Life for slave children in 1861

The Washington Post
By Carolyn Reeder
June 14, 2011

If you were a slave child 150 years ago, your life would be hard. How hard?
Harder if you worked on a huge plantation in the Deep South rather than on
a smaller one in Virginia or Maryland. Harder if you worked in the fields
rather than in the house. And hardest if your owner used cruel punishments
or broke up your family by selling off a parent or sibling.

Let’s pretend you’re a house servant in southeastern Virginia. You are busy
with chores at least from dawn till dusk, but it’s easier than field work.
At night you sleep on a mat somewhere in the Big House instead of in a slave
cabin with your mother and siblings. (Your father doesn’t live with your
family because he belongs to the owner of a nearby plantation.)

Life for slave child

What do you do all day? Whatever you’re told to do. Let’s say your main
job is caring for one of the white family’s children who is a bit younger
than you. You are that child’s personal servant and companion. The two of
you might also be friends, but no one would ever forget that you are the
property of that other child’s family.

Because you spend a lot of time around the master’s family, you often
listen to the grown-ups talk. That’s how you hear about a man named
Abraham Lincoln, who is against the spread of slavery. That’s how you
know that “secession” and “the Confederacy” are important, even though
you don’t know what the words mean. And that’s how you learn there might
be a war between North and South. You hid your excitement when you heard
that, because you knew people in the North hated slavery.

Talk of an invasion

Last month, you pretended you weren’t listening when the family’s oldest
son announced that Yankees had invaded Virginia and he was leaving home
to fight them. (You figured out that “Yankees” meant Northerners.) And
you pretended not to care when the master told the family that thousands
more Yankee soldiers had come to Fort Monroe — and that they had camps
outside the fort, too. The frightened faces around the table told you
that the fort and those soldiers were nearby, and you wondered what would
happen next — and what it would mean to you.

What happened next was important to slaves throughout the South. Three
slaves seeking freedom fled to Fort Monroe. The Union commander there
decided that the U.S. law that runaway slaves must be returned to their
masters had no effect in Confederate Virginia, so he refused to return
the men to their master. Instead, he let them stay at the fort and work
for the Union army.

Fleeing to safety

By June, whole families of slaves were making their way to Fort Monroe.
As word spread, more and more slaves took refuge in Union camps. They
probably worked as hard there as they had on the plantations. Maybe even
harder. Their living conditions were usually crowded and unhealthful. And
the soldiers thought of them as property, just as their owners had. They
were called “contrabands,” or items taken from the enemy.

So if you had found your way from the plantation to Fort Monroe in June 1861,
your life would still be hard and you still wouldn’t be free. But you would
have taken an important step toward freedom.