Reconstruction is a tough story to tell. The promise was so great and the ending so disappointing. It’s hardly a surprise that it took a century and a half to open a national historical park portraying what happened. In January 2017, a site was established as a national monument and rededicated as Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in 2019. The location is in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, where Reconstruction can be said to have begun and for a long while succeeded. Rich Condon arrived as park ranger a year later, around the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. The temporary closure of the National Park Service site gave him time to acclimate to his new situation and to the touchy subject matter with which he would be dealing.

The attempt to reconstruct the South after the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves didn’t go according to plan. But what was that plan? What were the goals at the start?

Here in the South Carolina Sea Islands, U.S. troops arrived in November 1861. They drive out a large portion of Confederate troops and White plantation owners. What’s left are about 10,000 African Americans. They make up 85–90 percent of the population.

A lot of questions start to surface. The U.S. troops are being asked: Am I free? Can I go to school? Can I carry a rifle? There are goals of providing education, building schools. There’s the goal of eventually arming newly freed African American men. You have the start of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, the first Black regiment to don the U.S. Army uniform. Things like land ownership and labor reform. All that’s part of Reconstruction.

What’s special about this site is that all that stuff happens here starting in 1862 through the rest of the war, when it isn’t really happening in many other places throughout the South. This becomes what historians have called a rehearsal for Reconstruction. All those goals are outlined here, and they attempt to execute them during the postwar period in many other places across the South. The success rate varies. Here, it’s a massive success. It takes hold and lasts probably the longest of anywhere.

How did the grand designs for Reconstruction go wrong?

For a long time, Reconstruction was portrayed as a failure. It wasn’t a failure. It was defeated. It was dismantled and defeated in large part by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League—groups of White supremacists who did not want to see African Americans in U.S. Army uniforms. Seeing them in a position of authority didn’t sit well for people who used to call a lot of these men “property.”

Reconstruction takes root and is doing well for a while. In most places it’s lasting 12-plus years. If you look at most definitions of Reconstruction, people look at it beginning with the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and ending about 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes is elected president and pulls U.S. troops from the South.

Here we have a much broader definition. We start in 1861 with the arrival of U.S. troops and we extend it to about 1900, because even in the 1880s and 1890s, there are Black public officials being elected to office. Where it goes wrong is some of these more isolated areas like the South Carolina Upcountry, where you have the Klan presence—White supremacist violence and voter intimidation. In many parts of the North, White Northerners were losing interest in Reconstruction. All these are contributing factors to the process going into a steady decline.

In the end, what were the most significant changes, good and bad?

We see the legacy of Reconstruction in a lot of different places, even into the 20th and 21st century. Some of the good changes: African American land ownership. African American citizenship. “Citizenship” was defined largely by Black U.S. military veterans from the Civil War before 1868. Before the passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868, “citizenship” was not clearly defined.

The bad side is that at the end of Reconstruction, you have the start of the Jim Crow era, which lasts well into the 1960s. Here in South Carolina, the 1868 state constitution was a restructuring of society. It allowed African American men to vote. It extended public education to everybody, regardless of sex or race. Almost 30 years later, in 1895, a new constitution is passed in which segregation is codified, in which African Americans are seen as less than citizens and are largely disenfranchised. This was happening across the South at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, and the ripple effects of that last much longer than people like to remember.

This is one of the newest national historical parks. Can you talk about how it came to be?

There was plenty of interest in the local community of having a park here addressing Reconstruction. Broad and diverse support ranged from community leadership to churches to average citizens. They have a vested interest in this story being told.

This site was established initially as a national monument through an executive order in January 2017, and it becomes a national historical park in March 2019. And really what that did was allow for the expansion of this story. It allowed for the establishment of the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, which is operated by the park. We have national parks across the country that are part of this network. We also have sites that are not managed by the federal government that have a Reconstruction story to tell. It allows this story to become more familiar to people across the nation.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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How do you manage to maintain a balance in your portrayal of controversial subject matter like this?

We talk about the hopes and successes of Reconstruction, but we also talk about the dismantling, and that includes things like racial violence, attacks on African Americans and their allies in the South. We talk about the reactions to things like African American progress, to moving from the state of enslavement to freedom to working toward equality. I think we give it a fair treatment, which in other places it had not been given in a long time.

I’ll note that we didn’t have a lot of violent push back on the Sea Islands during Reconstruction. That’s because the population remains about 90 percent African American, so you don’t have groups like the Klan or the Red Shirts operating. You also didn’t have bridges that connect these islands to the mainland until the 1920s.

Can you describe briefly what’s most important about each of the distinct sites that make up the park?

We have three, you could say three or four, sites. We have our main visitor center in downtown Beaufort. There is a plethora of things we can cover here, one of them being African American financial autonomy. The Freedman’s Bank, one of the first in the nation, is still standing. We can talk about land ownership and labor reform. The majority of the homes and lots in this area are African American–owned by 1864–1865.

Out on Saint Helena Island, a 15-minute drive from here, we have the Penn Center Historic Landmark District. We operate a site there called Darrah Hall, and we also have an easement agreement with Brick Baptist Church right across the road. At Darrah Hall, education is the big story. The people who attended classes there at Penn School, who were enslaved just a couple of months earlier, were prevented by law from learning to read and write. This is their first opportunity to change that. Knowledge is power. That’s the last thing a plantation owner wants the people he calls “property” to have.

The last one is Camp Saxton, down in Port Royal, about 4 miles south of here. This is the site where the 1st South Carolina was recruited and trained for service, the first Black men to wear the U.S. Army uniform.

You learn, in a larger sense, how military service, especially for African Americans, is kind of this direct pathway toward citizenship. During Reconstruction, when the nation’s trying to figure out who deserves citizenship, 200,000-plus African American veterans raised their hands: we fought for this country and prevented it from falling apart.

Here is also the site where about 5,000 African Americans gathered on January 1, 1863, for an impartation of the Emancipation Proclamation. They’re hearing the words that declare their freedom for the first time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Condemning slavery was a dangerous business in the 19th century. As a small, vocal, and growing group of Americans began to agitate in favor of abolition in the 1830s, they were often met with mob violence.

The attacks sometimes made headlines. William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston by a mob in 1831, and preacher and newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy was shot and murdered during a shootout with an anti-abolition mob in 1837. The abolitionist-funded Pennsylvania Hall was burned to the ground by arsonists only days after it opened in 1838. For many abolition evangelists, however, violence and threats were merely a fact of life. In an 1840 letter to abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld, one traveling lecturer noted an uptick in violence but remarked wearily, “I have not reported them to any of the papers because I am tired of [reading] about them….”

Abolitionists were quick to argue their traveling lecturers and newspapers should be protected by freedom of speech and the press guaranteed by the Constitution. That included Cassius Marcellus Clay, scion of one of the most influential slaveholding families in Kentucky, who had embraced abolitionism while studying at Yale. Although Clay supported a more gradual approach than radicals like Garrison, his politics generated many enemies in his home state. Undeterred, he began publishing an anti-slavery newspaper, True American, in Lexington in 1845.

When a group of men in Lexington met and demanded he cease publication, Clay responded with venom: “Go tell your secret conclave of cowardly assassins that C.M. Clay knows his rights and how to defend them.”

A second meeting, held two days later, would be attended by more than a thousand residents. Thomas F. Marshall, a local lawyer and nephew of former Chief Justice John Marshall, was asked to address the crowd and outline a legal pretext for shutting Clay down. Marshall offered a rousing, remarkably explicit justification for vigilante action against abolitionists. Though he could cite no specific law, Marshall succeded in giving the crowd’s planned suppression of Clay a veneer of legal legitimacy by highlighting the danger abolitionists supposedly posed to a slave society. The Lexington community, he argued, had an inalienable right to defend itself against Clay’s incendiary writing:

A formidable party has arisen within a few years in the United States….They aim at the Abolition of Slavery in America and halt not at the means. They are organized, active, united in pursuit of this object, and desperately fanatical. They have found their way into the National Legislature, and already exercise a threatening influence there. They command a powerful press in the United States. They have among them a burning zeal, commanding talent, and a large amount of political influence and monied capital….They maintain that the negro slave here is an American born, entitled to the full benefits and blessings of republican freedom, under the Declaration of Independence, which freed all of American birth. They maintain for him the right of insurrection and exhort him to its exercise.…

In proceeding by force and without judicial process, to arrest the action of a free citizen, to interfere in any degree with his private property, and if the necessity of the case and the desperation of the man require it, to proceed to extremities against his person, we owe it to our own fame, and the good name of our community, to set forth the facts upon which rises in our justification the highest of all laws, the law of self defense and preservation from great and manifest danger and injury.…

Such a man and such a course is no longer tolerable or consistent with the character or safety of this community. With the power of a press, with education, fortune, talent, sustained by a powerful party…who have made this bold experiment in Kentucky through him, the negroes might well, as we have strong reason to believe they do, look to him as a deliverer. On the frontier of slavery, with three free states fronting and touching us along a border of seven hundred miles, we are peculiarly exposed to the assaults of abolition. The plunder of our property, the kidnapping, stealing, and abduction of our slaves, is a light evil in comparison with planting a seminary of their infernal doctrines in the very heart of our domestic slave population. Communities may be endangered as well as single individuals. A great and impending danger over the life or personal safety of a single man, justifies the employment of his own force immediately in his own defense, and to any extent that may be necessary for his protection….

Our laws may punish when the offense shall have been consummated; but they have provided no remedial process by which it can be prevented. To war with [a newspaper] of Abolition by action or indictment for libel, would make that powerful party smile….An Abolition paper in a slave state is a nuisance of the most formidable character—a public nuisance—not a mere inconvenience, which may occasion delay in business or prove hurtful to health or comfort, but a blazing brand in the hand of an incendiary or madman, which may scatter ruin, conflagration, revolution, crime un-nameable, over everything dear in domestic life, sacred in religion, or respectable in modesty. Who shall say that the safety of a single individual is more important in the eye of the law than that of a whole people? Who shall say that when the case of danger—real danger, of great and irreparable injury to a whole community, really occurs—that it is not armed legally with the right of self defense?

….An unauthorized crowd, who inflict death upon persons or destruction upon property, for the gratification of passion or even for the punishment of crime, is a mob, and is the most fatal enemy to security and freedom. But as in the case of sudden invasion, or insurrection itself, the people have at once, independent of the magistrates, the right of defense, so when there be a well-grounded apprehension of great, and, it may be, irreparable injury, the use of force in the community is lawful and safe. We hold the abolitionists traitors to the constitution and the country, and enemies to the terms upon which the Union was originally formed, and the only terms upon which it can continue to subsist. When they bring their doctrines and their principles into the bosom of a slave state, they bring fire into a magazine. The “True American” is an abolition paper of the worst stamp! As such, the peace and safety of this community demand its instant and entire suppression.

Inspired, the meeting adopted a series of resolutions condemning abolition and formed a committee to seize and ship the printing press and other items in the True American offices across the Ohio River to Cincinnati. Bedridden with typhoid fever, Clay was in no position to contest the seizure. His foes would also publish a pamphlet decrying his conduct and defending seizure of his press.

Upon recovery, Clay sought prosecution. Several committee leaders won cases defending their actions as lawful abatement of a public nuisance, arguing the True American was a danger to the community and its removal was justified to preserve public safety. In an 1847 trial against one ringleader in a neighboring county, however, Clay was awarded $2,500 in damages from a jury unconvinced that he needed to be silenced for the public good.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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In 1858, Abraham Lincoln casually and unknowingly created a time capsule of his contemporary mindset on both slavery and race relations—not hidden in a cornerstone but taking the form of a 3.25- by 5.78-inch black campaign notebook shared with Capt. James N. Brown, a longtime friend and fellow campaigner.

It was the waning days of Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and Brown was running for Illinois state legislature, partly at Lincoln’s encouragement. Brown, however, was assailed for his ties to Lincoln. Virulent opponents said that Lincoln—and therefore Brown, by association—supported and wanted to bring about social and political Negro equality.

Brown beseeched Lincoln for a clear statement on that Negro equality, what Brown referred to as the “paramount issue” of the day. Lincoln acceded, annotating what he called a “scrapbook” with news clips of his speeches on the subject, and a definitive 8-page letter, transcribed here.

Brown used the notebook from Lincoln during his campaign’s waning days. It didn’t help. He lost the election.

The scrapbook was cherished by Brown and, after his 1868 death, by his sons William and Benjamin. Eventually they sold it to New York rare-book dealer George D. Smith, who found a customer in Philadelphia Lincoln collector William H. Lambert, who believed Lincoln’s words warranted wider distribution and published a version of the notebook in 1901 as Abraham Lincoln: His Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original with an Explanatory Note by J. McCan Davis.

After Lambert’s death the ‘scrapbook’ was auctioned in 1914; and purchased for Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino, California library.

In his career Ross E. Heller, holder of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has been a journalist, U.S. Senatorial press secretary, lobbyist, association executive, entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and now, editor/author. Researching this book, he is also discoverer of new facts of America’s most-storied life; a life about which no one could imagine anything new could ever be found.

This article is an excerpt from By Abraham Lincoln: His 1858 Time Capsule, edited by Ross E. Heller and published by CustomNEWS, Seaside Books.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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In November 1862, Marcus Thompson escaped from a farm in Mount Sterling, Ky., to a nearby Union military camp commanded by Colonel Smith D. Atkins of the 92nd Illinois Infantry. Along with 29 other enslaved men, women, and children, Marcus had been farming the fields of a wealthy estate known for its corn and butter production, owned by the elderly Mary Thompson, who, it was clear, was not prepared to accept Marcus’ flight to freedom and teamed with her neighbors in suing Colonel Atkins. The lawsuit would test the legal bounds of emancipation through the military.

A year earlier Atkins, an antebellum lawyer, had abruptly departed in the middle of a criminal case in Freeport, Ill., to answer President Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops after the firing on Fort Sumter. The newly minted state attorney, who worked intermittently as a local newspaper editor, had passed the bar five years earlier.

Energized by the potential of the fledgling Republican Party, Atkins had actively campaigned for Lincoln in 1860. Not all Unionists agreed on the fate of slavery, of course, but Atkins was a fierce abolitionist, believing that emancipation would finally fulfill promises of national equality by the Founding Fathers. In a speech condemning the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, Atkins posited that warfare would be the only solution to secure a truly free nation.

Fugitive slaves were a particular concern in Kentucky, bordered to the north by the free states of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. Numerous state and federal laws criminalized slave flight and prohibited people from aiding and concealing runaways. Under various property laws, slave owners could sue antislavery reformers, and Underground Railroad conductors were often accused of stealing their “property.”

When war erupted in April 1861, Kentucky remained in the Union, and many politicians cited the Constitution’s “Fugitive Slave” clause as a key condition for it. Slaves nevertheless used familiar escape routes and Underground Railroad networks to abscond to Union fortifications. Seizing upon that, the U.S. government passed legislation in 1861-62 freeing fugitive slaves who made it to Army outposts. If the Confederacy considered slaves property, Congress would reason, the U.S. military had the authority over their slaves as contrabands of war.

Even though Congress granted emancipation to all Confederate “contrabands,” the policy threatened to reinforce the controversial interpretation of the enslaved as “property.” This proved especially difficult to navigate in Kentucky. The state had not seceded, and federal authority to invoke the contraband policy in Union territory, at the expense of loyal citizens, remained in question.

The November 1862 conflagration involving Atkins actually was ignited by a Union captain who complained to Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger about three slaves hiding within the 92nd Illinois’ lines. Those slaves—Cyrus, Henry, and Mosely—purportedly belonged to the Union captain’s uncle, Charles Gilkey.

Upon inquiry, Atkins declared he would not release any enslaved person against his or her will, which spurred Gilkey, Mary Thompson, and nearly a dozen other neighbors to retain the prestigious Robertson law firm to bring lawsuits against Atkins. On November 19, backed by armed townspeople, the Mount Sterling sheriff served a summons and “order for delivery of property” against Atkins in an attempt to forcibly remove Marcus Thompson—as well as Cyrus, Henry, Mosely, and a number of other slaves, ages 18 to 27—from the camp.

Fayette Circuit Court.

Mary Thompson

against } Order for Delivery of Property

Smith D. Atkins 

The Commonwealth of Kentucky, to the Sheriff of Fayette County: YOU are commanded to take the slave Marcus, copper color & 27 years old & medium size, and of the value of Eight Hundred Dollars, from the possession of the Defendant Smith D. Atkins, and deliver him to the Plaintiff, Mary Thompson, upon her giving the Bond required by law: and you will make due return of this order on the 1st day of the next February Term of the Fayette Circuit Court.

Witness: Jno B. Norton, Clerk of said Court, this 18 day of Nov, 1862

Executed Nov 19th 1862 by delivering to S.D. Atkins a true copy of the within order of delivery and demanding of him the slave Marcus. Said Atkins denied that he had possession of said slave but when charged that he was concealed in the 92 Regt of Illinois vol Infantry USA of which said Atkins is Colonel he did not deny the fact but stated that No officer of the law or other person should search for or take from the camp of his regiment this or any other slave. If attempted the officer would be shot. With the posse the Sheriff was able to summon it was impossible to get possession of or search for said slave.

