American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (57 page)

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Authors: Rod Davis

Tags: #Body; Mind & Spirit, #General, #Religion, #Ethnic & Tribal, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

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Page 347
APPENDIX II
THE REVOLUTION DENIED
From almost the inception of the slave trade, kings, constitutions and legislatures codified the incubating negative ideologies about Africans into edicts and ordinances, creating a legal and rationalist framework. As early as 1493, only a year after Columbus made landfall in the West Indies, Pope Alexander II ordered Spanish explorers to convert pagans (Indians and, later, slaves) in the New World territories. In 1685, as the French moved into the Caribbean plunder zone, Louis XVI issued the infamous Code Noir (Black Code) requiring, among other things, Catholic baptism for all slaves (as well as expulsion of Jews). One of the most important applications of the Code Noir, however, was its adaptation by Louisiana's territorial governors, who implemented their own Code Noir in 1724, which yielded to the Black Code of the Louisiana Territories of 1806, sustained until the Civil War. The other Southern colonies (and then states) enacted Black Codes of their own to regulate ownership, maintenance and punishment of slaves, free blacks, creoles and mulattoes.
One of the most consistent targets of the Codes was the practice of religion, especially anything non-Christian, i.e., African,

 

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i.e., voudou. Each state, through the Codes, created for Africans a legalistic anti-matter of First Amendment rights which restricted or outlawed most kinds of public gatherings or public expression, especially, singing, dancing and drumming by slaves and/or free blacks. So severe were the statutes that even black worship of Christianity was typically restricted to the presence of a white overseer if not prohibited altogether as in a Georgia statute of 1792 (Charles Goodell,
The American Slave Code
, 1853, p. 327).
In South.Carolina, an 1800 law prohibited slaves or free blacks to "meet and assemble for the purpose of mental instruction of religious worship, either before the rising of the sun or after the going down of the same" (George Eaton Simpson,
Black Religion in the New World
, 1978, p. 220).
An 1829 Georgia law forbade any black, free or slave, to teach another to read or write, the punishment being a fine and/or whipping. Whites who did the same faced a fine and jail term. It is telling that in 1747, just after slavery was introduced to the Georgia colony, a law was passed recommending religious instruction for slavesyet before the century was over at least two sets of laws reversed that position (Blake Touchstone, "The Large Planter and the Religious Instruction of Slaves," unpublished M.A. Thesis, Tulane, 1970).
In Mississippi, black preachers needed permission from their owners to preach to other blacks, and in Alabama, five whites had to be present when a black preached; even white preachers had to be licensed to speak to black congregations (John Hope Franklin,
From Slavery to Freedom
, 1947, pp. 199200).
New Orleans was a great port city, with the influences of three European powers, but it was not immune to racial fears any more than Savannah or Montgomery or Atlanta. City law prescribed punishment of up to a year in prison for whites who taught blacks to read or write, who were "author, printer or publisher of any written paper or papers" and who used "lan-

 

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guage with the intent to disturb the peace or security ... in relation to the slaves of the people of this State" (Ordinances of 1834, p. 541, Louisiana Supreme Court Library collection).
An 1817 ordinance (like that of Mississippi) restricted the hours of worship by slaves to "between daybreak and sunset" and forbade slaves to gather in public "except when attending divine worship, within the churches or temples," and then only during daylight. Punishment was ten to thirty lashes. Article Six of that same ordinance prohibited gatherings for "dancing or other merriment" except on Sundays and then only in "such open or public places as may be appointed by the mayor."
That was the year Congo Square was designated for public dancing. The likelihood is not that the city fathers had suddenly decided to allow blacks to openly perform traditional worship ceremonies; rather it was that it would be easier to monitor such ceremonieslong gone undergroundby putting them in a designated fishbowl. Of course, even at those ceremonies there was the possibility, to be punished by twenty lashes, of breaking Article Nine of the 1817 muncipal code which outlawed "whooping or hallooing anywhere in the city or the suburbs, or making any clamorous noise, or singing aloud any indecent song" (from Ordinances of 1817, p. 218, Louisiana Supreme Court Library collection).
In 1829, the city, responding to the successful slave revolt in Haiti as well as the unsuccessful ones that were subsequently ignited on continental shores, followed the lead of the state legislature by banning the importation of slaves "who have been accused of any conspiracy or insurrection" in any territory of the U.S. In 1830, ordinances prohibited the entry of any free persons of color (presumably from Haiti), and the same year, the fear of slave revolt was so strong that laws were passed to punish white agitators, too, who were widely suspected of being Jacobin radicals. Even Yankees had the willies: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both had propounded

 

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schemes to gradually get rid of slaves by shipping them back to Africa, or to Haiti. In 1835, New Orleans suspended the slave trade altogether, something the U.S. Congress had ordered in 1807, effective in 1808.
Restrictions didn't even stop with the Civil War. A city ordinance of 1882well into Reconstructionprohibited the use of parks for "political meetings, religious gatherings" (Charter of 1882, p. 400) and further outlawed the staging of "dramatic" works without a permit and "disorderly conduct ... at any public spectacle." This could be interpreted to block public voudou ceremonies, or most other gatherings of blacks, just as readily as had the more overtly stated Black Code laws.
It's small wonder the
New Orleans Bee
was editorializing as late as 1861 that "the black man in his own home is a barbarian and a beast.... When emancipated and removed from the crushing competition of a superior race he ... descends step by step down to the original depths of his ignorant and savage instincts, and at length is debased to nearly the state which he is found in the wilds and jungles of Africa ... the normal condition of the negro is servitude" (in Alfred N. Hunt,
Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America
, 1988, p. 142).
What one does wonder about that kind of sentiment, and the web of laws and social policies in which it became possible to think such things, is what all the fuss was about. If Africans were such savages, so prone to requiring tutelage, why was it necessary to enact four centuries of homicidal legalities to prevent them from saying whatever silly little things they had on their ape-like minds or praying to whatever far-fetched spirits they had brought with them from their homelands? Or was it that the Africans were quite human indeed? And that one of the things humans do in oppressive circumstances is make trouble. They revolt.
Even today, the climate of terror in which the ruling society of the South did its business is stupefyingly untold: Gabriel

