reproduced i was born just about four five miles from here and my first master was a presbyterian preacher his name was jeff montgomery my pappy's name was hardin montgomery and my mammy was susan montgomery there was 10 children of vegans and we was all separated i was sold when i was four years old i remember my mommy crying and i was scared they stood me on a big stump and doctoring me off they said for 450 dollars wish i had that money now i could show you is it good a man by the name of miller bought me first and then i was sold to old ned discus this sale was just a trade so i just changed home so to say owner of the man would allow his slave man to travel to visit his wife usually it was customary for him to at least be able to go once a week he would leave saturday after work finished and he oftentimes would not return until the middle of the night on monday to be there before work started monday morning mama worked in the house in the field too my mama worked in the field even when i was a baby she would lay me down on a pallet next to the fence where she plowed corn or worked in the field at night after she came home from the field she had the great corn for the family next day stepfather and mama always tended to their own tobacco and grain in the moonlight this they could sell and have the money many ways abroad marriage has made family life more vulnerable because because slave families were having to depend on the life circumstances of two different owners mama has been put together with my father sam adams would belong to a [ __ ] trader but had a place next to old cleveland but that didn't make no difference to old cleveland he was so mean that he never would sell the man and the woman and the chilling to the same one he would sell the man here and the woman there and if there was chilling he would sell them someplace else and when he would sell a slave he would grease their mouth up to make it look like they've been fed good and was strong and healthy it could mean that you know the slave woman's master died and and she and her children were dispersed amongst all of his heirs mr mccain was a rich slave holder his daughter was married to mr dawson and live in liberty when i was about eight years old the dawsons come back to paris to visit they had two children den so they took me as a nuts for the children my mother had to stand there like i wasn't hers and all she could say was be a good girl margaret i think that abroad families also had some flexibility because this is what they were used to they were used to being separated um they were used to only seeing each other once a week maybe twice a week so they would call in their mothers and their sisters and their cousins from other farms in the community and they would come to help a slave woman with the birth of her child but in spite of all this the the lack of time that slave men spent with their families there's still seem to have been some very vital ties between couples and between fathers and their children certainly slave fathers were important to their families and and they talked about them as being important after slavery had ended even if they weren't able to spend as much time one of the instances that we really know that they were important was because after the civil war missouri law after some of 1865 missouri law mandated that those slaves that consider themselves to be married and have family that they legally marry so they were required by the law to legally marry and there were just so many instances where couples would come together and would be legally married when they had children uh they would uh um not they would marry and they would list their children as such my father was owned by the lewis family out in the country with miss diggs on my mother and all her children i so often think about the hard times my parents had in their slave days more than i feel my own hard times because my father was not allowed to come to see my mother but two nights a week that was wednesday and saturday slave quarters we that spring we did our excavation on three of the slave quarters they were in decent they were in decent condition stone foundations easily identifiable probably probably a human wood structure the slave quarters themselves 12 feet by 15 feet rectangular one story had a small fireplace with a chimney a one-room structure and apparently some kind of loft area and uh and i believe that that was uh that was atypical with the three that we uncovered they were about oh 15 meters apart uh from one another there was there was evidence there was some evidence of of a fence in the back of these quarters which led this investigator to believe that there was livestock behind the slave quarters there was a natural spring which provided water for the entire farm itself the the spring is still still running even with all the development the floor was dirt but it was but it was it was it was it was so packed that it's even packed today uh we found uh the laboratory found uh bits of fiber which led this investigator to believe that there was some kind of covering maybe a hemp rug we found a flint lock we found components of a flint lock the lock part the mechanism of a flintlock we also found almost a cache of lead balls about 40 caliber lead balls uh which which were which were probably cast in that facility this was in the vicinity of the slave cabins now this led us to the conclusion that uh that the slaves had access to firearms probably for probably for hunting i was born in at warrensburg missouri in march didn't ever give no day just march i carried in the water and the wood to the mrs house and helped mom we never had no saturdays off