60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

Totalitarianism and Slavery
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plussed that although (in his own view) he was more liberal than any other
enslaver in providing his Blacks with food, easy working conditions and many
other inducements, they had proved incapable of being grateful and had
absconded (Manigat 1977, 496). But let us listen to this piece of talk from a
Maryland enslaver in 1755 about his chief confidant among his servile charges:
That this slave should run away and attempt getting his liberty, is very alarming,
as he has always been too kindly used, if any thing, by his master, and one in
whom his master has put great confidence, and depended on him to overlook
the rest of the slaves, and he had no kind of provocation to go off. (Blassingame
1979, 205)
Gabriel Debien, a modern writer, is convinced that some flights had inexplicable
causes; indeed, that some enslaved persons fled without motive, plan
or preparation (Fouchard 1972, 165–66). For Debien, flight in such instances
was sudden and completely irrational. In fact, he comes close to suggesting
that such flight constituted result (or action) without causation! He fails to
understand that the motive for flight lay in the very condition of servitude.
But he is not alone in this view. In 1783 the colonial legislature of Antigua
voiced the concern of the slaveholders that their servile charges were
absconding “without any other reason, than the dictates of their own vicious
inclinations” (Goveia 1965, 257). Miguel Lazo de la Vega, administrator of
San José in Peru during the eighteenth century, spoke about the enslaved
persons’ vice of always fleeing to the mountains at their fancy without any
motive (Kapsoli 1975, 60). In the same vein, another enslaver in that country
who considered himself a good overlord was bewildered by the fact that one
of his female charges had, without cause, jumped over a high wall that
enclosed his dwelling (Bowser 1974, 189).
Enslavers and others living in slaveholding societies generally regarded
desertion as proof that the Africans and their Creole descendants were lazy,
crafty, evil-minded and insolent, characteristics that many of them viewed as
pathological and perhaps genetic (Fouchard 1972, 33; Esteban Deive 1989, 45;
Long 1774, 2:351–78). It is said that Southerners in the United States viewed
running away as “a disease – a monomania, to which the negro race is peculiarly
subject”, while a New Orleans physician called it “drapetomania”, an
hereditary disease afflicting Blacks (Schweninger 2002, 18). João Saldanha da
Gama, governor of Bahia in Brazil, exemplified this kind of thinking in a
dispatch to the Portuguese Overseas Council in 1807: