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00:00:00Your country, how came it yours? Before the pilgrims landed, we were here.
00:00:15Your country, how came it yours? Before the pilgrims landed, we were here.
00:00:38Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not. May expatiate
00:00:49with owlish gravity upon the bliss of ignorance, discourse flippantly from armchairs of the
00:00:55pleasures of slave life. But let them toil with him in the field, sleep with
00:01:07him in the cabin, feed with him on husks. Let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled
00:01:17on. And they will come back with another story in their mouths. Let them know the heart of
00:01:25the poor slave. Learn his secret thoughts, thoughts he dare not utter in the hearing of the white
00:01:30man. Let them sit by him in the silent watches of the night. Converse with him in trustful
00:01:40confidence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And they will find that ninety-nine
00:01:48out of every hundred are intelligent enough to understand their situation and to cherish
00:01:53in their bosoms the love of freedom as passionately as themselves. Solomon Northrup, twelve years
00:02:05a slave.
00:02:29In January, 1793, a remarkable story of the
00:02:35sight appeared above the rooftops of Philadelphia, the birthplace of American independence. A woven
00:02:44basket large enough to carry a man, suspended only by an enormous balloon. It was the first
00:02:55voyage in the United States of the famous French aeronaut, Jean-Pierre Blanchot. Benjamin Rush, one
00:03:07of the city's fathers, declared, it was a truly sublime sight. Every faculty of the mind was seized,
00:03:16expanded, and captivated by it.
00:03:26We're into the age of enlightenment. And the balloon is certainly a product of it. Because
00:03:33we're talking chemistry with the gases that expand it, we're talking about aeronautics with the
00:03:38principles that, developing principles that hold it up. And we're also talking about that kind of
00:03:44optimism, that the mind can do anything.
00:03:50Part of what the enlightenment gave people faith in was this, this notion of a doctrine of progress. That, that
00:03:58history
00:03:58itself could be progressive. That human beings and the human character and human nature could be improved,
00:04:05maybe even perfected. And in America now, there was the spreading belief that liberty would expand. And the
00:04:12contradictions to that liberty, the problems that that liberty would face, would somehow be dissolved or absorbed.
00:04:24At the end of the revolution, the most conspicuous contradiction to liberty in America was slavery.
00:04:33By 1790, one in five Americans was being held in bondage.
00:04:41Most of the 700,000 enslaved men, women, and children who planted America's crops and tilled them,
00:04:50who kept America's homes and cooked its meals, who forged America's tools and weaved its very fabric,
00:05:00had been born in the oldest colonies of the South, over half in Virginia and Maryland alone.
00:05:08And though they were not untouched by the rhetoric of progress and equality that swept the young nation in those
00:05:15days,
00:05:17neither were they freed by it.
00:05:20America had decided in its first documents to keep nearly all the Africans now in America slaves.
00:05:27The Constitution prohibited even a vote on ending the slave trade until 1808.
00:05:38Still blacks claim out of the American Revolution their own kind of a declaration of independence.
00:05:45That they claim their own place now in this republic.
00:05:48That they refuse to let America say that the Declaration of Independence only applies to white people.
00:05:55In all of the ways that blacks start writing petitions to state legislatures,
00:06:00the ways that they appropriate the very language of the Declaration of Independence to their own uses,
00:06:05it's quite clear that they saw themselves as vessels of the legacy of this revolution.
00:06:14During the revolution, Thomas Jefferson had written the words,
00:06:19All men are created equal.
00:06:21He had defined the spirit of resistance and shaped the foundation of American democracy.
00:06:28And, in the early years of the New Republic,
00:06:32his writings would give voice to the paradox of human bondage
00:06:36in the land of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:06:42Jefferson always believed, always stated in any case,
00:06:47that the right of one man to hold another as property was an illegitimate form of property.
00:06:53From his earliest public pronouncements,
00:06:55Jefferson announced that there was something profoundly wrong with the entire concept of slavery.
00:07:02Yet, like most Virginians of his day in class,
00:07:06he found it virtually impossible to live without all of this unfree labor.
00:07:15In 1793, Thomas Jefferson was Secretary of State
00:07:19and the owner of over 130 human beings.
00:07:24Jefferson knew first-hand of the injustices of slavery,
00:07:28and his writings, both public and private,
00:07:31warned of a day when the slave would rise, as he put it,
00:07:35from the dust.
00:07:42Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure
00:07:46when we have removed their only firm basis,
00:07:50the conviction in the minds of the people
00:07:53that these liberties are the gift of God,
00:07:56that they are not to be violated, but with his wrath?
00:08:01Thomas Jefferson.
00:08:05Jefferson gave us the Declaration of Independence,
00:08:08but Jefferson is really one of the first people,
00:08:16and certainly the most important person,
00:08:19to discuss in writing black inferiority.
00:08:23He's the first person to discuss in writing the idea
00:08:28that blacks and whites cannot live together as equals.
00:08:36In 1781, five years after he composed the Declaration of Independence,
00:08:42Jefferson wrote notes on the state of Virginia.
00:08:48In it, he answered queries about the mountains and rivers,
00:08:52cascades and caverns,
00:08:54several pages devoted to the average fall of rain.
00:09:00But in Query 14,
00:09:03the administration of justice and the description of the laws,
00:09:08Jefferson turned his attention to the character of his slaves.
00:09:12Their griefs are transient, he wrote.
00:09:15Their odor disagreeable.
00:09:22Are not the fine mixtures of red and white,
00:09:26the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one,
00:09:32preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances,
00:09:37that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?
00:09:43Add to these flowing hair a more elegant symmetry of form,
00:09:49their own judgment in favor of the whites,
00:09:52declared by the preference of them as uniformly as is the preference of the orangutan
00:09:57for the black women over those of his own species.
00:10:05Jefferson had to find excuses for why he said one thing and practiced another.
00:10:10And so his answer was that Africans and their descendants were biologically inferior to Anglos
00:10:16and therefore they were essentially children.
00:10:19And it was his responsibility, his duty to care for these people
00:10:22who simply couldn't care for themselves in a free world.
00:10:41I was awakened and brought to see myself poor, wretched, undone, and without the mercy of God.
00:10:50I was tempted to believe hell would be my portion.
00:10:55And all of a sudden my dungeon shook, my chains flew off, and glory to God I cried.
00:11:09During the American Revolution, Richard Allen, born a slave,
00:11:14had been converted under the preachings of an itinerant white minister.
00:11:19He had worked for the patriot forces during the war to earn money to buy his freedom.