like they do now no no sunday's off neither no games no play only work after work we mostly go to bed we kids did early but i wake up lots of times and hear my mind pepe praying for freedom they do many times there is a belief that it's and it persists today that slaves were happy this whole idea about how happy everyone was doesn't really get going good in the newspapers until the 1850s that's when the slave power is crumbling that william wells brown was a writer he was the first slave or black writer that missouri ever produced and he was in saint louis and he was owned he was leased to someone who was a slave trader and he helped to get the the produce ready uh for market uh old men's whiskers were shaved their gray hairs plucked out of their heads their heads blacken they were taught how old they were and that was typically 10 to 15 years younger than they were and to increase their fitness for sale as brown describes the various slaves behavior quote some were set to dancing some to jumping some to singing and some to playing cards this was done to make them appear cheerful and happy but if you look to the reality of it this was a myth slavery was a mighty hard life kitty diggs hired me out to a presbyterian minister when i was seven years old i nursed in that family one year then ms diggs hired me out to a baker named henry tillman to nurse three children i nursed there two years not a family was nice to me the creature had a big farm so they put me on a pony at meal time to ride out to the field and call hands to dinner after the meal was finished i helped in the kitchen gathered the eggs and kept plenty busy slave hiring was was pervasive in in a place like missouri this really made slavery very flexible in an economic sense in missouri sometimes those other people were other slaveholders who just needed a few extra hands sometimes they were non-slaveholders so in a sense more white missourians were likely involved in the slave system than just the number of people who own slaves another thing that happened in a place like missouri is that these small slaveholders really helped one another out they would send their slaves over to the neighboring farmer to help during his harvest and then he would send his slaves over to their farm to help during the harvest and so they were augmenting their slave labor forces without having to pay anything to do that the other way that slave hiring was very flexible in an economic sense was often times when a slaveholding man would die his widow and children would hire out the slaves that were part of the state sometimes for years and years on end in order to provide income now in terms of punishments slaves very often were whipped as a form of punishment because obviously if a slave had created a violation or even committed a crime if you put him in jail then then the master lost the use of his services so very often whipping as in the south uh was uh punishment but in missouri uh very often they would try to use a paddle-like instrument rather than a whip because the whip would uh use uh would bring scars we never had no chills your back was your jail when you done something serious master warren called in the whoppers and they made your back bleed and then rub salt into the skin that they change you to a tree and let you suffer now in missouri missouri was one of the states though in which uh if a slave committed a a capital crime they actually were to be tried uh by a jury uh much as as a white person had been and they also were to be afforded legal counsel now for lesser offenses even sometimes stealing the master would be asked to make restitution as such my full name was rachel xlina mayberry you see i cared the name maybe cause that was my master's name i didn't know the old missus they told me she went crazy and killed herself shortly after i was born because she thought i was white we was the only slave family master hat and he was good to us only one time with me what happened was we made lots of molasses on our place oh lots of molasses and there was always some barrel standing up right with bungs and close to the bottom so the molasses run out one day i push at the bong i push this way and that way like i see the others do when all at once that bunk flew out and that molasses flew all over the place the barrel was full and it come out so fast i couldn't get the bung back in i tried till i was waiting lasses to my knees then i run call master and tell him a bunk bust out he know how i done it then he laid me on the floor and he put his foot on my head he took his switch and he gave me one good then he kept beating on the floor i guess that was to make the others think he was giving me a big beat so it all really depended upon the individual uh master uh the value that the slave had and whether uh uh there were uh you know uh bonds of affection that might develop as among all humans but mainly slavery was an economic institution so the the primary consideration was the economics in other words uh uh you know what the slave contributed to the economic well being as of the of the farm you have the reverend thomas c johnson uh he's a enthusiastic advocate of slavery and johnson county kansas is named for him but he came over to westport probably at the intersection now of broadway and westport road the coroner restaurant is there there's a teen little park that was probably a slave auction the records of his mission do show that he bought two negro girls for 550 one was eight years old and the other was two and a half then he came back for another purchase and paid seven hundred dollars for a fourteen-year-old girl that has my name and he paid eight hundred dollars