Changing The Complexion of Things: The Slave Revolt That Didn’t Happen

Today a swimming club in Pennsylvania turned away a group of summer camp kids simply because they weren’t white. The swim club didn’t want to change “the complexion” of their pool. You can see the story at http://abcnews.go.com/US/story.

When the kids tried to swim, the whites left the water. ABC reported that one African-American boy heard one white person say, “Oh I’m scared they might harm my children or try to steal something from me.”

It’s hard to believe that this kind of stupidity and fear exists in 2009. But the swim club bigots remind us that throughout American history, white people’s stupidity and fear have led to unspeakable brutality and cruelty against African-Americans.

An episode in the story of the African-American and white Slaydens of Dickson County, Tennessee, illustrates the point.

Back in 1856, the Slaydens of Dickson County, Tennessee – both African-American and white – lived near the Cumberland Furnace, one of about thirty iron works in the “iron district” that stretched along the mountains of central Tennessee and southern Kentucky.

They say the first cannonball used by the Confederates was forged at Cumberland Furnace.

But the iron district ran on slave labor. 2,000 slaves labored – forced and unpaid – at forges and furnaces throughout the iron district. Over 200 slaves worked at the Cumberland Furnace alone.

In December of 1856, reports of a slave rebellion swept the countryside. By one account, a slave at Cumberland Furnace had informed his owner that slaves working in the iron furnaces were planning a general revolt.

The informant said he knew all about the plot, but would die before he would tell. “He thereupon received seven hundred and fifty lashes, from which he died.”

The rumored plot was to forge a bloody road to freedom: “The plan was to butcher the whites upon isolated farms and in the workshops, and then to march to each chief town of the county. They would thus have established a free road along the Cumberland from Nashville to Ohio.”

Shocking headlines announced, “Negro Insurrection in Southern Kentucky and Tennessee.” The hysteria was picked up daily by the press. “’The negroes are marching upon us,’ is heard from every mouth,” wrote one observer from neighboring Stewart County. “The whole village is in a state of anxiety; the white population is armed, and I see children, who can scarcely carry a gun . . . aiding to swell the number.”

Violence by white vigilante committees and patrols erupted throughout the iron district. Nineteen African-American men were hanged in one town in Stewart County. Dozens of “ringleaders” were jailed and whipped. “The jails in all the counties were crowded with the arrested blacks.”

In Dickson County, the local white people heard the rumors and “commenced the work of apprehending and punishing all the negroes whom they could find out, as having been engaged in said plot, or of having been cognizant of it.” The ones found guilty were locked in the Dickson County jail.

But the rumors weren’t true.

The New York Times reported: “We see no evidence of anything more than local disaffection, -- and many of the designs attributed to the negroes seem to rest upon vague and unreliable testimony.”

One recent historian characterized the episode as a “brutal suppression of a black insurrection which seems to have existed only in the panic-stricken minds of white southerners in 1856.”

We don’t know if the Slaydens – African-American or white – were caught up in the hysteria. We do know that the “rebellion” of 1856 preceded by only five years the great Civil War in which the African-American Slaydens finally won their freedom.

But here we are – a century and a half later – and some white people in Pennsylvania still don’t get it. Those little African-American boys and girls weren’t going to harm their children or steal their stuff. Those little kids just wanted to swim.