00:11:25And in 1786, he came to Philadelphia, America's capital,
00:11:31a free man and a Methodist preacher.
00:11:36His dream was to build a church,
00:11:39to uplift the morals of those so long oppressed by slavery.
00:11:44Here's a man who has bought himself out of slavery.
00:11:50He's participated in the evangelical revolution that's happening concurrently with the revolution in the political realm.
00:12:05And in that evangelical revolution, the sense of the equality of people across racial lines in the eyes of God
00:12:17has for at least a moment become a reality in the social order.
00:12:23By 1793, Richard Allen was one of over 2,000 freed slaves in Philadelphia,
00:12:30embarking on another experiment in liberty.
00:12:35Allen had enlisted members of the white community in raising money for an African church
00:12:41and offered himself as an example that former slaves could reach as high as white Americans.
00:12:50Some of what moved Allen were ideas like work real hard, go to school, learn, you can do anything.
00:13:01You know, these principles, these American principles that, hey, here's this wilderness,
00:13:09and if we dedicate ourselves, we can change it.
00:13:15We can change it into a garden.
00:13:16I think Allen believed that.
00:13:22Allen spent his days going among the poorest of the freed slaves,
00:13:26preaching as many as five times a day.
00:13:31He attended this white Methodist church until black members were evicted from services one Sunday
00:13:38for mistakenly sitting in seats reserved for whites,
00:13:43seats the black community had helped to build.
00:13:48But during the sweltering summer of 1793,
00:13:52Allen believed Philadelphia's black community would have an opportunity
00:13:57to prove itself once and for all.
00:14:04Any summer in a city was an unhealthy time.
00:14:08I mean, sanitation was primitive, to say the least.
00:14:13People got sick and people died.
00:14:15What was unusual about 1793 is that the rates of death creep up,
00:14:22and up, and then they start to leap up.
00:14:29A malignant fever has broken out in Water Street,
00:14:33which has already carried off 12 persons.
00:14:36The disease is violent and of short duration.
00:14:39In one case, it killed in 12 hours,
00:14:42and in no case has it lasted more than four days.
00:14:47Benjamin Rush, Philadelphia.
00:15:00A real siege mentality took over, so that in a household, if one person caught it,
00:15:07that person was ostracized, and often just put out doors.
00:15:13And you had the situation where you had actual situations where children were put out of doors,
00:15:20dropped in the street, because people were afraid the child would infect everybody else.
00:15:32It's a scary moment. It's a moment of absolute chaos.
00:15:35The government flees town.
00:15:38The people who are supposed to be responsible for law and order
00:15:44give up, run away the ones who can, the ones who are rich enough.
00:15:50The week before last, the deaths were about 40.
00:15:53The last week, about 80.
00:15:55And this week, I think there will be about 200.
00:15:58All persons who can find asylum elsewhere are flying from this city.
00:16:02The President set out for Mount Vernon yesterday.
00:16:05General Knox is setting out for Massachusetts,
00:16:07and I think, to go to Virginia.
00:16:10Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State.
00:16:16Dr. Rush has acknowledged, with a candor that does him honor,
00:16:20that in his early days, having depended on gentle purges of salts,
00:16:24his patients all died.
00:16:28Afterwards, he had recourse to strong purges of Calamal and Jallop,
00:16:32and the bleeding.
00:16:34Matthew Carey.
00:16:39Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
00:16:43and Philadelphia's leading physician,
00:16:46had acquired a reputation as a friend of the black community
00:16:50when he joined Allen in soliciting funds for the African church.
00:16:56Dr. Rush had some reports that seemed to him to indicate
00:17:00that people of African ancestry are immune.
00:17:04So several ideas come together in this man's mind
00:17:07that this is a divine dispensation,
00:17:11that you have a segment of the community despised, discriminated against,
00:17:15who are, for some reason, he thinks, unable to contract yellow fever.
00:17:21So what an opportunity for them to be of service
00:17:24to the white community that is afflicted,
00:17:27nurse people, treat people,
00:17:29and then in the aftermath,
00:17:30how much gratitude is going to be lavished upon them.
00:17:33And so you had this anomalous situation
00:17:36of people who wouldn't allow,
00:17:39who would never dream of having a black person enter their front door,
00:17:44let alone their bedroom.
00:17:46People who are now dependent on a black person who was wielding a knife,
00:17:53and who entered the bedroom and opened a vein.
00:18:05I don't know what the people would do if it were not for the Negroes,
00:18:09as they are the principal nurses.
00:18:12Dr. Rush has had it, but recovered.
00:18:16Isaac Heston.
00:18:19By October, nearly 4,000 white Philadelphians lay dead or dying,
00:18:25and 10% of the city's black population had been claimed by the plague.
00:18:32In the end, the fever had shown no preference for black or white.
00:18:40The plague didn't end until the first frost in November.
00:18:45And then there seemed to be this miraculous lifting of the curse.
00:18:51And, of course, people were jubilant
00:18:53and felt that the city had been saved, had been delivered.
00:18:59And then race rises up
00:19:02and begins to become the organizing principle.
00:19:09With the cool weather came accusations and charges
00:19:14against the black nurses, cart drivers, and gravediggers,
00:19:18charges of wrongdoing, of profiteering, and of murder.
00:19:24The yellow fever epidemic is a harbinger of things to come
00:19:27for African Americans, because it's a place where African Americans
00:19:31put in a lot of energy hoping to earn themselves a place in American society.
00:19:40And as a result, they are vilified for it.
00:19:45What we see is folks beginning to dig in and become entrenched
00:19:49for this long struggle that they saw on the horizon.
00:19:55So we have this, how do we live for today?
00:19:58And also, how do we live for tomorrow?
00:20:00What is it that will make things better for our children and our grandchildren?
00:20:03And this planning and strategizing was beginning to form in earnest.
00:20:09The following year, in the shadow of Independence Hall,
00:20:14Richard Allen opened his church, that it would be a gathering place of souls.
00:20:20It was called Bethel, House of God.
00:20:39When I arrived at the age of 18, it was my lot to be introduced
00:20:44to a slave girl named Melinda.
00:20:47Melinda was graceful in her walk, extraordinary.
00:20:50Her skin was smooth with dark and penetrating eyes.
00:20:56Before I was aware of it, I was deeply in love
00:20:59and became satisfied that it was reciprocal.
00:21:03I could read it by the warm and affectionate shake of the hand
00:21:07and a gentle smile upon the lovely cheek.
