Suicide, infanticide, and self-mutilation by slaves in the United States



Suicide, infanticide, and self-mutilation by slaves in the United States was documented, although it remains an understudied aspect of slavery in the United States.

Suicide
Overall suicide rates of black slaves in the United States are believed to have been comparatively low, in part due to cultural beliefs common to both Africa and African-American communities. Africa has the lowest suicide rate of any continent, and the suicide rate of African-descended Americans is a fraction of that of European-descended Americans. When an enslaved person did die by suicide, it was often due to "deterioration in their circumstances or unfulfilled expectation." Researchers have found that as a rule, "when slaves did choose suicide, the reasons for it were almost always directly connected with their condition of servitude."

The highest rates of suicide amongst enslaved people brought to Thirteen Colonies and United States appeared to have occurred during and immediately after the Middle Passage. The proximate psychological cause of these suicides was the "trauma of captivity" leading to either "anxiety and self-mutilation or depression and stupor." Suicide rates among this population appear to have been slightly higher among men, those who were alone without others from their community, and older people. A "disproportionate amount" of the suicides that occurred in the immediate wake of being trafficked appear to have been individuals who had been high-status members of their communities back home. An example of this may be found in 1898 account of the people who were illegally trafficked to the United States on the Wanderer, which stated that a number of survivors later committed suicide under the belief that "if they would jump into the sea and drown themselves they would be carried back to Africa by the good spirits...among them being one called King Mingo, who decoyed two children to St. Simon's beach, during the absence of his mistress, and all three of them jumped from a high bluff into the swift current and were drowned."

In one accounting, suicides described in slave narratives were majority male, with drowning being the most common method. The proximate cause of suicides described in slave narratives was typically either past or future "punishment" by violence, failed escape, or forthcoming sale, including being "threatened with separation from a spouse and children as a result of being sold to another slave owner."

A type of slave suicide that scholars speculate may have existed but that cannot be readily studied is "suicide by slave owner" (as per suicide by cop).

European slavers of the 19th century maintained a number of folk beliefs about which ethnic groups were most likely to commit suicide or use certain methods to kill themselves. The Ibo of Nigeria were asserted to be especially likely to kill themselves if abducted into slavery.

Mary Gaffney, interviewed for the WPA Slave Narrative Collection, described a slave who murdered his pregnant wife. The slave owner put him "in jail at night and in the daytime he had to wear chains around his legs. He never could go to any more dances or have not another free day there on the plantation...they told me he finally got hold of some wire and hung his self before freedom."

Infanticide and filicide
The most famous case of infanticide in American slavery was that of Margaret Garner, who killed two of her children rather than see them delivered to slavery in the Deep South. Garner's story inspired Toni Morrison's novel Beloved and her libretto for an opera called Margaret Garner.

Similar crimes appear throughout slave narratives and in contemporary newspaper reports. In 1828, Annice was executed by the state of Missouri for deliberately drowning five children, two of which were her own. In 1837, Dorcas Allen and her four children were put up for sale by her old owner's wife's new husband. While in James H. Birch's pen, she killed two of her four children rather than see them sold south. District Attorney Francis Scott Key advised Nathan Allen, husband of Dorcas and father of the children, to raise money to try to buy their freedom. With contributions from figures like John Quincy Adams it was done and Allen and her surviving children were freed. In 1831, an enslaved woman in Tennessee reportedly drowned three of her children after being "chastised" by her legal owner. In 1848, a man killed his wife and child with a pocket knife and tried to kill himself while "confined in one room" by a slave trader using the Covington, Kentucky jail. On Thursday, September 2, 1852, "A negro woman belonging to George M. Garrison, of Polk county, Tenn., killed four of her children by cutting their throat while they were asleep...and then put an end to her own existence by cutting her throat. Her master knows of no cause for the horrid act, unless it be that she heard him speak of selling her and two of her children and keeping the others."

According to historian Walter Johnson, 25 percent of interstate slave trades destroyed a first marriage and 50 percent destroyed a family, "many of these separating children under the age of 13 from their parents. Nearly all of them involved the dissolution of a previously existing community." Thus, self destruction was arguably a means to avoid a different kind of destruction of self.

Self-mutilation
In 1829 an enslaved man who was part of a coffle being transported South by Virginia trader Jourdan M. Saunders "got possession of an axe, and cut off all of the fingers of his right hand." In 2003, a woman living in Maysville, Kentucky, recalled her great-grandmother telling her about "a slave mother so bereft at her forced separation from her daughter, who was being sold downriver, that she cut off her hand in despair".