Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2022/Fall/Section093/Julia Brown (Aunt Sally)

Biography

Early Life

Julia Brown was born in Commerce, Georgia. She was born enslaved and her parents belonged to two different families. She was taken from her mother as a baby and never saw her again although she did have six siblings. Brown began working in the fields when she was five years old and she describes not being allowed to go anywhere except occasionally church. Not all aspects of slavery affected Brown because she was young when it ended but it is clear that the things happening around her greatly impacted her. She describes how her uncle was married to a woman owned by a different master which many masters did not even allow their slaves to marry people with a different master. He was only allowed to visit her twice a week and one day he went to visit her and she was gone because she had been sold and nobody had told him. Brown was thirteen years old when the civil war ended and slavery therefore ended however nobody told her that slavery ended and she continued to work as a slave until a while later.

Adult Life

After she was freed she moved to Winder, Georgia where she married Green Hinton and had eight children. Hinton was a farmer and Brown describes him as making a good living for their family. Once most of her children had grown up Hinton died and Brown went on to marry Jim Brown and then move to Atlanta, Georgia. Her husband Brown started off as a farmer and later on worked for the railroad. It was at the railroad that he was killed after he fell in front of a moving train. brown should have received a good sum of money from the railroad company for the death of her husband but instead her lawyer received most of the money. All of her children later on died except one remaining son who was very sick and unable to take care of himself. Brown was very old at this point and unable to do anything to support herself either. She describes being in such poverty that she had little to eat and had to sell the deeds to her house to pay her water bill.

Social Context

Childhood Slavery

When enslaved people had children the second their child was born, they too became a slave. Slave children were a huge asset to slave owners because they were not expensive to care for yet they could start to work at the age of six. And unlike slaves that slaveowners had to pay to purchase slave children were free of charge because they were produced by people the slaveowner already owned. Because of this slaveowners often sold enslaved children even when they were still infants. Slave parents lived in constant fear that their children would be sold and they would never see them again. Enslaved women’s ability to reproduce was therefore extremely important. At the age of six enslaved children started by doing small tasks like fanning their master as they took a nap. Masters ranked children based on fractions. When they first started to do chores they were considered “quarter hands” and as they got older they took on more and more tasks until the age of eighteen where they became “full hands” and were required to do an adult’s amount of work most likely in the field or the house.

Post Civil War Slavery in the South

The idea that slavery ended in 1863 with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation is far from the truth. Many black people were kept in slavery long after that with no idea that they were free. Enslaved people became indebted to their owner in one way or another and were not allowed to leave the property. One major way slaveowners were able to keep their slaves in captivity is the terms of the thirteenth amendment which banned slavery it said that slavery was illegal “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This meant that slavery was not fully banned which made it much easier to continue to do it.

Slave Marriage

An 1899 illustration of a broomstick wedding ceremony. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

Enslaved people were legally considered as property and not as humans which meant there was no way for them to be in a legal marriage recognized by the government. Slaves could marry if they slaveowner allowed it but it was not a real marriage. “Slave couples did not solemnize their contubernal relationships with traditional wedding ceremonies performed by a clergyman or by a justice of the peace in a church or meeting hall.” These marriages could also be terminated by slaveowners at any time. The marriages were considered legitimate within the slave community and usually enslaved people had ceremonies of their own creation for the marriages. Slave marriages was often seen as beneficial to slaveowners because they were an incentive for slaves to breed and create more slaves. Slaveowners could also sell on member of a slave marriage at any time so the bond in no way made sure that the two people could stay together.

Bibliography

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery. National Archives, 1865.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marriage_of_enslaved_people_(United_States)&oldid=1091761664. Wikipedia. 2022-06-06.

Brown, DeNeen L. “‘Barbaric’: America’s Cruel History of Separating Children from Their Parents.” The Washington Post, May 31, 2018.

Goring, Darlene. “The History of Slave Marriage in the United States.” University Law Digital Commons, 2006.

Harrell, Antionette. “Black People in the US Were Enslaved Well into the 1960s.” Vice, February 28, 2018.

Mullins, Melissa Ann. “Born into Slavery: The American Slave Child Experience.” Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects at W&M ScholarWorks, 1997. https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-w1w7-8b19.

Tonsill, Geneva. “I’se Always Had a Hard Time.” UNC University Libraries, July 25, 1939.

Wallenstein, Peter. “Slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment: Race and the Law of Crime and Punishment in the Post-Civil War South.” Louisiana Law Review 77, no. 1 (2016): 1–20.