00:21:11I could read it in the language of her bright and sparkling eye.
00:21:15Our marriage took place during Christmas.
00:21:19And some months later, Melinda made me a father, Henry Bibb.
00:21:30Slave marriages took many forms, from elaborate weddings,
00:21:34to a couple's jumping over a broomstick hand in hand.
00:21:40When ceremonies were conducted by white ministers,
00:21:44the phrases, till death do you part, and those whom God has joined together,
00:21:49let no man put asunder, were customarily omitted,
00:21:54since slave marriages were neither legal nor secure.
00:22:02In 1793, a new invention would threaten those unions as never before.
00:22:09That year, an application for a patent was made by a school teacher named Eli Whitney.
00:22:17Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic had shut down the government
00:22:21and delayed action on Whitney's invention,
00:22:25a device to separate the seeds from cotton without destroying the fiber.
00:22:31It was called an engine, or gin for short.
00:22:37This gin, if turned with horses or by water,
00:22:41two persons will clean as much cotton in one day
00:22:44as a hundred persons could clean in the same time.
00:22:47Eli Whitney.
00:22:49The cotton gin was important, probably the most important invention
00:22:54in American history up to the Civil War,
00:22:58but it carried a great price.
00:23:02It carried a price for black people,
00:23:04and it also carried a price for white people,
00:23:07because while the country advanced economically
00:23:10because of this technology,
00:23:12it created a system that they were going to have to deal with later on.
00:23:21Before Whitney's invention,
00:23:24short staple cotton could not be grown for profit
00:23:26because of the labor needed to filter out the seeds.
00:23:31Now, it could be grown almost anywhere climate permitted.
00:23:37And American farmers wasted no time
00:23:40pushing west into the wilderness of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.
00:23:47seeking more and more land to turn white with cotton.
00:23:53Within 50 years, 75% of the world's cotton
00:23:58came from the black earth of the American South,
00:24:01making work for an army of laborers
00:24:03who planted and picked it.
00:24:08But as the nation moved west,
00:24:10no slave family would be safe from separation.
00:24:37When my babe was born, it weighed only 4 pounds,
00:24:41but God let it live.
00:24:43When he was a year old, they called him beautiful.
00:24:47The little vine was taking a deep root in my existence,
00:24:51though its clinging fondness excited a mixture of love and pain.
00:24:56When I was most sorely oppressed, I found a solace in his smiles.
00:25:01I loved to watch his infant slumbers.
00:25:06But always there was a dark cloud over my enjoyment.
00:25:10I could never forget that he was a slave.
00:25:15Harriet Jacobs.
00:25:22If a master died, or if a master went into debt,
00:25:25or if the crops failed, or if there was some catastrophe,
00:25:30these people were a prey not only to hunger and poverty,
00:25:36but were a prey to their most intimate relationships being violated.
00:25:43One of the challenges of trying to understand what slavery meant
00:25:48is to somehow balance the big picture of
00:25:53here is this dreadful, oppressive relationship
00:26:01with the other reality that
00:26:04there are men, women, and children
00:26:08who are living their lives, who are falling in love,
00:26:11who are deciding to have children,
00:26:17who have all the kinds of human frailties of others.
00:26:25After the sale of my mother,
00:26:27my father's master resolved to sell my father
00:26:31to a southern slave dealer.
00:26:34About midnight, my grandfather silently repaired to the cabin of my father,
00:26:41gave him a bottle of cider and a small bag of parched corn,
00:26:45and then, praying to the god of his native country to protect his son,
00:26:51enjoined him to fly from the destruction which awaited him.
00:26:55In the morning, the Georgian could not find his newly purchased slave,
00:27:00who was never seen or heard of from that day.
00:27:05Charles Ball.
00:27:22After the invention of the cotton gin, the threat of sale loomed larger than ever before,
00:27:28and laws were passed to keep slaves under a tighter watch.
00:27:34Some resisted by running away, others by stealing or refusing to work.
00:27:41A very few saw no other alternative but to take up arms.
00:27:47One was a slave named Gabriel, who stole a pig and was hauled into a courthouse outside Richmond, Virginia in
00:27:571799.
00:28:00Gabriel was caught stealing a pig.
00:28:02Instead of accepting the abuse, which of course every slave was supposed to accept,
00:28:07he threw the man to the ground, wrestled him to the ground,
00:28:10and bit off the better part of his left ear.
00:28:12That, of course, was a capital crime. Pig stealing was a common occurrence.
00:28:16Biting white people was something that was not encouraged for black Virginians to do.
00:28:24Gabriel was convicted of attacking and maiming the white man who caught him.
00:28:30To deter others from such crimes, he was publicly humiliated, branded,
00:28:35and forced to spend a month in jail.
00:28:40As Gabriel sat in his cell, he decided that the time was right to organize the slaves of Richmond
00:28:47and strike against those who were holding them in bondage.
00:28:52The only time that slaves would have had any mobility without the most rigid observation of whites would have been
00:29:02on a Sunday,
00:29:03would have been at night.
00:29:06Religious gatherings could have, in some cases, provided an opportunity for people to meet.
00:29:14We must never forget that any kind of move toward liberation among blacks was a question of life and death.
00:29:32Like all revolutionaries, Gabriel seemed to have very little concern for violence and danger.
00:29:41He was an enormous man, 6'2", 6'3", in a time of relatively shorter men.
00:29:47He was a blacksmith, so he was a man of enormous strength.
00:29:51He was described as having scars on his face.
00:29:54He was missing most of his front teeth.
00:29:56And I suspect that that came from mixing it up in the quarters with other slaves.
00:30:01He was a man who people instinctively tended to follow.
00:30:05And he apparently feared very little.
00:30:12After his release, Gabriel began hammering out instruments of war, turning shovels into swords and molding bullets.
00:30:20Through most of the year 1800, he recruited soldiers for a rebel army.
00:30:30All the whites were to be massacred, except the Quakers, the Methodists and the Frenchmen.
00:30:34And they were to be spared on account of their being friendly to liberty.
00:30:39They intended also to spare all the poor white women who had no slaves.
00:30:43Ben Woolfolk, conspirator.
00:30:47Obviously, he was not a naive man.
00:30:50He realized that this would be black freedom born of white fear, not out of white magnanimity.
00:31:03One thousand men was to be raised from Richmond.
00:31:07Six hundred from Ground, Squirrel Bridge, and four hundred from Goochland.
00:31:12The business of the insurrection had so far advanced that we were compelled, even if discovered, to go forward.
