Jim Matthews Escapes to Maine
When Jim Matthews made the decision to escape from a South Carolina plantation in 1837, he knew what the stakes were.
“If the hunters could see us, they would shoot us,” Matthews told an interviewer in Hallowell, Maine, a year later. “They don’t think any more about shooting a nigger than a dog.”
One day, after a brutal whipping, Matthews’ master, Davy Cohen, sent him to get the mules. He walked outside and kept walking, right into the swamp. This time, he hid out for a month before a slave-catcher caught him.
Knowing Matthews would not give up his quest for freedom, Cohen sent him to a slave-breaker named Jim Wolf to extinguish his rebellious spirit. Wolf ran a torture camp inside an old sugar house surrounded by a brick wall with sharp, pointed iron bars and broken glass sticking out the top. After revolutionary Denmark Vesey’s slave rebellion plot was foiled in 1822, the building was used exclusively for torturing enslaved people who refused to submit. As historian Joseph Williams wrote, slave owners who “did not want to sully their own hands” by beating their slaves paid slave-breakers like Wolf to give them, in the parlance of the time, “a bit of sugar.”
The stone sugar house had an iron door that was chained shut. Its cold, dark basement was set up like a dungeon with an array of torture devices along the walls, including paddles, whips, cowskins, cat-o’-nine-tails, and a device called a “bluejay” that punctured flesh.
“I have heard a great deal said about hell, and wicked places, but I don’t think there is any worse hell than that sugar house,” said Matthews. “It’s as bad a place as can be.”
Before they were whipped at the sugar house, men and women were stripped naked and a cap was put over their faces. They were bound with their limbs stretched out using a winch and ropes tied to pegs on opposite sides of the room. Slavers could choose from a menu of torture options for their “runaways.”
“They wet the paddle, and then rub it in sand, and every time they hit with it, the skin peels off just the same as you peel a potato,” said Matthews. “When it gets well it will be right smooth, and not in knots as when whipped with the cowskin. Some would want their niggers whipped with one thing and some with another, and some wouldn’t care how they were whipped, so they got it.”
Cohen instructed Wolf to give Matthews 50 lashes and put him on the treadmill: a large, rotating paddle-wheel device used to grind corn. As a form of torture, people were forced to walk on the steps of the wheel for up to eight hours a day, in three-minute intervals. They often collapsed from exhaustion. After the slave-breakers whipped Matthews, they stripped off his rags, rubbed salt brine in his wounds and threw him into a five-foot cell with only a tiny hole to let in air.
“My back, when they went to whip me, would be full of scabs, and they whipped them off till I bled so that my clothes were all wet,” recalled Matthews. “Many a night I have laid up there in the Sugar House and scratched them off by the handful.”
The sounds of men and women being whipped and paddled reverberated throughout the sugar house at all hours of the day. As soon as one prisoner was untied, another was brought in to take their place, like an assembly line of torture. Female slavers, particularly widows, made up a large part of the sugar house’s clientele. Some would stay to watch the torture and taunt the victims, asking, “How does that feel?” Matthews recalled enslaved women getting down on their knees to beg for forgiveness, but the master would retort, “‘You bitch, you’ve got the devil in you, and I’ll get it out.’”
The only food inmates were given was dry hominy (corn), daily at 11 a.m. Some would beg workers at the sugar house for the water the workers boiled their salted fish in. The rooms were so crowded that children had to lay atop others to sleep. The inmates slept in rows on the floor with their heads against the wall and a path between their feet to walk. It was so swelteringly hot inside that they would awake drenched in sweat as if someone had dumped buckets of it on them.
There was a jail beyond the jagged wall, where slaves were held when the sugar house was full. There was also a “poor house” and a “crazy house” nearby.
“Sometimes the people in the Poor House would throw scraps out of the window into the Sugar House yard, and every morning when we were let out, we used to rush up to the wall to get what had been thrown out overnight,” Matthews said. “I never eat the meat, it was so dirty — but sometimes got a scrap of bread.”
