The Study of Racialism

mistermulatto · New User Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 45 }

Spooked
The white slave narratives

Stephan Talty
[Figures]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As evening fell, the prow of the Brooklyn Ferry cut through the dark surface of the East River, its waters whipped by an icy October wind. The instant the ramp touched down on Fulton Street, Henry Ward Beecher strode off and headed for Broadway. He had been up late the night before, auctioning off pews to raise funds for his church in Brooklyn Heights. The auction had been an unqualified success. Plymouth Church was one of New York's most fashionable houses of worship, and Beecher's congregation had pledged $8,500. But tonight's event, an auction at the Broadway Tabernacle, posed a unique challenge.

Beecher was thirty-five; he was neither the most famous religious spokesman of his century, nor the "poet of the Victorian popular imagination," as his biographer William C. McLaughlin termed him. That would come later. But he was already a politician in the pulpit, a spokesman for the growing American middle class. Beecher was fighting his way out of his famous father's shadow by leading his flock away from Lyman Beecher's steely Calvinism toward a new, more upbeat form of Christianity.

Tonight he was to confront the most vexing religious and social question his country faced, the question that would make him an international celebrity: slavery. The lots up for auction were not pews but human beings--two young black girls known as the Edmonson sisters. The Edmonsons were the daughters of a slave mother and a white father. They had escaped the auction block in New Orleans by stowing away on a schooner bound for New York. All the local newspapers carried the story, and Beecher had been inspired to throw a fund-raiser for the sisters. They would be the highlight of an antislave auction; the preacher was trying to raise their ransom price--$2,000--and buy their freedom.

On arriving at the crowded church, Beecher climbed the podium and looked out to the eager faces assembled before [End Page 48] [Begin Page 51] him. He called the first of the sisters--a pretty girl with skin the color of light coffee--to the front of the tabernacle.

"A sale by a human flesh dealer of Christian girls!" Painting scenes as "lurid as a Rembrandt," Beecher enumerated the cruelty the girls would face on a plantation: lashing, mental degradation, endless work under a blazing sun, rape. (Beecher focused on the virginity of the girls and emphasized the inevitability of their violation.) He assumed the part of the Southern flesh dealer with surprising enthusiasm--one observer remarked that he could have been "a capital auctioneer." His somber pastoral voice returned as he explained that the Edmonson sisters had accepted their immortal Redeemer, and that they would lose their honor, their Savior, and their souls in the jungle of the South. He ended with a flourish, coarsening his voice to a rasp. "How much for her? Who bids?"

A masterful preacher, perhaps the greatest of his century, Beecher outdid himself that night. "Of all the meetings I have attended in my life," said Beecher, who would attend thousands, "for a panic of sympathy I never saw one that surpassed that." Women wailed, grew hysterical, tore off their jewelry--rings, bracelets, brooches--and piled them in the collection plates. Men's hands trembled to tear money from their pocketbooks and loosen gold watches from chains. Those who could not wait for the plate tossed bills at Beecher's feet. There was an intoxication of the spirit unlike anything ever seen in a mainstream white congregation.

Beecher, too, was moved. He had equivocated on slavery for years: though he would come to be considered a radical, his stance was full of moral evasions. Slavery was wrong, Beecher believed, but like most Americans, he doubted that it could ever be ended. In Best Thoughts of Henry Ward Beecher (1893), Lyman Abbott wrote that the girls' Christianity made him rethink the entire subject of slavery. Of course, most slaves in the mid-1800s were at least nominally Christian; the Edmonsons' Methodism was nothing special.

Abbott imagined Beecher asking himself, "Do you believe in the abolition of slavery at the price, perhaps, of war or disunion?" Beecher had already answered that question for himself with a resounding no. But now, confronted with the sight of two pale, beautiful mulatto girls, he saw the matter anew. "Shall this girl--almost as white as you are--be sold for money to the first comer to do as he likes with?" The Edmonsons' Caucasian features and creamy skin made them seem less like doomed heathens, and empathy surged through the preacher. "He sees all of this," Abbott writes, "as if he were an actor in it, himself. It is more real to him than the crowded church filled with sobbing women."

Abbott holds that Beecher had a revelation that night. He certainly achieved a new summit of passion and anger in his oratory. There was a kind of racist logic behind his newfound ardor: Beecher believed Africans did not have the same inborn [End Page 51] love of freedom as whites; mulattoes, on the other hand, inherited some of Europe's liberal spirit. And Beecher the performer sensed a new opportunity in his audience's rapturous response to the girls.

The evening of October 23, 1848, marked a new beginning: a total of $2,200 poured in, the Edmonson sisters were freed, and the auction was the lead story in the next day's papers. Beecher was suddenly an antislavery celebrity. The Brooklyn preacher began to press the slavery issue in sermons and newspaper columns, enraging Southern politicians and solidifying his reputation as a slavery-hating Christian. In 1855, when Kansas was overrun by Missouri ruffians who wanted to claim it as a slave state, he encouraged the embattled pioneers to defend themselves. Soon, crates filled with rifles--"Beecher's Bibles"--were being shipped to the territory. Beecher's Plymouth Church raised and equipped a regiment of soldiers to fight the Confederacy during the Civil War.

There were also more auctions: they grew into passion plays of sexual innocence, money, and redemption. The girls (always Christian, always pretty) grew whiter and whiter, until in 1856 Beecher "sold" a captive who was completely indistinguishable from his fairest parishioner. He dressed "Sarah" head to toe in virginal white and played with her flaxen hair, letting it fall to the floor in shining waves--its straightness a clear sign of her racial purity. He kept photographs of all the girls; late in life, he liked to leaf through them and reminisce. "White and beautiful," he called them in his autobiography. "Flaxen-haired children born under the curse of slavery." One critic remarked that if Beecher ever auctioned off a chattel slave who was "very homely and very black," it was never recorded.