00:31:21Solomon, conspirator.
00:31:27Gabriel decided his troops would move at midnight on August 30th, 1800, carrying a flag with the motto, Death or
00:31:36Liberty.
00:31:39We can imagine what it was like on that day in August in 1800, with scores of African Americans gathering
00:31:50on a Sunday to create this rebellion,
00:31:55with picks, and axes, and knives, and clubs, and what it must have been like for them, prepared to strike,
00:32:04and yet unable to strike.
00:32:07That very evening, one observer wrote, there came on the most terrible thunderstorm accompanied with an enormous rain.
00:32:17Rivers swelled, roads and bridges washed away, and when it became clear that the business, as it was called, would
00:32:27be impossible in the storm,
00:32:29Gabriel tried to postpone the revolt, but before morning, the plot was betrayed by two slaves.
00:32:40What's phenomenal is how close it got.
00:32:44If the accounts and the inferences we can make about the numbers, that had lasted so long before any betrayal
00:32:54is quite extraordinary.
00:33:02Gabriel went to trial on October 6th, 1800.
00:33:07He refused to testify, or to explain his actions, but one of the rebels did make a statement.
00:33:16I have nothing more to say in my defense, than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he
00:33:22been taken by the British and put to trial.
00:33:24Well, I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and I am a willing
00:33:33sacrifice in their cause.
00:33:37And I beg, as a favor, that I may be immediately led to execution.
00:33:43I know that you have predetermined to shed my blood.
00:33:49My then, all this mockery of a trial.
00:34:08One cannot go to bed in the evening without the apprehension of being massacred before morning.
00:34:15Masters and overseers are obliged to retreat to some secure place during the night, or employ armed sentinels.
00:34:23A gentleman of high respectability lately informed me that he personally knew a master of slaves who retreated every night
00:34:32into an upper room,
00:34:33the entrance of which was by a trap door, and kept an axe by his side for defense.
00:34:41Jesse Torrey
00:34:46The growing fear of slave uprisings in the American South was intensified by the success of the rebels in the
00:34:54small Caribbean colony of Haiti, known then as Saint-Domingue.
00:34:58And Saint-Domingue had been the most brutal of Europe's colonies in the New World, and the most successful, until
00:35:11a violent slave revolt in 1791 had changed all that,
00:35:16releasing hundreds of thousands from their bondage, and overturning the plantation economy.
00:35:27But by 1801, peace and commerce had returned to Saint-Domingue, and a detente between the former slaves and former
00:35:35masters had come with it.
00:35:41While still a French colony, Saint-Domingue was moving toward independence, just as the United States had done 25 years
00:35:50before.
00:35:54That year, Saint-Domingue's governor, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, declared a new constitution outlawing slavery forever.
00:36:09Slavery's regime tried to create for slaves a very limited horizon in terms of, you know, what constituted their world.
00:36:21And one of the things that this Saint-Domingue revolution was doing was really focusing attention at things that were
00:36:27taking place outside,
00:36:28and opening up, to some degree, a whole set of possibilities.
00:36:34As Vice President, Thomas Jefferson urged Congress to cut off trade with Toussaint.
00:36:41Black sailors from the island mixing with American slaves in southern ports was a threat that could not be contained,
00:36:47he argued.
00:36:50But the trade was too profitable, and Congress refused.
00:36:56Jefferson's fear was that black Americans, like Gabriel, would be inspired by what they saw taking place just off the
00:37:04shore of America.
00:37:05And he spent virtually his entire career trying to shut down any contact and therefore any movement of information between
00:37:12the American mainland and the Caribbean island.
00:37:14In 1801, weeks after Jefferson's inauguration as America's third president, he was visited by Napoleon Bonaparte's representative in America's new
00:37:27capital, the city of Washington.
00:37:31Napoleon, the first consul of France, was seeking Jefferson's help in reimposing slavery in Saint-Domingue.
00:37:45After the meeting, the envoy wrote to Napoleon that Jefferson promised that all necessary measures would be taken to starve
00:37:54out Toussaint and to aid the French army.
00:38:01In February 1802, the first of Napoleon's troops began to arrive at Saint-Domingue's harbors.
00:38:09After four years, after four years of peace, war resumed immediately.
00:38:21Despite the French effort and despite the Americans' tacit support of that French effort, they managed, nevertheless, to establish independence,
00:38:33to resist and defeat the French force under Napoleon's brother-in-law.
00:38:39And established an independent country on January 1, 1804, whose name was Haiti.
00:38:47Haiti was now the second republic in the Western Hemisphere, and a stunning example for American slaves.
00:38:56It had taken 13 years and cost over 100,000 black lives, but there would never again be slavery in
00:39:05Haiti.
00:39:11Napoleon, now unable to use Haiti as a military base to protect French interest in North America, and embroiled in
00:39:19other foreign wars, abandoned the New World, selling the Louisiana Territory to the United States for $15 million.
00:39:30Well, it's ironic that despite Jefferson's own hostility to the Saint-Domingue, Haitian Revolution, that the signal achievement of his
00:39:39administration was very much based on the success of that revolution.
00:39:43That was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory.
00:39:50Called the greatest bargain in American history, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the American Republic, making room for
00:40:0113 new states all west of the Mississippi River.
00:40:06Four years later, the first American steamboat would push away from its mooring.
00:40:12And by the 1830s, the Mississippi would be crowded with them, embarking from ports like New Orleans, Louisiana, and Jefferson
00:40:23City, Missouri, laden with slave-grown cotton.
00:40:43By 1808, agriculture was on the decline in the older southern states, like Maryland and Virginia.
00:40:51There was not enough work to support the half-million slaves now held there.
00:40:59In the North, slavery was dying, and an anti-slavery movement was being born.
00:41:07Its first goal was achieved when Congress abolished the foreign slave trade, stopping importations from Africa or the Caribbean.
00:41:18The ban was signed into law on January 1st, 1808, the earliest moment allowed by the U.S. Constitution.
00:41:31Let the first of January be set apart in every year as a day of public thanksgiving.
00:41:39Let the history of the sufferings of our brethren and of their deliverance descend by this means to our children,
00:41:45to the remotest generations.
00:41:48And when they shall ask in time to come, say, what mean the lessons of this day?
00:41:54Let us answer them by saying, the Lord on this day abolished the trade which dragged your fathers from their
00:42:02native country,
00:42:04and sold them as bondmen in the United States of America.
00:42:08Absalom Jones, Philadelphia.
