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Title : A Dreadful Deceit

Author: Jacqueline Jones

[image file=images/9780465069804.jpg] A DREADFUL DECEIT

Also by Jacqueline Jones

Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873

Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present

The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present

American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor

A Social History of the Laboring Classes from Colonial Times to the Present

Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s

Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War

A DREADFUL

DECEIT

[image file=images/title1.jpg]

The MYTH of RACE

from the COLONIAL ERA to

OBAMA’S AMERICA

JACQUELINE JONES

BASIC BOOKS

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York

Copyright © 2013 by Jacqueline Jones

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

Designed by Trish Wilkinson

Set in 11.5 point Adobe Garamond Pro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Jacqueline, 1948—

A dreadful deceit : the myth of race from the colonial era to Obama’s America / Jacqueline Jones.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-46506980-4 (e-book) 1. Race awareness—United States—History. 2. Race— Philosophy. 3. African Americans—Race identity—History. 4. African Americans—Biography. 5. United States—Race relations—History. I. Title.

E185.625.J658 2013

305.800973—dc23

2013031130

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Amelia

CONTENTS

Introduction

ONE: Antonio: A Killing in Early Colonial Maryland

TWO: Boston King: Self-Interested Patriotism in Revolutionary-Era South Carolina

THREE: Elleanor Eldridge: “Complexional Hindrance” in Antebellum Rhode Island

FOUR: Richard W. White: “Racial” Politics in Post–Civil War Savannah

FIVE: William H. Holtzclaw: The “Black Man’s Burden” in the Heart of Mississippi

SIX: Simon P. Owens: A Detroit Wildcatter at the Point of Production

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

Like countless other cultures and countries throughout the world, the United States has its own creation myth—its own unique, dramatic story intended to explain where we came from and who we are today. In the case of the United States, this story holds that the nation was conceived in “racial” differences and that over the last four centuries these self-evident differences have suffused our national character and shaped our national destiny. The American creation story begins with a violent, self-inflicted wound and features subsequent incremental episodes of healing, culminating in a redemption of sorts. It is, ultimately, a triumphant narrative, one that testifies to the innate strength and moral rectitude of the American system, however imperfect its origins.

According to this myth, the first Europeans who laid eyes on Africans were struck foremost by their physical appearance—the color of their skin and the texture of their hair—and concluded that these beings constituted a lower order of humans, an inferior race destined for enslavement. During the American Revolution, patriots spoke eloquently of liberty and equality, and though their lofty rhetoric went unfulfilled, they inadvertently challenged basic forms of racial categorization. And so white Northerners, deriving inspiration from the Revolution, emancipated their own slaves and ushered in a society free of the moral stain of race-based bondage. The Civil War destroyed the system of slavery nationwide, but new theories of scientific racism gave rise to new forms of racial oppression in the North and South. Not until the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 did the federal government dismantle state-sponsored race-based segregation and thus pave the way for better race relations. Though hardly an unmitigated triumph, the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 signaled the dawn of a postracial society and offered a measure of the distance the country had traveled since slavery prevailed in British North America.

Yet America’s creation myth is just that—a myth, one that itself rests entirely on a spurious concept: for “race” itself is a fiction, one that has no basis in biology or any long-standing, consistent usage in human culture. As employed in the popular rendition of America’s national origins, the word and its various iterations mask complex historical processes that have little or nothing to do with the physical makeup of the people who controlled or suffered from those processes.

The ubiquity of the term race in modern discourse indicates that early-twenty-first-century Americans adhere to this creation myth with remarkable tenacity—in other words, that they believe that race is real and that race matters. In fact, however, like its worldwide counterparts, the American creation myth is the product of collective imagination, not historical fact, and it exists outside the realm of rational thought. Americans who would scoff at the notion that meaningful social or temperamental differences distinguish brown-eyed people from blue-eyed people nevertheless utter the word “race” with a casual thoughtlessness. Consequently, the word itself helps to sustain not only the creation myth but also all the human misery that the myth has wrought over the centuries. In effect, the word perpetuates—and legitimizes—the notion that some kind of inexorable primal prejudice has driven history and that, to some degree at least, the United States has always been held hostage to “racial” differences.

Certainly, the bitter legacies of historic injustices endure in concrete, blatant form. Today certain groups of people are impoverished, exploited in the workplace, or incarcerated in large numbers. This is the case not because of their “race,” however, but rather because at a particular point in US history certain other groups began to invoke the myth of race in a bid for political and economic power. This myth has served as a tool that one group can use to ratchet itself into a position of greater advantage in society, and a justification for the economic inequality and the imbalance in rights and privileges that result.

Perhaps the greatest perversity of the idea of race is how meaningless it truly is. Strikingly malleable in its contours, depending on the exigencies of the moment, race is a catchall term, its insidious reach metastasizing in response to any number of competitions—for political rights, scarce resources, control over cheap labor, group security. At times, within this constellation of “racial” ideas, physical appearance receded into nothingness—for example, when the law defined a person’s race according to his or her “reputation” or when a mother’s legal status as a slave decreed that her offspring would remain enslaved, regardless of their own skin color.

The indistinctness of this idea has given it a twisted trajectory. Throughout American history, members of the white laboring classes witnessed firsthand the struggles of their black coworkers and rivals and yet still maintained that “race” constituted a great divide between them. After the Civil War, on the campaign stump, white politicians charged that black people were incapable of learning, even while the descendants of slaves were rapidly gaining in literacy rates compared to poor whites. In the early twenty-first century, many Americans disavow the basic premise of racial prejudice—the idea that blacks and whites were somehow fundamentally different from each other—and yet scholars, journalists, and indeed Americans from all walks of life persist in categorizing and labeling groups according to those same, discredited principles.

This book is about the way that the idea of race has been used and abused in American history. It focuses on the contradictory and inconsistent fictions of “race” that various groups of people contrived for specific political purposes. As deployed by the powerful, race serves as a rationale for brutality, and its history is ultimately a local one, best understood through the lives of individual men, women, and children. The stories included here range over time and space to consider particular, shifting processes of racial myth-making in American history: in mid- seventeenth-century Maryland; Revolutionary-era South Carolina; early-nineteenth-century Providence, Rhode Island; post–Civil War Savannah, Georgia; segregationist Mississippi; and industrial and postindustrial Detroit.

The myth of race is, at its heart, about power relations, and in order to understand how it evolved, we must avoid vague theoretical and ahistorical formulations and instead ask, Who benefited from these narratives of racial difference, and how, where, and under what conditions? Race signifies neither a biological fact nor a primal prejudice, and it lacks the coherence of a robust political ideology; rather, it is a collection of fluid, contingent mythologies borne of (among other imperatives) fighting a war, assembling a labor force, advancing the designs of demagogues, organizing a labor union, and preserving voting and public schooling as privileges reserved for some, rather than as rights shared by all.1

This book is about physical force flowing from the law, the barrel of a gun, or the fury of a mob; but it is also about the struggle for justice and personal dignity waged by people of African

descent in America. Their fight for human rights in turn intensified policies and prejudices based on so-called racial difference. In fact, in the region that would become the United States, race initially developed as an afterthought or a reaction—an afterthought, because for several generations the exploitation of people of African heritage required no explanation, no justification beyond the raw power wielded by the captors; and a reaction, because a concerted project based on the myth of race eventually arose in response to individuals and groups such as abolitionists and civil rights activists who challenged forms of state-sanctioned violence and legal subordination that afflicted enslaved people and their descendants.

For the first century and a half or so of the British North American colonies, the fiction of race played little part in the origins and development of slavery; instead, that institution was the product of the unique vulnerability of Africans within a roiling Atlantic world of empire-building and profit-seeking. Not until the American Revolution did self-identified “white” elites perceive the need to concoct ideas of racial difference; these elites understood that the exclusion of a whole group of native-born men from the body politic demanded an explanation, a rationalization. Even then, many southern slaveholders, lording over forced-labor camps, believed they needed to justify their actions to no one; only over time did they begin to refer to their bound workforces in racial terms. Meanwhile, in the early-nineteenth-century North, race emerged as a partisan political weapon, its rhetorical contours strikingly contradictory but its legal dimensions nevertheless explicit. Discriminatory laws and mob actions promoted and enforced the insidious notion that people could be assigned to a particular racial group and thereby considered “inferior” to whites and unworthy of basic human rights. Black immiseration was part and parcel of white privilege, all in the name of—the myth of—race.

By the late twentieth century, transformations in the American political economy had solidified the historic liabilities of black men and women, now in the form of segregated neighborhoods and a particular social division of labor within a so-called color-blind nation. The election of the nation’s first black president in 2008 produced an outpouring of self-congratulation among Americans who heralded the dawn of a postracial society. In fact, the recession that began that year showed that, although explicit ideas of black inferiority had receded (though not entirely disappeared) from American public discourse, African Americans continued to suffer the disastrous consequences spawned by those ideas, as evidenced by disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment, home foreclosures, and incarceration.

Spanning the seventeenth through the late twentieth centuries, the following six chapters highlight a number of constant themes that connect disparate times and places: the wavering class lines that blurred divisions between blacks and other people of color compared to whites of modest means; the matrix of military, political, and labor-market imperatives used to justify the denigration of people defined as “black”; the persistent, ongoing process of blaming black men and women for economic downturns and other national misfortunes; and patterns of circular and cumulative causation whereby racial mythologies gave license to practices by which blacks were marginalized and dispossessed, conditions that in turn reinforced these same mythologies.

The six stories presented here challenge the American creation myth and provide a new perspective on both the evolving notion of race and the multiple, practical uses that groups of whites found for that notion. The mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of an enslaved African named Antonio at the hands of his Dutch master in early colonial Maryland reveal the

social dynamics of an Atlantic world of colliding empires. Within this world, Africans were enslaved not because of their “race” or their status as nonwhites or non-Christians; rather, Africa’s diverse ethnic groups lacked membership in a robust nation-state that could rescue, protect, or redeem them on the high seas or in a foreign land. During the early years of British North American settlement, planters in the Chesapeake Bay region of Virginia and Maryland experimented with groups of laborers who were European, Native, or African, men and women set to work in the fields as bound workers, family members, sharecroppers, or hired hands. These planters were not ideologues; they embraced the institution of human bondage because it was possible and practical for them to do so, not because either visceral feelings or intellectual theories of racial difference inevitably impelled them in that direction.

By the time of the Revolution, the institution of bondage had made a small group of planters fabulously wealthy. Those in the South Carolina Lowcountry failed even to contemplate the hypocritical dimensions of their own revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality; they felt no compunction to rationalize human bondage, preferring to see the institution as one upon which their own self-interest depended. Slavery provided the ruling class with the labor that fueled a privileged way of life, of which richly furnished mansions, fashionable clothing, lavish dinners, and fancy carriages were key components. Race as a justification for black subordination developed only gradually as other slaveholders—Thomas Jefferson most notably—decided that revolutionary times demanded a theory of social difference that would posit black intellectual inferiority and rationalize black exclusion from the body politic of the new nation. To counter these gradually emerging ideas of racial difference, evangelical preachers such as the fugitive slave Boston King sought a wider, transnational community based on religious faith and spiritual equality among all men and women.

Meanwhile, in the post-Revolutionary North, whites of all classes and backgrounds aimed to preserve their political privileges by attaching the stigma of slavery to recently freed people of color. This contradictory, fictional narrative held that the former slaves and their descendants were by nature poor and dependent, but also at the same time predatory and dangerously capable of depriving whites of access to good jobs and even political rights. A rapidly transforming economy in the Northeast threatened the social and financial stability of white householders and provoked attacks on blacks, who served as scapegoats for the factory system’s degradation of skilled labor. Elleanor Eldridge, a savvy black businesswoman of early-nineteenth-century Providence, Rhode Island, defied contemporary stereotypes of her forebears, Africans and Narragansett Indians, as lazy, promiscuous, and degenerate. At the same time, in a series of disputes over landownership, Eldridge also confounded her white supporters, who preferred to see black people as purely pathetic victims of slavery, rather than as advocates for themselves in the courts and in the marketplace. Throughout the North, white politicians hastened to encode “racial” distinctions into law, thereby excluding a whole group of free, native-born Americans from the rights of citizenship.

By the time of the Civil War, myths of race had hardened to presume a large underclass of dark- skinned menial laborers, men and women “naturally” inferior to whites in intelligence and moral sensibility. Yet these prejudices could not account for the growing number of people of African descent who were well educated and accomplished—and in some cases as “white” as white supremacists themselves. As a result, the notion of race became more flexible and abstract. Richard W. White, a Union veteran, looked “white,” yet he earned for himself—through his

service in the Massachusetts Fifty-fifth Regiment and his aggressive push for civil rights for former slaves—a reputation as a “black” man. White became a loyal Republican, assuming that the party of Abraham Lincoln was as dedicated to the full equality of the freedpeople as it had been to the elimination of slavery. However, by the latter part of the century, it was clear that, despite the massive loss of life during the Civil War era, the American partisan political system would fail to address, or redress, systematic forms of discrimination leveled at black people. In fact, both the Democratic and the Republican Parties catered only to their own constituents— white men who could vote—and acted on the presumption that no partisan good could come of challenging racial ideas.

From the early nineteenth century onward, control over public schooling in its various forms became a means by which whites could reserve for themselves specific privileges and economic opportunities. In the South, even rudimentary education such as literacy instruction seemed to threaten a political economy that relied on a large, subordinate agricultural labor force. In 1900 Mississippi politicians used the heavy hand of the state, and manipulated the fury of the lynch mob, to promote, once again, a baldly contradictory set of ideas—that first, black people were incapable of learning, and second, black people must be prevented from learning at all costs. William H. Holtzclaw, a Tuskegee Institute graduate, founded his own small vocational institute for blacks in the heart of rural Mississippi, only to encounter a violent hostility among whites to any plan or program that would improve the lives of black people still mired in a rural peasantry. Yet Holtzclaw’s work as the principal of Utica Institute demonstrated that under certain conditions money could speak louder than racial rhetoric in shaping the relations between local store owners and their black customers, the school’s staff and students. The merchants’ prospect of financial gain moderated the harsh project of race that might have otherwise threatened to destroy the school. Particular racial meanings derived from local conditions in the town of Utica during the early twentieth century.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a small group of industrial workers sought to weld diverse laboring classes into a unified movement; yet they had to contend with racial ideologies that not only were well entrenched and granted “scientific” credibility, but also were perceived by whites regardless of class as necessary to their own well-being and the future well-being of their children. Transformations in the economy again produced wrenching dislocations for all workers, prompting whites to reprise their nineteenth-century practice of scapegoating blacks as the root cause of white unemployment. To counter these ideas of division and distrust, Simon P. Owens and others in his Detroit-based Marxist-humanist collective held that, as coal miners and factory workers, black people were uniquely positioned to lead the way in challenging new soul- deadening assembly-line technologies. By this time, generations of discriminatory laws and policies had produced whole communities marked by concentrated poverty—neighborhoods bereft of good schools, adequate health care, and decent jobs for men and women with little in the way of skills or formal education. In contrast to prevailing and mistaken notions of “race,” Owens’s focus on an entrenched division of labor as a key factor in African Americans’ plight identified a determinant of intergroup differences that was at once concrete and meaningful.

Antonio, King, Eldridge, White, Holtzclaw, and Owens are the six protagonists of this book, and yet a seventh figure too plays a critical role. This book takes its title from a recurring phrase used by David Walker in his brilliant, militant polemic, Walker’s Appeal, first published in 1829. Walker, a native of North Carolina, had been born to a free mother and an enslaved father. By

the 1820s he was living in Boston and playing a leading role in the fight against slavery. His Appeal draws from history, political theory, and Christian theology to expose the falsity of race. Walker argued that Europeans had devised a uniquely harsh system of New World slavery for the sole purpose of forcing blacks to “dig their mines and work their farms; and thus go on enriching them, from one generation to another with our blood and our tears!!!!” Gradually, white people, he wrote, concocted lies by which they “dreadfully deceived” themselves, ruses to keep blacks in ignorance and subjection—the idea that descendants of Africans “were not of the human family,” that they were “void of intellect,” and that enslavement was their “natural condition.” These notions mocked the equality of all people before God and amounted to the greatest deceit of all—that blacks “are an inferior and distinctive race of beings.”2

Walker adamantly refused to identify himself as a member of “the negro race”; different skin colors did not imply useful or significant distinctions among groups of people, he noted. Enduring “reproach for our colour,” blacks all over the country regardless of legal status remained victims of whites’ avarice and fear. Even those free from the yoke of bondage encountered discriminatory laws that prevented them from getting an education and a decent job. Meanwhile, they had to suffer in silence as whites smugly dismissed their poverty as inevitable and eternal. Walker called on his black readers to throw off the cloak of servility and defend themselves against blows to the body and blows to the spirit—both kinds emanating from the myth of race. Prescient, he warned of a coming conflagration that would destroy the system of slavery; but like other abolitionists of the time, he failed to anticipate that, although slavery would die, “race” would survive and mutate into new and hideous shapes.3

In a study devoted to the resonance of race, defining the terms white and black is essential. Like notions of race, these two remarkably dichotomous descriptors emerged from a fundamental imbalance in power among social groups. On slave ships transporting men, women, and children from their homelands to the New World, European captors became white and their African captives became black. Over time these two adjectives each took on multiple meanings, with white signifying “someone free and descended from free forebears,” and black signifying “someone enslaved or descended from slaves.” These contrasting associations were the result of political processes, when people in power foisted a “black” identity on people devoid of legal protection, and later, when members of the latter group embraced the term “black” as an act of solidarity among themselves. The terms “black” and “white” are used throughout this book, then, with the understanding that they distinguish between groups of people according to heritage, legal status, or collective self-identification, depending on the immediate context.

In the early twenty-first century, the words “race,” “racism,” and “race relations” are widely used as shorthand for specific historical legacies that have nothing to do with biological determinism and everything to do with power relations. The story that unfolds in the following pages suggests that racial mythologies are best understood as a pretext for political and economic opportunism both wide ranging and specific to a particular time and place. If this explication of the American creation myth leads to one overriding conclusion, it is the power of the word “race” to distort our understanding of the past and the present—and our hopes for a more just future—in equal measure.

ONE

ANTONIO

A Killing in Early Colonial Maryland

These were the criminal charges leveled at Symon Overzee by the Maryland Provincial Court: that on September 20, 1656, at his St. John’s plantation near St. Mary’s City, Overzee beat a man called Antonio with a whip made of pear-tree twigs, that he poured hot lard onto Antonio’s wounds, and that he then tied Antonio to a ladder and left him to die.1

Six months before, Antonio had arrived in Maryland, forced off a boat onto the banks of the St. Mary’s River, a waterway that connected Overzee’s plantation with the greater Chesapeake Bay and with the wider Atlantic world. Antonio had survived a months-long ordeal, a journey that began in his homeland, the Kongo-Angola region of West Central Africa, and took him through the coastal port of Loango to the volcanic island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, across the ocean to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, and finally south to the Chesapeake. Symon Overzee had intended that Antonio join St. John’s patchwork labor force of Europeans, Indians, and Africans, some free, some enslaved, others bound as indentured servants; when Antonio arrived in March 1656, these workers were preparing tobacco seedbeds in the half-cleared, stump-filled fields along the St. Mary’s River. Yet Antonio declared his own intentions: at the first chance, he escaped from St. John’s and lit out for the nearby woods and swamps. Caught and dragged back to the plantation, he bided his time and then ran away again, and again. In late September 1656, field workers were bent over picking hornworms off tobacco leaves and bracing themselves for the frantic harvest to come, but by then Antonio was dead.2

Maryland’s Provincial Court proceedings typically took the form of a boisterous ritual meant to impose a measure of rough justice on all persons living within the boundaries of this raw, highly litigious outpost of the British Empire. Trials veered toward spectacle; Ebenezer Cook, a contemporary poet and cynic, contended that judges, defendants, lawyers, and jurors all dealt in “nonsense, stuff, and false quotations / With brazen Lyes and Allegations.” Held during the winter slack season, when no agricultural work occupied the colonists’ time, the court session of February 1659 offered a striking diversion to all. It featured no ordinary defendant, no defiant servant or downcast debtor, but rather Symon Cornelisen Overzee, one of the most prominent men in the colony. Trafficking in slaves and tobacco, he and other merchants pumped the lifeblood of commerce through the creeks and rivers of the Chesapeake region. By the time he faced public scrutiny for the drastic way he had administered what the court called the “correction” of Antonio, the thirty-one-year-old Overzee had earned a reputation as a shrewd trader who had wrested riches out of the fields and thickets of Maryland’s Western Shore—no mean feat for a merchant who grew up in a comfortable home in Rotterdam. Yet according to the trial transcript, in late 1658 a fellow colonist had “informe[d] the Court ag[ain]st Mr. Symon Overzee,” forcing him to defend himself against a charge of manslaughter.3

In November 1658 two eyewitnesses to the alleged killing, Hannah Littleworth and William Hewes, gave depositions in the august presence of Judge Philip Calvert, half brother of the colony’s proprietor, Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore. Littleworth offered a remarkably detailed account, even though it was recorded more than two years after the fact. She testified that at St. John’s, in the morning or early afternoon of the day in question, Overzee’s wife, Sarah,

had acted in her husband’s absence and ordered the man “commonly called Tony” to be chained up “for some misdemeanor.” That afternoon Overzee returned to his fine house overlooking the river and proceeded to release Antonio from his shackles, commanding him to return to work. Yet instead of obeying his master, Antonio “layd himselfe downe & would not stirre.” Overzee cut a switch out of pear-tree twigs, ordered Antonio stripped of his clothing, and “whipd him upon his bare back.” Alternately observing and abetting the assault were Littleworth, a servant; Hewes, a hired man; an unnamed enslaved Indian; and Mathew Stone, brother of former governor William Stone.4

According to Littleworth, even after the whipping, Antonio “still remayned in his stubbernes & feyned himself in fitts, as hee used att former times to doe,” refusing to stir off the ground. Now clearly exasperated, Overzee instructed Littleworth to bring him a red-hot fire shovel with lard on it. As he began pouring the scalding fat onto Antonio’s back, the shock and the pain of it finally forced the defiant man onto his feet. Overzee told the Indian standing nearby to bind Antonio’s wrists with leather ties and to suspend him from a ladder leaning against the main house. “And still the negro remained mute or stubborne, & made noe signes of conforming himselfe to his Masters will or command.” Shortly thereafter Overzee and his wife left the premises without giving the onlookers any instructions “concerning the sd negro.” (Meanwhile, “a negro woman” remained in the workers’ quarters and “never stird out” in the course of the afternoon—a tantalizing and unelaborated detail in Littleworth’s testimony.) Littleworth recalled that as a wind rose from the northwest, she realized “the negro was dying.” Less than half an hour later, Antonio suffocated to death; he had been bound to the ladder between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, drawing his last breath between 6 and 7 that evening.5

William Hewes, the other deponent, confirmed Littleworth’s basic account and claimed that he at one point had been willing “to help the negro from the grownd” but that Overzee, cutting the pear twigs, threatened to run his knife through Hewes if he did. Philip Calvert asked only one direct question: whether or not the black man’s feet remained on the ground when he was tied to the ladder. Littleworth maintained that they were, but Hewes seemed less certain. (Perhaps the justice was gauging whether or not Antonio’s punishment constituted strappado, a medieval form of torture in which the victim was suspended above the ground.) And finally, Hewes confirmed that “the negro did commonly use to runne away, & absent himself from Mr. Overzees service.” That day in September, on the eve of the harvest, Overzee apparently confronted a chronic offender impervious to discipline of any kind.6

A few weeks after the depositions, on December 20, 1658, the Provincial Court formally convened at St. Clement’s, a feudal manor that sprawled over 12,500 acres in northwestern St. Mary’s County. Governor Josias Fendall and his councilors, who were serving as associate judges, were in attendance. Also present now was Overzee, who requested “that he may be acquitted,” bringing an end to the matter. Instead, he was ordered to post a huge bond of 100,000 pounds of tobacco, the common currency of the Chesapeake, and to appear at the next court session. The judges wanted to hear from Mathew Stone, whose testimony might elicit, in the words of the court transcriber, “some things materiall in the business.”7

It was several weeks later, in February, when the court next met, this time in St. Mary’s City, Maryland’s capital, a short distance across a creek from Overzee’s plantation. Maryland’s attorney general proceeded to empanel a jury of twelve men and present a formal indictment of

manslaughter against Overzee. Maryland planters were desperate for labor, and some routinely brutalized their workers, whether slaves, servants, or hired hands. Yet the torments inflicted upon Antonio seemed to go beyond acceptable forms of discipline: the indictment read that Overzee had tied the black man to a ladder and left his body to “hang from the Grownd exposed to the injuries of the weather, Of which stripes, melting Lard & hanging up by the wrists &c: the sd Toney wth in three howres died.”8

The intervening months since the first hearing had worked to Overzee’s advantage. Instead of calling Mathew Stone to testify, the court now decided to hear from a surprise witness—the powerful Job Chandler, a court councilor, receiver general of the colony, and Overzee’s brother- in-law. Chandler spoke not about Antonio’s death, but about events leading up to it, beginning in March 1656, when Antonio first arrived at St. John’s. Chandler told the court that Overzee had sent Antonio to Chandler’s Portobacco plantation, located north of St. Mary’s City, with instructions to “give him blowes” to make him work. Yet soon the overseer there was complaining that “hee could not make him doe any thing”—even force Antonio to prepare his own food by pounding corn into hominy. Antonio managed to run away and, “lurking about the plantation,” waited until the others were occupied in the fields or the cow pen before periodically returning to the house and stealing bread and meat before disappearing into the woods again. At one point he had eluded capture for about a month when a female servant happened upon him one day in Chandler’s workers’ quarters, eating hominy out of a pot.9

At the sight of the woman, Antonio fled again, only to be tracked down by dogs while he was still nearby, “amongst high weeds creeping on his hand[s] & knees,” in Chandler’s words. The planter found that the fugitive had an infected hand, but questioning him about the cause of the injury elicited no intelligible response. Chandler testified that he “could not with all the words & signes I could imagine understand from him how it came, for of all humane Creatures that ever I saw, I never knew such a Brute: for I could not perceive any speech or language hee had, only an ugly yelling Brute beast like.” After dressing Antonio’s hand, Chandler offered him some food, which “hee eate as Ravenous as an hungry starved Dog, & after hee had eaten good part of what I gave him hee made signes that hee would begone,” an attempted escape that Chandler thwarted with the use of a whip. Chandler ordered a servant to bind and keep watch over the offender until he could be returned to Overzee’s plantation, for Antonio was, he believed, “a dangerous Rogue” who “might take some fit opportunity to doe mee, or mine, a mischief.” Yet somehow, Chandler recounted, because of either the servant’s negligence or the intervention of the devil, Antonio managed to free himself, a feat that, according to the planter, “did seeme very strange to mee, [he] having but one hand to do it.” Chandler concluded by saying that he then returned Antonio to Overzee, who had learned of recent events from an informant, a local Pangayo Indian.10

According to court records, the jury deliberated for “some time” and returned its verdict: “Ignoramus”—literally, “We know nothing of it”—meaning that the jurors had decided that the evidence was insufficient to sustain the charges. The sheriff declared that anyone else with knowledge about the case should step forward and offer it now. “And noe one appearing, The Prisoner acquitted by Proclamation.” Overzee was free to go.11

The trial, such as it was, had a number of curious elements—not least among them its characterization of Antonio’s relationship with Overzee. The depositions provided by Littleworth and Hewes referred to Antonio as Overzee’s “negro servant” and thereafter repeatedly as “the

negro.” In contrast, the day that Chandler testified several weeks later, the court referred to the victim as “the said slave.” No doubt Antonio was an enslaved worker; by definition indentured servants contracted with a master in return for their passage across the ocean and for their room and board, and as he could not speak English, Antonio could not agree to such an arrangement. The fact that Overzee was tried in court at all was notable, furthermore, for masters had considerable leeway in “disciplining” their workers. And the intimate involvement of Symon Overzee’s brother-in-law in the proceedings was remarkable as well. Chandler’s overseer was one of the twelve jurors deciding the case. Chandler himself shed no light on the immediate circumstances surrounding the killing, but he reinforced the view that Antonio was resistant to all “correction” and that he was a dangerous man, even preternaturally so. The day Chandler took the stand, he was also serving in his regular capacity as a councilor on the Provincial Court. Essentially, Chandler oversaw proceedings in which he was the only witness.12

On the surface at least, the outcome of the trial hardly appears surprising: jurors absolved a wealthy Chesapeake planter-merchant of responsibility for taking the life of an enslaved Angolan. Nevertheless, the trial remains something of a mystery. Why was a man of Overzee’s stature hauled before the court at all? Did not Overzee possess the right to deal with his own slave—who, under colonial American law, constituted his personal property—any way he saw fit? What accounts for the delay in the trial, which came more than two years after the actual incident? And who was bold enough to “inform” against Overzee?

Underlying the trial were the protagonists’ assumptions about the legitimacy of a labor system that granted to one group of people the power of life or death over another group. This system emerged from a militarized Atlantic world that only gradually spawned new social categories. The inhabitants of Maryland in its early, turbulent years defined themselves and others according to multiple, overlapping signifiers related to wealth, ethnicity, religious belief, and gender. In testifying about Antonio, Job Chandler had tried to impose an identity upon him, but it was not an identity the black man chose, nor was it an identity based upon the idea of “race.” Rather, Chandler seemed to be drawing upon the image of the “wild man,” a popular trope in Early Modern European folklore and literature. Indeed, when Chandler described Antonio as a creature crouching, menacing, and uttering incomprehensible sounds, he evoked precisely the stereotypical person who was mad, degenerate, demonic. Europeans originally devised this image to describe other Europeans—usually heretics or some other kind of dangerous being— not Africans.13

At this early period in Chesapeake colonial settlement, the notion of race had virtually no practical significance. In fact, Chandler made no effort to assign a “race” to Antonio, a man who was ultimately a member of only one of many groups of resistant workers in the Chesapeake. Wealthy Chesapeake planters engaged in shrewd calculations to assemble the diverse pool of subordinate labor that powered their plantations; the tobacco economy demanded men, women, and children compliant and susceptible to severe discipline regardless of their ancestry, regional loyalties, physical characteristics, or religious beliefs. No trial witnesses or justices tried to justify Antonio’s enslavement and later death by invoking his alleged biological difference from, or inferiority to, Europeans.

It was his lack of political power, not his appearance or any imposed racial identity, that truly set Antonio apart in the colonial world. Ultimately, planters within the Chesapeake sought out

vulnerable field workers who lacked the protection that fellow warriors, coreligionists, jurists, or sea captains might have afforded them. Indians and European servants could count on some combination of these protections. Early on, the colonists were forced to negotiate and establish diplomatic relations with powerful Native regional confederations (“nations”), making it difficult to enslave Natives for service as field workers. The well-being of English indentured servants received at least minimal consideration under the law, and these young men and women also benefited from customs that had long regulated relations between the landed gentry and their workers. In contrast, African captives had no advocate, no protector, in the New World, whether in the form of a well-armed nation-state or lawyers representing a traditional body of law. And so the English and other European groups felt free to exploit Africans and their descendants with impunity.

Local political economies and labor demands shaped by military imperatives—not racial prejudices—account for the origins of slavery in the colonies. The story of Antonio’s death is a small sliver of that story, wrought in Maryland and elsewhere throughout the New World by the tangled motives flowing from commercial gain, ethnic and religious chauvinism, and aggressive empire-building on the part of Europeans as well as people indigenous to the area. Yet the enslavement of Africans was not a foregone conclusion. Antonio’s suffering derived from his extreme political vulnerability compared to both European and Native laborers; at the same time, in his agony and his resistance, he remained a tangible threat to his oppressors generally and his master particularly. And so a central question remains: Why would Symon Overzee choose to bring onto his plantation a “dangerous Rogue,” an “ugly yelling Brute beast like” person who might do harm to his family and inject into this precarious settlement yet another source of disorder? The answer to this question emerges out of the history of early Maryland, a place forged in violent conflict between Natives and interlopers and among the interlopers themselves.

[image file=images/centerli.jpg]

In March 1634, more than two decades before Antonio’s death, a party of about 140 English men and women disembarked from the ships Ark and Dove on an island off a fingerlike peninsula extending southeasterly from the North American mainland into the Chesapeake Bay. The passengers, exhausted from a harrowing four-month voyage on stormy seas, intended to claim the territory they called Maryland for its new proprietor, Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore. Calvert’s “designe” for Maryland included converting the Indians to Christianity (at least in part as a means of securing them as political and military allies) and establishing a network of feudal manors that would turn a profit and also offer religious freedom to English Protestants and Roman Catholics. Led by Cecil’s brother, Lieutenant Governor Leonard Calvert, the immigrants soon realized that the place they occupied was but a tiny beachhead in a vast land of competing Native and European empires. Within this land, neither allies nor enemies were readily identifiable by their appearance, speech, or country of origin, and traders and runaway workers made a mockery of territorial boundaries that were both shifting and porous.14

Immediately upon their arrival, the colonists plunged headfirst into the high-stakes world of Chesapeake diplomacy, managing to strike a deal for land with the leader of a local Indian group affiliated with the Piscataway, a 7,000-person strong chiefdom that dominated the peninsula. The leader agreed to share with the newcomers a portion of the spot called Yaocamico six miles up a Potomac tributary, the St. George’s River (later the St. Mary’s). Apparently, he thought the

interlopers would protect his people from their powerful rivals to the north and west: the Iroquois and the Susquehannock. For their part, the colonists fervently hoped that “this emperour being satisfied, the other kings [of lesser tribes] would be more peaceable.” The Marylanders understood that Chesapeake Native groups were large, well organized, and armed; therefore, a combination of trade, accommodation, and physical force would prove useful in cohabiting with and exploiting these dangerous peoples and in playing one group off against another.15

George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore, had envisioned a New World settlement that would reward wealthy investors with expansive landholdings and lucrative public offices and serve as a rebuke to the religious wars tearing England apart. Yet the colony’s founding by his son Cecil, two years after the elder Lord Baltimore’s death, only inflamed existing tensions of all kinds in the Chesapeake basin. There a fierce rivalry prevailed among the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and English for trade with multiple Indian nations. England was by no means all-powerful within this complex and often violent trading system. In fact, it was the lively Dutch port of New Amsterdam (present-day New York City) far to the north that greatly facilitated commerce among the colonists and Europe; and even in the closer English colony of Virginia, Rotterdam rivaled London as a market for staples produced in the Chesapeake.16

Founded a quarter of a century earlier than Maryland, Virginia had forged a successful military and diplomatic alliance with the fierce Susquehannock, facilitating a highly lucrative trade in beaver pelts. Powerful London merchants, many of whom were Protestants, had a direct interest in the trade. Jealous of their own territorial prerogatives, and respectful of the Susquehannock’s hunting and fighting abilities, Virginia colonists cast a suspicious eye on their new neighbor Maryland. The Piscataway, latecomers to the beaver trade, wasted little time allying with the Marylanders, a move that threatened the delicate equilibrium between the Virginians and their own Indian trading partners. Even more alarming to Virginians were the extraordinarily sweeping powers granted to Cecil Calvert by Charles I: Calvert was essentially king of his own colony, with control over land, taxes, political appointments, judicial affairs, and religious matters—a degree of authority no longer enjoyed by any English monarch, let alone by administrators of the Crown’s other North American colonies.17

Virginia’s opposition to Maryland emanated, ominously, from within Maryland itself. Kent Island, off Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the middle of the Chesapeake, was home to William Claiborne, a Virginia councilor and militant Protestant. He considered himself the indispensable pivot on which the beaver trade turned: the link among Virginians down the bay, the Susquehannock to the north, and the great Protestant merchants 3,000 miles to the east in London. To Claiborne, the founding of Maryland represented a threat of multiple dimensions: a rival for the beaver trade and for the goodwill of Indian allies, a nest of Roman Catholics bent on the subjection of all Protestants, a center of kingly privilege, and an assault on the security of his Kent Island home. Between 1635 and 1638 Claiborne and his supporters parried with a Maryland force led by Leonard Calvert and Thomas Cornwaleys, the latter an original emigrant and the colony’s military commander. Marylanders, for their part, rightly feared that they would survive and prosper only to the extent that their own leaders were willing to take up gun and sword in defense of the colony.18

Most prominent among Maryland’s fighters, the Roman Catholic Cornwaleys exemplified the combination of privilege, wealth, religious zeal, and physical aggression that played such a

powerful role in shaping the early history of the colony. Born in England in 1605, the second son of Sir William Cornwaleys, Thomas took the route of many young men from distinguished families who could not expect an inheritance, a right limited to the firstborn. Cornwaleys was Maryland’s leading investor and entrepreneur and an early trader in beaver pelts. He was a sworn enemy to Virginians and to Protestants, especially to men who were both. By the 1640s Cornwaleys was the richest man in Maryland, possessed of more than 8,000 acres, and he reckoned his New World success in distinctly material terms. His St. Inigoe’s Creek mansion was built with 50,000 bricks, and, in his words, “furnished with plate, linen hangings, bedding, brass, pewter, and all manner of household stuff worth at least a thousand pounds, about twenty servants, a hundred cattle, a great stock of swine and goats, some sheep and horses, a new pinnance of about twenty tons beside a shallop and other small boats.” Cornwaleys had much to fight for and defend.19

Cornwaleys had another, more perishable asset to worry about: human chattel. A portion of his wealth was derived from Maryland’s slave trade, which in the colony’s early years was fueled mostly by men, women, and children forcibly transported from the African continent, but also by some Natives, mostly women and children, captured by the English in battle or sold to the English by enemy tribes. Only the wealthiest colonists could afford to own, rather than lease, their laborers. As a slaveholder, Cornwaleys had a disproportionately large stake in the colony’s economy, a stake that would become even greater over the coming years.

Throughout the 1640s regional religious and political hostilities simmered and periodically boiled over, with raids and revenge raids by the Susquehannock and the Piscataway upon the English and upon each other. The soldier-provocateur Cornwaleys strove to prove himself the equal of his nemesis Claiborne by conducting periodic killing sprees in the form of surprise attacks on the “enemie” Indians, thereby perpetuating the cycle of mayhem on all sides. In 1643 Cornwaleys earned accolades as, in the words of a contemporary admirer, “that noble, right valiant and politic soldier [who] killed with fifty-three of his raw and tired Marylanders twenty- nine [Susquehannock] Indians.”20

Thus, Maryland remained literally and figuratively unsettled, and it was becoming apparent that the colony’s future, if indeed it had one, lay not in acquiring a larger share of the dwindling supply of beaver pelts, but in grubbing around in the ground and growing tobacco. By 1650 depleted natural resources and intertribal wars had diminished the power of the Susquehannock, signaling a shift away from the trade in beaver pelts that had brought Indian, Virginian, and London elites together in common pursuit of material gain and diplomatic accommodation. Now arose a greater emphasis on a market economy based on tobacco and a burgeoning Indian slave trade. This latter enterprise was facilitated by a predator Indian group well armed by Kent Island’s Claiborne: the Westo, who wreaked havoc by raiding Native groups for bodies to sell. Early Maryland planters considered Indians a reserve of viable subordinate laborers; captives were relatively available, cheap, and easy to acquire. Meanwhile, tobacco, with its powerful addictive and narcotic qualities, was finding favor all over Europe. Maryland settlers had begun growing the crop as early as 1636, and throughout the Chesapeake tobacco leaves already served as an official regional currency—“the Money of that Country which Answers all things,” in the words of a regional booster at the time. Growing the weed necessitated cultivating diplomatic relations with Natives who could furnish slaves, but also dispossessing the Natives of their hunting grounds. For labor, Chesapeake planters primarily relied on young English men and

women servants imported to grow tobacco, with the region’s cash supply derived from the marketing of tobacco in Europe and the selling of enslaved Natives to the West Indies.21

Back in England, Lord Baltimore rightly feared for his weak and largely defenseless colony. Its fate seemed sealed in 1647 with the defeat of King Charles I and the victory of the English Parliament in the Civil War. As a royalist and a Catholic, Cecil Calvert well understood his own precariousness and that of his New World enterprise. He therefore made a bold move: upon the death of his brother Leonard, Calvert sought to secure the goodwill of the king’s enemies, and ingratiate himself with Parliament, by appointing William Stone as Maryland’s first Protestant governor. A resident of Virginia, Stone was a nephew of wealthy tobacco merchant Thomas Stone, whose syndicate had captured a monopoly of the Virginia tobacco trade as early as the 1630s. The new governor set about recruiting to Maryland other well-born Virginia Protestants —especially Puritans, who felt aggrieved there—and rewarding them with land and public offices. Though he claimed that he was offering refuge mainly to persecuted Puritans languishing in Anglican Virginia, in fact Stone cared less about freedom of religion and more about respectability of pedigree. Some three hundred Virginians proceeded to form a settlement to the north and west of St. Mary’s on the western bank of the Chesapeake Bay, along the Severn River, a town they called Providence (the site of present-day Annapolis). With the infusion of this new blood, presumably the colony could placate Parliament and also reassure Virginia that Maryland was not in effect a Catholic mission bent on the destruction of all Protestants.22

[image “FIGURE 1.1” file=images/f0012-01.jpg]

FIGURE 1.1 Oriented to show the north on the right, John Ogilby’s 1671 map of Maryland was the first to provide the names of the colony’s counties. Ship captains relied on this map to locate ports for picking up shipments of tobacco along the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. St. Mary’s County, in the middle of the map, is a peninsula that lies at the confluence of the bay and the Potomac River. Despite the proximity of St. Mary’s to Virginia, armed conflict among Marylanders, Virginians, Susquehannock, and Piscataway complicated trade and travel between the two places. COURTESY MARYLAND STATE ARCHIVES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS (WILLIAM T. SNYDER MAP COLLECTION). JOHN OGILBY, 1671 NOUA TERRAE- MARIAE TABULA MSA SC 2111-1-2.

Among these recruits were two young recent arrivals to Virginia named Symon Overzee and Job Chandler, both Protestants (but not Puritans). Even at this early point in their careers, the fortunes of the two men had become tightly linked. Born in 1623 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Chandler came to Virginia in the spring of 1648. He was the younger brother of influential merchant Richard Chandler, one of Lord Baltimore’s associates and subsequent critics. A former apprentice to Thomas Stone, whose tobacco syndicate had benefited from strong connections with Holland’s merchants, Richard was now capitalizing on his own connections with Dutch traders.23

Political allies of Overzee would later claim that he, too, was born in England, but in fact he grew up in a prosperous Rotterdam family. (The privileged status Overzee would come to enjoy in Maryland might have derived from Lord Baltimore’s authority to proclaim anyone an English citizen.) Overzee’s father, Cornelis Symonsz Overzee, a prominent ship owner, sea captain, and tobacco importer, likely traded with both Richard Chandler and Thomas Stone. As early as 1647,

Symon was living up to his last name, which means “overseas” in Dutch: only twenty years old, he was actively trading as the contractor or owner of ships plying the Virginia-to-Rotterdam tobacco trade. He probably settled in Virginia around 1650, his immediate task the promotion of his father’s business interests. By 1651 both Symon Overzee and Job Chandler were living in Lynnhaven, Lower Norfolk County, in the southeastern corner of Virginia, where Chandler was already serving as a county sheriff, justice of the peace, and burgess, or member of Virginia’s colonial assembly. The area was the site of a thriving Dutch trading post that supplied the English planter elite with exotic foods and spirits, fine furniture, luxury goods such as linens and laces, and, for a wealthy few, enslaved workers. Shortly after their arrival in Virginia, Overzee and Chandler married two Lynnhaven women, the Thoroughgood sisters, Sarah (born in 1631) and Anne (1630), respectively. They were the daughters of Adam Thoroughgood, recently deceased, a wealthy political leader, Indian fighter, and slave trader. At the time of their marriage, the sisters were the stepdaughters of Sir Francis Yeardley, the younger son of Virginia’s first governor, the Protestant George Yeardley.24

Symon Overzee’s father-in-law was also in the process of developing deep ties to the colonial system of slavery. Born in Jamestown in 1624, Francis Yeardley had grown up in a slaveholding household. He himself was an early buyer and seller of enslaved Africans and Indians, relying on Dutch merchants for his own large bound workforce. In 1647 the twenty-one-year-old Yeardley had made an excellent match with a wealthy thirty-six-year-old Lynnhaven widow. Her new name, Sarah Offley Thoroughgood Gookin Yeardley, testified to the serial monogamy that prevailed during the early years of Chesapeake colonization, when mortality rates were high— almost three-quarters of immigrant men died before age fifty—and marriages short, an average of seven years. Francis Yeardley took up residence with his new wife at her Lynnhaven estate, where she was living with her children, including (at that point) her unmarried daughters, Sarah and Anne. After Overzee and Sarah Thoroughgood wed, Yeardley and his new son-in-law parlayed their kin relationship into a financial one. The two men jointly bought the sloop Wittepaart (Dutch for White Horse) from its captain, Dirck Wittepaart, and embarked on a trading business facilitated by Overzee’s ties with other Dutch merchants on both sides of the Atlantic.25

In 1649 Lieutenant William Lewis, a Catholic landowner, signed over his patent for 2,000 acres on Portobacco Creek on Maryland’s Western Shore to Overzee and Chandler jointly. Lewis had in mind the long-term interests of Maryland, and by his gift to the two Protestants he hoped to spare the colony the religious and political wars ravaging England, and the whole English Empire, at the time. Chandler also laid claim to an additional 1,200 acres of land. Arriving in 1650 with his bride, Overzee named his portion of the tract, located on Nangemy Creek near an Indian settlement of the same name, “Rotterdam.” For a while at least, the Thoroughgood sisters would live on adjoining estates in Charles County.26

Overzee’s brother-in-law was received with great fanfare in their new home. In June 1651 Maryland officials offered Chandler a uniquely obsequious welcome to the colony, hailing the arrival of “our trusty and well beloved Job Chandler,” recommended by Governor Stone and surrogate of “your Brother and our good Friend Richard Chandler of London Merchant.” Sweetening the deal for Job were several high-ranking political and judicial appointments conferred upon him: he would serve as a member of the Governor’s Council, a small, powerful judicial body; as a county justice of the peace; and as receiver general of the colony. This last

position required him to collect port duties and quitrents and entitled him to an annual salary of £100 sterling as well as 10 percent of the colony’s revenue. Members of the council declared their “special trust and Confidence in your Fidelity Wisdom diligence and experience of affairs in these Parts,” no doubt an exaggerated compliment to the youthful newcomer, but certainly a testament to the influence of his brother, Richard, in parliamentary politics and colonial affairs generally.27

Overzee’s star, too, was on the rise. He and his wife soon moved from his Rotterdam holdings to a plantation called St. John’s, at St. Mary’s City. The move was, if nothing else, strategic, for though it took Sarah away from her sister, it made the Overzees close neighbors of Philip Calvert and Thomas Cornwaleys and brought the couple literally within shouting distance of the colonial seat of power. Yet the St. John’s house itself might have been enough to draw Overzee out of the wilds of Nangemy Creek. Situated strategically above the banks of the St. Mary’s and close to a millpond, the one-and-a-half-story frame dwelling had been built by colonial secretary John Lewger. So commodious was the structure that at times the assembly and the general court had met there, and sheriffs and guards had lodged there with the Lewger family. For Overzee, who no doubt had been raised in material comfort surrounded by books and fine furniture and carpets, the house was a welcome and dramatic contrast to the primitive, temporary clapboard and wattle- and-daub structures that sheltered most Marylanders at the time. The Overzees took up residence on a fully improved plantation that included a freshwater spring, a tannery, pasturelands, corn and tobacco fields, and orchards. Although according to a local historian St. Mary’s City could “hardly be called a Towne”—it consisted of a forge, a mill, a Catholic chapel, and a few small houses—it was the most that Maryland had to offer the couple in terms of a settlement. Yet if the move to St. John’s increased Overzee’s physical comfort, it also demanded that he fill a new and completely unfamiliar role: that of plantation owner and labor manager.28

[image “FIGURE 1.2” file=images/f0015-01.jpg]

FIGURE 1.2 An artist’s rendering of St. John’s, the home of Symon Overzee, where the enslaved man Antonio died in September 1656. At a time when most Maryland colonists lived in small, temporary structures, the St. John’s house was exceptional for its size and gracious design and for the improved fields, gardens, and orchards that surrounded it. The site has been recreated by Historic St. Mary’s City. COURTESY L. H. BARKER AND HISTORIC ST. MARY’S CITY.

Around this time Francis Yeardley, too, responded to Governor Stone’s call for Protestants, establishing a plantation near Chandler and Overzee on Portobacco Creek and accepting political appointments. In September 1651 Yeardley and Chandler were serving together on the Governor’s Council. Meanwhile, Yeardley boldly straddled Virginia and Maryland by maintaining his Lynnhaven residence, where his wife continued to live, and filling a number of local posts in Virginia. Maryland chauvinists would later charge that Yeardley had only “pretended” to settle in their colony. Yet Overzee also retained ties to Virginia, where his seafaring father was trading in tobacco and deerskins in the early 1650s, and where Symon numbered many planters among his debtors.29

Unlike his sons-in-law Chandler and Overzee, Yeardley had grandiose plans for the development of New World settlements, plans that presumed peaceful cohabitation with Christian Indians.

