Individual Stories, Individual Heroes

Slavery and the Making of America delves beyond the concept of slavery as an institution and into the personal struggles and triumphs of the enslaved themselves. Below are the stories of some of the men and women featured in the series.

Wednesday, February 9 at 9 p.m.

"The Downward Spiral"

John Punch

John Punch was a black indentured servant working on a small farm in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, in the 1640s. Day after day, Punch toiled in the fields, enduring unimaginable harassment and oppression as he helped to make tobacco the colony's most profitable export. He worked side-by-side with two white indentured servants, a Scotsman named James Gregory and a Dutch man who went only by the first name "Victor." With no hope in sight and facing unbearable work conditions, the three men chose to flee their master. After crossing into Maryland, they were captured and sent before the colony's highest court for sentencing. For the white men, that meant indentured servitude for several additional years. For Punch, a black man who had committed exactly the same crime, the sentence was servitude for life. There was no law that said he had to be treated differently because he was black, but his infinitely harsher sentence was one of the first indications that being white came with privileges and benefits, and that skin color had the power to determine one's status and fate.

"Liberty in the Air"

David Walker

Born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, David Walker learned to read and write in one of the city's early black churches. By 1820, he had arrived in Charleston, where he was exposed to the ideas of Denmark Vesey. After Vesey's failed rebellion, Walker headed north to Boston, where he experienced both virulent racism and a growing political consciousness among black people. Calling upon what Vesey had taught him, he quickly became a leading voice in the black community. In 1829, Walker set out to write about his life experiences, analyzing the slavery system and expressing his outrage over it.

Entitled An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, Walker's "appeal" became the most important abolitionist document of the 1800s and is considered a call-to-arms that asked African-Americans to empower themselves. Walker drew from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bible, posing questions such as "When shall we arise from this death-like apathy?," calling Thomas Jefferson and America as a whole hypocritical, and underscoring the role black people played in shaping the nation. Through an elaborate network of contacts, he was able to distribute the appeal up and down the Atlantic coast; copies were discovered as far away as North Carolina. Threatened slaveholders in the South put out bounties on Walker's head; in 1830, he was found dead in his doorway, the probable victim of a murder.

Maria Stewart

Prior to Walker's death, his cause was taken up by Maria Stewart, who had been born free but grew up as the domestic of a minister's household. Following the death of her husband, Stewart underwent a religious conversion and embarked on a public speaking campaign, referring to Walker as her mentor and attempting to carry his mission forward. She became the first American-born woman to address an audience of both black people and whites about political issues, most notably the condition of black women. Impassioned and particularly harsh on black men, Stewart evoked resentment within the black community and eventually had to leave Boston. But her words -- and those of David Walker before her -- remain the backbone of the concept of African-Americans as a nation within a nation.