Grapevine Telegraph

While the “grapevine telegraph” has come to connote word-of-mouth social networks among the enslaved and their allies, it also evokes the technological network that shaped its practices. One neat summary of the grapevine comes from Scott Bond in From Slavery to Wealth (1917) who explains that

The telegraph network proudly proclaimed its presence across the American landscape, while the grapevine telegraph operated through coded gestures and furtive discourse (Cullen). Bond refers to one popular mode of the grapevine that made use of the “clothes-line” by communicating visual patterns of hung wash. In his (1856) autobiography, Charles Thompson describes the manner in which one enslaved person, estranged from his wife, would visit her on an adjacent plantation only when she hung “a certain garment in a particular spot,” indicating that “the coast was clear and no danger need be apprehended” (22). These clothes-line signals would have been as impervious as morse code to most observers, but the operators of the grapevine also strove to erase all physical records of their human “wires” and the signals they carried. This underscores the contrasting material presence of the telegraph network that according to many above accounts embodied and flaunted the history of white domination. The grapevine by contrast encoded its messages in mundane, domestic materials such that its history was constituted wholly in the minds of the participants.

Not only were the grapevine telegraph’s messages hidden in plain sight, but its messengers gathered their news through equally discrete methods, often collecting intelligence under the noses of disdainful masters. As Sergio A Lussana explains, this network enacted a form of “oppositional discourse” (135). Harry Smith recounts that when their masters would receive information—often through the literal telegraph—the “slaves would listen at the door,” which could risk “fifty lashes” (116). To initiate this information network was to verge upon self-destruction. Whereas the telegraph network had quickly become acclimated to the quotidian processes of American life, the tremendous risk of eavesdropping lent gravity to the social network of the enslaved and rendered its information precious to senders and recipients alike. In one account from William H. Robinson’s From Log Cabin to the Pulpit (1913), the grapevine even returned trustworthy news from California to North Carolina (17). In other words, we have some reason to believe that the urgency and peril of the grapevine telegraph inspired high-fidelity transmission across great distances.