Salt Lake Community College

Perspective
Proof that Hope is Indestructible

Max Barlow
History 1700 Section 34
Hoskisson
12/15/2016

Understanding the perspective of the African American people during the antebellum
period requires a deep awareness of some major ideas. You must comprehend how the American
nation was dividing, and the problems that resulted from this split. More importantly, you must
understand who Robert Smalls was and the iconic reputation he held within the African
American minds. Also you must acknowledge the importance of the illiterate being represented
historically through slave narratives and their brutal innards. Most important of all you must
understand that there is no amount of pain and suffering that will take hope from a person.
In the antebellum, antiblack, bureaucratic American system, how does a black person
feel? Bad, hostile, bitter, outraged, provoked, piqued? What does he/she experience? Imagine
that every day you are watching people of your own race being brutally beaten, and that you are
often being the subject of the same abuses. You are one of the people repeatedly receiving the
most evil fine tip in all of existence. A whip is a very persuasive instrument. A whip will demand
obedience, and it will be given it! However, hope is indestructible! There is no number of
lashings that will make a person cease to hope that a brutality will soon end. The antebellum
period was the first opportunity since its dawn that the African American people had to escape
this brutality. Despite this very little glimpse of hope, the antebellum period was the hardest the
African American people had ever endured.
I know that it is hard to imagine any form of hope in such despicable circumstances, but
hope is immune to the destruction of a whip: hope that someday one of these Crackers will
develop the inkling that the African American People are, in fact, people; hope that someday a
Robert-Smalls will exist; and hope that someday someone, with the ability to do so, will fight for
the equality of humans, as opposed to the equality of white, land-owning male humans.

To truly understand the perspective of African Americans during the antebellum period, you must
understand where the American Colonies were as a whole.
During the antebellum period, there was a major split between the North and and South
due to the differing labor systems and wealth. The North was experiencing the industrial
revolution and transportation revolution which opened opportunity in industries other than cotton
and crops. Because of this, the North rapidly began moving to a labor system called free labor,
which was not truly free, but it was low paying work usually in a factory or other place of harsh
conditions. This new form of labor, in conjunction with and partially because of these
revolutions, diminished the need for slavery within the bounds of these revolutions. The South,
not being part of these revolutions, had invested everything they had into the slave system; all of
their extreme wealth was founded on the backs of the hard working African American people
that they called property. The South had staked everything on the slave system, and until the war,
it was monumentally successful. This difference in work style and wealth between the North and
the South drove long, wide wedges between them and resulted in a division the likes of which
the American Colonies had never imagined.
In order to understand the African American perspective during this period, you must
understand who Robert Smalls was and what he represented to the African American People: a
true ICON within the African American minds.
In 1839, a baby by the name of Robert Smalls was born into a slave family in Beaufort,
South Carolina. His mother was an African American slave by the name of Linda Polite. His
father is said to be the son of the plantation owner to whom his mother was enslaved. Despite
having a white father, because the status of every baby follows that of the mother, Robert Smalls
lived as a slave. At the age of twelve, Robert Smalls family moved to Charleston where he got a

job working at the docs as a rigger and eventually as a sailor on a ship called the Planter.
Throughout this period, Robert Smalls learned everything he could about sailing. One night
while the white officers of the Planter slept, Robert Small and about eight other African
Americans slaves aboard the Planter convened. At this meeting, Robert Smalls convinced them
to help him steal the Planter. In doing so, they all agreed that death was preferable to being
caught. The gunpowder aboard the planter was used to prepare an explosion that would kill them
all and sink the ship in the event that they were caught. The next morning, the eight men along
with a few others (Smalls wife and children, plus a few more women) boarded the Planter
before first light and sailed free of the Charleston Harbor. Enabled by years of experience aboard
the Planter, Charles sailed the Planter though many checkpoints providing the correct signals at
each to gain passage. After escaping, Robert had the flag dropped, and a white sheet took its
place as they hand-delivered the Confederates supply ships to Union soil. Upon arrival, Smalls
and his crew gave the ship to the Union and provided all the knowledge they had at their
disposal. All and all, the knowledge they brought with them proved to be even more valuable
than the ship, guns, and ammunition the Planter held.
All of this was only the beginning. Upon completion of his daring and perilous escape,
Robert Smalls began fighting for the Union as a Captain and later a Brigadier General. When the
war ended, Smalls went into politics, where he made it all the way to the House of
Representatives and also to the state Senate, all the while fighting for African American rights. In
1915, Robert Smalls died of natural causes at the age of 75.
The implication of Robert Smalls actions went far beyond the acts themselves. Robert
Smalls brought a Confederate supply ship full of supplies and priceless information about the