Yeardley drew on his father’s wealth and reputation, and on the skills of an interpreter he employed, Nathaniel Batts, to go beyond trading beaver pelts with the Susquehannock and to forge new links with Indians from the Currituck and Albemarle Sounds to the south of Virginia. In correspondence with a potential English investor, he referred to Native leaders in terms that conveyed his respect for them: these were “emperors” and “great commanders” presiding over “great nations” defended by men “valiant and fierce in fight.” Yeardley defined these strange- looking people not by their skin color or their race, but by their powerful political-military associations. At the same time, he envisioned a future settlement of English-speaking, Christianized, literate Indians who would live in English-style frame houses and promote Mediterranean enterprises such as vineyards, olive trees, and silk-making. Such a scheme, Yeardley concluded, would rebound to God’s glory and “England and Virginia’s honor,” suggesting his loyalties lay with Maryland’s rival.30

If Yeardley and Chandler’s influence in Maryland was political, Overzee’s clout—such as it was —was economic. Though benefiting from his connection with Yeardley, Overzee had already built a substantial trading business of his own, partnering with influential traders in Rotterdam and Virginia, including, among the latter, Edmund Scarborough of Northampton County. In the process Overzee learned what his father already knew: that merchandizing in the age of empire was not for the risk averse. Indeed, seventeenth-century Dutch traders embraced the perils of far- flung voyages, relishing the battle against pirates, mutinous crews, and stormy weather just as they relished the battle against their own sinfulness in the sight of God. Overzee remained on the front lines of wealth creation during these uncertain times. In 1648 he lost one of his ships to the Spanish on the high seas en route to Virginia. Two years later the ship that he and Yeardley owned—originally named the Wittepaart but now diplomatically renamed Virginia Merchant— sank off the coast of New England. These setbacks failed to dampen Overzee’s spirit; courting disaster and making money were part of the same impulse.31

Barely out of their teens, Overzee and Chandler had already given evidence of the energy and political savvy necessary to take advantage of Maryland’s economic potential. Nevertheless, neither the arrival of these and other Virginia Protestants nor the forthcoming parliamentary support could guarantee Maryland the security and stability its inhabitants craved. The Chesapeake remained a site of sporadic warfare, with the Westo Indians forcing a reconfiguration of the tribes they raided for slaves, the Susquehannock terrorizing Maryland planters, and Maryland Catholics and Protestants kidnapping and assaulting each other.32

And then in early 1652 came a diplomatic breakthrough when the Susquehannock initiated a conditional peace with the colony. The treaty secured the territorial rights of Maryland, with the exception of Kent Island, “which belongs to Captaine Clayborne.” The Indians and English agreed to retrieve fugitives for each other—“Servants belonging to the English or to the Indians [who] shall goe away or run away from either side”—with masters liable for the costs incurred in capturing them. The treaty further stipulated that any Indians who entered an English settlement must limit their delegation to no more than ten persons and must carry tokens, distributed to them earlier by the English, to identify themselves as friends. The treaty was signed, on the one hand, by Maryland officials and, on the other, by Sawahegeh, treasurer, and by a number of war captains and councilors “appointed and sent for that purpose by the Nation and State of Sasquehanogh.” The agreement concluded on a hopeful note: that “these Articles and every particular of them shall be really and inviolably observed and kept and performed by the two

Nations before named.”33

For treaty purposes in 1652 at least, the English were willing to grant certain Indian tribes the status of nation, with all the military and political significance the term implied. These Native groups possessed the numbers and the military prowess to extract from the English a measure of fearful respect; and in fact all Indians were either allies or foes, social relations the English well understood. Absent from these considerations was any sense that the Indians were part of a homogeneous race of people. Rather, there were clear social and political divisions among various cultural groups, differences that rendered generalizing about these Native peoples difficult and indeed counterproductive for anyone on the front lines of colonial profit-seeking.

Meanwhile, together Maryland and Virginia authorities were pushing back against Parliament’s stringent measures to restrict the Dutch trading presence in the Chesapeake; the colonists were torn between their loyalty to England and their commercial interests, and the latter won out over the former. The regional tobacco economy hinged on merchants such as Overzee and his network of Virginia and Dutch traders, a Rotterdam–New Amsterdam–Chesapeake connection based on a dense tangle of intermarriages that spanned the Atlantic. During this era of English civil wars and of banditry on the high seas, Chesapeake tobacco planters understood that to sell their crop abroad—that is, to survive and profit—they needed the predictable sail power that only the Dutch could provide. In 1651 Virginia’s governor, William Berkeley, condemned Parliament’s Navigation Acts forbidding foreign nations to trade with any English colonies. Declared the governor, “The Indians, God be blessed round about us are subdued; we can onely feare the Londoners, who would faine bring us to the same poverty, wherein the Dutch found and relieved us; [the Londoners] would take away the liberty of our consciences, and tongues, and our right of giving and selling our goods to whom we please.”34

As a Dutch trader Overzee played an integral part in Maryland’s emerging prosperity, but he was living in a struggling English community that was profoundly suspicious of foreigners— regardless of skin color—who were part of viable nation-states. This suspicion kept Overzee on the political fringes of the embattled colonial sphere he had so recently joined, even while granting him a healthy share of its profits. Unlike other prominent men, Overzee had little to do with the governance of the colony, and for one so wealthy, he was conspicuously absent from the long list of councilors, burgesses, county justices of the peace, jurors, and overseers of highways who enriched themselves by making laws and policies that favored their own financial interests. Overzee’s public service stints were limited to a brief period in late April and early May 1658, when he appeared as a commissioner for St. Mary’s County, appointed by Lord Baltimore, and when he twice served as a foreman of petit juries impaneled by the county. (As a native of the Netherlands, he was ineligible for political or administrative office.) Yet his regular appearances in court testify to his extraordinary economic power in a time and place where influence was measured by the number of a person’s legal adversaries. Over the years Overzee confronted many dozens of debtors in county court and Provincial Court in Virginia and Maryland. No amount of tobacco—whether owed by male or female, rich or poor, young or old—was too small to be forgiven or forgotten. Moreover, his relation to Job Chandler rendered unnecessary any formal politicking on Overzee’s part; in fact, the two men enjoyed an ingenious alliance based on the political power of the one and the economic prowess of the other. Theirs was the elite equivalent of a mateship, the contemporary term for a landholding partnership between men of modest means.35

Governor Stone appreciated that Symon Overzee represented an entrepreneurial moneymaking machine of sorts. Nevertheless, the governor was paying dearly for recruiting at least some of Overzee’s fellow Virginia Protestants several years before. Throughout the early 1650s, pressure was building among the principled Puritans from Virginia; they chafed at taking an oath of allegiance to the Catholic Lord Baltimore, disingenuously refusing to swear “to uphold [the] Antichrist.” During this newly unsettled period, some Marylanders fled to England; among them was the militant Catholic Thomas Cornwaleys.36

Stone and his allies clashed violently with a group of disaffected Puritans on Sunday morning, March 25, 1655. This clash, known as the Battle of Great Severn, took place at Horn Point, opposite the Puritan settlement of Providence, and brought together a total of four hundred men from both sides. Fighting alongside Stone that day were a newly commissioned Major Job Chandler and Chandler’s benefactor, William Lewis. Chandler appeared determined to remain loyal to the governor and to distance himself from the other former Virginians, men possessed of a religious zealotry that was alien to him. Stone, Chandler, and Lewis were captured in battle and, with ten others, convicted of treason and condemned to death. Stone and Chandler were spared—according to one observer “by the Petitions of the Women, with some other friends which they found there”—but Lewis was not. He and three others were executed. Eventually, Chandler paid a fine of 15,000 pounds of tobacco for his role in the rebellion.37

Throughout this tumultuous period, Job Chandler and Symon Overzee held onto their livelihoods, and their lives, by virtue of their relation to Yeardley and to Chandler’s brother and Stone’s uncle in London. The wealth that the two young men accumulated in Maryland through the 1650s can be measured any number of ways. Overzee owned several large land parcels, including the 1,000-acre Rotterdam plantation; the St. John’s freehold of 200 acres, where he lived with his wife; an additional 800 acres near St. Mary’s City; a plantation called Hebden’s Hole, of 700 acres; and another 600 acres called Stoopside. By the mid-1650s he had expanded St. John’s to include a loft, a dairy, and a quartering house where an indeterminate number of free and enslaved workers lived. He furnished the home with a rich array of cabinets, feather beds, leather chairs, trunks, and pewter and silver serving sets. His wife, Sarah, owned Holland aprons and dresses trimmed with Flanders lace, in addition to mounds of linens, blankets, and sewing materials—an abundance of finery that would one day pique the malicious envy of some of her servants.38

Chandler in time also accumulated enslaved workers and at least 500 acres in addition to the 1,000-acre parcel he received from William Lewis (and named Chandler’s Hope). His profit- making activities included delivering Indian prisoners to county officials and sending large quantities of muskrat skins to London. Yet Chandler distinguished himself primarily not as a trader but rather as an elected official and political appointee. He was a regular on the county court circuit, hearing a veritable kaleidoscope of cases involving witchcraft, adultery, infanticide, bigamy, theft, slander, public drunkenness, and murder. Together with other judges, he sentenced offenders to a range of punishments, from a stint in the pillory or on the ducking stool, to fines, brandings—runaway workers at times had an “R” burned into their shoulders—and death by hanging. Such power apparently convinced Chandler of his own invincibility.39

It was Francis Yeardley who, living and politicking in two colonies at once, put into motion a series of events that would escalate into a major scandal engulfing Overzee and Chandler. This

controversy, as with Overzee’s later trial over the death of Antonio, would revolve around the disposition of slaves. In the winter and early spring of 1653–1654, Yeardley was in residence at his Portobacco plantation, worked by a number of enslaved Africans and Indians. By March 1654, however, Yeardley was back at his plantation in Virginia, where he received an Indian chief from the Albermarle region to the south. The chief wanted his son to be baptized and so left the youngster with his hosts “to be bred up a Christian,” which, Yeardley prayed, “God grant him to become!”40

Yeardley’s springtime absence from Maryland had worried his creditors there. In April one buyer sent a boat to Portobacco to pick up two enslaved Indian youths he had already paid for, but Yeardley was not there to make good on the transaction. If indeed the planter had intended to elude his creditors, it would not have been the first or last time a debtor had slipped away across the bay; this sort of boundary-crossing was already a time-tested way of leaving behind financial, personal, and legal obligations of all kinds. Yet Yeardley was far too wealthy to fear those whom he owed tobacco or slaves, no matter how large the debt. He left Maryland to return to the place he considered his real home. Now, however, his peripatetic existence came to an abrupt end: in February 1655, while still at his Virginia plantation, the thirty-five-year-old Yeardley died. With him expired his vision of an English-Indian cooperative in the territory that would eventually become North Carolina.41

In May, shortly after Yeardley’s death, Chandler and Overzee took control of their late stepfather-in-law’s Portobacco estate by virtue of their status as Yeardley’s closest male heirs, the sons-in-law of Yeardley’s widow. The local sheriff began routine proceedings to assess the estate so that all its creditors with outstanding claims could be compensated. Yet in a deft act of sabotage, Chandler, in his capacity as councilor, ordered the sheriff to refrain from securing the plantation and to stay away from it until further notice. At this point Overzee brought in one of his sloops and spirited off the plantation the most valuable movable property, the enslaved workers, depositing them at St. John’s so that they could be fed before being sent, and presumably sold, away. Later one of Yeardley’s creditors would state the case against the two: “The One [Chandler] having protected the sd Estate contrary to the Legall Course of Attachment, & after delivered it up, & permitted it to be exported,” acting in concert with “the other” (Overzee), who “knowingly ayding & assisting by his Sloope & man to the exportation of the same, & victualing them att his own howse, when they were going out of the province.” As a result, “the said Partys are since enriched, by the sd Estate.” It is unclear whether or not either Chandler or Overzee knew the identity of all the claimants on Yeardley’s estate. If they did know, their underhanded appropriation of the assets was reckless in the extreme. If they did not, they would soon pay for their ignorance.42

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While this legal clash between one of Yeardley’s creditors and the Overzee-Chandler mateship was unfolding, a slave ship docked at the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam to the north. In November 1654 Dirck Wittepaart and a partner had received permission from Amsterdam authorities to sail their ship Wittepaart to Africa and take on human cargo for the slave trade. (This ship is not to be confused with an earlier ship of the same name that Wittepaart had previously sold to Overzee and Yardley.) In September 1655 the vessel docked in New Amsterdam and deposited 391 traumatized men, women, and children into slave pens. Residents

of the city could not help but note the vessel’s arrival: the overwhelming stench of human waste emanating from the hold permeated the whole harbor. Sixty-four of the total 455 persons wedged in the hold of the ship had perished between the West African port of Loango, in the Kongo- Angola region, and New Amsterdam.43

The Wittepaart was the first ship to dock at the Dutch seaport for the express purpose of selling slaves. Soon after the ship arrived, the city council expressed alarm—not at the savagery of the slave trade, but at the quick sale of people who had “been transported and carried hence without the Hon’ble Company or the inhabitants of this province having derived any revenue or benefit therefrom.” The result was “An Ordinance Imposing a Duty on Exported Slaves,” New Amsterdam’s first tax on the sale of human beings.44

Among the buyers who paid the extraordinarily large sum of 1,200 florins (on average) for each captive was Virginia merchant Edmund Scarborough, who regularly traded between the Chesapeake and New Amsterdam. Scarborough was Virginia’s equivalent of Maryland’s Thomas Cornwaleys: a New World planter-entrepreneur possessed of many thousands of acres (in Scarborough’s case, 30,000 on Virginia’s Eastern Shore) who combined political influence with a savvy business sense and unapologetic aggression toward any Indians he considered threatening to his enterprises. In April 1651 Scarborough had rallied his neighbors with reckless bravado, formed his own militia, and conducted an unprovoked attack on a band of Eastern Shore Pocomoke with whom the English were at peace. The massacre horrified Virginia authorities struggling to coexist with the many Indians who literally surrounded them.45

Among his purchase of forty-one men and women at New Amsterdam, Scarborough reserved at least some for his own large salt works, manned eventually by thirty enslaved laborers. Some of the other slaves would go to his daughters, Tabitha, age eighteen (and recently married), and Matilda, twelve. The Africans whom Scarborough bought had remained in Manhattan for seven months after their arrival; a one-month voyage to Virginia would have them arriving in March 1656. Sure enough, on the 27th of that month, Scarborough’s daughters received a patent of 3,500 acres of land in Northampton County, Virginia, as a routine reward for transporting into the colony seventy laborers.46

Sometime during that month, Antonio also arrived on Symon Overzee’s plantation. The timing of Antonio’s arrival, coincident with the arrival of the Scarborough slaves, and the active trade relations among a group that included Scarborough and Overzee suggest that the enslaved man had been on board the Wittepaart. And the owner of the vessel was almost certainly the same captain who had piloted the ship of the same name that Overzee and Yeardley bought in 1650, revealing another connection between Overzee and the slaves brought south to the Chesapeake by Scarborough.

The three-hundred-day voyage of the Dutch slave ship Wittepaart originated in Texel, the Netherlands, in November 1654 and took on slaves in Loango, stopping along the way in St. Helena before arriving at New Amsterdam on September 15, 1655. Yet even this minimal information opens a wider window onto Antonio’s life in Kongo-Angola and the Chesapeake.

Slave traders prized young men trained as soldiers, men healthy and strong enough to withstand the horrific Middle Passage and attract buyers of sturdy field workers, so there is a strong

likelihood that Antonio’s previous life had involved some form of military service for his own tribal group. Like many other persons captured in this region of West Africa in the mid- seventeenth century, Antonio might have hailed from the Ubangi River and learned the trades of metalworking or pottery-making. Or he might have mined for gold, iron, or copper or made a living as a fisherman. This last kind of job would have provided him with the skills to survive for weeks at a time in the dense latticework of creeks and rivers on Maryland’s Western Shore, as he would do toward the end of his captivity.

There is a strong likelihood, too, that civil unrest in Africa had propelled Antonio into slavery. During the 1650s the Kongo-Angola region witnessed a bloody competition among the English, French, and Dutch to displace Portuguese traders and missionaries. Antonio might have been sold by his kin or convicted for a crime; but more likely he was the victim of a raid that was merely a pretext for kidnapping human beings. Many captives from this area were given Portuguese names (such as his). And, significantly, a considerable number were Christian, testifying to the labors of Catholic missionaries in that part of Africa since the latter part of the fifteenth century and to the decision among certain Kongo leaders to embrace the new faith on behalf of themselves and their people.47

Antonio belonged to one of the many dozens, even hundreds, of cultural groups throughout this region of West Central Africa, and he spoke a language that was not understood by his European captors or even, probably, by many of his fellow captives. On board the Wittepaart he had become black and African—crude labels deployed by the white captain and crew to distinguish themselves from people bound for sale. In what was a floating prison–cum–torture chamber, the more than four hundred men, women, and children had been packed tightly, forced to lie together in their own urine, excrement, blood, and vomit. The ordeal sometimes served to forge rudimentary social bonds among people who had no preexisting connections apart from the hue of their skin and a vulnerability to warriors and slave traders in their homelands. Shipboard rebellions were neither uncommon nor often successful; but they led to pidgin languages that enabled the captives to transcend their diverse ethnic identities, thus welding together disparate peoples in opposition to white men. More often, however, the Middle Passage devastated those Africans who survived it, stripping them of hope and any sense of belonging or protection. The routine rape of women captives and the torture, dismemberment, and murder of troublemakers were institutionalized forms of terror practiced by captains, strategies calculated to turn soldiers and freeborn men and women into slaves. The stench that emanated from the Wittepaart in New Amsterdam harbor gave fulsome expression to the combined horrors suffered by the captives.48

By the time he was forced onto Symon Overzee’s plantation, Antonio had endured the disintegration of a number of communities of which he was a part—in his homeland, on the forced march to the sea, aboard the slaver, during the seven cold months in New Amsterdam, and, finally, on Scarborough’s ship bound for the Chesapeake. And now in Maryland, Overzee and Chandler were trying to force Antonio to till the soil, a task reserved for women in his homeland and one avoided by all English colonists who could afford to do so. At St. John’s, he refused to bend to the will of his captors; he ran away.49

Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop that required heavy hoeing, stoop labor, and a timely harvest. Mid-seventeenth-century Chesapeake planters experimented with various kinds of workers whose productivity could be regulated by some combination of kinship obligation, physical

force, and legal sanction. The system admitted few tangible incentives that would have prompted field hands to toil willingly in the heat and humidity of midsummer. Most landowners therefore considered a matrix of factors in their search for a compliant labor force—a suitable combination of bound and free, young and old, male and female, English, Indian, and African workers. Overzee, Chandler, and other Chesapeake planters had little choice but to use trial and error to cobble together workforces consisting of young immigrants from Europe, mostly England; forced immigrants from Africa; Indians of enemy tribes; and nearby poor but independent householders. Some of these workers toiled as indentured servants, others as wage earners, sharecroppers, or renters. Some Indians and Africans were held as slaves. Yet it was difficult to correlate a specific ethnic group, or a specific skin color, with a specific legal status.50

African workers were relatively rare in the Chesapeake during these years; they were expensive to buy, and they were likely to fall ill and die soon after enslavement there, making an investment in them a risky venture indeed. In 1650 the region was home to only 1,700 persons of African descent (about 10 percent of the total population), some of them servants, some of them free, and others enslaved. Passengers aboard the Ark, the ship that had deposited Maryland’s original settlers on the continent in 1634, included Mathias de Sousa, an indentured servant of African-Portuguese descent; within four years of his arrival in the colony he had become free, a mariner and a fur trader, and, remarkably (in 1642), a member of the colonial assembly of freemen. Those planters leading the way by introducing enslaved Africans into their workforces were mainly Dutch merchants. Signaling their great wealth, Francis Yeardley, Symon Overzee, and Job Chandler all used enslaved laborers on their Maryland plantations at a time when most of their neighbors were relying on white indentured servants. (Among Overzee’s slaves were two Indian youths, a boy and a girl.) Some owners exploited Africans for the skills they had acquired in their homeland: Edmund Scarborough later wrote that his enslaved “Angolas” knew how to work metals, make pots, weave mats and clothing, and rotate crops. Granted some control over their own energies, they chose to raise pigs, sheep, and chickens.51

At least two other persons of African descent worked on Overzee’s St. John’s plantation, including the anonymous black woman, perhaps a domestic, who remained in the quartering house and “never stird out” the day Antonio was killed. She remains an enigma: Was she indifferent to, contemptuous of, Antonio? Overwhelmed with pity but fearful for her own safety? John Babtista, described in Maryland court records as “A moore of Barbary,” also worked for Overzee as a servant in Virginia in the late 1640s, perhaps as a way to repay a debt for some linen that he owed Overzee’s father. Babtista’s name was his insurance policy at a time when Christian converts could still distinguish themselves from most enslaved Africans. Symon sold the remaining time on this man’s contract to another planter, who tried to hold him against his will past his indenture. The English-speaking Babtista sued, left his new master, and emigrated from Virginia to Maryland, where he began working as a servant for the younger Overzee again. Overzee granted Babtista his freedom on March 1, 1656, just a few weeks before Antonio arrived at St. John’s, though this act failed to resolve either Babtista’s legal status or the compensation due him; both matters remained in litigation for years. Still, persons of African descent occupied a variety of legal statuses in mid-seventeenth-century Maryland.52

Throughout this period European travel writers showed great interest in the Chesapeake’s Africans and Indians alike, in some cases generalizing about particular groups’ distinctive physical appearance and reproductive potential. Yet in separating friend from foe and identifying

potential workers, English colonists found themselves forced to deal in local realities, not in theoretical or ideological abstractions. These local realities, moreover, worked to the Indians’ advantage—and worked against Africans.

Together with other planters, Overzee desperately needed compliant laborers, but he was not so foolish to think that dark-skinned, non-English-speaking, pagan Natives afforded a limitless reservoir of tobacco hands. The Susquehannock held out little promise as field laborers, bound or otherwise. As long as the beaver trade was viable, Indians were trading partners and diplomatic allies; but even with the rise of tobacco, and the ruthless efficiency with which the Westo captured and enslaved weaker groups, planters used discretion in exploiting Indians as workers. Indians tended to vanish into the forests or serve as a provocation to their countrymen to kill English masters. Overzee directed an enslaved Indian, probably the youth he owned, to bind Antonio right before he whipped him. Planters were willing to traffic in a young male Indian slave or two at a time, but adults could fetch higher prices in the Caribbean. In its relatively weak and defenseless state, then, Maryland could not afford to aggravate either the Piscataway or the Susquehannock by enslaving as many local Natives as its labor-intensive staple-crop economy might require.53

The English remained ambivalent about the roles and uses of Indians in general: Were they to be hounded as heathens or cultivated as political allies? Poet Ebenezer Cook expressed the confusion by referring to Indians in general as “courteous devils.” Most Natives eschewed what the English considered decent clothing, and the warriors made themselves look fearsome by painting their faces red, green, white, and black. Noting their strange appearance, their “black, long and harsh hair,” and bizarre tattoos, another contemporary Marylander, George Alsop, highlighted their odd and frightful practices: “Singing (or rather howling out) … bellowing in a strange and confused manner,” they remained terrifying creatures, a people of devil worshippers, “strange to behold.”54

At the same time, Indians maintained powerful military and political confederations and eagerly embraced trade, activities the English appreciated. Indeed, noted Alsop, “where they [Indians] spy profit sailing towards them with the wings of a prosperous gale, there they become much familiar” to the English. In addition, Francis Yeardley’s scheme for a productive colony of Indians testified to his confidence that they could be converted from pagan hunters to sedentary Christian farmers. At times it even seemed as if Indian allies were the least of the colony’s enemies. Virginia Protestants now living in Maryland and chafing under the requirement that they take an oath of allegiance to the Calverts charged that Indians “judged to be heathen” in fact “exceeded in kindness, in courtesies, in love, and mercy, unto them,” than those “mad, rash rulers of Mariland.” Various ethnic and political identities existed only in relation to one another.55

Indian men proved useful as hirelings, and they welcomed payment for hunting wolves; harvesting the rich bounty of the Chesapeake—blue crabs and terrapins, deer, fish, and fowl; tracking down cattle and hogs; retrieving criminals and runaway workers; and (depending on their point of origin) trafficking in slaves. The Pangayo Indian who reported to Overzee on Antonio’s whereabouts lived in Zachaia Swamp, east of Portobacco Creek. He no doubt counted on some kind of reward for the information. For colonists, the issue of arming Indians presented a dilemma: whether to supply “friend” Indians with guns and ammunition so that they could hunt

and protect the English from “enemy” Indians, or whether to deny these ostensible friends firearms on the theory that all Indians were dangerous. In general, though, Maryland Natives tried to keep their distance from the colonists in both cultural and physical terms; the Piscataway, for example, stayed to themselves in a village in the northwestern part of the colony.56

As they set about establishing their Maryland plantations, Chandler and Overzee pondered the best way to manage workers set to any number of tasks that were invariably some combination of disagreeable, difficult, and unfamiliar. At St. John’s between 1650 and 1658, Overzee employed at least twelve indentured servants, two sharecroppers, a renter, four slaves (Indian and African), and four builder-carpenters (and probably many more of each of these groups). His heedless treatment of Antonio indicates that he was on his way to owning more slaves, which rich men did because they could afford to do so. Slave owning was an unpredictable investment: high mortality rates among “unseasoned” slaves (those imported directly from Africa, without exposure to the brutality and New World diseases characteristic of bondage in the Caribbean) could overshadow their potential as long-term bound workers, and only the wealthiest landowners could afford to take this risk. Overzee knew he would never find enough workers to satisfy St. John’s demand, for the land was almost limitless, and the hands necessary to chop down trees, construct fences and dwellings, and plant and harvest crops were scarce.57

The mid-1650s posed special challenges for planter colonists in Maryland; years of political and military conflict in their homeland had taken a toll on the supply of young English indentured servants. By this time a chronic labor shortage had become acute, the result of Maryland’s poor reputation as a settlement and a workplace. Large numbers of servants contracted malaria, diphtheria, or typhoid during the deadly summer “seasoning time” (when newcomers either succumbed to or survived New World diseases) soon after their arrival. In the fields they took their lives in their hands, ever on the watch for Indian enemies and Virginia raiders alike. Some stumps they girdled, in the Indian manner, a method that killed the trees and allowed daylight to stream through the branches onto the rows of tobacco or below; but other trees they had to chop down for lumber for fences, houses, and outbuildings. Coming from a place where forests were the province of gentleman hunters, and where ordinary folk collected firewood from the “lops” on the ground, these English folk had no experience felling trees, nor did they know which implement to use—hatchet or saw or felling ax, pick, or small ax—or how to use it. Young men toiling in the forests wounded themselves or expired, crushed under falling trees. The enforced pace of the February-to-December tobacco cycle of planting, hoeing, weeding, worming, harvesting, and processing left all hands exhausted, suffering from sunburn and mosquito and snake bites. Consumption of the beverage of choice—alcohol in the form of hard cider—meant that most stumbled through the forests in a sweat-soaked haze throughout the summer and early fall. Sundown brought only more work for the famished: the pounding of corn into hominy, a task that demanded considerable time and upper-body strength.58

Women servants employed in the fields felt especially aggrieved. For English women, such labor outside of harvest time carried a stigma associated with, in the words of one of Overzee’s neighbors, “wenches that are Nasty, beastly, and not fit to be employed in housewifely tasks.” A Maryland man of modest means named John Nicholls contracted with Thomas Cornwaleys and placed his daughter Hester in Cornwaleys’s household, anticipating that the great man’s wife would train the ten-year-old to be a lady’s maid. Instead, Cornwaleys deemed the girl “a Rude Raw ill bred Childe” and put her to work in the fields. Mortified, Nicholls petitioned the court

that she “may not be mad[e] a Slave a tearme soe scandalous that if admitted to be the Condition or title of the Apprentices of this Province will be soe destructive as noe free borne Christians will ever be induced to come over as servants.” After a trial, the jury ruled in Nicholls’s favor, though it is unclear whether their chief concern was the welfare and reputation of little Hester or the public-relations disaster that her continued “enslavement” would entail. Cornwaleys railed against the “weake and Ignorant” members of the jury, his social inferiors; the master of twenty servants, he claimed he had taken in the girl, “soe useless a Servant,” only as a matter of charity.59

At the same time, masters did not enjoy full license to push indentured servants to the limits of human endurance the way they could with slaves. In the Chesapeake, planters had to abide by traditional English custom and give English workers the right to rest on the Sabbath and a half day on Saturday. Courts considered indentured servants’ demands for adequate amounts of English food and drink to be legitimate and responded accordingly when young men and women were bold enough to press their claims with legal authorities. Indeed, as English citizens, even these downtrodden workers had access to the judicial system to varying degrees. At least some brave servants and concerned neighbors alike were willing to file grievances in county courts alleging “hard usage” on the part of a master or mistress; their boldness suggests that such rights were a brake on unbridled “corrective” violence. Those grievances yield a catalog of abuses the justices considered unacceptable according to English standards: young men and women starved nigh unto death, deprived of adequate clothing, beaten and mutilated, their wounds or illnesses left untreated to the point where, in the words of the court, “the voyce of the People Crieth shame.”60

To many masters, the need to grow great quantities of tobacco seemed at odds with a customary judicial system that exerted some control over the deployment and discipline of English indentured servants. Seeking to provide some measure of protection to these young people, the Maryland assembly tried to systematize the terms of servants who arrived without prearranged indentures: those twenty years and older would serve four years; those between twelve and sixteen, seven years; and those younger than twelve, until they were twenty-one. Also, throughout most of the seventeenth century servants could count on receiving “freedom dues” at the end of their terms; for the men, that meant a cloth suit, canvas drawers, shoes, socks, hat or cap, felling ax and weeding hoe, two shirts, and corn and for the women, clothing, corn, and 40 shillings in cash or goods. Until 1682 the men were additionally entitled to fifty acres of land, but only if they could locate a parcel for sale and afford to hire a surveyor. The labor turnover that flowed from the limited terms of servants meant that masters had constantly to replenish their workforces.61

These conditions lessened the value of indentured servants in the eyes of their masters and bolstered the case for using slaves—at least among those men who could afford to buy them. By the time Symon Overzee became a planter, slavery had been a feature of New World colonization for more than a century; his father might have had a direct hand in the slave trade linking Angola to the sugar colony of Pernambuco, Brazil, which the Dutch had wrested from the Portuguese in 1630. And Overzee only had to look to the example set by his wealthy neighbors to understand which forms of labor were most cost-effective in the long run.62

Nevertheless, local politics played out in the short run and at times interfered with the grand

designs of the powerful. Increasingly, wealthy planters aimed to use more enslaved workers outside the reach of English law and fewer rebellious indentured servants bent on using the law to their own advantage. Yet even men and women freed from indentured service could aggravate their former masters and mistresses in a way that diluted the everyday power of the elite. In the 1650s Maryland still offered relative promise for householders of modest means. In contrast to Virginia, where elites early wielded unchecked power, through the 1650s the Calverts’ colony could boast at least modest rates of upward mobility. Most former servants either entered the ranks of the small landowning class or readily found jobs as sharecroppers or, if skilled in a trade, wage earners. They were required to be neither wealthy nor literate to fill the large number of local offices that maintained civil order in the beleaguered colony.63

For example, both Daniel Clocker and his wife, Mary, rose from servitude to become respected members of Maryland society. A carpenter, Daniel had once served Thomas Cornwaleys. Mary’s first husband had freed her by buying the time remaining on her indenture from her mistress. Former servants such as the Clockers might embrace the perquisites of freedom and in the process refuse to defer to their social betters, a possibility that Symon Overzee would soon realize to his sorrow. English servants were troublesome workers, and as they aged and became free, they remained troublesome to their former masters and mistresses.64

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Owners need not fear that their slaves might one day challenge them in court. Yet the management of enslaved men and women, at once so valuable and so vulnerable, could still prove exceedingly difficult, as Overzee well understood from his frustrated attempts to monitor Antonio’s labor and even his whereabouts.

Why Overzee killed Antonio remains a mystery. Raised in a privileged urban household, Overzee as a youth presumably neither witnessed nor participated in the beating to death of a recalcitrant worker. Yet carving a plantation out of the forests of Maryland was an inherently corrupting enterprise, demanding varying degrees of ruthlessness from all who engaged in it. Moreover, in 1656 political pressures on Overzee were intensifying all around. A recent precipitous decline in the price of Dutch East India stock ruined a large number of shareholders, and Overzee and his father might have been among them. Closer to home, Symon had lost several of his most influential patrons, including William Lewis, executed for his role in the Battle of Great Severn, and Francis Yeardley, who died in 1655. Two years later Overzee’s mother-in-law, Sarah Yeardley, also died. Meanwhile, the English and Dutch had entered into yet another naval war, a conflict that reverberated throughout the colonies. New Amsterdam officials were aggressively pressing their claims in the Delaware Bay region, and their designs reached deep into Maryland territory. As an informal emissary of Dutch imperialists, Symon Overzee must have been keenly aware of his own shaky political status in the English colony.65

Or perhaps these larger issues were irrelevant. Perhaps for a young rich man used to getting his way, Antonio’s violent resistance was just too much to bear. Or Sarah Overzee’s role in the killing might have indicated tensions between husband and wife. Did one or both of them judge her decision to chain Antonio for “some misdemeanor” to be inappropriate—either because it was not within her purview to discipline a slave or because her husband had delegated to her a responsibility she found distasteful? Did his wife’s hand in this awful business reflect poorly on

Overzee as a master and a husband? Certainly, Antonio posed a real threat to the couple: he was a volatile and unpredictable stranger. To keep him at St. John’s was to fracture whatever well- ordered household the couple hoped to create or maintain.

Quite aside from the circumstances surrounding Antonio’s death, the trial turned out to be a staged performance among Maryland elites competing among themselves for land, labor, and political influence. Developments during the intervening months before the public testimony of servant Hannah Littleworth and hired worker William Hewes offer clues as to why and when the proceeding occurred and what it meant. Overzee continued to haul his debtors into court, as Maryland went through yet another period of political turmoil. In July 1656 the disaffected Puritan migrants from Virginia managed to wrangle an appointment as governor for Josias Fendall, a Protestant ally of William Stone and a veteran of the Battle of Great Severn. Fendall immediately antagonized powerful men in the colony, including those who claimed that God would “sooner condemn a man for killing a Negro or an Indian than for killing Captain Fendall.” Thomas Gerrard, the lord of St. Clement’s Manor, now for some reason switched his allegiance and challenged the Calverts and the new governor Fendall.66

During these months the Provincial Court considered a number of dramatic cases involving the selling, buying, “entertaining,” and punishing of servants, including high-profile trials of abusive masters. Late summer and early fall brought sensational proceedings against John Dandy, charged with murdering Henry Gouge. The body of Gouge, a twenty-year-old servant, had been found naked, lying facedown in a creek, in July 1657. One witness recalled that when he saw the corpse being dragged out of the water, Dandy had remarked “that he [Dandy] Should come into a great Deale of trouble about this boy.” Testimony from Dandy’s neighbors and other servants revealed that Gouge had endured beatings for years; he suffered from a head wound and from bruised and bloody ears that made one witness wonder whether “the ratts [had eaten] off his Eares.” If nothing else, the Dandy case showed that authorities could act with dispatch if inclined to do so: Gouge’s body was found on July 7, and Dandy was jailed within a month. The trial began on September 23, and Dandy was hanged two weeks later.67

Around this time Symon Overzee evinced a new and striking legal vulnerability to both his debtors and creditors, a remarkable array of men and women, some of them former servants using the law to advance their claims and embarrass their social betters. Over the next two years he would become a litigant in at least ninety cases. On March 25, 1658, he was probably taken aback when the attorney for the estate of one of his deceased hirelings, carpenter John Crabtree, not only sued him for unpaid wages, but also read a statement that the carpenter had written several years before. (He had died in 1655.) Overzee had just appeared in court to sue five of his own debtors, but in a turnaround he now found himself forced to listen to Crabtree’s words, which were both apologetic and defiant. Crabtree had written, “Sir you know I have bene a great while without my pay, wch hath bene a great hinderance to mee in settling my family.” He continued, “Therefore I hope I shall bee noe longer delayed: for I doe not love trouble if I can avoid it.” Yet three years later Overzee still had not settled.68

In April the court ruled that Overzee and Chandler, despite their alleged undermining of the local sheriff charged with managing the estate of their deceased mother-in-law, did in fact possess the right to Francis Yeardley’s holdings because they were the assignees of Yeardley’s widow. The court’s decision opened the way for Yeardley’s creditors to sue the estate, and one person

immediately came forward. After a four-year absence, a newly married Thomas Cornwaleys had returned to Maryland from England. Putting his affairs in order, he immediately filed a suit charging that he had paid Yeardley and his Indian interpreter Nathaniel Batt 5,000 pounds of tobacco in December 1653 in exchange for the delivery of two enslaved Indian youths, but did not receive them when he went to fetch them several months later. Cornwaleys demanded his due from Yeardley’s estate and went on to level charges against both Chandler and Overzee, whom he believed conspired to move the most valuable property, its enslaved laborers, off the plantation before creditors could stake their claims. By this time Cornwaleys had reestablished himself in Maryland, now as attorney general and second in command to the governor, and had resumed his place as a burgess, a provincial judge, and an active litigant suing his many debtors.69

At this point Overzee began to play a more active role in local governance, as indicated by his service as foreman of two juries in late April 1658. The next month Governor Fendall was presiding over the Provincial Court when Overzee was appointed commissioner for St. Mary’s County, reciting the oath, “You shall doe equall right, to the poore, as to the rich, to the best of yor Cunning, witt, & power, & after the presedents & Customes of this province, & Acts of Assembly thereof made.” Another justice appointed at this time was an ambitious newcomer named William Barton.70

Overzee and Chandler scrambled to counter Cornwaleys’s suit and his allegation that the enslaved workers were still in the two men’s possession, presumably at Overzee’s St. John’s plantation. In September Chandler appeared in court to suggest that Cornwaleys’s attorney had had plenty of time to make a claim on behalf of his client, but failed to do so. During the court session of October 5–7, Chandler and Overzee could not miss the signs that together, for the first time in their careers, they were fair game for a host of litigants, even though Chandler was currently sitting as a justice with Governor Fendall, Philip Calvert, and former governor William Stone. The governor by this time had many bitter enemies. On October 5 Thomas Gerrard, a member of the council and the lord of St. Clement’s Manor, denounced Fendall; as a group the justices in turn accused Gerrard of engaging in drunken and lewd behavior and slandering his fellow councilors, including Chandler.71

Suddenly, Overzee’s legal difficulties were overshadowed by another, more profound source of woe. Within a few days of this court session, Overzee’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Sarah, died in childbirth, and shortly thereafter, in a matter of hours or a couple of days, so did the couple’s newborn baby. On Sunday morning, October 9, as Sarah Overzee’s body was being carried to the church to be buried, two workers sought to take advantage of the household’s distress. The hired wet-nurse for the baby, Mary Clocker, together with Mary Williams, the wife of one of Overzee’s sharecroppers, began to ransack the bedchamber of the deceased woman. Over the next few days the two Marys carried off an astounding amount of staples and goods, including soap, laces, clothing, linens, thread, buttons, handkerchiefs, and pecks of corn, not neglecting to throw in a pair of tweezers in their haste. Subsequent testimony revealed that Job Chandler, visiting or residing upstairs in the loft of the house that Sunday, had given Mary Williams the storehouse keys. She told him that she needed some spices to add to a pudding she was making, but instead she used the keys to open Sarah Overzee’s “great Dutch trunk.” She and Clocker hid a large, loot-filled pillowcase in a tree in the forest; however, before the goods could be fenced by Clocker’s son Thomas Courtney, the cache was discovered by two children. By early

November (between the October and December court sessions), witnesses were already giving depositions in preparation for a trial against Williams, Clocker, and Courtney.72

If Overzee and Chandler thought that Cornwaleys would let slide a relatively modest case involving 5,000 pounds of tobacco, or take pity on Overzee because of the recent loss of his wife, they were mistaken. On the first day of December, Cornwaleys appeared in court to offer a detailed chronology of the events of four and a half years before, when he contracted with Yeardley and Batt for the two enslaved Indians. He charged that the widow Yeardley hatched the plot when she heard that he was on his way back to Virginia from England; presumably, she urged her sons-in-law to take a sloop and remove “all the visible Estate of th sd Yardley,” including “the sd negro’s.” Cornwaleys wanted not just his money back, but also answers: Who hired or borrowed the sloop for this venture? Were the crewmen engaged by the month? Who fed them? The court ordered that the two defendants appear at the next session and “putt in their answers upon oath.”73

It is here that Antonio makes his first appearance in the existing court records, for the following day, December 2, William Barton, fifty-three years old and a landowner residing at St. Clement’s Manor, “informe[d] the Court agst Mr Symon Ouerzee, for that the sd Ouerzee correcting his negro seruant the sd negro dyed under his sd correction.” Entered into the record were the depositions of Littleworth and Hewes, taken on November 27, indicating that the case had been set in motion even before Barton lodged the formal charges.74

Barton had come to Maryland in 1654 from England with his wife and two children, and within just a few years he had done well for himself. He fought in the Battle of Great Severn, winning the favor of Lord Baltimore, and bought a freehold at St. Clements, which by this time had fallen on hard times in the absence of viable tenants. Though Barton arrived in Maryland as a mariner with no title, within a decade he was calling himself a “gentleman” and living in “Barton’s Hall.” Unlike most of the other St. Clement’s freeholders, who eschewed public service, Barton embraced the political life of the manor and the county. Beginning in 1655, he served as a justice for St. Mary’s County, and he would soon be named bailiff of St. Clement’s. For his start on the road to economic independence and political respectability, Barton owed a debt to Thomas Gerrard, the contentious lord of St. Clement’s Manor, who by this time had developed a deep hatred toward both Governor Fendall and Job Chandler.75

In his capacity as justice of the peace, Barton no doubt had the right to offer a presentment against a defendant, but the question remains why he did so. Symon Overzee had just recently lost his wife, and the death of Antonio was more than two years in the past. Still, it is difficult to ignore the timing of the case, coming as it did in the middle of Cornwaleys’s suit against Overzee and Chandler and Thomas Gerrard’s feud with Fendall, Chandler, and the other councilors. In “presenting” the case against Overzee, Barton could ingratiate himself with his patron, Gerrard, and with Cornwaleys, both of whom had a vested interest in seeing Chandler and Overzee humbled.

It is therefore likely that the trial over Antonio’s death was largely—if not purely—a piece of political theater meant to rankle Overzee. No one was claiming that Antonio was one of the pilfered Yeardley slaves. More likely, Antonio was a proxy for the group ultimately disposed of by Overzee. Furthermore, by forcing the Dutch planter to stand trial for the death of Antonio,

Cornwaleys could highlight his own reputation as a killer; he could claim that when he killed men, it was Indians or other enemies of Maryland, not a man bound to a ladder, with his hands tied above him.

At the next court session, on February 24, 1659, the manslaughter trial was not exactly perfunctory, but it did not appear to be a serious attempt to hold Overzee to account for his role in the death of Antonio. At that session Chandler tried his best to absolve his brother-in-law of the charge of undue “correction,” ignoring the particular circumstances surrounding the torture of the enslaved man. Moreover, the court failed to call one of the material eyewitnesses, Mathew Stone, despite its announced intention to do so.

Though acquitted, Overzee was not yet free and clear. The same day the jury rendered its Ignoramus verdict in the manslaughter case, Cornwaleys once again demanded satisfaction from the brothers-in-law. Chandler claimed that he had never seen in writing the allegations against him and asked for more time, which the court granted. This request marked a brief interlude between Chandler and Overzee’s trial and the impaneling of a jury in yet another major case: the trial of Mary Clocker and John and Mary Williams for theft and Thomas Courtney as accessory after the fact.76

This trial played out like a melodrama, with a large cast and a riveting narrative: the deceased mother and child, their bodies barely cold in the ground; the anguished John Williams professing ignorance of his wife’s alleged crime; the tale of the two children coming upon the pillowcase in the hollow of a tree; and the duplicitous Mary Clocker, whose tragically brief service as wet- nurse only heightened the suspicions against her. Mary Williams threw herself on the mercy of the court and confessed, adding details about the frantic moment when she and Clocker were standing in the bedchamber where Mistress Overzee had just expired, throwing as much stuff as they could in bags and looking over their shoulder in case Job Chandler should enter the room. Williams told the court that she worried that someone would recognize and identify the goods, to which the other Mary retorted, “Hang him (as she conceaves Mr. Overzee) rather than ever hee shall have them, I will burne them, & further sayd shee would bury them in a Case in the Grownd.” Williams also testified that Clocker said that Overzee already had enough linens —“there were enough about the howse”—and would not miss what she took.77

As Clocker, Williams, and Courtney’s trial proceeded, Chandler prepared to counter Cornwaleys’s allegations against him and Overzee. On Monday, February 28, Chandler finally responded to Cornwaleys’s charges about the removal of the Yeardley slaves, declaring that he “utterly denyeth” all of them and reminding listeners of his own loyal service to the Calverts at the Battle of Great Severn (a point unrelated to the case at hand, as the jury may have noted). He claimed that Yeardley’s assets were not removed until a year and a half after their owner’s death, giving the plaintiff plenty of time to press his case. Chandler also argued that the property in question had originally belonged to Sarah Yeardley and remained hers during the course of the marriage; therefore, Cornwaleys had no claim on the estate while she was alive. As her sons-in- law, he (Chandler) and Overzee were now the rightful heirs of all that remained. Overzee spoke next and disputed the claim that he was guilty of “ayding & assisting to the exportation of the Estate of Col Yeardley.” Overzee admitted that he had hired a sloop at the request of Sarah Yeardley—she wanted the Portobacco crop delivered to her in Virginia—and that at some point the boat “by distresse of weather, putt in here att St. Maries” at his own house while he was

absent. He said the cargo included “Corn, Tob[acco] & Negroes,” but denied that he had stolen the property from the disputed estate.78

Overzee had just finished defending himself when he faced a fresh round of accusations: Daniel Clocker claimed that Overzee was now reneging on a promise that, in the event Mary Clocker was found guilty and brought “upon the stage” (i.e., the gallows), the planter would use his influence to spare her life in return for 3,000 pounds of tobacco that Clocker would pay him. Certainly, the former servant showed a great deal of nerve in suing the victim of his wife’s criminal behavior. Overzee countered that Clocker possessed “an ill intent [acting] out of mere malice & spleen.”79

March brought a resolution to three cases. Overzee countersued Cornwaleys for a two-year-old debt of 3,370 pounds of tobacco and won at trial, with his attorney, Philip Land, sitting on the jury. In the suit Cornwaleys brought against Overzee and Chandler, the court ordered the two defendants to repay debts owed by Yeardley and to compensate the plaintiff with 5,000 pounds of tobacco per a December 1653 agreement between Francis Yeardley and Cornwaleys. Governor Fendall declared John and Mary Williams and Mary Clocker guilty and sentenced them to hang, and he ordered that Thomas Courtney receive thirty lashes with the whip. However, the next day the governor spared Clocker and the Williamses from the hangman’s noose. In observance of the death of Oliver Cromwell (in September of the previous year) and the rise of his son Richard to the Lord Protectorate of England, Fendall pardoned all those recently convicted of capital crimes.80

Within a month Overzee was back in court, this time battling two of his former employees: Hugh Bevins, a carpenter, and John Williams, recently spared from execution, both claiming Overzee owed them money. On April 25 the planter requested a jury trial to resolve the charges that Daniel Clocker brought against him; this jury, like the one that had decided his fate in the manslaughter trial, came back with a verdict of Ignoramus, absolving Overzee of defrauding Clocker of 3,000 pounds of tobacco. After a few months, however, Clocker returned, this time to hold Chandler (presumably as Overzee’s agent) accountable for failing to pay the full amount due him for making Mrs. Overzee’s coffin and, incredibly, due his wife for delivering Mrs. Overzee of her child and nursing her baby. Clocker complained that Mary had forfeited a considerable share of her income by attending to the deceased during the height of the busy dairying season, failing to mention that his wife had been convicted of ransacking the dead woman’s bedchamber. Still, the court awarded Clocker a judgment of 500 pounds of tobacco, bringing to a close the former servant’s effort (most likely successful) to aggravate both great men, Overzee and Chandler.81

From late spring through the fall, Overzee and Chandler jointly began to dispose of some of their holdings, renting out and signing over land on Portobacco Creek and elsewhere. Like Thomas Gerrard, they were anxious about the shortage of both servants and tenants and hoping to raise some cash from the sale of land. Chandler apparently was putting his financial and legal affairs in order; in August he drew up his will, listing as executors “brother-in-law Symon Overzee, friend & brother” and William Stone.82

By September 1659 Overzee had remarried, this time to twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Willoughby, who, like his first wife, came from a prominent Lower Norfolk County, Virginia,

family. At the end of the month the newlyweds entertained some distinguished visitors: Bohemian-born Augustine Herman, one of Overzee’s trading partners, and another man, Resolved Waldron. Herman and Waldron had journeyed south in a leaky canoe from New Amsterdam to survey territory. On behalf of Governor Peter Stuyvesant (Herman’s brother-in- law), they aimed to assess the viability of English settlements, dispute the original claims made by Lord Baltimore, and demand territorial concessions from Maryland. Making their way south, the two men had crossed multiple shifting boundaries established by competing groups of Indians and Europeans, and encountered a number of fugitive servants eager to escape to, in Herman’s words, a “strange nation” rather than serve their allotted time for a master.83

Overzee welcomed the travelers to St. John’s, and a few days after their arrival, he took them across the creek to Philip Calvert’s home, where they pored over maps and argued over the relative merits of claims by the Dutch, French, English, and Swedes. On October 6 Overzee appeared at a session of the Provincial Court to “English” (translate from Dutch into English) the official documents sent by Stuyvesant to Fendall. Predictably, Herman and Waldron failed to receive a sympathetic hearing for their case, which challenged the right of the English to settle anywhere between the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. At the same time, perhaps remarkably, their host had managed to reclaim—or perhaps maintain—his high standing within Maryland society.84

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Antonio’s killer had rebounded after an intense period of nasty litigation against him over a five- month period from December 1658 through April 1659. Symon Overzee’s thick skin had served him well during his multiple interlocking trials—both legal and personal—and he had emerged from this period to relish his role as host of and mediator for the Dutch ambassadors. A Protestant from Rotterdam, he had negotiated the treacherous religious politics in an English colony and retained his standing as a wealthy man of considerable influence in Maryland.

He was, in fact, an emblematic colonial trader. Writing in 1666, George Alsop ruminated on the transformation of Europeans into American colonists. Whether from the effects of the saltiness of the ocean they had once traversed, or “the remote Clyme where they now inhabit,” these men became “a more acute people in general, in matters of Trade and Commerce, than in any other place of the world; and by their crafty and sure bargaining, do often overreach the raw and unexperienced merchant.” Alsop added, “He that undertakes Merchants employment for Mary- Land, must have more of Knave in him than Fool” and indulge neither his conscience nor his desire to impress other people with his wealth. Rather, he “must be a man of solid confidence,” pursuing his economic interest with a grim determination. Unlike his father-in-law, Yeardley, Overzee was no religious visionary; his lodestar was raw power—as a master, within his own household; as a planter, within the colony of Maryland; as a merchant, with trading partners regardless of nationality on the high seas. Accordingly, he probed for and exploited any point of vulnerability among workers and legal and political antagonists. Antonio, for all his suffering, had been only one of the many unfortunates in Maryland to get in the way of Overzee’s relentless drive for financial gain.85

Overzee had played fast and loose with the law, and he prospered accordingly, though his wealth did not come easily and his authority was not absolute. In the 1650s St. John’s plantation was a

site of fraught encounters among people of English, Dutch, Angolan, and Pangayo descent, a site where the imperatives of military conquest, labor shortages, and international commerce shaped relations between masters and workers. Yet these relations had not yet crystallized into a rigid system of human bondage. Though Overzee was a wealthy and influential European, he nonetheless could be hauled into court for killing an Angolan. And it is unclear whether the benefits of enslaving men and women outweighed the costs, for that process came at a high price in terms of the master’s peace of mind and his sense of well-being and safety for his family.