* * *

In Beecher's day, slavery had sunk its hooks deep in the American heart. Citizens mistook what was for what must be: many assumed that since slavery was part of their heritage, it was here to stay. Remove it and the nation would collapse. When abolitionists called for immediate emancipation, they were seen as seditious, even in places like Massachusetts and Illinois.

The abolitionist movement had begun with a speech by William Lloyd Garrison at Boston's Park Church on July 4, 1829. In this address, Garrison threw down the gauntlet against Southern slavery, anticipating the method his rival Beecher would employ twenty years later: to shatter the crowd's complacence, he asked his audience to imagine that the slaves' skin had suddenly become white. Would they still ignore their suffering, still argue about constitutional limitations? No, he said, almost shouting. They would not. "Your voice would peal in the ears of the taskmasters like deep thunder!"

Henry Ward Beecher was by no means the only antislavery leader to enact the substitution that Garrison suggested. When Levi Coffin, one of the architects of the Underground Railroad, failed to convert other Northern gentlemen [End Page 52] [Begin Page 54] to the cause, he introduced them to a slave named Rose, a "curiosity from the South" whose white skin left them speechless with pity. Even John F. Kennedy employed this device during his famous 1963 civil rights speech. Observing that a black American could not eat lunch in a public restaurant, send his children to the best schools, or vote freely, JFK asked, "Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?"

In the late 1800s the term white slavery was used to describe poor Caucasian girls who had fallen (or been pushed) into low-level prostitution. It was hyperbole, but it got people riled up, and the problem was soon addressed with committees, government funds, and police raids. The white slave had evolved from an abolitionist rhetorical device to an icon of degradation. But in all the arguments about light-skinned slaves and white prostitutes, one of America's great secrets has been lost. Those who denounce "white slavery" often forget that there was a time when "white slave" was not hyperbole.

* * *

In the seventeenth century, thousands of European indentured servants began to arrive in port cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. They were treated much the same as the African slaves who arrived in Virginia and points South: they lived in fear of the lash; they battled starvation; they worked until they collapsed from exhaustion. But there were two crucial differences between the [End Page 54] European immigrants and their African counterparts: the Europeans had agreed to their servitude in hopes of a better life in America; and they were released, after two or five or seven years, with a new suit, a bushel of corn, and a plot of land. Though English slave traders sometimes press-ganged innocent children onto ships bound for America, indentured servitude was usually voluntary. And it was popular: from the mid-1600s to the mid-1700s, nearly two-thirds of all European immigrants came to America as indentured servants.

Of course, the hardships of white indentured servitude have been documented: in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Eugene Genovese wrote, "We cannot be sure that the position of the earliest Africans differed markedly from that of indentured servants." But white slavery--as opposed to servitude--remains obscure. History has buried these stories, and historians have yet to unearth them; stranger-than-fiction accounts of kidnapping and betrayal gather dust on library shelves. (The only other contemporary investigation into the subject is an essay by Carol Wilson in a 1999 issue of the British journal Slavery and Abolition.) One hundred and fifty years after Henry Ward Beecher's auction, [End Page 55] the white slave has become a mystery, a rumor, a ghost.

The first true white slaves emerged from the ranks of indentured servants. These "unfortunates"--often children--were kidnapped on the high seas, sold against their will by scheming relatives, or snatched from country lanes by slave traders. The exact numbers are hard to calculate, although they appear to be substantial. One historian estimated that thirty children from New York City were stolen into captivity in 1857, and he added that the number was "notoriously on the increase." It seems that thousands of white slaves were abducted from 1700 until Emancipation.

The kidnappings themselves were brutal affairs--horrific urban legends come to life. One common scenario begins when the child (often female) is grabbed on a lonely side street. A plaster is stuck over her mouth and eyes, and her body is hidden under blankets in the back of a wagon. After a furious gallop into the woods, the victim feels the blankets being thrown off, and she is lifted from the wagon. The plaster is stripped away, along with the child's clothes, and the naked child is carried to a square pit filled with water. It looks like a small grave. The child is thrown into the water and held there--an illustration in George Bourne's Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (1834) shows a slave catcher using a pole that resembles a bishop's crosier. Another conspirator pours dye into the water (nitric acid was commonly used), and the captive is turned over like a pig on a spit. The dye disperses through the water and leeches into the pores of her skin.

Children were the easiest targets, since adults had reputations, voting records, and memories that might come back to haunt a slave catcher in court. It was easier to dye a young child's skin, as well as her imagination: there are cases of emancipated [End Page 56] white slaves who refused to believe they weren't black. Those that weren't stolen were sold by desperate families, hoping to save their children from starvation by delivering them to slavery. Others were illegitimate, raised by blacks on the plantation: the shame of extramarital sex was so grave that some young white mothers preferred to abandon a child to slavery rather than raise a bastard. In 1907, a Georgia clergyman discovered that white women from his parish were still given to abandoning unwanted children in the black part of town--a revelation that left the community "hysterical."