C.S. Bodley S.F.C.

The plaintiffs made sure to frame their suits around property loss, complete with appraised monetary value for each man, naming Atkins as the thief. The petitions demanded immediate repossession and damages, or, if the sheriff could detain them, judgment for the enslaved men’s value. Although the court ordered Atkins to answer the petition, he refused, which spawned affidavits demanding his compliance. The colonel continued to stand firm, however. In turn, a jury awarded Mary Thompson $625, with an additional $25 in damages. Her fellow plaintiffs secured similar judgments, some as high as $800 per slave, with damages as high as $50.

The judgments totaled more than $12,000, and Atkins feared his property in Illinois could be auctioned off by a court ruling while he was away fighting. Leaving Kentucky later in the war did not end Atkins’ legal troubles either. In August 1864, he was charged with “slave harboring,” by the state’s Montgomery Circuit Court, a judgment carrying a possible sentence of 2–20 years. Despite the indictment, Atkins was never arrested.

The January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation authorized the recruitment of African Americans in the U.S. military. Kentucky and four other border states were exempted from the proclamation’s stipulation that all slaves in Confederate territory were to be freed.

The 92nd Illinois took part in the June-July 1863 Tullahoma Campaign, and Atkins commanded a cavalry brigade during the 1864 March to the Sea and then oversaw the surrender of Chapel Hill, N.C., in April 1865. He ended the war a brevet brigadier general.

In May 1864, Marcus Thompson—still legally a fugitive slave according to Kentucky—enlisted in the 15th USCT, serving until 1866. From 1867 to 1872, he served with the 9th U.S. Cavalry, a famed “Buffalo Soldier” regiment, in Fort Stockton, Texas. Upon his death, he received a military burial in Austin. 

Daniele Celano, a Jefferson Scholars Foundation fellow, is a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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From 1854 to 1860, America’s newspaper headlines screamed bloody murder. Sensationalist headlines read: “Bleeding Kansas!” “Sack of Lawrence!” “Pottawatomie Massacre!” “Battle of Osawatomie!” “Marais De Cygnes Massacre!” “Much Blood Spilt!” “Murder and Cold-Blooded Assassination!” Purportedly they were relaying news of an incredibly bloody and deadly clash of anti- and pro-slavery forces fought along the Kansas-Missouri border. 

No single event in the nation’s drift toward Southern secession and the armed conflict that would inevitably follow paved the road to war more than the hyped-up strife that took place for six years from 1854-1860 in eastern Kansas and western Missouri along the border between the state and the new territory.

A Media Myth?

Dramatic headlines would deepen the nation’s rapidly developing North-South rift, dividing those who fervently opposed further extension of what they realized was the country’s “original sin”—the curse of slavery—and those who stubbornly supported maintaining African Americans in chattel bondage as both constitutionally legal and essential to clinging to their wealth, livelihood and way of life. No rational person today can argue against the fact that slavery was an evil that had to be eradicated from the United States, nor can anyone deny that pro-slavery forces were fighting on the wrong side of history. The duty of historians is to investigate, determine the historical facts and accurately report those facts—in particular, historians must not perpetuate myths. 

The overblown headlines, created and promoted by partisan newspaper reporting on both sides, misrepresented what was actually happening west of the Mississippi River along Kansas territory’s eastern border. Newspapers championing both sides of the deeply-entwined “slavery-states’ rights” issue filled their papers with fabricated “atrocities” and overly-sanguine accounts of “pitched battles” in which casualties were actually either miniscule in number or often completely nonexistent.

This apparently horrific partisan struggle pushed the nation into its bloodiest war more than any pre-Civil War conflict, but was simply a fabrication created by the burgeoning national newspaper industry and capitalized upon by the ambitious new Republican political party to help it rally a nationwide electorate to win the White House in the 1860 U.S. presidential election.

The historical irony of so-called “Bleeding Kansas” is that over 10 times more Americans were murdered in the streets of San Francisco, California, in one year—1855—than were ever killed for their political beliefs during the 1854-1860 Border War. Simply put, “Bleeding Kansas” is an easily-disprovable albeit long-enduring myth. 

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act was a patched-together compromise hammered out by Illinois Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas and then-President Franklin Pierce, a “northern Democrat” opposed to Abolitionism but willing to compromise to dampen northern and southern firebrands. The act ostensibly promoted construction of a transcontinental railroad and the accompanying economic benefit of opening millions of acres of land to new settlement.

However, it included the “popular sovereignty” concept (introduced in the 1850 Compromise but as yet untested), permitting Kansas and Nebraska territory settlers to decide by popular vote whether they would enter the Union as “free” or “slave” states. Well-meaning—but not well-considered—“popular sovereignty” essentially made obsolete previous Congressional attempts (1820 Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) to alleviate rising North-South sectional tensions regarding slavery’s spread. 

In hindsight, the 1854 act inevitably created the political conditions in Kansas territory that, predictably, devolved into violence as pro- and anti-slavery factions clashed to influence the “popular sovereignty” vote’s outcome regarding statehood. Although initially assumed that Nebraska would become a “free state” and Kansas would enter as a “slave” state, once the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed all bets were off. “Popular sovereignty” made Kansas territory a free-for-all for anti- and pro-slavery factions. Henceforth, whichever side of the slavery question wanted to prevail in Kansas would have to fight for it.

Inevitably, violence erupted along the Kansas-Missouri border in 1854, and nationwide newspapers consciously and deliberately propelled what were in fact relatively minor border clashes into a major, national political issue. The term “Bleeding Kansas” itself originally appeared in 1856 in abolitionist editor Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to falsely describe the struggle as being one of “innocent” Free-state settlers unjustly harassed by evil pro-slavery Missouri “Bushwhackers,” thereby deliberately stoking the fires of North-South sectional passions.

Newspapers Weigh In

Yet, the truth is that despite the amplified claims of partisan newspaper editors, neither side in the Border War held a monopoly on ruthlessness and violence in pursuit of their opposing political causes.  

Between 1840 and 1860, printed newspapers—daily, weekly, quarterly and periodically—underwent an explosion of overall numbers and the amount of copies printed annually. While the U.S. population then rose 180%, newspaper numbers increased 250% with total annual printed copies expanding nearly 500%. 

Propelling this phenomenon were ground-breaking (labor-saving and cost-cutting) advances in printing technology. Truly “industrial scale” printing resulted from the Fourdrinier paper-making machine (U.S. introduction in 1827), which created continuous rolled paper in massive quantities and the steam-powered, continuous-feed, rotary printing press (invented in 1843 by American Richard M. Hoe).

No longer limited by laboriously printing single sheets, countless copies of a page could be produced daily. By the 1850s, illustrations were prominently featured, enhancing visual appeal, while increased staffing (typically, 1-2 in the 1820-30s; 30 in the 1840s; and 100 by the 1850s in larger papers) made it possible to fill more pages with more stories of national, regional and local interest. Advances in railroad transportation sped distribution. Improved communications (telegraph) meant widespread “breaking news.” The resulting “media blitz” was a newspaper revolution.

That era’s most influential newspaperman, New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley (editor from 1841-72), explained in 1851 how the phenomenon’s nationwide spread mirrored the country’s growth: “[T]he general rule…was for each town to have a newspaper, and, in the free states, each county of 20,000 or more usually had two papers—one for each [political] party. A county of 50,000 usually had five journals…and when a town reached 15,000 inhabitants…it usually had a daily paper and at 20,000 it had two.” 

Citizens today would expect media sources to strive diligently to present the news as straightforward facts and allow the public to draw its own conclusions. However, in the mid-19th century, political partisanship in newspapers was the norm, not the exception. The “Bleeding Kansas” myth resulted from unashamedly biased newspaper reporting—each paper aggressively politically partisan and firmly committed to championing its favored side in that conflict. Editors blatantly chose sides, some aligning with the new, anti-slavery Republican Party, while others backed the then pro-slavery Democratic Party. Partisan editors graphically described the “Border War” as a war of annihilation waged by pro- and anti-slavery factions to determine Kansas territory’s future statehood status as a “free” or “slave” state. 

Exaggerated Casualties

Readers nationwide became morbidly mesmerized by the “terrible casualties” reported and impatiently stood by to purchase “hot off the press” papers recounting the latest atrocities. Right was irrevocably on the side the competing newspaper editors supported, while the opposing side was accused of incredible acts of violence. 

These attention-getting headlines sent circulation soaring. The atrocities described were either exaggerated or fabricated to stoke the flames of political hatred and animosity. This “spin,” in contemporary parlance, favored a particular cause or political party. A century-and-a-half ago, political parties and their media allies ignored the truth and outrageously manipulated facts.

Editors profited by exaggerating the trans-Mississippi border conflict. Both sides developed derogatory names for each other; anti-slavery newspapers condemned pro-slavery forces—primarily from Missouri—as “Border Ruffians,” “Bushwhackers” and “Pukes,” while the Kansas partisans were known as “Redlegs” and “Jayhawkers.” 

Created in 1854, the new Republican Party—formed of former Whigs, Free Staters and anti-slavery activists—finished a surprising second in 1856 with its first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont. In the 1860 presidential election, the party made maximum advantage of the headline-gathering Border War to expand its mainly regional electorate into a party with widespread national appeal. The new political party was eager to capitalize on the Border War to create a national voter base to promote the party’s 1860 presidential ambitions. 

When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed in 1854, 15 states (and three territories west of the Mississippi) still permitted slavery, while the abominable practice was illegal in 17 states and five territories.

With the handwriting on the wall regarding slavery’s ultimate survival, Southern states’ slave power block was desperate that Kansas become a slave state. Correspondingly, Northern anti-slavery forces, led by committed Abolitionists and anti-slavery activists, were equally determined that Kansas become free.

A Rush On Kansas

Frantically, residents of Kansas territory’s neighboring slave state, Missouri, fearful that a “free state” Kansas on its western border, combined with the established free states of Illinois on its eastern border and Iowa on its northern border, would surround the border slave state on three sides—becoming a runaway slave magnet—rushed “settlers” across Missouri’s western border into contiguous eastern Kansas to “vote-pack” Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Although the statewide population of Missouri was then split between pro- and anti-slavery adherents, the pro-slavery faction firmly held state power in Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City.

Adamantly opposed to slavery, the Boston-based Abolitionist, New England Emigrant Aid Company—generously financed by wealthy northeastern businessmen such as Eli Thayer, Alexander H. Bullock and Edward Everett Hale—quickly organized an anti-slavery settler movement. The Emigrant Aid Company funded the settlement of eastern Kansas, rapidly packing it with heavily recruited, anti-slavery settlers, and well-armed them with numerous Sharps .52-cal breech-loading rifles.

Both sides therefore—not just pro-slavery Missourians as is often claimed today—raced to populate Kansas territory with their ideological followers. Both sides unconscionably “packed” Kansas with adherents who obediently “stuffed” ballot boxes with votes to control the election. Anti- and pro-slavery adherents were equally guilty of vote tampering, voter intimidation, ballot-box stuffing and election malfeasance. 

The stage was thus set for a bitter fight for Kansas’ statehood status: two well-armed opposing factions holding unwavering political positions faced off in what, according to the era’s terminology, was dubbed a “War to the Knife, and the Knife to the Hilt!” Yet the truth of the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War is much different than what we accept today as “conventional wisdom.” 

How Bloody was the Struggle?

Conventional wisdom only holds up until someone actually does the math. That someone is historian Dale Watts in his ground-breaking article “How Bloody Was Bleeding Kansas?” published in the Summer 1995 editionof Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains. Watts’ exhaustively-researched article discovered “Bleeding Kansas” produced only a small fraction of the politically-motivated deaths of anti- and pro-slavery forces both sides widely claimed. 

Using historical documents and meticulously examining 1854-1860 death records, Watts determined which deaths were “political killings” (i.e., murders by a pro- or anti-slavery partisan because of the victim’s opposing political stance) or due to apolitical motivations (e.g., land disputes, personal animosity, or common criminality, robbery or homicides). Contemporary accounts nearly always overestimated the conflict’s deaths.

For example, the Hoogland Claims Commission 1859 report outlandishly claimed “the number of lives sacrificed in Kansas during [1854-1855] probably exceeded rather than fell short of two hundred.” However, Watts’s research verified the casualty record generally confirmed by Robert W. Richmond’s 1974 conclusion that “approximately fifty persons died violently [for political reasons] during [Kansas’] territorial period [1854-1860].” 

Watts’s independent research revealed that of 157 documented violent deaths from 1854-1860 in Kansas territory, only 56 were attributed to the Kansas-Missouri political struggle. For historical comparison, Watts noted that in the contemporary “gold rush-era” California alone, a total of 583 people died violently in 1855, and at least 1,200 people were murdered in San Francisco between 1850 and 1853. This violent death comparison makes Kansas Territory seem almost calm given its small number of political killings recorded during the much-hyped Border War.

Single-digit Casualties 

Significantly, Watts shows that of those 56 murders, 30 were “pro-slavery” advocates, including the only woman slain, Sarah Carver, whose husband merely professed to be pro-slavery while there were 24 anti-slavery proponents killed. One victim was an ostensibly neutral U.S. Army soldier while one was an officer whom both sides tried to claim. Moreover, some allegedly “bloody battles” (called “wars” and “massacres” at the time) were essentially bloodless or resulted in single-digit casualties. For example, in the June 1856 “Battle” of Black Jack not one person was killed. 

No “Bleeding Kansas” engagement produced more than five deaths. Anti-slavery radical John Brown and his sons killed five allegedly pro-slavery settlers during his notorious “Pottawatomie Massacre” from May 24-25, 1856 along Pottawatomie Creek. The attackers used broadswords to hack their neighbors to death in retaliation for the nearly bloodless “sack” of Lawrence three days prior. 

Even the inaptly-named May 21, 1856 “Sack of Lawrence” produced only two casualties—one on each side. This incident is not to be confused with the later Lawrence Massacre during the Civil War in August 1863 by Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill’s raid that killed over 160, mostly civilians. The 1856 incident essentially consisted of Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones leading a force of about 800 citizens to Lawrence to enforce a legal warrant, and the damage to property consisted of the razing of the Free State Hotel (then used as headquarters of Kansas’ anti-slavery forces) along with the residence of anti-slavery firebrand, Massachusetts-born Charles L. Robinson who was elected Kansas’ first state governor in 1861 and in 1862 became the first U.S. state governor—and only Kansas governor—to be impeached. A single pro-slavery man was killed by being crushed in a collapsing building and a single anti-slavery man suffered a non-fatal injury. 

Watts’s research proves conclusively that “Bleeding Kansas” was a myth that grew from fabrications in biased newspapers and fueled by political parties seeking to promote partisan interests. Nearly a million Americans would die making war on each other in the subsequent Civil War, which was in large part precipitated by the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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The iconography of the Union crusade against slavery can be symbolized in a book, a song, and a photograph. The book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was read by hundreds of thousands; the song “John Brown’s Body,” was sung by tens of thousands of blue-coated emancipators; and the photograph was the hideously scarred back of a Black man known variously as Gordon, the whipped Peter, or merely the scarred slave. It’s the photograph and the story behind it that director Antoine Fuqua has taken as the subject of “Emancipation,” and he has harnessed the star power of Will Smith to depict the unrelenting cruelty of the South’s “peculiar institution.”

Slavery, like the Holocaust, is almost impossible to portray through any medium. But Fuqua and Smith have marshalled their considerable talents to produce a film that is hard to watch and impossible to look away from. The R rating is visible in nearly every celluloid frame. A brief summary of the real Gordon’s harrowing escape saga, given when he staggered into the encampment of several Massachusetts regiments of the Union’s 19th Corps outside Baton Rouge, La., in March 1863, will put the historical accuracy of William A. Collage’s sparse script to the test.

The historical Gordon escaped from the 3,000-acre cotton plantation of John Lyons, located along the west bank of the Atchafalaya River in St. Landry Parish, near today’s Krotz Springs, La. He spent 10 hellish days in the region’s swamps avoiding the relentless pursuit of blood hounds handled by the plantation’s overseer, Artayou Carrier. Gordon carried onions in his pockets to hide his scent from the pursuing dogs. New Orleans–based photographers William D. McPherson and his partner, Mr. Oliver, happened to be in the Union camp when Gordon stumbled in. They produced carte-de-visite photos of Gordon seated, stripped to the waist, his back showing the deep welts that crisscrossed his skin from his shoulders to his waist.

The photograph was reproduced by the thousands in the North and became an instant sensation. The photo appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly, the country’s most widely read journal during the Civil War. Gordon subsequently enlisted in the Louisiana Native Guards and fought at Port Hudson in July 1863. His life after the war is unknown.

Echoes of the Holocaust are unmistakable throughout the movie. In the film, Smith, playing Gordon, is torn from his wife, played by Charmaine Bingwa, and his children in a scene of random violence and thoughtless cruelty that will be repeated in many guises throughout the movie. Along with other slaves, Smith is herded into a prison-like cart and sent to labor alongside Confederate deserters rebuilding a railroad. Under concentration camp-like conditions, the worst of human nature becomes commonplace. Through senseless acts of sadism, men are worked like animals until they die and then their bodies are tossed into a mass grave.