Slavery resulted from a complex calculus of the security and financial costs and benefits flowing from several different kinds and ethnicities of workers. Most profoundly, the Byzantine politics of New World empire-building revealed that Antonio remained uniquely defenseless, but not because of his skin color or what the English judged to be his strange customs, unintelligible speech patterns, volatile temperament, or recalcitrance in the fields. Rather, within the Atlantic world he lacked an advocate in the form of an Indian confederacy or a European nation-state. Abused workers from places other than Africa could count on countrymen or coreligionists to provide them with at least a minimal amount of protection in the fields, forests, courts, and colonial assembly. Because of their nationality, English servants possessed basic rights (though those rights were often honored in the breach), whereas Indians and Africans were utterly without rights by comparison. Neither group had been party to the generations-long process of negotiation between the English landed gentry and their field workers, a negotiation that had yielded legal protections for impoverished white men and women. Both groups were also subjected to the stereotypes and prejudices of their colonial neighbors. If the English considered Africans exotic, they held essentially the same views of Indians. Both groups of dark-skinned people appeared wild and unpredictable, easily seduced by the devil.86

Ultimately, the defining difference between Indians and Africans, no less significant for its obviousness, was that Indians were native to the continent and organized into nations and confederations, political entities that the English understood and, for a while at least, respected. In the colonies Europeans remained suspicious of all Indians, but they did not reify them; rather, some were “friends” and some were “enemies.” It was the slave traders in Africa who had to worry about diplomatic and economic relations with various African groups; New World planters had the luxury of contending with persons from that continent as bound workers only, not as diplomats, leaders, or organized bands of warriors.

In time, of course, this relative disparity would change. By the end of the seventeenth century, Maryland colonists saw Indians less as military allies and more as human barriers to the cultivation of their cash crop; in 1695 the governor authorized his council to seize Piscataway land to “occasion a greater quantity of Tobacco to be made.” Indians would be forced to supply the land, and Africans the labor, in pursuit of profits.87

Overzee and his neighbors understood that they did not have to fear retribution from armed men seeking vengeance for the death of Antonio, for no nation of military consequence could claim the victim as its own. Yet in 1656 the idea that all black people belonged in slavery, a notion that would come to dominate American public life, was hardly a foregone conclusion. In the Atlantic world, variations in languages, religious beliefs, and military prowess were ingredients in a transnational competition for power, and fixed forms of identity were anathema to the competitors. Neither ethnicity nor skin color correlated precisely with a specific legal status;

Africans and persons of African descent worked as slaves, but also as freemen and free-women and as servants, indentured or otherwise. Similarly, some Indians were hirelings and others slaves. Colonists used the word slave itself with a remarkable amount of imprecision. In 1638 the word first appeared in official Maryland records, but it was unclear whether the term referred to enslaved Indians or Africans; and it was not unusual for some (such as Hester Nicholls’s father) to refer to badly exploited young people as “white slaves” or even “white Negroes.” Ethnicity remained a key signifier: Edmund Scarborough described his slaves as Angolans, not Africans; Chesapeake colonists called themselves English, not Europeans; Marylanders allied with the Piscataway, not with Indians.88

In fact, the aggravation felt by Overzee and Chandler in disciplining Antonio did not bode well for the expansion of African slavery as an institution. Enslaved laborers were expensive, and if they ran away or died, a master’s considerable investment went with them. Perhaps Overzee had received Antonio as a gift from Scarborough or Dirck Wittepaart, the captain of the ship of the same name. If so, Overzee had no financial investment—just his reputation as a master—to protect. At the same time, colonists in general were frightened by the Indians and Africans who cohabited with them; English masters found it difficult enough living among countrymen and - women with whom they shared no kin ties—profane young people who drank, fornicated, shirked work, and stole all manner of goods, the “loathsome, stinking” servants who threatened the moral no less than physical health of entire households. Then, too, Chandler believed that Antonio was fully capable of doing his family harm, certainly an argument against introducing larger numbers of Africans into these isolated plantations. Yet despite the potential danger they represented, recalcitrant enslaved men and women were too valuable as substantial financial investments to incarcerate or execute—in most cases, at least.89

Throughout this period Maryland colonists initially found paganism a convenient rationale for enslaving Indians and Africans; hence, the religious conversion of those groups represented a formidable obstacle to solidifying the institution of bondage. In the seventeenth century Catholic missionaries were proselytizing among Kongo-Angola groups, Jesuit priests and men like Francis Yeardley were envisioning the peaceful cohabitation of the English and newly converted Indians, and some Africans and Indians were embracing Christianity on their own. In the eyes of masters and mistresses, such developments might serve to reflect the glory of God and render Africans more familiar to the English, but converting workers did not lessen the demand for their labor. And, of course, in claiming time off for the Sabbath and other ways to participate in the community of Christian believers, enslaved workers would have explicitly challenged their own uniquely subordinate status.

In 1664 a Maryland law stipulated that enslaved workers would retain their status for life, and that the children of white women and enslaved black men would be born as, and remain, slaves. Seven years later colonial legislators wrote into law a new kind of person—the enslaved Christian devoid of all rights—four years after Virginia had passed a similar statute. The colonists in general feared that the process of religious conversion could potentially deprive them of a vast number of laborers, now baptized. Lawmakers shifted from a religious rationale for slavery to a legal one and in the process reassured planters that they could proselytize among their enslaved workers without fear that such apparent solicitude would result in their freedom. Ten years later the colony decreed that the legal status of a child derived from the status of his or her mother, reversing an English precedent. This 1681 law allowed planters to sexually abuse

enslaved women and at the same time replenish their own bound labor force with children born to such forced unions. Late-seventeenth-century legal developments thus signaled that justifications for slavery remained fluid, and that neither legal authorities nor planters were deploying the notion of racial differences as a rationale for the subordination of black people. Indeed, the light-skinned offspring of masters and enslaved women mocked the very notion that slavery was created as, or remained, a “racial” institution.

As denizens of an Atlantic world, the English routinely encountered people with “natural” skin colors along a broad spectrum from “white” to “black.” In the Chesapeake the English confronted coreligionists darkened by the sun who had so transformed themselves, in the words of a contemporary Virginia colonist, “both in complexion and habite” that they were recognizable only by their speech. The term mulatto at this point in colonial American history referred not to a Greek or a Turk or a member of any other particular established ethnic group, but rather to a person who blended national identities and thus lacked one of his or her own. This increasingly lax approach to defining ethnicity culminated in a system of identification that erased national origins altogether in favor of an either-or classification. Soon Europeans would use the word white to describe themselves, no matter their nationality or, for that matter, their skin color; and negro or black would mean “slave,” no matter the person’s ethnicity.90

A number of factors contributed to the codification of African slavery in the New World in the period after Antonio’s death. Most Chesapeake planters were neither ideologues nor idealists; they were entrepreneurs bent on making money and thus willing, if reluctantly so, to cohabit with suspect and even menacing peoples. In the late seventeenth century, a shortage of English indentured servants, combined with more favorable mortality rates for seasoned Africans, made slavery more profitable for colonial householders, even those of modest means. And the fact that enslaved women could reproduce the plantation workforce helped to shift the economic calculus from servitude to bondage.

Eventually, planters would justify the system of slavery with theories of racial difference, theories that their colonial forebears had no incentive to create or invoke. British North American slavery evolved from a struggle for empire and a quest for mastery in the fields, and racial prejudice was more of an afterthought than a cause.

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At the February 14, 1660, session of the Provincial Court held at St. Clement’s Manor, a desperate Gregory Murrell charged that one Nicholas Morris of Virginia was harassing him for nonpayment of a debt. Murrell had already spent 102 days in debtor’s jail, but at his trial Morris did not appear, and so the charges were dropped. When Morris subsequently revived his pursuit of Murrell, the defendant hired Symon Overzee as his attorney. This time around it was Overzee who failed to appear at the hearing. The court record reads, cryptically, “The sd Mr Symon Overzee dying (in a manner) sodenly, not making any Will.” At the time of his death, in January or February 1660, Overzee was thirty-one years old.91

People either die or they do not die. How does a person die “in a manner”? The absence of an inquest suggests that local authorities did not suspect foul play. Perhaps Overzee drowned, or perhaps he succumbed quickly to one of the many fevers or gastrointestinal illnesses that took so

many colonists to an early grave.92

Within a few months of Overzee’s death, Job Chandler died, too. His last appearance at council was on June 4, 1659. The landholdings the brothers-in-law owned jointly (granted by William Lewis) came into the sole possession of Chandler’s children, leaving them wealthy indeed.93

In early Maryland multiple conflicts divided Indians from Europeans, Susquehannock from Piscataway, English from Dutch, Protestants from Catholics, and workers from masters and mistresses. Regardless of ethnicity or skin color, the hirelings, servants, and enslaved workers of the colony who chopped its trees and tilled its soil were susceptible to harsh working conditions and punishments. Yet the unique forms of torment inflicted on Antonio are not difficult to pinpoint. Antonio’s fate was sealed when he was forced on board the Wittepaart, for he died thousands of miles from his native land, tortured to death by a man whose language he did not understand, and buried without the funerary rites customary to his people. His countrymen and - women had no opportunity to mourn him, redeem him, or seek justice in his name. In the coming years landowning colonists would devise elaborate rationalizations for the brutality that lay at the heart of slavery; but in the late 1650s Symon Overzee and Job Chandler thought or cared little beyond the facts that Antonio appeared to pose a danger to themselves and their families and that he refused to work in the fields.

TWO

BOSTON KING

Self-Interested Patriotism in Revolutionary-Era South Carolina

In 1798, some fifteen years after the close of the American Revolutionary War, a pious man named Boston King sat down to write his life story. Now thirty-eight years old, he had spent the previous two decades searching for a community of like-minded souls bound by transcendent notions of earthly and spiritual equality. Through the years that quest took King from his native South Carolina to New York City; to Nova Scotia; and then to Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa; and from there to London and finally back to Sierra Leone. Born a slave, King freed himself by successfully eluding the treacherous reach of American patriots and British Redcoats alike. As a literate preacher of the Christian gospel, he defied both these combatants, who saw him and other persons of African descent only as laborers to be exploited in pursuit of white people’s own divergent self-interests. In South Carolina the Revolution amounted to a contest over who would control the bodies of enslaved men and women, a struggle that turned on realities of military might. In the eyes of King, slaveholders had squandered the truly revolutionary potential of the war, instead indulging in a cynical, if hard-won, celebration of their right to hold onto their own property—the men, women, and children they owned.

King’s autobiography described a life’s journey toward freedom that was both temporal and spiritual. He had grown up twenty-eight miles from Charles Town, South Carolina, on the plantation of his owner, prominent patriot Richard Waring. The plantation sat in the heart of the South Carolina Lowcountry, a fertile region where indigo and rice production enriched a few slaveholders but proved deadly to the thousands of enslaved people who toiled there. King’s father, a native of Africa, worked as a cattle driver, and his mother, he wrote, labored as a seamstress and also attended “upon those that were sick, having some knowledge of the virtue of herbs, which she learned from the Indians.” One day when he was twelve, minding cattle for his master, King underwent the first of a series of religious revelations: “It pleased GOD to alarm me by a remarkable dream… . I saw millions of millions of souls; some of whom ascended up to heaven; while others were rejected, and fell into the greatest confusion and despair.” A few years later he found himself apprenticed to a builder and “was beat and tortured most cruelly,” unable to work for weeks at a time. When the British invaded South Carolina in 1780, he fled to Charles Town, to “throw myself into the hands of the English. They received me readily, and I began to feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before.” King’s brief sojourn in the city was not without its hardships, however: he contracted smallpox, and he “was much grieved at first, to be obliged to leave my friends, and reside among strangers.” Later King would express gratitude for “the blessing of the Lord,” not the British, for his recovery from smallpox and his deliverance from slavery.1

That summer Boston King had joined diverse black fugitives converging in war-ravaged Charles Town. Streaming into the city from the killing fields of the Lowcountry rice kingdom, and from hiding places in remote marshlands, came hundreds of black people seeking refuge and paid labor. On their bodies were inscribed personal histories: scars from beatings and bouts of smallpox, and tribal marks from the Angola, Eboe, Fulow, and Guinea regions of Africa, long- lost homelands. Light-skinned well-dressed native English speakers, ladies’ maids and gentlemen’s valets, mingled with ragged, dark-skinned speakers of Gullah, a pidgin language.

Together they were fleeing from proud patriots, from diehard Tories, and from men and women whose loyalties bent with the stiff gale winds of war sweeping over the city and its hinterland. Boston King was a seeker after liberty, and in that respect he had imbibed the particular spirit of this revolutionary age. At the same time, though, he and other fugitives were, like Antonio more than a century before, partaking of a generations-long rebellion against tyranny in a most vicious form—the tyranny wielded by slaveholders.2

Some whites in South Carolina and elsewhere termed blacks a “Nation within a Nation,” a “separate people” by virtue of their common plight. Yet if such a black “nation” did exist in the Lowcountry, it was hardly a stable one. Black people possessed many roles and identities rather than a single one. Some were imposed upon them, but others they chose for themselves, all within a colonial system shaped by the imperial imperatives of the British Crown. Hence, enslaved laborers were articles of commerce, bought and sold by traffickers in human flesh; producers of the profitable staple crops rice and indigo; service workers for wealthy consumers of luxury goods; petty marketers within the local economy; members of families and communities of extended kin; and some, at least, sisters and brothers in Jesus Christ together with their oppressors throughout the Western world.3

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The American Revolution spawned any number of homespun and learned theorists of republican values, but most South Carolinians regardless of skin color saw the conflict primarily as a means to pursue their self-interests, variously defined. Wealthy whites aimed to preserve their “liberty” by protecting their property, whether in the form of human bodies, gracious mansions, or rice plantations sprawling over thousands of acres. For their part, Boston King and his black Lowcountry compatriots sought to deprive the Americans and the British and their respective armies of the one resource they craved in equal measure: the labor of slaves.

South Carolina planters, together with their counterparts throughout eighteenth-century colonial America, stereotyped Africans according to their tribal origins but refrained from attaching any racial characteristics to Africans and their descendants generally. Like their Maryland predecessors, Lowcountry elites maintained order through violence and state-sponsored terror; they saw no need to justify bondage in racial terms because local critics of bondage—mostly the enslaved themselves—were for the most part weak and lacking in both basic legal rights and firearms. At the same time, in echoes of the roiling politics of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, Lowcountry planters perceived enslaved workers as situated on a continuum of potentially dangerous undesirables that included Native groups and impoverished men and women of the planters’ own ethnic heritage. Nevertheless, the institution of slavery produced an overarching dichotomy between “white” (the free) and “black” (the enslaved), a dichotomy that stigmatized even those people of color who were free. Overall, though, South Carolina elites believed that enslaved workers were subversive not because they were of a certain race, but because their current circumstances and historic grievances made them so.

In the years before the Revolution, South Carolinians remained determined to resist the growing calls among northern whites to consider slavery a humanitarian issue, a matter of morality. Rather, they sought to turn the issue on its head and claim that the institution was good and right because it ensured them a particularly genteel, “English” existence. For planters and Charles

Town merchants, a claim to equality with the British gentry depended on an existence that only slave labor could ensure. Hence, the trappings of wealth—including the large numbers of retainers to build fine homes and to serve, cook, scrub, and sew within them—constituted an argument that the colonists deserved a place of respect and political equality within the empire.

Nevertheless, if slavery was the foundation of Carolina’s “civilized” way of life, it was also the greatest threat to that way of life. The two archetypal enemies of the institution of slavery, bloodthirsty field hands on the one hand and evangelicals preaching the equality of all God’s children on the other, posed a distinct danger to white people regardless of status—the former because they threatened whites with bodily harm, the latter because they challenged an entire political economy built on the oppression of a particular group of people. No wonder, then, that within the South Carolina General Assembly as well as the gracious drawing rooms of Charles Town mansions, discussions of slavery turned on rational questions of profit, and also on rational fears of self-preservation, a form of “self-interest” shaped by the viscera as well as the ledger book.4

For the 100,000 blacks who lived in the Lowcountry, a series of ongoing wartime catastrophes defined their own interests and created a chaotic mix of peril and promise. When war came to South Carolina in 1775, some fugitives joined long-standing colonies of runaway slaves deep in remote stands of live oaks and tall pines. Other men and women, “carried off” or “driven off” by British or American soldiers, were forced to dig trenches and build fortifications for white men on both sides of the conflict. The fighting gave some blacks the opportunity to carve new lives out of the turmoil of war. The successful British assault on Charles Town in the spring of 1780 inflamed the surrounding countryside, as lines between patriots and American-born loyalists blurred, leading to raids and counterraids by rogue bands of armed men and swelling a refugee population of blacks and whites. Boston King took advantage of these upheavals to make his way into the city, freeing himself, at least temporarily, in the process. Meanwhile, the Crown’s men were quashing slave uprisings on estates seized from rebel owners. By this time the plantation system had utterly collapsed, as slaves abandoned the cultivation of staple crops. Mounted black men became a military force to be reckoned with in a time and place where food, guns, horses, and black bodies were prized commodities, the currency of a war-torn realm.

Lowcountry blacks, fully one-half of whom in 1775 were African born, inhabited a land of profane and sacred dimensions. In the deadly rice swamps, they toiled under the exploitative task system, forced to grow and process most of their own food. Waterways along the coast served as conduits of information and commerce, as avenues of escape, and, within the African American spiritual world, as a link between the living and the dead. Enslaved people struggled to harvest the fruits of their own labor, engage in trade, and pray and live out their family lives on their own terms. For these reasons, some blacks remained rooted to their home quarters, especially after the formation of local militias drained white men from the plantations. Nevertheless, by 1781 warfare had brought a halt to much food production. In the fertile Lowcountry, teeming with fish, shellfish, deer, and fowl, the final chapter of the conflict was written on the gaunt faces of people who were starving to death.5

Meanwhile, British forces of occupation were conducting bloody forays outside Charles Town, scouring the countryside for garden truck and livestock. Yet as in all wars, material deprivation was unevenly distributed. During the last week of January 1782, a favored few of the British

officers in the city received handwritten invitations to a ball that Thursday evening. Braving unusually cold weather, the guests who gathered at the fashionable address of 99 Meeting Street found the dance to be an exotic, and no doubt erotic, affair. Their hostesses, three enslaved women, had appropriated from their (presumably absent) mistresses the white women’s silk dresses, powdered makeup, sense of social grace, and even names. Calling themselves Hagar Russell, Isabella Pinckney, and Mary Fraser, they arrived at the party in handsome carriages and joined their guests in a sumptuous repast, dancing until 4 in the morning. Yet like the broader history of Charles Town, this elegant affair masked the rot that lay just beneath the surface.6

The three hostesses no doubt welcomed a respite from their usual lot that winter—perhaps days spent polishing silver, dusting mahogany furniture, attending to the personal needs of fastidious mistresses, or laundering the clothes of British soldiers. They were probably light-skinned ladies’ maids and grateful for a night of dressing up, dancing, and flirting. Predictably, not every white person was amused. Three weeks after the event, an indignant Charles Town merchant, Daniel Stevens, relayed to a northern friend a detailed description of what he called the “Ethiopan Ball.” He fumed, “Those shameless tyrants,” the British officers, “dress’d up in taste, with the richest silks, and false rolls on their heads, powder’d up in the most pompous manner” the enslaved women and then “drove [them] through streets in pomp alongside of them.” Stevens neglected to mention to his friend that before the British arrived, the city’s elite men had routinely attended the same sort of gatherings. A visitor to Charles Town four years before had been struck by a South Carolina “peculiarity,” namely, “the ‘black dances’ as they are called; which are given by Negro and Mulatto women, to which they invite white gentlemen.” In any case, Daniel Stevens was now offering up his patriotic if salacious and wholly disingenuous description of the Ethiopian Ball to indict what he called the “state of shame and perfidy [of] the officers of that once great Nation [Britain].”7

Outside the rarified atmosphere of 99 Meeting Street, the city’s shops reflected the ironies of the war’s impact. Now that the occupation had opened trade with England again, the well-stocked shelves of mercantile houses displayed a striking array of newly imported goods. Wealthy women perused shell jewelry and ivory combs, feathered plumes, looking glasses, tea tables, and a wide selection of fabrics, from German linens to flannels, linseys, and Yorkshire cloths. In contrast, the central marketplace, where old, young, rich, and poor shopped for food, had only limited, exorbitantly high-priced items for sale: trout, clams, oysters, eggs, geese, turkeys, peas, and okra supplied by enterprising black women and men skilled in trading and smuggling.8

It is unknown whether Charles Town’s British commander, Lieutenant General Alexander Leslie, attended the Ethiopian Ball. If invited, he might have felt conflicted. He certainly needed a diversion, no matter how brief, from his woes, but he had recently received orders from the British Army’s headquarters in New York to economize on the garrison’s expenses, which were spiraling out of control. And for British officers generally, a winter’s night of conviviality could not ease their anxieties. News of the stunning defeat of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781 had reached South Carolina a month later. The rebel victory emboldened the enemies of the king and inspired many halfhearted loyalists to abandon him—in some cases, once again, for their allegiances to either side remained unsteady throughout the war. Leslie informed his superiors glumly, “In short the whole of the Country are against us.” Meeting in Jacksonborough a mere thirty-six miles to the south was the South Carolina General Assembly, the provincial congress that South Carolinians had formed to govern their state after the Royal governor, Lord

William Campbell, had disbanded the original, Crown-controlled body. Meanwhile, the British lacked the horses they needed to fight and forage for food.9

Called to justify the garrison’s lavish spending—greater even than that of British headquarters in New York City—Leslie could only point to the expense of feeding and sheltering an estimated 4,000 people, including troops, black workers, and large numbers of refugees, these last two groups deserving of support because of “their Misery and helpless situation.” Loyalists who had scattered to New York, East Florida, and the West Indies when rebels had first seized the city six years earlier, at the start of the war, were now returning home and looking to Leslie for sinecures that would allow them to sustain their large entourages and lavish way of life. Those loyal to the king who had stayed and endured the depredations of the rebels were demanding exorbitant compensation for their confiscated estates. Rawlins Lowndes, a former rebel but now one of several “sudden Converts to Royalty,” offered Leslie a meticulous accounting of all he had lost in the last two years. Previously, Lowndes’s holdings had produced annually 1,000 barrels of rice, worth £15,000, and he had earned £3,000 from rentals of his several Charles Town properties. Now, he lamented, “my houses have been taken from me for public uses, and are gone so much to decay they are not fit to be let … [and] I have from various causes lost upwards of 80 of my best slaves.”10

Leslie had other worries besides the staggering claims submitted to him by entitled planters. Hessian mercenaries recruited to fight alongside the British had been forming “too many [local] connections” and deserting, melting into the hinterland; replacement recruits were expensive. And Indians, too, were making insistent demands: in late December Leslie had received from the southern superintendent of Indians a bill for the extraordinary sum of £11,000, this over and above the £5,000 the agent had recently spent for cash and gifts, resources ultimately wasted on inconstant allies. If the price racked up for a series of dinners held in Savannah for Chocktaw Indian chiefs and warriors was any indication, His Majesty’s money was going for copious amounts of alcohol consumed from bowls of punch and bottles of wine, porter, grog, and, one evening, a keg of rum to bring the gathering to an end, in the words of a British Indian agent, “and send them [the Indian guests] to Camp they being drunk.”11

In Leslie’s mind, the only truly commendable person in the Charles Town garrison was the resourceful Lieutenant Colonel James Moncrief, head of engineers and hero of the siege of the city two years before. Moncrief did not attend the Ethiopian Ball; at the time he was in Savannah, Georgia, strengthening that city’s defenses. Throughout the two-and-a-half-year occupation of Charles Town, he orchestrated the labor of hundreds of black men and women in the city and on the coastal islands guarding the harbor. He was, in Leslie’s estimation, a man of “excellent judgment” who had performed admirably under the most trying circumstances. Moncrief actually produced something of value for the Crown, and his skillful management of the region’s most precious resource—labor—made him infinitely more valuable than faithless troops, spoiled loyalists, and endlessly demanding Indian nations.12

Had they known of Leslie’s distress during the winter and early spring of 1782, his enemies might have taken heart. Still, patriot planters found little in the state’s prospects to cheer them. As early as 1775, they had watched as groups of their enslaved workers fled to the British on the largely mistaken assumption that enemies of their owners were their friends. By 1780 at least some of these black men and women were laboring under the direct supervision of Moncrief in

Charles Town. Arthur Middleton, a wealthy slave owner and signer of the Declaration of Independence, knew firsthand the toll the war had taken on the holdings of planters. More radical than his father, Henry Middleton, an early president of the Continental Congress, the forty-year old Arthur remained an unwavering patriot throughout the war despite his material losses: in early 1776 fifty of his enslaved workers, including John Banbury, thirty-one, and his African- born wife, Lucy, had fled his plantation. Middleton’s former enslaved workers were now earning wages in the British Army’s Engineer Department and the Royal Artillery.13

The Middletons and their neighbors understood that the war was being fought by ever-shifting factions unpredictable in their motives and actions—backcountry settlers, rival Indian tribes, loyalists, substantial numbers straddling both sides, and, most menacingly of all, the thousands of black men and women in their midst, a subversive force in the heart of American territory. Black men, many of whom had once been subjugated and brutalized by the very revolutionaries who now claimed to be fighting in the name of liberty, were aiding the British directly as spies and guides, but some were acting under no white man’s orders. Arthur Middleton was relieved when on February 10, 1781, the South Carolina General Assembly rejected a recent proposal introduced by one of their own, young Colonel John Laurens, to enlist the state’s slaves for battle. The proposal had prompted a mixture of derision and alarm among the delegates, and they voted the measure down decisively. Governor John Matthews instead authorized the military use of blacks as servants, wagoners, and skilled laborers for purposes of the colony’s defense.14

By this time a vicious guerrilla war was engulfing the backcountry, as food shortages gave rise to bands of black and white renegades who had no politics, just a murderous rage for revenge and greed for the spoils of war. The numbers told a larger story: in 1780 South Carolina alone accounted for fully two-thirds of all patriot battlefield deaths and 90 percent of all patriots wounded. The take-no-prisoners policies on both sides yielded a grim litany of summary executions, burned estates, and kidnapped slaves. Military discipline was nonexistent. Patriot general Nathanael Greene lamented the condition of his threadbare, mutinous force, two-thirds of whom, he believed, were “totally unfit for duty.” By the spring of 1782 the exhausted rebels, like their antagonists, were contending with “mutinies” and “conspiracies” among troops who, deprived of pay and food, were resorting to banditry. North Carolina officials could not resist taunting their proud neighbors to the south, rice-rich men who now groaned under “all the calamities which can be apprehended from an Insolent Relentless Irritated, and Rapacious enemy, from your own Slaves armed against their former masters, [and] from the Savages [Indians] excited to make bloody and merciless dispositions and … to make their force and ferocity as effectual against you as possible.”15

Despite the bitter clash between the British and the Americans over the nature of empire, for the most part officers on both sides shared similar views of enslaved people, whom they perceived primarily as so many cards in a deck—to be shuffled from one place to another, used, or discarded as wartime strategy demanded. In November 1775 Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had issued a proclamation promising freedom to slaves who would leave their masters and join the British forces. This move alerted American military officials to the revolutionary and devastating potential of enslaved men as both fighters and laborers for the British. And soon after, the Continental Army and some northern states enlisted enslaved men in their ranks and then emancipated them. Yet these moves were less expressions of principle than they were political ploys (on the part of Dunmore) and troop-recruitment efforts (among northern patriots).

Overall, manpower shortages were the critical factor affecting policies toward and ideas about blacks. In South Carolina virtually no men of influence bothered to address the humanitarian dimensions of bondage. At the same time, many enslaved people, like Boston King, took their chances; if they could not find freedom on the Lowcountry battleground, they would at least try to seek out a better life than they had known before. In contrast to their patriotic owners, whose views of freedom were distinctly exclusionary and self-referential, these enslaved people became principled seekers after liberty.16

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Throughout the South dire, immediate labor demands shaped the priorities of politicians and military officers; fighting over territory became a means of pursuing variable notions of patriot and British self-interest. Both sets of combatants, however, contended with a hostile terrain and with black workers of varying degrees of usefulness. The lush Lowcountry mocked conventions of eighteenth-century warfare: military engineers on both sides had to transport fieldpieces, cannons, and troops over territory intercut with unbridged creeks and rivers. Soldier-workers expended thousands of man-hours in an effort to fortify redoubts and batteries in danger of sinking into the soft, marshy soil. The British siege of Charles Town had amounted to a clash between two undermanned armies rushing to reconfigure the terrain to their own purposes. In the end, the major players had not been the commanding generals, Henry Clinton for the British and Benjamin Lincoln for the Americans, but their respective engineers—Moncrief of the Royal Engineers and Frenchman Louis le Beque de Presle, Chevalier Du Portail, head of the Continental Military Engineering Corps. In fact, however, Du Portail arrived late on the scene and then only to advise Lincoln to evacuate the poorly fortified Charles Town immediately.17

On December 24, 1779, a British fleet of sixty-one ships carrying 7,584 men had set sail from New York; stormy weather slowed the progress of the convoy and also resulted in the loss of ships bearing Hessian soldiers and horses for cavalry and other purposes. The delay of the fleet on its way down the coast gave the Americans some time to assemble a black workforce intended to bolster Fort Moultrie (named for General William Moultrie) at the mouth of Charles Town Harbor. The General Assembly hastily took up the question of the “raising of a Black Corps to be annexed to the army,” with much of the ensuing debate focused on the definition of “pioneers,” “fatigue men,” “oarsmen,” and “mariners,” the categories of labor to which the men would be limited. The assembly called for the impressment of 2,000 blacks between the ages of eighteen and forty. The number of enslaved men actually volunteered by their owners amounted to only a fraction of that number—perhaps 600. Faced with a critical labor shortage, General Lincoln would periodically go to the city’s outlying fortifications and take up a pick and shovel, rallying his men and reminding them that the cause would be won by those who dug most energetically in the dirt. Meanwhile, morale remained low among the troops, wracked by smallpox, hunger, and intense dislike for the Massachusetts-born Lincoln, and there was, according to one deflated patriot, “no Rum or Sperits of any kind which they hanker after so much.”18

The British feared that “our long voyage and unavoidable delays since have given the rebels time to fortify Charlestown towards the land, a labour their numbers in Negroes has greatly facilitated,” in the words of General Clinton. Yet his troops gained some advantage by their arduous slog through the lowlands. The first approach of the British fleet had set off a massive

exodus among thousands of enslaved rice laborers along the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, many of them traveling by water toward the coast. On June 30, 1779, Clinton made his own Dunmore- esque proclamation, promising every black person who abandoned the rebels “full Security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper.” Certainly, his words suggested that fugitives would not be reenslaved in the process. Yet British officers on the march were quick to take advantage of men and women refugees; each regiment received ten blacks who could be put to work cooking, washing clothes, and otherwise serving their new would-be masters.19

By March 7 the British, largely unimpeded, had begun erecting batteries along the Ashley River, relying on black men as pilots and as sources of military intelligence and muscle power. Blacks guided troops around the Lowcountry cypress marshes and seemingly impenetrable undergrowths of yucca and hollies and piloted supply ships through mazes of rivers. Sent out to forage, British scouting parties that lacked the guidance of local blacks lost their way and spent the night camped out, shivering, in deep stands of Sea Island oaks, black gums, and tupelos. More fortunate troops were led by runaway slaves to the expansive plantations of some of the Lowcountry’s most ardent patriots, including Rawlins Lowndes, Ralph Izard, and the Middletons. The foreigners marveled at the impressive Georgian-style houses and formal gardens before looting stores of Madeira and fine wines and pocketing shoe buckles and watches. They could not help but contrast the planters’ wealth to the impoverished condition of their enslaved workers, for standing in the shadow of brick mansions were dwellings of earthen walls covered with thatched palmetto roofs.20

The British needed all the military support they could get, and the brief appearance of a Lower Creek sachem named Ravening Wolf gave hope that, in the words of Hessian captain Johann Ewald, the chief would reassure upcountry Native groups that the “English army … was in such a condition that it was worth the trouble for these nations to venture further into an alliance with the English.” The sight of Ravening Wolf, clad in sandals and a long shirt but no breeches or stockings, caused quite a stir among the soldiers. His clothing and adornments suggested the ambivalent nature of Indian self-interest—dependence on whites for trade, but also a desire to remain independent of them. According to Ewald, the chief had a ring through his nose, and he had daubed his face with red paint. “On his chest he wore a ring-shaped silver collar and around both arms silver shields fastened with red ribbons, which were gifts from England and on which the monogram ‘George Rex’ was engraved.” In the end, though, the chief seemed more curious about the Hessians’ long beards (“put on merely for ornament,” he thought) than serious about offering any real aid to the Crown.21

Chief Engineer Moncrief had no illusions about the task before him. He had won accolades for his successful defense of Savannah against French and Continental forces in the fall of 1779. From that campaign, he understood that the assault on Charles Town depended upon the number of men he could bring under his control and the ability of those men to transport huge amounts of equipment over water-soaked terrain. He relied chiefly on sailors and on blacks assembled from a variety of places, including 120 “Black Pioneers,” a group of black fatigue workers organized by the army and sent south with the fleet from New York City, and laborers attached to the British occupying forces in nearby Savannah. Gradually, he integrated into his corps the fugitives making their way toward British lines; their intimate familiarity with the waterscape and their long years of working in marshland proved a boon to him. By April 1, with an

estimated 3,000 men at his disposal, Moncrief was supervising the rapid construction of new redoubts as well as assembling various pieces of offensive equipment. Working in cold rainy weather, blacks tore down local buildings and out of the wood fashioned several mantlets, portable screens used to shield soldiers; each one required eighteen men to carry it. They built abatises, obstacles formed from tree branches with their ends sharpened and placed in a ditch at the base of a battery. They dug trenches, drained swamps, and constructed sandbag trestles, fascines, and pontoon bridges to traverse ten different rivers, each a laborious undertaking. To compensate for the loss of the horses at sea, Moncrief put black men to work dragging cannons, munitions, entrenching tools, and provisions through the soft, silty marshes. Encircling the city to the west, a force 134 strong used a contraption made of two wheels on the front and wooden rollers on the back to transport cannons and flatboats overland from the Ashley to the Cooper River.22

The British then proceeded to launch a barrage of cannon fire toward Charles Town, raining death and destruction on its defenders. At the same time, within the city black people were proving subversive to the American cause. Some managed to flee and give the British information on recent troop movements and the devastation wrought by the shelling. On April 17 one neighborhood burst into flames, not from British shells but from a fire that began when a group of enslaved men who had been boiling pitch abandoned their post. Whites attributed the conflagration to an “accident.” The climax to the siege came on May 10 when Fort Moultrie’s defenders surrendered at the sight of the advancing enemy.23

Not every self-proclaimed patriot had stayed to defend the city. Soon after the war began in 1776, Boston King’s owner had hired him out to a series of Charles Town tradesmen, white men who beat him nigh unto death. By this time Richard Waring himself had taken up residence in the city, but when he heard that the British invaders were on the march, he removed his entire household back to the countryside, a safe distance from the port city. It was in late spring 1780 that King once again feared for his life—this time because another slave to whom he had lent a horse failed to return it—and he made his way to Charles Town to try his luck with the British. King’s motives were not political or ideological but self-preservative. And indeed the same could be said of Waring, whose commitment to the patriot cause was only as strong as the American military presence in his immediate neighborhood.24

The occupying British Army had to deal with the uncertain loyalties of American soldiers and civilians alike. For military officials, the first order of business was to economize and send 2,000 enemy soldiers back to their homes, “on parole,” extracting from them an unenforceable promise that they would not take up arms against the Crown again. Eventually, the authorities would also pack off twenty-nine prominent Charles Town patriots, ridding themselves of, in the words of one British officer, “some of the most dangerous, hardened, and perverse Rebels that ever existed.” One sympathetic patriot reported that the exiles, sent to detention in St. Augustine, Florida, complained loudly when they found themselves in decidedly less than luxurious quarters, “compelled to do the most menial Offices, yet could scarcely procure the plainest Necessaries of Life.” In contrast, hundreds of merchants and artisans eager to resume trade remained in Charles Town; they, together with several leading rebels, Henry Middleton among them, reversed course and took a renewed oath of allegiance to the king, becoming the “protection gentry.” David Ramsay, a patriot and historian of the war, condemned them as weak- willed cowards: “Several who had lived in ease and affluence from the produce of their lands,

cultivated by their slaves, had not fortitude enough to dare to be poor.”25

When General Leslie sat down on June 3 to outline his plans for the occupation, he wrote this under the word “Negroes”: “There are so many different Interests to attend to in the Arrangements required.” He wanted to respect the property rights of loyalist planters and return enslaved men and women to their rightful owners. As for runaways who had deprived the rebels of their labor, after serving the British “faithfully during the war [they] are entitled to their Freedom.” Until then, they should work in the various military departments “with adequate Pay, Provisions and Cloathing.” Yet despite Leslie’s pointed policies, the city’s black population continued to “go about uncontrolled, to the distress of the [white] inhabitants, the detriment of the government, and in direct violation of orders.”26

Not even a raging smallpox epidemic, “which sweeps them away in great numbers,” in the words of a British officer, could discourage hundreds of blacks from coming into the city. (Boston King had managed to survive after going for several days without food and water and thanked God for sending a British soldier who revived him.) Leslie’s chief concern was to slow the number of black in-migrants. At one point he intercepted seven hundred blacks en route downriver; believing they were infected with smallpox, he decided to “distribute them about the Rebell Plantations,” a deadly form of germ warfare that relied on black bodies as agents of disease. In June he rejoiced when an estimated five hundred black men, women, and children left with Clinton as part of a thirty-ship fleet bound for New York City; some had attached themselves to Hessian officers, and others had joined—or been forced to join—the Black Pioneers. Taking the pox with them, more South Carolina blacks would follow Cornwallis north in the fall of 1781 en route to his fateful encounter at Yorktown.27

Efforts to stem the tide of humanity coming in from the countryside included a short-lived initiative to force fugitives to labor on the sequestered estates of the rebels. In an ambitious plan, the British aimed to hire 100 white men to oversee 5,000 blacks considered still enslaved, now to the Crown; but the steady incursion of American forces, combined with the decayed nature of many plantations, their fields weed choked and irrigation systems destroyed, halted that experiment. As the American army moved closer to Charles Town and overran these broken- down estates in 1781, the British officer in charge of the project admitted defeat, as he was “compelled … to abandon every hope of effecting His purpose; and behold with extreme regret, the product of His unremitting labor, become a most Material acquisition to the Enemy.”28

The prospect of cash wages paid by the British proved a powerful lure for field hands and skilled carpenters, English speakers and non-English speakers, people running away from an owner or toward a place of unknown possibilities. In January 1781 a master advertised for a runaway, enslaved carpenter Hercules, and acknowledged that “he is frequently seen in Charlestown, where he may endeavor to get employ.” (The ad ended with the somewhat plaintive words, “If Hercules returns of his own accord, he shall be forgiven.”) Some fugitives opted for self- reinvention. The owner of a runaway named Titus suggested that he was well equipped for city life: “He may alter his name, speaks bad English, and can (tho’ very cunning and artful) pass for a fool.”29

Once in the city, many blacks found themselves subject to multiple forms of coercion, for their bodies carried a high market value throughout the years of the Revolution. Privateers plying the

coastline offered escaped slaves jobs as pilots or crew members; some of these offers were legitimate, and others were mere pretexts for kidnappers to sell men and women in the Caribbean islands. British and Hessian officers and their wives, and even ordinary enlisted men, could now afford their own personal valets, hairdressers, and cooks and considered these workers to be status symbols of the highest order. Loyalists decamping to London or elsewhere succumbed to the temptation to take with them enslaved servants accustomed to the everyday rituals of the elite. And displaying black retainers remained a prized perquisite for the occupiers: Lieutenant Governor William Bull, complaining of kidney stones, traveled through the streets on a litter borne by four enslaved men.30

Like the Americans, the British acknowledged that black labor was “so necessary in every branch of employment.” One of many military departments in the city, the Ordnance Department, used 800 workers. In the spring of 1781 the Engineering Department, Commissary General, Quarter Master General, Barracks Master, Royal Artillery, and General Hospital were employing at least 515 men, 141 women, and 15 children, almost all of whom still had an owner attached to their names. Some toiled as servants, sawyers, carpenters, smiths, and teamsters. Others were set to cleaning the filthy streets and maintaining the one hundred commercial buildings now quartering troops.31

Moncrief successfully attracted and kept black workers of both sexes, perhaps because of his willingness to see that they were decently clothed and paid in cash, though at rates less than those for white laborers. He provided blankets, shirts, shoes, suits, and dresses for hundreds and employed a full-time tailor to sew garments out of white plains and blue duffels in addition to the customary osnaburg called “Negro cloth.” Some employees, such as boatmen Cupid, Alex, Troy, Will, Abraham, and Jack and chain drivers Tom, Peter, Mingo, Glasgow, and Cudjo, pocketed their pay directly. Others, presumably still enslaved by loyalist masters, received food, clothing, and shelter while their owners showed up periodically to claim their wages.32

In occupied Charles Town, familiar communities of blacks reconvened and new communities coalesced. While he was in the city, Boston King might have encountered the other Waring slaves, Mathias, Tom, Peter, and Scipio, who were now working for the British Quarter Master. Phillis Clark of South Carolina met her future husband, Pompey, who had come south with the British from the North, when both were working in the Hospital Department. An unknown number of men and women had attached themselves to Moncrief since his defense of Savannah in 1779. Among those now under his supervision were twenty of General William Moultrie’s slaves: Sally, Fanny, Daphne, Abba, Nappy, Molly, Flora, Peggy, Rachel, Mariane, Peggy, Lindy, Ealy, Bob, Prince, Cyrus, John, Sharper, and two men named Jemmy. Some workers had remained in the city after their patriot owners were paroled or exiled, and others had joined the ranks of refugees fleeing their masters in the countryside.

David George and his wife were among those black people who followed a circuitous route to Charles Town. Born around 1740 in Essex County, Virginia, of African parents, George had fled from a cruel master and found his way south to the Savannah River, where he was enslaved by Creek Indians for three years. A charismatic black preacher named George Liele inspired George to believe that he had “found great blessing and mercy from the Lord.” Determined to devote his life to his newfound Christian faith, George felt “so overcome that I could not wait upon my master.” Defying whites who sought to silence these evangelical preachers “lest they furnish us

with too much knowledge,” George learned to read and interpret the Bible for himself. He began to minister to Liele’s congregation in Savannah (from which grew the first African Baptist Church in North America), at the same time keeping a butcher’s stall and trading in hogs. When the British captured that town in 1779, George’s wife found work as a laundress for General Clinton, “and out of the little she got maintained us.” The Georges were probably among the many blacks who accompanied Clinton on his triumphal entry into Charles Town.33

Drawing on skills characteristic of West African cultures and honed under slavery, many black men and women participated in a robust local economy driven by a shortage of food and by an expanding demand for domestic and military labor. In February 1781 British officials publicized regulations for the public marketplace, a long list revealing of blacks’ resourcefulness generally and black women’s historic role as traders more particularly. Black men with access to some sort of conveyance possessed considerable advantages in this economy. The Barrack Office routinely sent out calls for wood and for owners of wagons, carts, and “small VESSELS and Craft.” Because privateers had seized British fishing boats, the garrison remained dependent on the black men and women who could bring in fish and truck from the surrounding area. City authorities complained about the high prices that teamsters exacted for their services; the Board of Police established “Rates of Cartage: for wood, lumber, salt, lime, and shingles” in an effort to stem the traders’ “desire of inordinate gain” and tendencies toward “engrossing.”34

In Charles Town and the surrounding Lowcountry, traffickers smuggled goods and food in from the hinterland via boat, carriage, horse, and oxen, facilitating a viable informal economy that benefited whites and blacks alike. Authorities called in vain for consumers to refrain from buying from soldiers who did not have written permission from their commanding officer to trade or barter. Still, many blacks found willing partners in homesick foreign troops eager to ransack private homes and strip them of everything from tablecloths and pillowcases to silver tea sets. Lively local markets, whether legal or illegal, reflected a larger breakdown in military discipline. One officer advertised in the local paper, “I do hereby give notice to all deserters from the regiment under my command that if they will return to their duty, by joining their corps … they will be pardoned for all past offences.”35

To the extent that they could get rice, vegetables, and fish in to the Charles Town market, black men and women could turn to their own advantage “deranged estates”—that is, those abandoned by whites in the interior and on the Sea Islands. Patriot general Francis Marion condemned the trade in provisions originating along Wamboo River and Goose Creek, but he despaired of curtailing it, for such a move would require him to “tak[e] every person adjacent to town and make them prisoners, or keep them a great distance from their plantations, and remove all their possessions.” Throughout the Lowcountry, clusters of black men and women staged their own quiet revolution when they planted gardens and fished, intending to earn some money by marketing any surplus no matter how small.36

For all military and political officials, entrepreneurial activity on the part of blacks assumed a conspiratorial cast, leading to calls for the summary execution of those caught carrying provisions of any kind or engaging in the “shameful commerce” of purloined horses. Writing from the rural outpost of Uxbridge in August 1782, Governor Matthews reported to Marion that American cavalry were derelict in allowing the “dozen or twenty negroes to come out almost every night in the week, and carry off cattle, horses, and anything else they want, within twelve

or fifteen miles of their camp.” Because of this “villainous” activity, “the Charlestown markets are now daily supplied with the greatest plenty of everything they want,” he claimed with some exaggeration.37

White revolutionaries showed little appreciation for blacks’ own brand of insurgent independence. Rebel planters were constantly denouncing British soldiers who sought to “steal all the [blacks] they can, and carry them off” or who incited workers to “desert” their masters— men, women, and children whom the Red Coats would either sell or put to work. Patriots rarely acknowledged that some of those “carried off” might have gone willingly; instead, they saw blacks in general as dupes of the British. The king’s forces wished that it were so—that the blacks who sought shelter with the British were biddable and compliant. In fact, behind British lines some refugees found paid work but others faced reenslavement, which quickly soured the willingness of many blacks to devote themselves wholly to the British cause. Army employees had to wear regimental identification badges, while the provost marshal would “flog out of the encampment all those who are not Mark’d agreeable to Orders.” Officers were “to execute on the Spot any Negro who is found quitting the Line of March in search of plunder.” However, plunderers were not easily separated from soldiers. Mounted black cowboys drove cattle for the advancing army, and black “Dragoons” (as many as one hundred at a time) engaged in “bush fighting” against the rebels. Governor Matthews authorized the execution of all blacks “taken in arms” whether aiding the British or operating on their own, for, he wrote, “exemplary punishments on such notorious offenders will have a very salutary effect.”38

Less liberators, the British remained the enemies of black people’s enemies. Boston King left Charles Town to accompany a British raiding party outside the city and began to work for a British captain, supplying him with fish. The officer asked him, “How would you like me to be your master?” King escaped from this man and attached himself to another officer, risking his life to retrieve military intelligence and warn British troops of an imminent patriot attack. At one point, making his way back to the camp, he heard approaching American soldiers and, fearing detection, “fell flat upon my face till they were gone by.” Once again, he believed, God had interceded: “I then arose, and praised the Name of the Lord for his great mercy, and again pursued my journey.” For his courage he earned “3 shillings and many fine promises, which were all that I ever received for this service from him [the second officer].”39

In contrast to single men like King, who had responsibility only for himself when he fled from his master, many families tried to remain in familiar surroundings; there husbands and wives tended their gardens and chickens, cows, and pigs and protected the modest stores of household goods they had accumulated. Those still under the nominal supervision of a white man either ignored his orders or negotiated for more favorable treatment. When the British swept through the Ashepoo region, “they took with them” (in the words of planter Thomas Pinckney) nineteen blacks, among them “the hardy boys.” Those who remained “are now perfectly free to live on the best produce of the plantation”—that is, the produce they themselves had grown. As for the overseer, they “pay no attention to his orders.”40

Predictably, compared to their British counterparts, American officers were just as rapacious in their exploitation of black men, women, and children. In December 1781 General Greene highlighted the governing principle shaping military and labor deployment: “The natural strength of this country in point of numbers, appears to me to consist more in the blacks, than the whites.”