00:42:15In an odd way, the prohibition on further African imports as of January 1st, 1808, actually strengthened slavery in a
00:42:24place where it had been the weakest.
00:42:27The ban created an artificial scarcity of black laborers, and consequently, immediately, an inter-American trade between the Upper South,
00:42:37between Virginia and Maryland, and the Lower South, South Carolina and Georgia, emerged.
00:42:45My purchaser ordered me to cross my hands behind, which were quickly bound with a strong cord.
00:42:52And then he told me that day that we must set out for the South.
00:42:57I joined 51 other slaves, 32 men and 19 women.
00:43:03A strong iron collar was closely fitted by means of a padlock around each of our necks.
00:43:09We were handcuffed in pairs, with iron staples and bolts.
00:43:16Charles Ball.
00:43:24Though slavery would vanish from the North, it would flourish on the New Frontier,
00:43:31and provide a market for the surplus of slaves in the Upper South.
00:43:38Charles Ball was born into slavery in Maryland, as his parents had been.
00:43:45He would be one of hundreds of thousands force-marched into the deep South and West.
00:43:56If one was between the age of roughly 18 and 30,
00:43:59you had about a 1 in 3 chance of being sold to South Carolina or to Mississippi.
00:44:05Some masters, and Jefferson falls into this category,
00:44:09tried to sell women with their children, but for slave men.
00:44:14They were not regarded as being part of the family.
00:44:16And if we think about someone such as Charles Ball,
00:44:20who is married, who has children,
00:44:24his first thought when he's captured, when he's taken,
00:44:27he makes the request that, can I at least see...
00:44:32Well, his first thought is the issue of the fertility of any resistance.
00:44:36And then his thought immediately goes to facing that quickly.
00:44:41This is a fait accompli.
00:44:43And he simply asks, can I see my family beforehand?
00:44:48And one of the things, to me, when I read this,
00:44:51it just, it sends a chill down my back,
00:44:54that the response that he gets is,
00:44:58you can get another wife in Georgia.
00:45:06We all lay down on the naked floor to sleep in our handcuffs and chains.
00:45:13The women, my fellow slaves, lay on one side of the room,
00:45:16and the men who were chained with me occupied the other.
00:45:21I, at length, fell asleep, but was distressed by painful dreams.
00:45:27My wife and children appear to be weeping and lamenting my calamity,
00:45:32and beseeching and imploring my master on their knees not to carry me away from them.
00:45:39My little boy came and begged me not to go and leave him,
00:45:44and endeavored, with his little hands, to break the fetters that bound me.
00:45:52Charles Ball.
00:46:13In the first place, it is impossible in the nature of things for the blacks in the north to ever
00:46:20be reconciled to the whites,
00:46:22while hundreds of thousands of their countrymen are groaning, bleeding, and dying beneath the frowns of despotism in the south.
00:46:32Suppose an army of them should march on Philadelphia.
00:46:37What havoc would a handful of infuriated Negroes occasion?
00:46:43Thomas Branigan.
00:46:45Thomas Branigan.
00:46:49Since 1793, the black population in Philadelphia had grown to over 10,000 souls.
00:46:57Many were refugees from slavery.
00:46:59There and throughout the north, free black communities had built churches and formed mutual aid societies to help the fugitives
00:47:10and those newly freed.
00:47:17And on April 11th, 1816, the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, uniting congregations throughout the country,
00:47:27was founded at Richard Allen's Bethel Church in Philadelphia.
00:47:33Allen was consecrated its bishop.
00:47:38nochmal bleeding.
00:47:39Arguably, the AME church was the main black institution for most of the 19th century.
00:47:47It served as a forum for political organization, for economic cooperation.
00:47:56It served as a place where blacks could express themselves in a public arena.
00:48:06It served as a focal point for the organization of free black communities.
00:48:14As the black population in northern cities grew,
00:48:18some whites worried that the peace and security of the nation was at stake.
00:48:28Three times from 1805 to 1814,
00:48:33bills were introduced to ban further black immigration into Pennsylvania.
00:48:38And by 1816, black citizens were shut out of public celebrations on the 4th of July.
00:48:45That year, a group of white politicians and ministers met in Washington, D.C.
00:48:52to discuss the problem of free black people in the United States.
00:48:58You genuinely had individuals who were concerned about the future of black people in America.
00:49:05Whether it be from purely racial motivation that they did not like the prospect of living alongside black men and
00:49:14women who would be fellow citizens,
00:49:16or whether it was because they wanted to protect their slave investments and felt that free black people were likely
00:49:22to incite the slaves to rebellion.
00:49:26On New Year's Day, 1817, the concerned statesmen gathered in Washington founded the American Colonization Society.
00:49:35With support from the federal government, its mission was to resettle free black people outside the United States.
00:49:46The ACS would list among its members President James Monroe, the author of The Star Spangled Banner, George Washington's nephew,
00:49:58and a famous anti-colonizationist from Tennessee named Andrew Jackson.
00:50:05This is the same generation, bear in mind, that forced thousands of Georgia Cherokees to move to Oklahoma.
00:50:12And so the idea of moving people around to make this a more perfect white man's country was not nearly
00:50:17as irrational as it often seems to us.
00:50:21Days after its founding, the American Colonization Society contacted James Fortin, a wealthy businessman in Philadelphia's black community.
00:50:36The ACS hoped free black people would see their future in a place like Sierra Leone, an English colony on
00:50:44the coast of West Africa.
00:50:50There were a good number of free blacks, moderately prosperous blacks, barbers, artisans, tavern keepers, who simply had had enough
00:51:01and decided to go.
00:51:03They were weary of endless white demands for deference.
00:51:08They were tired of getting off the sidewalk when a white man walked toward them.
00:51:13They decided, as the antebellum period dragged on, that America never would give them an even break.
00:51:26Paul Cuffey, a black shipping merchant from Massachusetts, wrote that the citizens of Sierra Leone were instilled with every privilege
00:51:36of free-born citizens.
00:51:43On January 15, 1817, a meeting was called at Bethel Church to respond to the Colonization Society's proposition.
00:51:54This was a meeting that absolutely packed Bethel Church with 3,000 men, constituted the vast majority of the adult
00:52:02men in the black community.
00:52:03It was a tremendous meeting, and led by the very people that they had the greatest reason to respect, Richard
00:52:11Allen, Absalom Jones, James Fortin, men who had proven themselves over and over again,
00:52:17whom the community was accustomed to look to for leadership, for assistance, for guidance.
00:52:26That night, Fortin and other leaders argued in favor of setting sail for African shores.