The muted cinematography of Robert Richardson gives these scenes a documentary-like look—intended, probably, to symbolize the hopelessness forced upon slave laborers everywhere. “Where is God?” asks a dispirited slave. His answer, “He is nowhere,” is a reality Gordon cannot accept. It sparks his determination to escape from this environment of relentless evil and twisted humanity. Gordon’s inner strength comes from his determination to return and free his still enslaved family.

Smith portrays his 10 days on the run in the swamps with muted desperation and internalized rage. There is little dialogue and Smith’s physicality moves the action forward. Fuqua turns Louisiana into a Biblical wasteland through which Gordon must journey to find freedom and salvation. Smith faces and overcomes the worst forces of nature, including mud, snakes, and even alligators, as cruel and unrelenting as his life on the plantation.

In a sense, “Emancipation” is a story of redemption, and every redemption film needs an evil adversary that must be overcome. Smith finds his nemesis in Fassel, the overseer, portrayed with menacing determination by Ben Foster. “You walk the earth because I let you,” he snarls. Living under the capriciousness of someone having the power of life and death over another human being is the fate all enslaved must endure.

Fuqua’s film is without nuance, which denies him complete development of his characters. But “Emancipation” differs from other Hollywood efforts to portray slavery. There is no Lost Cause mythology, no redemptive whites to mitigate the worst aspects of the institution they have created and control. “Emancipation” is an unflinching exposure of an overwhelming corruption. But it is also an affirmation of the human spirit’s ability to overcome and survive. The film had a brief theatrical release and streams on Apple TV+ Starting December 9.

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Black and White children as schoolmates. A Black sergeant assigned to command over 70 mostly White soldiers. Black clergymen leading mixed-race congregations. Skilled Black craftsmen highly respected by White members of their communities. Do these citations sound like examples of the progress America has made in overcoming racism? They’re actually examples of life in the early 19th-century South.

If critics and admirers of the Old South agree on one thing it’s that Civil War-era attitudes toward slavery and race were grounded in long-standing tradition. Admirers claim that that tradition blinded otherwise decent people. Critics see evidence of a thoroughly corrupt society. Shadow unmasks a different reality.

Slavery and racism existed from early days in colonial America, but a certain fluidity characterized these phenomena for over two centuries before attitudes hardened. At first slaves could own property, sometimes earning enough by hiring themselves to buy their freedom. Some free Blacks were aristocrats, even slaveowners. Whites commonly accepted free Blacks of their own class as at least more or less equals. Believers in “racial superiority” didn’t necessarily treat that construct as a White/non-White issue. Some persons of Anglo-Saxon ancestry considered themselves superior to White people from other origins.

Such a mix of attitudes typified the revolutionary era and the republic’s early days. Many on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line favored gradually ending slavery. Newer, extreme views gained credence among southerners in the 1820s. “Scientific racism” replaced unthinking prejudice, with adherents claiming to be able to perceive a strict biological hierarchy among races. This “scientific” mode of analysis would affect the status of people with one Black great-grandparent in ways the older view never did. Slavery came to be seen as a great good—not merely “acceptable” or a way to avoid something worse.

So while abolitionism bloomed and grew in the North, the South began codifying the slave system in terms stricter than ever while moving toward a subjugation of the region’s 250,000 free Black residents that culminated in Jim Crow. Shadow tells how those free southern Blacks survived and fought back, aided by White neighbors opposed to the new policies. This fascinating story shows that early America was more benign—and the antebellum south more sinister—than generally realized. —James Baresel is a freelance writer in Annandale, Virginia.

This book review appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South

by Warren Eugene Milteer

University of North Carolina Press, 2021

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Frederick Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century. He knew the power of visualization and sat for more than 160 photographic portraits. Douglass is again in the public eye with a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, an HBO documentary, and a film produced for distribution by the Public Broadcasting System. It should come as no surprise, then, that he is now the subject of that most American of theatrical formats: the musical.

But American Prophet, recently staged by the Kreeger Theater, part of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s most prestigious regional theaters, is not your typical song-and-dance musical. Like the widely acclaimed and better-known Hamilton, the retelling of the first half of Douglass’ turbulent and often violent life departs from the realm of tuneful fancy into the more exacting realm of history. Using Douglass’ actual language drawn from a plentiful archive of his speeches, letters, journalism, and autobiographies, Hummon, a Grammy Award winner, and Randolph-Wright, an award winning playwright, reveal the poetry and power of the rising abolitionist, orator, journalist, and author and challenges the audience to see that the discrimination and racism Douglass endured throughout his life continue in society today.

While the musical is primarily set between 1851 and 1865, Douglass’ early years are presented in flashbacks that include his childhood in Talbot County, Md., his escape to New York City in 1838, his settlement in New Bedford, Mass, and his growth as an recognized spokesman for abolition and racial equality. Cornelius Smith Jr. who portrayed Douglass in the Kreeger production, is a riveting presence on the show’s minimalist, wood-paneled set. His soulful voice and and hauntingly powerful eye contact with the audience makes Douglass a compelling and complex character that demands attention and respect. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rousing song that ends the first act, “We Need a Fire.” Sung by Douglass and the show’s ensemble, it is the production’s signature anthem and is drawn from Douglass’ famous 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech, delivered at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y.

Douglass isn’t the only character commanding attention. Hummon and Randolph-Wright bring to life Douglass’ wife, Anna Murray, a constant and resolute partner often overlooked by history because she chose to remain in the shadow of her illustrious husband. Kristolyn Lloyd poignantly portrays Anna, a free Black woman from Caroline County, Md., a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and a bona fide historical heroine in her own right. She met Douglass at a dance in Baltimore in 1838, urged him to persevere in his flight to freedom, later served as his business agent, and raised five children during their 44 years of marriage while her peripatetic husband spent most of his time on the road. Their steely yet affectionate bond is reflected in the yearning beauty of “Children of the Same River,” a song acknowledging that the struggle for freedom and racial justice will consume both their lives.

American Prophet also depictsthe complicated relationships Douglass had with three other important historical figures: William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln. Chris Roberts plays Brown with an impatient vitality worthy of the firebrand abolitionist. He joins Douglass in “We Need a Fire” and is given a much deserved solo in “Hands” as he prepares for his ill-fated Harpers Ferry raid. Thomas Adrian Simpson portrays both Garrison and Lincoln. Some critics have found fault with how Lincoln is portrayed and with Douglass’ meeting with the president. But these are easily overlooked quibbles in an otherwise praiseworthy production that challenges the audience to look into their own hearts and grapple with the complex issues and emotions portrayed.

In a recent interview, Randolph-Wright presciently reflected, “We need to understand where we’ve been to deal with where we are and where we’re going.” He hopes his show will soon be going to Broadway, where it deserves to garner large audiences and rave reviews.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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A wonder of the New World, the vast oyster beds supported by the great estuaries of the mid-Atlantic shore allowed free Blacks — and fugitive slaves — to carve out less-surveilled lives as self-employed watermen. These aquatic entrepreneurs included Thomas Downing, born in Chincoteague, Virginia, in 1791 to parents who were freed after their owner converted to Methodism (“Rehearsal for Rebellion,” June 2022). At 21, Thomas headed north, first to Philadelphia and then to Manhattan.

The New York diet so celebrated the oyster that locals called shellfish-bearing outcroppings in the harbor Great Oyster Island and Little Oyster Island, later renamed Liberty Island, site of the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, scene of immigrant processing. Downing started out oystering, but soon showed a landward entrepreneurial streak, establishing an elegant Manhattan oyster bar that elite whites came to favor. His establishment, at Broad Street and Wall, faced the New York Stock Exchange, guaranteeing a stream of customers preferring to gulp oysters in a setting more lavish than the rough cellars in which most workers washed down their oysters with beer.

Noted Abolitionist

Though remarkably well known as a restaurateur and caterer, Downing pursued another career to which he was equally committed: civil rights activist. He and his son George became unusually prominent and prosperous — and also emerged as unstinting advocates for the abolition of slavery and the equality of Blacks and whites. In 1836, Thomas Downing cofounded the Antislavery Society in New York City, and in the damp cellar where he stored shellfish he sometimes harbored fugitive slaves. In 1836, he presented a 20-foot-long, 620-signature petition to legislators in Albany asking that New York State grant voting rights to all “without distinction of color.”

The gesture failed. Downing founded schools for Blacks in New York City, also trying but failing to get New Haven, Connecticut, to permit a college for Blacks to open there. He was among many Blacks to challenge segregation as practiced on streetcars in New York City, and one of two confrontations over that matter left him with cuts to his ears and a badly bruised and swollen leg. He could be prickly, refusing in 1860, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision declaring Blacks to be non-citizens, to tell a census-taker his real estate’s value, noting that property could not own property. Nonetheless, Downing managed to balance activism, enterprise, and generosity, and is credited with quietly loaning his white customer Gordon Thomas Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, money to keep Bennett’s paper running.

Thomas Downing died in 1866, and obituaries nationwide celebrated his equanimity, dignity, and industry. Black abolitionist Martin Delany described him: “Benevolent, kind, and liberal minded, his head was always willing, his heart ready, and his hands open to give.” New York’s Chamber of Commerce closed for a day in his honor.

The NExt Generation

Downing and his wife had five children. One, George Thomas, developed an even bolder profile than his father in business as well as in activism. He attended one of a handful of African Free Schools in Manhattan and, at age 14, created a discussion group on how to improve Blacks’ lives. Attending Hamilton College in upstate New York, he met his future wife, Serena DeGrasse, enrolled at a female seminary nearby. Their wedding in 1841 joined the Downing family to another of distinctive pedigree: one DeGrasse ancestor was an immigrant from India who arrived as adopted son of Revolutionary War Adm. Comte François Joseph Paul DeGrasse; another was Abraham Van Salee, one of two sons of a Dutch seafarer turned Moroccan admiral. Likely born to an African woman, the young men emigrated to New Amsterdam around 1630. Anthony, the younger son, tangled with locals and was exiled to Brooklyn, where he was an early settler. 

In 1850, with his father, George Downing formed the Committee of 13 to oppose the seizure of escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law. By then, George had extended his father’s business into Providence and Newport, Rhode Island. Around 1855 George built a resort that — despite a suspected arson — helped Newport’s nascent tourist trade take root and flourish.

George Downing counted among his friends and correspondents abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Gerritt Smith, and U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner. A year after John Brown was hanged, Downing sponsored a commemorative event in Boston. Though threatened by a mob, he did not flinch. During the Civil War, he was among a handful of highly effective Union Army recruiters highlighting the need and opportunity for Blacks to enlist. Downing and other private recruiters were key to filling musters in some states because unlike state workers they could cross state lines to meet enlistment quotas. Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew offered George Downing a colonelcy in a colored militia; Downing refused unless the term “colored” were stricken from the unit’s name. The governor acceded. For years, George emulated his father, encouraging education and doggedly campaigning to desegregate schools in Rhode Island. After nearly a decade of effort, his campaign ended in 1866 — with success.

In February 1866, Downing, as head of the National Convention of Colored Men, led a group of distinguished personages, including Frederick Douglass, to meet with President Andrew Johnson to ask Johnson’s support for Black suffrage and equal rights. In the grip of the puzzling notion that freed Blacks somehow were aligned with wealthy whites against poor whites, Johnson dismissed the requests. The petitioners used the encounter to highlight the hollowness of Johnson’s stance on Black equality.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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THreatened by the Klan

In 1868, through his friendship with Charles Sumner, George Downing got the contract to run the U.S. Capitol cafeteria, widening and strengthening his contact with prominent politicians — and prompting the Ku Klux Klan to threaten him by letter.

The elder Downing quipped to the Providence Free Press in 1864 that in the 46 years he spent building his oyster business, he “gave my boys an education and they got out on Wall Street and caught the bad habits of white people. They would be politicians. It is not my fault but that of white people.”

Over time oysters had faded as a path to prosperity. The window for Black success in that industry closed as shellfish beds were privatized, a mechanized dredging technique took hold, and a flood of industrial waste fouled New York City’s waters. By 1927, pollution had gotten so bad that the local oyster trade was banned. The Downing children moved into other occupations. Son Philip became an inventor; his best-known creation is the U.S. Postal Service mailbox, unchanged from his original design.

George Thomas Downing died in 1903 in Newport, where Downing Street honors his 1854 donation to help buy land for Touro Park.

In an 1892 letter, Frederick Douglass wrote his friend, “Our lives have been long in the land and we have both done something to leave the world better than we found it.”

Shortly before his death, George Downing was talking with churchmen. “I was a fighter as well as an urger,” he told them, pointing to a picture of his father. “I owe it all to that man.”

On February 23, 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced placement of plaques memorializing Robert Lewis and Robert Mulliner, Black men lynched in the New York towns of Port Jervis and Newburgh in the late 1800s. Philip Dray’s timely “A Lynching at Port Jervis” tells Lewis’s story. He was accused of assaulting Lena McMahon, a white woman, on June 2, 1892, on the banks of the Neversink River. Several white Port Jervis residents sought to ensure Lewis’s trial by due process, but that night a mob seized, tortured and hanged him from a tree in the front yard of a white judge, who also attempted to intervene.

That a horror generally associated with the Jim Crow South happened in a northern railroad town was shocking. More shocking were efforts by Port Jervis residents to befog the guilt of those “persons unknown” behind the gang murder and to erase the lynching from collective local memory. A transcript of the coroner’s public inquest into Lewis’s death vanished and remains missing. In keeping with the times, authorities sought and recorded little input from contemporaneous Black sources. Nevertheless, making use of robust national and local press coverage and personal recollections, Dray weaves a compelling narrative.

“A Lynching” is as much an analysis of Port Jervis and its people as of lynching as mob “justice.” Dray flatteringly describes the town’s social strata and key figures, including the alleged victim, her parents, and her paramour, who may have conspired in the alleged assault. The author also chronicles how literary luminaries Ida B. Wells and Stephen Crane tried to spotlight the town’s hidden shame.

The book has nits. Illustrations often go unexplained, sending the reader repeatedly to the index. A Lynching would have benefited from more detailed maps of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, pertinent rail lines, regional topography, and the ostensible and actual crime scenes. “A Lynching at Port Jervis” is a fast-paced account of a terrible episode and how an American town buried the crimes. Dray portrays the atrocity early, then sifts the evidence and the suspects toward a coroner’s inquest and two grand jury reviews, in the mode of an episode from a steampunk version of “Law & Order” — except that in television procedurals evildoers usually come to grief. In the Port Jervis of the 1890s, the persons unknown who slew Robert Lewis evaded justice.

This book review appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of American History magazine.

A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age

By Philip Dray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

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In associating John Brown’s traits with the current meaning of terrorist, he measures up to the profile. He was an American abolitionist leader who fought in Kansas Territory and led a small band that captured the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Brown was hanged two months later; in the North he became a martyred hero.

Charles Poland’s 336-page narrative chronicles Brown’s life comprehensively, with a noticeable focus on his attempt to aid Southern slaves. The author examines the personality and characteristics of this “Good Terrorist” in order to comprehend his life and motivations.

The author traces Brown’s involvement in Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s and, most important, how he came to believe that violence was a way to ending slavery. He then examines Brown’s travels through the Northeast to find sponsors for his proposed liberation army. Even Frederick Douglass, though, opposed raiding Harpers Ferry. The author offers a fascinating review of Brown’s taking of the arsenal and his capture by U.S. forces under Colonel Robert E. Lee. Poland makes the point that Brown’s flawed preparation and poor leadership doomed the operation to failure.

Poland offers insightful observations on Brown’s legacy after Harpers Ferry. For instance, after Brown’s death, many abolitionists in the North embraced violence as a way to ending slavery.

America’s Good Terrorist is both captivating and rewarding—and a meticulous narrative of Harpers Ferry. It is excellent as history and quite appealing as biography.

America’s Good Terrorist

John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid
By Charles P. Poland Jr

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The Levi and Catharine Coffin House in Fountain City, Ind., may seem off the beaten path for Civil War aficionados, but that was not the case for thousands of enslaved people in antebellum America, for whom it was a symbol of incredible hope—appropriately labeled the “Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad” in the 1840s. Today the restored house and its barn are part of the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site, which also features an exceptional interpretive center that helps put in perspective the vital role the Coffin family played during the buildup to the Civil War.

Originally from North Carolina, Levi Coffin and his wife, Catharine, were Quakers who strongly opposed slavery and eventually moved to Indiana, where they would live for 20 years in what was known at the time as Newport. The small town of Fountain City is not far from the Indiana–Ohio state line in Wayne County, about 93 miles northeast of Indianapolis via Interstate 70.

Abolitionist and slavery themes are present as soon as you enter the Interpretive Center. A dual-purpose timeline on the first floor provides a look at the history of slavery and the law and also examines the rich Coffin family history. One of the first things you will see is a telling quote by Levi: “I date my conversion to Abolitionism from an incident which occurred when I was about seven years old. It made a deep and lasting impression on my mind, and created that horror of the cruelties of slavery which has been the motive of so many actions of my life.”