The Americans put blacks to work as cooks and valets, like the slave Billy, who, according to a patriot officer, was “well known throughout the army, making himself useful in shaving, and dressing the hair of many officers,” and as ransom, like “one negro man, named Doctor,” whom General Thomas Sumter held, along with a horse, a saddle and bridle, a cutlass, and nineteen silver dollars, all for the use of the revolutionaries’ cause until their owners could prove that they were not allied with the British.41

The Americans also used black men’s bodies as an inducement for militiamen to volunteer. A plan first proposed in 1779, the so-called Sumter’s Law, would give “a negro bounty” to each recruit because efforts to draft men had failed miserably. Similar plans were proposed throughout the war to reward men who raised and commanded their own troops, and one in April 1781 provided that South Carolina allow each colonel of a new regiment “to receive three grown negroes and one small negro; Major to receive three grown negroes; Lieutenants one large and one small negro; the staff, one large and one small negro; the sergeants, one and one quarter negro, each private, one grown negro.” (Children under ten years and adults over forty were deemed one-half a person.) In May 1782 Governor Matthews wrote to General Marion and asked him “whether it will be best to sell the negroes, and recruit with money, or continue on the old plan of recruiting with negroes.” Cash was more portable, and less truculent, than black people.42

Patriot troop recruitment efforts reflected the shortage of Lowcountry whites available for service and the resistance of nonslaveholders to join the fight. Early in the conflict Charles Town elites understood that white men of modest means did not necessarily share their animus toward the high-handedness of the Crown. On the eve of the war, settlers in the fast-growing backcountry hailed from Virginia and North Carolina, while others were German and Scots-Irish immigrants who now feared the patriot cause would endanger their land grants. All remained at perpetual risk of Indian raids. In 1775 a prominent planter, William Henry Drayton, together with a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend William Tennent, traveled west of Charles Town and conducted a series of political rallies–cum–religious revivals to bring settlers there into the patriot fold. These efforts availed little; Drayton especially had little experience dealing with people whom he considered the ruder sort, those who used horses instead of enslaved workers in the fields. Tennent’s unctuous sermons also aroused suspicions among folk wary of the motives and manners of Lowcountry aristocrats.43

For elites, the war brought into sharp relief the unpredictability of various Indian tribes and poor white men as well as slaves. Soon after the conflict started, the Americans were aiming to pry the Cherokee away from their historic allies, the British, and to secure the military support of other Native groups. When the Catawba sent two of their men to Charles Town to inquire about the nature of the emerging conflict, members of the patriot Council of Safety told them that “our brothers on the other side of the water wanted to take our property from us without our consent, and that we expected their warriors would join ours.” Predictably, this paean to American property rights failed to move Native warriors. When pleading failed, total war followed. Drayton, an emissary to the Cherokee, was frustrated by the hostile reception he received from them. In July 1776 he issued a “word to the wise” to upcountry military officers: “It is expected you make smooth work as you go—that is you cut up every Indian corn-field, and burn every Indian town—and that every Indian taken shall be the slave and property of the taker; that the nation be extirpated, and the lands become the property of the public.” Before long this

scorched-earth policy led to the dispossession of all Cherokee east of the South Carolina mountains.44

During this period of strife, the state was forced to relinquish its claim as a place of “civilization” and refinement. By 1782 the backcountry, much of it engulfed in flames, had dissolved into anarchy, with courts closing and lynch mobs stepping into the breach. Large numbers of American militiamen deserted. Stationed at St. David’s on the Great Pee Dee River, an American officer denounced the plundering and other depredations “perpetrated by a banditti of the most desperate villains and mulattoes, immediately bordering on our settlements.” Despite atrocities so “fierce and cruel,” in the words of a judge, the governor felt compelled to “open a Treaty with these very Murderers,” which allowed the miscreants a pardon and the privilege of living at home. For the great planters, the carnage confirmed their view of a region populated by uncivilized backwoodsmen, settlers untamed by wealth borne of the profits from slavery.45

The western part of the state remained a nest of menacing Natives and fugitives. Prominent planter and slave trader Henry Laurens cited what he considered British forces’ craven manipulation of both groups: “Excited by rewards & promises[,] the Savages of the Wilderness & the Negro Slaves” had been propelled to what he called “an indiscriminate Butchery of Men Women & Children.” From the outset of the war, South Carolina leaders had fretted about securing the cooperation of diverse Indian nations, groups that respected no colonial boundaries but had proved profitable trading partners. Lowcountry patriots recognized that, in the words of John Rutledge (Governor Matthew’s predecessor), “diplomacy” with certain Native groups took the form of “Donations” over and above “the Emoluments of Trade.” Among those donations, ammunition and guns were high on the Indians’ list of prized articles. Like Marylanders a century and a half before, South Carolinians faced a balancing act: to provide weapons, in the words of an official 1775 declaration, “with such a quantity as might, in some degree, satisfy their urgent wants, but could not incite, by enabling, them to commit hostilities.” For their part, most tribes, and factions of tribes, found they could play the combatants against each other and also profit handsomely by demanding guns and alcohol. As a result, American officials shared with their British counterparts the view that Indians in general remained insatiable for gifts and ever ungrateful.46

In early 1782 military desertions increased the pressure on both sides to arm slaves as uniformed soldiers. The British had put guns in the hands of black men who stormed Savannah in 1778 and then protected it from French forces a year later, and had also authorized the Black Dragoons to conduct raiding parties. By March Moncrief and Leslie were contemplating a formal “brigade of negroes.” Moncrief reminded his superiors of “the many advantages which His Majesty’s service has derived from their [blacks’] labor in carrying on the different works in this and the province of Georgia.” He recommended that his superiors now arm them and presumably grant them their freedom in return. Leslie concurred, “as it appears to me a measure that will soon become indispensably necessary shou’d the war continue to be carried on in this part of America.” As to who should command this new armed force, Leslie suggested Moncrief as “a very proper person to be at their head, being well acquainted with their disposition, and in the highest estimation amongst them.”47

Patriots, however, continued to be far more reluctant than the British to accept black soldiers into their ranks. Earlier in the century, in their battles against Indians and the French and Spaniards,

South Carolina colonial officials had enlisted blacks, finding these soldiers “necessary, but very dangerous domestics.” General Lincoln had proposed arming slaves in anticipation of the British siege of Charles Town, a plan countered by the governor at the time, John Rutledge, who insisted that if these servile men were to be mobilized at all, it would be “as a corps of able bodied men accustomed to labor.” Overwhelmingly, South Carolina patriots believed enlisting blacks was a disastrous idea. Remarking on the threat posed by blacks in the Revolutionary era, one rebel later wrote, “All subordination being destroyed, they became insolent and rapacious, and in some instances exceeded the British in their plundering and devastations.”48

On the subject of black soldiers, Rhode Island native Nathanael Greene reduced the question to one of bodies and dollars only. He told Governor Rutledge, “The number of whites in this state are too small, and the state of your finances too low, to attempt to raise a force in any other way.” Greene continued, “That they would make good Soldiers I have not the least doubt and I am persuaded the State has it not in its power to give sufficient reinforcements without incorporating them.” Quickly rebuffed by the South Carolina General Assembly, the general agreed to settle for 440 black wagoners, pioneers, artificers, and personal servants. At the same time, he believed that unless blacks had an “interest” in their own continuing servitude, they would be “of little benefit, and by no means depended on” in the larger war against Britain. He proposed “that the public cloathe them, and that the negroes be allowed the same wages allowed by Congress to the soldiers of the Continental army.” Greene noted that opposition to this plan stemmed not from the expense “but from an apprehension of the consequences.”49

“An apprehension of the consequences”: the imperatives of military mobilization only intensified whites’ raw fear of the black people who lived in their midst. And, indeed, it was that fear that had made all of South Carolina an armed camp long before the start of the Revolutionary War, one menaced as much from the inside as from the outside.

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On Sunday morning, September 9, 1739, almost sixty years before Boston King wrote his autobiography, twenty enslaved men, “some Angola Negroes,” who had been set to work repairing the roads near Stono, reconfigured themselves into a band of rebels under the leadership of an enslaved man named Jemmy. In a bid to make their way to the Spanish outpost of St. Augustine in present-day Florida, and to the freedom promised to all runaways there, they broke into a store and made off with firearms and powder. Then they headed southward, ransacking and burning houses and killing white men, women, and children. Soon other blacks joined the band, and, according to a contemporary account, “they calling out Liberty, marched on with colors displayed, and two Drums beating.” Out on the road, Lieutenant Governor William Bull unwittingly happened upon the insurrectionists, but he managed to escape and raise the alarm. In the end, the blacks killed twenty-five whites, and forty-five slaves paid with their lives for what came to be known as the Stono Rebellion.50

Here was Symon Overzee and Job Chandler’s worst nightmare come to pass: a whole host of Angolans slaughtering their masters. With the aid of “several Indians” (offered food in return for their services), white responders shot and killed some of the blacks on sight and later executed others. Still, the planters of the region would congratulate themselves that “notwithstanding the Provocation they had received from so many Murders, they did not torture one Negroe, but only

put him to an easy death.”51

William Bull attributed the revolt among what he called “domestic enemies” to “a slack inspection” of enslaved men who “had been very indiscreetly assembled and encamped for several nights.” Yet Stono was no spontaneous uprising. Rather, the rebels had sought to exploit the tensions gripping South Carolina whites in the summer and early fall of that year—a yellow fever epidemic in Charles Town, the prospect of an impending war with Spain. The conspirators hailed mainly from Kongo-Angola, and their martial tactics—the drums beating, white flags flying—reflected both West African military traditions and contemporary Christian iconography. In the five years preceding the rebellion, six out of ten of all the enslaved workers imported into South Carolina had come from Kongo-Angola, where Catholicism had taken hold nearly a century before.52

South Carolina’s highly profitable staples of rice and indigo exacted a price of eternal vigilance on the part of slave masters and mistresses who lived there. Whites’ anxieties were legion. Africans brought with them contagious, ill-defined diseases, “distempers.” And the costliness of their bodies produced a growing, crushing debt for individual planters and for the whole colony because South Carolina’s exports of deer skins, tar and turpentine, and rice and indigo could not match the value of imported slaves and luxury goods. In the 1730s traders had overseen the sale of 17,323 slaves on the docks at Charles Town, 16,280 of whom had come directly from Africa, the others from ports in the Caribbean. Like Symon Overzee’s Antonio, Jemmy and other perpetrators of the Stono Rebellion had no recorded last names, and they represented the radical potential of runaways to wreak havoc on the established order. South Carolina’s royal governor was convinced that “our Negroes are … more dreadfull to our safety than any Spanish invaders.” As the black population grew, so did the danger posed by conspirators; at the time of Stono, the colony had 39,155 slaves and only half as many whites. Some Lowcountry parishes were more than 90 percent black.53

[image “FIGURE 2.1” file=images/f0071-01.jpg]

FIGURE 2.1 This detail from a 1773 map of St. Stephen’s Parish in Craven County, South Carolina, shows enslaved workers making dye from indigo. The picture suggests the variety of tasks that slaves were forced to perform, from cultivating and harvesting the indigo plant to chopping down trees, clearing fields, constructing fences, and building the wooden apparatus used to produce the dye from the plant. Similarly, rice cultivation necessitated complex irrigation systems that slaves were forced to engineer, build, and maintain. USED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN RESEARCH CENTER, DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY.

Authorities reacted decisively to Stono. Delegates to the General Assembly struggled to put into words their terror: “On this Occasion every Breast was filled with Concern. Evil brought Home to us within our very Doors awakened the Attention of the most Unthinking. Every one that had any Relation, any Tie of nature; every one that had a Life to lose were in the most sensible manner shocked at such Danger daily hanging over their Heads.” Authorities mobilized armed patrols in the countryside and scout boats along the coast and bolstered a police watch to scour back alleys, gardens, and service buildings in Charles Town. They banned the use of drums, associated with secret messages and criminal behavior, and—inferring that African-born slaves

were more dangerous than their American-born counterparts—slapped a prohibitively high tariff on imported slaves, reducing direct imports of Africans to only 1,356 (out of a total of 1,562 slaves) for the entire decade of the 1740s. (Despite this effort, between 1706 and 1776 Charles Town traders sold 93,843 slaves, about half of all Africans imported into the British North American colonies.) Owners sought to deal swiftly with runaways—many of them valuable, able-bodied young men—by selling them to the Caribbean islands. Nevertheless, the colony would remain in a perpetual state of unease. Cried the lawmakers, “With regret we bewailed our peculiar Case, that we would not enjoy the Benefits of Peace like the rest of Mankind and that our own Industry should be the Means of taking from us all the Sweets of Life and of rendering us liable to the Loss of our Lives and Fortunes.”54

In response to real and perceived threats from the blacks who surrounded them, officials devised a series of punishments that in their cruelty reflected the deep, pervasive fear shared by Lowcountry whites who considered themselves beleaguered within their own homeland. Executions and forms of torture became public spectacles: black men and women were hanged, their heads severed and placed on poles for all to see. Strung up and suspended from the ground, they endured (or not) two hundred lashings at a time, with vinegar or salt rubbed into the bloody wounds. They were burned alive, branded, gibbeted, or hung in chains until dead, mutilated and castrated, buried alive.55

Whites took offense at unfamiliar cultural forms they deemed inherently menacing. Blacks’ distinctive language, Gullah (perhaps a form of “Angola”), a pidgin that melded African grammar with English vocabulary, provided a means of communication incomprehensible to most whites. In the quarters black men and women observed traditional forms of song and dance under the cover of darkness. Secret mutual-aid and benevolent societies; the practice of herbal medicine, which (it was feared) could lead to the poisoning of masters and mistresses; incessant drum beating; the strange sounds and body movements that accompanied worship and funeral services—all of these West African traditions seemed threatening to masters and mistresses. And when an Anglican missionary described Lowcountry blacks in 1740 as “a Nation within a Nation,” he alluded to blacks’ cultural bonds and to their impulse for collective self-defense against white people’s violent aggression.56

As the number of slaves increased in South Carolina, so, too, did whites’ fears of blacks as a homogeneous, uniformly threatening people. In characterizing all blacks in this way, South Carolinians unconsciously mimicked Job Chandler’s use of the European trope of the wild man during Antonio’s trial in the previous century. At the same time, these white colonists also invoked an English legal precedent that had allowed for the economic subjugation of impoverished peoples more generally. Reflecting the influence of the sugar colony of Barbados, South Carolina’s initial slave law of 1712 referred to blacks as “of barbarous, wild, savage natures”; the legislation echoed a 1547 English statute designed to punish and keep in check vagrant peasants, who, shunning productive labor, would supposedly steal and also threaten their social betters with bodily harm. To enslave a whole group of people, and their offspring as well, was to address a perennial challenge faced by the English propertied classes in the midst of widespread underemployment—countering the criminal behavior of highwaymen and pickpockets who robbed and assaulted rather than working. By harnessing the energies of the poor, vagrant laws and systems of bondage could yield predictable reserves of labor and discourage the mayhem wrought by the dispossessed upon the wealthy. Based on the rule of law,

which at least recognized the basic humanity of landless countrymen and -women, that project had been stable enough in England, but in the New World it provoked the resistance of enslaved peoples and the apprehension of whites who could not control them.57

Not all British colonial authorities were willing to assume the public security risks that came with human bondage. Georgia, founded in 1733 as a barrier between the English of South Carolina and the Spanish of East Florida, initially banned slavery on the theory that the institution would discourage white settlers from working hard enough to tame the coastal swamps and inland hardwood forests. From Virginia came a voice of experience, wealthy planter William Byrd II, who urged the Georgia Trustees to stick to their principles, for slaves would “blow up the pride, & ruin the industry of our white people, who seeing a rank of poor creatures below them, detest work for fear it should make them look like slaves.” Also, according to Byrd, it was likely that a black man “of desperate courage” would “kindle a servile war … before any opposition could be formed against him, and tinge our rivers as wide as they are with blood.” Byrd had predicted Jemmy of Stono. Nevertheless, in 1749 the Trustees bowed to the demands of Georgia’s whites, who insisted that slaves toil as field hands only and remain under the close supervision of an overseer. Presumably, enslaved artisans and domestics, who had relative freedom to ply their trades on a day-to-day basis, would threaten the colony’s order. The hot, muggy climate and the arduous work of clearing the land had convinced the new settlers of the “Impossibility of white men being asked to work here and live” without the labor of slaves.58

Exhibiting none of Georgia’s hesitation about slavery, South Carolina quickly transformed itself from a rough-hewn backwater colony devoted to lumbering and cattle ranching, where enslaved workers and free white colonists labored together in the woods, to a staple-crop powerhouse that contributed to Britain’s riches. Contemporaries called the rice swamps the “Golden Mines” of Carolina—literally, the equivalent of the Brazilian gold mines for the Portuguese and, more prosaically, the Chesapeake tobacco fields for the great planters of Virginia and Maryland. And just as in South America’s infamous mines, the human price of the rice economy was enormous: cultivation of the staple was, in the words of one contemporary observer, “a killing work for the negroes.” Virtually all survivors of the Middle Passage suffered emotional trauma and damaged immune systems, conditions that shattered women’s fertility. Toiling in soggy fields during the height of summer, rushing to harvest the crop in fall, working in the cold muck in winter, blacks of all ages suffered high mortality rates. Elderly workers and pregnant and nursing mothers could not always complete their task of one-quarter acre a day in the allotted time; they relied on the help of younger hands or endured the lash. Because of a genetic-based immunity, some West African groups were resistant to the mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, that ravaged white populations in South Carolina. At the same time, workers contracted pneumonia and tuberculosis from toiling in the cold and in standing water, gastrointestinal ailments brought on by drinking polluted water, and anemia from subsisting on protein-deficient diets. On some plantations more than half of all babies were dead within a year of their birth, a condition that reflected the work demands placed upon women during the latter stages of pregnancy.59

Some enslaved men and women could work in the afternoons for themselves, but others had only Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Lowcountry blacks considered their own time to be their “right,” a chance to fish, tend gardens, and raise chickens. Black women who traveled routinely between plantation and city market embodied the Gullah entrepreneurial impulse characteristic

of West Africa and the Caribbean. The resulting trading networks facilitated communication among plantations, leading whites to see trading as a means of circulating goods and provisions but also of spreading rumors among workers and news of sinister plots. Throughout the eighteenth century a series of slave uprisings and conspiracy scares highlighted the sources of subversion embedded in the plantation system.60

In Charles Town whites might grudgingly tolerate a familiar black woman hawking her wares on a city sidewalk or in the public marketplace, but they took a decidedly dimmer view of groups of enslaved men and women gathering together for any reason. This principle extended to religious worship as well as to clandestine exchanges of stolen goods. Carolina masters remained suspicious of Christianity as a potentially explosive set of beliefs, whether propounded by Anglican missionaries, whom the slaves mostly ignored, or the more egalitarian-minded evangelical preachers, whom the slaves at times found compelling. Some of the latter, who preached loudly about the miserable plight of people treated worse than livestock, attracted a following in the quarters and in cramped meeting places in Charles Town. Ideas that glorified the brotherhood and sisterhood of the spirit could inspire a worker’s resistance in the fields or a cook’s effort to administer a deadly potion as part of an evening meal. The newly Christianized David George wrote of his religious conversion, “I felt my own plague, and I was so overcome that I could not wait upon my master.” Instead, “I felt myself at the disposal of sovereign mercy.” Boston King’s early vision, of a fiery world where millions of souls ascended to heaven but others suffered rejection, revealed his faith in an apocalypse that would affect all people on the basis of the depth of their piety, rather than on the color of their skin.61

The Lowcountry was a site of considerable religious diversity, with elites embracing the formality of the Church of England and poor whites and enslaved workers finding in the sermons of Baptists and Methodists an uplifting, egalitarian message of deliverance and redemption. Some African-born Muslim men and women tried mightily to retain cultural practices related to diet and worship, though the slave system was not hospitable to traditions that mandated either specific foods or prayer at certain times of the day. Some Angolans tried to adhere to their Catholic faith as they had practiced it in their homeland. Yet regardless of their ethnicity, many enslaved men and women were receptive to evangelical precepts that gave rise to the celebration of eternal life over death. They also embraced literacy as a means to unlock sacred texts and found appealing those Christian beliefs that stressed an afterlife, the omnipotence of the spirit, and the convergence of supernatural and natural worlds. Like West Africans, enslaved Lowcountry men and women honored the symbolic and real properties of waterways as revealed in the ritual of baptism and the stories of runaways: According to a Gullah saying, “The sea brought us, the sea shall take us back”—to Africa, to their ancestors, to God.62

Surrounded by what William Bull called “domestic enemies,” coastal whites lived as a people constantly besieged. Moreover, when the great rice planters gazed westward, they saw the upcountry borderlands populated by enemy Indians whom they called “savages” and friendly Indians who were a “strainge copper collour’d gentry,” as well as fugitive slaves and white men restive in their powerlessness in the colonial assembly. Still, throughout the eighteenth century the lords of the rice kingdom prospered, adding to their wealth in land, slaves, and money. Together with lawyers and merchants, they consolidated their power by dominating political offices and by forming dense extended familial ties through endogamous marriage practices. In 1750 Charles Town was the richest settlement in the British North American colonies. The

Lowcountry now resembled the West Indies with its staple-crop monoculture, enslaved majority, and tiny, wealthy elite.63

South Carolina planters sought to fashion themselves as English men and women living abroad, expressing their “Englishness” in a variety of ways: the men by sitting in the assembly with their hats on and by challenging the king’s prerogatives; the women by following the latest Continental fashions in ladies’ clothing and replicating London social etiquette. The Charles Town aristocracy hosted highly ritualized tea parties and elaborate dinners; enjoyed concerts, operatic performances, the theater, and dance assemblies; and gambled on games of chance and horse races during the winter social season. Planters considered themselves cosmopolitan; they regularly traveled to the North, the Caribbean, and England with tutors, nurses, cooks, laundresses, valets, and footmen in tow. Despite the Lowcountry heat and humidity, they wore heavy English garments and at times ate heavy English food. Apparently no self-imposed form of physical discomfort was too great to bear in service to English modes of dress and diet.64

The colonists’ appropriation of British material and political culture was decidedly selective—for example, they chose not to emulate the 1772 Somerset decision that essentially abolished slavery on English soil. In fact, it was through things that the colonists most forcefully expressed their identity and contrasted themselves to black and red “savages” and impoverished white reprobates in the backcountry. With its eight wharves handling the cargoes of as many as three hundred ships at a time, Charles Town was the center of an extensive luxury trade in furnishings, clothing, and carriages, and the way of life among its most privileged residents was encapsulated in the frequently invoked word “opulent.” Planters’ wives amused themselves shopping for colorful silk and satin fabrics, smooth and shiny, and dainty shoes with silver buckles, in contrast to the drab, coarse garments worn by barefoot enslaved men and women. Daniel Stevens’s displeasure at the Ethiopian Ball stemmed at least in part from the jarring sight of black women in such rich clothing.65

Rice and indigo produced high rates of human misery but also the cash and credit necessary to build magnificent plantation houses such as Drayton Hall and Middleton Place and the elaborately furnished Charles Town houses to which the grandees and their families repaired for much of the year. Yet black people’s labor was necessary not only to buy a luxurious way of life, but also to maintain it. Indeed, wealth had little value without an enormous retinue of enslaved people to care for immense dwellings and serve the white people who lived there. Domestics emptied chamber pots and cleaned up the vomit and excrement of the ill. Laundresses faced a mountain of clothing and table and bed linens to be washed and ironed. Personal valets attended to men who demanded to be shaved, their hair dressed and wigs powdered. Seamstresses and ladies’ maids served mistresses seemingly unable to adjust their own corsets, wigs, and hooped petticoats by themselves. Carpenters serviced delicate carriages and phaetons, and footmen remained on call at all hours. In this world of fine things, an elaborate afternoon meal for twenty guests became not only a social event, but also an expression of a man’s status and his competitive instincts. Enslaved cooks and their helpers spent hours hauling water, stoking fires, gutting fish, plucking chickens, shucking oysters, peeling onions, seasoning meats, and then assembling, boiling, stewing, frying, roasting, and baking the many delicacies that made up a Lowcountry supper. Enslaved waiters served the multiple courses that followed, contending with an array of soup bowls and dinner plates, butter boats, fruit and dessert plates, salt dishes, and changing glasses for each new wine and eating utensils for each new course. The end of the meal

brought relaxed conversation for the guests, but for those in the kitchen hours of washing, drying, and storing all the silverware, dishes, glasses, pots, and provisions in their proper places.66

In England free white servants performed all these many tasks. In South Carolina the national or ethnic heritage of plantation laborers was irrelevant to the tasks at hand, but of course critical to keeping those laborers in a state of subjection. The net result of the social system was that Carolina elites lived in fear for their lives in a way that their English counterparts did not. Luxury was its own liability, for if wealthy whites expected to surround themselves with fine things, they had no choice but to rely on the daily labors of real and potential thieves and murderers.

As a matter of principle as well as practice, consumption drew the ire of a small number of critics, who understood the political and security risks associated with compulsive, competitive buying. During the 1769 debate over the nonimportation agreements (which would bar the sale of English luxury items and other imports from the mother country), Reverend Tennent chastised Charles Town women, so attached to the status and sociability of what he contemptuously called “their darling tea-dish ceremony.” Radical patriot Christopher Gadsden pointed out the irony of protests against taxation when in fact “it is but a burden arising voluntarily from an indulgence in foreign articles, nine-tenths, in general, I believe … superfluous[,] and luxuries.” In fact, he claimed, this devotion to expensive things was a form of dependence that flew in the face of republican simplicity, for “if there is anything that deserves the name of the Great Whore of Babylon, it is certainly her ladyship, Trade.” In the same spirit, some northern visitors to Charles Town attributed the intellectual shallowness of their hosts to their love of fine things. According to Josiah Quincy Jr., “The luxury, dissipation, life, sentiments and manners of the leading people naturally tend to make them neglect, despise and be careless of the true interests of mankind in general.” Ebenezer Hazard saw the Lowcountry rich as “haughty and insolent,” lording over poor whites who were just as indolent as they and appearing “to pay more attention to dress than any thing else.”67

A widespread view held that the black population was highly combustible, susceptible to leaders who might at any time draw the disaffected together and thereby ignite them. By the 1770s, however, Lowcountry elites had made a calculated decision to tolerate a certain amount of threat to maintain the vibrancy of commerce and their own privileged way of life. City jurors exclaimed in 1774 that “Negroes in Charlestown are become so obscene in their language, so irregular and disorderly in their conduct, and so superfluous in their Numbers,” revealing the cultural contradictions of slavery within an acquisitive society. Like the colony at large, which contained 100,000 slaves and 90,000 whites, Charles Town had more blacks than whites among its 14,000 souls. On any given day, many black people went about their jobs with no owner in sight; these were slaves who hired themselves out or did errands at their mistress’s bidding and fugitives who sought out urban anonymity. In a city where one out of every thirteen structures was a grog shop, liquor purveyors did a brisk business selling to whomever had the money to buy, even on Sundays. An underground economy flourished in rum and stolen goods, bringing together blacks and whites who bartered and exchanged the snuffboxes, watches, and clothing pilfered from wealthy men and women. In multiple ways, then, marketing—and its corollary, stealing—undermined the ideal of a static, hierarchical society.68

The fragile hegemony that South Carolina elites had established over a rapidly growing

subordinate black population was repeatedly tested, however, in the buildup to the Revolutionary War. For whites, crises stemming from threats real and imagined arose with striking frequency in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as black people “mimick’d their betters in crying out ‘Liberty,’” in the words of an alarmed Henry Laurens. Increasing numbers of black men and women were embracing Christianity and calling for an end to the tyranny of the body over the spirit. In March 1759 a black man named Philip Johns (or Jones) recounted his vision of white people under the earth and of a sword going “through the Land[;] it should shine with their blood.” Johns, apparently inspired by the millennialist exhortations of an Anglican cleric in Charles Town, told his followers “that God Almighty had given much for them to do … for killing the Buckras [i.e., Whites],” according to a witness. Johns was executed. In the fall of 1765 news that the Crown was going to require the use of stamped paper for official and commercial transactions provoked consternation among whites, who now feared that their own protests against English authority would give license to violence-prone slaves to do the same. Around this time authorities gibbeted alive two black men accused of poisoning their master.69

Having witnessed the carnage of Stono firsthand, Lieutenant Governor Bull reiterated his warning that “the cause of our danger is domestic, and interwoven with almost all the employments of our lives and so ought to be our attention to the remedy.” By 1775 white paranoia leavened with the provocations of emboldened black preachers had proved an explosive mix throughout the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry. Swift retribution was the watchword—two black men accused of arson and poisoning were burned alive in Savannah, and in Charles Town a free black pilot named Jerry was tried, convicted, and hanged for allegedly fomenting an insurrection among slaves, his body then “burned to ashes.” A white physician condemned what he saw as a rush to judgment in this case and remarked after the hanging, “Jerry met death like a man and a Christian, avowing his innocence to the last moment of his life… . Surely, there is no murder so cruel and dangerous as that committed under the appearance of law and justice.” In November of that year black men forced to labor on harbor fortifications threw down their shovels and congregated on Sullivan’s Island with the intention of seeking refuge on a British ship. A slave rebellion was truly under way, with at least some of the rebels drawing upon time-honored Christian precepts infused with contemporary revolutionary rhetoric—to whites, a frightening combination if there ever was one. More disquietingly, by this time armed conflict between patriots and British troops had flared up in the North, and white South Carolinians expressed well-founded anxieties about whether the war, when it arrived, would threaten their tenuous grip on newly energized black chattel.70

For the first three years of the conflict, South Carolina saw little in the way of combat. After fending off a clumsy assault by British forces in June 1776, however, Charles Town authorities confronted a startling new reality: business had stalled, and on the countryside the mobilization of militiamen had deprived plantations of overseers, halting the production of rice. Still, the aggravations faced by patriotic planters had little to do with British forces far away. Rather, their human property was giving them renewed trouble. Masters such as Isaac McPherson of Stono found themselves now forced to bargain with enslaved workers; his newly purchased “negro fellow well known in this town named Tom, a carpenter by trade,” decided to take off because, according to McPherson, “he does not chuse to live in the country.” The white man promised Tom, “so the said fellow may be satisfied,” that he “could look for another master,” an indication that McPherson was willing to be accommodating as long as he could somehow get his money back. The institution of slavery, defined by plantation discipline, was disintegrating.71

In the city poorly disciplined American troops and resourceful blacks were already causing an uproar. In June 1777 General Marion expressed gratitude to a group of white women who planned to host a dinner for the soldiers, but he could only hope that “the men will behave with sobriety and decency to those ladies who have been so kind as to give them so genteel a treat; for soldiers being seen in the street drunk or riotous, will be scandal to the regiment, and prevent any farther notice being taken of them.” In the winter of 1779 Charles Pinckney Jr. wrote to his wife that he and others were at a loss about how to “oblige the militia to do their duty.” Indeed, the volunteers’ unruly behavior had “roused the spirit as well as the indignation of the House so much at the conduct of their fellow-citizens” that legislators were considering subjecting the men to martial law. Black people, meanwhile, were supplying the city with poultry, corn, and other provisions brought in from the islands and coming to dominate the city’s wartime economy as draymen and hawkers and suppliers of fish and game. Throughout the Lowcountry, enslaved men and women were engaging in kinds of trading and risk-taking that their owners could well understand and to a degree at least appreciate. Yet a common love of liberty among the owned and the owners remained a self-evident truth quite lost on planters and slave traders.72

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The Revolutionary War had no discernible impact on Lowcountry whites’ commitment to slavery. If anything, the uprisings and defections that whites had witnessed during the war had bolstered their resolve to strengthen the institution of bondage, a goal that necessitated turning southern states into militarized entities. In 1787, four years after the war’s end, former governor John Rutledge sought to consolidate South Carolina’s gains during the Revolution by defending the international slave trade at the new republic’s Constitutional Convention. He and others crafted the US Constitution as a proslavery document in which trading in human bodies amounted merely to the “importation of such persons as the several states shall think proper to admit.” To a colleague from Maryland, who argued that it was “inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution, and dishonorable to the American character, to have such a feature [slavery] in the Constitution,” the South Carolinian retorted, “Religion and humanity had nothing to do with this question; interest alone is the governing principle with nations.” Rutledge suggested that if Northerners would only “consult their interest, they will not oppose the increase of slaves, which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers.” He was correct in predicting that the Union as a whole would continue to support at least the domestic slave trade, and that northern merchants would continue to prosper from slavery in the South. As for limits on the trade, Rutledge made clear his constituents’ opposition: “The people of the slave States will never be such fools to give up so important an interest.”73

Rutledge, like many other whites who supported slavery, possessed only a selective understanding of human liberty. A representative South Carolinian, he had begun his political career at age twenty-one when he became a member of the colony’s General Assembly. He served as a delegate to the First Continental Congress (in 1774), president of the lower house of the legislature (1778), and governor of the state (1778–1782). He eventually resumed his seat in the assembly and went on to represent the state at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. He ended his career with a brief stint as chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. His older brother Edward was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a fierce critic of anyone who proposed to arm the slaves. Both Rutledges were wealthy slaveholders. John spoke on behalf of all patriot planters when he likened the subordination of the colonies to the Crown to a

process of enslavement. Addressing the General Assembly in April 1776, he declared that “no man, who is worthy of life, liberty, or property,” would fail to join the cause when he realized that the only choices were “absolute unconditional submission, and the most abject slavery, or, a defence becoming men born to freedom.” All over South Carolina white men were rallying to the cry “We rather choose to die Freemen than to live Slaves, bound by Laws in the formation of which we have no participation.”74

Rutledge and other patriots rested their case for independence on the principle of self-interest; they spoke and wrote much about the loss of their own liberties, a prospect made all the more horrifying by their intimate familiarity with bondage. Yet those fears provoked virtually no doubts about the institution of slavery per se. In their failure to connect their own grievances against unbridled authority with the grievances of their enslaved workers, revolutionary South Carolinians were not so hypocritical as they were oblivious to the glaring contradiction: for them, self-interest was all, and a common humanity counted for nothing. Moreover, in the process of defending the South’s commitment to slavery, Rutledge made no attempt to claim that the enslaved themselves deserved such treatment by virtue of their race or anything else; the institution of bondage existed because white men profited from it and relied upon it, not because people of African descent were fit for no better.75

Like their claims for liberty, patriots’ defense of slavery rested on a basic assumption about their rights as Englishmen—rights that Africans and their descendants conspicuously lacked. When John Rutledge and other planters cited “natural rights” as a justification for rebellion, they tended to affix the qualifier “for Englishmen” only. During the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, which spurred the colonists to demand “no taxation without representation,” soon-to-be patriots pointed out that it was not all people, but only “British subjects” who were “entitled to the inestimable rights of the same laws and customs, founded on the reason and common sense of mankind.” In one of the opening rhetorical salvos of the Revolution, William Henry Drayton (writing as “Freeman”) likewise claimed that what he called “the fundamental right of Englishmen is that residuum of natural liberty, which is not required by the laws of society to be sacrificed to public convenience.” Drayton indignantly asked, “Why should not the English Colonists in America, enjoy the same national rights, which the English Colonists in Ireland possess?” The Americans were certainly not calling for the political equality of children with their parents, wives with their husbands, or enslaved men and women with their masters. Nor did Rutledge and his peers aspire to a form of democracy that would presume the equality of the Lowcountry elite with the backcountry rabble. Some hierarchies and forms of subjection were “natural” and just, whereas others were “unnatural” and unjust. To the South Carolinians, then, their birthright as Englishmen—and not some putative universal humanity—allowed them to lay claim to freedom from the Crown.76

At the same time that Revolutionary Lowcountry leaders were promoting their own self-interest, few could plead ignorance of contemporary antislavery arguments. One such argument came in the form of the bold actions of their own slaves who absconded during the war. Another came in the form of John Laurens’s pleadings to his well-born neighbors. The outspoken Laurens was no wide-eyed evangelical preacher or crackpot visionary. Born in 1754, the son of Henry Laurens, one of the wealthiest men in the British North American colonies, John studied in Geneva and London between 1772 and 1776 and returned home a confirmed patriot. In 1777 he became an aide-de-camp of General Washington. While serving in the northern theater of war, he took note

of the heroic actions of black soldiers who had enlisted in the Continental Army and in state regiments sponsored by New York and Rhode Island. Gradually, he devised a plan radical in its simplicity: to turn slaves into soldiers and emancipate them for their service. His father expressed skepticism: “I abhor slavery,” the older man wrote in 1776, but as for emancipation, “great powers oppose me—the Laws & Customs of my Country, my own & the avarice of my Country Men. What will my children say, if I deprive them of so much estate?”77

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FIGURE 2.2 A notice published on April 26, 1760, in the Charles Town Gazette by Henry Laurens’s firm, Austin, Laurens & Appleby, one of the colony’s leading importers of slaves and exporters of rice, indigo, deerskins, and naval stores. The advertisement seeks to allay planters’ fears that, along with slaves, they would be introducing the scourge of smallpox into their households. Planters understood that they paid a high price for the colony’s dependence on slavery: their own indebtedness and widespread fears of disease, as well as violent resistance and rebellion on the part of their bound workers. COURTESY NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY.

In 1778 he had his answer to that question, when John Laurens requested his father “cede me a number of your able bodied men slaves, instead of leaving me a fortune.” In asking for an early inheritance consisting of human property instead of money, John aimed to mold these black men into a fighting force of honorable men. Such an effort, he believed, would “bring about a two- fold good; first, I would advance those who are unjustly deprived of the rights of mankind to a state which would be a proper gradation between abject slavery and perfect liberty, and besides I would reinforce the defenders of liberty with a number of gallant soldiers.” John Laurens believed that his father’s enslaved laborers had the potential to represent the American cause with distinction. Despite their currently debased condition, blacks were, he wrote, “capable of aspiring to the rights of men by noble exertions, if some friend of mankind would point the road, and give them a prospect of success.” Laurens was horrified that rebels against the Crown would continue to enrich themselves and indulge their tastes for fine things by colluding in “the bloody wars excited in Africa,” wars intended “to furnish America with the slaves—the groans of despairing multitudes, toiling for the luxuries of merciless tyrants.”78

John Laurens presented his plan to enlist and then emancipate slaves before the South Carolina General Assembly (of which he was a member), where it was summarily crushed. Laurens had fully expected “that monstrous popular prejudice, open-mouthed against me,” but he failed to anticipate the extent of the scorn that the elite would heap upon him; its members made certain, in his father’s words, that his “black Air Castle is blown up, with contemptuous huzzas,” not once but twice. In successive debates the question turned on blacks’ potential for violence, rather than on any putative shortcomings among them in terms of their temperamental or intellectual capacity for freedom. In early 1782 the General Assembly defeated the proposal for the second and last time. Christopher Gadsden condemned the scheme as a “very dangerous and impolitic step.” Overall, planters “received [it] with horror,” in the words of patriot David Ramsay. Remarking on the 100 votes against the measure and the 12 or 15 in favor of it, Edward Rutledge, “very much alarmed on the Occasion,” expressed relief: “Upon a fair full Argument, people in general returned to their Senses, & the Business ended.” John Laurens died on August 27, 1782, killed during one of the last and largely meaningless skirmishes between American troops and British soldiers outside Charles Town. His proposal had gone down amid cries of

ridicule and derision, but the assemblymen believed they had given those ideas a “fair full Argument” before rejecting them.79

Whites’ resistance to black liberty remained entrenched throughout the war and its aftermath; yet at least some slaveholders came to believe that the Revolutionary project mandated that Americans devise some rationale to justify the harsh exploitation of blacks as well as their exclusion from the body politic. Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson, architect of the nation’s conception of liberty and a slaveholder himself, speculated about whether black people were inherently less intelligent and imaginative than whites, and whether they could and should be barred from civic life on that basis. Jefferson certainly understood that blacks’ historic grievances set them apart from whites; their resentments were real and well founded. At the same time, he set about generalizing about all “black” people, even as increasing numbers (his own children among them) had both African and European ancestry. In contrast, his South Carolina counterparts developed no theories of black inferiority, for they were not in the business (as Jefferson was) of reconciling Enlightenment theories of liberty with self-interested theories of the limits of liberty. Rather, Lowcountry planters saw enslaved people on a continuum of dangerous groups whose interests were antithetical to their own. If blacks were commodities, they nonetheless also exhibited behaviors that likened them to Indians and impoverished whites, other groups at odds with propertied white men.80

All three of these subordinate groups proved resistant to discipline and disruptive of the established order. Skin color alone did not connote inferiority in either intelligence or resourcefulness. Enslaved people were (according to their masters) smart and artful in the crafts of deceit and disguise. Indians were barbarous savages, and yet their “natural” impulses made them “politic, warlike, and jealous of their independence.” Backcountry whites as a group were little better than “horse thieves,” the “scum of the universe,” with the traders among them “a Shame to Humanity, and the Disgrace of Christianity.” John Rutledge called them “a pack of beggars.” At times poor white militiamen seemed incorrigible, and in fact the complaints about in-subordinate troops echoed complaints about recalcitrant slaves. According to one officer, “When a soldier shows so great a contempt of discipline as to break through the orders that are issued, he is easily led on to commit the greatest offenses”—stealing, succumbing to drink, and “meanly skulking from his duty,” chief among them. When in the summer of 1782 Governor Matthews had complained to Arthur Middleton that “relaxness in discipline … has really grown into licentiousness,” he was referring to American troops, but he just as well could have been referring to slaves. By that time so many militiamen were deserting and “refus[ing] to do their duty” that officers were reporting them “collectively,” rather than individually by name.81

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By this time black men and women were weighing their options as the British prepared to evacuate Charles Town. Victorious patriot masters had been reduced to cajoling and threatening fugitives who were pondering whether to stay in familiar surroundings or to cast their lot with the departing British. Using “every argument” he could think of, Christopher Gadsden finally promised his escaped slaves Billy, Sam, and Nancy that they would receive a “pardon” if they returned to him; at the same time, he was secretly arranging for them to be “taken immediately into custody” if they did not comply. In early November a board of examiners gave 260 laborers the choice of either returning to their owners or, on the basis of British lieutenant colonel James

Moncrief’s testimony, receiving a British certificate of protection from the claims of their former masters, having been deemed (in official parlance) “obnoxious” to their owners by virtue of their service to the British. Moncrief was hoping to send some of this latter group to St. Lucia as military laborers. Gadsden eventually cornered several blacks he knew—perhaps his own former slaves on the British payroll, including Caesar, a laborer for the Artillery Corps, and Scipio, who worked for the Quarter Master General. He reported, though, they “told me with an air of insolence they were not going back.”82

British officer Alexander Leslie, now a general, assumed the daunting task of categorizing workers as he contemplated freeing some of them: “sequestered” workers who had belonged to rebel owners and lived on plantations now abandoned, and blacks who were either the legal property of loyalists or attached to soldiers or civilians as “servants.” Admitting he was “embarrassed how to dispose” of the sequestered slaves, Leslie was hoping to raise some cash by selling them. By far the largest proportion of the estimated 9,000 blacks to leave the city with the British were slaves of loyalists bound for East Florida, the West Indies, or England. As for the rest, the Americans demanded that Leslie return to their original owners all black men, women, and children held by the Crown either as waged or as enslaved laborers. Leslie agreed at first, and then reneged, on the pretext that his adversaries were still holding three captured British soldiers. Even as he was winding down operations, he needed black workers for the massive undertaking of removing troops, horses, provisions, and artillery to the new British garrison in Halifax; because many soldiers were ill, blacks had to fill their places. Meanwhile, Moncrief ordered his workers to dismantle the same batteries they had recently built, lest the Americans try to attack the departing fleet. In fact, the evacuation that day was uneventful; apparently the Americans feared the departing enemy would torch the city if provoked.83

Many blacks formerly belonging to patriots remained enslaved, now beholden to new loyalist owners. Leslie acknowledged that “officers long in this country look on negroes as their property … and every officer wishes to include his slave into the number to be brought off. They pretend them spys, or guides, and of course obnoxious, or under promises of freedom” from some high- ranking general. Some black people, including Mary Postell, who had worked under Moncrief’s supervision and was now preparing to leave the city on her own, decided to attach themselves as “servants” to departing loyalists. In contrast, other blacks slipped away from their masters who were preparing to board ship. Of the 5,327 black men and women who left Charles Town on December 14, perhaps 1,200 were free or of an indeterminate status.84

Forming a small sample of enslaved men and women who scattered outside South Carolina in the final stages of the war, workers from the wealthy—and revolutionary—Middleton family left for Georgia, East Florida, Jamaica, St. John, Indian Territory, and New York. Some died en route to these places; for others these disparate destinations were only way stations. On December 14 fifty of Charles Town’s black emigrants sailed for New York City. There they met hundreds of formerly enslaved South Carolinians who had converged from different places in the course of the war. Some had come north with the British—in August 1776, in the wake of the initial, failed assault on Charles Town; with General Clinton, after the successful siege of 1780; or on any one of the numerous transports that sailed between the two port cities between 1780 and 1782. Others had escaped from owners who had resettled temporarily in Virginia (where authorities exempted slave imports from a per capita tax) or Philadelphia.85

New York was a magnet for fugitives, a place where they might find paid employment and a measure of safety. Some former Lowcountry slaves labored for the Black Pioneers as teamsters, carpenters, and longshoremen, building temporary housing for the troops and transporting large quantities of tents, baggage, clothing, and artillery off and on ships. They also found jobs cleaning streets, shoeing horses, and repairing wagons. With an estimated 50,000 loyalist refugees and 18,000 provincial, British, and German soldiers, the city afforded plentiful work for black women as domestics and cooks and, predictably, as hostesses of so-called Ethiopian Balls. Yet like Charles Town, New York offered only temporary security for many fugitives.86

Sometime before 1782 Boston King had boarded a British man-of-war sailing from Charles Town and disembarked in New York, where he tried to find work as a carpenter. He later recalled, “But for want of tools [I] was obliged to relinquish it, and enter in [domestic] service.” It was around this time that he met his soon-to-be wife, Violet, a dozen years older than he was and the former slave of a Wilmington, North Carolina, owner. The couple moved to New Jersey, where King labored for a series of white men who paid him little or nothing at all; out of desperation he went to work on a pilot boat and then a whale boat. In his misery, he wrote, “I called to remembrance the great deliverances the Lord had wrought for me, and besought him to save me this once, and I would serve him all the days of my life.” Seeing a young friend brutally punished, King determined to free himself once again, and using a stolen boat, he and Violet managed to escape to New York. There he met long-lost acquaintances, presumably men and women he had known from South Carolina, who now “rejoiced to see me once more restored to liberty, and joined me in praising the Lord for his mercy and goodness.”87

In 1783 a rumor swept through the city that the British intended to return all slaves to their masters. According to King, “This dreadful rumour filled us all with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our masters coming from Virginia, North-Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” Among the persistent owners was South Carolina’s Rawlins Lowndes, who managed to track down a black woman working for the New York Engineer Department. Rawlins appealed to the highest echelons of British command, claiming that that the woman “had raised his children and had the care of their infancy.” When questioned, however, she gave an account that differed “materially” from that of Lowndes, but a British officer eventually handed her over to the white man. Other perils awaited blacks who had taken refuge in the northern city. New York’s thriving slave market catered especially to departing loyalists who wanted to take with them experienced house servants. Some former slaves who had made the arduous journey to New York on foot now found themselves sold and forcibly transported to London or Jamaica.88

Fears of reenslavement help to account for the 1,136 men, 914 women, and 740 children who sailed from New York from April through November of 1783; most (2,775) were bound for Nova Scotia. Some, like Boston King, received from British general Samuel Birch a certificate of protection, “which dispelled all our fears, and filled us with gratitude.” Together with 133 other black people, he and his wife were aboard L’Abondance when it departed in July for Port Roseway. The passengers hailed from states up and down the Eastern Seaboard. One county in particular was overrepresented—Norfolk, Virginia, with at least some of the blacks former slaves of the Willoughbys, probably descendants of the family of Symon Overzee’s second wife.89

Of the 418 South Carolina blacks who left New York during the final months of the British

occupation—including 21 free people of color and 397 former slaves representing almost 300 different owners—only a few went, in the parlance of British emigration officials, “on their own bottom,” that is, unencumbered by potential claims on their bodies. General George Washington was outraged at what he considered the flagrant theft of valuable property belonging to the victorious Americans, a violation of the Treaty of Paris the year before. Still, it was black people’s value as laborers, more than any considerations of humanity or justice, that motivated British officials to help them escape from New York. The last boat to sail for Nova Scotia left shortly after the official evacuation of troops, for blacks had been forced to play a major part in the garrison’s final, concerted wartime effort—to remove men, horses, livestock, and military equipment out of the city. The British had even decided to dismantle a whole fort and take the pieces with them, and for this particular effort, too, they had to rely on black workers.90

Washington’s protests, and his largely thwarted attempt to restore his compatriots’ lost property, account for the personal descriptions of emigrants that read like truncated advertisements for fugitive slaves; British officials thought they might someday have to calculate the value of each person and compensate former American owners. Thus, Boston King, then twenty-three, was described as a “stout fellow” and Violet, thirty-five, as a “stout wench.” Arthur Middleton lost John Banbury, thirty-eight, and his wife, Lucy, forty, also a “stout fellow” and “a stout wench,” respectively. Henry Middleton lost Harry, fifty, “worn out,” and Sarah, twenty-five, “stout wench with a child 6 months old.” Among the ten persons formerly belonging to Henry and his sons Arthur and Thomas were three (George, Bob, and John) now attached to Hessian officers and two (Charles Middleton and Thomas Thompson) claimed by loyalists, John Nash and a Mr. Ellis, respectively. Other black émigrés belonged to generals, lieutenants, cornets, captains, majors, and even a trumpeter.91

The Nova Scotia–bound group was only a small fraction of South Carolina fugitives, yet they were representative of those buffeted by wartime upheavals. David George and Boston King would spread the gospel in Canada and beyond. Some émigrés, like Dinah Mitchel, thirty, traveling with her baby and with her son, Frank, ten, had managed to stay together with at least one kin member. The group as a whole had a more balanced sex ratio (60 men to 40 women) than that of short-distance runaways, suggesting that more families had fled intact during the Revolution, compared to the prevalence of single male runways under slavery. Some had escaped from their owners as many as eight years before, when the royal governor took his leave from South Carolina, but others did not break free until the last boat left Charles Town in December 1783. Some assumed new names. Of the 274 who listed a last name, 155 (56 percent) gave a name different from that of their former master. In other cases the last name was an approximation of the owner’s. Thus, General Benjamin Huger’s slave Ned became Ned Ugee, and Henry Middleton’s Henry became Henry Minton.