Matthews was held in the sugar house for three months, but when Cohen returned to claim him, Matthews told him he still didn’t know if he was ready to go back to the plantation. Realizing the enslaved man was determined to run away again, Cohen decided to sell him to a speculator.
These speculators, Matthews recalled, would arrive with loads of naked children that they packed into carts “like pigs.” Occasionally, one was discovered smothered to death. Matthews had become so frail and sickly inside the sugar house that Cohen could only fetch $700 for him — $500 less than he’d paid for Matthews.
An illiterate, drunken Dutchman named John Fogle bought Matthews and hired him out to the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company to do hard labor on the tracks. One day, after Matthews was whipped by the overseer, he threw down his spade and fled into the woods. When night fell, he crept up to a train as it made a stop and hid in a car between bales of cotton. The next morning, as the train approached Charleston, he jumped out.
Matthews ended up joining other free and enslaved workers loading cotton onto ships. While aboard one of the ships, he found a shiny trinket on a chain. When a policeman boarded the vessel to search for runaways, he demanded to see badges denoting that the Black men were allowed to work there. Matthews saw other workers show their trinkets, so he showed his to the cop. “I was very much frightened, because I did not know as it would do, but he looked at it and said it was right, and then I felt mighty glad,” he recalled. “If I had not had that badge I should have been carried straight to the sugar house.”
Another day on the docks, Matthews met a friendly ship steward from up north. The man asked him how much of his wages he’d had to give to his master. “All,” Matthews replied. The steward told him that where he was from, workers kept all of their hard-earned wages because everyone was free.
“When he told me this, I began to think that there was a free country, and to wish that I could get there,” Matthews said.
The man offered to hide him on the ship bound for Boston. Matthews offered him what little money he’d earned at the dock, but the steward refused it. He told Matthews he’d need it when he arrived in the free states.
Under cover of darkness, the steward led Matthews to a narrow space between some cotton bales and plugged it with wood to conceal him. He warned him not to cough or make any noise. After the ship departed, the steward smuggled him bits of bread and some thin clothes, but it was very cold in the cramped and dirty hiding place. Matthews got extremely ill, and worried he wouldn’t survive the four-week journey. When the steward told him they were close to Boston, Matthews couldn’t stand, so he scuttled along the floor to glimpse the lights on the Massachusetts shoreline.
Once the rest of the crew had departed, the steward led Matthews out of the ship and told him, “‘Now, my friend, I have brought you so far, safely, and that is all I can do for you,’” Matthews recalled. “‘Go down this street and inquire for a boarding house for colored people, and some of your colored friends will tell you what to do.’” The steward shook his hand, said, “God bless you,” and went back to the ship. Matthews never knew the steward’s name and never saw him again.
When he arrived at the colored boarding house, Matthews was given warm clothes and sent to live in the country. It’s not clear how he ended up in Hallowell, but in February of 1839, a writer named “J.” (likely the abolitionist Joseph C. Lovejoy) informed readers of the Advocate of Freedom that the young refugee was working as a farm hand. Matthews was reported to be “happy” and “contented.”
“The farmer with whom he has worked ever since he came to this place, speaks of him in the highest terms as a faithful, sober, industrious, well-disposed young man,” wrote J. “He has thus far shown himself trustworthy in every respect. He is eager to learn, and his employer has placed him at school this winter, where his progress is quite satisfactory. In a little while he hopes to be able to write, so as to send a bill for services to his old masters. If he should recover his just dues, he would be worth a little fortune.”
Sadly, it appears Matthews suffered from mental problems, probably from the severe trauma he experienced in slavery. Census records show that by 1850, he was a “pauper” living on Hallowell’s poor farm for indigent residents. He was listed as “insane” and was getting treatment at the Maine Insane Hospital in Augusta.
James Matthews died in 1886 at the age of 79, of “old age.” A granite gravestone marks his final resting place with the inscription, “He hath done what he could.”
Andy O’Brien is communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. He also writes on Substack, and maintains the website Maine Working-Class History, with Will Chapman.