Despite the peril, Levi and Catharine were fully committed to assisting freedom seekers make their way to Canada. They would help liberate more than 1,000 freedom seekers while they resided in Newport.

The Interpretive Center’s second floor has a self-guided exhibit gallery titled “Souls Seeking Safety,” where the challenge of telling such a rich story in a relatively small space is more than met. Photographs, graphics, text, and interactives in the gallery blend seamlessly for a rewarding experience.

The interactives adopt both a physical and passive approach. Visitors, for instance, learn the story of Henry “Box” Brown by lifting the lid of a reproduction of the crate that Brown used to ship himself to freedom, a journey lasting 27 hours. Another exhibit looks at Catharine’s sewing circle as its members discuss abolitionism. The most powerful interactive, however, is a cutaway reproduction of a false-bottomed wagon used to transport freedom seekers to and from the Coffin House. Placing your head in the concealed rider’s space, you can hear the sounds of the road, including a conversation between a wagon driver and bounty hunter.

Another nice feature is a lighted map showing key cities and the confluence of three major routes near the Coffin House that freedom seekers used to cross the Ohio River: Cincinnati, Ohio; Jeffersonville, Ind., and Madison, Ind. Nearby Quaker settlements providing further support are shown.

As is the case in many such house tours, there is great focus on the Coffin House’s architecture and furnishings. The spaces and voids tell a key story, as they provided freedom seekers refuge—spaces in which they could hide, eat, sleep, and dream of freedom until the next leg of their journeys. Notably, visitors enter the house through a side door, the same threshold that freedom seekers crossed in the 19th century.

The furnishings are primarily of the period. The first floor has a kitchen, a guest room, and a sewing/sitting room where Catharine’s sewing circle made clothes for the freedom seekers. The kitchen area has a discreet curved staircase that visitors can use to enter an upstairs bedroom under the roof’s eave. The short door in the shortest wall of the room provides access to a garret, space capable of housing up to 14 freedom seekers. Visitors can peer through the doorway to see that precarious hiding place.

Tours of the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site are a powerful experience, well worth your time. To date, reservations are required for tours and numbers are limited due to pandemic-related guidelines.

The Interpretive Center is ADA-compliant; however, the Coffin House does pose challenges for visitors with limited mobility. The staff makes every effort to provide full access to the house, offering visitors with mobility issues alternate ways to gain access to certain rooms, including an alternate wider staircase to the upper floor and alternate entryways to the basement.

For those confined to wheelchairs, the first floor is readily accessible. Upon request, staff will provide visitors photographs or a link to a virtual tour exploring the second floor.

To find out more about the Levi and Catharine Coffin House State Historic Site, go to indianamuseum.org/historic-sites/levi-catharine-coffin-house.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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It has become commonplace that current political and cultural fissures rival those at any other point in U.S. history. The Civil War is frequently offered as a comparative example to highlight contemporary disagreements. A New York Times piece from December 2021, titled “We’re Edging Closer to Civil War,” reflected this phenomenon in sketching an ominous national mood. Whether stemming from genuine ignorance about American history or from a cynical attempt to abet partisan political agendas, such claims and comparisons distort both mid-19th-century and 21st-century disruptions and, by extension, threats to the stability of the nation. In fact, as the United States enters the third decade of the 21st century, it is not witnessing an almost unprecedented breakdown of national civility. Public acrimony of the past decade pales in comparison to that of the period that included systemic political failure climaxing in secession, a cataclysmic military conflict, and wrenching postwar aftershocks that lingered for more than a decade.

A few examples will illustrate the profound difference between the Civil War era and the recent past. Prominent actors increasingly use awards ceremonies as a platform to express unhappiness with political leaders. On April 14, 1865, a member of the most celebrated family of thespians in the United States expressed his unhappiness with Abraham Lincoln by shooting him in the back of the head. Similarly, Americans regularly hear and watch members of Congress direct rhetorical barbs at one another during hearings and in other venues. On May 22, 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into bloody insensibility on the floor of the Senate chamber because Sumner had criticized Senator Andrew Butler, one of Brooks’ kinsmen, for embracing “the harlot, Slavery” as his “mistress.”

Recent presidential elections have provoked a good deal of posturing about how Texas or California might break away from the rest of the nation. The election of a Republican president in 1860 prompted seven slaveholding states actually to secede between December 20 and February 1, 1861. Four of the remaining eight slaveholding states followed suit between April and June 1861, and Americans grappled with the reality that the political system established by the founding generation had failed to manage internal tensions during an election no one claimed had been tainted by fraud.

Events on January 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., provide a final example. Often described by politicians and pundits, and even by some historians, as the gravest threat to the republic since the Civil War, the chaotic occupation of parts of the Capitol Building yielded deeply troubling images. But the incident lasted only a few hours before order was restored. The heated presidential canvass of 1860, in contrast, positioned the United States and the newly proclaimed Confederacy to engage in open warfare that stretched across four agonizing years of escalating bloodshed. More than 3,000,000 men eventually took up arms (that would be equivalent to more than 30,000,000 today). Between 618,000 and 750,000 perished (imagine between 6.2 and 7.5 million dead today). Hundreds of thousands of African American and White civilians became refugees (the number would be millions today). Four million enslaved people emerged from what Frederick Douglass called the “hell-black system of human bondage.” And the country soon entered a decade of virulent, and often violent, disagreement about how best to order a biracial society in the absence of slavery.

The key to mid-19th century political and cultural turmoil, and eventually to slaughter on battlefields, lay in the existence of the institution of slavery. Slavery’s toxic presence provoked debates about the gag rule in the House of Representatives, halted the untrammeled dissemination of printed materials to parts of the nation, affected diplomatic decisions relating to Mexico and Cuba, split mainstream Protestant denominations, hastened the breakdown of the second party system, and, in the late 1850s, triggered a low-level guerrilla war in “Bleeding Kansas” and John Brown’s quixotic raid on Harpers Ferry. The key issue centered on whether slavery would be allowed to expand into federal territories, creating a series of crises between 1820 and 1860 that ultimately proved intractable.

No political issue in 2022 approaches slavery in terms of potential explosiveness, which bodes well for the long-term stability of the republic. More broadly, to compare anything that has transpired in the past few years to the political, military, and social upheavals of the mid-19th century represents a spectacular lack of understanding about American history that is potentially destructive to current political discourse.

Public ignorance about U.S. history, or its willful manipulation for political ends, often gets in the way of fruitful debate about issues of surpassing importance that have ties to American past. The discussion of immigration, for example, too often betrays little appreciation of comparable public debates throughout U.S. history—or of the vitriol characteristic of some of those debates that makes the current ones seem almost tame.

Once again, the Civil War era provides useful context. The Know Nothings of the mid-1850s (formally the American Party), with a strong focus on nativist issues, won control of the Massachusetts Legislature, polled 40 percent of the votes in Pennsylvania in 1854, and significantly affected politics in numerous other states. Moreover, mid-19th century statistics attest to the fact that percentages of foreign-born residents currently are not at unprecedented levels. In 1861, as the Lincoln administration prepared to go to war to restore the Union, almost one-third of the military-age White males in the loyal states had been born outside the United States, and the proportion of foreign-born residents in 1860 and in 2020 was almost the same (the 1860 percentage rose in the censuses of 1870, 1890, and 1910).

A careful examination of U.S. history leads to an inescapable conclusion: A more certain sense of their national past would allow Americans, as a people, to know that almost no issue or debate is new, that earlier generations overcame far greater problems than the present generation faces, and that the nation almost certainly will emerge from current controversies intact.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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On March 23, 1820, off Africa’s western coast, Captain Vicente de Llovio of Spanish merchant brig Antelope uneasily watched an unfamiliar vessel enter the Bay of Cabinda. Antelope had been anchored for two weeks in the bay, where the Congo River meets the Atlantic Ocean. De Llovio and his 24-man crew had been sharing the anchorage with an unnamed Portuguese vessel. Both crews had come to trade with a figure the Europeans knew as the Prince of Cabinda. The prince was a mambouk, or local representative of the king of Ngoyo, ruler of an area north of the Congo River.

Business had been going smoothly but now here came trouble. A large ship, also a brig but rigged unusually, with square sails on the foremast and only gaff-rigged—that is, in the shape of a triangle truncated at the top—fore-and-aft sails on the mainmast, a configuration sailors called “hermaphrodite”—was coming at Antelope. 

In his dealings with the prince, de Llovio had been exchanging European trade goods for captive Africans. Whether taken prisoner during tribal wars common in the Congo watershed, kidnapped by brigands, or convicted of criminal or civil infractions, the bartered unfortunates were destined for Havana, Cuba, and its slave markets.

That the newcomer was flying a Spanish flag did not reduce de Llovio’s apprehension, confirmed when at the interloper’s rails appeared several dozen musketeers. Gunners were running out the hermaphrodite brig’s cannons. Hands took down Spain’s flag and raised the ensign of the Republic of Banda Oriental. Now known as Uruguay, Banda Oriental then was a Portuguese colony in South America in revolt against the mother country and also at war with Spain. 

Though a merchantman, Antelope, in acknowledgment of seagoing reality, mounted on its sides four 8-lb. muzzle-loading cannons to discourage unwanted company. The oncoming vessel, which reflagging instantly identified as either pirate or privateer—the latter an armed ship empowered by letter of marque to harry the issuing nation’s enemies—was keeping just out of range. Had de Llovio had his crew rig a spring line Antelope could have rotated at anchor and brought its own guns to bear. He had not rigged a spring line, however. His men looked to be outnumbered two to one. With only 12 muskets and 12 cutlasses in his ship’s armory, resistance was futile.  

The raider came to rest at Antelope’s forward bow, poised for the approaching vessel’s gunners to rake its target along nearly its entire length with no chance of fire being returned. Captain de Llovio surrendered. A boarding party swarmed over the bow rail, quickly and bloodlessly herding Antelope’s crew below decks to join the Africans confined there. Boatmen from the hermaphrodite quickly subdued the Portuguese ship.

In minutes, Captain Simon Metcalf and the crew of Arraganta—who enjoyed the status of privateersmen, since Metcalf held a letter of marque from Bandas Oriental authorizing him to plunder Spanish and Portuguese ships—had captured two prizes. Besides the ships and their material goods, the booty included nearly 300 kidnapped Africans who had now gone from being Spanish chattel to commodities highly valued in the illegal American slave trade.

Arraganta originally had been named Baltimore, after the Maryland port at which the ship had been built. Metcalf and his 36-man crew were Americans, save for two Britons and a Spaniard. On three previous privateering runs, they had captured four Spanish ships, taking more than 1,100 Africans whom Metcalf sold on the illicit market in the United States for kidnapped Blacks. That very busy market owed its existence to an 1808 federal ban on importing slaves to the United States, which had pushed the smuggler’s selling price of a robust young African man to $800. 

Treatment of “recaptured” Africans, as they were called, was much more severe than penalties imposed on convicted smugglers. When smugglers were seized, almost inevitably in the South, whichever state the smuggler had landed in had jurisdiction over the liberated Africans. Pending adjudication, they could be sold into slavery, with the state getting the proceeds, or “bonded out” to planters obligated to provide for their welfare in exchange for their labor. If found not to have been previously enslaved, recaptured Africans were to be declared free persons and returned to Africa. During court proceedings, however, most disappeared, with planters claiming they had run off or died of disease. A planter in this situation forfeited the bond he had posted, but the profit on a surreptitiously sold slave more than made up for that business expense. 

However, the case of the Africans seized from Antelope proved to be a turning point in deciding the fate of Africans recaptured at sea.

Privateer Arraganta had begun this cruise sailing from Baltimore under the name Colombia, flying the flag of Venezuela; that colony also had broken away from Spain and was issuing letters of marque. According to Metcalf, the mission was to hover in the Straits of Florida waiting for a Spanish prize. Soon after weighing anchor, though, Metcalf announced a change in plan. Arraganta was going to head for Africa, there to hijack Spanish and Portuguese slave ships laden with human cargo worth fortunes. 

Many on the crew chafed at this change of terms. They had signed on to attack Spanish merchant shipping in the Caribbean as part of Venezuela’s war of independence, not to raid slave ships off Africa. Plundering Spanish shipping under a letter of marque from a would-be rebel republic was one thing but hauling kidnapped Africans into bondage was another. An American serving aboard a foreign privateer was violating the Neutrality Law and technically committing piracy, letter of marque or no. But the crime, if prosecuted, was treated most often as a misdemeanor. Unless the target had been an American vessel or the case included a wanton murder, jury nullification—that is, when jurors in effect dismiss a charge—was the order of the day. However, stealing slaves was participating in the slave trade, which had little public support outside the South. Additionally, the Act to Protect the Commerce of the United States and Punish the Crime of Piracy, as amended May 15, 1820, declared any American vessel or any American serving aboard any vessel that transported kidnapped Africans to be a pirate. A conviction for piracy was punishable by hanging. To foreclose such an indictment, some privateering Americans, like Metcalf’s first lieutenant John Smith, renounced their American citizenship. And in many instances crew members, upon learning the true nature of a slaving cruise, deserted and tried to sabotage the effort by informing authorities. Crews sometimes even mutinied rather than engage in slaving. Ships’ masters often had to threaten force to keep malcontents under control. 

The United States had outlawed the foreign slave trade on January 1, 1808, but slavery remained the keystone of the Southern economy, and in that agrarian region demand persisted for enslaved workers, satisfied by outlaw traders. Patrolling for slavers, U.S. Navy vessels and Revenue Marine cutters caught and captured many smugglers of humans, but without reducing the practice. In the 12 years since 1808, more than 10,000 African captives had been bought or bartered on that continent’s west coast and sneaked onto the American mainland. Operating near slave-state ports such as New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah, and having the support of local smuggling organizations, smugglers brokered deals between transatlantic mariners and illegal buyers. A primary method was to forge documents misrepresenting kidnapped Africans as having been enslaved legally in the United States and claiming to be moving them from shore to a buyer’s location elsewhere. 

Outlaw slaving dangled enormous potential profits. A 300-person shipload could bring $120,000—today about $2.5 million. Half went to the vessel’s owner; crewmen shared the rest. Monthly wages aboard ship in 1820 ranged from $60 for a captain to the lowliest seaman’s $10. Metcalf stood to pull down $60,000; an ordinary seaman, more than $3,000. 

From an opportunistic perspective, official penalties for the crime of attempted smuggling of slaves were light. When a captured slave-smuggling ship was confiscated, its owners, if they could be identified and arraigned, were fined $20,000 apiece. Each crewman was fined not less than $1,000—but to keep their identities secret owners often paid penalties anonymously. Transporting kidnapped Africans prior to May 15, 1820, was legally not piracy but simply smuggling. Now that slave trading had been deemed piracy, and public opinion was strongly against enslaving previously free Africans, many mariners did not want to roll the dice to see if jurors trying them would find them not guilty by jury nullification.

Metcalf always seemed to get away clean and to make his accomplices rich. Earlier that March, a few hundred miles north of the Bay of Cabinda, Metcalf had been attacking two Portuguese schooners loaded with slaves when Royal Navy sloop Myrmidon, patrolling for slavers—Britain had abolished slavery in 1807—interceded. Hauled into Freetown, Sierra Leone, under suspicion of piracy, Metcalf showed his letter of marque. Myrmidon’s captain chose not to risk a potentially costly court battle trying to disprove the validity of Metcalf’s commission. Ordered out of the area, Metcalf turned south. Once beyond British reach, he plundered another Spanish ship and hijacked 25 kidnapped Africans from the illegal slave ship Exchange, operating out of Bristol, Rhode Island.

After seizing Antelope at Cabinda, Metcalf handed the ship over to a prize crew led by first lieutenant John Smith, and put the subjugated vessels’ crews ashore. The privateers stowed the captive Africans, along with plunder from the second Portuguese ship moored in the bay, aboard Antelope, then burned the Portuguese vessel. Metcalf headed his little squadron to sea to continue his depredations along the coast. Arraganta soon had taken three more Portuguese schooners, whose plunder topped off the flotilla’s holds. It was time to head west to cash in.

The Atlantic passage went smoothly for the ships, but, as usual for such voyages, around 20 percent of the confined Africans died en route, their corpses tossed overboard. Off Brazil a gale caught the heavily laden ships. Arraganta went down with Metcalf and many hands and captives. Through superior seamanship and by jettisoning his four guns, Smith was able to keep Antelope intact and afloat, and even rescue some members of the crew and captives from Arraganta.

Styling himself captain of a privateer in his own right, Smith forged paperwork identifying the stolen ship Antelope as General Ramirez. He stopped at the first viable market for his illicit cargo: the Dutch colony of Suriname. The Netherlands, like the United States, had banned the slave trade, but not slavery itself. Planters in Suriname were willing to flout the importation prohibition, as long as risk of apprehension was low. Smith had to break off negotiations when disaffected crewmen deserted and informed the authorities. Smith took Antelope—now renamed General Ramirez—north to the Caribbean, stopping at Dutch holding Saint Maarten and then Saint Barthelemy, owned by France, which had banned slavery in 1794. He found no buyers but at Saint Barthelemy sought out a mysterious fellow named Mason, thought by some crewmen to be Arraganta’s owner. In return for cash, Smith received from Mason supplies and the promise of more, along with replacements for his jettisoned guns. These transfers were to take place near Hole-in-the-Wall, a landmark at the east entrance of the Providence Channel through the Bahamas, almost 1,000 miles northwest.