There are even cases where African Americans captured whites to sell them down the river. In 1859, a black slave catcher named William Brown apprehended the white Issac Dickson at gunpoint near Edwardsville, Illinois, and accused him of being a fugitive slave. If the townspeople hadn't recognized Dickson, he would have been taken south (for a $200 reward) to replace a light-skinned escapee. A twenty-year-old white man from New Orleans named Adolph Archer showed up one day at a city police office to report that he had been kidnapped by a free black named De Lisle eight years earlier. For the better part of a decade, Archer had been strictly forbidden to speak to white people while he lived and worked as a black captive in the remote Attakapas territory of Louisiana.

Newspapers reported one shocking case after another. One unlucky man was slathered with a brownish "ooze" and tied to a stake in the sun to darken; his hair was cut short and seared with a hot iron. When the process was complete, he was shipped off to Georgia. He escaped eventually and returned north, only to discover that his wife had died and his six children had been scattered.

The fourteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Pennsylvanian spent several hours with her kidnappers before being rescued by two African American men. A white boy from Ohio was tattooed until he was "a genuine nondescript, neither of the white, Indian nor African species"; abolitionists didn't manage to free him until thirteen years later. Parents knew the dangers of slave catchers: one New Hampshire minister told William Lloyd Garrison that he would no sooner allow his child to play outside alone than send her into a "forest full of tigers and hyenas." But even family didn't always protect a victim. An Alabaman named James Wilson married a white woman, then sold her and her children into slavery. The buyer was a preacher.

Other captives were sold by Northern orphanages: in 1858 the New York Journal of Commerce reported that a group of white boys and girls was on display at the House of Reception, at 23 West Thirteenth Street. Cash on the barrelhead would buy one of the creatures, and the purchaser could take his acquisition home immediately. In Jamestown, Wisconsin, the newspaper published an account of an all-female, all-white auction at a place called the Free Church. The price of each child was $10, cash. The doors of the church were thrown open to bidders, who entered and saw young girls seated in rows, some of them crying. Customers walked among the ranks "with perfect coolness," checking teeth, kneading muscles between thumb and forefinger, making their selections. These castaways were probably sold as indentured servants, but the line between servitude and slavery wasn't always clear [End Page 57] in pre-Civil War America. Some dealers bought children and sold them to professional slave traders, who carried them south and sold them as light-skinned blacks. Lifelong slaves were much more valuable than seven-year servants, and these children were slaves the moment the trader's wagon crossed the Mason-Dixon Line.

White immigrants were also easy prey for slave traders. In 1791, a man made a startling deathbed confession: seventeen years earlier, he had purchased an entire boatload of Irish natives and sold them in the South. The sale of poor Europeans by the boatload was presumably rare, but any young emigrant without papers was at risk. "Just catch a stray Irish or German girl and sell her--a thing sometimes done," one writer remarked in the 1830s. "She turns into a nigger at once, and makes just as good a slave as if there were African blood in her veins."

* * *

One of the earliest and most renowned of the white slaves was Lord Altham, a British nobleman. Altham--or the Chevalier James, as he liked to call himself--was an only child, heir to three baronies, thousands of acres of English countryside, at least one castle, hundreds of tenants, and tremendous political clout. Indeed, the House of Altham was one of the oldest and most powerful noble families in Europe. But by the early 1700s, they were in crisis: James's father was a drunkard, a gambler, and a reckless lecher; his wife was thwarted by her jealous mother-in-law; and James's uncle Richard was corrupt and decadent, a monster straight out of Shakespeare. And for Richard to get his hands on the family's land and titles, little James had to disappear.

To that end, Richard sent his nephew to live in the country with poor relatives. They abused him, and Richard had the boy declared dead. Meanwhile, James had run away to London and become a street vagrant, a miserable little boy with dim memories of aristocracy. When he revealed himself to the other guttersnipes, they mockingly called him "milord" while beating him and robbing him of his remaining funds. As he took their blows, James told them that he was better than them all and that his father would come to the rescue someday. Eventually, an innkeeper who knew the family found James and contacted his wicked uncle. Richard quickly realized that he had to find a more permanent way to dispose of James, so he conspired for a ship's captain to take the boy to Pennsylvania and obtain a new history for the Chevalier. The bizarre plan was recorded in a popular book called Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Returned from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America (1734):

The story the Inhuman Uncle invented to bring the Master of the Vessel into this Project was that the Boy being the natural Son of a Person of Condition, and not meriting the Protection of his Father on account of a Propensity to Vile Actions, it was thought proper to send him where he might have less Opportunity of following his Inclinations.
Of course, the heir knew nothing of the plot to blacken his name. He thought he was being sent to Europe for schooling, and he set sail with thoughts of Paris and great books. When dinner was served [End Page 58] [Begin Page 60] on the first night, James attempted to take his seat beside the captain. But he was grabbed by a sailor and thrown back from the table. "'Hold, youngster,' cried the seaman. 'Do you think you are to be a messmate with the Captain?'" The crew laughed at him, and James stared in disbelief. Back home, the sailor would have been whipped for his insolence, then made to beg for the Chevalier's forgiveness. Faced with such a dramatic role reversal, the young nobleman went numb. "I spoke not a word," he wrote.

When a sympathetic sailor finally told him the truth, James fainted. The boy went on a hunger strike and was put on suicide watch in the hold--a sequence of events not at all uncommon on African slave ships. When the captain called him to his quarters, James protested, "But I shall be a Slave!" The officer tried to calm him: "Yes, yes. But there is nothing so terrible in the name of Slave as you imagine--'tis only another name for apprentice."