00:52:33But when a vote was called, Fortin later wrote, a no was heard that sounded as if it would bring
00:52:41down the walls of the building.
00:52:44The assembly gathered that night adopted the following resolutions without one dissenting vote.
00:52:57Whereas our ancestors, not of choice, were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America,
00:53:03we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil.
00:53:10We will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country.
00:53:17They are our brethren by the ties of consanguinity of suffering and of wrong.
00:53:45A polygamist, a former slave who had purchased his freedom with money won in a lottery.
00:53:51A man described by his acquaintances as mean and intolerant of human frailty.
00:53:58Denmark Vesey seemed an unlikely candidate to unite slaves and free black people in the fight for their liberty.
00:54:08As the property of a slave ship's captain, Joseph Vesey, for nearly half his life,
00:54:15Denmark was well acquainted with the harsh realities of the traffic in flesh.
00:54:22I think that his own experiences, being born a slave in St. Thomas, living briefly before the revolution in Sando
00:54:28Man as a slave,
00:54:30being forced by Captain Vesey to go down to the docks and even bring ashore,
00:54:35slaves who were being imported into South Carolina and get them to the slave pens in Charleston,
00:54:41reminded him that this was not a world of brotherhood.
00:54:48In 1816, Denmark Vesey and other black Methodists in Charleston elected to separate from the white church.
00:54:56By 1820, there were some 3,000 members of the city's African church, accounting for nearly a third of the
00:55:06members of the AME denomination nationwide.
00:55:11The church was opening this horizon. People were experiencing this conversion so that all of a sudden,
00:55:18they see themselves as a part of this larger world, this larger God, this cosmos, where they have rights.
00:55:28When white authorities shut down Charleston's African church, church members decided it was time to orchestrate a plan to free
00:55:38the slaves of Charleston.
00:55:39They were led by Denmark Vesey. Vesey called a meeting to organize the strike, excluding, he said, slaves who accepted
00:55:50presents of old coats from their masters and the pastor in charge of the African church.
00:55:58I one night met at Vesey's a great number of men. Vesey said the Negroes were living such an abominable
00:56:07life. They are to rise.
00:56:09I said I was living well. He said though I was, others was not, and that it was such fools
00:56:16as I that were in their way. Frank.
00:56:24The number of conspirators in Vesey's plot was estimated to be in the thousands, making it the most far-reaching
00:56:34insurrection planned in North America.
00:56:41Denmark Vesey's plot against Charleston, South Carolina was one of the most significant of the attempts to strike against slavery
00:56:51by American slaves.
00:56:53It's probably the most elaborately planned of the conspiracies that we know about.
00:56:59And it's interesting in several regards. One of the ways in which it's interesting is that it appeals to both
00:57:05biblical Christianity and to African conjure.
00:57:14Jack Pritchett called on me. He sometimes called Gullah Jack, sometimes Cooler Jack. He said, put into your mouth this
00:57:25crab claw and you can't be wounded.
00:57:28He said all his country born promised to join because he was a doctor. That is a conjurer. He said
00:57:38his charms would not protect him from the treachery of his own color.
00:57:42Witness number ten. A negro man.
00:57:51Unlike Gabriel, twenty years before, Vesey planned to spare few whites.
00:57:59But like Gabriel, his insurrection ended before it began. Vesey was informed on by one of his men and captured
00:58:11and sentenced to die.
00:58:18Denmark Vesey, it is difficult to imagine what infatuation could have prompted you to attempt an enterprise so wild and
00:58:30visionary.
00:58:31You were a free man, were comparatively wealthy, and enjoyed every comfort. You ought to have known that success was
00:58:41impracticable.
00:58:43A moment's reflection must have convinced you that the ruin of your race would have been the probable result.
00:58:53Lionel H. Kennedy, presiding magistrate.
00:58:55Lionel H. Kennedy, presiding magistrate.
00:58:59Lionel H. Kennedy, presiding magistrate.
00:59:06In the aftermath of the Vesey conspiracy, white citizens of Charleston tore down the African church, brick by brick.
00:59:17It was important to raise the church.
00:59:22It shows the importance of these black institutions for a sense of black independence and autonomy.
00:59:32It's the same reason that black churches are bombed or burned today.
00:59:37It represents a sense of crucial autonomy for black people.
00:59:43And an autonomy which in Charleston had turned dangerous.
00:59:47In one Friday, late in July of 1822, the state executed, in one moment, 22 of Vesey's followers.
01:00:01Instead of using the regular gallows, they simply tossed ropes over an old wall known as the lines that was
01:00:07built in the northern part of Charleston.
01:00:13The 22 were all slaves.
01:00:19A crude platform was built for them to stand on.
01:00:24But the platform was so low to the ground that when the slaves fell, their necks didn't break and they
01:00:30were slowly strangling to death.
01:00:39To hasten them to the grave, the captain of the guard rode down the line shooting each of them in
01:00:46the head.
01:00:47Reloading as he went from one man to the next.
01:01:05The year before Vesey was executed, Missouri was the second territory carved out of the Louisiana Purchase to be admitted
01:01:14to the Union.
01:01:17Despite protests from the North, the Compromise of 1820 allowed Missouri to come in as a slave state.
01:01:28But the southern states were forced to agree to a new line drawn across America, above which slavery could not
01:01:35expand.
01:01:37There was now officially a border between North and South.
01:01:41And by 1830, there would be fewer than 3,000 slaves living above it.
01:01:53Writing in 1820, Thomas Jefferson expressed the opinion that this line would never be obliterated.
01:02:01And that every new irritation would mark it deeper and deeper.
01:02:07As it is, we have the wolf by the ear.
01:02:12And we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.
01:02:17Justice is in the one scale and self-preservation in the other.
01:02:31It would be Jefferson's last contribution to public debate.
01:02:37Thomas Jefferson died on the 4th of July, 1826.
01:02:50When Jefferson died on the 50th anniversary of his most celebrated document,
01:02:55for white America it was a moment to ponder the meaning of the revolution
01:02:59and to make a new commitment to revolutionary ideals.
01:03:03For the roughly 200 slaves who lived on his hilltop in Monticello, it was a moment of enormous tragedy.
01:03:10Jefferson had always lived well beyond his means.
01:03:13He died in great debt, which meant it was quite clear that his heirs were going to liquidate.
01:03:20In his 83 years, the author of American Democracy had freed three slaves.
01:03:27His will freed five more.
01:03:31Jefferson had written that he wanted to be remembered by future generations for only three things.