 

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Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisianathe bloody rebellions percolated with increasing frequency into the last days of the antebellum period. Every isolated plantation, every rural community, and even some of the big cities were sitting ducks.
We can only wonder what might have happened to the shape of America had the Asian and South American liberation struggles of the twentieth century come earlier, giving expertise as well as solidarity to the vast untapped slave guerilla armies of the American South? Haiti had been unnerving enough. Imagine: A massive African revolt instead of the Civil War. Why else did the South plunge into strategic folly? To protect cotton? To protect slavery? No. To stop the demographic nightmare. Further deterioration of apartheid would have made white feudal hegemony untenable. Had African slaves joined ranks with white workers, many of them the "white trash" descendants of the once thriving European indentured servant (i.e., slave) trade, Dixie might have become the paradigmatic revolutionary model for race/class alliance in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world.
A glance at population figures shows a major reason that the fear of revoltand thus the outlawing of any means by which the slaves might learn to organize or communicate dissentwas so prevalent. On the eve of the Civil War, the 1860 census listed 3.9 million slaves in the South and 8.1 million whites, making slaves about thirty-three percent of the population. But in the major states, the proportion of blacks was significantly higher: fifty-five to fifty-seven percent in South Carolina and Mississippi; forty-seven percent in Louisiana; forty-five percent in Alabama; forty-four percent in Georgia; thirty-one percent in Virginia (Eugene D. Genovese,
From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World
, 1979, and almanacs).

 

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In New Orleans, a key port city, the figures were even more African-weighted. In 1791, the population of 4,446 reflected 1,900 whites, 1,800 slaves, and 750 free blacks (Hunt, p. 46, and almanacs). In antebellum decades this almost startling ratio lessened, though the total numbers of Africans, slave or free, grew much higher and would continue to climb. In 1860 the black population was about 25,000, among about 144,000 whites. By 1880, about 57,000 blacks lived in the city, among 158,000 whites (John Blassingame,
Black New Orleans 18601880,
1973).
High as these numbers climbed, they were still dwarfed by the black majorities of eighty percent or more in St. Domingue (Haiti), Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, leading Genovese to conclude the numberstaken with other factorsweren't high enough in the American South to sustain a widespread rebellion. "[I]n general, their position steadily deteriorated over time until revolt became virtually suicidal" (
From Rebellion to Revolution
, p. 49).
While I concur and even applaud most of Genovese's analysis of the revolutionary climate of American slavedom, I propose considering the population factor in a different way. Blacks may not have constituted a majority, but their numbers were certainly high enough to launch, support and even win a protracted guerilla war, as reference to the successful wars of liberation of the twentieth century surely attests. Neither Fidel nor Mao, for example, controlled a majority of their country's populations at the outset of resistance.
Further, the high black populations were so strictly segregated and alienated from the dominant white culture that a revolutionary movement would have had little trouble delineating the shape and nature of the struggle to its own people. The sharpness of that separationas simple as black and whitewould have turned the nation-within-a-nation predicament of the slaves to psychological advantage, not liability. Very much as in Haiti, blackness could have been used as a weapon of terror to destabi-

 

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lize and defeat the white population in the same way that blackness as a sign of inferiority had been used by whites to justify slavery and control the black population. Signs and signifiers, fully reversed, might have added that unquantifiable element that has so oftenthe American Revolution would be a good exampleundone predictable outcomes and turned worlds upside down.
Of course, population wasn't the only factor, as Genovese stresses. The slaves in the U.S. were poorly armed, if at all. They were also relatively spread out, and tended to be deployed in units of a couple dozen or less, vastly different than the mega-systems of the more labor-intensive Caribbean plantations, where slaves were sent into the sugar fields 100 or more at a time, where, by the way, they didn't last as long as they did in the South. As George Eaton Simpson observes, although only about five percent of the Atlantic slave trade's human cargo wound up in the United States, by 1950 the U.S. was home to one-third of Africans in the Americas; the Caribbean islands, which had imported forty percent of the slaves, contained only twenty percent of the New World's Africans. "In the highly capitalistic slavery of the U.S.," Simpson notes with a kind of numbing understatement, "slave owners generally used force optimally, not maximally" (Simpson, p. 282).
We could argue at length, and many historians have, over why more rebellions might have occurred and why this or that factor was favorable or unfavorable at a particular historical moment. I would like to foreground what is usually in the background: the role of voudou. An analogous clue is found in the effect of decentralized methods of production, an important effect of which, the isolation of slave units, was the material counterpart to an equally if not more crucial quarantinethat of communication and leadership. How the Southern economy produced cotton and other crops was probably an accident of

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