Chevalier James was sold to a brutal master in Pennsylvania named Drumon. Everything in the New World was strange to him: food, customs, the hurly-burly commerce, the wide-open landscape. Drumon put James to work in the virgin American forest alongside slaves from Africa and Europe, cutting wood for pipe staves; he earned many stripes on his back for his awkwardness. In his first few months, the slave suffered terribly. He tried to work his way out, exceeding his daily quota, but it was little use. Whether he cut forty staves an hour or a hundred, whether he spoke like an English lord or swore like a sailor, Drumon saw him exactly the same way. The master did everything in his power to degrade his slaves, to dehumanize them; he treated them like livestock or worse.

The captive hardly spoke to anyone in the New World. No one cared whether his story was true or not, and his snobbery doomed him to a solitary life. There is even evidence that James began to suffer something akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome. He experienced visions that woke him out of deep sleep: scales of justice descending to crush him; arrows shooting toward his head; a huge sword slicing toward his neck, "the blade [End Page 60] blue with keenness," its hilt encrusted with clotted gore.

James had only one confidante, an aristocratic and learned old white woman who had been sold into slavery by her husband when she became too old for his taste (and too curious about his young mistress). This unnamed woman believed the slave and taught him the history of Europe and the stories of the great English families (she didn't mention the role many of these families played in the slave trade). These forbidden lessons arrived on slips of paper, along with his daily gruel of cornbread and sweetened water. Among the "illustrious catalogue" he found records of his ancestors' greatest battles and speeches.

James never compared his own plight to that of enslaved African noblemen who mourned their own lost histories. He was too self-absorbed, and Africans remained outside his sympathies. In fact, blacks hardly appear in Chevalier James's memoir, but his narrative does present slavery with painful clarity. The reader learns the slave's diet, his view of the master class, his ploys, and his rage; for the slave-owning reader, it must have been unnerving to read such a book a hundred yards from the place where his African bondmen slept. But most of all, the reader is made to feel what it is like to be a piece of chattel property:

Instead of his fresh and rosy color, a livid paleness overspread his cheeks, his eyes lost a great part of their former luster, and were continually cast down, and his sprightliness was cast into a kind of dead sloth--a melancholy which is not to be expressed hung upon his heart. He knew what he ought to be, and to think he never could be what he ought to be was a dagger to his soul, which gave wounds too severe for anything in the power of those he was among to heal.
There are few better evocations in Frederick Douglass of the brutal shock of chattel life.

Chevalier James soon became entangled in a series of leatherstocking adventures: he ran away several times, was caught, punished, and sold, and refused the love of two young women--the first of these, Maria, was his master's daughter, and the second, Turquoise, an Iroquois girl. The slave could not be bothered with their affections; his dreams were full of "the welcomes of tenants, dependants and servants blended with the gay show of equipage and the pomp of titles." He was kind to Turquoise, but quietly explained to her that a marriage to a poor Iroquois girl was unsuitable for a man of his station. She didn't understand; through tears, she told him, "I will go with you all over the world if you will but love me." But the Chevalier held firm. Maria, equally lovestruck, fared no better. The women didn't take this well: Turquoise threw herself into a river and drowned, and Maria faded in a pining sickness. After another escape attempt and a fistfight with his master (who sold him after promising to set him free), James was finally released from bondage [End Page 61] after thirteen years. Now a young man of twenty-five, he boarded a ship back to England and once more became "the Chevalier."

If James's story ended here, it would still be extraordinary: he endured more than a decade of bondage in America, exposed the condition of the slave to large British and American audiences, and denounced the institution in unusually powerful language. He wrote about the experience of slavery more than a century before the publication of the first American slave narratives. But his cowriter would have us believe that James came away from his experience unchanged. "So wonderfully did providence interpose in favor of this young Innocent," he averred, "that his pure and florid blood flow'd through his veins untainted, and his mind imbibed nothing of the principles of those he was among, not the least tincture of their manners." The mention of "tincture" gives away the ghostwriter's ambition: he wants to convince his readers that the Chevalier had never become a black man.

And yet the Chevalier's own story shows that he did become a black man of sorts--insofar as eighteenth-century blackness meant understanding suffering and caste. When he arrived back on his native soil, James found he had been changed by his time in America. For a man who had been dreaming of retainers and courtly pomp for thirteen years, he began to act strangely. His friends and lawyers urged him to go to the courts and recover his birthright. (True to form, his Uncle Richard sent spies and saboteurs and claimed James was an imposter.) But James didn't really want to be a master anymore. He abandoned his fight to reclaim Altham for a time in order to pursue a woman of a lower class. It was a complete about-face: the haughty young prig with indomitable airs took a commoner for a wife.

The Chevalier had one more adventure worth recounting. While hunting one day, he spotted two peasants fishing from the lake on his family estate. He chased after them--a father and son, as it turned out--and his gun went off during the pursuit. The father died instantly, and James was stunned: he stood "like one transfixed with thunder." He could not speak. He became a fugitive, running from house to house, hiding from the man's relatives. He had flashbacks of his terrifying hours as a runaway slave--memories he thought he had exorcised. When the victim's family caught him, James broke down completely, beseeching them, "Oh, if any of you is my friend, have compassion on what I feel, and kill me instantly." He expected to be executed on the spot, but his plea--so inappropriate to a man of his class--stunned even the man's relatives. After hearing his explanation of the accident, they declined to kill him, and James was found guilty of no crime. He was released to live out his life as one of Britain's most compelling oddities: a nobleman with the mind of a slave. [End Page 62]

* * *

Lord Altham's journey into the world of slavery was a complicated psychological negotiation: a white man learned to think of himself in the same terms that African slaves did. But other white slaves plunged into the world of blackness far less self-consciously. The most notorious was a German girl named Salome Muller, a shoemaker's daughter who was born in a small town in Alsace around 1814. At the age of four, Salome boarded a ship with her family, bound for a new life in America. Sally lost her mother to disease during the arduous crossing (two-thirds of the ship's nine hundred passengers died of starvation or sickness). Sally landed at Balize, on the mouth of the Mississippi River, near New Orleans. When they arrived, the Germans were informed that they were to be "redemptioners"--indentured servants who paid for their passage with a term of service upon their arrival. The Mullers had already [End Page 63] paid for their passage, but unscrupulous agents had tricked them; now, the family was to be split up and sold. "We were scattered," one fellow traveler remembered, "like young birds leaving a nest, without knowing anything of each other."

