'I Could Not Stay There': Enslaved Women, Truancy and the Geography of Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Antebellum Plantation South

Abstract

Like many other antebellum planters, Sallie Smith’s Louisiana owner hoped to control his labour force and to affirm his position as head of the plantation household by limiting the movement of enslaved people around and, especially, off his property. Accordingly, he forbade his bondpeople from leaving his plantation without a pass. When his enslaved people broke the rules that determined where they ought to be – in the field, in the yard, in their quarters – and when they ought to be there, Smith’s owner punished them violently, as was his prerogative. After running away temporarily, Smith was tortured inside of ‘a big barrel he kept to roll us in, with nails drove all through it’. But Sallie Smith continued to run away: ‘I did not stay more than a month before I ran away again. I tell you, I could not stay there.’ 1 Unwilling or unable to ‘stay there’, Sallie Smith was like many other bondwomen who, for short periods of time, ran away from overwork and abuse on antebellum plantations. Smith was not a typical bondwoman in that most did not run away nearly so frequently as she. But many other enslaved women and men did run away on occasion throughout their lives. Called ‘runaways’ by antebellum Southern blacks and whites, and termed ‘truants’ and ‘absentees’ by historians, they did not intend to make a break for freedom in the North, but sought short-term escapes from work, from planter and overseer control and from the prying eyes of family and friends. 2