for a year old girl that has my sister-in-law's name martha so you didn't want to run to johnson county uh kansas you wanted to go someplace else thomas johnson 800 in full payment for a negro girl named martha a black complexion aged about 15 years above described negro girl i warn sound and body and mind a slave for life and free from all claims westport missouri may 26 1856 david burge celia was a slave woman who lived in callaway county missouri and she was purchased at age 14 i believe by a man named robert newsom who was a widower he bought her as a sexual partner this 14 year old girl and a number of years past four or five years she had apparently had a couple of children by this man but about the time she turned 18 or 19 she entered into a relationship with another slave man and wanted to be with him apparently from the court testimony it seems that he perhaps put some pressure on her to try to end the relationship as if she really could in the relationship with him he was her master he had the ultimate power over her there was not really a whole lot she could do but she attempted to try to break off the relationship and newsom said no way and he came to her cabin one night after this discussion or argument that they had had you know from the testimony apparently tried to force himself on her she picked up a big stick and whacked him over the head and then whacked him a number of other times and he died he fell to the ground dead but what's interesting about the case is that the attorney who was appointed by the county by the judge to defend her really did genuinely try to ably defend her and so he put forth a defense of self-defense he said it was self-defense that he she was essentially being sexually abused by this man and that she tried to defend herself [Applause] [Music] okay i am john jameson i represent the defendant and we are ready for trial syria has prayed ourselves upon our god and our country my name is william powell of callaway county i went to converse with celia at the request of several citizens the object of my conversation was to ascertain whether she had any accomplices in this crime your honor this witness's testimony is all hearsay counselor you know the defendant is a slave woman and for that reason she cannot be allowed to testify here and i think the jury needs to hear her words about what happened that night your objection is overruled continue this was eight or ten days after she had been put into jail i asked whether she thought she would be hung for what she had done she said she thought she would be hung i then had her tell the whole matter she said the old man had been having sexual intercourse with her that he had told her he was coming down to her cabin that night she told him not to come and if he came she would hurt him she then got a stick and put it in the corner he came down that night she said there was very little fire in the cabin and when she heard him coming she fixed the fire to make a little light she said his face was towards her and he was standing talking to her when she struck him he did not raise his hand when she struck the first blow but sank down on a stool towards the floor threw up his hands as he sunk down the stick with which she struck was about as large as the upper part of a windsor chair but not so long she said after she had killed him the body laid for a long time she thought an hour she did not know what to do with it she said she would try to burn it in her fireplace she told me it took almost all night to burn the body and she ground up the larger bones with a rock the following morning she asked master james coffee wainscott mr newsome's grandson to carry out the ashes and gave him some walnuts for that my name is virginia wainscott and i'm the daughter of robert newsom mr powell told me our boy george denied any knowledge of papa's whereabouts and suggested that he check celia's cabin ms wainscott what did you find when you search the defendant's cabin we lifted up the hearthstone and found what looked like bones there were some clumps of ashes that were damp and smelled bad we found a buckle gallus and some buttons my sister mary sewed on my father's beaches a few days before his death miss wayne's good i'm not attempting to be delicate here but can you tell the court for your father customarily the cabin is about 60 steps from the house and the night my father was killed i never noticed his bid sister always made up the beds your honor even slaves have a legal right to preserve their own lives and in missouri it is illegal to take any woman unlawfully against her will or by force or menace or duress and compel her to be defiled a murder committed while warring off such a crime against one's person is justifiable [Music] if the jury believes the testimony that mr newsome at the time of the killing attempted to compel syria against her will to commit sexual intercourse they may find her not guilty of murder in the first degree now mr jameson if i understand you right you want the following jury instructions if the jury believes that celia did kill robert newsom but that the act was done without deliberation and with the intent to prevent newsome from having sexual intercourse with him robert newsom they will find her not guilty of murder in the first degree mr jameson that is a self-defense plea and that is clearly not the case here i will have to refuse that jury instruction so she was she was convicted she was supposed to hang but she was pregnant so they there was a stay of the execution in the meantime the attorney tried to take the case all the way up to the it did go all the way up to the missouri supreme court trying to get the