01:03:37The Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, which he wrote.
01:03:43The University of Virginia, which he founded.
01:03:46And the Declaration of Independence.
01:03:49But Jefferson owned five working farms in 1826, and over 200 slaves.
01:03:57His life and his death would come to mean something far different to those who he once said,
01:04:04and his death labored for his happiness.
01:04:09An inventory of the state of Thomas Jefferson, deceased.
01:04:14And this is dated the 7th day of August, 1826.
01:04:23Negro Man Barnaby, who's valued at $400.
01:04:27Negro Woman Betty Brown, who's worth nothing.
01:04:30Critter, Negro Woman, worth nothing.
01:04:33Negro Woman Ellen, $300.
01:04:37Negro Man Peter Hemmings, $400.
01:04:41Negro Sally Hemmings, $200.
01:04:45Negro Man Wormley, $200.
01:04:48Negro Woman Ursula and her young child, $300.
01:04:52Negro Woman Anne and her young child, $350.
01:04:57And it goes on down.
01:04:59It lists all of his slaves.
01:05:01This Negro Woman Ursula and her young child and a few of her other younger children were sold to the
01:05:07university for $1,100,
01:05:09along with some other household goods.
01:05:14To satisfy Jefferson's enormous debts,
01:05:18130 slaves were sold in one auction,
01:05:22most away from the only home they had ever known.
01:05:36What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages,
01:05:43to our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms,
01:05:49embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute,
01:05:56occupied by more than 12 millions of happy people,
01:06:00and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion.
01:06:06Andrew Jackson.
01:06:11In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected the seventh president of the United States,
01:06:17on a platform that proclaimed him champion of the common man.
01:06:23In many states, white men no longer needed to own property to vote,
01:06:27and the coming of photography would allow ordinary people to chronicle the nation's rapid expansion.
01:06:35In 1830, the first U.S. railroad would open for business,
01:06:40and by the end of the next decade,
01:06:43thousands of American citizens would seek their fortunes in the West,
01:06:48taking slavery along with them.
01:06:52What's blooming now is this, in many ways, golden age of American optimism.
01:06:58But at the same time, there's all of this optimism,
01:07:01this faith and progress in America,
01:07:03there is beginning to be a real fear
01:07:05that what's also spreading across this continent
01:07:09is a problem that someday the country's got to face,
01:07:12that someday there has to be a solution to this contradiction
01:07:15of slavery in a land of liberty and freedom.
01:07:21By 1827, the last vestiges of slavery in the North were crumbling.
01:07:27That year, New York freed all 10,000 men, women, and children
01:07:32held in bondage in the state.
01:07:35But in a nation of 12 million, fewer than 3% were free black people.
01:07:48The more you improve the condition of these people,
01:07:53the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them.
01:08:01You give them a higher relish for those privileges which they can never attain,
01:08:07and turn what we intend for a blessing into a curse.
01:08:13Elias B. Caldwell.
01:08:22The right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be elected,
01:08:27the right to spend money freely, whatever money you have without social restrictions,
01:08:32the right later on to serve in militias, to migrate west.
01:08:36All these, of course, are rights of citizenship in the United States.
01:08:40But in this period in particular, they get defined as the rights of whites.
01:08:46They get identified.
01:08:46So that citizenship in the United States becomes equivalent to whiteness.
01:08:53As slavery disappeared from the North, a new chorus of scientists reprised the amateur suspicions
01:09:00Thomas Jefferson had voiced a generation earlier.
01:09:05Doctors measured skulls and identified diseases that only afflicted black people.
01:09:12One concluded that, in bodily structure and economy, they were closer to apes than to Europeans.
01:09:19In Philadelphia, Dr. Charles Caldwell published two long essays on the inferiority of Africans.
01:09:28There's a sequence of attacks on African American self-esteem, psychological attacks,
01:09:36that culminate in the late 1820s in the works of a caricaturist named Edward Clay,
01:09:42which are reproduced as huge broadsides and then as small, almost baseball card size,
01:09:50that do caricatures of the progress that African Americans have made.
01:09:57The Edward Clay cartoons are indeed documentation of a sort as well as ridicule.
01:10:03That's part of what makes the ridicule so sharp.
01:10:05By 1830, there are about 15,000 African Americans in Philadelphia,
01:10:12about 1,000 of whom are economically and socially in a position to live a kind of middle-class urban
01:10:21life.
01:10:25These people are regarded by the white community as legitimate targets,
01:10:31the butt of any kind of ill-feeling, rather obnoxious humour that anybody feels they want to level against them.
01:10:39And very clearly that is something that might have been there in certain segments of the white community earlier,
01:10:46but hadn't surfaced in the way it would do in the 1820s, 1830s.
01:10:58In the 1830s, a new character appeared on American stages.
01:11:08First called Jim Crow, then Zip Coon, Snowball, Samba.
01:11:20A white face black by a burnt cork gave birth to a new American myth.
01:11:31The happy slave.
01:11:33The black man in his natural condition.
01:11:40Absurd as may seem Negro minstrelsy to the refined musician,
01:11:44it is, nevertheless, beyond doubt that it expresses the peculiar characteristics
01:11:49of the Negro as truly as the great masters of Italy
01:11:53represent their more spiritual and profound nationality.
01:11:58The New York Tribune.
01:12:02Well, at the same time minstrelsy explodes as this popular art form across the north,
01:12:07it is the very time that free black communities begin to form in northern cities
01:12:12on a large scale.
01:12:14And these free black communities, of course, are concerned probably as much with anything,
01:12:20are concerned with creating their own sense of dignity,
01:12:24their own sense of place, their own sense of belonging.
01:12:29On September 15th, 1830, Richard Allen, now an old man, gathered 40 delegates from black communities
01:12:38in New York City, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Boston, for the first National Negro Convention.
01:12:45The assembly, composed an address to the free people of color,
01:12:50which began with a reference to the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence,
01:12:56all men are created equal.
01:13:00I think that the real consciousness of an African American community,
01:13:04as opposed to Africans kind of scooping themselves together and trying to make a community,
01:13:10that the real consciousness comes with that convention in 1830.
01:13:13They're never again without some organization that meets nationally at least once a year
01:13:19and gets together and talks about, well, where are we now and what do we do next?
01:13:25Out of the National Negro Convention movement would come boycotts of slave-produced goods,
01:13:32strategies for ending segregated passage on steamboats and stagecoaches,
01:13:37and a call for slave rebellion in the South.