Many of the redemptioners completed their terms of service (most often two years) and became free citizens in New Orleans. They kept in touch and formed a tight group. But Salome Muller, the "pretty, black-eyed, olive-skinned" girl, was lost; her cousins searched for years without finding a trace. Two and a half decades later, a woman named Madame Karl, who had been Salome's playmate on the ill-fated ship, was walking along the riverfront "down near the lower limits" of New Orleans. Passing the open doorway of a tavern, she happened to glance in. Karl never explained what prompted her to turn and peer at the woman scrubbing the floor in the dark. But she stopped cold: the woman had Salome's face, her black hair and eyes, her olive skin, and the Muller "expression." Madame Karl rushed to the girl, brought her into the light, and studied her closely. Finally, she asked her name.

"My name is Mary," said the woman. "I am a yellow girl. I belong to Mr. Belmonti." Madame Karl wasn't convinced. "You are not rightly a slave," she told the girl. "Your name is Muller. You are of pure German blood. I knew your mother and I know you." Mary had no memories of Alsace or the ship, but with her master's permission, Madame Karl took her to her family. As soon as they walked in, another German redemptioner cried, "My God! The long-lost Salome Muller!"

The Germans soon persuaded Mary that despite her servitude, her black husband, and her two black children, her name was Salome Muller (or Sally Miller, as she became). They petitioned Belmonti to release her, but he replied "with threats of public imprisonment, the chain-gang and the auctioneer's block," so they sued for her freedom. It was a high-profile case: Sally's relatives hired a brilliant lawyer, a former redemptioner named Christian Roselius--a man who had risen to become the state's attorney general before entering private practice. Sally's petition immediately became a sensation, and the New Orleans newspapers eagerly followed this case of "unparalleled hardship, cruelty and oppression." The public's sympathy was mostly with the German girl. Slave owners, however, firmly supported Belmonti. In a city like New Orleans, where African blood often intermingled with the blood of plantation owners, statesmen, pastors, and governors, where many [End Page 64] slaves were so white they could be mistaken for Mayflower descendants, the Miller case put skin color itself on trial.

Belmonti's lawyers argued that the plaintiff was not Sally Miller at all; they put forth the claim that she was a "mulatress" slave named Mary Bridgett. There was little to document Muller's German ancestry, and witnesses testified that they had always believed Sally a quadroon and that indeed they had seen slaves much whiter than she. Roselius called witnesses who swore this was the lost girl from Alsace. In the end, Sally's [End Page 65] best evidence was her unusual skin--she revealed two moles "about the size of a coffee bean" on the inside of her thigh, and a German woman who had bathed the young Sally testified that the baby had the same marks.

One witness was asked whether he would ordinarily assume that Sally was white. "I cannot say," the witness replied. "There are in New Orleans many white persons of dark complexion and many colored persons of light complexion." How could one tell the difference? "People who live where there are many colored people acquire an instinctive means of judging that cannot be well explained." Here, neatly summarized, was the foundation of the South's looking-glass world: race divining was a kind of magic; dark was light and light was dark and only a true son of the South could measure the difference; masters could be darker than their slaves; and there was no unequivocal test for determining a person's origins. "Legal determinations of race could not simply reflect community consensus," the legal scholar Ariela Gross writes, "because there was no consensus to reflect."

But the Louisiana court was not about to cede the power of self-determination to a slave, no matter how pale her skin. The suit was dismissed on the grounds that Roselius did not prove that Mary Bridgett was really Sally Miller. The judge added an intriguing conclusion to his decision, however. If this was the real Sally Miller, he wrote, then her relatives could easily buy her, since Belmonti would be eager to sell a slave "from whom he can hardly expect any service, after what has passed." Judge A. M. Buchanan tacitly acknowledged that Mary probably was Sally, but he knew that freeing the slave of a wealthy white businessman on the word of a group of Alsatian redemptioners was too much to ask.

Only an appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court was left. One of Sally's relatives sailed back to Alsace and obtained Salome's birth certificate for the defense team. This new evidence was combined with a new argument: Sally must be white, Roselius reasoned, since the public would never have wasted its sympathy on an "idle, reckless and extravagant" quadroon; the empathy of whites proved her origins. The court agreed.

New Orleans celebrated in high style. There was an elaborate party with fine German food and wine. Sally Miller was welcomed into white New Orleans society: "The rich, the beautiful and the accomplished" flocked to greet the orphan who had returned to the bosom of her race.

The new citizen may have become white and free again, but she lost her black family and friends in the process. Her two sons, now categorized as free mulattos, "went to Tennessee and Kentucky, were heard of once or twice and disappeared." Nor did Sally recover all of her white family: her father and brother had died during her time in bondage. Her sister was never found; presumably she toiled as a black slave somewhere in Louisiana, never knowing her true identity. [End Page 66] But Sally did not want for companions: she became a celebrity of sorts, an honored guest at exclusive parties and teas. A short time later she married a dashing celebrity--a Mississippi riverboat captain--but their marriage failed, and Sally's star dimmed. She finally moved to California, where she lived out her days alone.