The privateers were nearly a week reaching Hole-in-the-Wall. Arriving low on provisions and water, Smith gained cannons, ammunition, and other supplies promised by Mason. He next set a course for Saint Augustine, Florida, a voyage of 400 miles, where he was refused supplies, even after offering for ransom the governor’s son, whom Smith had taken hostage after spotting the young man aboard a ship at Hole-in-the-Wall.

Until 1818, Smith’s next logical course would have been north for Amelia Island, Florida, near the mouth of the Saint Mary’s River, the line of demarcation between Spanish-held Florida and the state of Georgia. Amelia Island was rife with smugglers and pirates, who were at least tolerated and at worst abetted by local merchants and residents. Frustrated at smugglers sneaking goods from Amelia into the vicinity of St. Mary’s, Georgia, the local U.S. customs agent had complained to the secretary of  the Treasury, prompting an invasion and garrisoning of the island with troops at the town of Fernandina, reinforced by a U.S. Revenue Marine cutter across the river at St. Mary’s. As a result, Smith’s only option was to land his illegal cargo a bit farther south, at the mouth of the Saint John’s River. From there, smugglers in league with the Creek Nation—many members of that indigenous tribe owned slaves—could ferry the captives into Georgia.

However, Smith’s vessel and its shenanigans had not gone unreported. Word of the pirate brig’s predations reached Captain John Jackson aboard the revenue cutter Dallas at Saint Mary’s. Barely a year earlier, Jackson had captured American schooner Hampton at the Saint John’s River. Hampton already had offloaded 92 Africans who had disappeared into captivity, but physical evidence aboard the schooner and testimony from disgruntled crewmen supported forfeiture of Hampton for “being configured for slaving.” This time Jackson meant to save kidnapped Africans from enslavement.

Jackson sailed downriver from St. Mary’s to Fernandina to augment his crew with 12 soldiers from the Army garrison, bringing his complement to about 27, in line with the number of pirates he anticipated aboard his target. Reaching the open sea at about 4 p.m. Thursday, June 29, 1820, Jackson kept the Dallas well offshore and bearing south, probably on the assumption that the pirate vessel’s crew, trying to avoid detection, would be doing the same.  

Jackson’s hunch paid off. At daylight, a lookout sighted Smith’s ship ahead and bearing south-southeast, about 20 degrees off the cutter’s starboard bow. As Jackson ordered “all sail” to intercept, Smith’s disguised Antelope juked northeast, veering straight for the mouth of the Saint John’s. Smith likely was running for Spanish waters; reaching them would put his vessel out of American reach. He ran in vain. Dallas was a topsail schooner, a design with a lean hull and an impressive spread of sail, meant to run with the fastest vessels afloat. In the service of speed Dallas’s only armament was a 6-pound smoothbore cannon mounted on a pivot slightly forward of amidships. Jackson ordered his troops to conceal themselves and be ready for a fight.

Just before 2 p.m., with Dallas rapidly gaining, Smith began to clear his deck for action. Within half an hour, the cutter had gained the “weather gauge”—the tactically advantageous position upwind of another vessel. Both crews ran out their guns. Rising from concealment, Jackson’s soldiers lined the rail, muskets at the ready. Smith ordered his men to fire; the gunners, pushed to mutiny by their dislike for dealing in slaves, refused to obey. Smith hove to.

The cutter’s officers found 280 Africans chained below deck. During the “middle passage,” as the voyage between Africa and a plantation was known, 70 more had died. The boarding party found “seaman’s protection papers” identifying Smith as an American citizen. Many of the “deceived” crewmen readily admitted to being American and were more than willing to share the details of their vessel’s activities.  

With more than enough probable cause, Jackson seized Smith’s ship and arrested its officers and crew. At Saint Mary’s, he left the seized brig and surviving Africans in the charge of 1st Lieutenant William Askwith and six men and continued on aboard Dallas to Savannah, Georgia, to arraign the 28 prisoners and seek guidance on the rescued Africans’ status. 

The piracy case against John Smith should have been easy to prove. However, Smith’s lawyer successfully argued that his client had renounced his American citizenship in order to serve the cause of Banda Oriental’s independence. While the letter of marque Smith presented for the General Ramirez might be fraudulent, since Smith believed it was authentic and piracy was a crime requiring intent, the jury could not convict him, the attorney claimed. The prosecution barely contested these assertions and presented little evidence of its own. Upon being acquitted Smith had the audacity to sue for ownership of the recaptured Africans.

However, U.S. Attorney Richard Wyly Habersham likely had a larger strategy. Had Smith been found to be a pirate, international law demanded that the Africans be returned to their Spanish and Portuguese claimants. Habersham could assert that as a legal privateer Smith, upon capturing Africans at sea, had gained ownership, which he then forfeited by trying to smuggle them into the United States. The result should have been immediate freedom for all the captives.  

However, the Africans Metcalf had taken from Spanish and Portuguese vessels were subject to claims from supposed foreign owners. A court had to address such claims before it could free recaptured Africans. Only a group of 25 who had  been seized from an American vessel, Exchange, of whom 18 had survived to reach Savannah, came under no ownership claims. The court ruled that the 18 qualified for immediate release. They were transported to Liberia, an area in West Africa that Blacks repatriated from the United States recently had begun settling with the assistance of the American Colonization Society and the U.S. government. The remainder of the Africans aboard Antelope faced seven years of servitude as claims to their ownership by Spain and Portugal crawled toward the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall. Of 157 survivors, 37 were delivered to Spanish claimants, while Portugal’s claim on the remainder was completely discounted for lack of any individual owners; 120 were sent to Liberia.

Although only slightly less than half of those that Dallas rescued survived to recover their freedom, this episode demonstrated a new American resolve to stop the enslavement of kidnapped Africans. Now persons bound for bondage but recaptured and able to prove they had not previously been enslaved were to be freed. 

In 1839 Africans aboard Spanish slaver La Amistad, bound for the United States, rebelled at sea and commandeered that schooner. U.S. Navy brig Washington intercepted Amistad and brought the ship to New London, Connecticut, occasioning a landmark legal case. Ruling in 1841 in U.S. v. The Amistad, the Supreme Court declared that any African entering the country was free unless a claimant could prove that that person previously had been enslaved under another nation’s laws—reversing the burden of proof in use since the Antelope incident. The last slave ship known to land Africans in the United States was the schooner Clotilda, lately the subject of headlines (see p. 8). The 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery on New Year’s Day 1865.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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Besides his career in statesmanship and governance, eminent New Yorker John Jay fought valiantly against bondage 

The USS Confederacy limped into the harbor at St. Pierre, Martinique, on December 18, 1779. A storm had broken the 36-gun warship’s masts, damaged its rudder, and killed a crewman. Among passengers debarking from the frigate that Saturday was U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain John Jay, en route to his new posting in Madrid. Accompanying Jay was his wife Sarah, her slave Abbe, a nephew of theirs, and Jay’s personal secretary. Awaiting repairs to Confederacy or a replacement vessel in which to continue their trans-Atlantic journey, Jay and party explored the French-held island. Sarah wrote home about the sugar-producing colony’s superb markets and exquisite beauty. Her spouse took note of a contrasting side of Caribbean life that also caught the attention of Captain Joseph Hardy, commander of Confederacy’s complement of U.S. Marines. In his journal that December, Hardy, in the spelling and locution of the day, explained that passengers and freight moving to and from ships in St. Pierre’s harbor traveled in canoes “rowed by five or six Negroes whose Lives appear to be as wretched as any part of the Human race. Some of them are chained by one leg to the Boat and others shews the stripes of cruelty on their Body’s in this manner these unhappy Mortals row in these Boats for Weeks without 10 hours intermission and as Naked as the moment of their Birth not even the Galley Slaves in Barbary is more misirable.—It is not only these that feels the stripes of inhumanity but many on shore are to be seen with a heavy Iron ring around his Neck from which leads a heavy chain to another ring around his Waist and from that another Ring round his anckle and others dragging by one foot 50 or 60 lb. of Chain and in this situation are obliged to go thro’ their usual service.” 

Martinique’s sugar industry ran on slave labor. The fervently religious Jay, convinced the rights of man extended to all men, was haunted the rest of his life by such scenes, which literally put flesh on a reality that had surrounded him all his life. Jay, born in New York City, had spent his childhood in Rye, New York. He had grown up in wealth, his family connected by blood and wedlock to elite New York clans of Dutch and French descent. 

All owned slaves; in time, so did John Jay. His father, Peter Jay, and his grandfather, Augustus Jay, a French Huguenot, had been prosperous merchants, fastidiously diversifying holdings that included investing in slave ships, a common and profitable colonial-era practice. In terms of numbers of slaves living and working within its boundaries, New York City rivaled Charleston, South Carolina. In 1740, five years before Jay’s birth, enslaved persons had made up almost 20 percent of the total New York population. Jay’s visceral reaction to the slave-driving he witnessed in Martinique was not enough to dissuade him from buying a 15-year-old slave named Benoit and taking the youth along to Spain and his other postings. 

In September 1780, while in Spain negotiating to gain that monarchy’s support for the American cause, Jay pondered the horrors he had seen on Martinique. In a letter to friend and New York State Attorney General Egbert Benson, Jay wrote, “The State of New York is never out of my mind and heart. An excellent law might be made…for gradual abolition of slavery. Till America comes into this measure, her prayers to Heaven for liberty will be impious. This is a strong impression, but it is just. Were I in your legislature, I would prepare a bill for the purpose with great care, and I would never leave moving it till it became law or I ceased to be a member. I believe God governs the world, and I believe it to be a maxim in his as in our court, that those who ask for equity ought to do it.”

The conflicted Jay had acted fitfully against slavery, backing a failed abolition provision in New York’s 1777 state constitution. Early in the Revolution, he had worked with his friend Alexander Hamilton to convince General George Washington to allow bondsmen to toil as laborers and later to carry guns for the American cause, with freedom their reward if the rebellion succeeded. 

Like many fellow revolutionaries, Jay took as gospel Enlightenment rhetoric extolling the innate rights of man. He avidly ingested such philosophy and political theory entering adulthood in the 1760s. He began acting consciously to make those ideals manifest in his homeland as part of the rebellion against Great Britain. His early steps against slavery had been theoretical and tepid. Now, having seen the phenomenon unvarnished, John Jay meant to eliminate its scourge in New York. 

Jay started his personal crusade in Europe, just after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. In November 1783, Sarah’s slave Abbe ran off, going to ground in the French capital. Jay wrote to a friend that Abbe’s flight “was not resolved upon in a sober moment.” He explained that he “had promised to manumit her on our Return to America, provided she behaved properly in the mean Time.” He surmised that “Indulgence and improper Company have injured her. It is a Pity.” Jailed as a runaway bondswoman—the empire kept human chattel on a tight rein—Abbe fell ill. She was returned to her owners, whose best efforts at care could not keep her alive.  

Soon after Abbe died, Jay wrote a manumission contract for Benoit, now 19, in which Jay declared, “hav[ing] served me until the value of his services amount to a moderate compensation for the money expended for him, he should be manumitted; and whereas his services for three years more would, in my opinion, be sufficient for that purpose.” 

Jay made good on that proposed arrangement and in later years repeated the gesture with other slaves that he bought, often paying his enslaved workers wages in the bargain.

Early in 1785, Jay and other New York leaders, including Alexander Hamilton, founded the “New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May Be Liberated,” better known as the New York Manumission Society. Pursuing the larger aim of abolishing slavery in New York, the Society legally assisted enslaved people and former slaves against kidnap and worked to ensure their rights as citizens of New York. The group also educated free Black children. Organizers elected Jay their first president.

Almost from its founding, the Society began pushing a gradual emancipation bill in the state legislature. Contrary to similar measures elsewhere, this proposal would manumit the currently enslaved, though, as a palliative to owners, to gain freedom men would have to serve 25 years of indenture and women 22. Enthusiasm for the concept eroded amid resistance to the details. Slaveholders and their allies balked at the indenture arrangement. Others worried about how freedmen would fit into society, some voicing doubt of manumitted Africans’ readiness for citizenship and suffrage. In a bitter 1785 defeat, the bill foundered on the shoals of property rights, economic stability and racism. 

Not only had Society members assumed naively that egalitarian principles expressed during the Revolution regarding all persons would persist in peacetime, they had readied no effective retort for proslavery arguments. But they did succeed in 1785 in getting New York to ban import of slaves into the state. Unsatisfied with that baby step, Society members began laying groundwork for more campaigns. Jay corresponded at home and abroad with fellow abolitionists. These exchanges often found Jay on the defensive. Reassuring Dr. Benjamin Rush of his group’s commitment, Jay wrote that he “wish[ed] to see all unjust and unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished and that the time may soon come when all our inhabitants of every colour and denomination shall be free and equal partakers of our political liberty.” Answering Welsh moralist Richard Price, Jay wrote, “That men should pray and fight for their own freedom, and yet keep others in slavery, is certainly acting a very inconsistent, as well as unjust and, perhaps impious part; but the history of mankind is filled with instances of human improprieties.” The best anyone can do is to persevere against evil and dutifully work toward a just society, he added. 

In 1787, the Manumission Society founded an African Free School in lower Manhattan to educate the children of free Blacks. Many society members belonged to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, by now a strong voice on behalf of abolishing slavery. In running its school, the manumission organization embraced Quaker practices such as visiting students’ homes to enforce moral behavior in the household. To counter racist assumptions about Blacks, the Society carefully recruited and selected the students it enrolled. The Free School operated until 1835, when the New York City school system absorbed it.

Meanwhile the organization encouraged members and all others to manumit persons held in bondage. Society officers believed that “the good Example set by others, of more Enlarged and liberal Principles, and the face of true Religion, will, in time, dispel the mist which Prejudice, self Interest and long habit have raised….”—an awkward sentiment, given that Jay and many other members owned slaves. 

Many slaves confiscated from Loyalist owners during the Revolution and held by the state government had been sold back into bondage. The Society demanded and got an amendment stipulating that all remaining slaves still held by the New York government be freed. And the Society’s efforts to find and unshackle freed Blacks who had been kidnapped and sold south led in 1788 to a ban on exporting bondsmen and -women for sale to buyers in slave states, infuriating slaveholders. 

On September 26, 1789, the Senate unanimously confirmed John Jay as the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. To avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, Jay resigned the Manumission Society presidency, but informally continued his abolition work.  

In New York, a proslavery legislative backlash arose. When Society member Matthew Clarkson introduced a gradual emancipation bill in 1790, that piece of legislation stalled, as did kindred efforts to strangle the slave trade. In 1792, the backlash broadened. That year Jay did as many Federalists suggested and challenged four-time governor George Clinton at the polls. Jay seemed poised to win until opponents played the abolitionist card. Jay would not renege on his principles. “Every man, of every colour and description, has a natural right to freedom,” he declared. “And I shall ever acknowledge myself to be an advocate for the manumission of slaves.” Clinton won a fifth term.

Events began to work in abolition’s favor. America’s conflict with Algerian pirates who enslaved White Americans refocused discussion: Why go to war over enslaving Whites but not Blacks? Slavery suffused the debate over ratifying the Constitution, which nowhere contains the word “slavery” but instead refers to enslaved persons, leaving inspecific the governmental role regarding abolition of slavery. 

These debates also raised the issues surrounding the end of the foreign slave trade, slated in the U.S. Constitution for 1808, and the formulation of the Three-Fifths Compromise, an equation that increased Southern states’ political power by mandating that slaves be counted in the national census as three-fifths of a White person. Against this backdrop, New Yorkers debated what kind of society they wanted and worried about bondage’s potentially negative economic impact. Thanks to the Manumission Society’s work and a growing population of free Blacks, journalists were filling the state’s periodicals with reports of Blacks integrating successfully into the majority society. Meanwhile, the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, was eventually to overturn French rule and emancipate Haiti’s slaves, heightening concerns about slave revolts as a feature of a slaveholding society. In New York, the state’s White population growth had shifted north and west, coming to be dominated by farmers and merchants who owned no slaves and were not about to support slave interests through taxes or other means.  

While Jay was in England during 1794-95 negotiating a treaty to ease tensions with the crown, New York held another gubernatorial election. Jay’s friends nominated and won him the office, advocacy he may or may not have known of. Jay returned having accomplished his diplomatic mission to find himself governor-elect—and pilloried for what became known as “Jay’s Treaty,” an achievement that may have benefited the abolition cause by helping to “nudge New York past an obstacle to gradual abolition,” according to historian David N. Gellman. Although Jay’s treaty focused on issues that lingered between America and Britain after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, that document ignored the matter of compensation to colonial slaveholders for slaves said to have been “stolen” by the British during the war. Gellman argues that after the American colonies’ fight for liberty from Britain, Jay and others felt loath to compensate slaveholders for enslaved persons who sought emancipation by fleeing to and fighting for the British. 

