Follow the Drinking Gourd song

[Wilson Gray]

On Oct 15, 2004, at 9:45 PM, James A. Landau wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "James A. Landau" <JJJRLandau at AOL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Follow the Drinking Gourd song
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> In a message dated  Thu, 14 Oct 2004 23:59:36 -0400,  Wilson Gray
> <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> writes
>
>>> If, as Jim suggests, the song was extremely local, isn't also odd
>>> that
>>> Parks (and Parks alone) should have picked up one stanza in North
>>> Carolina and several more a thousand miles away in Texas
>>
>>  FWIW, my ancestors were slaves in North Carolina before being
>>  transported to Texas after Stephen F. Austin, a former slave-holder
>>  from Missouri, was successful in re-establishing slavery in Texas.
>> When
>>  Texas was part of Mexico, slavery had been outlawed.

> Were your ancestors lucky enough to be transported as a family group,
> or did
> they suffer the all-too-common fate of having families broken up for
> the slave
> sale?

I think so. I have only two sets of records. One set is from 1851 Texas
and gives the surname as Frazier. The men all came from North Carolina,
whereas some of the women also came from Tennessee. The other set of
records, from 1888 Texas, lists the birthplace of the patriarch as
Tennessee and his surname as Garrett, whereas the birthplace of the
matriarch is listed as South Carolina, followed by a list of 14
children, all born in Marshall, Texas. Since I have a plethora of
kinfolk variously named Garrett, Frazier, Prothrow, Harrold, Bobo,
Jones, Curry, Hurd, Rambo, etc., etc., all over East Texas, I've always
assumed that that came about as a result of the selling or the trading
of excess Fraziers to other plantations.

-Wilson Gray

>
> As to why your ancestors got taken from North Carolina to Texas, there
> is a
> rather complex reason.
>
> You might think slaves were cheap.  On the contrary.  Circa 1850 a
> good field
> hand would fetch around $500 at auction.  This is equivalent to
> something
> like $100,000 in today's money.  Or another comparison: in 1850 a
> white artisan
> might receive an annual wage of $180 or so, and an unskilled white
> worker
> somewhat less.  If you bought a slave and put him to work, you had to
> work him for
> something like five years before you were doing better than if you had
> hired a
> white laborer.
>
> And you had to buy a slave for cash.  Banks did not like to loan money
> on
> collateral that might at any time drop dead or escape to the North.
> (Gives a new
> meaning to "collateral damage".)
>
> The rule of thumb was that it took 30 slaves to justify having a white
> overseer.  (For less than 30 slaves, on slave was designated the
> "driver" and acted
> as overseer.)  To set up such a plantation with 30+ slaves and an
> overseer
> meant an extremely illiquid investment of the equivalent of 2 to 4
> million of
> today's dollars.
>
> Other countries' aristocracies were "land-poor".  The plantation
> owners in
> the South, even the prosperous ones, were "slave-poor", to coin a
> term.  This
> was the big economic shortcoming of the South, that so much of its
> capital was
> tied up in slaves.
>
> So what did a plantation Massa or other slaveowner do when he needed
> money?
> He had no choice but to sell some of his slaves.  It might almost be
> said that
> in the slave-owning parts of the South, the unit of currency was not
> the
> dollar but the slave.
>
> What about the infamous cruelty of having slave families broken up for
> resale
> (which strikes me as one of the very worst aspects of slave life in the
> South)?  It was not (usually) intentional cruelty on the part of Massa
> but rather
> callousness on the part of the slave-dealer, who said, "I'll take the
> big one
> with the muscles, but his woman ain't gonna fetch enough to make it
> worthwhile
> taking her, and there's no market for the young-uns."
>
> And the slave-dealer was himself in a financial bind.  He was dealing
> in
> slaves, who as I said before were big-ticket items, in a cash- and
> credit-short
> economy, which meant that he had to recoup his investment by resale
> for cash as
> quickly as he could, or else he'd go bankrupt as his working cash ran
> out.
> Even renting out his slaves (a dollar a day was a typical rate) would
> not do,
> because he had to depend on quick turnover to keep from using up his
> limited
> supply of cash.
>
> Where was the market for slaves?  Not in the eastern South, where the
> Tidewater (the only area where plantations were found) was already
> divided up into
> plantations most of which grew enough slaves of their own that they
> didn't have
> to buy any.  No, the market was on the frontier where previously empty
> land
> was available for new plantations.
>
> So what most likely happened to your ancestors is that their owner(s)
> in
> North Carolina needed cash and sold them, and the dealer who picked
> them up sold
> them in Texas where slave-holding was expanding and there was a
> seller's market
> in slaves.
>
> As a check on the previous paragraph, do you know when your ancestors
> were
> brought to Texas?  It was probably not during the period of the
> Republic of
> Texas, as its finances were in such bad shape that it couldn't pay for
> imports
> (the Texas dollar bottomed out at 2 cents US).  Possibly it was before
> 1836, but
> I would guess the 1850's as more likely, and most likely during the
> Panic of
> 1857, when a lot of plantation owners found themselves short of money
> and
> called in the slave dealers.
>
> [footnotes on request]
>
>     - James A. Landau
>