The Sally Miller trial was extraordinary, but it was not unique: during the nineteenth century, Southern courts were often asked to settle questions of racial identity. Slaves appeared before juries, endeavoring to establish that their ancestors were whites or American Indians, not Africans. Bills of sale were scrutinized, along with samples of the plaintiff's hair, voting records, and various acts of citizenship (all considered proof of whiteness). Different techniques for discovering the rogue African gene were put forth, and legislatures struggled with the issue.

* * *

Many travelers in the American South encountered captives as pale as Sally Miller; an eerie feeling--a kind of racial vertigo--swept over them. On December 4, 1863, the Union officer J. W. DeForest wrote his relatives about a group of children in rural Louisiana. He was shocked that these children, with their "hazel or blue eyes, chestnut or flaxen heads and clear complexions," were slaves. "I had met the same persons before in the streets, without suspecting that they were other than pure Anglo-Saxon."

Even native Southerners, hardened to the sights of slave life, reacted strongly to white slaves: in 1821, the auction of a woman and her children who were "as white as any of our citizens" scandalized Louisville, and no one dared bid on them. Light-skinned mulattoes were prized auction items, as long as they clearly had some African blood. But experienced traders knew that it was almost impossible to sell a slave whose complexion was too close to that of the potential buyer.

Despite this unease, many Southerners prized their light-skinned property. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, visited a Georgia plantation just before the Civil War. One day he was riding through a large field as a gang of workers hoed. An overseer pointed out a woman: "That one is pure white. You see her hair?" Olmsted stopped and studied the pale-skinned, straight-haired girl. "Every plantation has at least one," the overseer told him. Startled, Olmsted asked the slave drivers if the girl would be recognized as a slave if she ran away. Oh, yes, one of the overseers replied. A Northerner could never tell the difference, but a Southerner would know immediately; her language and manners would give her away, no matter what clothes she wore. Olmsted wasn't convinced: What if she was raised among white people as a house servant? The overseer considered this for a moment, then replied: In that case, the only way to tell that she was a slave was to see how she reacted when a white man "looked her in the eyes." Such was the psychology of slavery: A true slave might change her clothes, and even her dialect, but never the terror in her heart.

European visitors to the South were [End Page 67] perhaps even more shocked by Anglo-Saxon slavery. In the 1850s an English writer named Charles Mackay visited New Orleans. Pro- and antislavery feelings had reached fever pitch, and the Englishman hovered near the doorway of a slave depot, afraid to go in lest he be taken for an abolitionist and beaten or jailed. Mackay spotted a slave trader he knew from a previous stay in New York, and the man escorted him between the columns of slaves--men on one side, women on the other--being offered for sale. The blacks called out to him, begging him to buy them, detailing their skills as nursemaids, carpenters, gardeners, coachmen, barbers, and waiters. Mackay soon regretted his curiosity: the display made him physically nauseous. He vowed that if "by the mere expression of my will" slavery could be abolished, he would snap his fingers and release these people from bondage. When the slaves learned he was just a writer absorbing some local color, they gave him a dismissive look and returned to their vigil.

A few minutes later, Mackay was taken aback by the sight of a man beckoning to him from the end of the line. He approached slowly; as he drew closer he realized the slave was as white as he was. To Mackay's well-traveled eye, he looked like an Irishman from Cork. The man stepped forward and announced that he was an excellent gardener who could also do some carpentry and look after horses, his voice rising and falling in an unmistakable Celtic brogue.

"But you are joking," said Mackay. "You are an Irishman?"

The slave shook his head and replied, "My father was an Irishman."

The slave dealer and owner of the depot approached, and Mackay pointed out the pale-skinned man, asking if some horrible mistake had been made: "This is a white man!" he cried. The trader, probably amused by the foreigner's reaction, calmly replied that the man's mother was a "nigger" and that he himself had sold much whiter men than this. [End Page 68] The nausea returned, and Mackay felt a desire to run out of the depot, into the fresh air. But before he did, he made an extraordinary offer, one that did not occur to him when he was inspecting the other, darker slaves. He wanted to buy the gardener and set him free in New York City. The trader refused to take his money, telling the Englishman that this would be a disservice to the slave: freed slaves had no energy or self-confidence, and this one would soon fall to the lowest levels of degradation in New York. When the crutch of the master's care is removed, the trader asserted, freed captives cannot walk alone. Mackay reluctantly accepted the racist logic and left the Corkman to his fate.

Mackay's response is proof of Henry Ward Beecher's hypothesis: no slave arouses white sympathy like a white slave. When faced with the dark-skinned captives, Mackay bemoaned man's inhumanity to man and wished it all away. But one Irishman was worth over a thousand dollars. This was a brother: through him, Mackay could see himself on the block in the New Orleans depot. Imagine Mackay's response multiplied a thousand or a million times, and you have a sense of the threat white slaves posed to the Old South.

* * *

Of course, kidnappers were not the main source of light-skinned slaves. The greed of the nation's least scrupulous entrepreneurs was more than matched by the lust of slave owners.

