Chattel slaves had no rights, the most rudimentary, which their southern masters were bound to respect.
Archibald Henry Grimké
The Public Record
Archibald Henry Grimké was an African-American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He graduated from freedmen's schools, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School, and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. He was an activist for the rights of Black Americans, working in Boston and Washington, D.C. He was a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as president of its Washington, D.C. chapter.
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They did not, for example, possess that most elementary of rights, the ownership of self and of the products of their labor.
They did not own the cabins they slept in or the clothes they wore or the food they ate or the tools they worked with or the air they breathed or the water they drank or the bit of ground that they were buried in at last, any more than did…
The slave system owned the minds and bodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, or to the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of the masters own their mates or the young which were born…
The slaves were rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production of wealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure and pursuit of happiness.
Amid such evil conditions ignorance necessarily abounded and moral degradation deposited its slime, generation after generation, over the souls of masters and slaves alike.
The slave race possessed no more and knew no more as freedmen than they had possessed or known as slaves.
But being landless and moneyless they were dependent for employment on the old master class.
This put them at an immense economic disadvantage as a labor class on the threshold of their new life of freedom, and in the power of the old master class.
All the same these people, poor and ignorant and at the mercy of a ruthless employer class, were happy as children in the delight of their newfound freedom.
The sound of their childlike joy was heard in the land amid the grim desolations of war and the sullen faces of their old masters.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.