Proslavery forces continued to challenge every abolition bill floated in New York. Jay, determined to keep his 1780 promise, thought it prudent to absent himself from the public process, lest he become the focus of debate. In January 1796, state Representative James Watson, acting as Jay’s proxy, introduced a gradual abolition bill. The measure stalled when slaveholders argued against citizenship rights such as suffrage for manumitted persons. Naysayers insisted the state compensate former owners for freeing their bondsmen. However, abolitionists had learned their lessons. The Manumission Society had begun making effective use of the legal system to free numerous slaves and to rescue free Blacks at risk of kidnap back into bondage. The cost to appeal the resulting court rulings was giving slaveholders pause. Emergence of governmental and charitable aid to the needy was weakening the argument that, once freed, help for indigent Blacks would create an unworkable drag on the state. 

Most importantly, abolitionists realized that they needed to find a way to work with slaveholders. A 1798 effort also stalled, mainly over remuneration, but abolitionists engineered a compromise.

On March 29, 1799, the New York legislature passed a gradual emancipation bill taking effect that July 4. Children born to enslaved mothers after Independence Day 1799 would be free but would have to serve their birth mothers’ masters under indenture until age 28 for males, 25 for females. As of July 4, slaveholders would have to register children newly born to enslaved mothers, not only to record manumissions but also to document emancipation as a defense against attempted kidnap or transport south. Abandoned slave children would become wards of local jurisdictions. The bill allowed unrestricted manumission of elderly or unproductive slaves. Jay’s son William wrote years later that his father felt “no measure of his administration afforded him such unfeigned pleasure” as that bill’s passing and enactment.

Jay had achieved what he envisioned almost 20 years before, but that achievement continued to come under attack, as did free Blacks’ political rights. A gap in the 1799 bill had relegated Blacks born into slavery in New York before 1799 to continued enslavement. In 1817, Jay’s eldest son Peter, a member of the legislature, worked with Governor Daniel Tompkins to order that, effective July 4, 1827, those born before 1799 would be deemed free. Another son, William Jay, fought slavery nationally and as a judge stated that he would not abide by any laws requiring the return of fugitive slaves. Jay’s grandson John Jay II maintained a similar stance.

Retiring in 1801, John Jay continued to correspond with fellow abolitionists, at times lending support while trying to avoid national political entanglements—save for an episode in 1819. That year New Jersey lawyer Elias Boudinot, who had founded the American Bible Society, wrote to Jay asking about the constitutionality of extending slavery into Missouri, which had petitioned for statehood. “I concur in the opinion that it ought not to be introduced nor permitted in any of the new States; and that it ought to be gradually diminished and finally abolished in all of them,” Jay replied. “To me the constitutional authority of the Congress to prohibit the migration and importation of slaves into any of the States does not appear to be questionable.” Because Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution mandated in 1788 an end to the foreign slave trade in 1808, Congress had the right to restrict slavery, he continued, claiming “that from and after that period [1808], they were authorized to make such a prohibition, as to all the States, whether new or old.” He went on to explain, “It will, I presume, be admitted, that slaves were the persons intended. The word slaves was avoided [in the U.S. Constitution], probably on account of the existing toleration of slavery, and of its discordancy with the principles of the revolution….” 

He encouraged those trying to keep slavery out of Missouri, but, pleading poor health, declined to join that fight. On May 17, 1829, John Jay died of a stroke in Bedford, New York. In 1854, Empire State newspaperman Horace Greeley wrote, “To Chief Justice Jay may be attributed, more than to any other man, the abolition of Negro bondage in this state.”

This story was originally published in the October 2021 issue of American History Magazine. For more great stories, subscribe here.

In 1780, with the American Revolution in full cry, one enslaved woman seized an opportunity to assert her freedom. Hearing the constitution of the new state of Massachusetts, which included the line “All men are born free and equal,” read aloud in the public square, she approached a neighbor for legal assistance. Mum Bett, as the plaintiff was known, filed a lawsuit to gain her freedom. For the first time in America, a suit challenged slavery’s constitutionality—and succeeded. 

In recent years popular understanding of slavery in America has undergone a transformation, as historians have worked to portray in three dimensions enslaved individuals who were overwhelmingly illiterate and so unable to leave accounts of their own. The only glimpses of enslaved persons’ lives incorporated into the record were those that had been observed by White officials compiling census records, White slaveowners keeping ledgers, White newspaper editors setting the type of runaway notices, and White lawyers writing legal documents. In a limited but profound way, new and deeper scholarship has begun to rebalance that skew.

Most Americans think of slavery as a phenomenon that occurred in the southern states before the Civil War, typified by plantation settings populated by gangs of enslaved people oppressed by indolent slave owners. In fact, slavery was a going concern in all 13 American colonies. Massachusetts may be strongly associated with the abolitionist movement, but within ten years of Boston’s 1630 founding, that colonial and later state capital was a busy slaving port with people in bondage brought there to labor or be sold. 

Slavery looked significantly different in New England. Historians distinguish between a “slave society”—a socioeconomic and legal system built upon slavery—and a “society with slaves,” a culture in which enslaved people were not the primary economic engine.

The New England colonies—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island—became societies with slaves. By the beginning of America’s revolutionary era, New England was home to some 15,000 enslaved people. A third of those lived in the Massachusetts colony. These Black bondsmen and -women lived among few others of their kind: only 10 percent of the region’s colonists owned more than four slaves and 35 percent held just one. Women comprised 30 to 40 percent of the total New England enslaved population, typically sharing quarters with one or two other female slaves or even White indentured servants in a rural or urban household. That phrasing suggests an easier way of life compared with conditions down South, but slaves’ average life span—40 years—fell dramatically short of White colonists’ 70-year average. 

The particular living conditions endured by enslaved persons in New England cut both ways. Any sense of Black community was scarce to nonexistent—but slaves had easier access to White conversation and discussion. The lively, often open-air, debates occurring after 1770 about liberty and equality found an eager audience among the enslaved. And as Enlightenment concepts took hold and cultural acceptance of slavery declined, owners around the region manumitted—freed—bondsmen and -women at an increased rate. In these tumultuous years, freedom swirled around the enslaved and looked like them, too. 

The New England colonies were a unique environment for enslaved persons in other important ways. Reflecting as the region’s laws did a strong religious influence, New Englanders considered slaves not only property but persons. Some colonies also came to view only Africans as fit for slavery, even legislatively. Early in the colony’s history, natives captured in wars, considered too dangerous to remain in the colony, often were shipped to the West Indies to work as slaves on sugar plantations. An individual with an Indian or White parent was not considered Black and so could not be enslaved. Such colonial statutes offered legal paths to freedom. In the period before 1780 slaves in New England, 14 of them women, brought nearly 50 lawsuits. Women seeking legal redress faced even higher barriers than men. Authorities included enslaved women under the same law of coverture that applied to White women: wives were considered their husbands’ property and could not sue on their own behalf. 

Historians have chronicled the stories of several enslaved female plaintiffs. In 1741, Elisha Webb was declared free by a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, court. Born in Virginia to a White woman and enslaved Black father, Webb became free at birth because of her mother’s race. However, Virginia typically indentured such children for 8 years when they reached puberty. Seven years in, Webb’s time was transferred to a Portsmouth sea captain who dared to sell her as “Elishea [sic] a negro.” Webb, who was literate, wrote to the Virginia judge who set up her indenture. By sending documentary evidence, she was able to prove her status as a free woman.  In a similar 1767 case, Jenny Slew twice sued owner John Whipple, claiming Whipple had wrongfully enslaved her since her mother was White. On her second try, Slew won her suit in Salem, Massachusetts, and four pounds in compensation.  

By 1774, when Juno Larcom brought a different suit in Salem, revolutionary rhetoric had worked its way into common parlance. The long-enslaved Larcom, a married woman, declared herself single in order to have standing to allege that she had been enslaved illegally, because her mother was an Indian. 

Larcom’s impetus for bringing legal action was the sale of two of her children by an owner hard-pressed for cash. At trial, Larcom told the court, “Judge Ye Weather or noe I hadent ort to be set at Liberty.” The case was still underway when her owner died; afterward, Larcom boldly claimed her freedom. The owner’s widow gave up resistance and freed Larcom and her children, even giving the family a small residence on her property. 

As significant as the Webb and Larcom cases were, only upon Mum Bett’s filing of her suit in 1780 does the language of equality appear in the legal record. Called Bet or Bett, she had been born around 1744; her precise birth date was not recorded. Her parents and their progeny belonged to Pieter Hogeboom, head of a wealthy Dutch family residing in Claverack, a town in New York near that colony’s eastern boundary with Massachusetts. 

After daughter Hannah Hogeboom married John Ashley, seven-year-old Bett was sent 25 miles east to the Ashley home—now a historic site—in Sheffield, a town in Massachusetts colony. John Ashley was among the area’s largest slaveholders; Bett became one of five people he owned. Growing up in the Ashley home, she never learned to read; her story threads through historical records and White employers’ personal writings. At some point, she bore a daughter, called “Little Bett” or “Betsy.” Accounts differ regarding the father’s identity and whereabouts and the couple’s marital status. 

John Ashley’s home in Sheffield was a center of pre-Revolutionary ferment. Ashley, a highly influential lawyer and local judge, had commanded a local militia during the French and Indian War. In 1773, he hosted a group of insurgents who wrote an early petition to the British crown. The Sheffield Resolves, as that manifesto became known, stated, “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” Though illiterate, Bett could not have helped but hear the words “equal,” “free,” “independent,” and “liberty” with a thrill. 

A later sympathetic account describes Bett enduring repeated abuse from Hannah Ashley yet sustaining herself with a strong will. At one point, Bett incurred a bone-deep wound in one arm because she stepped in to prevent her mistress from striking Bett’s daughter with a hot shovel. “I had a bad arm all winter, but Madam had the worst of it,” the account quotes Bett as saying. “I never covered the wound, and when people said to me, before Madam, ‘Betty, what ails your arm?’ I only answered—‘ask missis!’” 

Mum Bett’s opportunity to claim a free life came in the midst of the Revolution. In 1780, she was in her late thirties. With illiteracy widespread across the colonies, the authorities commonly read aloud important documents for all to hear. That was the case with Bett and the new Massachusetts state constitution. “All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights;” she heard, “among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.” This document, which chiefly was authored by John Adams and which was influenced by the Declaration of Independence, was approved by Massachusetts voters in June 1780. It is unclear whether Bett heard a reading before or after voter approval. 

Shortly thereafter, Bett approached a neighbor, Theodore Sedgwick. A young lawyer, an early abolitionist, and a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, Sedgwick had been among the drafters of the Sheffield Resolves. His daughter, Catherine, later sketched the scene between her father and Mum Bett. “’Sir,’ said [Bett], ‘I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom. I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?’” 

Sedgwick agreed to take Bett’s case. Soon, her litigation was combined with a freedom suit brought by another enslaved person owned by Ashley, a man named Brom. Sedgwick realized that Bett’s suit could serve as a means of determining whether slavery was legal under the new state constitution. Tapping Reeve of Litchfield, Connecticut, another patriot and renowned legal educator, joined the case. Some sources suggest that Sedgwick and Reeve were looking for a test case and chose the two defendants, though it’s not clear why only two or these two particular people would be the plaintiffs.

Sedgwick and Reeve began by filing a writ of replevin, a legal action that seeks the return of property illegitimately held. Ashley responded that both Bett and Brom were his rightful property for life. After Ashley refused to comply with two further writs, the court ordered a trial. 

In August 1781, at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the Berkshire County Court of Common Pleas heard the case of Brom and Bett v. Ashley. Addressing a jury of free White men, Sedgwick and Reeve argued that the language of the new state constitution effectively outlawed slavery. Though in 1781 these veniremen were hardly a jury of the plaintiffs’ peers, few jurors hearing the case were likely to own slaves. By the next day, the jury had found for Bett and Brom: the two were free people. Bett and Brom were awarded 30 shillings in damages. Ashley was ordered to pay six pounds in court costs. Ashley appealed but within months, after a similar suit was also decided in favor of the enslaved, dropped his appeal. 

Another such case brought about the legal end of slavery in Massachusetts when on July 8, 1783, the state supreme court ruled in Commonwealth v. Jennison. In that finding the judge referenced the new state constitution’s declaration that “all men are born free and equal” in stating that “slavery is in my judgment as effectively abolished as it can be. . . .”  

Mum Bett took the name Elizabeth Freeman and began to fashion a free life. John Ashley offered her a paid position, but she went to work for Theodore Sedgwick. Freeman acquired a reputation as a midwife and nurse. Sedgwick’s daughter Catherine, who disliked her stepmother, came to call Elizabeth “mother.” 

Catherine Sedgwick’s sentimental 1853 reminiscence first revealed the story of Mum Bett. Catherine wrote that Elizabeth liked to recall her struggle for freedom. “I would have been willing if I could have had one minute of freedom just to say, ‘I am free,’” she remembered Elizabeth declaring. “I would have been willing to die at the end of that minute.”

The Sedgwick family employed Elizabeth Freeman until 1808, when she purchased and moved into a house of her own on nearby Cherry Hill Road. She continued to practice midwifery. In 1811 Catherine Sedgwick’s daughter Susan painted a miniature of Freeman, the only known likeness of her. The portrait presents a paragon of respectability wearing the white cap typical of women of that era, a blue dress, and a white neckcloth in the fashion of the day. Mum Bett wears a gold necklace given her by Catherine. 

Elizabeth Freeman was about 85 when she died on December 28, 1829. She left a detailed will distributing her assets among her daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. These included five gowns, including one in black silk; “a large home made birds eye petticoat” and a black velvet hat; pieces of furniture; three “green edged pie plates;” and her gold necklace and earrings. She is buried at Stockbridge Cemetery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Catherine Sedgwick wrote on Mum Bett’s headstone, in part, “She could neither read nor write yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal.”

This story was originally published in the August 2021 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.

It took a century and a half and the tireless work on dissenting Friends to create the first White-dominated antislavery movement

That Benjamin Lay, a hunch-backed dwarf with an oversized head and spindly legs, stood out in his opposition to enslavement would be an understatement. Lay, a Quaker, was among the most strident American abolitionists of the early 18th century. He pricked the consciences of coreligionists fearful of bucking Quaker doctrine with theatrics that traded on his startling appearance. Born in Colchester, England, and now a Pennsylvanian, Lay agitated against Quakers’ role in slavery as owners, traders, and participants in businesses reliant on bondage. 

Lay’s protests, carefully planned and uproarious, left an indelible impression. One wintry Sunday morning in 1733-34, Lay—coatless, right foot and leg bare in the snow to remind onlookers of how cruelly slaveowners treated their human chattel—posed outside a Quaker meetinghouse in Philadelphia as a Meeting for Worship ended. Congregants admonished him not to make himself sick. 

“Ah, you pretend compassion for me but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half clad,” he replied.

On Friday, September 19, 1738, Lay attended a large Quaker assembly, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, in Burlington, New Jersey. Wearing a military greatcoat over a soldierly uniform, complete with sword, he carried a  book. In a hollow between the covers, he had fitted an animal bladder brimful of pokeberry juice, which runs a rich red. When his turn to speak came he hefted the oversize volume, railing at Friends whose hands Lay decried as soiled by bondage. “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures!” the strange little man shouted, throwing off his coat, pulling his blade, and stabbing the book. Gouts of red splattered him and all nearby, shocking everyone at hand. Ejected from the hall, Lay went along without protest. Soon after, disowned—excommunicated—by his home Monthly Meeting in Abington, Pennsylvania, Lay dropped from sight and the Quaker community, living for 20 years as a hermit in a cave outside Abington. 

Before Lay’s performative but compelling protests, other Quakers took their fellows to task for participating in the American colonies’ slave-driven economy. William Southeby, John Farmer, and Ralph Sandiford challenged mainstream Quaker values, decrying enslavement and laying the foundation for what became the abolitionist movement and a nation’s grudging redirection toward emancipation.

George Fox was born in Leicestershire, England, in 1624. At age 21, after years of spiritual searching, Fox reported hearing God say, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, what can speak to thy condition.” In 1652, after a vision in which Christ revealed to him “a great people” to be gathered, Fox founded the Religious Society of Friends—dubbed “Quakers” by skeptics for their tendency to “tremble at the Word of the Lord.” Fox was a charismatic leader; by 1660, he had 50,000 followers in England divided geographically into “meetings” each named for a city in that region.

Quakerism opposed the ritualistic Church of England. The Friends had no set ceremony, no minister. They believed “there is God in every man” and posited that an “inward Light” led to personal salvation without clerical intermediaries; in God’s sight, all were equal, they said. Citing the Golden Rule, Quakers refused to serve in the military or take judicial oaths. Despite the deliberate absence of a clergy, someone had to organize matters, leading to the creation of committees, or “overseers,” of particular functions, including the publishing of tracts by individual Friends. 

Quakers’ radical stances brought condemnation. English authorities beat, whipped, and imprisoned as many as 15,000 Friends—Fox was jailed eight times—until the 1689 Toleration Act granted the sect freedom to practice. By that time many Quakers had fled England for relative safety in North American and Caribbean colonies, particularly the West Indies, where Quaker missionaries first arrived in 1655. By 1700, approximately 10,000 Friends had settled in Jamaica, and substantial numbers in Barbados. 

