The Negro Business is a great object with us. It is to the
Trade of the Country as the Soul to the Body.
— Joseph Clay, slave owner
Josiah Henson's earliest memory was of the day that his father came home with his ear cut off. He, like his parents, had been born into slavery, and knew no other world beyond the small tract of tidewater Maryland wherehe was raised. He was five or six years old when the horrifying thing happened, probably sometime in 1795. "Father appeared one day covered inblood and in a state of great excitement," Henson would recall many yearslater. His head was bloody and his back lacerated, and "he was beside himselfwith mingled rage and suffering."
Henson was born on June 15, 1789, on the eastern shore of ChesapeakeBay, on a farm belonging to Francis Newman, about a mile fromPort Tobacco. His mother was the property of a neighbor, Dr. JosiahMcPherson, an amiable alcoholic who treated the infant Henson as somethingof a pet, bestowing upon him his own Christian name. In accordance with common practice, McPherson had hired out Henson's motherto Newman, to whom Henson's father belonged. Newman's overseer, a"rough, coarse man," had brutally assaulted Henson's mother. Whetherthis was an actual or attempted rape, or the more mundane brutality ofdaily life, Henson does not make clear. Perhaps he didn't know. Whateverthe cause, Henson's father, normally a good-humored man, attacked theoverseer with ferocity and would have killed him, had not Henson'smother intervened. For a slave to lift his hand "against the sacred templeof a white man's body," even in self-defense, was an act of rebellion. Slaveswere sometimes executed, and occasionally even castrated, for such an act.Knowing that retribution would be swift, Henson's father fled. Like mostrunaways, however, he didn't go far, but hid in the surrounding woods,venturing at night to beg food at nearby cabins. Eventually, hunger compelledhim to surrender. Slaves from surrounding plantations were orderedto witness his punishment for their "moral improvement." Onehundred lashes were laid on by a local blacksmith, fifty lashes at a time.Bleeding and faint, the victim was then held up against the whipping postand his right ear fastened to it with a "tack." The blacksmith then slicedthe ear off with a knife, to the sound of cheers from the crowd.
What the real sentiments of the slaves watching this punishmentmight have been no one can say. Perhaps they cheered in a desperate effortto reassure their masters that they, unlike Henson's father, were docileand trustworthy, and harbored no thoughts of rebellion. Or perhaps withrelief, seeing a "troublemaker," whose deed had caused their masters tobecome more vigilant and harsh in an effort to forestall further rebellion,now getting his just deserts. Or perhaps, to people so brutalized by theirown degradation, the cruelty may even have seemed a form of gruesomeentertainment. Afterward, Henson's father became a different man, broodingand morose — "intractable," as slave owners typically described humanproperty that no longer responded compliantly to command. Nothingcould be done with him. "So off he was sent to Alabama. What was his afterfate neither my mother nor I ever learned."
Following his father's disappearance, Henson and his mother returnedto the McPherson estate. Even after years of freedom, Hensonwould remember the doctor as a "liberal, jovial" man of kind impulses,and he might well have lived out his life in passive oblivion as a slave hadnot it been for another stroke of fate that abruptly changed his life yet again. One morning, when Henson was still a small child, McPherson wasfound drowned in a stream, having apparently fallen...
“Well written, moving, and stimulating...Could provide the occasion for a constructive national conversation.”
