'The Great Stain' on Our Nation

Review by Bill Doughty

Author Noel Rae brings us face to face – and nose to nose – with the horrors of the great stain and stench on our nation's history.

In "The Great Stain: Witnessing American Slavery" (The Overlook Press, 2018) Rae succeeds takes us back hundreds of years. He shows us, using source materials from various perspectives, "the everyday reality of life as experienced by the slaves themselves – and the way to this was to accumulate as much eyewitness material as I could find – in the words of those who were there."

Those eyewitnesses include African and European slave dealers, New England and Confederate slave holders, American abolitionists, black sailors and soldiers and, of course, slaves themselves. We read their first-person accounts of brutality, dehumanization, escape, resistance and war in letters, diaries, newspaper stories, travel journals and other personal histories.

The assault on fellow humans is an assault on the senses, especially in the "horrible conditions aboard slave ships when crossing the Atlantic and the brutal way slaves were sold on arrival."

Here is how former slave Olaudah Equiano, who was purchased by a Royal Navy lieutenant but eventually found freedom in England, described the conditions:

"At last, when the ship in which we were had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my grief. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspiration so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves of which many died, this falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This deplorable situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs [latrines], into which the children often fell and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable."

Abolitionists learned that 12.5 percent of slaves died in the voyage from Africa across the Atlantic. A ship's doctor, Alexander Falconbridge, testified to an abolitionist-inspired committee of England's Privy Council in 1789:

"During the voyages I made I was frequently a witness to the fatal effects of (the) exclusion of fresh air ... But the excessive heat was not the only thing that rendered their situation intolerable. The deck, that is, the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful or disgusting. Numbers of the slaves having fainted, they were carried up on deck, where several of them died ... The place allotted for the sick Negroes is under the half-deck, where they lie on the bare planks. By this means those who are emaciated frequently have their skin, and even their flesh, entirely rubbed off by the motion of the ship from the prominent parts of the shoulders, elbows and hips, so as to render the bones in those parts quite bare. The excruciating pain which the poor sufferers feel from being obliged to continue in such a dreadful situation, frequently for several weeks, in case they happen to live that long, is not to be conceived or described."

Greedy slavers, owners and apologists justified their actions, including severe beatings and family separations, in various ways: even in slavery, blacks would have a better life in the West Indies or British Colonies than in Africa; conservatives argued, "it was vital to the nation's security by training sailors who in time of war could be recruited into the Royal Navy;" a slave-economy was supposedly a good, harmonized economy; and Christian slave traders and owners believed they were saving souls. They based their convictions on the Bible, especially the Old Testament.

Early Portugese naval vessel crews were motivated "for the holy purpose to seek salvation for the lost souls of the heathen." The Vatican, which indirectly profited, endorsed capturing "idolators." The English came "in their usual vigorous and self-righteous manner – a drawn sword in one hand and a Bible in the other." In the New World, Cotton Mather based his justification of slavery and New England witch hunts against Africans and American Indians on his faith in God. 

Reverend Thornton Stringfellow said in his book "The Bible Argument, or Slavery in the Light of Divine Revelation" evidence of God's authorization was in plain sight. It could be found in the Bible, including in Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians; Genesis IX, 18-27;  Exodus 21, 16; and the Ten Commandments.

Stringfellow claimed that "servant" equaled "slave" in the Bible and noted that Abraham owned hundreds of slaves, Stringfellow wrote, "The next notice we have of servants as property is from God himself, when clothed with all the visible tokens of his presence and glory, on the top of Sinai, he proclaimed his law to the millions that surrounded the base: 'Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's house, though shalt not covet they neighbor's wife, nor his man-servant, not his maid-servant, not his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's." Servant meant slave, he said.

On the other hand, reformed Christianity helped inform some of the abolitionists, who found other interpretations to make their case against slavery. We learn of the colorful abolitionist and Protestant Benjamin Lay, and we get this "found" haiku from enlightened free-thinker (and, like George Washington, flawed former slave owner) Benjamin Franklin: 

Slavery is such

an atrocious debasement

of human nature

Frederick Douglass

The "charismatic leader" of American abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, made a conflicted peace with religion, choosing to base his views on logic, human values and civil rights earned from personal experience.

"The Great Stain" provides first-person accounts of resistance, mutiny and insurrection, as well as harrowing escapes, in which slaves would use the stench of Indian turnips, turpentine and onions to throw dogs off their scent. The narrative continues with an assault to the senses.

John Warren, who escaped from Mississippi to Canada, described how he disguised his scent from the dogs: "I could do it with red pepper. Another way I have practised is to dig into a grave where a man has been buried a long time, get the dust of the man, make it into a paste with water, and put it on the feet, knees, and elbows, or wherever I touched the bushes. The dogs don't follow that."

U.S. Air Force graphic by Tommy Brown

"The Great Stain" concludes with the Civil War – a war fought to end slavery – and descriptions of the heroism of William Tillman, Robert Smalls, and the Massachusetts 54th regiment in the attack on Charleston and assault on Fort Wagner. "Fort Wagner, said the New York Tribune, would be to black Americans what Bunker Hill was to white Americans."

Two Douglass speech excerpts close the book. 

Douglass urged all Americans to fight for the Union and "resolutely struggle on in the belief there is a better day coming, and that we by patience, industry, uprightness, and economy may hasten that better day."