For the British, Nova Scotia was a relatively close destination to store equipment for future expeditions and to provide homesteads for disbanded troops. Officers were awarded land grants of two hundred acres each; privates, fifty acres. Some black people qualified for twenty acres each, but of the 3,550 blacks transported to Canada, only one-tenth ever received land. Finding themselves on rocky, forested soil, they had to make do with the axes and spades allotted to them; they could cut trees, but without saws they could not plane them into boards. Most barely survived the stormy winter living in hovels made of saplings covered with bark. White settlers, no doubt bitter about their own plight, subjected blacks to draconian punishments for minor

infractions: two hundred lashes for petty larceny, hanging for stealing a bag of potatoes. Here were black men and women who had literally slaved for the British during the war, who had a rightful claim to British citizenship, and now had no hope of wringing a livelihood from Nova Scotia’s snow-covered landscape. Mary Postell had worked for Moncrief in Charles Town and agreed to work as a servant for loyalist Jesse Gray. He claimed her as a slave, paid her nothing, and sold her two children. Suing for her freedom, she had her lawyer call to the court Scipio Waring, who had worked with her in Charles Town. While Waring was testifying on her behalf, his house burned to the ground in a fire that also killed his child. The judges in the case ultimately vindicated Gray and his claim on Mary Postell.92

Boston King and David George attempted to transform tiny black settlements in Nova Scotia from outposts of suffering into congregations of believers, King for the Methodists and George for the Baptists. In the new settlement of Birch Town, Violet King led the way for her husband. Later, he expressed gratitude that her conversion had “set her soul at perfect liberty.” He wrote, “The joy and happiness which she now experienced, were too great to be concealed and she was enabled to testify on the goodness and living kindness of the Lord, [with] such liveliness and power, that many were convinced of her testimony, and sincerely sought the Lord.” By 1785 Boston King had embarked on his own mission to bring nonbelievers to God. Yet preaching did not earn him money; and as time went on and the residents of Birch Town “killed and [ate] their dogs and cats; and poverty and distress prevailed on every side,” he sought work as a chest- maker, a fisherman, and a seaman. In the process, he found himself thrown on the mercy of white men who used the Lord’s name in vain with impunity.93

In spreading the Gospel, David George also “found the white people were against me,” and though his Shelburne church had grown from several dozen members within a few months, he could not feed his wife and children. When he addressed a congregation of both blacks and whites, he roused the ire of his white neighbors. Throughout the province disbanded soldiers grew increasingly hostile toward the blacks in their midst, men and women who would work for starvation wages and who demanded equality with white people. George and his family had to flee Shelburne when forty or fifty former soldiers “came with the tackle of ships, and turned my dwelling house, and every one of [his black neighbors’] houses, quite over, and the meeting house they would have burned down, had not the ringleader of the mob himself prevented it.” George continued to preach, even when a mob “came and beat me with sticks and drove me into the swamp.” He eventually removed his family to Birch Town.94

In 1792 King and George’s village furnished half of all the Nova Scotia recruits to a new colony on the coast of West Africa, Sierra Leone, established five years before as a haven for freed slaves. Boston King joined the emigrants in hope of “contributing to the best of my poor ability, in spreading the knowledge of Christianity in that country.” In February 1792 fifteen ships carried 1,196 people, fully one-third of the Canadian Maritime black population, to Freetown, a port on the Atlantic Ocean. Among the blacks relocating were a number from South Carolina in addition to King and David George. Several, including Lucy Banbury, John Kizell, and Frank Peters, now returned to the continent of their birth. There, the self-proclaimed “Nova Scotians” forged a new identity for themselves, as “Africans” who were also Christians, a chosen people fierce in their defiance of craven white authorities in the United States and other places throughout the Atlantic world. Yet rent by internal disputes and the contempt of white officials, beset by conflicts with surrounding Native groups, and decimated by disease and extreme

weather—Violet King was one of the early casualties—the colony faltered and gradually lost its idealism.95

Within a few years, denominational rivals George and King had traveled separately from Sierra Leone to England, where they told their dramatic stories of flight and faith and became objects of curiosity among white clergy and intellectuals. For King, preaching in an English church allowed him to see the congregants as his brothers and sisters in Christ and to overcome his “uneasy distrust and shyness” toward whites (whom he pointedly refrained from calling “our enemies”) in general. Here finally was a community of the spirit where distinctions based on skin color and ethnicity receded and different groups of people embraced a common humanity. In 1796, after a two-year stay in England, King returned to Sierra Leone, where he remarried and resumed his evangelizing among a Native group, the Sherbro. He and his second wife died six years later.96

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The American Revolution had highlighted deep fissures among groups of people who called themselves “white,” at the same time making manifest the basic values shared by whites and blacks alike. Boston King was a risk-taker, a quality prized by the planters who invested so much money in land and slaves in the hope of a great return. Black people, too, were savvy traders and lovers of fine clothes. The gruesome deaths that awaited black preachers of the Gospel were testament to the power of ideas that bound together the enslaved and their masters as fellow Christians. The light skin color of increasing numbers of black workers challenged the idea that Africans and their descendants remained a group apart from all whites and exposed the falsity of the notion of enslaved peoples as a separate “race.” Nevertheless, ultimately, white South Carolinians lacked empathy, or, to use an eighteenth-century term, “sensibility”—a modern view of the world that would have allowed them to rise above their own narrowly defined interests and appreciate the sufferings of other men and women. Black people were exploited by wealthy slaveholders because that exploitation was critical to whites’ identity, status, and physical comfort and because they had the means—the power and the money—to do so. Like seventeenth-century Maryland planters, South Carolinians saw no need to offer an intellectual rationalization for slavery to themselves or anyone else.97

For the southern states generally, the end of the war meant the simultaneous expansion of “liberty” and slavery, as staple-crop cotton agriculture spread into the upcountry, beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Seeking new markets, fresh lands, and “efficient” cultivation techniques, planters presided over an explosion in the number of slaves through natural reproduction and reopened avenues of importation, eventually “re-Africanizing” the Lower South workforce. Annual cotton exports climbed, from 10,000 pounds in 1790 to 6 million pounds ten years later. By 1810 half of all enslaved laborers in the state toiled west of the Lowcountry and a unified class of white men presided over a slave owners’ republic. Within a couple of decades South Carolinians would be forced to defend their “peculiar institution” against increasingly vocal northern abolitionists, and only then would the sons and daughters of patriots begin to invoke the so-called imperatives of race to justify their own freedom at the expense of the enslaved.98

A year after the withdrawal of British forces, the city of Charleston (renamed in 1783 to downplay the significance of the monarch that it originally intended to honor) enacted “An

Ordinance for the better ordering and governing of Negroes, and of other Slaves, and of Free Negroes, Mulattoes and Mustizoes, within the City of Charleston.” The law amounted to a long list of familiar complaints about unruly men and women of color—regardless of legal status or phenotype—hiring themselves out unsupervised, trading in the market and throughout the city street without a license, renting rooms and keeping shops on their own, fencing goods, and assembling freely “for the purpose of merriment during all hours of the day and night.” The law’s stipulation that no more than seven male slaves gather together at any one time failed to stem the rumor or threat of slave conspiracies. In the event of any real or suspected rebellion, South Carolina elites, like other Southerners, would abandon their states’ rights principles and demand that federal troops come to their aid.99

Whether in the North or South, the new states were united in their desire for cheap labor, in their fear of impoverished “disorderly” people, and in their conviction that the nation was a “white” one: the Naturalization Act of 1790 decreed that only “free white people” could enter the country and aspire to citizenship. The act signaled the demise of indentured servitude and other forms of bound labor among whites and the simultaneous elevation of slavery as a labor system apart from all others. This original codification of citizenship, then, made explicit the categorization of all blacks, whether enslaved or free, as outsiders deprived of even the hope of political equality and protection under the law. The Revolution had fortified the institution of bondage and highlighted the legal liabilities of all people of African descent residing in this newly independent nation, even if their forebears also included Europeans or Native Americans. Indeed, the white supremacist impulses of Lowcountry planters were less a regional aberration of an otherwise glorious cause than a variation on a national theme that shaped the contours of the new republic everywhere and the contours of the nation for generations to come.

THREE

ELLEANOR ELDRIDGE

“Complexional Hindrance” in Antebellum Rhode Island

Demolishing a house with one’s bare hands in a matter of minutes takes considerable effort; the task is, by definition, hard work. Demolishing several houses by hand over a few hours takes not only hard work, but also a concerted sense of purpose, especially if the perpetrators are determined to destroy a whole community and not just the buildings that compose it. Eyewitnesses to the destruction of the Providence, Rhode Island, neighborhood known as Hard Scrabble on the night of Wednesday, October 18, 1824, provided a vivid account of the physical exertion necessary to this grim undertaking. The men who caused the mayhem, together with their lawyers, testified to the political will that drove this perverse kind of “work.”

That night a mob of several dozen young men labored mightily to dismantle seven of Hard Scrabble’s buildings and damage several others. Jesse Sweet, owner of a dwelling left “badly shattered” by the attack, recalled, “It was pretty hard work to pull the houses down,” and “those engaged appeared to labour hard.” One of these “workers,” Nathaniel Metcalf, “made himself very busy,” in Sweet’s words, and another, Oliver Cummins, boasted that “he had worked like a good fellow.” A town watchman observed what he called “the proceedings” by “keeping as still as possible”; he returned the next morning and found the area “a complete ruin, the houses demolished, the inhabitants without shelter and everything in ruins.”1

Providence authorities called the event a “riot” perpetrated by a “mob” against the tiny community, which consisted of no more than twenty structures. Located in the northwestern corner of the city, the ramshackle neighborhood of Hard Scrabble was a place where sailors, construction workers, and other patrons of its “halls” and “disorderly houses” (small shops and brothels) could dance all night to the fiddle and tambourine and find cheap lodgings, food, alcohol, and sex. Yet far from a spontaneous riot, the proceedings that night in October reveal a considerable amount of purposeful labor, a planned attack on what respectable folk considered a noisy, disreputable place, a “notorious nuisance.” Assembling at 7:30 in the evening, the fifty to sixty men who reduced Hard Scrabble to splinters used their hands to rip studs and joists from the buildings; but the rioters had also come armed with clubs and axes, the better to chop off shingles and split beams, and with their own lanterns, the better to assess the task before them on a moonless night. Exhausted from their labors, the rioters at one point “took a vote and finally concluded to adjourn until Saturday evening,” a nod to democracy in action.2

In antebellum New England white men took up bricks and cudgels in brutal attacks on individual blacks and on whole black communities in what was at heart a fierce, local competition for what many considered to be finite resources: jobs, real estate, public schooling, political rights. At the same time, northern white men were relying on the lawmaker’s handiwork and the lawyer’s brief to craft new ideas about free people of color generally, men and women only recently emancipated from slavery. These emerging ideas held that even free blacks remained “naturally” poor and inclined toward criminal behavior. Whites regardless of class or ethnic loyalties fashioned their own identity by contrasting themselves to blacks—hence, the democratic spirit of the rioters, convinced of their own righteousness and secure in the conviction that they were doing white people’s work on that dark night in 1824.

Authorities brought to trial the men who had labored so hard to destroy Hard Scrabble, but the proceedings denied justice to the victims of the mob’s fury. During Oliver Cummins’s trial, attorney Joseph L. Tillinghast spent less time defending his client than he did condemning the black people who lived, labored, and allegedly squandered their money in Hard Scrabble. Tillinghast considered it obvious that “we must all agree the destruction of this place is a benefit to the morals of the community,” for it was a refuge of prostitutes, thieves, and fencers of stolen goods. Rather than subject the defendants to the humiliation of a trial, the lawyer intoned, the upright citizens of Providence should applaud them for their “meritorious and praiseworthy act.” In his summation, Tillinghast announced with feeling, “Gentlemen of the Jury—The renowned city of Hard-Scrabble lies buried in its magnificent ruins! Like the ancient Babylon it has fallen with all its graven images, its tables of impure oblation, its idolatrous rights and sacrifices.”3

Attempting to counter Tillinghast’s bombastic appeal, Attorney General Dutee J. Pearce pointed out that if outraged persons were determined to shut down a brothel, they possessed the legal and peaceful means to do so. Nevertheless, the all-white jury acquitted Cummins. They found Metcalf and one other defendant guilty but recommended the two be discharged anyway, and the presiding justices obliged. Pearce then dropped all charges against several other men.4

Despite the moral panic stoked by Providence authorities, Hard Scrabble was not an all-black enclave, nor was it primarily a site of vice and crime. Black and white shopkeepers, seamen, and laborers lived there, as did whites and people of Narragansett Indian descent, all patrons of the neighborhood’s refreshment stands and grog shops. Some boardinghouse owners served as go- betweens for their customers looking for work and ship captains looking for crew members, making Hard Scrabble a rough sort of labor exchange. Attracted to its cheap land and rents, poor people and their families built modest dwellings or occupied close quarters in its shanties and tenements. Jesse Sweet, who testified against Cummins and other defendants, was white. At the same time, the court denied a voice—either individual or collective—to Hard Scrabble residents like Christopher Hall and other people of color who lost their “halls” and homes to the ax- wielders. True, men and women of various ancestry worked, ate, fought, danced, and fornicated together in Hard Scrabble, which was at heart a boisterous, impoverished community, but it was also home to industrious laborers who could afford no better.5

Nevertheless, local newspapers (as well as defense lawyers) framed the night of violence in a way that produced a dramatic narrative of respectable white men purging Providence of disorderly blacks—presumably all former slaves unable to lay claim to a glorious recent past of fighting against and triumphing over British rule. In the months before the riot, the Providence Gazette had alerted its readers to what it considered an alarming inmigration of poor blacks into the city, vagrants the paper described as eager to “live on the labours and earnings of others, and to riot in dissipation and idleness.” Residents must do their “duty,” warned the editors of the paper, so that “the number of these locusts, who consume the fruits of industry and labours of our citizens, may be easily ascertained, and they will be driven from our confines.”6

Popular hostility toward Hard Scrabble posited contradictory claims: black parasites feeding off an honest white citizenry but also rapacious black predators wresting privileges from white rivals. The tensions that animated the Hard Scrabble mob had provoked violence elsewhere in Providence in the days leading up to the incident. On a downtown bridge the Sunday before the riot, black and white youths had fought each other in a pitched battle, throwing bricks and

wielding clubs and bludgeons. Apparently, the whites were responding to a provocation by blacks, who were, according to another local paper, the Beacon, “determined that they would possess and maintain the side walk, at all hazards, and had declared that they would not yield an inch to any ‘white face’ whoever he might be.” Sidewalks were a relatively recent innovation in Providence, but white pedestrians had wasted little time seizing the inside of the walkway, forcing black men, women, and children into the muddy, carcass-strewn, excrement-littered center of the street. According to the Beacon, the Sunday night fight “ended with a victory most signal and complete on the part of the negroes,” a win “that may embolden them to make a more formidable effort to gain an ascendancy over the town.” Whites therefore should seek to control these “cast-off and outlawed” intruders, the Beacon urged, so that blacks would no longer find in Providence “an asylum safe and secure, in which they can dwell and riot without undergoing the fatigue of labour.”7

The Hard Scrabble rioters had intended to dispossess modest black householders and shopkeepers and force them to flee. Widower Christopher Hall supported his children by chopping wood; he was, in the words of one who knew him, “a pious man, bearing a good character.” The mob dismantled his house, leaving only the roof intact, and then seized his possessions, carrying them to nearby Pawtucket and selling them at auction. Defiantly, the black man returned to his wrecked dwelling, pulled the roof down over his cellar, and lived the winter with his children in this covered hole in the ground. A group of white women offered to care for his children, but he refused. A year and a half later Hall took his family and immigrated to Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 to sponsor the settlement of free people of color and former slaves in Africa. In contrast to colonization efforts in Sierra Leone borne of abolitionists’ revolutionary fervor the century before, the ACS operated under the assumption that blacks, now labeled by many white Americans an inferior “race,” could not and should not live in the United States as a truly free people. Most northern blacks condemned the ACS; they sought full citizenship rights in the United States rather than deportation masquerading as repatriation.8

It was the plight of Christopher Hall and his children, not the carousing of midnight revelers, that revealed most starkly the hardships of black people in Providence and other northern communities in the 1820s. Throughout the post-Revolutionary North, with the practice of slavery codified in the country’s new Constitution but challenged by an increasing number of free blacks and their allies, many states passed legislation that would provide for eventual emancipation. However, these states also offset abolitionist legislation with “Black Codes” that denied blacks fundamental rights and limited their opportunities to work and to move in search of work. In 1784 Rhode Island had provided for the gradual freeing of its slaves. Yet Providence continued to “warn out” (i.e., turn away) recent black in-migrants, to pass ordinances targeting black drinkers and prostitutes specifically, and to bar black children from public schools whether or not their parents were taxpaying homeowners. In the face of demands from propertied blacks that their children be allowed to attend the public schools—because “taxation and representation went together”—city authorities in 1800 stopped taxing black householders altogether. Two years before the Hard Scrabble incident, the state had also disenfranchised black male property owners, seen as swing voters in closely divided elections. Like other northern states that revoked black male suffrage in the early nineteenth century, Rhode Island feared that granting black men citizenship rights would only accelerate rates of black inmigration. Cried a state legislator, “Shall a nigger be allowed to go to the polls and tie my vote? No, Mr. Speaker, it can’t be.”9

Many northern whites regarded free blacks as a social oxymoron of sorts. Since the vast majority of them were poor, whites assumed they must have been unprepared for freedom, and this view simultaneously reflected and reinforced a discriminatory social division of labor in the North. To be sure, such stereotypes also benefited in material ways the whites who held them. By keeping blacks in menial jobs permanently, whites might reserve new and better opportunities for themselves and ensure that someone else did the ill-paying, disagreeable work. In the 1820s Providence was a bustling center of transatlantic commerce and also an engine of broader regional industrial development fueled by textile mills and other manufacturing establishments throughout New England. Yet employers refused to hire blacks as machine operatives or as skilled workers. Most blacks scrounged for a living, the men as seamen, teamsters, manual laborers, peddlers, errand runners, servants, and scavengers; the women as laundresses and cooks. Compared to the colonial period, when many enslaved workers possessed specialized skills, in the increasingly industrialized early Republic fewer and fewer blacks were producing any tangible objects; instead, they sailed, hauled, scrubbed, chopped wood, cooked, watered down the streets, and whitewashed buildings. That so many waited for work on street corners and bridges, or worked outside for wages as peddlers and street cleaners, or went door-to-door to beg for jobs or hawk their services as night men and chimney sweeps, made them vulnerable to routine harassment from whites. William J. Brown, a black community leader, noted that he and his neighbors “had little or no protection” as they wended their way through the gauntlet of whites lining Providence streets; mobs were “the order of the day, and the poor colored people were the sufferers.” While the vast majority of emancipated black people remained poor, the rest of the region—and nation—celebrated dynamic growth and “progress.”10

The attack on Hard Scrabble demonstrated nothing less than whites’ attempts to purge Providence of black people altogether; by this time, according to the emerging white “racial” imagination, the former slaves and their descendants had already rendered themselves superfluous to the body politic and to the new industrial system. Some Hard Scrabble rioters worked hard that night out of sheer exhilaration, for the hurrahs of the crowd and the thrill of it all, but others labored out of fear and anger. In the Northeast the factory system signaled disruptions to deep-seated forms of authority within families and also within the political arena. Fathers must now yield to the mill owners who employed their children and enforced a harsh industrial work discipline. Unskilled whites found themselves for the first time thrust into competition with free people of color vying for jobs as canal diggers and railroad construction workers. At the same time, the 1820s and 1830s marked a transition in the nation’s political system, with traditional modes of deference giving way to the more popular styles of campaigning represented by the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828. In many parts of the country a newly broadened suffrage presented a distinct challenge to elites, who were accustomed to governing without courting the votes of ordinary men. Nevertheless, Rhode Island maintained uniquely onerous property qualifications for voting: in 1830 more than two-thirds of the state’s white men lacked the right to vote, a high number at odds with the new ideal of universal (white male) suffrage.11

Members of the self-proclaimed respectable laboring classes aspired to full citizenship rights, in the process distancing themselves from the unruly mix of toilers who spent their days doing ill- paid work outside and their nights carousing in places like Hard Scrabble. Presumably, the disorderly black poor represented a profound threat to prosperity and to America’s vibrant new democracy. Not surprisingly, while Joseph L. Tillinghast was representing the Hard Scrabble

defendants, he was planning to run for political office. In his condemnation of black vice, Tillinghast played to the all-white jury, but also to a larger constituency of conservative farmers and anxious tradesmen who now fell back on their skin color, ethnicity, and family history to distinguish themselves from their fellow Americans. This process of differentiation relied on the idea of race and on legislation to enforce that idea.12

Southern colonial planters had lacked the incentive to construct a rhetorical or legal apparatus to justify slavery; their power came from the barrel of a gun and the handle of a whip. In contrast, antebellum northern whites launched a concerted project to impose “order” on newly freed slaves by devising racial ideologies and enshrining those ideologies in discriminatory laws. Race was not only a means of categorizing people. It was also a multipronged strategy consisting of mob actions, pseudo-scientific pronouncements, legal statutes, and barriers to good jobs—in other words, one group’s plan of action for retaining and strengthening its economic and political power at another’s expense. Whites had much to gain from such ploys; in that regard racial ideologies were a rational response to rivalry among groups, a means to protect the privileges that derived from a particular ancestry if not a particular skin color. At the same time, these whites assumed that political rights were precious, finite resources and that to the degree that blacks benefited from equality, whites would suffer accordingly.13

Throughout the North a strident campaign to cordon off and demean the “colored” population forced black men and women to seek out each other and to build a base for political activism. If white church congregants confined blacks to upstairs galleries, if white officials barred black children from the public schools, if white Freemasons refused to admit blacks into their ranks, then “black” or “African” institutions would fill the void. By the 1820s Providence whites were watching with a mixture of amusement and alarm as people of color began to cluster in specific neighborhoods. Some Providence blacks were managing to buy property and open small shops; like their white counterparts, they formed the temperance and literary societies that were the hallmark of an emerging middle class regardless of color. They also established the African Meeting House, the Meeting Street School for Colored Children, the African Greys (a militia group), debating associations, and black Freemasons lodges. This last institution in particular, a transnational fraternal order, sought to bind together black men of talent wherever they lived. The black Masons forged wider connections among people of African descent all over the United States and the Atlantic world, with what members called their “brothers in affliction.” The group evoked natural and universal rights in its call for equality among all people and in its efforts to promote responsible leadership on the part of black men.14

In Providence blacks’ indignant public voice and their presence on the streets and in the white imagination were out of all proportion to their numbers—in 1824, the year that Hard Scrabble was attacked, the city’s black population was only 1,200 out of a total of 16,000. Through their writings, former slaves and their descendants angrily explicated new ideologies of racial differences and policies of racial exclusion. Yet they failed to agree on a concrete plan to combat a rising, regionwide tide of antiblack violence. Speaking to a Providence audience on Thanksgiving Day, 1828, Boston black preacher Hosea Easton, like a substantial contingent of black and white “friends of the colored people,” urged his listeners to earn the respect of whites: “It is no time, my young friends, to spend your time in the dance-hall. It is no time to exercise your ability in gambling. But you must lay aside all unnecessary diversion, and alter your courses. Come out of this degrading course of life; Distinguish yourselves as pious, industrious,

and intelligent men and women.” This course, according to Easton, “will demand respect from those who exalt themselves above you.”15

Not all black writers and activists agreed that their community must prove itself worthy of citizenship rights. And certainly if blacks at times exhibited raucous or untoward behavior, so, too, did many whites (the Hard Scrabble rioters constituting a notable example). In 1829 David Walker, then living in Boston, published his Appeal, a lengthy tract in which he argued that plantation slavery in the South and the sources of black misery in the so-called free North were part of a single unified system of violent labor exploitation masked as obeisance to race. Writing as an evangelical Christian and as a member of the Freemasons, Walker damned white hypocrites for making American blacks “the most wretched, degraded, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began.” He ridiculed religious and other “scientific” justifications for black oppression, citing Thomas Jefferson and other theorists in this regard; these ideas, he wrote, were little more than a ruse designed to keep black men, women, and children hard at work “as slaves and beasts of burden.” Walker was one of his generation’s most prescient and insightful critics of the nascent ideas of racial difference concocted by self-identified whites against descendants of Africans—the notion that blacks were by nature lacking in intelligence, morals, and industry. After depriving black people of schooling and access to the trades and factory work, whites claimed, perversely, that black’s impoverished state was right because it was “natural.”16

Walker simultaneously excoriated those blacks who offered what he called only “a groveling servile and abject submission to the lash of tyrants,” North and South—especially the black men of the “free” states content with “wielding the razor and cleaning boots and shoes.” And he issued a not-so-veiled threat: “The whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of them will curse the day they ever saw us.”17

Walker’s words had an ominously prophetic ring: in late summer 1831 Providence newspaper readers learned of Nat Turner’s revolt in Southampton, Virginia, when rebellious slaves and free people of color murdered an estimated sixty whites. Authorities executed Turner and fifty-five of his presumed coconspirators, and white mobs killed as many as two hundred more blacks. In the words of the Providence Patriot/Columbian Phoenix, the white victims had been sacrificed “to the savage ferocity of demons in human shape.” Compounding whites’ anxiety was the fact that some people who shared their skin color were also beginning to take up the rebels’ cause, if not their violent methods. Earlier that year Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had founded a newspaper, The Liberator, dedicated to the immediate eradication of slavery. Conservative congregational clergymen, textile mill owners, and the white laboring classes came together to oppose the emerging abolitionist movement, which, they feared, sought to cut off the flow of raw cotton northward and send millions of slaves pouring into northern cities. Whites had no trouble linking what they considered the seditious rantings of Garrison and Walker to the carnage unleashed by Turner and his followers.18

In Providence the four-day Olney’s Lane (or Snow Town) riot in September 1831 gave dramatic expression to whites’ collective anxieties—and to the limits that authorities were willing to place on white mobs like the one that had destroyed Hard Scrabble. City officials described the Olney’s Lane neighborhood in familiar terms, as a place inhabited by “idle blacks, of the lowest stamp,” a place of “midnight revels, the succession of severe and bloody affrays, and of the

frequent, bold and open riots, carrying fear and alarm into numerous respectable families.” On the evening of Wednesday, September 21, a group of six or seven seamen on shore leave from the Swedish ship Lion set out looking for trouble and perhaps for a particular black man, Richard Johnson, owner of a modest “cooky stand,” a site of raucous entertainments and frequent fistfights. A subsequent investigation highlighted the discordant noises that marked the ensuing melee—Johnson’s anguished cry, “Is this the way blacks are to live, to be obliged to defend themselves from stones?” and the crack of his pistol when he fired in defense of his establishment and killed one of the Lion’s crew. The seamen beckoned onlookers to join them, and “a great noise was made, the crowd singing and shouting” as they proceeded to tear down several buildings.19

The robust response of law enforcement authorities revealed that Olney’s Lane was no mere encore of Hard Scrabble. An estimated one thousand would-be troublemakers regrouped on Thursday night and, with alarm bells ringing in the background, fought with police officers and a hastily assembled militia force. After using axes, fire hooks, and clubs to tear down ten houses in Olney’s Lane, the rioters moved on to Snow Town, another small black neighborhood to the west, and continued their work of demolition. As the battle continued on Saturday night, 130 militiamen found themselves “assailed by stones or brick bats, and constantly insulted by shouts, hisses, and execrations.” Crowd members roared their rage as the soldiers fired a warning volley over their heads. A sheriff directed the militia captain to fire, eliciting the cry, “Fire and be damned!” Within minutes four white men—a shoemaker, a paper hanger, a bookbinder, and a sailor—lay dead or dying.20

On Sunday Joseph L. Tillinghast, selfsame lawyer for the Hard Scrabble defendants seven years before and now speaker of the state House of Representatives, moderated an emergency Providence town meeting. This time he offered no words of praise for the presumed defenders of the city’s morality. Instead, he condemned the “disorderly and riotous conduct of the mob” and lauded the “forbearance, moderation and firmness of both the civil and military authorities.” Among the wrecked buildings were two brothels, but the mob had gone too far and also attacked the holdings of prominent men, merchants, and absentee slumlords. According to the resolutions passed by the meeting over which Tillinghast presided, “It was no excuse for a mob, that the houses they assailed were inhabited by persons of ill fame, or that their tenants had on another occasion acted improperly or illegally.” The rioters had targeted law enforcement officers as well as militiamen and damaged or destroyed property belonging to leading men of the city. Within weeks officials had instituted administrative changes that would presumably allow them to respond more quickly to civil crises such as Olney’s Lane.21

By the mid-1830s it was apparent that the American political party system could no longer contain conflicts springing from “racial,” no less than class or ethnic, animosities. These tensions were metastasizing, finding expression in social and cultural forums as well as the political arena. Between 1834 and 1837 abolitionists traveled around the countryside collecting signatures on antislavery petitions and exhorting townspeople to form their own antislavery societies. These same years in Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and other cities, angry mobs screaming, “Amalgamation!”—a rallying cry among whites opposed to black equality and to black political action in any form—pillaged black neighborhoods, burned schools and churches, and beat men, women, and children. Among many whites, the carnage hardened their conviction that blacks remained a group apart, unworthy of even basic civil protections. Indeed, keeping black

newcomers out, and driving current black residents out, amounted to an act of white “self- preservation.”22

In calmer moments Providence whites acknowledged that, in the words of the Gazette after Hard Scrabble, it was unfair “to condemn our black population in the gross. They do not merit indiscriminate censure; and many of them, from long residence, are known to be sober, industrious and respectable citizens.” Yet many whites considered black property owners to be just as much a “nuisance” as their lewd and drunken counterparts. It was strivers such as William Brown—mariner, shoemaker, self-taught bookkeeper, churchgoer, and founder of self- improvement societies—who led organized resistance against white prejudice and the self- fulfilling policies it spawned.23

For all black men and women determined to avoid exorbitant rents and buy their own home, David Walker had offered a cautionary tale about “a poor man of colour, who labored night and day, to acquire a little money, and having acquired it, he invested it in a small piece of land, and got him a house erected thereon,” only to be “cheated out of his property by a white man, and driven out of door!” Continued Walker, “Can a man of colour buy a piece of land and keep it peaceably? Will not some white man try to get it from him, even if it is a mud hole?” Walker’s story revealed the well-founded conviction among blacks, then and since, that raising themselves up in society would prove a Sisyphean task so long as they lacked equal protection under the law.24

The tribulations of one Providence woman of African and Narragansett descent seemed to offer ready testimony to the truth of Walker’s words. Though associated with various “disorderly” elements merely by virtue of her dark skin, Elleanor Eldridge had kept a far distance from Hard Scrabble and Olney’s Lane in both a literal and a figurative sense. In 1824 Eldridge was thirty- nine years old, the owner of a small house in rural Warwick, Rhode Island, and a more substantial one in a largely white Providence neighborhood. She was the antithesis of the noisome pest denounced by whites. A wage earner since the age of ten, she had over the years amassed impressive real estate holdings by dint of hard work as a cow drover, egg gatherer, spinner, weaver, dairy maid, laundress, wallpaper hanger, painter, domestic servant, nurse, soap boiler, and whitewasher. Nevertheless, in the mid-1830s she fell prey to white men who intended to deprive her of the hard-won fruits of her own labor. They wielded not axes or clubs but sheriffs’ orders and judges’ decrees. And they targeted her not because of her actions or character but because of an imposed racial identity that made her uniquely vulnerable under the law and that lumped her together with all the other industrious blacks who so threatened the privileged position enjoyed by white men and women.

Yet Eldridge did not play the role of victim well. In fact, she was also thoroughly and willingly enmeshed in the hard-edged financial world of Jacksonian America as a house-rich, cash-poor owner of rental properties; an enterprising businesswoman; a speculator in city lots; a debtor adding mortgage upon mortgage; and a self-taught litigator meeting suit with countersuit. From this perspective, Eldridge was not the poor woman of color so cruelly exploited by white sheriffs, judges, and businessmen; instead, she was just one among many speculators of the day engaging in risky financial behavior and paying the price for her own carelessness in managing money.

In 1838 Eldridge formed a serendipitous partnership with one of her employers, a thirty-three- year old white writer, Frances Harriet Whipple. Together, they produced the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge, hoping to sell enough copies so that Eldridge could pay her debts and offer a public rebuke to those who had wronged her. The two women wrote Eldridge’s life story to appeal to a narrow segment of the New England book-buying population: men and women of abolitionist sympathies, particularly well-to-do white women disapproving of what they considered the cruel, money-driven labor relations besetting the Northeast. In the end, though, Eldridge confounded her white enemies and friends alike, for she conformed to none of the contradictory stereotypes of black people that constituted the rhetorical basis of so much violence, as well as so much “benevolent reform,” in antebellum America. She was, ultimately, her own woman, not nearly as vulnerable as her adversaries assumed, but not nearly as free to shape her own destiny as she herself presumed.25

[image “FIGURE 3.1” file=images/f0109-01.jpg]

FIGURE 3.1 The Frontispiece of Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge, published in 1838 in Providence, Rhode Island, by B. T. Albro. Eldridge holds a tool used in her trades of whitewashing and paper hanging. Her unadorned personal appearance, including her short hair and simple shawl, suggests that she and Frances Whipple wanted to present her to readers of the Memoirs as a hardworking woman eschewing fashionable clothing and other forms of ornamentation. COURTESY RHODE ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

[image file=images/centerli.jpg]

It appears at first an unlikely collaboration, the pairing of the daughter of a former slave with the daughter of one of Rhode Island’s oldest (colonial) families. Though separated by twenty years in age, and by strikingly divergent forms of life work, Elleanor Eldridge and Frances Whipple found fertile common ground, which Whipple highlighted, if only obliquely, in the Memoirs. Both women claimed descent from Revolutionary War soldiers, both endured family crises that threw them into the workforce at an early age, and both suffered the untimely loss of loved ones. Eldridge eschewed politics; she wanted to make money by working and renting out the tenement rooms she owned, and she was willing to master the intricacies of property law to do so. In contrast, Whipple was bent on exposing a dominant white-male culture that seemed to denigrate the “female” values of love, cooperation, and generosity; she aimed to shame men who put their “souls in their pocket”—that is, men who sold their moral instincts for a few coins or ignored these instincts when it suited their personal interests.26

The Memoirs revealed Whipple’s dilemma: on the one hand, she aimed to condemn the heartlessness of Eldridge’s tormenters, and on the other, she had to detail Eldridge’s plight, which ultimately flowed from the older woman’s own aggressive, speculative impulses. Juxtaposed to Whipple’s bland praises of long-suffering womanhood were her own complicated retellings of Eldridge’s financial dealings and role as a savvy businesswoman–cum–self-taught lawyer. One sympathetic person who read the book and met its subject noted as much, suggesting that the sentimental story as written by Whipple contrasted with Eldridge’s bold style of self-aggrandizement.27

Of course, the Memoirs itself was a moneymaking venture. A group of nineteen white women,

current and former employers of Eldridge over a thirty-year period, sponsored the book and an 1842 sequel by offering testimonials to her good character. Eight editions of the Memoirs were published between 1838 and 1847. When Whipple began the book, she was already an experienced writer determined to make a living with her pen; in 1829 she had edited her own short-lived periodical called the Original, a collection of sketches, poems, and short stories. Within a few years she was publishing pieces in Garrison’s Liberator. Whipple surely understood that the Memoirs would succeed—would sell—to the extent she could attract white female readers, an audience she knew well. So she couched the narrative in the language of a clear-cut morality tale, with an exemplary heroine and a large cast of male villains. Readers would derive from the story of what Whipple called this “indigent and obscure” woman universal life lessons in justice.28

At the same time, the book did not promote standard sentimental fare. Eldridge was childless, and she claimed no membership in a particular church or even religious denomination. Though Whipple sprinkled her text liberally with quotations from the Bible, God was not the prime force here: people were. On the surface at least, Eldridge seemed free of the patriarchal imperative enforced by fathers, husbands, and preachers. And Whipple underscored a potentially radical theme made explicit on the front cover with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

O that estates, degrees, and offices

Were not derived corruptly! And that clear honor

Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!

How many, then, should cover, that stand bare?”29

Whipple was suggesting that white men’s so-called popular politics was corrupt because it excluded virtuous white women and people of color. Yet she failed to recognize a larger political truth: the depth of black people’s enforced dependence on well-meaning employers and benefactors such as herself. More generally, these patron-client relations contradicted the prevailing individualistic, meritocratic spirit of the age. Many blacks of comfortable means could hardly claim to be “self-made” so reliant were they on whites for jobs, loans, and acts of legal intercession.

The Memoirs contained a number of inconsistencies, omissions, and verifiable errors. Whipple referred to and quoted from correspondence and manuscripts, “Elleanor’s documents,” which she purportedly consulted, but in other places she implied Eldridge was illiterate (she was not). Whipple took liberties, considerable liberties in some cases, and her chronology was faulty. Eldridge’s memory probably failed her at times, and at others she and Whipple may have calculated that fiction would serve their cause better than fact. Yet census data, court and tax records, private correspondence, and newspaper accounts, among other sources, confirm the basic outlines of Eldridge’s labors and her unhappy encounters with the local court system as presented in the Memoirs. And one of the striking aspects of her story was her relative residential stability: her family of origin is documented by the 1790 and 1800 federal censuses, and she herself, as household head and Providence resident, appears in every census from 1820 to 1860.30

Eldridge reported her birth date as March 25, 1785, in Warwick, Rhode Island, a town situated on a “neck” in Narragansett Bay, a dairy district seven miles south of Providence. Whipple began Eldridge’s story by confronting forthrightly destructive prejudices as they affected both blacks and Indians: “Elleanor Eldridge, on the one hand, is the inheritess of African blood, with all its heirship of wo[e] and shame; and the subject of wrong and banishment by her Indian maternity on the other… . It seems, indeed, as if the wrongs and persecutions of both races had fallen on Elleanor.” There followed an account of the capture of Eldridge’s paternal grandparents and their offspring, including her father, Robin, and his siblings, by slave traders in the Congo River region of West Africa, the place of origin of Antonio and the Stono rebels.31

In Whipple’s account, Eldridge’s grandfather, the “simple-hearted” Congo chieftain Dick, together with his wife and small children, were “induced … to come on board an American slaver, under pretence of trade.” Suddenly, the crew surreptitiously weighed anchored and set sail out to sea. In short order the family “were chained, and ordered below; where the sight of hundreds of wretches, stolen, wronged, wretched as themselves, only showed them that they were lost forever.” As for the Middle Passage, “No tongue can depict the horrors of that passage.” Arriving in the colonies, the human cargo was “presented for sale, more than half brutalized for the brutal market,” the father’s “pride crushed, and his hopes forever extinguished.” The slave market, suggested Whipple, was a creature of its masters’ cynical calculation and unspeakable cruelty—a formulation that echoed her critique of employer- employee relations generally.32

Certainly, the Rhode Island slave market was a root cause of Eldridge’s plight and that of her ancestors. For eighty years, beginning in 1727, merchants in Newport and Providence were key players in the American slave trade, despite a state ban against the trade legislated (and promoted by the state’s Quakers) in 1787. Fully one-sixth of all Africans imported to British North America arrived through Rhode Island ports. Based on Elleanor’s age and birth order, it is possible that her grandparents were captured in the 1740s, a time when Newport was taking the lead in the notorious Atlantic “triangle trade” that cycled sugar, rum, and human bodies from the Caribbean to the United States to Africa. However, it is highly unlikely that chieftain Dick would have been so gullible as to take his family aboard any kind of foreign ship lying off the coast or in one of the Congo’s inland waterways. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Congo region was thoroughly militarized, its politics and economy corrupted by the stealing, buying, and transporting of slaves; virtually all native men, especially “chieftains,” would have participated in, witnessed, or at least heard about both the fierce fighting and the depredations of human trafficking that had engulfed that part of Africa.33

Dick’s three sons, Dick, George, and Robin (sometimes Robert), grew up in bondage, as did most other Rhode Island blacks at the time. On the eve of the Revolution, the Narragansett region of southwestern Rhode Island had exceptionally large numbers of enslaved persons compared to the rest of New England; in towns such as South and North Kingston one-third of all white families owned slaves. In Warwick, Kent County, where Eldridge’s father lived, nearly one-fifth did; indeed, Eldridge was a common name in Warwick, and Robin probably acquired his surname from a master there. Throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic, black men like Robin were well integrated into a dynamic economy as skilled craftsmen and farm laborers and were often given whites’ family names as an acknowledgment of their inclusion—however patronizing and incomplete—in whites’ social world.34

At the beginning of the American Revolution, Robin and his two brothers joined the patriot cause and thus, in Whipple’s words, “presented themselves as candidates for liberty.” Perhaps they joined the First Rhode Island Battalion, the only patriot regiment consisting entirely of men of color. (Their names are not on extant rosters, though that does not rule out the possibility that they served, or fought, in some capacity.) In return for volunteering, the Eldridge brothers, wrote Whipple, were “promised their freedom, with the additional premium of 200 acres of land in the Mohawk country [in western New York State], apiece.” At the end of the war, the three “were pronounced FREE; but their services were paid in the old Continental money, the depreciation, and final ruin of which, left them no wealth but the one priceless gem, LIBERTY.” Penniless, they were unable to claim the land owed them, a promise betrayed by Congress, which had stipulated “that all soldiers’ children who were left incapable of providing for themselves, should ‘inherit the promises’ due to their fathers.” Later in life Elleanor, according to Whipple, saw a public notice to that effect and tried to make a legal claim on behalf of her siblings, but to no avail.35

[image “FIGURE 3.2” file=images/f0114-01.jpg]

FIGURE 3.2 A French Army officer who fought at Yorktown on the side of the patriots sketched these four Continental Army soldiers in 1781. On the left is a black private from the First Rhode Island Regiment, which included several companies of black soldiers (among them, perhaps, Elleanor Eldridge’s father, Robin, and two uncles). Also pictured are a white private, a rifleman, and an artilleryman. Black veterans of the war belied white men’s later claims to an exclusive Revolutionary heritage. COURTESY JOHN HAY LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, BROWN UNIVERSITY.

Whipple noted that during their time in the army, Robin Eldridge and his comrades “literally left foot-prints of blood, upon the rough flint, and the crusted snow,” perhaps a reference to the illfated Oswego campaign of February 1783. Crossing a frozen lake to attack a British trading post, black soldiers from Rhode Island and New York endured bitter cold and many suffered from frostbite. Yet the promises of two hundred acres of “Mohawk lands” are suspect: only New York authorities could confer grants of land in their state, and then only upon New York soldiers, though Rhode Islanders reasonably might have assumed that they were entitled to such a reward as well. In dismissing the troops under his command at Saratoga in June 1783, Rhode Island’s Colonel Jeremiah Olney regretted “that such faithful service has heretofore been so illy rewarded, and painful is it to him to see the officers and men retire from the field without any pay, or even their accounts settled and the balances due ascertained.”36

In embellishing these stories of enslavement and Revolutionary War military service, Whipple wanted to show that the love of freedom was by no means the exclusive province of whites, a point not all that obvious to readers saturated with images of blacks unable or unwilling to provide for themselves. She wrote, “Oh LIBERTY! What power dwells in the softest whisper of thy syllables, acting like magic upon the human soul!” These stories also served to refute the white workers bent on contrasting their own Revolutionary War heritage with blacks’ history of slavish dependence. One contemporary critic of the American Colonization Society made the astute observation that blacks’ skin color was not “the sole source of the universal prejudice against the descendants of Africa, though undoubtedly it has served to strengthen and perpetuate it.” Rather, “the name of the negro has, in this country, always been associated with slavery, and

the word slave is, and ever has been, a term of reproach all over the world.” It was this association—of blacks with slavery only—that Whipple sought to dispute in her account of Elleanor’s father and uncles.37

Robin Eldridge went into the war a married man. After he returned to Warwick, he and his wife, Hannah Prophet, settled near at a place called Apponaug, “where,” Whipple wrote, “by his honesty, industry, and general good character, he was always held in esteem.” There he bought a piece of land, built a house, raised a family, and remained self-supporting. Whipple reported that Hannah Prophet was the daughter of Mary Fuller, a Narragansett Indian, and of Thomas Prophet, an enslaved man whose freedom she bought. In what would have been a practice not uncommon at the time, Mary might have raised the money for Thomas’s purchase price by selling some of the property she owned. By the mid-eighteenth century the Narragansett were impoverished, overwhelmed by debts incurred while indulging in English goods and vices such as alcohol. In 1780 less than six hundred Indians were just barely managing to survive on reservation lands, and others were leading a peripatetic existence, searching for jobs throughout New England—the men as farm tenants, servants, sailors, and day laborers; the women as traders of cranberries and cheese and hawkers of brooms and baskets. In Narragansett country a radically unbalanced sex ratio in favor of women (2:1) made Indian-black unions predictable, if not strictly necessary. In the eyes of whites, patterns of intermarriage and forcible displacement had effaced the Narragansett’s historic identity, transforming them into “people of color” virtually indistinguishable from blacks in terms of the stigmas attached to them—as unsettled, slothful, and depraved.38

Much about Eldridge’s background remains a mystery—whether she was indeed the granddaughter of the Narragansett Mary Fuller, whether she spoke or understood Algonkian, and whether she considered herself black. In the course of the Memoirs, she visited with Massachusetts relatives, including her mother’s only sister, and stayed in touch with two of her Prophet cousins, Jeremiah and Lucy. It is impossible, though, to tell if she was closer to one side of her family than to the other—her African grandfather or her Indian grandmother—or to neither or both. At any rate, in her ambitions to accumulate property and profits, Eldridge partook of a thorough “Americanness” that transcended ethnic or “racial” identity.39

When the US Census was taken for the first time in 1790, “Robin Eldrich,” a free man of color, was heading a six-person household in Warwick, a household at least partially supported by his wife, Hannah, a laundress. The couple had nine children; Elleanor, the youngest, was one of five who survived. That year Warwick had a population of 2,493 persons, including 35 slaves and 224 free persons of color. In 1790 Hannah died, a traumatic event for her daughter, who within a few years was placed as a servant in the home of one of her mother’s former employers, the wealthy Joseph Baker of Warwick.40

Thus, at a tender age Elleanor Eldridge, like many other black children of the time, entered the world of paid labor, but not before, according to Whipple, she showed her mettle by “making a definite BARGAIN” with the Bakers: “She fixed her price at 25 cents per week, and agreed to work for one year.” Whipple gave an emotional account of Elleanor’s parting from her family: “The sundering of family ties is always painful; and I have often thought that among the poor it is eminently so.” Elleanor tore herself away from her baby brother (probably George, born in 1791 to Robin and his new wife, Betsey), who called out, “Don’t go, Nelly!” What a revelation

for white readers—that for the Eldridges, neither their modest circumstances nor the color of their skin diminished family feeling.41

Whipple described Elleanor’s time with the Bakers as pleasurable, but not because of any intrinsic goodness embedded in the master-servant relationship. In this respect the author alluded to “the servant problem” at a time when native-born white women were shunning the job as inherently degrading. According to Whipple, the Bakers treated Elleanor as one of their own children and received her cheerful cooperation in return. This blissful state of affairs illustrated the principle that, as Whipple ruminated, “kind and judicious masters and mistresses, generally are blessed with efficient and faithful servants.” In contrast, more typical families considered their servants “the mere instruments of their own selfish gratification … the mere appendages of luxury”; these families did not care if their employees were “left to their own wayward courses, often [to] sink into depravity and vice, when a little kindness and good feeling, a little affectionate interest and judicious advice, might restrain and save them.”42

During the nearly six years she worked for the Bakers, Elleanor learned “all the varieties of house-work, and every kind of spinning,” Whipple explained. When Elleanor was fourteen (in 1799), she also became expert in “plain, double, and ornamental weaving” and made carpets, coverlets, damask, and bed ticking. Like most urban women of her day, Whipple possessed no such skills herself, and she was correct in suggesting that this form of double weaving was “a very difficult and complicated process,” an art and a mystery. Though Elleanor lacked any formal education, and indeed “her powers had never been disciplined by any course of study,” she nevertheless, in Whipple’s words, demonstrated “great mechanical genius, or to speak phrenologically … her ‘constructiveness,’ ‘comparison,’ and ‘calculation’ are well developed.”43

By pronouncing Elleanor a “mechanical genius,” Whipple paid homage to the resourcefulness of rural New England women and at the same time (perhaps inadvertently) highlighted the exclusion of African Americans from textile mill work, and indeed factory work of all kinds. The early Rhode Island textile mills employed mostly white children and women, an acknowledgment that making cloth was white women’s work and that, in some respects at least, machine-tending was but an extension of household industry. By the 1830s factories throughout the Northeast were hiring an eclectic labor force of male and female, young and old, native-born and immigrant workers. Yet black and Narragansett men, women, and children were conspicuous for their absence from these work sites; machine operatives were “modern” workers, while people of color continued to perform task-oriented labor in white households or out-of-doors.44

Whipple paired the description of Eldridge’s mechanical genius with details of her success as a dairywoman employed by another prominent Warwick family, that of Captain Benjamin Greene, from 1803 to 1811. At the Greenes’ she did spinning for a year and then assumed responsibility for more than two dozen cows, making “from four to five thousand weight of cheese annually” and winning prizes for the quality of her work. Though spinning, weaving, milking, and cheese- making were “not very poetical” subjects, Whipple declared, “they are important, as giving a distinct idea of the capacity, which early distinguished our subject.”45

In 1800 Elleanor was the only person of color in the Joseph Baker household; when she moved

to Captain Greene’s soon after, census records suggest that was again the case. During the colonial period many enslaved New Englanders lived in white households apart from other blacks—in contrast to the South, where those whites who owned slaves often required them to live in separate quarters. In 1774 nearly half of all Rhode Island slaveholding families included only one black person. Whipple herself mentioned no other blacks in Elleanor’s life besides her immediate family from the time she left her family at age ten until she emerged as “quite a belle” nine years later. It was then she began to attract suitors and to accompany her half brother George to the annual Negro Election festivals that were common in certain New England towns. The June festivities drew people of color from scattered workplaces to come together to dance, prance, drink, and show off their finery; the songs and musical instruments were loud and distinctively African in origin, the costumes brightly colored and fanciful. The men elected a leader, a “governor,” and other informal officials to serve as judges throughout the year. While Elleanor was working for the Greene family, George was elected governor of Warwick’s black community three successive years. Meanwhile, whites gathered to gawk and to ridicule what they considered the foolish pretenses of their slaves and servants. For their part, black people aimed to make a mockery of those who believed in their own racial superiority.46

That George Eldridge was elected governor three times in a row speaks to his relative influence in the Warwick community, perhaps a reflection of his father’s good name and status as a Revolutionary War veteran. Whipple suggested that Elleanor thereby occupied “the very highest niche of the [colored] aristocracy,” appearing on George’s arm dressed in a way that befitted “the sister of ‘His Excellency’”: “On some of these occasions she wore a lilac silk; on others a nice worked cambric; then again a rich silk, of a delicate sky blue color; and always with a proper garniture of ribbons, ornaments, laces, &c-.” Perhaps her fine clothing was part of her own wardrobe, or a gift from the Greenes for the day, for by dressing elaborately, by “shining in borrowed plumage,” celebrants reflected the wealth of the households where they labored.47

Disingenuously, Whipple begged the reader’s forgiveness for offering details of Elleanor’s dresses and accessories, but she also suggested that “no fair reader” would blame her for an “honorable exactness” on the subject of clothing. Here the author ran the risk of portraying her heroine as a stereotypical black woman frittering away what little money she earned in a misguided effort to imitate her fashionable social betters. Similarly, in describing Elleanor as a sought-after belle and a “buxom lassie,” Whipple presented her as a sexual being in a way that on the surface at least ran counter to her image as a diligent worker.48

It was in the lengthy passages describing Elleanor’s love interest, a cousin named Christopher G, that Whipple succumbed most noticeably to sentiment: “There was the due proportion of fear, hope, doubt, ecstasy, and moonlight; together with the proper infusion of sighs, tears, &c” during the meetings of the two lovers (“I feel myself justified in calling them so”). Whether Christopher G, a seaman, actually existed is unknown. Real or not, he was representative of the many black men who sailed up and down the East Coast in the first years of the nineteenth century. In Whipple’s telling, his wooing of Elleanor spanned at least six years, only a few days of which he apparently spent in her company or even on dry land. Shipping out of Providence and Newport, he traveled to the West Indies, Ireland, England, and Russia. Some of these destinations were unintended; writing from Guadeloupe (again, this according to Whipple), and several years later from Archangel (Arkhangelsk), Russia, he reported that he had been held against his will by British ship captains and crews.49

Soon after Elleanor developed an attachment to Christopher, her father died. (Noted Whipple, perhaps thinking of her own father, a less than dutiful breadwinner, “Robin Eldridge had the art, which many white fathers have not, that of commanding, at once, respect and affection.”) Learning that the disposition of the estate “could not be settled, without some legal advices” (presumably, information about her father’s finances) from her sister Fettina, now living in Adams, in western Massachusetts, Elleanor in the fall of 1806 took a temporary leave from the Greene family and traveled the 180 miles to Adams on foot. Adams was also home to Elleanor’s aunt, her mother Hannah’s only sister, and a number of cousins, all of whom were, according to Whipple, “respectable.” Such kin networks bound together people of color throughout New England; former slaves, with their newfound mobility, took advantage of such connections to further family ties and to find jobs. Elleanor quickly found work as a weaver and also “made quite a sensation among the colored beaux of Adams.” The following spring she returned to Warwick, now in possession of letters giving her power of attorney over her father’s estate. At Captain Greene’s house, she took up weaving again and over the next few years tried to take her mind off her beloved Christopher.50

Around 1811, wrote Whipple almost perfunctorily, “there was a long period of alternating hopes, doubts, and distressing fears. Then came the heart-rending intelligence, of shipwreck, and death.” Elleanor’s “lover,” it seems, had been lost at sea. She lived the rest of her life a single woman, loyal to Christopher with her “faithful heart.” Through this story Whipple was likely hoping that she could count on the sympathies of the growing number of never-married women in New England; some might relate to Elleanor’s heartbreak because their “single blessedness” was a product not so much of their own choice as of demographic changes that left the region with a surplus of women when young (white) men migrated west in large numbers. Yet other women, inspired by stirrings of democratic individualism, might have chosen never to marry in order to remain free of legal constraints that kept a woman from running a business or buying property on her own. Whether intentional or not, Elleanor’s status as a single woman would open up this second path to her.51

The Memoirs revealed Elleanor Eldridge through descriptions of her work, and her good works, rather than through her own words. Toward the end Whipple offered a rare quotation—this in response to “our young and romantic readers … curious to know why Elleanor never married.” Whipple reported that “she says she has determined to profit by the advice of her aunt, who told her never to marry, because it involved such A WASTE OF TIME: for, said she, [and here apparently quoting Eldridge quoting her aunt] ‘while my young mistress was courting and marrying, I knit five pairs of stockings.’” Overall, though, Eldridge offered up little of herself in the narrative, focused as it was on her wage-earning activities, relations with family members, and legal bouts with devious officials and heartless creditors.52

By the midpoint of the Memoirs, Whipple had established Eldridge not only as the granddaughter and daughter of slaves, but also as the daughter of a Revolutionary War soldier. Her life thus far, according to Whipple, testified to the universal virtues of respectable New England womanhood, for Eldridge was a devoted family member, a skilled weaver, and the heartbroken object of the affections of a young man, now deceased. And so few “fair readers” could have anticipated the heroine’s energetic burst of deal-making soon to come; as it turned out, this mechanical genius had a head for numbers, and she was determined to make her business sense pay. Her success would reflect her ability to cultivate relations with well-to-do

white patrons and present herself as a creditworthy, hardworking woman—in other words, to escape from the stigma of race insofar as such an escape was possible in the nineteenth-century North.