Light-skinned mulatto slaves were everywhere in the South, and they figured prominently in everything from Confederate racial theories to plantation hierarchy (lighter slaves became the favored house servants, and darker bondmen went to the fields) to the folklore of Southern romance. Slave owners made concubines not only of their slaves but also of the mulatto daughters these unions produced. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, had a mulatto daughter of his own brother as his mistress. And one planter in Montgomery, Kentucky, managed to impregnate four generations of slaves--ultimately becoming father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather to the same little boy.

Southerners were well aware that illicit sex had caused the color line to blur and warp. In 1859 the Charleston correspondent of the New York Gazette argued, "If the morals of the city continue as at present in a century there will be no Negroes left." When the English travel writer Anne Royall visited Virginia in 1823, she found that "these people, instead of abolishing slavery, are gradually not only becoming slaves but themselves changing color."

George Fitzhugh, the leading philosopher of slavery--possessed of a brilliant mind and a medieval sensibility--responded to the crisis by proposing that the nation's poor whites be enslaved for their own good. Fitzhugh's argument was simple: the strong were meant not only to rule the weak but also to care for them and include them in the plantation's extended family; feudalism, not democratic capitalism, was the ideal political system. "Some were born with saddles on their backs," the Tidewater planter wrote in his vivid, cavalier style. [End Page 69] "And others booted and spurred to ride them. And the riding does them good." Fitzhugh wanted to transcend race by creating an integrated house of slavery, ruled by a white American elite.

As improbable as it sounds to modern ears, Fitzhugh's modest proposal found many supporters among the Southern ruling class. Senator James Mason of Virginia affirmed that slavery was ennobling to men and women, whatever their race. Newspapers reprinted Fitzhugh's essays and offered editorial support. "While it is far more obvious that Negroes should be slaves than whites," the Richmond Inquirer wrote, "the principle of slavery is, itself, right and does not depend on difference of complexion." Unsettled by the thought that time would only bleach the slave population further, divorcing slavery from skin color, some Southerners thought that Fitzhugh's theories provided a way out.

The radical idea soon reached the ears of a young lawyer and aspiring politician in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln read Fitzhugh's influential Sociology of the South (1854) and followed the debate on white slavery in the national newspapers closely. What he read disturbed him. "The clamor for white slavery seemed to be in all the papers I read from the deep South," he wrote in 1855, the year before he helped found the antislavery Republican Party in Illinois. Fitzhugh's writings spurred Lincoln to write memoranda to himself countering the planter's arguments; he remarked that in the Southern racial hierarchy, "you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own." But even as he contended with Fitzhugh's essays, Lincoln sensed that the sensational figure of the white slave had already carried the issue beyond all rational argument. "The sentiments pouring forth from Dixie made me despair that slavery could ever be removed from this country by peaceful means," he wrote a friend soon after reading Sociology. Fitzhugh's ideas became intertwined in Lincoln's mind with his belief that the Democrats and their proslavery supporters were trying to nationalize slavery. Like the Virginia writer, Lincoln believed the nation could not survive half slave and half free. Fitzhugh's advocacy of white bondage helped galvanize Lincoln against the South's vision of a coast-to-coast feudal paradise where class would supplant race as the rationale for slavery. [End Page 70]

* * *

In 1734, the white slave had gained notoriety in the memoir of Lord Altham. The Anglo-Saxon captive became an object of dread and compassion, a ghost that Americans could neither avoid nor fully confront. Almost exactly one hundred years later, the ghost returned as a conscious creation. The first abolitionist novel published in America--a best-seller that preceded Uncle Tom's Cabin by almost two decades--was The White Slave (1836). Now forgotten, it is the story of a white-skinned mulatto who escapes from slavery and returns to the country disguised as a white man. The White Slave (also published under the titles Memoirs of a Fugitive and Memoirs of Archy Moore) gives turbulent expression to all the rage that Harriet Beecher Stowe transformed into Christian forbearance in Uncle Tom's Cabin. If Uncle Tom was the archetype of the accommodating black man, Archy Moore was the exact opposite--Nat Turner in whiteface.

The White Slave was written by a white Whig historian called Richard Hildreth, but it was published anonymously, in part to give the impression that it was nonfiction. The novel begins with a dedication to the reader. Already the tone is dark, seething: the narrator imagines his story piercing through the "triple steel" that encircles the oppressor's heart, penetrating into his conscience in order to "torture him with the picture of himself." Archy is the son of a beautiful mulatto slave (herself the daughter of a prominent military officer) and a Virginia aristocrat, Colonel Moore; he has "the best blood in Virginia" running through his veins. He considers himself the equal of any man he encounters, and superior to many--including his half brothers. In other words, he feels white. "I prided myself on my color as much as any Virginian," he [End Page 71] boasts early on in the book. He learns to read and write alongside his white half brother, but crosses the line when he demands to be recognized as a son: his father sends him into the fields to be lashed by the overseer. "My love for Colonel Moore turned into hate," Archy says. "I trembled for the future, and cursed the country and the hour that gave me birth."

The white slave falls in love with a lovely house servant named Cassy; but the jealous Moore forces them into flight. When they are caught, the colonel orders Cassy to whip Archy, but she refuses; the pair is split up and sold. They [End Page 72] are reunited just long enough to have a child, but Archy is so scarred by his experiences that he is tempted to kill the infant rather than let him grow up a slave.

