In another part of her interview, it is interesting to note, Sarah Wilson refers to Ben Johnson as an “old Indian.”1 However, Ben Johnson, like other European-American men in the Cherokee Nation, had married a Cherokee woman (Annie Johnson) and thus become a member of the Cherokee Nation through marriage. Though not biologically “Indian,” Sarah Wilson and others in the Cherokee Nation recognized many of these individuals as “Indian.” Indeed, many enslaved people may have become so accustomed to interacting with light-skinned, biracial European-Cherokees in the Nation that European-American members may have blended in more easily. Based on 1860 census data, Michael F. Doran estimated that 716 European-Americans resided in the Cherokee Nation, constituting approximately four percent of the total population of the Nation.2 An increasing number of European-American men married Cherokee women in the eighteenth century; such unions continued to occur into the nineteenth century. Ben Johnson’s ideas of mastering reflected his individual personality; however, he and other European-American masters, who married in to the Cherokee Nation, shared their mastering techniques with other members of the Nation. Even though brutal mastering techniques of Cherokee owners also emerged in the Nation, the presence of European-American slave-owning men in Indian Territory certainly shaped the overall tenor of slave-master interactions in the new land. Cherokee and European-American slave-owners in the Cherokee Nation habitually employed intimidation as a useful tactic to inhibit unruly slave activities. Even though this strategy resulted regularly in the desired responses, some enslaved people would not be swayed and continued to express their indignation toward their owners.
Various forms of punishment and torture could be callously utilized on those who continued to resist in order to achieve acquiescence. Like Sarah Wilson, Cherokee freedwoman Charlotte Johnson White also recalled the harsh treatment her family experienced while enslaved by Ben and Annie Johnson. One day when her mother was too sick to get up,
de old master [Ben Johnson] come around to see about it, and he yelled, ‘Get out of dere and get yourself in de fields.’ She tried to go but was too sick to work. She got to the door alright; couldn’t hurry fast enough for de old master though, so he pushed her in a little ditch dat was by the cabin and whipped her back wid the lash, den he reached down and rolled her over so’s he could beat her face and neck (Baker and Baker 465).
Charlotte Johnson White remembered that her mother “didn’t live long after dat and I guess de whippin’s helped to kill her, but she better off dead than jest livin’ for the whip.”3
Though enslaved women often feigned illness as a way to refuse regular duties, Charlotte Johnson White presented her mother’s illness as all too real. So real, in fact, that death followed soon after this beating. Ben Johnson probably believed that White’s mother was pretending to be ill in order to shirk her responsibilities, as others had attempted at various points before and after arrival in the new Cherokee territory. Even if he had recognized that White’s mother was too sick to work, this actuality failed to persuade him to excuse her from fieldwork that day. Instead, he used this opportunity to emit a clear message in a public space about the demands of labor and the strict regimen on his farm. Certainly, the death of White’s mother soon after this beating relayed a message to other enslaved people who witnessed (or heard about) this attack—a message louder than the sound of Johnson’s orders or the whip against her skin.
- Ibid., 347. [↩]
- Michael F. Doran, “Population Statistics of Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 53, no. 4 (winter 1975-1976): 501. [↩]
- Baker and Baker, The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, 465. Charlotte Johnson White’s interview is one of the Oklahoma interviews that was published for the first time in Baker and Baker’s book. [↩]