In 1812 Captain Greene died, and subsequent “alterations” in his family prompted the twenty- seven-year-old Elleanor to leave and move in with her sister Letisse in Warwick. She thus joined a pronounced exodus among blacks from the homes of their employers and former owners to their own households. For many former slaves, establishing their own homes apart from their former masters, and owning a small piece of property, demonstrated that they were free persons with a tangible, if modest stake in society. The local Court of Probate had appointed Letisse as guardian of her younger siblings now that both parents were deceased. Together Letisse and Elleanor “entered into a miscellaneous business” that consisted of weaving, spinning, laundering, nursing, and boiling soap. This last item they carried to Providence to sell in the market. Such miscellaneous pursuits were common among free people of color forced into low-paying, seasonal jobs and could provide women such as Elleanor and Letisse with a crucial—if meager —supplemental income.53

Without a family to support, and now living apart from her white employers, Elleanor managed to save enough money to purchase a small house; it provided her with shelter and a steady income because she rented parts of it to tenants for $40 a year. And as long as she was living in Warwick, she served as dutiful maiden aunt, at times helping out in George’s household—for example, when his whole family became gravely ill and his wife and several children died. In 1815, however, Elleanor moved to Providence at the behest of another sister; it is possible that through her soap-selling business in that city she came to understand the opportunities, at once vast and circumscribed, that awaited her there.54

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The bustling city where Elleanor Eldridge made her new home was only a matter of miles from Warwick, but in its economy and character it offered a striking contrast to the sleepy agricultural village she had just left. The Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812 had temporarily hobbled the growth of Providence as a port, but those interruptions in foreign trade also stimulated domestic manufactures; now the city and its environs were transformed into the cradle of several simultaneous early Republic “revolutions”—in industry, transportation, and the commercial market. By 1815, within a thirty-mile radius of the city, workers operating 140,000 spindles in 165 mills were weaving 29,000 bales of southern cotton into 28 million yards of cloth. Meanwhile, municipal authorities were embarking on a building spree, reconstructing the wharves, bridges, and buildings destroyed by the Great Gale of 1815 and sponsoring a number of public works projects, such as the reclamation of marshlands west of the river in 1817 and the installation of sidewalks in the early 1820s. A canal linking Providence to Worcester was completed over a three-year period, 1825 to 1828, and a railroad linking Providence to Boston began operations in 1835; both projects provided jobs for hundreds of workers. Meanwhile, wood remained the city’s greatest source of energy, increasing the demand for choppers and haulers exponentially.55

As the city’s economy expanded, so did its population. From 1800 to 1870 the city grew by an average 36 percent each decade—in the 1820s by 43 percent, the result of multiple urban

inmigrations and foreign immigrations. Rural folk abandoned the countryside in response to periodic depressions and freakish weather—the hurricane of 1815 and the unseasonably dry and cold summer of 1816—that took a toll on many farmers and day laborers. Beginning in the late 1820s Irish immigrants arrived to take factory jobs. Sawyers, construction workers, and seamen passing through the city found cheap rooms in places like Hard Scrabble and Olney’s Lane.56

The perceived large influx of black newcomers to Providence galvanized white residents. In the fall of 1821 the author of a letter to the editor of the Gazette decried the “vicious and disorderly” black population now allegedly “flooding” into the city and supposedly causing “strong and faithful” white laborers to flee. Foreshadowing the antiblack tirades surrounding the Hard Scrabble riot, the writer suggested that “some strong measures should be adopted to rid the town of blacks who have no legal settlement, or are not actually employed by the month or year, in the service of some white inhabitant.”57

For some enterprising individuals, however, the city’s swelling population afforded opportunity for material gain. Throughout this period Elleanor Eldridge and other landlords aimed to profit from the more than 1,800 free people of color seeking jobs and places to live in Providence. She was also responding to the labor and consumer demands of wealthy merchants and lawyers and members of the emerging middle class. Around 1815 she “commenced a new course of business, viz—whitewashing, papering and painting,” Whipple wrote. (Eldridge apparently gave up weaving for good; the textile mills proliferating on the countryside were producing cloth more quickly and cheaply than she could make it.) Eldridge’s decision revealed a keen appreciation for emerging markets. Prosperous households were stocking their pantries with a rich array of imported foods and buying luxury consumer goods from far-flung corners of the world—silks and window screens from China, honey and pineapples from Cuba, and other exotic items from Europe, Brazil, and India. They were also decorating their brick Colonial and Federal-style mansions with “elegant paper hangings,” including those made in France with fancy landscape prints and borders to match. For the duration of her working career, Eldridge offered a variety of services while working for many homeowners and landlords. The portrait of her in the Memoirs frontispiece showed her holding the tool of her trades: a long-handled brush used for papering and whitewashing. With her short curly hair, simple dress and shawl, and serious demeanor, she was the embodiment of probity. Yet an equally evocative portrait would have had her clutching a sheaf of legal papers and mortgage notes, for Eldridge’s business sensibilities had by this time landed her in court.58

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During the winter months Eldridge often worked as a domestic in a hotel, boardinghouse, or private family. Among her employers were Henry Mathewson, a well-known ship captain who traded along the coast of South America; Davis Dyer, a merchant who specialized in goods as varied as clover seed, Madeira wine, and North Carolina hams; Gravener Taft, a teacher in the city’s first public school, opened in 1800; Nathan Waterman Jackson, the city’s longtime town clerk (from 1799 to 1829); and Gamaliel Church, a US Customs inspector. Mathewson and Dyer were also landlords; they probably hired Eldridge to work on the houses they rented to tenants. Whipple remarked of these employers, “ELLEANOR HAS ALWAYS LIVED WITH GOOD PEOPLE.” By highlighting this connection between Elleanor and some of the city’s most prominent families, Whipple implied that her subject routinely interacted in a responsible way

with employers of good character and morals. As a free woman, Eldridge had earned their respect as well as their patronage, no mean feat for a woman born to a father born a slave.59

In the winter of 1819 Eldridge consented to accompany a Miss Jane C to New York City, but there she fell ill (“occasioned by the damps of the basement kitchen”) and could do no work. Jane C hired a nurse to attend to Eldridge, and she also paid for “two of the most skillful physicians the city afforded.” By April the patient, who seemed to be suffering from “a malignant fever, of a typhus kind,” was well enough to return to Providence. And yet in a remarkable development, according to Whipple, Miss C paid not only Eldridge’s medical fees, but also “THE FULL AMOUNT OF HER WAGES FOR THE WHOLE TIME, as if she had always been in actual service.” Whipple praised such “disinterested benevolence,” in response to which “human nature feels itself exalted, and begins to learn its own divinity.” To rest and recuperate fully, Elleanor decided she must return to Warwick, and it was there on August 7 that the census taker found her in the house she owned (it was assessed at $350). Her brother George lived in his own house on one side of her, and her brother Jetter headed his own household and lived in her house as a tenant.60

Sometime in the spring or early summer of 1820, Elleanor had a most unpleasant encounter with the law that revealed her enduring reliance on the white men who were her employer-patrons. On July 26 the Providence Patriot ran a “public notice” stating that a person recently convicted of petty theft in Cranston had described his accomplice, and as a result “Eleanor Eldridge, a woman of colour, was arrested.” She was interviewed and released, but the incident prompted “certificates” from “several gentlemen in whose families she had worked in this town, desirous of dissipating any injurious impression which might be made by the above occurrence.” Among the letter writers were those whose names were published in the notice: Nathan W. Jackson, Gravener Taft, and Gamaliel Church, all of whom attested to “her good conduct, honesty and industry, while employed by them.” Without the testimonials of these men, Eldridge might have been sent to the city workhouse or endured a public whipping in the State House yard. For obvious reasons, the Memoirs made no mention of Eldridge’s humiliating arrest and interrogation.61

Eldridge was not able to avoid controversy for long, however, and not all of it seems to have been unjust. As Whipple delved into Eldridge’s investments and legal woes, she did not stint on the financial details. However, throughout this part of the story she got the chronology wrong and consistently portrayed Eldridge as an innocent victim when in fact court and legal documents suggest she had assumed more risk than she could handle. In that respect Eldridge was not unlike many other speculators, then and since, who borrowed more freely than they should have. One of Whipple’s contemporaries, who later wrote a biographical sketch of her, alluded to Eldridge’s considerable property holdings, “of which she had been perhaps legally, but at all events unfairly, deprived.”62

In 1826 (Whipple gave the date as 1822), Elleanor, “Single Woman of Colour,” took $100 in her savings, borrowed about $1,600 from an unknown individual or individuals, and bought a 50-by 130-foot lot “together with a certain wooden Building erected for a Dwelling House” in Providence. (Nathan W. Jackson, the town clerk who had testified to Eldridge’s good character six years before, recorded the deed.) Soon she added an addition on either side and set up housekeeping for herself in one of them. She rented out the rest of the house to tenants for a total

of $150 a year. It was in this Spring Street dwelling that she would live for much of the rest of her life. Whipple described the dwelling, “with its two wings, and its four chimneys,” as wearing “quite an imposing aspect” and “a fine establishment” with a “pleasant little garden-spot.” It accommodated as many as ten residents—Eldridge and three families of two to three persons each. Such cramped quarters were customary for black families, who, regardless of size, were used to occupying only one or two rooms.63

The relatively large sums of money associated with Eldridge’s real estate investments are noteworthy. For a humble laboring woman, she was remarkable for hoarding cash and securing loans, from $200 to $1,500 at a time, from private creditors, probably her male employers or the husbands of her female employers. She apparently eschewed the siren call of consumer goods; if she needed to impress someone—a judge, for example—she borrowed a fancy horse and carriage from an employer. Perhaps the fact that her father was a homeowner convinced her of the lasting value of real estate: her holdings would not only put a roof over her head, but also pay her a regular dividend, and their value would appreciate as the demand for housing grew apace.64

In the late 1820s Eldridge took out more loans, including one from George Carder, a bank director and attorney who apparently specialized in real estate cases; he lived in Apponaug, where Elleanor had grown up. She probably knew him, and members of her family had probably worked for him for years. He charged Eldridge 10 percent interest and told her that she need pay only the interest on the loan each year. What Eldridge did with the money is unclear, but she does not seem to have used it to expand her latest property, for the number of tenants there remained unchanged during this time. In 1830 she was living in her Spring Street house, along with eight black tenants: two single men, Abraham Rooms and Richard McKim; Noah Howland, a seaman and head of a household of three; and Samuel Shoffield, head of a household of five. Most of her immediate neighbors were white. It was around this time that Elleanor served as executor of the estate of Lucy Gardner, a woman of color, who had died in the early fall of 1830; as required by law, a “notice” ran in a local paper, informing creditors of Gardner’s death and requesting them to submit their claims to “the subscriber”—Eldridge—“for settlement.” Elleanor was educating herself about property law.65

Whipple had Eldridge “again seized with the typhus fever” in September 1831, the month of the Olney’s Lane violence. (Presumably, Providence readers in 1838 remembered that cataclysmic event, and Whipple intended to show that Eldridge had no connection to it.) After spending six weeks in Warwick, Elleanor and the widowed George decided to journey again to Adams, where she could recover in the company of her relatives. Around this time, though, she defaulted on one of her loans; a judge ordered her to pay $57.45 and court costs of $4.57.66

En route to Adams, Elleanor and George stopped at a Hadley, Massachusetts, inn for the night, but she felt so unwell they decided not to continue and stayed another day. Other patrons of the establishment believed that Elleanor was ill, deathly so, and, in Whipple’s words, “the reader will subsequently find, how all Elleanor’s troubles sprang from the wanton carelessness of those, who so busily circulated the story of her death.” George and his half sister finally made their way to Adams, where he spent the winter cutting wood and courting his cousin, Ruth Jacobs. It was not until the spring that George and Elleanor, along with Ruth, returned to Providence. Whipple described a scene in which Elleanor went across the street to buy bread, only to be confronted by the baker’s son, who, astonished, exclaimed, “Is that you Ellen? Why I thought you was—dead!”

To which she replied, “No; I am not dead … but I am hungry. Give me some bread, quick!” The boy then screamed, “Don’t come any nearer!—don’t Ellen, if you be Ellen—cause–cause—I don’t like dead folks!”67

Despite the dramatic details of this story, it is possible that Whipple needed to fabricate a tale of Eldridge’s absence from Providence in order to make credible—and even more perfidious—the actions of creditors and law enforcement authorities during the intervening months. Whipple also seemed to be reminding her readers of the invidious nature of gossip. Eldridge’s legal woes might have stemmed from the malicious rumor of her death, or she might in fact have made herself vulnerable to the depredations of white creditors and the sheriff simply by owing so much money and then leaving town for an extended period of time. Regardless, the white men who pursued her in court must have been taken aback at the aggressive way she defended herself.68

Soon after returning to Providence, Elleanor discovered that John Carder, a Warwick innkeeper and brother of George Carder, had recalled the full amount of the loan given her by his brother on such favorable terms. In her absence John convinced the sheriff to repossess her house. This development should have impressed upon Eldridge the dangers of leaving Providence for any length of time when creditors were expecting her to be more attentive to her finances, but apparently it did not.69

Around this time—after her return from Adams in April 1832—Elleanor found herself back in court, this time as an advocate for her half brother. In Whipple’s words, George Eldridge had been accused of “having horse-whipped, and of otherwise barbarously treating a man upon the highway,” one Samuel Gorton, a member of a prominent white Warwick family. The actual indictment read that on April 4, 1832, “with force of arms” George Eldridge committed an assault on Gorton that “did bruise and wound” him with “malice aforethought to kill and murder.” Elleanor visited George in the jail in East Greenwich, where she found him “in a state of great distress,” anxious about the well-being of his family. (And in fact the 1830 census shows that the thirty-nine-year old “George Eldred” was head of a household of eight, three children and four other adults, one of whom was presumably his new bride, Ruth.) To secure George’s freedom, Elleanor was, in Whipple’s recounting, ready to risk all, for “was there any thing in the abstract possession of money, houses, or lands, that could, for one moment, be weighed against it? She thought not.” Whipple claimed Elleanor posted a $500 bond for George and oversaw his defense, with its “considerable cost and trouble.”70

In February 1833, in her own hand, Elleanor wrote to Attorney General Albert C. Greene (kin to Benjamin Greene), notifying him that her brother’s lawyer, none other than Joseph L. Tillinghast of Hard Scrabble trial fame, was ill and thus unable to appear in court. There are several possible reasons that the vociferous defender of the 1824 rioters agreed to take the case. Eldridge might have been paying him his standard fee. Or the several of his female relatives who were sponsors of the Memoirs might have urged him to work pro bono or for a reduced fee. In the absence of Tillinghast, Elleanor requested a continuance of the case and added, “I will holde My Self heretofore bound for Costs, etc.”71

In August 1833 at least twenty-four people appeared as witnesses in the Kent County Court of Common Pleas in response to a summons from the deputy sheriff. A number of those who showed up in court were close neighbors of either Carder or Gorton or George Eldridge. It is

likely then that both Elleanor and George had established client-patron relations with George Carder over the years. Living not far from Benjamin Greene, Carder knew and trusted Elleanor well enough to lend her money, and he felt favorably enough toward her half brother both to post bail for him and to testify on his behalf at the trial. George Eldridge was ultimately declared not guilty, though whether or not through Elleanor’s efforts, as Whipple claimed, is unknown. Certainly, Tillinghast’s involvement in the case must have been a boon to the defendant; few other blacks accused of crimes could count on such a high-profile defense lawyer.72

Over the next two years Eldridge’s financial woes mounted, thanks in part to a falling out with one of her old allies. Returning home after a stint as a nurse and domestic servant in Promfret, Connecticut, she found out that her home had been seized to pay the ten-year-old, $250 loan from George Carder. Whipple denounced the seizure as a “wanton destruction of property”—the sale of a house valued at several thousand dollars, all for a $250 loan! Nevertheless, court records indicate that Eldridge had indeed defaulted on the original loan. John Carder was suing her in January 1835 because she had not repaid the money owed his brother. When she could not come up with the amount of the loan, plus court costs, the sheriff auctioned off her house on September 12 to thirty-one-year-old Benjamin Balch, a baker, for about $1,700. Balch proceeded to demolish the two additions Eldridge had put on the structure and to evict her tenants. Whipple reported, “Ellen, in a single moment, by a single stroke of the hammer [was] deprived of the fruits of all her honest and severe labors.” With her tenants “compelled to find shelter in barns and out-houses, or even in the woods,” a creditor, sheriff, and buyer, all supposedly “honorable” men, had managed to effect a Hard Scrabble riot in miniature.73

Eldridge, probably with the aid of her employers, decided to challenge Balch in court. By May 1836 Tillinghast was about to launch a (successful) run for the US House of Representatives, but he agreed to represent her in Elleanor Eldridge v. Benjamin Balch. Eldridge also enlisted the services of Attorney General Greene. Observed a contemporary, Greene had “assisted her, as did many of the best citizens of Providence, to whom she was well known.” Greene suggested that the auction of her house might have violated the law if it had not been announced three times in public, or in the local papers, before the sale.74

In a case heard by the Court of Common Pleas in January 1837, Eldridge charged that Balch “with force and arms has broken & entered” her house and that the sale itself had not been properly advertised. When Sheriff Mann insisted that he had indeed posted the requisite notice, three other witnesses disputed his contention, but, according to Whipple, “it was found that the oaths of common men could not be taken against that of the High Sheriff. So the case was decided against the plaintiff.”75

Certainly, any debtor would have despaired at this point. Yet in Whipple’s recounting, Eldridge proceeded to hire two men (whom she “fee’d liberally”) to search the city for evidence that the sheriff had placed notices of the sale in three places: “But no person could be found, who had either seen them, or heard of their being seen. A fine advertisement, truly!” And what accounted for this outrage? Whipple answered her own question: “THE OWNER OF THE PROPERTY WAS A LABORING COLORED WOMAN.” Around this time, however, Balch decided to be done with the wrangling and to make a tidy profit in the process. So he offered to sell the house back to Eldridge for $2,100, plus two years’ worth of rent, prompting her to seek yet another loan. Impatient, Balch now informed her that the price would be $2,300 and, soon after that,

$2500 plus six months’ rent. He was claiming that he had made certain “repairs and alterations” for which he was owed compensation. He was even threatening to charge her rent because her furniture had remained in the house all this time. Sheriff Mann seized the furniture, and he would have sold it had not a mysterious benefactor—according to Whipple, “a gentleman who had the management of [Eldridge’s] business”—reached a settlement with Balch. Recovering her property, Eldridge once again plunged headlong into debt. And so she was in straitened circumstances in 1838 when Whipple offered to tell her story about how she became “a prey to the wanton carelessness, if not the willful and deliberate wickedness, of men, who SHOULD have been the very last to have seized the spoils of the weak.”76

In her dealings with white authorities, Elleanor had defied not only the stereotypes of black women as poor and dependent, but also the reality that made most of them vulnerable under the law. If creditors had thought her an easy mark—someone unable to afford legal counsel, someone from whom they could strip all earthly belongings on the pretext of recalling a loan— they were mistaken. And throughout this period she called upon her employers for support that went well beyond the financial and in fact made a dramatic statement about her respectability and her creditworthiness. Eldridge thus eluded the usual, and disastrous, effects of the race project in Providence, a project designed by whites to keep blacks in poverty. At the same time, among her many business ventures, her partnership with former employer Frances Whipple stands out for its sheer audacity, for Eldridge desired not just public vindication, but also the money that such a partnership could earn her. She showed, then, that she possessed both the nerve and the entrepreneurial spirit to make whites pay handsomely—not, in this case, for a stint of whitewashing or painting, but for her own carefully constructed life story.

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By the time the Memoirs appeared in print, Eldridge had established herself as a skillful navigator of local judicial and law enforcement bureaucracies. She had apparently looked into the possibility that her father had been due a grant of land by virtue of his status as a veteran of the Revolutionary War. After his death, she served as executrix of his estate. With the help of patrons, she had defended herself against charges that she was an accomplice to theft, and she had played a part in (if not managed) the proceedings that eventually won George Eldridge’s acquittal at trial. She had signed legal documents, issued promissory notes, secured loans and mortgages, and benefited from the legal counsel of one of the most influential men in the city when she sued Balch for breach of contract and Sheriff Mann for dereliction of duty. She had enlisted the help of the state attorney general and hired two investigators to expose the sheriff as a liar. Thus, Whipple’s assertion that white men had taken advantage “of her ignorance of business, and her situation as an unprotected colored woman” was true only to a degree. And at the least, Elleanor had learned to exploit the complexities of white patron–black client relationships, a dexterity that must have amazed her creditors.77

Eldridge would have been counting on the publication of the Memoirs to pay off her considerable debts, and, if Tillinghast had not provided his services pro bono, recoup her considerable legal fees. Whipple, for her part, aimed to register her own outrage over the case, which she considered a betrayal of the “simplest and most evident principles of justice.” By publicizing Elleanor’s ordeal, she could at least expose what she considered the gratuitous spite that underlay the act: “By the common laws of HONOR, it is cowardice to strike the unarmed

and the weak. By the same rule, HE WHO INJURES THE DEFENCELESS, ADDS MEANNESS TO THE CRIME.”78

Whipple had an additional aim with the Memoirs: to provide “the colored population, an example of industry and untiring perseverance, every way worthy of their regard and earnest attention.” In her view, the long-term remedies to Eldridge’s dreadful predicament were that white men become more moral and less “mean” and that black people become more moral and less frivolous in their pursuits. This proposition, put forth by a number of black and white men and women (including the Reverend Hosea Easton), remained doubtful, however, because whites of varying political persuasion looked askance at all blacks, whether impoverished or comfortable in their circumstances, whether rowdy or respectable. William Brown expressed the conundrum facing blacks in Providence, and elsewhere in the North: “If you were well dressed they would insult you for that, and if you were ragged you would surely be insulted for being so; because as peaceable as you could be there was no shield for you.” Brown also maintained that people of color had no legal recourse unless they had “some white gentleman that would take up their case for them.” Yet Eldridge was not shy in demanding her due from white women and men who were indeed in a position to “shield” her.79

Eldridge left no record of her views of her benefactors, either the nineteen sponsors who arranged for the publication of her two books or the readers who bought them. As for the views of her supporters toward her, some evidence suggests that even her most public advocates found her too assertive, making bold claims upon their dollars as well as their praise. For whites of different political bents, she represented an enigma of sorts. An independent businesswoman, she established her own household at a time when white housewives were lamenting that the departure of live-in domestics made it difficult to maintain their own homes. An owner of a substantial amount of property, she was hardly the abject bondwoman immortalized in abolitionist literature. The abuse she suffered at the hands of white men came in the form of eviction notes and recalled loans, not beatings or sexual assault. In fact, with their blinkered gaze focused on the horrors of southern slavery, many white abolitionists failed to see the burdens shouldered by people of color in the North.

A small book that sold for 50¢, the Memoirs was a popular success, going through eight printings within the ten years of its publication and selling perhaps as many as 2,000 copies, a substantial number for the times. Eldridge herself went on a wintertime book tour in 1838–1839, visiting New York City; Philadelphia; Boston, Fall River, and Nantucket, Massachusetts; and Bristol, Warren, and Newport, Rhode Island. Apparently, many literate, book-buying Northeasterners were eager to read Eldridge’s story and the revelations it provided.80

The white women who supported the book’s publication seem to be a case in point. Considered together, Eldridge’s sponsors constituted a Providence women’s reform association in microcosm, their status and impulses similar to those of other women active in the many other overlapping groups at the time: the Providence Employment Society to benefit wage-earning women, Providence Ladies AntiSlavery Society, Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Children, Providence Society for the Relief of Indigent Women and Children, and the Providence Female Charitable Society. All the sponsors belonged to families in relatively comfortable circumstances, and most of the women had employed Eldridge in some capacity. Several had joined with other members of either their immediate or extended families, and others

lived together in the same building or next door to each other. Their husbands belonged to interlocking networks of bank directors, merchants, and public officials, though a few made their living as skilled tradesmen (one as a shoemaker) and others owned paper-hanging or painting businesses. The fact that so many sponsors had surnames that were also Providence street names —Cushing, Olney, Arnold, Chandler, Rhodes, Williams, Thurber, and Lockwood—indicates that they, like Frances Whipple, were members of long-established Rhode Island families.81

The sponsors might have had no broader agenda than to lend their names to an effort designed to benefit a longtime, loyal employee. Several women had suffered a personal loss that perhaps made them more sympathetic to the tribulations of a single woman forced to fend for herself; more than half were widows, at least some of whom had had difficult dealings with lawyers, mortgagors, and other creditors in the process of sorting out their late husband’s estate. Three sponsors (Mary T. Gladding, Elizabeth G. Chandler, and Amey A. Arnold) were related to Joseph Tillinghast; after his death in 1844, they would be listed as direct heirs. That he should defend the destroyers of Hard Scrabble, defend city authorities after Olney’s Lane, and defend George and Elleanor Eldridge in court perhaps points to his consistent stance in favor of social order and respectable individuals.82

More obvious is the reason that William Lloyd Garrison opened the pages of The Liberator to Eldridge’s story, as he would first do for Whipple’s writings on her behalf. The Liberator published her poem “Hard Fate of Poor Ellen” in which Whipple pleaded with her readers:

Sweet sympathy! O, shed one tear!

Humanity! Pray loud your aid;

And, if you’re not rewarded here,

In heaven you will be over-paid.

Whipple portrayed Eldridge as a pathetic victim of rapacious white men, much like an enslaved woman of the South. The Liberator also ran lengthy advertisements for the Memoirs and publicized Eldridge’s book tour. In the November 30, 1838, issue, Garrison offered a lengthy, glowing testimonial for both Eldridge and the “attractive narrative” she was selling: “Elleanor belongs to that race which a republican and Christian people (alas! What a mockery of terms!) have for two hundred years classed among the brute creation, and treated with utmost barbarity.” Recounting her legal woes, Garrison noted that “all the fruits of a life of industry and prudence [were] wrested from her by fraud and violence.”83

Yet Eldridge never conformed to northern whites’ views of the suffering slave, and even some dedicated abolitionists found fault with the book itself and with her insistent prodding for money. In New Bedford, after hearing her speak, one audience member opined that the book might have been more effective “had it been written in the plain common sense style in which the subject of it narrates it.” This person also criticized Eldridge for not seeking out the formal schooling that might have helped her avoid legal trouble in the first place. In response, she said that she was too old to worry about education: “My head is too full now.”84

In late 1838 Garrison confided in a letter to one of his friends in Providence that he found

Eldridge’s appeals grating. She was, he felt, “in affluent circumstances.” And he found “her heart set upon the perishable things of earth,” rather than devoted to more principled matters. His recent notice in the paper, he admitted, though “cheerfully written,” nonetheless “was extorted by her importunity.” Eldridge, it seems, had asked Garrison to come to her defense, and although he had obliged, he resented both the pressure and the woman who exerted it. Unlike the bruised slave, she was not an obvious or appropriate object of charity. Furthermore, she had an outsized sense of her own self-importance, according to Garrison, owing to “bad advisers [presumably Whipple], who have led her to think that her case is one of national importance, and that abolitionists universally would bestir themselves mightily on her behalf!” Meanwhile, even his public endorsement had failed to move more than forty copies of the two hundred books he had in his office. Her promise “to return shortly, and bring another trunk full with her” filled him with dread.85

That Eldridge generated such antipathy even among her ostensible allies speaks to the complicated racial ideologies that dominated post-Revolutionary America. Garrison remained fixated on the image of the slave writhing under the sting of an owner’s whip; like many other white abolitionists, he saw no connection between slavery in the South and black poverty in the North. Black writers pointed out that even many “friends of the Negro” refrained from hiring blacks in any but the most menial capacity. No matter how stridently abolitionists denounced slavery, they seemed to take for granted a social division of labor that confined all black people regardless of ambitions or talents to ill-paid labor. Almost all whites ignored the relationship between the exclusion of blacks from new (if exploitative) jobs in an expanding economy and their exclusion from citizenship rights.86

Eldridge was remarkable for her bold, even brazen, efforts to bend local labor and real estate markets to her will, and it was no wonder that these efforts drew scorn from whites of divergent classes, cultures, and political beliefs. Whether high-minded abolitionists or employers of ill-paid black menials, whites expected obsequious expressions of gratitude from a group of people only just released from slavery. In antebellum New England few whites could imagine the former slaves as independent actors, as advocates for their own hard-won self-interests. The collusion of white workers and elites kept blacks confined to lowly, dangerous labor. As a woman and an entrepreneur, Elleanor Eldridge had no trouble distancing herself from the blacks who confronted Providence whites on the sidewalk, or who fought them on a downtown bridge with bricks and bludgeons; such violent forms of self-defense only confirmed in the minds of whites that blacks were prone to violence and other forms of criminal behavior. And so whites— surrounded by a group of people toiling at ill-paid tasks, the men deprived of the right to vote and the women limited to domestic service—devised a racial ideology from a harsh reality, an ideology that justified the immiseration of black men, women, and children, all in the name of racial difference.

[image “FIGURE 3.3” file=images/f0135-01.jpg]

FIGURE 3.3 This iconic image of a slave first appeared in the 1780s as the seal of England’s Society for the Abolition of Slavery. In the United States the image was popularized through abolitionist publications such as a broadside of John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1837 poem “Our Countrymen in Chains.” The image endured after emancipation, when whites in the North and South persisted in seeing descendants of Africans as servile men and women beseeching whites

(or government officials) for aid. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

[image file=images/centerli.jpg]

In 1842 Whipple published another book on Eldridge’s behalf, this one titled Elleanor’s Second Book and sponsored by eleven women, five of whom overlapped with the previous group. Whipple assured her readers that “our dark friend” was still trying to pay off Balch and that on his way out of the house (he had occupied it for three months, from August to November 1838), he had pilfered fireplace grates and uprooted several bushes from the yard. In fact, Eldridge had arrived home from her book tour and immediately initiated a fresh round of challenges to Balch. This time she had another, equally prominent lawyer on the case: Gamaliel Dwight, secretary of the Rhode Island Bar Association. Eldridge’s plans for the house now included improvements for her tenants. And her exhausting court appearances had not dampened her enthusiasm for financial transactions or diminished such opportunities: Balch’s former partner was eager to hire her “bake-house” (presumably a part of the house). Eldridge reported to Whipple, “I have let it for good rent.”87

The Second Book offered little new information about Eldridge; it summarized the Memoirs and included short stories exposing the indignities visited upon poor but honest mill workers, pieces that had been published before. And the Second Book had a slap-dash feel about it, perhaps because Whipple’s attention was elsewhere. In July 1842 she had wed artist Charles Green (she was thirty-seven, and he was twenty-four). She continued to write for abolitionist and temperance magazines and had recently completed a novel, The Mechanic. Moreover, a violent upheaval in Rhode Island politics was now claiming much of Frances Whipple Green’s emotional and literary energies and in the process upending her views about black people’s relation to their “true” friends.88

Rhode Island’s white workingmen had been agitating for changes in the state’s suffrage laws since the 1830s. In 1841 a group calling itself the Suffrage Association began planning a “people’s convention” to write a new state constitution, a “people’s constitution,” that would enfranchise white men who did not own property. The association opposed black suffrage, even among home owners, because, in the words of one of its members, “we know that, as a general rule … it might be too great a shock to public sentiment to allow colored men the privilege.” Arrayed against these insurgents—called Dorrites, after their leader, Thomas Dorr—were men calling themselves the Law and Order Party. Also called Charterites, this group supported the original 1663 Royal charter, a document that decreed that only substantial householders could participate in politics.89

Apparently, some light-skinned black men managed to vote for delegates to the People’s Convention, but overall the gathering—like the leaders who dominated it—favored a whites-only policy. Newly arrived in Providence, a black preacher named Alexander Crummell appeared before the October convention and presented a petition that expressed black people’s collective ire. The association’s high-minded rhetoric purporting to represent all “citizens” was sullied by a blatant antiblack bias: “To pair citizenship with color corrupts the purity of Republican Faith,” the petitioners declared. Representing the nearly half of all black Providence men who by this time owned their own homes, the petitioners felt compelled to refute various arguments that they were not worthy of the vote:

Is justification of our disfranchisement sought in our want of christian character? We point to our churches as our reputation. In our want of intelligence? We refer not merely to the schools supported by the State, for our advantage; but to the private schools, well filled and sustained, and taught by competent teachers of our own people. Is our industry questioned? This day, were there no complexional hindrance, we could present a more than proportionate number of our people, who might immediately, according to the freeholders’ qualification, become voters.90

Democracy eventually won out in the Rhode Island dispute, but its reach remained limited. In the spring of 1842 state authorities representing the “Charter” government declared the Dorrites guilty of treason and sought to suppress a popular uprising throughout the state, including an alternative “People’s” government. Among those quashing the Dorrites by force—Dorr was eventually imprisoned for several months—were the African Greys, who had volunteered to assist 3,500 white militiamen in the effort. And for the first time Providence authorities opened the ranks of the City Guard to blacks. To reward black men for their service in the so-called Dorr War, a new constitution would grant the franchise to propertied black men. All native-born landless men in the state could vote if they owned $134 worth of personal property, performed a day’s worth of militia service, or paid a $1 poll tax. (The Suffrage Association responded by denouncing the Law and Order Party as the “Nigger Party”) However, the vast majority of Irish immigrants could not meet these requirements and remained disenfranchised. Throughout the Dorr rebellion, no one ever suggested that Elleanor Eldridge, or any other woman for that matter, be allowed to vote. In 1845 her taxable holdings amounted to $4,500.91

White women were active in the Suffrage Association, and Whipple Green became a foot soldier in the cause. Caught up in the ferment, she contributed the best way she knew how—by writing. In her new magazine, Wampanoag and Operative’s Journal, she claimed that by excluding black men, the Dorrites had “forfeited the esteem and confidence of all the true and consistent friends of freedom.”92

Yet when the dust cleared and the Charterites emerged victorious, Whipple Green proceeded to denounce what she considered to be the blatant manipulation of blacks by the Law and Order Party. In her history of the conflict, Might and Right, she condemned the imprisonment of Dorr and his followers, and she took to task abolitionists for withholding their support from the Suffrage Association: “I have yet to learn that black men are better than white men, or that their rights are any more sacred.” She wrote, “They made the colored men voters, not because it was their right, but because they needed their help” As for the black man who would sell his political soul for favors from antidemocratic forces, “I would tell him that he is a DUPE.” She failed to appreciate the awful dilemma faced by black householders in Providence: to cast their lot with the white laboring classes, most of whom were rabidly hostile to all people of color, or to acquiesce in the patron-client relationships established with wealthy whites over the years. To understand the alliance between men of color and elites, she need only to have looked at her own sponsorship of Elleanor Eldridge.93

The People’s Convention and its aftermath did expand the bounds of political participation for Rhode Island’s propertied black men to a degree. As many as one thousand of them were enfranchised as a result of the new constitution, and they became a key constituency of the Whig Party machine. In local and state contests throughout the 1840s, they confirmed the worst fears of the Dorrites and served as decisive swing voters, representing as they did 2 percent of the total

Rhode Island population of 108,837. However, state and national political systems remained biased against the broader cause of black civil rights. Though official recognition of the African Greys was notable, overall Rhode Island’s black men gained little for their affiliation with the Whigs. And in 1848 their partisan loyalties led them to vote for slaveholder Zachary Taylor over Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren, who opposed the territorial expansion of slavery. For blacks, political elections offered a poor vehicle for expressing moral principles.94

In 1847 forty-two-year-old Frances Whipple Green divorced her husband of five years on grounds of abandonment and “acts of extreme cruelty and gross misbehavior … repugnant to, and in violation of the marriage contract.” By this time her interests had shifted to Spiritualism, a positing of the unity of the material and spiritual worlds, and she was trying to make a living by writing and speaking on the subject. In 1861 she moved to California, and the following year she married sixty-year-old William Creighton McDougall, a miner and a politician. In the 1870s she and her husband moved around mining camps east of San Francisco. While he panned for gold, she kept house and wrote on spiritualism, California botany, and recent history. In 1871 she published a lengthy newspaper piece, “The Donner Tragedy: A Thrilling Chapter in Our Pioneer History.” She died in Oakland in 1878.95

[image file=images/centerli.jpg]

During Elleanor Eldridge’s lifetime, Rhode Island’s political economy threw in stark relief the rivalry among laboring blacks and whites for public resources, including tax-supported schools. Inevitably, it was the whites—more numerous and with political influence—whose claims for those resources were heard most loudly, for blacks as a group were the constituency of no party or politician.

When members of the Providence Mechanics’ Association met in October 1831, soon after the Olney’s Lane riot, their main purpose was to call for a ten-hour workday not only for themselves but also for their children, whom they hoped would be able to go to public school: “We acknowledge the charity of Rhode Island citizens and manufacturers, in appropriating funding for free and public schools, and we wish to have our children reap their proportion of the benefit.” Toiling for up to fourteen hours a day left no time for nine-and ten-year-old factory workers to attend classes during the day or night.96

In Rhode Island white children occupied the front lines of the Industrial Revolution (they made up 40 percent of the early workforce; most of the rest were women). These children labored for long hours in poorly lit, claustrophobic mills scattered throughout the state. Employers valued children for the cheapness of their wages, which averaged 75¢ to $2 a week; for their obedience —they were accustomed to taking orders from their fathers; and for their malleability, because they had no choice but to conform to factory regulations or suffer fines or pay cuts in the process. However, this process of inculcating in children the virtues of punctuality and industrial-work discipline in general was an uneven one. Some fathers objected to challenges to their own authority and spoke out against conditions endured by sons and daughters who toiled as machine tenders in the heat and dampness of the mills in summer and in the cold by candlelight after dark in the winter. Shop-floor bosses varied in their attentiveness to the safety concerns of a workplace where children were replacing bobbins, surrounded by whirring wheels and gear shafts and flying shuttles. Nevertheless, Rhode Island was the last New England state to

mandate compulsory school attendance (in 1883), reflecting the integral role of children in the industrial labor force.97

As the common schools broadened their reach among whites, drawing in immigrants and the urban poor, violence against black schools and their teachers intensified proportionately. Educational reformers promoted public schools as an agent of the new industrial order, a guarantor of uniform instruction and a marker of eventual, full citizenship rights for the children who attended them. The threat to white privilege posed by black education was evident in the lengths to which mobs would go in preventing black pupils from learning—anything, anywhere. In 1833 in Canterbury, Connecticut, a white woman named Prudence Crandall had opened a school for both black and white children; threats forced her to dismiss the whites and teach black girls only. Local whites expressed their continued displeasure: shopkeepers refused to sell to Crandall or her seventeen pupils; townspeople poisoned the school’s well and set fire to the building; the local sheriff arrested and jailed Crandall for violating a recently passed law that made it illegal to teach blacks from out of state. Frances Whipple had penned a poem of protest, unsurprisingly, published in The Liberator as an “Address to Miss Prudence Crandall”: “Heroic Woman! Daring pioneer / In the great cause of mental liberty!”98

Many whites believed that citizenship rights were finite: supposedly, the more “mental liberty” granted to blacks in the public schools, the less “mental liberty” enjoyed by whites. A leading opponent of the Canterbury school, Andrew Judson, member of the American Colonization Society and aspiring politician (he was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1835), spoke for many whites seemingly undisturbed by their blatantly contradictory views of blacks: “The colored people can never rise from their menial condition in our country,” he declared, and then added, “they ought not to be permitted to rise here.” Here, then, were the cruel ironies of northern prejudice: whites charged, on the one hand, that black people were incapable of learning and exercising citizenship rights and, on the other, that they were all too capable of learning and politicking and threatening white privilege in the process. A northern abolitionist named James Freeman Clarke pointed out that white politicians went out of their way to ingratiate themselves with their constituents by “attacking the unpopular and defenceless colored man.” Blacks’ vulnerability derived from a legal system that deprived them of basic protections, and such discrimination in turn spawned contempt. Noted Clarke of whites’ attitudes toward blacks, “We dislike them because we are unjust to them.”99

The promise of equality enshrined within the four walls of the school-room was not lost on blacks in Providence. The city’s public school system, founded in 1800, suggested a future meritocracy, where opportunity based on talent and hard work would erase arbitrary forms of privilege, such as the one represented by the strange and shifting idea of race. In 1857 a group of black men petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly, protesting the city’s segregated black schools, opened in 1838: they “set us apart, make us a proscribed class, and thereby cause us to feel that we have separate interests and not alike concerned and interested in whatever pertains to the interests of the State.” Denying black children a public education, the petitioners pointed out, caused “us to be regarded in the eyes of the community as an inferior, a despised class to be looked down upon; and thus blunt our patriotism.” More generally, barriers to “rising” provoked anger and frustration among blacks all over the North. Providence black leader William Brown noted, “To drive a carriage, carry a market basket after the boss, and brush his boots, or saw wood and run errands, was as high as a colored man could rise.” In the 1850s blacks in

Providence were still barred from factory work and absent from the city’s list of professions such as lawyer, druggist, merchant, and professor. Still, when the city’s public schools integrated in 1857, not all black residents were enthusiastic; some lamented the loss of teaching positions and the loss of control over a pivotal community institution.100

Yet Elleanor Eldridge had managed to rise without much, if any, in the way of formal education. Unlike a black teacher or preacher, she was not dependent on impoverished pupils, congregants, or customers for her livelihood. In a city where nearly nine out of ten black women were working as menials, she had managed to accumulate a substantial amount of property by dint of hard work and an uncanny ability to navigate the state’s law enforcement and judicial systems. At the same time, she was forced to rely on white patron-employers, who provided her with credit, legal assistance, and sponsorship of the Memoirs.

Eldridge’s bouts with the law had not taken away her appetite for risk-taking. In 1847, several years after she had claimed her head was “too full” for schooling, she bought a lot next door to her Spring Street house for $2,000, paying $500 in cash and securing a mortgage for $1,500. Three years later she was living in her house, along with seventy-one-year old Mary Carpenter, a cook. Three other households made their home in separate apartments, including Thomas and Cornelia Case; laborer Stephen Brown and his wife, Anna, and one-year-old Susan Johnson; Sarah Smith and (perhaps her sons) David, a laborer, and Ira. Ten years later Mary Carpenter was living next door in Eldridge’s other house and Eldridge had new tenants under her own roof: Mary J. Randolph, a washerwoman, and her daughter Mary J.; and Rosannah Carpenter, a cook.101

Eldridge died of tuberculosis on June 24, 1862, at the age of seventy-six. Public officials recorded her death and listed her parents as “Robert (c[olored])” and Hannah Eldridge. With her real estate holdings of $4,800, she was the wealthiest black woman in Providence and within the black community second in wealth only to Manuel Fenner, a horse farrier and veterinarian. Two siblings and four nieces and nephews were her heirs. In 1860 one sister, Roby (Roba) Potter, was living in South Adams and still working as a domestic servant at the age of eighty-two and another, Dorcas Rosser, aged sixty-seven, lived in Warwick. Elleanor’s nieces included Lettice Peck, living in San Francisco with her white husband, a cook; Jane Lloyd, a washerwoman in Buffalo; Julia Hoose, married to a farmer in Lanesborough, Massachusetts; and Abby Ann Lewis, married to a Providence barber. Her nephews included Robert M. Eldridge, a sailor and farm laborer, and George, a miner, both of Warwick. When she died, Robert and George together sold her house for $4,500 to the local surveyor of highways. A contemporary biographer of Frances Whipple Green McDougall wrote that Eldridge “lived to a good old age, a respected and respectable woman, tall and erect as the young oak in the native forest of Rhode Island, through which her grandmother had wandered among the last of a race now unknown.”102

By this time Providence was attracting few black migrants; compared to Boston, it was a particularly inhospitable place for them. Immigrants were joining the ranks of the Rhode Island industrial workforce, but few of these white newcomers could vote because they lacked means to purchase enough property to meet the $134 threshold. Thus, in the 1860s foreign-born voters numbered only 1,260 (out of 37,394 immigrants residing in the state), while the black population of less than 4,000 accounted for 1,000 voters. This contrast in voting rights exacerbated Irish animosity toward blacks, even though, on the surface at least, the Irish shared obvious liabilities

with many blacks: both groups faced discrimination from native-born whites, most members of both groups remained confined to low-paying jobs, and both had suffered from a centuries-long form of slavery—in the case of the Irish, subjugation to the British Crown. Nevertheless, Irish newcomers retained substantial advantages in politics, job-seeking, and business; for example, they replaced blacks on public works construction projects, and qualified for liquor licenses where blacks were not allowed to buy such licenses. In their distress, the Irish would see blacks not as compatriots but as competitors for scarce resources—and for citizenship rights.103

Within this contentious political climate, academic debates over “scientific” racial ideologies played only a minor but supporting role. In Providence antiblack laws and policies emerged from conflicts over jobs, schools, the ballot box, and the inside of the sidewalk, not from abstract theories of racial difference. Still, local papers might occasionally run pieces summarizing scholarly studies of the world’s races. Around the time of the Hard Scrabble riot, the Rhode Island American saw fit to print an article on William Smellie’s “five varieties of the human race.” First published in Edinburgh in 1790, Smellie’s Philosophy of Natural History described the African “race” as “remarkable for its black colour, curled hair, flat nose, compressed cranium, and large lips. The individuals belonging to it are nearly all in an uncivilized state, and have an apparent inferiority in intellectual capacity.” In contrast, the “Caucasian race” was “distinguished by the fine form of the head and the great beauty of the features … distinguished in arts, arms, learning, sciences, and civilization.”104

In the North some black clergymen disputed the very idea of race as an affront to the Christian spirit, but only a few ordinary blacks had the luxury of time to ponder the intellectual underpinnings of race. One was David Walker, and another was George Henry, a ship captain. Born in the South in 1819, Henry settled in Providence. He argued against race, pointing out that, because all mankind was descended from Adam, meaningful “racial” differences were nonexistent. God was the arbiter of all social relations, Henry wrote in a letter to a local paper: “Now Mr. Editor, where did you get your race from? If it is a different race from mine[?] Please tell me and the world, and if you cannot answer this question, never let me hear any more howls from your paper about races.” He noted that extrapolating racial difference from skin color made no sense from a theoretical or practical point of view, for neither a capacity for citizenship nor a proclivity for godliness flowed from such a superficial characteristic.105

By casting former slaves as by nature perpetually poor and disorderly, northern politicians and members of the white laboring classes conjured a fiction to justify the suffering of men and women who were no longer deprived of power through other, simpler means—the institution of bondage. This fiction contrived a threat called “racial.” Ideologues argued that blacks lacked the requisite intelligence and moral character to use their freedom well, but the actions of mobs to deny blacks access to the ballot, schools, and good jobs spoke louder than the words that posited racial difference. In this respect, the local project of discrimination carried on by the whites of Providence and its environs foreshadowed a national project of the 1860s and beyond, one embraced by whites of varying political persuasions who claimed that former slaves and their descendants posed a threat to whites’ rights and livelihoods.

