Hallowell Asylum Seeker James Matthews Makes His First Escape from Slavery
This is the second part in a series about James Matthews, an asylum seeker who fled slavery in 1837 and ended up in Hallowell, Maine. His memoir originally ran anonymously in Advocate of Freedom, a Hallowell-based newspaper that served as the official voice of the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. Content warning: this story contains graphic descriptions of torture and abuse.
When Jim Matthews was about 14 years old, his mistress decided to give all the enslaved children on the plantation to her adult children. The white family gathered for a big dinner and, afterward, they gathered all the enslaved children in the yard. The slavers made five rings on the ground and hustled about 25 children into each one. Appraisers then moved some into other rings until they figured each group was of equal value. The mistresses’ children drew slips of paper to determine which group of enslaved children now belonged to whom.
The oldest son, Alfred Smith, drew Matthews’ group, and Jim went to live with him in the small town of Bethel, South Carolina. Alfred’s wife, Rebecca, Matthews recalled, “was the most spiteful woman I ever saw, and very cruel to the house servants.” She was extremely picky about how she wanted them to perform their tasks and would beat them if they failed to live up to her standards. She was known to beat the cooks with tongs, a knife, or whatever kitchen utensil was handy.
“One day when I was watering the horses at the well near the kitchen,” Matthews said, “I heard a great noise, and in a few moments the cook woman Lucinda came out with her head all bloody, so that you could not tell whether she had hair or not. Her head was all gashed up with a knife. When mistress found her head was bleeding all over the kitchen, she sent her out to wash it off.”
Another time, Matthews was visiting a nearby home to borrow some sugar and coffee when he witnessed the neighbor, Bob Bradford, jam a fork into a cook and break the prongs off in her head. He observed that slave owners would often come up with elaborate ways to torture their workers. A very wealthy planter named Ned Broughton, Matthews said, would punish slaves by putting them into a long box just large enough to hold them, like a coffin, and then screwing a board over it with a hole just large enough to breathe through.
Rebecca Smith was frequently bedridden due to a chronic illness and would make her servants stand by her bed while she whipped them with switches. Alfred would typically use a broom stick to crack over their heads. The master’s children were taught from a young age that abusing enslaved people was acceptable and even encouraged.
Sometimes enslaved workers were forced to beat one another. Matthews remembered an incident during which a young domestic servant was coming into the house with a basket of eggs. The mistress’ daughter stumbled and knocked the girl down, causing one of the eggs to break. Rebecca Smith beat the girl until her face was swollen, and when her husband came home, he ordered Matthews to participate.
“He ordered me to take her right away to the whipping house and get her ready for him to whip her,” Matthews said years later. “When he came out, he scolded at me for not doing it right. He made me take off all her clothes and tie her on to the table. Her hands and feet were bound fast, and he then put a rope round her neck and bound her close down so that she could not stir in any way. When he had done this, he went into the house and got something to drink, and then came out with his cowskin and whipped her till her skin was all cut up, and there was a puddle of blood on the floor just as if a hog had been killed. He then took a paddle and paddled her on top of that almost to death, and made me wash her down with brine. The brine is to keep the raw flesh from putrifying, and to make it heal quick. They mix it very thick and rub it in with corn husks.”
The infants of enslaved mothers were always neglected, Matthews reported, because their mothers were forced to work all the time. Mothers would sling their children on their backs and put them in cradles in the shade, but were often prohibited from tending to them when they cried. When they tried to nurse their babies in the fields, they would sometimes find them covered in insects or bitten by snakes.
One cook at the Smiths’ property had to put her baby in a basket outside while she worked in the kitchen, and the field hands would move the baby into the shade when they came home at noon to feed the livestock. Matthews once found the cook’s child filthy and infected with parasites. Eventually the infant got very sick.
“When it was very sick, mistress asked what was the matter with that little nigger brat?” Matthews said. “They told her it was dying for want of attention. Then she let its mother take it into the kitchen and tend it. It died when she was getting breakfast.”
The Smiths were also known to force elderly and infirm men and women to work in the fields until they died. One day, an African field hand who had been kidnapped from Guinea told Alfred Smith that he was too sick to work. The master didn’t believe him, claiming the man didn’t have a fever, and sent him back into the field. When Sunday came, the Guinean worker had to be taken home in a cart after visiting his wife on another plantation because he was so sick. He died three days later.
Smith later sold Matthews to a wealthy Jewish man named Davy Cohen who lived 12 miles outside Charleston. There, Matthews was forced to live in a dirt-floored hut with only some pine and cypress bark to shield him from the beating rain. The workers slept on piles of hay or clapboards covered in old clothes.
“Often, we did not have beds at all, but slept in the ashes,” said Matthews. “We built our fires in the middle of the house, and never moved the ashes, so that there was a great heap, and when we came home, we prepared our ash-cake, and put it into the hot ashes to bake, and then laid down there ourselves and slept till the horn blew in the morning. Then we got up and brushed the ashes off, and took our cake or potatoes and went straight to work.”
One time, Matthews and other enslaved workers ran out of their allotted food for the week, so they stole some musk melons from the garden. Cohen’s slave drivers discovered some of the culprits by measuring their tracks and whipped them until one gave up the names of Matthews, a man named Reuben, and a woman. The men stretched Reuben out across four stakes in the ground and whipped him before putting him in the stocks. Matthews was tied tightly around a log and whipped. The woman was savagely beaten against a tree and then put into the “dungeon,” a dark hole under the house. The next morning, the overseers blew the horn and forced the three beaten and bloody workers back into the field. Matthews recalled being so sore that he couldn’t finish his work and was whipped again.
It was then he decided to make his first attempt to flee.
That same night, Matthews fled into the swamp and ran until midnight, when he came upon a camp of other freedom-seekers. It wasn’t uncommon for enslaved people to hide in the swamp after being whipped, he later noted. Sometimes they stayed for as long as five or six weeks before they were either caught or returned to the plantation due to hunger.
“I have known a great many who never came back; they were whipped so bad they never got well, but died in the woods, and their bodies have been found by people hunting,” Matthews said. “White men come in sometimes with collars and chains and bells, which they had taken from dead slaves. They just take off their irons and then leave them, and think no more about them.”
While living in the swamp, Matthews and the others laid low in a dense thicket all day and then “rambled and plundered all night long.” He stayed there two or three weeks, until one day, when he and another man were out hunting for plums, they stopped at a brook to drink and fell asleep on a log. That’s when Cohen’s overseer and another man came upon them. The sound of the slaver’s men awakened the other enslaved man and he tried to make a run for it, but they shot him in the back. They tied the dying man to a horse and brought him to Cohen, who beat him mercilessly with a walking stick while the other two men whipped Matthews before sending him back to work.
“I felt mighty bad that night,” he recalled. “I could not sleep. I went to the mill house to grind my corn for the next day, and I just stood up and leaned my head against the corner of the house, and ground and nodded all night. My flesh was all cut up, and I was too sore to lie down. When the horn sounded in the morning I had just enough corn ground to last me.”
Matthews’ body was broken, but his spirit was not. It would take several attempts, but he would eventually find asylum in New England.
We’ll continue Jim Matthews’ story next month. Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
