said there were never any such things perpetrated on the Negroes; never any Negroes so afflicted, and that the book was a libel on the people of the United States; and when she took to this Key she told them where they would find a man called Josiah Henson. She gave me a great name and said I was a venerable fellow, in which she was not much mistaken, for I was an old man, to be found in Canada West, laboring there as a minister of the Gospel, preaching to the fugitive slaves, encouraging the cause of education and building up the poor afflicted race of Negroes. (Applause.)
Josiah Henson, then, is my name.
Josiah Henson, then, was his name. The black baby was born June 15, 1789, and was the first to be born on the estate of a Mr. Francis Newman, who owned the father, and to whom the mother had been hired out. He was called Josiah for a Dr. Josiah MacPherson of Charles County, Maryland, who owned his mother, and Henson for an uncle of the doctor who had been an officer in the Revolutionary War.
On the Newman estate, which was about a mile from Port Tobacco, in the state of Maryland, the child grew to the age of memory, carried on his mother’s back in the fields or playing on the beaten-earth floor of the slave quarters. His memory, which was excellent, was to serve him well in later years and to be of use to Mrs. Stowe, for his story was first taken down from him in 1849 by a Mr. S. A. Eliot and published in Boston the same year. There Mrs. Stowe was to come across it in the reading rooms of the Abolitionist Society and was to be immediately struck by the vivid picture of slave life which it gave. It was written without the showman’s patter of the speech which we have quoted, but all the elements of her melodrama were there in their terrible reality.
Josiah’s memory of his father was a tragic one, for he saw him brought back to the slave quarters, half-dead, after having been beaten for striking an overseer who had attacked his mother. He had wounded the overseer and then hidden out in the woods, but hunger had driven him back to find food. He was soon captured and whipped in front of the poor whites and slaves of the neighborhood who gathered to witness the ceremony—one hundred lashes and mutilation being the penalty for his offense. After having assured themselves that he could stand the whole punishment, his owners had him flogged by the blacksmith.
Then, while he was semiconscious, his right ear was tacked to the whipping post; a slash with a knife and the ear was left on the post as he fell to the ground.
After this brutality, the slave became so surly and intractable that Newman decided that he could no longer safely keep him on the plantation and sold him to someone in Alabama. Josiah’s mother and five brothers and sisters never saw him again nor heard what became of him. Dr. MacPherson, who owned the mother and therefore the children, demanded their return of Newman, for he did not hold with such cruelty. They lived for two or three years more on his estate until, kindly man that he was, he tipped up one too many, as kindly men will, and fell flat on his face in a stream and drowned there.
The death of a kind master was a great calamity for the slaves, for it meant change, and change was rarely for the better in their experience. Upon the death of MacPherson the remnants of the Henson family were to be put on the auction block—the most dreaded experience in the life of a slave, no matter how often repeated. The cruel humiliation of being put on exhibit for sale, and the overwhelming fear that one might be sold “down south,” were factors quite as terrible as the certainty that families would be torn apart and that a common past of love and shared experience would be lost forever. Every slave’s life was a small circle beaten out around the tethering post; communication was impossible over the shortest distance; history was a black pit and oral tradition a fabric shredded into rags, torn and scattered to the winds by constant partings. Nothing remained of yesterday and nothing could be expected of tomorrow. Human beings mated and bred in cages; the rumor of a sale was enough to stampede them.
The auction block was a little dais with three or four steps leading up to it which each slave had to mount while the auctioneer read off his name, age, and accomplishments. Josiah’s brothers and sisters exhibited their teeth and muscles, jumped and danced to show their agility and were bid off first. Then his mother was sold to Isaac Riley of Montgomery County, Maryland, and she begged him to buy her Josiah, too, in order that she might not be separated from the last of the children. Since he had no need of the child and refused to buy him, the boy was bought by a man who owned a tavern near Montgomery courthouse some miles away. This man, a tavern owner named Robb, had a line of stagecoaches and owned about forty slaves, among whom he threw the child of six.
Josiah sickened and lay all day on the dirt floor, uncared for by any of the other slaves who were too brutalized by their own treatment to think of bothering with him. He was left all day alone while they were driven out into the fields or about their other work, and, when they returned at night, they threw him a piece of corn bread or a dried herring so long as he could still eat. Soon, however, he was unable to move and lay there near death. By chance, Robb, his new owner, met Riley, who had bought the mother, and offered him the child in return for a payment which was to be made in horseshoeing. Riley agreed, and Josiah was returned to his mother who nursed him back to health.
He grew in Riley’s service and learned all the lessons that a cruel master could teach: “The character and the habits of the slave and the slaveholder were created and perpetuated by their relative position,” says the autobiography, but it was to be more than sixty years before Henson could express himself in that concise and elegant way, if indeed the words were not put into his mouth by a ghost writer. At any rate, he was clever and observant, quick to learn and critical of his environment even as a boy. The slaves on Riley’s place were beasts of the field who huddled ten or a dozen to a pen and slept on the ground. In their log huts were no wooden floors, no furniture but beds made of a heap of rags thrown on the trodden mud and boxed in with a board or two. Henson said of this way of life: “Our favorite way of sleeping, however, was on a plank, our heads raised on an old jacket and our feet toasting before the smoldering fire. The wind whistled and the rain and snow blew in through the cracks while the damp earth soaked up the moisture until the floor was miry as a pigsty.”
The principal food on Riley’s farm was cornmeal and salt herring, to which, in summer, there was added a little buttermilk from the churnings and a few vegetables which were grown in truck patches and tended after dark when the field work was done. There were two regular meals a day: breakfast at twelve, after work since dawn, and a supper when the day was over. In harvest season there were three meals, for then the work was harder and a little dried meat was added to their diet. Clothing was of tow cloth, with only a shirt for children. As they grew up, they were also given a pair of pantaloons or a gown, and in winter a round coat, and a wool hat once in two or three years, and one pair of shoes a year.
Under even these conditions Josiah grew to be strong and agile as a young buck, he says; he could run faster, wrestle better, dance better, jump higher than any of the others on the farm. At fifteen he could outhoe, outreap, outhusk all the other slaves; and he worked all day in the field and ran through the orchard at night with the wild young ones following him, to steal and broil a chicken and plot first-rate tricks to dodge work. Yet he loved to work because it brought him to the notice of the overseer, and praise was dear to him. “One word of commendation from the petty despot who ruled over us would set me up for a month.” Josiah had not the makings of Uncle Tom for nothing, and there was just one way for a slave to better his lot and that was to move toward the Big House.
If there was another way, the way of escape, Josiah had not yet heard of it, and in all fairness to him it must be said that the means hardly existed at this time. From the earliest years of the nineteenth century, individual slaves had begun to escape from the plantations and make their way north to the free states. Many of those who ran away from the slave masters of the deep South marked a trail with their corpses or were caught and returned for punishment, mutilation, or death as an example to their fellows. Means of communication were closely guarded by armed patrols who demanded a pass of any Negro who might, in extraordinary circumstances, be traveling alone. The nature of the country, with its dismal swamps, broad marshes, and savannahs, made any travel, except by the few well-known roads, almost impossible. Nonetheless, some did from the earliest years manage to get to the northern states, as can be proven by the record of several attempts made in the late eighteenth century on the part of slave owners who wished to have their