With some notable exceptions, abolitionists and fighters for equal rights took for granted the “complexional hindrance” that, according to the petitioners to the People’s Convention, stymied all men and women of color in their bid for American citizenship. Yet even though blacks might

have been one people in terms of their history and the opprobrium they endured collectively, they were hardly one people in “complexion.”

FOUR

RICHARD W. WHITE

“Racial” Politics in Post–Civil War Savannah

Late in the morning of Tuesday, January 26, 1869, in Wright Square, the heart of Savannah, a man named Richard W. White approached the park amid a commotion. A large number of black men and women, all of them rice workers, were spilling out of the courthouse, adjacent to the square to the west. Dressed in the rude clothing of field hands, and speaking Geechee, a pidgin language unknown to city folk, these workers had arrived earlier that day from the Ogeechee River district to hear public testimony against several of their neighbors charged by officials with “insurrection against the lawful authorities of the state of Georgia.” The Ogeechee proceedings had begun at 9 and ended at 11, when the next case, with Richard White as the defendant, was to start. Although his name was by this time a familiar one in Savannah politics, to the workers he would have appeared to be just another white man, with dark hair and dark eyes but a light complexion—hardly distinguishable from his paper-toting lawyers, all of them well dressed, with soft, callous-free hands. Yet like the reputed Ogeechee insurgents, this former Ohio schoolmaster offered a potent threat to the established political order.1

Beginning in mid-January, for fourteen consecutive weekdays, the city had been transfixed by wild tales of the “Ogeechee Troubles”—according to authorities, a violent uprising on the part of rice workers near Savannah. In the courthouse black spectators were confined to the gallery and first-floor aisles, while whites sat in the downstairs seats and murmured to themselves about the several alleged ringleaders, whom they judged a “hard-looking crowd, the countenance of some of them being particularly bad.” Those people unable to squeeze into the courthouse could read about each day’s proceedings in the local newspaper, with the story invariably headlined “The Ogeechee Insurrection!”2

In December 1868 several hundred freedmen in the Ogeechee River district had allegedly armed themselves with muskets, bayonets, and swords, defying white landowners and claiming as their own the rice crop they had planted, tended, and harvested. Former slaves emancipated by the Thirteenth Amendment three years before, these rice workers continued to toil in the same fields, now bound by landlessness rather than shackles and chains. Prosecutors in Savannah claimed that, the month before, the alleged insurrectionists had loaded their flatboats and, under the cover of darkness, spirited the rice away to remote hiding places. Threatening to dump an overseer in the swamp and leave his body as carrion for the buzzards, they vowed to “fight knee-deep in blood” and expel all white men from the region—in the words of one white eyewitness, “That as long as they could see a man with straight hair he should not stay in the Ogeechee.” Other sensational (and suspect) testimony featured mysterious signals exchanged among the defendants and menacing drumbeats punctuating the stillness of the flat, expansive midwinter rice fields. At the conclusion of the trial, six of the original seventeen defendants would be found guilty and given long sentences of hard labor, but the fact that Georgia’s governor pardoned all of them in the summer of 1869 indicated the Ogeechee Rebellion was largely a product of white authorities’ fevered imaginations.3

Richard W. White was at the center of another court case, Clements v. White. This one overlapped with the Ogeechee hearings and ran from January through March. His trial lacked a dramatic narrative shaped by gunshot blasts and rebellious field hands; instead it revolved around history, politics, and constitutional law. Yet most whites would have agreed that the outcome of this case had the potential to shake the state of Georgia to its core, owing to one simple fact: a black man had won a local election in Savannah.

At least Savannah whites thought he was black. Now prosecutors had to prove it in court. The case that began on January 26 culminated in a trial on March 22, 1869, when district court judge William Schley convened a jury to answer the question, Was Richard W. White, clerk of the Chatham County Superior Court, black or white? Specifically, was he a “person of color,” having “in his veins one-eighth of negro, or African, blood”?4

[image “FIGURE 4.1” file=images/f0147-01.jpg]

FIGURE 4.1 Alfred R. Waud’s drawing “The First Vote” appeared in the November 16, 1867, issue of Harper’s Weekly and depicts four southern black men casting ballots for the first time. Richard W. White won election to the Savannah judicial clerkship the following April. Here, Waud suggests that voting was an orderly process, when in fact white registrars, poll watchers, police, and working-class men devised a variety of tactics to prevent black men from participating in the political process at the ballot box and elsewhere. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

Jurors’ answer to that deceptively simple question would determine whether White could remain in his newly elected post. In April the year before, the twenty-nine-year-old White had won election to the clerkship with 9,782 votes to the 2,712 votes of his opponent, William J. Clements. Whites in Chatham County had moved swiftly to unseat the new clerk. In May members of an all-white grand jury indicted White on a trumped-up case of larceny; their aim was to intimidate him and to register the outrage of former Confederates who had been forced to sit out the election on the sidelines, stripped of the right to vote by congressional mandate for their bloody attempt to destroy the Union by force of arms. White spent a night in jail until he could post bond. A few months later Clements, a forty-nine-year-old store clerk, sued to assume the job the voters had denied him, charging that Georgia law prohibited black men from running for or serving in public office.5

Georgia’s antebellum laws were predictably silent on the issue of black officeholders, and after the Civil War most of the Georgia political elite considered black citizenship rights to be unsettled questions still subject to debate in the courtroom and state legislature. And yet within the previous eight years, the Union had vanquished the Confederacy in the American Civil War, at a price of 700,000 lives; congressional legislation (in March 1867) had enfranchised black men in the former Confederacy; and the requisite number of states had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (in July 1868), which guaranteed black people the status of citizens for the first time. Nevertheless, Georgia’s whites were determined to use state courts to halt the erosion of their own power that was sure to follow from black men’s inclusion in the electorate. Through the spring and into the summer of 1869, the questions of Richard White’s “race” and his eligibility for office produced more than one hundred pages of testimony, cross- examination, and, ultimately, opinions of a state superior court judge and three Georgia State

Supreme Court justices. And yet even before the court could render its decision, a political revolution was well under way in Georgia.

To northern visitors staying in one of Savannah’s elegant hotels and luxuriating in the mild winter weather, the city presented an appearance of busyness and prosperity. Caught up in the social season, the well-to-do kept themselves occupied with private parties, charity benefits, horse races at the Thunderbolt track right outside town, and a variety of offerings at the Theatre Comique—comedies, farces, pantomimes, and “negro melodies.” The docks along the Savannah River were humming with activity as longshoremen loaded three-hundred-pound bales of cotton into holds of ships bound for the North and for Europe. The whole city was “cotton mad,” according to the Savannah Morning News, with factors and traders anxiously following the international markets each day. Savannah had regained its leading place as a southern port, second only to New Orleans and ahead of antebellum archrival Charleston.6

Despite these seeming signs of normalcy, the Clements case revealed the dramatic way the war had transformed the city’s politics. Richard White and the Ogeechee defendants were among the agents of that transformation—and the presence of the defendants’ supporters in the courthouse on Wright Square testified to the end of slavery and the beginning of a contentious new politics in the postwar South.

Judge Schley and Clements’s attorneys were initially taken aback at the prospect of having to prove that White was indeed black. On March 4 White and his legal team issued a demurrer in response to a demand from the state’s solicitor general that he vacate his duly elected position immediately; the defendant was “not confessing or admitting any of the allegations in the said Information to be true,” the document asserted. Schley immediately issued an opinion from the bench stating that Georgia state law, by not expressly granting the right of black men to hold office, prohibited them from doing so, but the judge needed a jury to decide White’s race. White was a relative newcomer to the city, from unknown parts and of unknown lineage, so producing his kin as evidence one way or another was not an option. Instead, Clements’s attorneys would have to come up with some creative arguments to prove that a man who looked white was in fact black.7

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Ideologies of race had remained in flux in the South throughout the Civil War era. Before the war some proslavery men, like their Revolutionary-era South Carolina forebears, considered insulting the notion that they must defend bondage, an institution they considered self-evidently normal and useful. In the words of a prominent editor, “As Southerners, as Americans, as MEN, we deny the right of being called to account for our institutions, our policy, our laws, or our government.” Yet under increasing pressure from northern abolitionists, planters had developed a rationale for slavery, a justification that bridged the past views of Thomas Jefferson and the future views of social-scientific racists. According to antebellum southern elites, blacks were unable to care for themselves; like adolescents, they could not resist the temptations to drink, steal, and sing and dance the time away if left to their own irresponsible devices. One planter spoke for the members of his class when he argued that “anatomical peculiarities” of the Negro, chief among them deficiencies in the brain, “give to him those mental and moral characteristics that distinguish him from the more perfect and intellectual of the races.” Slavery was thus a

necessary institution, providing care and protection for a group of dependents who lacked the discipline to engage in productive labor on their own.8

With the war years came a brief challenge to this view, as Confederate military authorities condemned blacks for their perfidious efforts to undermine the fight against the Union; enslaved workers were now “intelligent beings” making use of “information well calculated to aid the enemy.” These blacks were guilty of “furnishing the enemy with aid & comfort, & for acting as Spies and traitors” and pursuing “cheap goods, freedom, and paid labor,” in the words of one group of outraged Georgia planters living not far from Savannah. The mythical childlike slave now gave way to the mythical bloodthirsty subversive, a throwback to the colonial period.9

The end of the war brought yet another iteration of “racial” imperatives, this one positing that blacks were congenitally unfit for freedom, and hence easily duped by white politicians—in this case, leaders of the Republican Party. Ironically, this new ideology of race echoed the views of whites in the postemancipation North, who had earlier in the century claimed that black people could not use their freedom well—that the former slaves would not work of their own volition and that, unless treated harshly by employers and public officials, they would soon descend into shiftlessness and criminality. By definition, then, according to this view, free people of color represented a threat to the well-being of white folk. Whites in both sections of the country embraced this myth because it served as a convenient justification not only for denying blacks the right to vote and send their children to school, but also for denying them basic protections under the law, even when attacked by whites as individuals or in mobs. The freedpeople of Savannah thus shared with the enslaved men and women of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake vulnerability to the depredations of masters and employers, of political leaders and legal authorities.

In the wake of the destruction of slavery, unrepentant Confederates continued to organize their world around what they considered the verities of race. An editor of the Savannah Daily News and Herald reacted with disbelief to a piece of postwar legislation protecting the rights of former slaves or their descendants or anyone else “who does not belong to the so-called white race.” Filed by Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, the bill posed a challenge to the very idea of racial classifications, which provoked an outraged response from the editor: “Is the man ‘daft’? Does he dispute the existence of races among men? Is he, himself, only ‘called’ and not a white man or of the white race?”10

The notion of racial differences between blacks and whites would provide a guiding principle for postwar political relations and create a social superstructure to replace the legal institution of slavery. Southern yeoman farmers could ignore the material similarities between themselves and freedpeople and embrace a notion of whiteness that guaranteed them considerable privileges, and legal rights, without altering their lowly class status. Politicians could appeal to their impoverished white neighbors and exalt solidarity among white men, all the while exploiting the labor of tenants, sharecroppers, and field hands regardless of color. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) the widespread acceptance of the notion of race, that notion did not necessarily lend itself to proof—or to rational discussion for that matter.

Richard White’s trial revealed the unease of southern whites forced to defend via evidence produced in a courtroom their efforts to subordinate all black people. Under slavery, the legal

status of the mother determined the liabilities of a son or daughter, regardless of the skin color of either parent or child. Now Georgia whites confronted the daunting task of enshrining a new form of subordination—discrimination against freedpeople—into a new code of laws and a new set of social norms targeting former slaves. Richard White’s trial was a proving ground for these new codes and for a new racial ideology southern whites hoped might preserve their long- standing traditions of slavery—in practice, if not in name.

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Clements’s attorneys called four witnesses whom he hoped might prove White’s “blackness.” Albert Jackson, the white voter registrar in Savannah, claimed that prior to the election he had posted a list of voters in a public place, putting a “c” for “colored” next to White’s name, a designation that White had not challenged. Richard Mimms, a black man, swore that White had told him that before the war he had “made his escape from a master or a guardian.” Next called to the stand, a local white Republican politician named A. N. Wilson said that the first time he had seen White, in the fall of 1867, he was delivering a speech in favor of nominating an equal number of whites and blacks as delegates to the upcoming state constitutional convention; such a stance, Wilson believed, indicated that White was speaking “in behalf of the colored part of the Convention.” And finally, a white physician, Dr. Easton Yonge, testified that he had listed White as a mulatto on an insurance policy for the defendant’s wife, a form that White had signed without protest. Proclaiming himself an expert in the “science of Ethnology,” Yonge declared that “any intelligent person” could tell “the difference between a white man and a person of color, from observation.”11

Yonge was mistaken in assuming that White’s race was apparent from observation. Jackson, the registrar, testified that he had “seen Spaniards and Italians as dark as White.” Jackson had only affixed a “c” next to the defendant’s name because, he said, “I believe White is reputed a person of color.” And, in fact, the whole trial revolved around not the color of White’s skin, but the nature of his “reputation.”12

In a stunning admission of the arbitrariness of racial classifications, Judge Schley assured members of the jury that they could take into account the role of “general hearsay” in deciding a person’s race. So now the jury must consider “the reputation of the person in his community, that is what he says of himself—what others say of him—his associates, and his general reputation as such in the community in which he resides, &c, in order to determine as to his being a white man, or a person of color.” For the purposes of White’s trial, race would be a matter not of ethnicity, or heritage, or appearance, or biology. It would be, purely and simply, a social fiction —one without any appreciable basis in physical reality.13

White’s lawyers decided that they would deny their client was black and force the other side to prove otherwise. Yet in the end they had no choice but to try to counter Clements’s claims, and so they argued that White was white, but even if he were not, citizenship as a legal status was indivisible: if a man could vote, he must also be able to run for election. The state constitution barred certain men from office, including those convicted of a felony, treason, embezzlement of public funds, and malfeasance in office, or those who were “idiots or insane persons.” Black men as a group were not included on that list.14

It was undeniable that White had allied himself openly with Savannah’s former slaves and free people of color in seeking to organize a local branch of the Republican Party. Over the previous couple of years he had appealed loudly and insistently to potential political supporters; the local newspapers, for different reasons, were willing enough to publicize his efforts. The jury’s verdict, announced on April 1, was therefore predictable: “We, the Jury, find that the Defendant has one-eighth of African blood in his veins, and is a colored man under the laws of Georgia.” Such a determination was a lie: not a witness or a lawyer or a juror or probably even White himself knew the identity of all his great-grandparents. Nevertheless, Schley affirmed in his final judgment a key point made by the prosecution: that “evidence of general reputation, reputed ownership, public rumor, general notoriety, and the like, though composed of the speech of third persons, not under oath, is original evidence, and not hearsay.” Richard White was black, in other words, because other people said he was.15

The larger question by which the case came to be known—“Can a Negro Hold Office in Georgia?”—examined legal questions that went to the heart of the meaning of the Civil War. Although the Fourteenth Amendment had granted black people citizenship, white men in Georgia believed they could legitimately claim a superior brand of citizenship. The state of Georgia now had a new constitution, approved by the voters in 1868; this document enfranchised black men, but it did not grant them the specific right to hold office—a lack of specificity that allowed white Georgians to press their own political interests on their “reconstructed” state.

In fact, unrepentant Confederates retained enough power at the local and state levels to stymie even the most basic revisions of customary legal practice. Soon after the end of the war, the Georgia legislature sent a number of former rebels to Congress, including Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy. In response to this and other affronts to the memory of the Union dead, Congress instituted a series of initiatives known collectively as Radical Reconstruction, which, among other directives, mandated the enfranchisement of southern black men. The April 1868 southern state and local elections—the first since Radical Reconstruction began—resulted in Richard White’s winning the clerkship and nearly thirty black men gaining seats in the Georgia state legislature. Yet in September Democrats in that body, with the support of some white Republicans, had voted to expel all duly elected black state representatives and senators. Regardless of political affiliation, white men seemed to agree that they could live with black enfranchisement as long as black men could not hold office. When Clements v. White commenced in early 1869, all black Savannahians were barred from serving on juries or on the police force and only one, Richard White, held office at any level of the city or county government. Instead of reflecting the county’s changing voter demographics, the city’s government looked much like it had in previous years: a former Confederate who had successfully run the Union blockade occupied the mayor’s office, and several of the twelve city aldermen were holdovers from the antebellum and war years.16

To Savannah’s elite, White was a cipher; he had taken up residence in the city sometime in 1866 or 1867 without announcing where he had come from or who his forebears were. He openly allied himself with the Republican Party, whose most famous member—the recently deceased President Abraham Lincoln—had made the party’s name synonymous with abolitionism and black rights. At the same time, a number of notable white “traitors” to their race were also Republicans, White’s attorneys among them.17

Judge Schley’s ruling in White’s case would not be the end of the matter, however. Rather than ceding his position as clerk of the Chatham County Superior Court, White appealed the case to Georgia’s highest court. In his Clements v. White decision, Supreme Court chief justice Joseph Brown held that the Fourteenth Amendment granted blacks citizenship rights and those rights included the right to hold office. Brown, the state’s wartime Democratic governor, had switched his allegiance to the Republicans following the South’s surrender; he understood that, at least for the time being, the party of Lincoln was in the ascendancy in national politics. A few weeks before, in March, Republican Ulysses S. Grant had assumed the presidency, and the Republican- majority Congress had refused to count Georgia’s electoral votes, citing widespread fraud in the November 1868 election. Later, in a candid moment, Brown would declare his firm belief that blacks as a “morally delinquent” group should be barred from elective office; he maintained that the neoslavery forms of labor discipline prevailing throughout the Georgia countryside served as a wholesome corrective for freedpeople, now rescued from “idleness and dissipation, and thieving.”18

Brown was joined in his opinion by Justice H. K. McCay, but the third justice, Hiram Warner, filed a dissenting opinion upholding the lower court ruling and agreeing with the reasoning of Judge Schley that “the legal right of [black men] to hold office has never been affirmatively expressed.” Despite their disagreements, the justices were able to find common ground and issue a joint opinion. They concurred with Schley and with Clements’s attorneys that “pedigree, relationship and race may be proven by evidence of reputation among those who know the person whose pedigree or race is in question.” At the same time, they also agreed that Schley had erred in his instructions to the jury by declaring as fact White’s ineligibility for office and that therefore his ruling in the case should be overturned.19

For his part, Richard White seemed poised to profit from a time and place open to challenges to antebellum and wartime notions of race. Over the course of his lifetime he created for himself a malleable past: at one time or another he claimed, or others claimed for him, that he had been born in South Carolina or Virginia or Kansas or Ohio; that he was black, white, or Native American. A poet and lover of nature, he nonetheless considered his service as a Union soldier to be the defining experience of his life. With his light skin color, this newcomer to Savannah was bent on finding out how far the son of an enslaved woman could navigate through the treacherous politics of the postwar South. In the end, his adopted city offered only a constricted arena for a man defined as black, no matter his boundless talent for politicking and self- invention.

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Richard W. White spent his formative years in the company of abolitionists in rural and small- town Ohio. Sometime before mid-October 1850, a white Quaker family living on a farm near the small town of Smithfield in Jefferson County adopted the youth into its household. The Ballinger family, migrants from Maryland, included William, age ninety-three, and his unmarried children Samuel, forty, Mary, thirty-seven, and Rebecca, thirty-five. One of them told a census taker that the boy living with them had been born twelve years before in Virginia. It is probable that the Ballingers gave White his name, a nod to his light complexion, though the census taker marked him “B” for “Black.” Later, in the 1860s, White would report that he had been born in 1840 in, variously, Columbia, South Carolina, and in the area east of Columbia, Sumter District, and that

his father, Thomas P. Cleaveland, was a native of France and his mother, Sarah, a native of Louisiana.20

White likely came to Ohio from a Virginia slave plantation. Jefferson County, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from Virginia, was well known for its Underground Railroad stations, which provided safe havens for runaway slaves. One busy crossing was the town of Steubenville, a few miles northeast of Smithfield. Certainly, the Ballingers would have been taking a great risk by harboring an escaped slave. In September 1850 Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, criminalizing efforts to help enslaved persons flee from the South, efforts that included hiding someone in a cellar or attic or, perhaps, in the case of a person who looked white, harboring him or her in plain sight. More generally, Ohio served as a destination not only for fugitive slaves, but also for children fathered by slaveholders and enslaved women. Some of these children were brought north by abolitionists, and others were sent to Ohio by their fathers, white men who wanted their offspring off the plantation and out of the South. Richard White was too young to have made his escape from slavery on his own, but it is possible that his relatives had found their way to Jefferson County and lacked the means to care for him.21

Some adoptive or “patron” families chose to educate their charges, and in 1858 the twenty-year- old Richard spent the fall semester studying at Oberlin College, a place derided by critics as “that old buzzards’ nest where the negroes who arrive over the Underground Railroad are regarded as dear children.” Founded in 1832, the college put its radical abolitionist ideals into practice by admitting black and white women and men. In 1860 it enrolled 422 blacks: 212 women and 210 men. Within a few years of leaving Oberlin, White was teaching school in Salem, Columbiana County, due north of Smithfield. Salem, too, was a junction on the Underground Railroad and home of the AntiSlavery Bugle, a publication of the Western AntiSlavery Society.22

Settling in Salem together were a number of black Virginians, carpenters, barbers, whitewashers, draymen, and stock dealers who could afford to spare their children from labor and send them to a local common school taught by one of their own. Still, life was by no means secure for these transplanted Southerners, who accounted for fully three-quarters of Ohio’s black population by 1860. The state swarmed with “man stealers”—kidnappers and slave catchers from the bordering states of Kentucky and Virginia. Bent on raiding farmhouses and country inns, these men searched for runaways and even free people of color, anyone vulnerable enough to be exchanged for a reward or sold on the auction block. Hardworking men and women, many fugitives from slavery and others born free, vanished without a trace after the sudden appearance of a professional bounty hunter in the area, while others only narrowly escaped being sold (back) into slavery.23

The personal insecurity endured by all people of color regardless of legal status shaped the African American community in Ohio. One of its best known leaders was John Mercer Langston, a man who would come to play a significant role in Richard White’s life. Born in 1829 in Louisa County, Virginia, Langston was the son of Ralph Quarles, a slave owner, and Lucy Jane Langston, an enslaved woman whom Quarles freed in 1806. After the death of their father in 1833, John and his three brothers moved to Chillicothe, Ohio. At the age of fourteen, he enrolled in Oberlin College and earned a BA in 1849 and an MA in theology three years later. In 1856 Langston and his new wife settled in Oberlin, where he became active in education and politics, pressing for the enfranchisement of black men. Scouring the state, he identified promising black

students for Oberlin and paid tuition bills for some of them, including, perhaps, Richard White, who turned over $12 to the Oberlin treasurer in November 1858. The Langstons boarded a number of black Oberlin students, several of whom seem to have been the sons of slave owners; Richard White might have been one of them. From 1860 to 1862 Langston served as secretary of the state school board and spent a great deal of time visiting public schools and promoting integrated education as a critical component of American democracy.24

From the start of the Civil War in April 1861, abolitionists in Ohio and elsewhere saw the conflict as a righteous battle to free the slaves. Yet not all whites agreed that blacks enslaved or free had a direct role to play in this conflict. Conventional wisdom held that, by definition, soldiering was an affair of honor reserved for white men, though, according to some whites, light-skinned persons of mixed parentage might qualify given the exigencies of war. One Ohio white man wrote to the US secretary of war in the summer of 1861, expressing his support for the formation of an Ohio regiment “consisting of 1000 colored men, three-fourths of whom are bright mulattoes.” Nevertheless, the vast majority of white Northerners rejected the idea that blacks might contribute to the conflict. One Cincinnati police officer angrily told John Mercer Langston that the war was irrelevant to black people: “It was a white man’s fight, with which niggers had nothing to do.” In the summer of 1862, stung by widespread white opposition to black soldiers, Langston began to lay the foundation for a vigorous military recruiting effort among Ohio black men. President Lincoln released the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and shortly thereafter Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew announced that his state would sponsor all-black regiments filled with men from all over the North. Blacks would now join the great war of liberation as uniformed fighting men.25

Traveling throughout Ohio, to cities, small towns, and farm areas, Langston spoke at numerous “war meetings” and repeated the promise he had exacted in writing from Andrew and, eventually, from Ohio governor David Tod: that, in Tod’s words of May 16, 1863, “the pay, bounty, clothing and term of enlistment will be the same for colored troops as for white troops.” By May 1863 Langston and a fellow Ohio recruiter, brother-in-law O. S. B. Wall, had successfully filled one regiment, the famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, and started on another, the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts. Within just a couple of weeks, the Fifty-fifth, too, was ready, with one-third of its recruits coming from the state of Ohio. Among those recruits was Richard W. White.26

White journeyed east with other “Westerners”—black men from the Midwest—and arrived at Camp Meigs in Readville, near Boston, in late May. On May 31 he formally enlisted in Company D of the Fifty-fifth for a three-year term, and received a bounty payment of $50. Likely owing to his stint in college, which was rare among Americans of any background, he was immediately promoted to sergeant, one of forty-five such noncommissioned officers in eleven companies, A through K. White listed his occupation as teacher and his birthplace as Columbia, South Carolina.27

On May 28, under the leadership of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts left Boston for the South, receiving a boisterous send-off from the city. At Camp Meigs members of the newly constituted Fifty-fifth moved into the barracks vacated by the Fifty-fourth and immediately embarked on a rigid schedule of drills and fatigue work, their labors a source of great curiosity among whites in the neighborhood. Trained and armed with old-fashioned

Springfield muskets, the Fifty-fifth departed Readville on July 21; the regiment included 767 privates, 18 musicians, 64 corporals, 45 sergeants, 9 lieutenants, 5 captains, and 4 staff and 2 field officers. Half of the enlisted men were “of mixed blood,” and one-third were literate. With the exception of one chaplain and a few sergeants, all the officers were white. Apparently, many of the black men, unlike the average recruit, joined out of idealistic motives. Burt Green Wilder, a young white doctor in training, marveled at the men’s decorum, writing, “These negroes are very nice folk. They don’t drink, swear, or quarrel as much as the white soldiers I have seen thus far.”28

The regiment left Boston under less than auspicious circumstances, the men’s high spirits tempered by news of the Fifty-fourth’s recent assault on Battery Wagner in Charleston Harbor; the battle cost that regiment 272 casualties, including the death of Shaw. The Confederates dumped his corpse into a trench with those of his men. A southern officer declared with grim satisfaction, “We have buried him with his niggers.” On the day of departure, the Fifty-fifth was supposed to parade through Boston, but a downpour quashed those plans. And at the last minute the regiment also had to forego traveling through New York City. A few days earlier New York had witnessed horrific riots instigated by white men who objected to a newly instituted Union military draft; turning their wrath on black men, women, and children, whom they blamed for the war, the rioters burned the Colored Orphan Asylum and randomly killed black people who crossed their path. The death toll stood in the hundreds, the number of wounded in the thousands. Colonel Charles B. Fox of the Fifty-fifth regretted that New Yorkers would have no opportunity to see his “thoroughly drilled and disciplined colored regiment, marching firmly and boldly, as they had a right to do, through New-York streets.” Instead, the Fifty-fifth went directly south, the men crammed into a ship built to transport no more than six hundred passengers; the eight hundred soldiers slept scattered on the decks or wedged together in the hold.29

The men spent the next several months on the islands off the coast of South Carolina—first Morris, then Folly—where, according to White, they were “worked almost to death” from the beginning. Black recruits had taken up arms more than two years into the war, after the Union had already established control over large swaths of the rebellious South. Now, in the summer of 1863, the imperatives of military occupation mandated that the energies of the Fifty-fifth be devoted largely to manual labor carried out in all-day rotating shifts: building bridges and wharves, felling trees, guarding railway lines, mounting siege guns, digging trenches, erecting fortifications, and loading and unloading stores and ammunition. The sultry heat and torrential rains of a Lowcountry summer, together with contaminated drinking supplies and punishing work demands, took a physical toll on many. Moreover, the fact that white regiments in the area were largely exempt from performing fatigue work and waiting on white officers angered the black soldiers. In its first seven weeks of service, the Fifty-fifth lost twelve men to disease and the effects of what even the white officers were calling “excessive” duties.30

For all its hardships, army life appealed to Richard White. With its strict daily routines from dawn reveille through evening drills, and its precise, gridlike layout, the camp offered at least the feel and appearance of orderliness. At the same time, for a young man raised by a farm family (at one point he listed his prewar occupation as cattle drover), camp life was exhilarating and even exotic. During the war the Fifty-fifth lived near and fought with regiments from New York composed of German and Irish immigrants. White found the sandhills of Folly Island to be bleak and barren, and the heat and humidity were literal killers, but when he was later deployed to

Florida, he appreciated the lush landscape and the “deep-voiced thunder” and “moaning sea,” which, he wrote, spoke to him and preached “God’s sermons.”31

White must have pondered the historic forces that had thrust him so violently into the same despised group as the other descendants of Africans he encountered for the first time in the army. At least one soldier in the Fifty-fifth, a man born in Africa, still bore tribal facial etchings from his native land. Some of White’s comrades had been enslaved, and others had been born free. Some had dark skin, and others, like White, had pale skin. Soldiers in the first southern Union black regiment, the First South Carolina (later the Thirty-third United States Colored Troops), also camped in the vicinity of the Fifty-fifth. Black refugees fleeing the mainland were a constant presence on the island; many had been impressed by Confederate officials to repair railroads and fortify defensive batteries around Charleston. The descendants of South Carolina’s Revolutionary-era slaves, these men and women sang their traditional songs for the soldiers and sometimes brought or sold them fruit, chickens, and eggs. Yet they still spoke Gullah, a language no Northerners could readily understand, and in their distress they aroused in White memories of times he could only dimly recall, if at all, from his own childhood in slavery. Just what did he share with these men and women? Nothing more or less than an overarching political vulnerability traced back to enslaved forebears, a political and historical status that was nonetheless expressed in racial terms.32

Despite Burt Wilder’s first impressions, the Fifty-fifth did indeed include gamblers, drinkers, and carousers in its ranks. Yet recruits also spent time debating the meaning of the war, writing letters home, reading black newspapers such as the Christian Recorder and the Anglo-African, and forming literary societies among themselves. Using New England primers supplied by the Freedmen’s Aid Commission, the noncommissioned black officers took the lead in instructing their comrades as well as the refugees who had found their way into camp. In January 1864 the Fifty-fifth formed a school committee to solicit funds from sympathetic Northerners and conduct classes for the regiment’s soldiers each morning. No doubt the young schoolteacher from Ohio played a part in these efforts.33

By this time White had been promoted (on December 13) to commissary sergeant, a lowly position in the military hierarchy but a sign that he had found favor with the white officers. The small circle of noncommissioned black officers consisted of well-educated men, many of whom were light in color. One member of this circle was James M. Trotter, who had much in common with White. Born in Mississippi in 1842, Trotter was the son of a slaveholder and an enslaved woman; his mother took her two sons, James and Charles, and escaped to Cincinnati via the Underground Railroad. A talented musician, James had received teacher education training at a private academy in Ohio, and in the Fifty-fifth he was prominent among the school instructors. Noncommissioned officers in general enjoyed a special status: they organized the camp schools and mediated between the well-to-do white commissioned officers and the recruits, many from impoverished families.34

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FIGURE 4.2 Second Lieutenant James Monroe Trotter (1842–1892) of Company G, Fifth-fifth Massachusetts Regiment, is pictured here c. 1865. In several respects Trotter’s early life, service in the army, and subsequent political career paralleled those of Richard W. White. Born in

Mississippi to an enslaved woman and her owner, Trotter taught in Ohio common schools before joining the Fifth-fifth. Both he and White were eventually promoted to second lieutenant. After the war Trotter moved to Boston, where he joined the Republican Party and became the first black person to be hired by that city’s US Postal Service. Unlike White, however, when Trotter was passed over for job promotions, he bolted the party and became an active Democrat. His son William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) had an illustrious career as an influential newspaper editor and civil rights activist. COLLECTION OF THE GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK MUSEUM.

In late January 1864, White wrote a letter that was published by the Christian Recorder in its February 4 issue. The Recorder was the organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and, at the time, the nation’s oldest black publication. White reported to readers in the North that “the men are generally well at this time, quite as much as could be expected under the circumstances that surround us.” Those circumstances included heavy fatigue duty, as well as the taunts they had to endure from white soldiers stationed near them on Folly Island. He wrote, “When we first landed on this island, we were liable to be insulted by any of the white soldiers,” but now, “thank God, that is about played out, and they have come to see that they are bound to treat us as men and soldiers, fighting for the same cause indirectly, if not directly.”35

White’s overall positive account of the regiment’s progress was surprising given the other circumstances he mentioned in his letter: “I suppose you would like to hear how we are getting along for money, as you well know that we have not been paid yet.” The shock had come soon after the initial deployment of the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts regiments: instead of the $13 monthly pay, plus clothing, earned by white privates and corporals, black soldiers would receive only $10, and $3 of that amount would be deducted for the cost of their uniforms. Black sergeants made less than white privates. In December 1863 the state of Massachusetts offered to make up the difference for the black soldiers, but Northerners in both regiments rejected the idea. They argued that all the men should refuse any pay until they received the same as their white counterparts. Wrote one soldier, “No chance for promotion, no money for our families, and we are little better than an armed band of laborers with rusty muskets and bright spades.”36

The pay issue provoked a great deal of bitterness, and protests took a variety of forms. Some men, like White, wrote to northern publications to alert readers to the outrage. Trotter contacted prominent abolitionists. The Fifty-fifth formed a committee to raise the issue formally with the regiment’s colonel, Alfred Hartwell, whom they knew to be sympathetic, but his superiors dismissed his pleas on their behalf. In November 1863 men in the Third South Carolina Volunteers, almost all of them former slaves and stationed on the South Carolina Sea Islands, followed the lead of Sergeant William Walker of that unit and stacked their arms as a sign of protest, vowing that they would not go back to work until they were paid fairly. Officers charged Walker with mutiny and, after a court-martial trial, executed him in front of his brigade in February 1864.37

In July seventy-four of White’s comrades in Company D of the Fifty-fifth signed a letter addressed directly to President Lincoln and written by one of their members, John F. Shorter. The signatories pointed out that they had enlisted with the assurance that their pay would be “on the same footing of Similar Corps of the Regular Army.” Explaining their decision to forego diminished paychecks, they wrote, “To us money is no object” because “we came to fight For

Liberty justice &equality. These are gifts we Prise more Highly than Gold.” They reminded the president that they had spent thirteen months in the field “cheerfully & willingly Doing our duty most faithfully in the Trenches Fatiegue Duty in Camp and conspicuous valor & endurance in battle as our Past History will Show.”38

The army’s unequal pay policies had a crushing effect on families and friends back home. As the men of Company D noted, “We left our Homes our Famileys Friends & Relatives most Dear to take as it ware our Lives in our Hands To Do Battle for God & Liberty.” For married recruits, the ensuing hardships endured by their wives and children clouded the decision to refuse all pay until this wrong could be righted. Rachel Ann Wicker, the wife of William Wicker, a thirty-two- year-old farmer from Troy, Ohio, described her frustration in a letter addressed to “Mr. President Andrew.” (Governor Andrew of Massachusetts passed it along to Lincoln in Washington.) Wicker demanded “to know the reason why our husbands and sons who enlisted in the 55 Massichusette regiment have not Bin paid off.” She wrote, “I wish you if you please to Answer this Letter and tell me Why it is that you Still insist upon them takeing 7 dollars a month when you give the Poorest White regiment that has went out 16 dollars”? In Washington Treasury and War Department officials remained unmoved.39

Stationed on the coast not far from Charleston, Company D saw limited battlefield action in the spring of 1864. Together with other regiments, the company’s members skirmished periodically with the enemy, made brief raids into the interior for bricks and provisions, and succumbed in large numbers to epidemics and blistering heat. Throughout this time White no doubt relished his role as correspondent for northern publications, whose editors appreciated his keen powers of observation inflected with literary sensibilities. He was unusual among the Fifty-fifth’s war correspondents in including samples of his poetry in dispatches home. He felt moved by a kind of pantheism that no single religious domination could capture, and nature was his muse. The voices of the dead communicated to him through the forces of wind and sea:

They sing sweet tunes in muffled lanes,

Where piles of runnet leaves are strewn,

Or pierce my soul with nameless pains,

Of carol sweet as birds in June.

Perhaps reflecting his Quaker upbringing, White wrote that God spoke not through the biblical exegesis of the clergy, but through the “tiny lips of simple flowers.”40

In May he wrote a letter that he knew the Christian Recorder would never publish and sent it instead to the Anglo-African, a secular publication. In it he declared the willingness of all black men to sacrifice and suffer “if, by so doing we can, in the end, gain our freedom and that of three million and a half slaves, who have been for the last two hundred years enslaved by the government and religion of this country.” He went on: “I say religion, for the Christianity of the nation has done more to uphold slavery than any other one thing.” It was the soldiers of the Fifty-fifth who were doing God’s work “to win a free country to leave as an inheritance to their children, where no slave clanks his chains, and no mother weeps for her babe forever doomed to slavery’s hell.”41

White was proud to represent both Massachusetts and Ohio in the Fifty-fifth. Yet on July 28 he wrote to a Kansas army general in a clear, firm hand and asked to join a new “Battery of Colored men to be commanded by Colored Officers” in that state. He felt “great interest in this movement,” he continued, “first because I am a colored man, and second because I have been a citizen of the state of Kansas.” He concluded, “I therefore most humbly hope if you can do anything to assist me to get transferred from this Rgt to your Battery you will do so.” Major R. H. Hunt, in charge of organizing “U.S. Colored artillery light,” appended a brief observation to White’s letter, and noted, “Judging from the letter this man is an intelligent negro, and would doubtless make a good officer; and as vacancies still exist respectfully recommend his transfer.” Nothing ever came of White’s request, though clearly he ached to achieve a more formal leadership role in the army.42

Finally, a congressional act reinstated black soldiers’ back pay, but only retroactively to January 1, 1864, and only for those who could swear they had been free before the war. In September the men of the Fifty-fourth and the Fifty-fifth were paid, and together they sent more than $60,000 home. On Monday, October 10, members of the Fifty-fifth celebrated their hard-won but long- deferred compensation, and Sergeant Richard White was one of the featured speakers in a program that included music by the regimental band and the singing of “Vive L’America.” A comrade provided an enthusiastic account of the proceedings in a letter to the Christian Recorder, noting rather cryptically, “Sergt. White gave us one of those solid and manly speeches that Western [i.e., Midwestern] men know so well how to make. It was easy to see that he meant all he said, and that he meant a great deal.” White was finding a respectful audience among other freedom fighters.43

The Fifty-fifth engaged the enemy in only one major encounter, the Battle of Honey Hill on November 30, near Grahamville, South Carolina, not far from the coast. Under a hot sun and bereft of artillery support, the men rushed Confederate lines, charging through a narrow road bounded by underbrush set afire and running through a hail of bullets, canister, and cannon. It is possible, though, that during this battle White was at home in Ohio. On October 24 he had received approval for a thirty-day furlough that was intended, in the words of his superior officer, “for the purpose of visiting his parents, who are quite sick in Salem, Columbiana County, Ohio.” The officer supported the request by accounting for all the men who remained on duty— 817—and by adding, “Sergt White has always performed his duties in an exemplary manner and is well worthy of this indulgence.” It is possible that White indeed returned to Salem, where he had taught and where, perhaps, his birth parents lived. In any case, it is unclear whether White left immediately for the North after the 24th and returned right before the battle or whether his departure was delayed for a week or more, sparing him the fight.44

In mid-January 1865 members of the Fifty-fifth moved to the mainland of Georgia. There they savored the victory of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had completed his five-week- long trek across the state, culminating in a triumphant entry into Savannah on December 21. The Fifty-fifth performed garrison duty for Sherman’s troops (who had never before seen black men in uniform) and took in the sights and sounds of a city that was but a weed-choked, dilapidated shell of its former proud self. John H. Jenkins, a thirty-eight-year-old soldier from Boston, acknowledged that “Gen. Sherman says he will not fight with [i.e., use] our colored troops,” but Jenkins, overcome with exhaustion, chose to ignore the insult: “I have had my share of fighting,

so he can take his white men and fight as much as he likes, as long as he lets John alone.” Stationed at Forts Barton and Jackson near Thunderbolt, a few miles outside the city, the men of the Fifty-fifth spent part of their days in Savannah. They were among the first black troops whom Georgia whites laid eyes on. James Trotter reported, “Ours is the only colored Regt. so near Savannah and, of course, [we] create much sensation among the Georgians. They have great fear of our troops and are trembling because of our proximity and the expectation of our coming to town to them was [as] Belshazzar reads the handwriting on the wall.”45

In mid-February the Fifty-fifth advanced north and entered Charleston the day after the retreating Confederate Army had destroyed the city’s cotton warehouses, arsenals, bridges, military supplies, and even ironclad ships in the harbor. On February 19 crowds of black men, women, and children lined the streets of the still-smoldering city and roared their approval at the sight of the uniformed men of the Fifty-fifth, now conquering heroes. “Cheers, blessings, prayers, and songs were heard on every side. Men and women crowded to shake hands with men and officers.” An elderly woman declared, “Bress de Lord, I’se waited for ye, and prayed for ye, long time, and I knowed you’d come, and ye has come at last.” Certainly, this heartfelt reception made a lasting impression on Richard White, weary but euphoric in the now-vanquished cradle of secessionism. Meanwhile, for the few whites who had stayed in the city and hidden behind closed doors, the sight of black men in uniform was too much for them to bear. As a New York Times reporter noted with some understatement, “They [the whites] had an opportunity of observing that the colored soldiers were slaves no longer.” If before this moment White had been inclined to cast his lifelong lot with the former slaves of the South, this thrilling scene—the whites indoors and sullen, the blacks outside and exultant—might have solidified his decision.46

The Fifty-fifth could only briefly savor the moment, for its members spent much of the next several months in a downpour, slogging over muddy roads and through swampland in the South Carolina interior, rebuilding bridges and trestles, foraging for food, and skirmishing with Confederate stragglers and guerrillas. During the spring and early summer, the regiment passed through a devastated landscape littered with burned rice mills and bridges, ruined fields, rotting animal corpses, and the bleached bones of fallen comrades. Juxtaposed with these dismal sights, though, were more hopeful signs: large numbers of black refugees on their way to the coast, determined to make new lives for themselves. On April 11, 1865, the day that Robert E. Lee was surrendering his army to General Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia, the men of the Fifty-fifth came upon a mile-long “refugee train” composed of approximately 2,000 people and their wagons. They were, in the words of Colonel Fox, “new and old, fit and unfit, patched up, nailed up, tied up, and pegged up.” Women carrying children in their arms and heavy bundles on their heads helped to form a latter-day Exodus of biblical proportions. At the end of each day songs of jubilation rang out amid the roadside campfires, praise to God and to the “Black Yankees” who had delivered these refugees from bondage.47

[image “FIGURE 4.3” file=images/f0167-01.jpg]

FIGURE 4.3 The caption for this drawing published in the March 18, 1865, issue of Harper’s Weekly reads, “‘Marching On!’—The Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiment Singing John Brown’s March in the Streets of Charleston, February 21, 1865.” African Americans thronged the streets to welcome the city’s liberators, most of whom were black men from Massachusetts and Ohio. The stirring scene no doubt made a deep impression on the soldiers themselves,

including young Richard W. White. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

On April 14 the Fifty-fifth was camped near Charleston, where a grand celebration marked the end of four long, bloody years of fighting. A number of northern luminaries, including abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, addressed throngs at Fort Sumter, where the conflict had ignited. But, ominously, northern officers kept black would-be revelers from attending the festivities. Just five days later an assassin took the life of Abraham Lincoln. Charleston, at least the part composed of African Americans and northern whites, plunged into mourning.48

In late April James M. Trotter received a commission as a second lieutenant, a belated and bittersweet recognition of his leadership in the Fifty-fifth. The regiment was breaking up, but not before Company D was detailed as provost guard at Orangeburg, northwest of Charleston and halfway between that city and Columbia. Captain Charles C. Soule had been appointed chairman of the Orangeburg Commission on Contracts, a federal agency established to promote labor contracts between freedpeople and white landowners. Black men and women, however, had their own priorities: they were in the process of reconstituting family groups scattered before the war and ensuring that they would be able to provide for themselves out of the reach of white landowners.49

Soule and other white officials mistook the restlessness among Orangeburg blacks as signs of lawlessness, blaming the ensuing disorder on “the advice of many of the colored soldiers,” Northerners who pressed upon these simple people “false and exaggerated ideas of freedom.” Alarmingly, the freedpeople seemed to trust only “people of their own color, and believe that the [white] officers who have addressed them are rebels in disguise.” Freedom meant “law, order, and hard labor,” in Soule’s words. He predicted that “ignorant and degraded” blacks would prove to be the biggest obstacle to successful postwar reconstruction, which he defined as the revival the staple-crop economy.50

In a speech to an outdoor assembly of freedmen and freedwomen, Soule outlined a plan that Richard White no doubt found deeply troubling. Soule declared to his listeners, “You are now free, but you must know the only difference you can feel yet, between slavery and freedom, is neither you nor your children can be bought or sold.” Landowners would compensate their workers not with cash wages but with food, clothing, and shelter. Men and women must return to the fields and labor from dawn to dusk, keeping at their tasks and seeking the permission of their employer to leave “even to nurse a child or to go and visit a wife or husband.” Above all, black people must remember that they were poor and their employers rich; this fact should temper their dangerously exaggerated views of freedom.51

The men of the Fifty-fifth spent time in or near Charleston for brief periods throughout February, March, and April before finally convening in that city for the last time in August. The regiment was formally mustered out of the service on August 29, 1865, but not before the company physician, Dr. Wilder, under orders, took the men’s body measurements. An anthropologist would later use the data to argue for the racial distinctiveness of blacks.52

It is possible that within this relatively short period White had been able to grasp the extent of the great competing historic forces sweeping over the city and the South Carolina Lowcountry: the former slaves’ struggle for freedom and self-determination pushing back against whites’ attempts

to reassert the control they had lost during the war. As soon as northern troops, including the Fifty-fifth, entered Charleston, local black leaders set about establishing schools, opening and reopening businesses, forming a Union League loyal to the federal government, and assembling in mass meetings to debate political strategy for the future. At the same time, an estimated 30,000 black men, women, and children were settling on the Sea Islands, planting small patches of corn and vegetables, and peddling chickens and eggs to Union soldiers stationed nearby.53

Company D sailed out of Charleston Harbor on September 14, 1865. Stormy seas and lightning strikes on the ship’s masts made the weeklong trip back to Boston a harrowing one. And then early in October Richard White received his own commission as a second lieutenant. He could have interpreted this delayed promotion either as a grave insult, a pathetic gesture that came after the end of hostilities, or a great personal victory, given that so few black soldiers ever achieved such an honor. Overall, only one hundred black men received commissions during the war, and fully two-thirds of those were members of the Louisiana Native Guard, many well educated and light-skinned. Of the six men who had served with Massachusetts regiments and received commissions, all but one had to wait until the summer of 1865. Like White, most were Northerners, free before the war.54

Soule believed that only white Northerners, men of stern business principles untainted by romantic notions of black equality, could “bring order out of this chaos.” He would not have approved of the decision by one of his own men from Company D to settle permanently among the region’s former slaves. Yet as early as the spring of 1864, Richard White had signaled his intentions: “Do not think I am over zealous in the work; for I think I can see a bright future opening up to our people and I am determined to fight and do all in my power to hasten the day of universal freedom.” By the fall of 1865 Second Lieutenant White had proved himself smart and disciplined. He had survived the war with life and limb and reputation intact. He had served honorably, a good soldier with the soul of a poet who deferred to his white superiors. And so, determined to help forge a new South out of the war-torn old one, he charged headlong into the turbulent world of postbellum southern politics.55

[image file=images/centerli.jpg]

Within a few months after his discharge from the army, Richard White returned to Charleston, where chimneys stood as lone sentinels among the ruins of crumbling walls and scorched buildings. The detritus of war mirrored a larger demographic disaster, for the white South had lost a whole generation of men—more than one-fifth of the white adult male population—and hundreds of thousands of people uprooted from their homes were suffering from hunger and disease. Freedpeople from the interior were streaming to the islands or crowding into Charleston for safety. The churning refugee populations were emblematic of the unsettled nature of the political economy throughout the coastal region.56

Rising from the ruins of Charleston, a jubilant black population enlivened the city. Black women promenaded and flaunted their richly colored clothing and the veils that had been denied most of them under slavery (all but the handful of hostesses of “Ethiopian Balls”). In time-honored tradition, black hucksters continued to wend their way through the streets calling out their wares: berries, shrimp, bread, peanuts, candy, and beer made out of herbs. A cadre of well-educated, light-skinned free men of color sought to seize control of the city’s politics. Hailing from a small

town in Ohio, White was no doubt alive to the promise of Charleston, for here was a place ripe with possibilities for an idealistic young man. On May 30, 1866, he opened an account at the Charleston branch of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, created by Congress in late 1865 to encourage black veterans to save their wartime earnings.57

White probably arrived in Charleston sometime in late 1865 or early 1866 intending to teach in the schools sponsored by the United States Freedmen’s Bureau, a government agency created in 1865 to facilitate the transition from slavery to freedom among the 3.5 million freedpeople in the South. John Ogden, the bureau’s education superintendent in 1866, thought highly of White, writing in June 1868 to John Mercer Langston, “You will not forget Mr. White’s matter. I wish it could be so arranged that he could be placed in this work permanently. He is too valuable a man to be consigned to a mere clerkship.” White himself at some point apparently felt that he was too valuable a man to be consigned to a mere schoolmaster’s post. Although he might have decided to relocate permanently to the South in order to teach, he soon realized that his political acumen and his public speaking talents fitted him for a higher station in the former Confederacy. Certainly, Charleston in the mid-1860s afforded ample evidence of the opportunities available to ambitious black men who dared to seize them.58

Nevertheless, White did not remain in Charleston for long, leaving the city sometime in 1866 or early 1867 without making his mark on the political landscape. However, he did leave with a wife. Anna, or Annie, was twenty-two or twenty-three when they married; she had probably been free before the war, like her mulatto sister Sarah, who had been born in 1824 and was now married to Robert, a carpenter. Sarah and Robert formed a household with White and his bride; other members included Harriet (born in 1852) and Gustave (1859), siblings of either Sarah or Robert.59

Soon after their marriage, Richard and Anna and their extended household moved to Savannah, a place with which he had some familiarity, based on his deployment there in early 1865. The city had a small black leadership class, but one fractured among many individuals with divergent political views. Representative of men native to the city were Charles DeLaMotta, before the war an enslaved ship carpenter; editor and activist James Simms, whose professorial air belied a fierce commitment to full civil rights for all black people; James Porter, a teacher and talented musician; the Reverend Ulysses L. Houston, a Baptist preacher with an established constituency, his home congregation of First Bryan Baptist Church; and John Deveaux, son of an iconic figure in the city, Jane Deveaux, longtime teacher of a clandestine antebellum school for black children. From the North came the Reverend Tunis G. Campbell, founder of self-sufficient black colonies along the coast in Liberty County (on Saint Catherine’s Island) and McIntosh County (Belleville); and lawyer Aaron A. Bradley, a onetime fugitive slave from Georgia who had spent the last several years in the North reading law and earning a well-deserved reputation for his provocative language in the service of black rights.60

After the war many Savannah whites were disconcerted by the rise to political prominence of men who, by virtue of their appearance at least, were clearly more white than black. For example, the up-and-coming John Deveaux was a native of the city; only eighteen in 1865, he hailed from a well-established family, descendants of early-nineteenth-century immigrants from Antigua. Jackson Sheftall, a successful butcher who looked white, was the son of a prominent white man and an enslaved woman. Still, it was the interlopers who caused the most

consternation because their lineage remained a mystery. With his flowing red hair and copper- colored skin, Aaron Bradley proved a real curiosity, and a frightening one, among the city’s elites; they had never encountered a black man who had studied law and then put his legal knowledge to use with such a vengeance. Richard White threw them off as well; more subdued than Bradley, he had a low-key manner but cultivated potentially threatening political alliances with white Republicans.