01:13:59Go look into the back streets and crowded cellars of London and New York,
01:14:04the metropolitan cities of the Old and New World,
01:14:08and you will see a condition of squalidness, hunger and sickness,
01:14:13for which you will look in vain among the slaves of the South.
01:14:18The Negro race is nowhere upon the broad face of the earth more elevated in moral character
01:14:25than among the slaves of the South.
01:14:29The Reverend Iverson L. Brooks.
01:14:32In part because of the growth of the cotton economy,
01:14:35the white South, especially the lower South, South Carolina, Georgia,
01:14:39began to articulate a fairly new idea,
01:14:41which was that slavery was not a bad thing in any way,
01:14:46but that it was a positive good for all concerned,
01:14:48that it allowed for white American civilization to advance by taking whites out of menial labor.
01:14:56It allowed for Africans to be civilized by bringing them into contact
01:15:00with allegedly superior white culture and the Christian faith.
01:15:08In his narrative, published in 1836, Charles Ball wrote that
01:15:13The slaves were ready enough to receive the faith which conducts them to heaven
01:15:18on account of their sufferings,
01:15:20but they were not so willing to sit down in paradise
01:15:23with the whites who had oppressed them on earth.
01:15:29The Negro's heaven will be no heaven to him
01:15:33if he is not to be avenged of his enemies.
01:15:37I know from experience that these are the fundamental rules
01:15:43of his religious creed because I learned them
01:15:45in the religious meetings of the slaves themselves.
01:15:50Charles Ball.
01:15:53There is a sense of a providential journey
01:15:57in the African American experience
01:15:59from the beginning of the cotton gin
01:16:03as a method of expanding slavery
01:16:08and creating havoc in black life through the separation of families,
01:16:15through this incessant labor,
01:16:17which seems to be able to go on in perpetuity.
01:16:21For African Americans, it represents a period
01:16:24when their idea of providence is that this is not pleasing in the sight of God.
01:16:32Though black slaves made up only a small fraction of American Christians
01:16:38in the early 19th century,
01:16:41many who converted seized eagerly on the idea of divine retribution.
01:16:46One was a slave preacher named Nat Turner.
01:16:51Turner's actions in the summer of 1831
01:16:54would force America to face its deepest fears
01:16:58and help a mounting abolitionist movement
01:17:01gain the attention of the nation.
01:17:05While laboring in the field,
01:17:07I discovered drops of blood on the corn
01:17:10as though it were dew from heaven.
01:17:13And as the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth
01:17:17and had ascended to heaven for the salvation of sinners,
01:17:20it was plain to me that the Savior
01:17:23was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men.
01:17:27And the great day of judgment was at hand.
01:17:31Nat Turner.
01:17:33God in the Old Testament often worked through acts of violence
01:17:37and often protected the Israelites through acts of violence.
01:17:42And it was in that tradition that Nat Turner situated himself.
01:17:46He was an avenging messiah who had come to save his people
01:17:51from the sinfulness of the slaveholding south.
01:17:56Nat Turner was born in the year 1800,
01:18:00the week before Gabriel was hanged.
01:18:04In 1825, Turner voluntarily returned to bondage
01:18:10after successfully making his escape.
01:18:12The Spirit had appeared to him, he said,
01:18:16and told him to return to his earthly master.
01:18:20But in 1828, the Spirit appeared to him again.
01:18:29I heard a loud noise in the heavens,
01:18:32and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said,
01:18:35the serpent was loosened,
01:18:36and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men,
01:18:40and that I should take it on and fight against the serpent.
01:18:43For the time was fast approaching,
01:18:45when the first should be last and the last should be first.
01:18:49And immediately, the seal was removed from my lips,
01:18:54and I communicated the great work laid out for me to do.
01:18:59Nat Turner.
01:19:06Nat Turner confided his intention, he later explained,
01:19:11to four men in whom he had the greatest confidence.
01:19:16It was agreed that they would prepare a dinner,
01:19:20arm themselves, and then begin God's work.
01:19:26The issue here is God made us to be free.
01:19:30God is empowering us to claim this freedom
01:19:34which God has promised to us.
01:19:37And so what we see is that with Nat Turner,
01:19:44the key concept is deliverance.
01:19:49The work of death began on August 21st, 1831,
01:19:54and lasted for 36 hours,
01:19:57as more than 40 slaves joined Turner and his men in open rebellion.
01:20:03In the end, at least 55 white people were dead.
01:20:10An abolitionist newspaper in Boston, The Liberator,
01:20:15reported that whole families had been cut off.
01:20:19Not a mother, not a daughter, not a babe left.
01:20:25Putnam Moore, the young boy who legally owned Nat Turner,
01:20:30was murdered in the bed where he lay sleeping,
01:20:33outside Jerusalem, Virginia.
01:20:39It's horrifying.
01:20:41There were young children who were killed.
01:20:45But you can feel the rage, and you can feel the anger,
01:20:50and you can wonder whether slavery ever would have ended
01:20:55without that sort of rage.
01:21:01Nat Turner was hanged and then skinned in 1831.
01:21:07And for the first time, politicians in Virginia
01:21:10seriously considered a plan for abolishing slavery,
01:21:14but couldn't bring themselves to do it.
01:21:19Slavery was the soul of American progress.
01:21:23Without it, many argued, there would be no future.
01:21:31But to the growing abolitionist movement,
01:21:34Turner's rebellion was the beginning of the end.
01:21:41What we have so long predicted has commenced.
01:21:45The first drops of blood, which are but a prelude, have fallen.
01:21:51The first flash of lightning has been felt.
01:21:56The first wailings of a bereavement, which is to cloak the earth,
01:22:01have broken upon our ears.
01:22:03The Liberator, September 3rd, 1831.
01:22:13The Liberator, September 3rd, 1831.
01:22:19Hargreas 1034.
01:22:23I'ma write my breath come home.
01:22:27I'ma breathe sit under my hands.
01:22:32I'ma breathe sit under my hands.
01:22:33All I want to do for me is that I am
01:22:38to backlash on the test.
01:22:40For the future's guide for the series, visit the Africans in America website at www.pbs.org.
01:22:47Next time on Africans in America, the nation grows rich off the blood and sweat of enslaved African Americans.
01:22:55The country is on the brink of change as abolitionists in the segregated North ignite uprisings for freedom.
01:23:00What was also at stake was the whole future of the United States.
01:23:04To purchase the Africans in America home video, companion book or CD soundtrack,
01:23:10call 1-800-255-9424.
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