Barbados functioned as a strategic hub for England and its North American colonies, exporting sugar, rum, tobacco, cotton, indigo—and enslaved Africans. Slaving drove the Barbadian economy. Wealthy Quakers—plantation owners, merchants, ship owners—were among the many entrepreneurs active in the business.

At home and abroad, English society assumed less commercially minded Friends to be anti-government. Quaker missionaries Mary Fisher and Anne Foster sailed from Barbados to Boston in 1656, encountering the wrath of the city’s Puritan leadership. After five weeks behind bars, the two were shipped back to Barbados. They got off light; during 1659-61, the gibbet at Boston Common saw four Friends hanged for merely entering the colony. Around this time, Quaker preachers also were reaching the southern American colonies. 

From a small cadre of zealous missionaries, the 17th-century Quaker presence in North America grew rapidly as Friends flocked to new colonies and many other settlers converted. Quakerism persisted in Massachusetts and flourished in Rhode Island and the Chesapeake colonies. In the 1670s-80s Quakers founded the colonies of West Jersey and Pennsylvania. Beginning with communities in New England in 1661, the Quakers had by 1700 established six regional Yearly Meetings in the colonies, mirroring arrangements in England. In the colonies, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was first among equals.

Not a few Quakers embraced the slavery already entrenched in the colonies, even though owning another person violated Quaker philosophy. Many Friends settling in North America were wealthy Barbadians, bringing along their slaves and indentured servants.

By the 1680s more than half the ships in Boston harbor were involved in the West Indian trade in sugar, rum, cotton—and slaves. Via Barbados, the ports of Newport, Bristol, and Providence, Rhode Island were leading centers of the slave trade. William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” of Pennsylvania was not immune. In 1690, less than ten years after founding the colony, Penn reported that ten slave ships had arrived from the West Indies in a year.

For all their palaver about the Golden Rule and equality, many Quakers, like others of their time, saw importing and owning Africans as acceptable. Those enriched by bondage scorned talk of equality, even by the sect’s founder. Fox himself spoke up on behalf of the enslaved, albeit blandly, in a 1657 epistle, To Friends Beyond Sea, that have Blacks and Indian Slaves. Friends, Fox said, should “have the mind of Christ, and to be merciful, as your heavenly Father is merciful” and preach the Gospel to “every creature.” 

In 1671, accompanied by a dozen English and Irish colleagues, Fox spent five months in Barbados and Jamaica. He shuddered to see the condition of slaves, even those owned by Friends, on Barbados. Fox mildly admonished followers there to teach their slaves the Gospel and treat them kindly but stopped short of advocating emancipation.

Continuing to the North American colonies in early 1672—they landed at Patuxent on Chesapeake Bay—Fox and company, intent on organizing monthly and general meetings like those back home in England, crisscrossed the colonies north and south from Maryland for 13 months. No doubt Fox, while among slave-holding believers, communicated his concern for the well-being of their human property. 

In 1676, Fox published Gospel Family-Order, Being a Short Discourse Concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of Whites, Blacks and Indians. This slightly more incisive pamphlet incorporated his 1671 sermons on Barbados. Friends were not to slight “the Ethiopian, the black man, neither man or woman upon the face of the earth, in that Christ died for all” and “to let them go free, after a considerable term of years,” he wrote. 

In 1679, Fox again addressed slavery, but—as in all his writings—without flatly condemning the practice. In To Friends in America Concerning Their Negroes, and Indians, the founder admonished Quakers in America to convert persons they held in bondage, beginning his epistle, “All Friends, everywhere, that have Indians or blacks, you are to preach the gospel to them, and other servants, if you be true Christians.” 

William Edmundson, an Irish-born minister who had traveled with Fox on the founder’s first trip to North America, took the step that Fox would not. On his return to the colonies in 1675-76, Edmundson attacked slave ownership outright: “And many of you count it unlawful to make slaves of the Indians,” Edmundson asked. “And if so, why the Negroes?” These and other goads began to turn Quakers away from benign neglect and toward activism.

On February 18, 1688, Friends living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, staged the first formal anti-enslavement protest in the colonies. Two months later, also from Germantown, came a broadside against enslavement likely drafted by attorney Francis Daniel Pastorius, the Bavarian émigré who had founded Germantown. Signed by Pastorius and three others, including the clerk of their Meeting, the document began, “These are the reasons why we are against the traffick of men-body as followeth,” that enslavement violated the Golden Rule, that tolerating the practice would give Pennsylvania a bad name, and that keeping slaves meant a risk of a slave revolt. “Now consider well this thing, if it is good or bad?” the paper asked.

The Monthly Meeting at Dublin, Pennsylvania, ignored the Germantown declaration, finding enslavement “so weighty that we think it not expedient for us to meddle with it here.” The petition wound its way to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, whose members forwarded the message to the London Yearly Meeting. 

Both bodies declined to pursue the matter. Individual Quakers and local Meetings embraced the abolitionist cause, the first Christian denomination to do so. The Germantown protest exerted little direct impact, but its accompanying text inspired Quaker abolitionists into the 19th century. 

In 1693, the Keithians, a splinter group founded by Quaker George Keith, published An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes. Largely ignored by mainstream Quakers, the Exhortation called enslaved persons captives of “war, violence, cruelty, and oppression; and theft and robbery of the highest order.” The Golden Rule applied to all regardless of “what generation, descent or Colour they are.” Enslaving Africans is a sin, the Keithians said. In 1696, prodded by multiple Friends, including prominent minister William Southeby, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting began to grapple with slavery’s moral implications. 

Termed the “first native-born American to write against slavery,” Southeby, a Marylander who converted from Catholicism, was the leading anti-slavery Friend of his day. 

Southeby’s essay, To Friends and All It May Concerne, interwove arguments by Fox and Edmundson, the Germantown Friends, and the Keithians. Southeby’s exhortation and salvoes by Robert Pyle and Welshman Cadwalader Morgan persuaded the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to formulate the advice that “Friends be Careful not to Encourage the bringing in of any more Negroes.” 

Southeby found that language mealy-mouthed and likely to be ignored. So vigorously did he issue jeremiads that Philadelphia Quaker leaders twice censured him, though they apparently did not disown him, perhaps because, to preserve unity, he seems to have cooled his ardor. He was a Friend in good standing when he died in 1722.

The Philadelphia Meeting was not at all alone in shillyshallying on slavery. Meetings throughout the colonies discouraged anti-slavery expression by members. However, John Hepburn’s local Meeting in New Jersey did not blink in 1715 when the former indentured servant published his incendiary American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule, Or An Essay to prove the Unlawfulness of making Slaves of Men, the longest and most logically written attack on slavery yet to be circulated in the American colonies. Summarizing the anti-enslavement debate, Hepburn articulated the theology behind his condemnation—mankind’s free will comes from God, and enslavement denies Africans their free will. Hepburn emerged from notoriety unscathed.

Visiting English minister John Farmer wasn’t as fortunate. Farmer brought an epistle, Relating [sic] Negroes, to the 1717 New England Yearly Meeting at Newport. His message incensed the Yearly Meeting’s leaders, wealthy slave-owning and -trading Quakers. They “advised” he not publish. Farmer published and was disowned. Unapologetic, he traveled to Philadelphia and read his epistle at every opportunity, incurring the enmity of the city’s obdurate Quaker elite. The Philadelphia Monthly Meeting upheld Farmer’s disownment, as did the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1720, one of Quaker history’s rare double disownments. After the Southeby and Farmer episodes, no Friend from any Philadelphia Meeting spoke out for almost a decade. Antislavery sentiment was slowly spreading among rural Friends, but when English emigrants Ralph Sandiford and Benjamin Lay arrived in Pennsylvania—Lay, disowned by his congregation in England for disrupting meetings, came from England by way of Barbados—the pro-slavery perspective remained in comfortable control of Quakerdom’s Philadelphia establishment.

Sandiford, a merchant from Liverpool who bristled at sympathetic fellow Quakers for not speaking what they clearly felt, began attacking enslavement soon after he landed. In 1729, after a warning not to proceed from the Overseers of the Press, Sandiford published A Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times, questioning the injustice “to rob a Man of His Liberty, which is more valuable than Life?”

The Philadelphia Monthly Meeting ostracized Sandiford. With slavery weighing on his mind such that “the sense of it [had burdened his] life night and day” a year later he issued The Mystery of Iniquity; in a Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times, by the foregoing and the present Dispensation. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting disowned him. Sandiford retired to a farm outside Philadelphia. In his later years he and Benjamin Lay became friends. Sandiford died brokenhearted in 1733.

Lay regarded Sandiford as a martyr, and after his friend’s death intensified his outspokenness, penning All Slave Keepers, That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. In it, Lay called keeping enslaved persons “a Practice so gross and hurtful to Religion, and destructive to Government, beyond what words can set forth.” Benjamin Franklin printed the book in 1738. Three weeks later Lay pulled off his pokeberry juice exploit and was disowned—the last Friend to be cast out for fighting slavery.

By staking out extreme positions, Lay, Farmer, and Sandiford had laid a firm line of resistance. Mainstream Quakers needed a figure less strident to get them into action. John Woolman, a merchant and tailor from Mount Holly, New Jersey, and a minister of the Burlington Monthly Meeting, became that leader—according to historian Thomas Drake, “the greatest Quaker of the eighteenth century and perhaps the most Christlike individual that Quakerism has ever produced.” 

Woolman spent his youth unconcerned about enslavement. However, in 1742, when he was 22, his employer had Woolman draw up a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. The transaction deeply unsettled the young man. In 1746, he joined other missionaries preaching in the southern colonies, traveling as far south as North Carolina, seeing slavery up close for the first time. Slave-owning Friends reacted coolly when he counseled emancipation, but he persevered, visiting and revisiting, a gentle persuader who gradually changed a Society’s thinking.

Returning home to New Jersey, Woolman wrote Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination. “All men by nature,” Woolman argued, “are equally entitled to the equity of the Golden Rule, and under indispensable obligations to it.” However, he waited until 1753 and a change in makeup of the Philadelphia Overseers of the Press to present his tract for review. Approval and the pamphlet’s publication in 1754 marked a major shift in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s attitude. That shift intensified in 1758 when the Yearly Meeting approved “without spoken dissent” a recommendation that Friends free those they held in bondage. Lay learned of the advice shortly before he died in 1759.

By 1760, 50,000 to 60,000 Quakers lived in seacoast colonies, about half in areas around Philadelphia and in Maryland. Other Christian sects now outnumbered Quakers in North America. The Friends downplayed proselytizing, instead turning inward and institutionalizing their doctrine with such strictures as prohibiting marriage outside the Meeting and threatening disownment for “errant” Friends, stances that cost them members. 

Friends’ pacifism came to the fore during the French and Indian War, at the cost of political power. In 1756 Quaker legislators stormed out of the Pennsylvania Assembly to protest war taxes, relinquishing control of the government, abandoning provincial politics, and focusing on social issues. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s endorsement of emancipation came at a propitious moment.

Woolman had an influential ally in Anthony Benezet. Though not nearly as dramatic as Lay, Benezet, an émigré from France via London, worked tirelessly within the Quaker system. A prolific writer, he penned many pamphlets and petitions, beginning with 1759’s Observations on the Enslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes. Benezet said if Friends believed God was in every man, bondage must be a sin. Teaching black children in his home at night, he promoted the novel idea that all people are capable of learning and thus are equal and deserving of freedom. Benezet and allies among the Friends made their arguments to government as well as to fellow believers.

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s advice became a movement. Yearly Meetings from New England to North Carolina took steps toward banning enslavement within their Meetings, to find that many Friends preferred to keep their slaves and be disowned. 

Even Quakers willing to free their slaves could not necessarily do so. Virginia and the Carolinas sharply restricted the freeing of slaves except with government approval and only for meritorious service. Slave-owning Friends wishing to manumit had to choose: be disowned or leave the state. Hundreds of Quakers relocated west in Ohio and Indiana, taking their human chattel and liberating them upon arrival in the “free” territory. Some Northern Virginia Friends immediately freed slaves, but most waited until 1782 when that state’s anti-manumission law was changed after heavy lobbying led by abolitionist planter Robert Pleasants. A friend of Benezet and Woolman, he also presided over the short-lived Virginia Abolitionist Society in 1790. Pleasants, a planter and abolitionist, persuaded Virginia legislators to legalize manumission by last wills and testaments or other writings validated in a county court by two witnesses. Upon the legislative revision, he freed his slaves and hired them as paid workers.

During the American Revolution, Quakers throughout the colonies struggled to remain neutral; many had property and goods forfeited and some were exiled, but Benezet, now an “old white-haired busybody of good works scurrying around with a petition in one hand and an article against slavery in the other,” never quit.

Neither did Warner Mifflin.

Mifflin, a charismatic abolitionist in the Benjamin Lay mold, was the physical opposite of his antecedent, standing just under seven feet tall. After Benezet died in 1784, Mifflin became the most widely known Quaker in America, serving as the bridge between the early abolitionists and the wave of activists arising in the 1830s. 

A Delmarva Peninsula planter’s son, Mifflin owned slaves until a serious illness in his late 20s, during which he was “fully persuaded in my conscience that it is a sin of a deep dye to make slaves of my fellow creatures.” 

The younger Mifflin freed his enslaved persons in 1774 and paid them reparations, one of the first slave owners to do so. He persuaded his father to do the same. After the Revolution, Mifflin became a prominent lobbyist, promoting abolition, a cause that began to attract non-Quakers. Southerners called him a “meddling fanatic,” while fellow abolitionists praised his efforts. 

The North Carolina Yearly Meeting took an extraordinary step in 1808 to end-run that state’s pro-slavery laws—the Meeting itself became the agent of its members’ enslaved persons. Friends “gifted” their slaves to the Yearly Meeting, which treated them as “free.” Slave owners challenged the program in court, but Judge William Gaston ruled that under a 1706 state law the Quaker trustee system was constitutional. By 1814 the yearly meeting “owned” 350 slaves; by 1826, 729. The trusteeship was dissolved on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in Union-occupied territory. 

Separated from Southern-sympathizing Manhattan, Brooklyn had one of the largest and most politically aware Black communities in the U.S. 

On September 26, 1850, six days after President Millard Fillmore signed the federal Fugitive Slave Law requiring Americans to aid in the capture and return of runaway slaves, two deputy U.S. marshals arrested James Hamlet in New York City as he was working at his job as a porter. Hamlet, a runaway slave, had fled bondage in Baltimore, Maryland. He had arrived in New York by train in 1848 and, with his wife and three children, had settled near Brooklyn in a township then called “Williamsburgh.” Distance conferred only the illusion of freedom. Hamlet’s owner, Mary Brown, dispatched slave catchers—her son Gustavus Brown, son-in-law Thomas Clare, and a hired agent. In New York, the three presented documents to a federal official who ordered Hamlet arrested and, on the spot, held a hearing at which Hamlet was barred from testifying. The presiding officer agreed that Brown owned the Black man, ordered Hamlet shackled, and had the prisoner hustled aboard a steamship to Baltimore, where Brown put her returned human chattel up for sale. 

The Hamlet episode marked the Fugitive Slave Law’s debut. The case emphasized the difficulty of implementing that much-disputed measure, enacted to compel the return to slave states of runaways in free states. Previously, slaves who reached a free state could claim freedom. Hamlet’s pursuer, Thomas Clare, told the New York press the price of his prisoner’s freedom was $800. On September 31, more than 2,000 members of Black civic organizations and a “slight and visible sprinkling of white abolitionists” packed the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Church Street in Manhattan; a pass of the collection plate met Brown’s price. Back in New York, Hamlet appeared October 5 at a “great mass meeting of colored citizens” at City Hall Park in Manhattan. He told the crowd that when he was to go on the block in Baltimore would-be purchasers heard warnings to avoid buying him because “he had tasted liberty, and therefore could never be held again in chains.”

Hamlet’s experiences and those endured by other runaways showed that amid Northerners’ gathering resentment toward Southern domination on the slavery question, the Fugitive Slave Law would be impossible to enforce. In particular, Hamlet’s odyssey illustrated the existence of a thriving community of activist free Blacks in Brooklyn who, along with white abolitionists, were mobilizing to resist slavery.

By 1850, Brooklyn’s 200,000-plus population included one of the country’s largest free African-American communities. Blacks had been present there since the 1600s, initially as slaves brought to Bruijkleen, an agricultural district of Dutch colony New Netherland. Slavery had been part of life in New England since the earliest colonial times, first with Indians forced into labor. Considered too dangerous to roam the colony, Native American prisoners of war were often traded to West Indies sugar planters in exchange for enslaved Africans. Farmers in Bruijkleen bought slaves because, thanks to prosperity at home, no Hollanders were desperate enough to indenture themselves, contracting to work for a stipulated number of years in exchange for passage, provisions, and shelter. The Dutch let slaves own property, serve in the militia, and testify in court, but during winter and fallow times slaves had to fend for themselves, growing or hunting their sustenance. Dutch slaveowners could grant long-serving or deserving slaves “half-freedom” with colonial officials’ approval—and an annual payment to the colony by the half-free individual. When England conquered New Netherland in 1664, royal proprietor James, duke of York, wanted to recast his acquisition as a European settlement instead of a trading outpost. To attract Englishmen who were used to having servants do the heavy farm work, the duke encouraged the purchase of African slaves. By 1746, more than 9,000 adult slaves were living in New York, giving the colony the largest slave population north of Maryland. The slave ranks in Kings County townships Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, New Utrecht, Brookland, and Bushwick rose from 14 percent in 1698 to 21 percent in 1738. For large landowners, the ranks of slaves owned served as status symbols. A typical small farmer owned one or two men for field work, and perhaps a female domestic. Most local bondsmen lived in small households and had to support themselves while living crammed into cubbyholes, attics, and outbuildings. 