And, indeed, White found allies among some of Savannah’s white men who, for various reasons, were enemies of the postwar neo-Confederate project. Georgia natives included wealthy physician Dr. J. J. Waring, now held in contempt by his white neighbors for his antisecessionist stance (he would post bond for the newly elected Richard White in the spring of 1868). Some northern white men, such as brothers Walter and Dr. Joseph Clift (from Massachusetts), Isaac Seeley (New York), and Thomas P. Robb (Maine), had settled in or near Savannah after the war to pursue business interests and political careers in the heart of the former Confederacy. Savannah was also at least a temporary home to northern teachers and school superintendents sponsored by the American Missionary Association (AMA), officials of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and, after the imposition of Radical Reconstruction in the spring of 1867, US military men assigned to oversee the process of bringing Georgia back into the Union.61

What united all these men (for they were all men, with the exception of AMA teachers) was membership in various Union Leagues composed of persons loyal to the United States and then, after the enfranchisement of southern black men in March 1867, the Republican Party. Once in Savannah, Richard White wasted no time joining the party. He wanted to help rebuild the South, and this path offered the possibility of a livelihood in the form of a patronage job or elective office. If he had any hope of becoming a teacher, conditions in Savannah quickly disabused him of that notion: the AMA was in the process of pushing all competitors from the field, and the association refused to hire black teachers or teachers’ assistants. By early 1867 the AMA was operating eight schools with 950 pupils taught by eleven teachers working multiple shifts in day and night schools. The few black-run schools were small and ephemeral affairs, ill suited for any teacher who needed to support a family. It is unclear how White made a living before his election as clerk of the court; but because he spent his years in the army as a single man, he had probably saved enough of his initial bounty and his wartime pay to last several months.62

For almost a decade after his arrival in Savannah, White embraced the full range of rights and responsibilities available to conscientious citizens. He ran for and won public office and then mounted a spirited defense of his right to serve. He penned and circulated reasoned petitions protesting white men’s efforts to bar all black men from power. He wrote letters to his representatives in Congress and to leading national public officials. He addressed mass meetings, urging black Savannahians to vote and to use their numbers to good advantage. He worked as a civil servant for the federal government. When all else failed, he engaged in direct action and risked his life in the process. Yet gradually White was forced to adjust to political realities, sacrificing his idealism for his need to provide for his growing household.

White’s steadiness of character rendered him suspect in the eyes of at least one fellow black activist. After many years of exile in the Northeast, Aaron Bradley had returned to his home state in late 1865. In Savannah he quickly established himself as a force to be reckoned with on all sides, a man whose antiwhite rhetoric and swaggering demeanor placed him at odds with both

black clergy and other political aspirants regardless of skin color. Speaking at the Second African Baptist Church soon after his arrival, Bradley ridiculed the advice given by another speaker, the Reverend Garrison Frazier, an elderly Baptist preacher. Frazier urged his listeners to ingratiate themselves with their former masters and mistresses and to refrain from stealing. Taking the pulpit after Frazier, Bradley retorted that when the former slaves appropriated the fruits of their own labor, they did not steal but rather claimed what was rightfully theirs after slaving their whole lives for white people. According to a breathless account provided by a local paper, he urged his listeners to “resist, if necessary, at the point of the bayonet all attempts on the part of the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau to dispossess or remove them from the lands.” Local whites began to denounce Bradley as the “Great Wahoo,” an “incubus” of torture, and a “narrow-minded colored pettifogger.”63

Beginning in March 1867, the new plan of Radical Reconstruction unleashed a wave of political organizing among blacks in anticipation of election of delegates to the upcoming state constitutional convention, a body mandated by Congress to purge Georgia of the residue of rebellion once and for all. A cross-section of the black community in Savannah and its environs eagerly embraced politicking, with men, women, and children turning out for rallies in the city’s leafy squares and in the brush arbors dotting the surrounding countryside. Alexander Stephens, the former Confederate vice president, regarded the whole enterprise as inherently dangerous for whites. The New York Times, now elevating Stephens to the role of elder statesman, quoted him as saying, “The negroes are compactly organized, their ‘leagues’ reaching every corner of the State. They coerce and threaten any black man who does not join them.” He concluded, “They are a unit politically.” The Daily News and Herald promptly anointed the Republicans the “Mongrel Party,” attesting to its support among a few whites in addition to many blacks.64

In October 1867 Richard White won election as a delegate to the Savannah Republican Party convention. The following April he rode a wave of support for black Republican candidates in the elections for national, state, and local offices and won for himself the Chatham County Superior Court clerkship. Savannah black voters outnumbered white ones by 3 to 2 (3,062 to 2,269), and helped send Dr. Joseph W. Clift to the US House of Representatives and, among other black candidates, James Porter and James Simms to the Georgia House and Aaron Bradley to the Georgia Senate. Tunis Campbell won a seat in the State Senate, his son and namesake a seat in the House. Campbell Senior was also elected a justice of the peace in Darien.65

Nevertheless, these impressive electoral results could not shake the iron hold that white men retained over the machinery of Georgia government at every level. In September 1868 enough whites in the state legislature overcame their partisan differences to join together and vote to expel all the black representatives and senators elected four months before. Anticipating Clements v. White, these white legislators claimed that the law forbade black men from running for or holding office. The Reverend Henry M. Turner, a Union wartime chaplain now turned politician, accused white Republicans of wanting “the black man to be a mere ass, upon whose back any white man may ride into office, and then sink him to eternal infamy by their votes on diabolical legislation.” The Democrats used more direct means. Savannah authorities had managed to fend off attempts by blacks to gain some influence in the local government; during the general election in November, white authorities used a combination of poll taxes, violent intimidation, and legal maneuvering to deny an estimated 90 percent of all registered black voters the chance to cast a ballot. A police-led rout of would-be voters the first day of the

election claimed the lives of three black men and three white policemen, wounded seventeen blacks—and gave local Democrats an overwhelming victory.66

The next month White, together with two other black leaders, sent a letter to Representative Clift in Washington summarizing resolutions passed at “a mass meeting of colored citizens” of Savannah on December 28. The intent of the meeting was to urge Congress “to secure to every citizen of this State the rights of citizens of the United States.” Calling the expulsion of the black legislators “an unjust deprivation of our most sacred rights as citizens, a high-handed outrage,” the meeting condemned “fraudulent” acts of the legislature and “the persecution we have suffered, the barbarities committed in the name of the law, and the defiance of all law.” The letter, in White’s handwriting and probably his words, denounced lawmakers’ efforts to “declare a large number of its members, who were allowed to participate in said election, ineligible, and expel them therefrom, thereby with strange inconsistency and utter disregard of all principle vitiate and nullify its own action in the premises.”67

Even though White could blame white lawmakers in Georgia for his political troubles, in fact General Sherman had laid the foundation for Savannah’s postwar reactionary government. In December 1864 he allowed the city council to remain in place and he declared that the need for public order trumped all other priorities, including the rights of newly freed slaves. Two postwar city elections returned to the council several familiar faces, including former slaveholders who had enjoyed an unbroken stint of power before, during, and now after the war. In March 1868 General George Meade, head of the Union occupying forces, suspended municipal elections for the foreseeable future out of fear, or on the pretext, that balloting would call forth thousands of South Carolina rice hands who would inundate the city and dominate the balloting. In June 1868 Richard White organized a petition calling for the removal of city officers, an appeal that Meade ignored.68

Facing a solid wall of white opposition in Savannah, White used the occasion of his trial to begin reaching out to national Republicans. On January 21, the day before Judge Schley ordered him to appear at the Savannah courthouse, White wrote to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, describing his election and the subsequent travesty affecting the black legislators. White warned Sumner that “the Georgia Legislature composed as it is of opponents of the reconstruction acts will deprive all Republican office holders of their positions should Congress not interpose its authority, or give us that protection which we unfortunately & Sadly need at present.” White couched his appeal in terms of loyalty to the Republican Party rather than as a broader defense of black civil rights.69

The Clements v. White decision held that blacks could run for office in Georgia, but Savannah Democrats refused to cede control. In March 1869, in response to the threat posed by White and other would-be black officeholders, the city had instituted an additional poll tax for municipal elections (the state already imposed its own) and initiated a ward system for aldermen’s races in order to limit the choices of white voters and eliminate the influence of black voters altogether. A city election held in October 1869, the first in two years, firmly reestablished the Democratic Party in Savannah. Its seventy-person “challenging committee” monitored the city’s three polling sites. A local white judge ruled against adding a ballot box exclusively for black voters, a demand black leaders believed would minimize violence at the polls.70

On July 6, 1870, Richard White together with J. J. Waring and Isaac Seeley, a federal post office appointee, attended a city council meeting; the three men came armed with legal briefs protesting the use of a poll tax to suppress the black vote. The council adjourned without allowing them to speak. By this time the local Republican Party had lost whatever power it once had had and collapsed into bitter infighting. Aaron Bradley led the way in challenging the so-called Regulars, most of them white men who fervently believed that they were truly the best leaders of the party, as well as black men who were willing to accommodate themselves to a party that operated on this principle. Bradley had early called upon blacks to beware their professed white “friends,” and he excoriated Union officers, federal appointees, bureau agents, and other so-called white allies of the freedpeople in equal measure. Bradley put the matter succinctly: “In places where the majority are colored, why should we seek to elevate a third-class white man over a first-class colored man?”71

To Bradley, Thomas P. Robb represented all that was reprehensible about the Republicans. In 1870 the fifty-year-old Maine native was serving as collector at the Savannah customs house, a federal position that paid exceedingly well and that allowed Robb to reward his friends with patronage jobs of their own. Yet in denouncing the so-called Customs House Ring, Bradley saved his most potent dose of vitriol for Richard White, whom he considered an enemy to his color. White had remained steadfast in his support for white Republican Regulars such as Robb. Nevertheless, Bradley’s harangues about white federal appointees could not help but resonate with other black leaders. The September 1868 expulsion of the black legislators had proved that “whiteness” could function as a powerful ideology and plan of action quite divorced from partisan or class divisions. At the same time, many would-be black politicians realized that their color worked against them, while at the same time uniting them in common cause in the face of white opposition.72

Meanwhile, Bradley took to carrying a Derringer pistol and a Bowie knife. City officials understood that they harassed him at the risk of angering his most vocal supporters: coastal rice workers. Bradley also used his connection to these laborers to heap contempt on other black politicians who had their own political agenda. Bradley saw White as an easy mark, focusing on his light skin color to call into question his commitment to the freedpeople toiling in the fields. White had worked closely with Waring and Seeley, and he was keen to make alliances with white Republicans generally. Even more damningly, according to Bradley, White, during his 1869 trial, had sought to deny that he was black at all. In December 1870 Bradley decided to run against White to fill a partial term representing Georgia’s First Congressional District in the US House of Representatives.

On the campaign stump Bradley harkened back to what he considered White’s subterfuge during the Clements trial, but then went further and charged that White had once told him that his home state was Ohio, not South Carolina, and that his mother was white and his father Indian. Bradley mocked White’s claim to respectability by referring to him as “Saint Richard” and “this carpet- bag saint of Ohio,” an apparent reference to White’s cautious and ultimately conflict-averse demeanor. Warming to the fight, Bradley took to denouncing White as the “Big Injun,” the “Red, White and Leopard colored clerk of the court, Richard W. White,” a man who “betrayed the confidence of his fellow citizens.” Should the “hybrid” white be elected, Bradley asked, “What color will he represent himself?” The answer was, “The greasy color.” The Morning News gleefully reprinted Bradley’s diatribe and opined “that a man who is an Indian today and a negro

tomorrow is not the right sort of man to trust in politics or anything else. A color that won’t stand won’t do to rely on. What faith can they have in a man who, elected to day as a negro, turns out an Indian or a ‘heathen Chinee’ tomorrow?” The paper’s editors also took to calling any appearance by White as a “pow-wow.” With the black vote split between White and Bradley, the white Democratic candidate easily won the election for the district’s representative.73

In March 1871 White’s rocky tenure as Chatham County Superior Court clerk came to an end (it is unclear whether the court met at all from the summer of 1868 until none other than William P. Clements replaced White two and a half years later). Yet upon leaving office, White landed on his feet when Thomas Robb offered him a customs house clerk’s job at the munificent salary of $1,500 year. By this time White had taken on heavy family responsibilities. He and Anna had two children: two-year-old Lillian and nine-month-old Richard. Living with them were Anna’s sister Sarah; Sarah’s brothers (or brothers-in-law) Charles, eleven, and Gaston (sometimes Gustave), ten; and Henry King, thirty-four, perhaps another relative, born in South Carolina. White’s relatively comfortable status was evident from the fact that he headed a household of seven dependents, none of whom worked; Anna was “keeping house,” and Sarah was “at home.” Between August 1869 and November 1870, White made five Freedman’s Bank deposits “in trust” for Anna. These deposits, combined with an insurance policy that listed Anna as its beneficiary (introduced into evidence in White’s trial), suggest that the thirty-year-old husband and father possessed some discretionary income.74

Beginning in 1871 White made a career out of federal appointments. National presidential politics ruled the local patronage scene, and White had his best chance for a job during Republican administrations: Grant, Hayes, and Garfield (1869–1881); Harrison (1889–1893); and McKinley (1897–1901). In Savannah the two main sources of patronage were the federal customs house and the post office, with the former offering by far the greater variety and number of jobs; its employees were in charge of assessing tonnage dues, collecting tariffs, examining lading lists, checking for smugglers and illegal landings, maintaining the port, and fining shippers who had committed infractions. Employees included cashiers, clerks and auditors, night/day inspectors, deputy collectors, messengers, and an assortment of storekeepers, porters, surveyors, and assistant entry clerks. The highest officer, the port collector, made an annual salary of $4,000, a handsome sum and more than three times what White had earned as a clerk in the same building. The customs house itself, a massive gray granite structure of neoclassical Greek design, stood at the center of Savannah’s business district; its hulking presence reminded all city residents of the continuity of federal authority in Savannah before and after the war.75

Another source of federal employment for White was the Southern Claims Commission, established in March 1871 to compensate southern Unionists whose property had been seized by federal troops during the war. In December 1864 Sherman’s troops had swept through southeastern Georgia, and over the next month they had foraged throughout the countryside and appropriated lumber and livestock from blacks and whites in the city. Seven years later claimants came forward with lists of chickens, pigs, mules, horses, household goods, and farm tools taken by the federals. The process of filing an application was an arduous one; claimants needed a notary public to certify their signature and an attorney to guide them through the extensive paperwork. Together, Richard White and James M. Simms served these respective functions for a number of Georgia applicants. White earned a small fee for notarizing documents, but he required authorization from the man who succeeded him as clerk of the superior court, William

Clements, in order to do his job. And so accompanying White’s signature on applications was the statement by Clements that he certified White as a “duly qualified and commissioned Notary Public in and for the said County of Chatham.” Over the next six or seven years, White would extract a modest income from the claims commission, swallowing his pride while seeking Clements’s permission to do so. Of 764 Chatham County claims, the commission approved only 82.76

For thirty years White rotated in and out of various positions in the customs house and post office; the vagaries of politics and personalities meant that job security would always elude him. In 1872 he was demoted from a clerk in the customs house to an inspector, which paid $4 a day. Finding himself bound to the sordid world of patronage, he endured in a painfully personal way the clash between his lofty ideals and his need to support his family. Having served his country honorably, he believed he deserved the means to make a living. At the same time, he had to worry constantly about currying favor with any white man in a position to hire him. Nevertheless, for all black men who received such appointments, the jobs themselves represented a lifeline in a city where only black preachers could hope to work steadily throughout the year. A Georgia-born white Republican spoke for other white men regardless of political affiliation when he complained that patronage provided benefits for a select few black men “who are making money and buying lots” in a way they would not otherwise be able to do.77

Soon after starting his first customs house job, White wrote again to Senator Sumner, warning that “an effort is now being made to remove the Collector of Customs at this Port (Col. T. P. Robb) the Colored Man’s friend And one in whom we all have the utmost confidence as a Republican.” The effort to oust Robb amounted to (and here the handwriting is unclear) either an “iniquity” or an “inequity”—in any case both, in White’s view. Responding to Aaron Bradley’s call for Robb’s ouster, White initiated an equally aggressive pro-Robb petition drive; by October 1871 the effort had netted a reported (but no doubt overstated) 3,000 signatures.78

On January 15, 1872, White wrote to Sumner again, this time expressing his support for the civil rights bill under consideration in the Senate. The passage of the bill, which would have outlawed discrimination in public transportation and lodging, “will effectually do away with the present Sistem of Social Ostricism which now prevails in this, and other Southern States,” wrote White, “and place us in position to better enjoy as we should our political rights.” Yet within a few days of writing Sumner, White sent a far more personal and revealing letter to Benjamin F. Butler, a former Union general now serving as a Republican representative of Massachusetts in the US House. White was contacting Butler “to secure your influence if possible, in my behalf for a position in the Boston Custom House. I would be willing to accept any position whereby I can earn a livelihood for myself and family.” White continued: “My reason for wishing to leave this State is on account of my children, it being impossible to Educate them as I desire in Georgia, and if I could get a position in Boston I would then be able to accomplish my desire in that direction.” By this time White knew that he would be nominated as a customs house inspector, but at the same time his friend John Deveaux was supplanting him in the clerkship, a job that paid much better. In February Robb bowed to pressure and resigned as collector. White must now ingratiate himself with yet another white man.79

Acknowledging to Butler the “great interest you have always taken in the welfare of the Col’d men, and particular those who were Soldiers in the late war,” White recounted his own military

service, including his promotion to second lieutenant and his job in the customs house. Because of his record as a war veteran and a federal appointee, White himself was, he wrote, “the object of great persecution.” He was willing to take even a “minor position” as long as he could return to Massachusetts, his “adopted State (one I served as a soldier).” He concluded the letter by listing the names of men who could testify to his “past history and character,” including four officers of the Fifty-fifth, Hartwell and Fox among them. Among his other references were Tunis Campbell, James Porter, James Simms, Thomas Robb, and John Mercer Langston (now teaching law at Howard University in Washington, DC). By this time White must have deeply regretted that he had not followed the example of his army comrade James Monroe Trotter, who after the war settled in Boston, where he and other black officers received federal post office appointments and their children received decent schooling.80

Georgia reentered the Union again in 1872. Outmaneuvered on every level by the state’s Democrats, the Republicans there hardly functioned as a party at all. What newspapers they operated were sustained only by federal patronage. In Savannah both of the major papers were Democratic. The Republicans not only lacked any prospect of winning elections; they also remained splintered by skin color and political ideology. An increasingly large number of Savannah Republicans saw the party primarily as a vehicle for patronage appointments, some lucrative, most modest. For blacks, such positions would insulate them from the prejudice of private white employers. As long as a Republican president was in office, the party diehards in Savannah would jostle among themselves for jobs in the customs house, courthouse, and post office.81

On July 12, 1872, White sent a petition to President Ulysses S. Grant defending the recently departed Robb, whom critics had blamed for declining Republican fortunes in the southeastern part of Georgia. White and the other signatories maintained that Robb had been active in promoting the Republican cause not just in Savannah, but also throughout the First Congressional District, an area that included twenty-eight counties. At the same time it was true that the canvassers appointed by Robb in several instances “for their own personal safety were obliged to abandon their labours of love,” thus hindering their usefulness to the party. Indeed, according to White, in some counties Republicans were kept “in such fear by the Rebel Democracy, they could not render assistance, and in counties with a large Republican population, we failed to poll a single vote, for the reason stated.” Southern whites’ reign of terror over blacks and their allies would not abate for more than a century—and then only under pressure from black activists backed by the federal government.82

A few days after White sent off this latest petition, Savannah Republicans—a group largely congruent with post office and customs house employees—orchestrated several acts of civil disobedience meant to challenge the recent segregation of the city’s streetcars. The protests began on Saturday, July 27. The next evening at 6 Richard White boldly boarded a downtown “white” streetcar; immediately a group of men took hold of him and threw him off. Having been consigned to a desk job for so long, he must have felt the thrill of a righteous war wash over him once more. Over the next few days blacks and whites engaged in pitched battles that left five whites and five blacks wounded. Local papers condemned the city’s “mulatto chiefs” for inciting the riot and then disappearing into the crowd once violence erupted. The Savannah Daily Republican asked its black readers, “Did you see Indian Dick? … Did you ever see any of those worthies, who support the Custom House steps or rest their lazy sides under the trees of the Bay

to hatch their diabolical schemes for your destruction, in any place of danger in which they have thought you would earn the wreaths of victory? No.” (In this the paper was mistaken: Richard White had indeed placed himself in danger during this series of confrontations.) The Daily Republican speculated that White and other troublemakers intended to “raise such a difficulty as would give some grounds for the present [federal] Administration to declare martial law in this city or State, for the purpose of depriving the white population of the privilege of voting at the next Presidential election.” A Savannah-based US commissioner assigned to the case ruled that segregation was legal and that the protesters had acted illegally in disregarding “the kindly relations, confidences, and friendships” between blacks and whites under slavery and since.83

Soon after the streetcar riots, the Savannah City Council voted to change municipal elections from annual to biennial affairs, to move city elections from October to January, and to ease registration rules. These latter two “reforms” made it easier for white seasonal migrants from the North to vote in city elections. Although Republicans now had virtually no chance of winning any elective office, that fact did not diminish Bradley’s capacity to frighten whites. After one outdoor political rally, a local newspaper claimed that he had exhorted his supporters, 2,000 strong, to march to the polls with hatchets, not pistols, because “hatchets were better at close quarters.” Bradley continued to posture on the stump, but Richard White quietly and gradually removed himself from the crosshairs of white newspaper editors. In 1873 he ran unsuccessfully for county sheriff. Around this time Deveaux and others began to initiate annual legal challenges charging Democratic officials with orchestrating fraudulent election returns.84

By the end of 1874 a critical chapter in the freedom struggle of Savannah blacks had come to a close. That year Richard White managed to convince the city’s postmaster to discontinue a recent practice forcing blacks to drink from separate water fountains; this directive did not last long. In March Charles Sumner died, his death marked by 4,000 black men, women, and children mourners who gathered for an ecumenical service at Saint Philip African Methodist Episcopal Church and in the streets surrounding the church. On July 2 the Savannah branch of the Freedman’s Bank closed its doors forever; questionable investments and bad bookkeeping practices had bankrupted the institution. Under pressure from local black preachers, the American Missionary Association ceded its schools to the city, which proceeded to starve black education of taxpayer funds.85

Republicans continued to suffer, in the words of one, “isolation, contempt, ostracism, & ignominy.” Eventually, Thomas Robb picked up and headed to California, where he started a new life for himself and his family. Aaron Bradley abandoned Savannah for Kansas and then St. Louis, where he died, poverty stricken, in 1888. In contrast, Richard White remained loyal to the Republican Party, and he accepted whatever reward, no matter how modest, it could bestow upon him for enduring the contempt of white Savannahians.86

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Ten years after moving to Savannah, Richard White had established himself as an active and respected leader in the black community. Strolling around his East Savannah neighborhood, he was a recognizable figure to all, thoroughly integrated into its vibrant associational life.

White’s professional and personal partnership with Deveaux proved to be a lifelong connection.

In 1875 the two men joined others to found the Savannah Tribune and in 1876 to organize the Forest City Benevolent Association in response to a yellow fever epidemic that fall. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, White served as an active member of the local Masonic chapter and the Republican Party. He and other public-spirited black men and women had to content themselves with the relatively limited sphere of Savannah’s many church, charitable, and benevolent societies—Masonic Eureka Lodge No. 1 and Hilton Lodge No. 2 (both organized by James Simms in 1866), the American Union Ethiopian Association, Knights of Pythias and Knights of Damon, the Odd Fellows, Bible and literary clubs, and the Chatham Light Infantry. Yet what set White apart from the other leaders of Savannah’s postwar political battles was his status as a war veteran. Though Simms, Porter, and others had kept alive the promise of emancipation in the darkest days of the conflict, they had never worn a Union uniform. White proudly took his place as an officer of the local Robert G. Shaw Post No. 8, Grand Army of the Republic.87

Black men dependent on the federal government for their jobs expended much time and energy fighting among themselves over whom to send as delegates to city, county, and state central committees. These fights took the form of disputes over credentials and procedures, and in this regard White held posts of considerable influence. On and off for two decades he represented Savannah at meetings of the state central committee of the Republican Party and headed the city’s Republican Executive Committee. As chair of the local party’s credentials committee, White found himself at the center of angry, long-winded debates over who should serve on various ultimately powerless committees or county or state delegations. Ever patient, White won plaudits for his “conciliatory” speeches and his heroic efforts to restore order to rowdy gatherings.88

In 1880 the White family was living on Duffy Street, next door to the Deveauxs. Anna was keeping house, and Richard was working as a postal route agent for the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad, a position that, alternating with an inspector’s job at the customs house, provided him with steady work between 1877 and 1882. The three Deveaux children were about the same age as White’s three; they were probably playmates. Yet since the census taker’s last round, a dual tragedy had befallen the White household; baby Richard (nine months in 1870) and Lillian (two) had died. In June 1880 the household had a new baby, six months old, also named Richard. White and his wife had three other children: Marie, seven, Thaddeus four, and Ella, two. Bonnette, called Bonnie, would arrive in 1888.89

In March 1882 White once again found himself in the humiliating position of applying to the customs house; he had just lost his post office job. In his letter of application, he gave his birthplace as Sumter, South Carolina, and his level of education as “common school.” He went over the details of his military service and appended a statement by a local white justice of the peace: “We hereby certify that R. W. White is of good moral character, of temperate and industrious habits, and faithful to the Union and Constitution.” White again worked for the customs house from 1883 to 1887, but in 1888 he lost his job to Clement Saussy, a forty-two- year-old white grocer. In Boston a few years before, James Trotter had faced a similar predicament, displaced from his federal post by a white man. Yet unlike White, Trotter had quit the Republican Party to become one of Boston’s leading black Democrats, claiming the Republicans should never take black voters for granted.90

White remained a Republican, but his precarious financial state forced him to work alternately as a porter for a white-owned business, C. M. Gilbert and Company, as an insurance agent, as a financial adviser, and even as a construction laborer and carpenter. Periodically, the Savannah Tribune ran this ad: “If you wish to make a beginning towards purchasing a home, you will find it to your interest to consult Capt. R. W. White before investing elsewhere… . If you want to have your property insured against lost [sic] by fire call on Capt. R. W. White.” White had adopted the title of captain, as many veterans of public prominence did.91

In 1888 he was working as a porter and the following year, “being out of Government employ,” as he put it, as a carpenter at a Waldburg Street construction site, a five-tenement building. In 1890 he fell from scaffolding and sprained his ankle. He hired a Washington lawyer, James Tanner, to file a claim with the US government for a veteran’s pension. (Congress had passed pension legislation that summer.) In his initial application White described “a paralysis of the entire right side” exacerbated by general “ill Health incident to Army Service and a wound received from falling off a Building on or about April 10, 1889.” His application was denied.92

In March 1892 White served on a panel of judges for exercises held at First African Baptist Church, which included singing, recitations, and a debate on the question “Which Produces Most Crime: Woman, Wealth or Poverty?” The winner had answered, “[Woman] inasmuch as she is the great source from which evil flowed she must naturally be the cause of most crimes.” Of White’s relation with his own “woman,” Anna, we know little; she was absent from the society notices published by the Tribune. The loss of at least two of her children, combined perhaps with the domestic repercussions of her husband’s thwarted ambitions, kept her out of the spotlight in the black community.93

In March 1893 White once again applied for a pension, and once again he was unsuccessful. The doctor who examined him did little to bolster his case when he wrote that White was a “tall, well nourished, bright mulatto of 54,” and then continued, “I have known him many years and never have heard him complain about his foot; I have no doubt that he did have the accident he alleged but as far as the foot is concerned, I don’t believe he would do manual work if he could. He always hunted the soft positions.”94

Two years later White was the victim of a nasty effort by two white postal clerks to have him fired. The Tribune reported, “The plan of the conspiracy was to protect certain [white] men and to report all colored employees and Catholics in the office, and particularly to mix the letters of the general delivery, thus giving the post master grounds for finding fault with the clerk Mr. R. W. White.” The conspirators suffered dismissal from their jobs.95

White held a post office job sporadically over the next nine years, working as a retail clerk in 1896 and a laborer two years later. By this time he was no longer head of his own household. Anna had died, and he was living with Gaston Lloyd (whom he identified as his brother-in-law), a bartender. Other members of the household included White’s thirteen-year old daughter, Bonnette. Thaddeus, twenty-five, was serving in the army. White’s difficult circumstances—his constant anxiety about his job, his need to ingratiate himself with white Republicans, the routine and even menial nature of his positions—must have taken a great emotional and physical toll on him.96

During the national presidential campaign of 1896, the emerging People’s Party challenged Republicans and Democrats in a third-party bid to give voice to desperate industrial workers and farmers, black and white, all over the country. Republican William McKinley of Ohio ran on an unapologetic probusiness platform, portraying the Populist (and eventually also Democratic) candidate William Jennings Bryan as a wild-eyed fool. Deveaux and White were among McKinley’s earliest and most steadfast Savannah supporters. While farmers and other debtors around the country were calling for an expansion of the currency and were creating black and white coalitions, Richard White and his fellow Republicans were resolving “to secure the election of our Matchless Standard Bearer, the champion of sound money and protection to American industry… . Major McKinley believes in an honest dollar and the privilege to earn it.” McKinley’s campaign talking points revealed a shift in the party’s worldview from the moral fervor of Lincoln to a defense of entrenched business interests. The national party evinced no concern for black suffrage, leaving White and others to call in vain for “a free ballot and a fair count” in Savannah. Ironically, Bryan, the self-proclaimed candidate of the dispossessed, won the votes of whites in Georgia but lost the national election. Like their counterparts in Providence decades before, black men in Savannah found the two-party system a poor vehicle for pursuing the cause of justice.97

According to the Savannah Tribune, the Republican Party of Georgia was now “largely composed of colored men,” and so perhaps it is not surprising that relations among the stalwarts remained fractious and annual conventions routinely descended into “ire and venom” spewed by feuding parties. Once again, the Tribune called for “all good Republicans to lay aside personalities and technicalities as to the past and unite for the general good of all,” and once again, White stood at the forefront of such efforts. In late December 1897 he presided over a gathering of one thousand hoping to beat back city officials’ efforts to eliminate all black patronage appointees. The tone of the meeting was accommodating: “We recognize and appreciate the good will and harmony existing between the two races, and have confidence in our white friends with whom we have so longed lived and with whom we expect longer to live, that the mere matter of appointing a competent colored man as collector of customs for this port will not in any way disturb the friendly relations that now exist.” In a polite but indignant aside, the meeting also noted that black federal appointees were no longer an “experiment” but rather “a fact demonstrated by the proper and efficient manner in which they discharged their duties in the various offices held by the many of their race all over this country, and do not consider it an authority over the white man.” President McKinley could choose either a white Democrat or a black Republican. Eventually, he chose the latter, solidifying his support among the “loyal colored Republicans of Georgia.”98

White played no role in the national debate over black citizenship rights and the nature of increasingly destructive racial ideologies. Dependent on the goodwill of white Republicans, he devoted his energies to the cramped realm of securing patronage jobs and sorting out squabbles among party loyalists in Savannah. Perhaps, though, he took vicarious pleasure in the career of John Mercer Langston, who after the war emerged as an outspoken leader on the national stage; he traveled around the country to denounce the southern neo-Confederate project of disenfranchisement and segregation, a project touted as the New South. Langston condemned the belief among whites generally that the black man’s “former condition of servitude, nationality, and color, make him a political nondescript, if not a political outcast, under our Constitutional and legal provisions.” The Constitution, in fact, had nothing to say about either race or color. He

ridiculed whites’ obsession with skin color, a stigma associated with enslaved forebears, and the idea that the quality of a person’s hair texture and the shape of his nose or lips disqualified him from citizenship. Was not such a view equivalent to the argument “‘Your hair is very red, your face excessively freckled, your nose is crooked, and altogether you are a homely person’—ergo you cannot vote or serve on a jury?” No doubt he would have been disgusted with the proliferation of ads in the Savannah Tribune and other black papers around the country touting skin lighteners, like the “Black Skin Remover” that promised the buyer “a peach-like complexion,” a black person turned “perfectly white.” In any case, Richard White could have testified to the mistaken premise that white skin alone could turn anyone white.99

In 1901 the sixty-one-year old White consulted a new physician and reapplied for a veteran’s pension. This doctor reported, “The soldier is feeble, ataxic and paralysed, is confined to his bed and requires the attention of an attendant… . He appears honest and intelligent, answering frankly all questions plyed.” White also submitted an affidavit saying that “he has no income … no means of support these are the facts of the case.” The pension board approved his application for $12 a month because of White’s “inability to earn a support by manual labor,” the standard criterion by which the vast majority of black veterans were judged.100

Around this time White moved in with his married daughter Ella Hackett, who told pension officials, “My father has been paralyzed for three years. He is a pensioner and lives with me.” She continued: “He was born in Ohio, I think. He is entirely helpless and confined to his bed all the time. He has no wife.” Ella kept track of all his paperwork, and whenever the pension was up for renewal, John Deveaux “comes here to the house and fixes the papers for my father. I handle the proceeds of the pension check and my father gets the full benefit of it. He is well cared for by me.” In 1904 White managed briefly to go back to the federal post office, for the last time.101

His health failing, he had no choice but to retreat from the fray and depend on the tender mercies of his daughter. In 1905 it was Ella who wrote to pension officials and informed them of her father’s death on March 3.102

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A few years later the Savannah Tribune announced the return visit home of a young prodigal son after a sixteen-year absence: White’s son Thaddeus. The thirty-five-year-old had for a while worked in Savannah as a hostler, groomsman, and stable keeper. Enlisting as a private in the army on June 28, 1898, in Chicago, he joined Company F of the Eighth Illinois Volunteer Infantry and gave the name of his sister Bonnette White, 309 Duffy Street, as the person to be notified in case of an emergency. Thaddeus served in the war against Spain, in Soriana de Cuba, and subsequently suffered from rheumatism in the back and shoulders; he claimed “disability caused by exposure to the elements.” However, the examination board that processed his discharge in March 1899 disputed his claim and found that he had “no disability.” He left the army with a favorable evaluation: “Character, Excellent.” However, his second tour of duty, which began in San Francisco in 1905, ended with a dishonorable discharge two years later. In the service, he had been working as a cook.103

Returning to Savannah that Christmas, Thaddeus probably stayed with his sister Bonnie, twenty- two, a schoolteacher presiding over a boardinghouse with three “inmates” and two servants. A

high school graduate, she was teaching at Saint Anthony’s, a Catholic school for black children sponsored by a French order called the African Mission Society of Lyons.104

Both White’s daughter and son, she a schoolteacher and he a soldier, followed in their father’s footsteps—after a fashion. She avoided serving under the mean-spirited public education officials in Savannah by working for a school run by a Catholic order. There and throughout the country John Mercer Langston’s vision of the schools as an instrument of equality and democracy remained an unfulfilled dream. As a young man still in his teens, Thaddeus had left home and joined the army, but no grand ideals animated the US projects in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. Unlike his father, he saw the army not as an instrument of the country’s moral regeneration, but as a source of a menial job. For neither Bonnie nor Thaddeus then was public employment the means to financial security or personal dignity. In this, perhaps, they had taken note of the example set by their father: he had had faith in—and placed his life on the line for—the United States, only to be let down again and again when the nation’s white leaders refused to acknowledge his most basic rights.

Despite a lifetime of deep disappointments, Richard W. White left his mark on history through the public documents that reveal his remarkably robust citizenship: military service records; pension applications; transcripts and rulings in the 1869 Clements case; Freedman’s Bank savings accounts; petitions of protest; letters to public figures such as Sumner, Butler, and Grant; Southern Claims Commission forms; and even his answers to census takers. Inscribed in those documents is one man’s commitment to the idea of democracy, an idea that ultimately failed him and 4 million other Americans of African descent after the Civil War.

FIVE

WILLIAM H. HOLTZCLAW

The “Black Man’s Burden” in the Heart of Mississippi

In the autumn of 1908 black men, women, and children were toiling barefoot and stooped over in Mississippi cotton fields, picking the fluffy fiber off the spindly plants and depositing it into tow sacks the workers dragged behind them. Methods of cotton-picking had remained essentially the same since the days of slavery. Indeed, although it had been more than forty years since human bondage was finally outlawed in the United States, the lives of early-twentieth-century black field laborers closely resembled those of their enslaved forebears, at least in material terms. Most still made their homes in cramped, smoke-filled cabins and spent their workdays toiling under the supervision of white landowners. Deprived of the right to vote, vulnerable to white-initiated violence, blacks inhabited a world apart from their white neighbors, no matter how poor. Struggling to get by in central Mississippi’s Hinds County, one black farmer observed, “Times don’t never get no different with a man that ain’t got nothing.”1

William H. Holtzclaw begged to differ. The twenty-eight-year-old had arrived in the county determined to found a black “industrial” school modeled after Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, his alma mater. Holtzclaw was a self-made man, and education had proved a certain, if rocky, path of upward mobility for him. Now the young teacher was convinced that by sheer willpower he could bring literacy and enlightenment to the blacks of Hinds County, where fully 40,000 of the county’s total population of 52,000 were former slaves; he would thereby disprove the farmer who believed that time stood still in the Black Belt.

[image “FIGURE 5.1” file=images/f0192-01.jpg]

FIGURE 5.1 This portrait of William H. Holtzclaw appears as the frontispiece of his autobiography, The Black Man’s Burden, published in 1915. The principal of Utica Normal and Industrial Institute appears weary, no doubt because of his arduous and never-ending fund- raising efforts, which took him from his family and the school for weeks and months at a time throughout his adult life. COURTESY SCHOMBURG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY.

On the surface at least, Holtzclaw provided a striking contrast to the parents of his pupils. By the time he arrived in the county, he had long abandoned the rough denim overalls of a field hand in favor of formal Victorian menswear and a professorial demeanor. Small and bookish, with an expansive vocabulary, he resembled a city-born clerk more than the country-bred son of former slaves. Unlike most men and women in Hinds County, who remained mired in everyday hardships, Holtzclaw possessed what he considered a clear vision of the means by which rural southern blacks might improve their lot in life—a program of action that demanded accountability from his pupils, their parents, and members of the general community, all acting in concert.

Educated black men like Holtzclaw were a rarity in Hinds County. Ideologies of race had reached a vicious intensity in Mississippi; there, in a bid for power, a new breed of white

politicians set about demonizing black people regardless of class or skin color. State lawmakers had disenfranchised black men in 1890, and together with local sheriffs and judges, they remained complicit in promoting lynch mobs as agents of state-sanctioned terrorism. Such measures effectively relegated black families to poverty and the margins of politics, replicating in large measure slavery’s consequences, if not its legal codification.

In 1902, when Holtzclaw had first arrived in the small town of Utica on the edge of the Mississippi Delta, thirty miles southwest of Jackson, he found “the Negroes groping in darkness and suffering on every hand as a result of that darkness,” prompting him to carve from the region’s hardwood forests what would become the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute. Later he would title his autobiography The Black Man’s Burden, a nod to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, which began with an exhortation for Europeans and white Americans to embrace the duties of empire: “Send for the best ye breed Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need.” In Utica Holtzclaw sought to serve the needs of the captives in the wilderness that was Mississippi, “the most benighted state in the Union for the black man.” For one of so slight, even frail, a frame, the young man exuded an outsized missionary zeal. Warned by one of his Tuskegee Institute teachers, “You know there is no God in Mississippi,” Holtzclaw nevertheless described himself as “possessed” with a need to start a school, a need “which I cannot rid myself of if I would.”2

Holtzclaw oversaw the growth of Utica from a small open-air primary school that began under a tree in 1902 to an enduring institution of vocational training and higher learning. It was arguably the first school of its kind in Mississippi to be founded by a black educator on behalf of black people; other similar institutes and colleges owed their beginnings to a variety of church and missionary groups representing the (white) Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists. Just a few years after its founding, Utica consisted of a number of imposing frame structures— including a chapel, classroom buildings, and dormitories—built with the donations of prominent northern philanthropists. More than two dozen teachers, all black, instructed more than three hundred students, two-thirds of whom were girls and women. The school sponsored classes at the elementary and secondary levels during the day and at night and included training in agriculture and skilled crafts. Each student devoted a day and a half of each week to an “industrial” course, with the boys learning carpentry, blacksmithing, tailoring, shoemaking, and printing, and the girls learning sewing, millinery, housekeeping, cooking, mattress-making, and printing. The school was well on its way to boasting a physical plant worth $200,000. The fact that annual income equaled annual expenses testified to the daunting task that consumed its founder: without an endowment to draw upon for the future, Holtzclaw was forced to scramble each year to meet basic operating costs, including pay for the staff and room and board for the students, financial obligations not covered by tuition and fees alone.3

Some of Holtzclaw’s most ambitious plans for Utica met with resistance—and not just from expected quarters. In September 1908 he had to acknowledge that his black neighbors were in a quiet state of panic, gripped with fear that the impending visit of a special guest whom the founder had invited to Utica would lead to strife and even bloodshed. Certainly, whites in the area had reacted violently to far lesser provocations in the past. And so now, together, local black leaders appealed to principal Holtzclaw to dissuade his guest—Booker T. Washington—from coming to the tiny Mississippi town.

Initially, the local trustees of Holtzclaw’s school refused even to gather and discuss the prospect of meeting Washington. A famous educator, confidant of northern philanthropists, and adviser to and dining companion of a president, the head of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute nevertheless bore the label of a black man—and presumably his national reputation and well-known accomplishments would risk inciting the local white populace. Yet Holtzclaw had founded his own school precisely on Tuskegee principles; he considered Washington a mentor and a friend. To withdraw the invitation at this late date would mortify both men. The trustees finally met just a few days before the planned visit, and, according to Holtzclaw, “they promptly advised me that it would be a very unwise thing to have him come to Utica; in fact, they thought it would be a dangerous thing, that Dr. Washington could never pass safely through the streets of Utica.” The consensus of the group was “that we ask Dr. Washington not to come to Utica—for his good and for ours.”4

Holtzclaw understood these fears full well; Mississippi was rife with lawless brutality perpetrated by white people and aimed at blacks and whites alike. That fall the Jackson Daily Clarion-Ledger carried frequent stories about so-called Night Riders, poor white men threatening to destroy cotton gins and sawmills and to murder the men who owned them in order to protest the fact that modest farmers paid higher prices at these establishments while the great planters received discounts. The local Law Enforcement League, a group of vigilantes, was routinely destroying “blind tigers,” purveyors of illegal alcohol. The torture of black men and women had become public spectacles attended by crowds of white parents and children, farmers and businessmen. The newspaper alerted its readers so that they could plan to attend and witness the horror: “Prospects Good for a Lynching, And the Indications are that when it Comes it Will be by Wholesale; Five Negro Men and Two Women.”5

In the village of Utica memories of violence were still fresh: not too many years before, whites had terrorized local black families in a concerted campaign to drive them out of Mississippi altogether. In the early twentieth century, the heyday of these so-called White Caps, black landowners were waking up to find posters that read, “If you have not moved away from here by sundown tomorrow we will shoot you like rabbits.” Holtzclaw himself had to contend with periodic rumors that unknown white men were plotting to kill him, and he had faced down young white toughs and a knife-wielding sheriff’s deputy. As he put it delicately in his autobiography, his teachers and students, and black people generally in Hinds County, refrained from “moving to and fro among our white fellow-citizens in this section of the country.”6

Alarmed but determined not to rescind the invitation to Washington, Holtzclaw consulted a local businessman, “one of my good white friends,” who advised him not to have the educator come “if you have the least idea that there is any danger.” This man, Holtzclaw remembered, speculated that “some crazy, drunken fellow, having heard so many things about Washington, might attempt to do violence to him; and that would disturb the friendly relations between the races here which everybody has been working so hard to cement.” Moreover, the white man warned Holtzclaw, “Booker might say something in his address that would cause trouble for you after he is gone.”7

Not everyone in Utica, however, was so apprehensive about Washington’s visit. Unwilling to let the matter rest after his conversation with this white man, Holtzclaw approached a number of other leading whites, who assured him that Washington would meet with no harm in Utica,

ridiculing the idea that there was “the slightest danger in the proposed trip.”8

The visit took place according to plan, but during the twenty-four hours that Washington was in Utica, Holtzclaw “was careful to stay by his side, because I had said to the colored people when they were in their highest pitch of excitement that when he came I would be right by his side, and if any harm came, I would meet it first; I would see to that.” Holtzclaw had also taken the precaution of hiring two detectives to “watch the younger, less inhibited white men that nothing untoward would happen.”9

The throngs of black men and women who turned out to greet Washington early on the morning of October 7, 1908, were immediately reassured about his safety—and presumably their own. Washington was traveling with a most impressive entourage of thirty black men of refinement and distinction, including eight bankers, several college presidents and professors, representatives of the black Baptists and Knights of Pythias, newspaper editors and journalists, and a photographer. The group had chartered Pullman railroad cars that allowed them to travel and sleep undisturbed by the humiliation they would have endured in segregated transportation and lodging facilities. The train pulled over on a side track of the Jackson and Natchez branch of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, which had a station at the school. Many of the white onlookers were apparently drawn to see Washington out of curiosity, for it was exceedingly rare in Mississippi to see a black man wearing, as he was, a fashionable gray worsted suit with a four- button linen waistcoat, starched white shirt, high stiff collar, and silk bow tie.10

The group’s stop at Utica was part of a five-day tour of the state sponsored by the Mississippi Negro Business League (MNBL), a branch of a national group Washington had founded in 1900. No one disputed the fact that he was venturing into hostile territory, though the frenetic pace of the tour ensured that he did not linger in any one place for long—and thus tempt fate, not to mention any number of angry white men who might have resented his presence. Washington’s purposes in making the tour were to fact-find for his northern benefactors, including John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie; to provide some homespun advice to black farmers; and to live up to his name as the great “pacificator,” calming whites who saw even modest signs of black well-being as profoundly threatening to their own interests. Yet he no doubt also took pleasure in forcing whites of all classes to acknowledge a group of black men who bore little resemblance to the illiterate field hands they claimed to know and understand so well. As Washington moved from place to place, Holtzclaw and his neighbors wondered, Would the Jackson newspaper cover the story? Refer to the visitor as “Mr. Washington”? The answers to these two questions were yes and no; the paper called him “Booker.”11

The tour’s itinerary yielded maximum symbolic value. The first stop had been Holly Springs, where several years before Governor James K. Vardaman had cut off state aid to a black vocational school and where a new one, funded by northern white donors and Mississippi blacks, had risen in its place. Declared Vardaman at the time, “I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic. God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the white man.” Utica was next, the site of Holtzclaw’s impressive, relatively new school. After Utica the group would move on to Jackson, the state capital and home to ninety-three black businesses. The next stops, Natchez and Vicksburg, were legendary settlements of wealthy antebellum slave owners and cotton merchants. The visit to Greenville would include a side trip to the expansive land holdings of Alfred Holt Stone, author of a book on the so-called Negro

problem lamenting the rapid annual turnover among black sharecroppers, a fact of rural southern life that Washington, too, deplored. On October 10 the tour would end in Mound Bayou, an all- black town where even the railroad stationmaster, telephone operators, and bank tellers were black. Charles Banks, the head of the MNBL and chief cashier of the Bank of Mound Bayou, had overseen the plans for Washington’s visit to the state.12

In Utica Washington spoke in the chapel of Holtzclaw’s institute while whites milled around outside. At this and other places on his tour, he gave a speech “boldly declaring” (in the words of one sympathetic black listener) the ambiguous proposition “that no power on earth could stop the Negro from acquiring an education of some kind, and it was to the interest of all classes to see that he secured a good one.” Washington outlined the guiding principles of the school he had attended, Hampton Institute in Virginia; the school he had founded, Tuskegee; and the schools he had inspired, including Utica Institute. During his “cheerful journey” through Mississippi, he flattered whites by singling out a particular county, Marshall, where, he claimed, the absence of lynch mobs was a sure sign that blacks and whites were now living together “on such friendly terms.”13

Washington offered nuanced bits of advice to blacks, challenging some aspects of the state’s white power structure while seeming to accept—or at least abide by—others. He exhorted blacks to remain rooted in the southern soil and avoid the siren call of city living, to save their money and buy their own homes, and to teach their children personal hygiene and the difference between right and wrong. He stressed that black men should preside over modest but industrious rural households and add to the wealth of the region, all the while foregoing both formal political power and “modern” life in the form of urban wage work and consumerism. For whites, he made the case for black education in terms of their own self-interest: “In every Southern white home the food is prepared by Negro women. Your health, your very life, depends on their knowing how to prepare it.” By way of summary he highlighted “those fundamental things” on which all Southerners could agree, including the “the dignity of labor” and the “importance of those simple, common, homely things which make the life of the common people sweet and wholesome and hopeful.”14