conviction overturned and he was never able to successfully do that the missouri supreme court didn't want any part of of dealing with the bigger issue of slavery the interesting thing was at one point there was a jailbreak and celia broke out of the jail with it speculated the assistance of this attorney because basically the the execution date was was coming before the supreme court had had a chance to to decide on the case and so she was spirited away and hidden and basically after the supreme court made their ruling she was returned to jail and then she was um she was executed [Music] [Music] may god have mercy on her soul [Music] proceeding [Music] oh i have pro-state pro-slave state missouri on one side i have these uh these fervent anti-slavery people migrating to kansas with a operating under under a religious statute uh you can imagine that uh uh that the the turmoil had to erupt and it did approximately 1855 and it became known as the uh the uh infamous border wars uh the most infamous act was uh it was probably the burning of lawrence in 1856 and also the the raid on osawatomie kansas by the infamous john brown i'm sure my great grandfather got wind of all this activity he was right and he was right in the heart of it in platte county missouri my grandmother going back to her oral tradition her oral story she told me she suggested to me that her grandfather said just before the civil war the coloreds in that area where my great-grandfather's farm was would meet in a wooded area [Music] amongst themselves and also some some slaves from neighboring farms would meet on occasion and discuss the politics of the day and also discuss the fact that uh there was something called the fugitive slave act which which applied a national bounty for runaway slaves and also the fact that there were local bounties on runaways in the in the vicinity of platte clay and jackson county missouri the the secret nightly meetings and probably with a religious theme uh probably they the slaves probably got wind of the fact that if you get into kansas territory there's some there are white people there called abolitionists that would put you up on something called the underground railroad now about this time an ill-fated port town called quindaro it was constructed at the at the confluence of the kansas and missouri rivers it was a short live town it was a port it was a it was a it was a it was a large village a port village not quite as large as the city of parkville missouri and but at any rate it was it was founded and erected by kansans anti-slavery kansans in 1855. now i'm sure in my uh my grandfather uh he was in his teens by then or middle uh late teens and he was thinking about this he probably said to himself free and he probably had a question in his mind well the miller farm is all i know free to do what well i can have my own farm someplace uh i don't have to answer to uh to uh to jesse uh well wait a minute jesse wasn't that bad jesse kind of treated me like a father why would i want to leave and start oh well i'm a man i want to start my own family the promised land i'm sure that i'm sure these meetings had religious overtones uh very strong religious overtones having to do with the old testament and the biblical uh in the biblical exodus he also knew that parkville missouri was leaning toward anti-slavery as a matter of fact the parkville the leading parkville newspaper the the luminary the printing press was thrown into the missouri river in a famous incident because of its uh because of its uh anti-slavery publications my grandmother said in the dead of winter in january or february of 1862 a rare event occurred the missouri the mighty missouri river froze and the records indicate that it froze in some places almost a meter almost a meter thick and this was the case around parkville missouri now the uh the the farm site itself was adjacent to the farm site was this natural spring and creek which flowed downhill to the missouri river about oh a mile and a half couple miles away through the woods if you follow that creek it would take you under the cover of darkness it would take you right on the edge of the missouri river right on the outskirts of the uh the township of parkville if the missouri river froze everybody knew it there was no steamboat traffic you could literally do like jesus and walk on water to freedom so at some point in the winter of 1862 my great-grandfather i'm sure he did it with others followed that creek down to to the missouri river walked across the missouri river and somehow made his way to the small town of quindaro kansas i asked my grandmother what did he do with quindaro she said well he never talked about that so much uh but apparently he was there for three or four months he could have uh he could have uh hit out as a doc hand there's a friedman dockhand uh bounty hunters were all over the place uh there was there was a bounty on his head as a matter of fact my archives research uh indicated that uh that uh during the civil war uh jesse put a uh put about put a bounty on his head 200 you know to get george washington back and he also filed at the end of the war a document called uh it was called compensation for slave who enlisted in the military and he was suing him he was suing the government for a hundred dollars for losing his heart his unpaid heart his unpaid help in august of 1862 kansas was a state now the first senator the first senator was a guy was a was a controversial character by the name of jim lane now he had approached uh old abe lincoln the war wasn't going so well for the north he approached abe lincoln uh i'm having trouble here in kansas with these ruffians in missouri