Confederate Military to the Union. And yet, the most valuable part was the rebellious
encouragement the actions gave the Southern slaves.
The more essential part of these acts was that Robert Smalls was now a tool that could be
used to help persuade Abraham Lincoln (President at the time) to free all the slaves in the South
with the Emancipation Proclamation. He also showed the value in letting the African Americans,
who had more to lose than anyone else, fight in this misnamed white man's war. In his later
years following the war, Robert Smalls still fought for African Americans whether in the State
Senate or the House of Representatives, or even in his personal life when he started a school for
African Americans.
During the antebellum period, the vast majority of white people did not own slaves
thereby making them quite ignorant to the abuse African Americans slaves were receiving on a
daily basis.
African American did their best to capture their horrendous experiences in writings called
slave narratives. These slave narratives were usually brutal, harsh, and revealing writings. One
could argue that these were the true perspective of African Americans during the antebellum
period. Slave narratives often showed the extent of abuse that regularly fell on the African
American people.
Again, imagine being beaten over and over for tasks that are impossible to achieve.
Eventually you would give up and begin to believe that resisting was pointless. But there would
always be some small amount of hope somewhere deep inside of you. The antebellum period
was one that, if framed correctly, could be called a hopeful period for African American slaves
in the Americas.

There were some serious momentous events occurring across the United States that
would have had elephantine effects on the African American day to day lives: Abraham Lincoln's
potential and eventual signing of the Emancipation Proclamation; the industrial and
transportation revolutions in the North abolishing the need for slavery within their bounds; and
the introduction of Free Labor system to the American Colonies.
While there were reason for African Americans to be hopeful, there were also serious
risks and reasons for them to be afraid. Even the free African Americans could not escape from
the antiblack bureaucracy that governed the land they lived in. Solomon Northrup was proof of
this. He was a free African American farmer, born in New York as a free man who was
kidnapped, enslaved, and spent twelve years working on a notoriously harsh cotton plantation.
Solomon Northrop's literacy enabled him to document his brutal experience in an astonishing
slave narrative called Twelve Years A Slave. This is a huge piece of history because of the law
preventing the education of slaves and, thereby, the creation of any documentation that would
stand against the white slave owners.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, and it is

hereby enacted by the authority of the same, that any free persons, who shall hereafter
teach, or attempt to teach, any slave within the State to read or write, the use of figures
excepted, or shall give or sell such slave or slaves any books or pamphlets, shall be liable
to indictment in any court of record in this state having jurisdiction thereof, And upon
conviction, shall, at the discretion of the court, if a white man or woman, be fined not less
than one hundred dollars, nor more than two hundred dollars, or imprisoned: and if a free
person of color, shall be fined, imprisoned, or whipped, at the discretion of the court, not
exceeding thirty nine lashes, nor less than twenty lashes. (Wallerstein)

This law only applied to those within the bounds of North Carolina but almost every
slave state would have a similar law by the time the Civil War came around.
The meaning behind this is quite clear. The white lawmakers knew that if African
Americans were able to read and write, their rebellion could not be veiled by the fine tip of a
whip. It would no longer be one man running away, but it would be Nat Turner killing 55 white
people, or Jemmy gathering a group of 20 African Americans that would later grow to 100,
surviving for more than a week before the colonists could retaliate. (Henry Louis Gates) Also, if
the African Americans were able to to document their abuses, those slave narratives could be
spread among the people who could do something about it: the white men and women who did
not own slaves, Since their wealth and success was not based on the hard work of slaves, and
since they had the necessary skin color, they were in a better position to change the antiblack
bureaucracy prevailing over the nation known as the American Colonies.
Due to the lack of literacy with the African American people during the antebellum
period, it is very difficult to know their exact feelings, but it is not the slightest bit difficult to
understand how we would feel if we were put in the same situation. Even then, you would have
just scratched the surface of the antebellum, African American perspective.
Most American people, myself included, are so privileged that our brains lack the
functional capability to comprehend even our own perspective of an anti-insert-your-race
government and system.
To my knowledge, the English language lacks the word necessary to describe the
resultant feeling of such evil, so I am going to use many different words and phrases to describe
the situation: horrendous acts of evil, uneducated, ignorant, savage, barbaric, inhuman, bestial,
grim, and vicious. These were the circumstances, and yet somehow, hope was still being spread

by the ICON known as Robert Smalls, by Abraham Lincolns potential signing of the
Declaration of Independence, and by the potential that a white human could get the inkling that
an African American human was in fact a human.
Hope is my answer! Hope is the African American perspective during the antebellum
period.

Works Cited
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The African Americnas. n.d. 15 December 2016
<http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-africanamerican-slaves-rebel/>.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. Slaves are Prohibited to Read and Write by Law. n.d. 15 December
2016 <http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/slaveprohibit.html>.