Archy escapes to England, then sails back--bearing papers that prove he is a British subject--to reclaim Cassy and his son. He enters Southern society as a white man and is welcomed into the mansions of plantation owners; he has a chance to observe slavery from the other side of the looking glass. Planters gossip to him about miscegenation among the Founding Fathers and presidents, and one slaveholder recalls the sale of a woman who claimed to be a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson: "As far as resemblance goes, her face and figure sustained her pretensions." They whisper about Martin Van Buren, whose relationship with a black maid was hot gossip in the 1830s. Some Yankees accompanying Archy cannot believe they will have an "amalgamator" as vice president, but one planter defends him. There is nothing wrong with having a black lover or mulatto children, he explains, so long as you do not treat them as human beings. If Van Buren had quietly shipped his girls off to New Orleans to be sold as concubines, no one would have minded a bit.

Archy's tour among whites deepens his understanding of the slave owner's mind and sharpens his hatred. "Were I inclined to superstition, I should believe they were not men, but rather demons incarnate, evil spirits who had assumed the human shape, who falsely put on a semblance of human feelings in order the more secretly and securely to prosecute their grand conspiracy against mankind." There are times when Hildreth's language sounds remarkably contemporary, like something from a 1990s Harlem street corner.

In the end, Archy is reunited with Cassy, but this sentimental conclusion does not deflect the anger that courses through the narrative. Before the reunion, his anguish at its high point, Archy delivers a remarkable monologue aimed at the "true" white slaves of America, who are far more numerous than black slaves. "Not white slaves such as I was, pronounced so by the law," Archy explains, but those millions of Americans who either support slavery or stand by and let it thrive. "Those chains which you have helped to rivet on the limbs of others, you now find have imperceptibly been twined about yourselves and drawn so tightly that even your hearts are no longer able to beat freely."

The White Slave went through at least seven printings and became a cult novel, published in Boston but passed from hand to hand even in the South. Henry Mayer, the biographer of Garrison, reports that "throughout the 1830s and 1840s abolitionists and their friends wept over the book," in the belief that it was a historical memoir.

The White Slave is not a great book, but Archy is a compelling American character. He is not a foreigner, brought to these shores in chains: he is a blue blood (or black blue blood), "another [End Page 73] Ishmael, wandering in the wilderness," every man's hand against him, and his hand against every man. Archy calls slave owners devils, the Constitution a fraud, and America a nation on the brink of cataclysm. In his torn, volatile, biracial self, the reader could trace the portrait of a divided nation twenty-five years before the first cannons were fired on Fort Sumter.

Hildreth's decision to make Archy a near white mulatto may have been prompted by his own unconscious racism; perhaps he couldn't envision a coal-black hero as icily brilliant as Archy Moore. But there was clearly more to it. Hildreth consciously attempted to create a completely American character, a changeling who knows the lives of both chattel and master. He wanted to fuse the slave's anger with the buried moral instincts of his white readers: to throw the voice of slavery to make it heard. Perhaps Hildreth wanted his readers to see themselves in this new kind of black man: not a pleading or buffoonish or self-sacrificing or noble figure, but a firebrand, a revolutionary unafraid of the slave empire, or of death itself.

* * *

If white slavery is still invisible to scholars of slavery in America, it has become unsettlingly visible on the fringes of the culture wars. While most right-leaning commentators deride the claims of identity [End Page 74] politics, the self-styled "revisionist historian" Michael A. Hoffman II has dedicated himself to recovering the history of white slavery and servitude. In 1991 Hoffman, the author of Tales of the Holohoax (1989) and Masonic Assassination (1978), published They Were White and They Were Slaves. The book chronicles the miserable lives of indentured servants in early colonial North America, some of whom, Hoffman insists, spent their whole lives under the yoke. For Hoffman, the existence of white slaves gives the lie to the African American narrative of victimization; bondage, he argues, was a multiracial experience, and no group has an exclusive claim to its legacy. Whites, on this view, have been doubly oppressed--enslaved and then forgotten. If someone ought to be paid reparations, he says, it is the descendants of white slaves, not the blacks.

Of course, the history of white slavery hardly proves Hoffman's point. Like The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, They Were White and They Were Slaves takes the exception for the rule. The idea that some whites were slaves--or that some Jews owned slaves--is intriguing because unexpected. Everybody knows that slaves in America were overwhelmingly black and that the majority of slaveholders were white Christians; statistically, white slavery (like Jewish participation in the slave trade) barely registers. But in today's America, apparently, the idea of "white pride" is so abstract that its proponents must adduce a history of racial violence and discrimination in order to create a story of white people that proceeds "up from slavery."

At the same time, Wonders of the African World, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s recent television series, has helped to reinvigorate debate over the meaning of the North Atlantic slave trade. Gates provoked a storm of controversy by focusing attention on another forgotten figure, the African slaver. His aggressive questioning of the descendants of black slave traders dramatized one black American's anger and anguish at the role African kings and merchants played in supplying the world with black flesh. It's a tricky subject: the fact of the African slave trade has long been used to underwrite reactionary political agendas, from nineteenth-century colonialism to twenty-first-century denials of white culpability for American slavery. And yet this confounding history remains as disturbing and inescapable as the story of Sally Miller.

White slaves, black slavers: it may be that these rogue figures are a testament to the brute economic power of slavery. The lure of riches was so great as to upend the expectation that blood is destiny. But if slavery has always been a singular evil, its lessons are nevertheless familiar. Then, as now, the experiences of black and white bled into each other in ways that neither genetics nor ideology could predict or control. The white slave is a study in collapsing categories: servant and freeman; slave, mulatto and white; European and American and African; human and subhuman. In one person, many identities: the white slave betokens a secret proximity between black and white that dates back to the beginning of America's racial drama.

Stephan Talty is a freelance writer currently at work on a history of black and white culture in America. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Vibe, and the Chicago Review.