i have all these able-bodied slaves escaping from uh from these farms in platte jackson and clay county and and counties farther east they're all coming to kansas i have all these able-bodied men mr lincoln can i uh can i put these guys under arms and protect kansas lincoln uh adamantly said no jim lane came back to kansas and started his own militia he called it the first kansas colored volunteer infantry regiment if you make your way to fort leavenwort kansas if you make your way to mound city kansas you can make your mark most of the slaves couldn't read or write to include george washington my great-grandfather was never he never knew his letters or numbers lou was on a large tobacco plantation and my father was the head man on that plantation he cured all the tobacco as it was borrowing from the field made out of the twist and plugs in the tobacco his owner's son told him to read and that made his owners so mad how my father read the emancipation for freedom to the other slaves and it made them so damn happy they could not work well and they got so no one could manage them when they found out they were to be free in such a short time so lewis knew my father knew it as well as he did so he sat down and talked with my father about the future and promise my father if he would stay with him and ship his tobacco for him and look after all his business on his plantation after freedom was declared he would give him a nice house and life for his family right on his plantation and he had some influence over the other slaves he wanted him to convince the others that it would be better to stay with the former owner and work for him down in father's heart he felt louis did not have a spot of good any no place for a black man so father stayed just six months after that promise and taken 11 of the best slaves on the plantation and went to kansas city and all of them joined the us army they enlisted the very night they got to kansas city and the very next morning the patty owners were there on a trail after them to take them back home but the officers said they were now enlisted u.s soldiers and not slaves it could not be touched somehow he made his way in august of 1862 to leavenworth kansas made his mark a documentary recovered and was mustered in company f of the first kansas volunteer infantry regiment well anyway as it turned out historically the first kansas colored volunteer infantry regiment was indeed the first black regiment in the civil war to engage the enemy at a place called island mild missouri near current day butler missouri in october of 1862 george was there they were the first to uh they were the first blacks to die in the civil war at the at the skirmish at island mile missouri in october of 1862. they were the first to fight alongside white troops [Music] at a place called cabin creek ironically this was in 1863 july 3rd 4th and 5th at that same time the battle of gettysburg was taking place in pennsylvania my grandfather after he was mustered out according to my grandmother saved every uh dollar that he was paid now that's that's an interesting story uh the white troops were getting 13 a month uh soldiers during the civil war the colored troops were getting ten dollars a month and they had to pay for their uniforms and their weapons but they were being fed they were being housed they were being clothed uh they they there were certainly uh discriminated against they had nowhere to spend their money so like like uh probably several untold number of black troops they saved their money my grandmother suggested to me that he saved every um every uh every ten dollars a month he he didn't have to spend and stuck it in his brokens and so when he when he was mustered out of the military he had a pocket full of money what he did was uh in 1866 when he left he stayed in kansas he uh went to lawrence specifically a place called the wakarusa valley and in the wakarusa valley there was a real good bottom land that the whites didn't want but whites didn't want to farm that land because it was mosquito-ridden and there were some cases of malaria so this became the black community of bloomington kansas in the rock wakarusa valley starting in 1866 a year after the war and old george was one of the first he was one of the he was one of the founding fathers of that small black community of bloomington he lived there he uh he met a woman or amanda simpson and married her and had a had seven kids one of which was my grandmother my grandmother said she said in a joking manner she said she said her father used to say it was a good thing that i was a slave otherwise i would have known how to farm so good you know and this is i mean this is food for thought it's a good thing now think about this it was a good thing i don't think i i used to ask her when i was a youngster wasn't he bitter about being a slave and she would say no he wouldn't he would say something to the effect that that's just the way it was that was always the way it was i told you my father's name is spot but that was his nickname in slavery his full name was spot wood rice and my son's full name is william a bill he is enlisted in the army in the philippine islands i love army men my father brother husband and son were all army men i love a man who will fight for his rights and any person that wants to be something [Music] [Applause] oh [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] me [Applause] my

Channel: Negroes To Hire

Views: 166,854

Rating: 4.6947064 out of 5

Keywords: slave, negro, plantation, nigger, slavemaster, honky, peckerwood, redneck

Id: 3a7uQ--s81g

Length: 57min 20sec (3440 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2019