Owners could profit by renting slaves with desired skills. This made it worthwhile to train bondsmen at coopering, blacksmithing, and carpentry, and, as New York became more urban, baking, tailoring, tanning, shoemaking, and goldsmithing. When not toiling for their masters, slaves could seek paid work; many did hire out, accumulate savings, and buy their freedom, a pattern central to the growth of free Black communities in New York City and its neighbor across the East River whose name had undergone anglicization to “Brooklyn.” 

Others joined the community through flight or a casual form of freeing. Britain had outlawed the old Dutch “half-freedom” but allowed owners to dispose of elderly or sick slaves by turning them loose. Runaways from rural districts on Long Island and further north in the colony often disappeared into New York’s crowded streets, as did slaves fleeing bondage elsewhere. Some stowed away aboard ships leaving Southern ports. Others walked from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. During the Revolutionary War, British troops occupying Long Island, Manhattan, Staten Island, and New York counties east of the Hudson River offered rebel-owned slaves freedom if runaways reached Crown territory. This policy quadrupled the local fugitive slave population. With Britain’s defeat, American loyalists expatriated to Crown territories like Canada and the Bahamas, sometimes taking along their slaves. Other Blacks stayed behind, now free.

Northern colonists held thousands of slaves until the Revolution, when pressure from a lingering Puritan ethos, the rhetoric of independence, and a dearth of cash crops requiring gang labor prompted many owners to manumit bondsmen. In the 1780s, most northern states’ legislatures mandated gradual emancipation, a trend to which New Jersey and New York, more dependent on slavery, were late. New York’s elite formed the New York Manumission Society in 1785. Pressed by that body, the state dropped a requirement that owners assure good behavior by manumitted persons and made it even easier for owners to free slaves who were of diminished utility. Not until 1799 did the New York legislature pass a gradual emancipation bill promising enslaved children born after its enactment freedom at age 28 for men and 25 for women. 

In Brooklyn, enslaved and free Blacks found work in shipyards, at rope walks—expanses on which workers made rope by intertwining strands of hemp as they strode along—and with waterfront sugar refineries, adding racial diversity to those businesses. Black sailors crewed coastal vessels. Black women worked as domestics, midwives, laundresses, and cooks. 

Blacks lived in downtown Brooklyn, in the vicinity of the Fulton Ferry landing, and in a waterfront neighborhood, later called Vinegar Hill, that stretched from Bridge Street to the navy yard. Residents established mutual aid organizations like the African Woolman Benevolent Society, founded in 1810, to provide burial and property insurance, business loans, and charity. Black congregations erected churches: Concord Baptist, Siloam Presbyterian, Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal, and others. All became important social centers whose pastors preached saving money to help family and friends buy freedom. New York abolished slavery on July 4, 1827.

In the 1820s, individual Quakers in southern Pennsylvania and in an enclave in North Carolina began assisting slaves fleeing bondage, an effort that evolved into the Underground Railroad. Never the structured web of “stationmasters” and safe houses portrayed in late 19th century abolitionist historiography, the Railroad did shelter and direct northbound runaways, who generally had white help until they had traveled well into free territory. “Conductors” were mostly fellow slaves and free Blacks willing to risk hiding fugitives and forge passes and manumission papers. New York City was a scene of pause for runaways who were heading to Syracuse, Albany, and other upstate cities known as hubs of support. Immigrants hostile to Blacks crowded Lower Manhattan; to the familiar phenomena of Catholic-Protestant rioting and anti-immigrant violence, New Yorkers added strings of white-on-Black attacks. Brooklyn, insulated by the unbridged East River, offered Blacks a degree of refuge.

Jim Pembroke, enslaved on a wheat farm near Hagerstown, Maryland, was a skilled mason and blacksmith. His owner thought him insolent and caned him for his attitude. In 1827, Pembroke ran. Detained by white men when he could not produce the papers they demanded, he slipped away in the dark. Near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a helpful toll collector sent Pembroke to William Wright, a Quaker farmer and Underground Railroad figure. Pembroke stayed six months with the Wrights. Learning to write, reading the Bible, and being introduced to arithmetic and astronomy, he took the name James W.C. Pennington, probably to honor a prominent Quaker family, and took off to Brooklyn. 

A lawyer hired Pennington as a coachman; he used his wages to engage tutors. Starting in 1830, Pennington represented Black Brooklyn at yearly conventions of prominent African-Americans. In 1834-35, Yale Divinity School grudgingly let Pennington audit classes. He pastored a number of New York congregations, including Manhattan’s Shiloh Presbyterian Church, and became a leading Black writer and intellectual. During the Civil War, he recruited volunteers for the U.S. Colored Troops.

Other black activists in and around Brooklyn led the antislavery movement and helped fugitives escape. Charles Ray, born free in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1807, studied at Wesleyan College in Connecticut until fellow students’ racist protests drove him away. He farmed and learned boot making, and in 1832 opened a shoe store in New York. Ray, ordained a Methodist minister, joined the American Anti-Slavery Society at its formation in 1833. He pastored two predominantly white Congregational churches and for a time edited The Colored American, an abolitionist weekly. In 1835 Ray helped found the New York Vigilance Committee, devoted to foiling slave catchers. Chapters formed in Williamsburgh and Brooklyn. Principals included black ministers Samuel Cornish and Theodore S. Wright, both of Manhattan’s Shiloh Presbyterian, and the fiery David Ruggles, the committee’s leader 1835-40. The Vigilance Committee raised money, printed and distributed pamphlets and broadsides, hired lawyers to argue cases on behalf of individuals snatched by slave hunters, and sheltered hundreds of northbound fugitives. Ruggles prowled the wharves offering aid to runaways. State law restricted to nine months the term that Southerners bringing slaves into New York could maintain ownership of that human chattel. Ruggles made note of such visitors, confronting slavers who had overstayed their time. He often struggled with New York City Recorder Richard Riker, mainspring of the “Kidnapping Club,” a cabal of judges and constables who cooked up slapdash hearings and whisked Blacks, some legally free, into bondage. Ruggles broke with the committee over tactics and complaints that he diverted committee funds for his own use.

Black Brooklyn grew. In 1832, chimney sweep William Thomas bought and subdivided 30 acres on Hunterfly Road in Flatbush, well away from whites. He sold building lots to fellow African-Americans. Nearby, in 1835, using profits from his boot-blacking manufacturing company, “colored” Henry Thompson bought 32 parcels of land from the estate of slaveholder John Lefferts, for whom Lefferts Avenue is named. An 1837 recession generally crushed American land prices. 

In 1838, Thompson sold Virginian James Weeks acreage on which the buyer, a free Black stevedore, started what he called Weeksville, a development soon boasting more than 800 residents, a school, two churches, an orphanage, a cemetery, and abolitionist paper The Freedom’s Torchlight. 

Weeksville and kindred Brooklyn neighborhoods attracted fugitive slaves who took up residence and helped others move along to New England and Canada. 

The 1840 passage of a state law requiring a jury trial when slave catchers sought to arrest runaways discouraged bounty hunters from roaming New York in search of truant bondsmen. However, in 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act overrode such state “personal liberty” laws. The federal law barred aid to runaways and required Americans to help return fleeing slaves to owners. Violators risked a $1,000 fine and six months behind bars. The law provided bonuses and promotions for officials remanding fugitives, heightening tension. “Let parents and guardians, and children take warning,” wrote The Emancipator, an abolitionist paper. “Our city is infested with a gang of kidnappers—Let every man look to his safety.” 

Strictures against helping runaways fanned abolitionist fervor in white Brooklyn congregations like Plymouth Congregational Church on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights. Plymouth Congregational’s pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, was a younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of antislavery pot-boiler Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beecher railed at slavery from the pulpit and used donations to buy Sharps rifles he sent to free-soil settlers battling pro-slavery forces in the Kansas Territory. He was a masterful publicist. “Fugitives make their appearance continually, pleading with pathos deeper than words, for shelter and aid in their flight,” Beecher said. “I will shelter them, conceal them, or speed their flight; and while under my shelter, or under my convoy, they shall be to me like my own flesh and blood; and whatever defense I would put forth for my own children, that shall these poor, despised creatures have in my house or upon the road.” Runaways hid in the cellar beneath the Plymouth sanctuary. Upstairs, Beecher held fundraisers and “auctions” at which bidders donated money to buy freedom for runaways who were under the church’s care. 

Plymouth Congregational was one of many Brooklyn-based Underground Railroad “stations.” Others were in Weeksville, Carrville, and Williamsburgh. In downtown Brooklyn, occupants of a house at 233 Duffield Street built into their residence a secret passage for use by runaways. At 227 Duffield, abolitionists Thomas and Harriet Truesdale built a tunnel that may have led to nearby Bridge Street Church. Rescued fugitive James Hamlet kept a safe room in his home on South 3rd Street. At his home on Smith Street, James Pennington harbored runaways. So did wealthy white merchant Lewis Tappan, in his four-story brownstone at 86 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights (See sidebar, below. One escape in which Tappan participated grew out of a highly publicized international effort to free an extended family enslaved in Maryland—a story that was rendered particularly compelling by the family’s size and its female children’s vulnerability.

Ann Maria Weems was born into slavery in Rockville, Maryland, in 1840. Her father, John Weems, bought his freedom from, then worked as a laborer for, Rockville planter Adam Robb. After Robb’s death, his daughter sold John Weems’s enslaved wife, Arabella, and seven of their offspring to innkeeper Charles Price. Daughter Stella, 17, escaped to Geneva, New York. To end-run the Fugitive Slave Law, prominent minister Henry Highland Garnet, who had fled slavery himself, adopted Stella and took her with his family to England. Speaking to antislavery groups there, Garnet often told the Weems family story. John Weems tried hard to free his family, traveling to New York to importune the well-known abolitionist Charles Ray for assistance. Ray enlisted Garnet to raise money in England to help the family. Garnet worked the press and, with Quakers Henry and Anna Richardson of Newcastle, raised $5,000 for a “Weems Ransom Fund.” Ray and Lewis Tappan were to get the money to John Weems. Weems returned to Maryland. Charles Price, the planter who now owned Weems’s wife and children, had moved Arabella and their five sons to a slave pen in Washington, DC, where he sold them for $3,300 to an Alabama planter. Price kept daughters Ann Maria and Catharine Weems. 

The abolitionists had sent John Weems enough money to buy one daughter. Catharine was older and at greater risk of sexual predation; her father bought her freedom. Abolitionists in the South stood ready to help Weems find and free his other loved ones; the challenge was getting money to the agents. In Alabama, a representative bought Arabella and the two youngest boys for $1,650. Three sons remained enslaved there. Quaker attorney Jacob Bigelow of Washington, DC, offered Price $700 for 13-year-old Ann Maria. Price demanded $1,000. Bigelow returned to Washington without the girl. For a year, Ray and Tappan argued, with Tappan accusing Ray of misusing money from the ransom fund. On September 23, 1855, Ann Maria, now 14, stole away to Bigelow’s home in Washington. Two months later, an escape plan took form demonstrating Underground Railroad operatives’ ingenuity. On November 25, sympathetic physician Ellwood Harvey parked his carriage on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in front of the White House. Ann Maria Weems appeared, hair shorn and tucked beneath a man’s cap. Wearing a livery driver’s uniform down to the bow tie, the girl took the reins and steered the carriage north to Philadelphia.

From there, Underground Railroad conductor William Still got Ann Maria to Brooklyn. Through Charles Ray, Lewis Tappan and wife Sarah used $63 from the ransom fund to buy her clothes and a carpetbag. Ann Maria and Black minister Amos Freeman rode openly by train to Buffalo. On December 1, the pair crossed the Niagara River into Ontario, Canada. Ann Maria reunited with relatives in Dresden, Ontario. She stayed in Canada the rest of her life. 

In 1856, Tappan and cohort bought Ann Maria’s brothers Joseph and Adam for $1,700. The same sum went to free the oldest Weems son, Augustus, in 1857. Usually a 22-year-old bondsman fetched more, but Augustus had tuberculosis. He died within a year.

Abraham Lincoln and fellow members of the new Republican Party hesitated to join calls to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act, but it became clear through the 1850s that no court in the North was going to prosecute any Northerner for aiding fugitive slaves. In the Midwest and New England, the Underground Railroad was operating in the open. In New York City, where businessmen and politicians feared alienating Southern business partners, especially those in the cotton, tobacco, and rice industries, which were dependent on enslaved workers, the Railroad ran in deep secrecy. When slaveholding states seceded and civil war began in 1861, Brooklyn counted fewer Confederate sympathizers than New York City; many Brooklynites enlisted in the Union army. Several early volunteer Union regiments grew out of New York State militias, including the 14th Brooklyn Regiment, which Henry Beecher’s flock at Plymouth Congregational adopted as its own. Brooklyn contributed much to the Union effort, including the construction of the ironclad USS Monitor at Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint. Women of Beecher’s congregation made bandages, knitted socks, and sewed uniforms for “the Plymouth boys.”

History mainly remembers New York City’s 1863 Draft Riots. That disturbance eclipsed an incident in August 1862 at Watson’s Tobacco Company in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The factory’s Black cigar rollers, many of them former slaves, were making $14 a week. White laborers, mostly Irish, made $10 a week. A Saturday night stare-down between white and Black Watson’s workers escalated into a fight. A rumor circulated that Black men had “insulted” white women. On Monday morning, August 4, five Black men and 20 women and girls were working at the cigar-rolling factory when 400 whites stormed the building. The workers barricaded themselves in on the second floor. One Watson’s Tobacco Company employee, Charles Baker, a Black man, was beaten severely. 

Police rescued Baker, who was arrested for striking an officer. Rioters, some yelling “Kill the Black sons of bitches!” and wielding pitchforks, tried but failed to torch the factory. Police arrested eight whites. Charges against Baker were dropped. In court, the defendants argued that they were standing up for their rights. 

The Draft Riots started in Manhattan Monday, July 13, 1863, two weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg. By the end of the first day rioters, infuriated at being conscripted to fight for emancipation, turned their fury on any Black person they could catch. Whites lynched 11 Blacks. At least 119 people died in the riots and in a fire that destroyed the Colored Orphan Asylum. Twenty percent of Manhattan’s Black population fled the island by ferry for the relative safety of Brooklyn. Many never returned. 

_____

The Tappan Brothers: Silk and Defiance

Manhattan merchant Arthur Tappan disliked conversation. The shy, bad-tempered, headache-prone silk importer hunched at a table writing correspondence while younger brother and partner Lewis, slightly less waspish, supervised their 20 clerks. Arthur Tappan & Co., in the early 1830s one of America’s richest business enterprises, sold fabrics and fashion accessories from Europe. Deeply religious, the brothers bankrolled the abolitionist movement of the 1830s and ’40s against their bankers’ wishes. “You demand that I shall cease my antislavery labors…or make some apology or recantation,” Arthur Tappan declared. “I will be hung first!”

The Tappans, born in 1786 and 1788 in Northampton, Massachusetts, grew up in the Calvinist Congregational Church. They gave up Calvinism to join the 19th-century evangelical movement, which preached the importance of good works. Arthur started his New York business in 1815. As he prospered, he donated money to train ministers and missionaries, promote temperance, distribute Bibles, rescue prostitutes, and educate Black youths. He initially supported an American Colonization Society campaign to expatriate free Blacks to Africa. 

However, upon learning that Liberia’s American sponsors intended to sell the colony’s inhabitants rum and firearms, Arthur quit the society. Lewis, a talented manager, joined Arthur’s firm in 1827 as a partner. In 1830, the brothers met Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, an encounter that launched their lifelong antislavery crusade. 

In 1833, the Tappans and Garrison formed the American Anti-Slavery Society, outraging businessmen and newspaper editors in New York City who supported the South, along with poor white workers fearing competition from freed Blacks. Mobs disrupted the society’s first two Manhattan meetings. On July 9, 1834, toughs rifled Lewis Tappan’s house on Lower Manhattan’s Rose Street and burned his belongings in the street. 

At the Tappan & Company store the next night, rioters began battering the door. Inside, Arthur Tappan passed out guns. 

“Steady, boys,” he said calmly. “Fire low. Shoot them in the legs, then they can’t run!” Soldiers dispersed the mob. 

In 1835, Arthur Tappan poured money into Oberlin College in Ohio in return for a pledge to admit “promising” African-Americans, treat them equally with whites, and become the first integrated college in the United States. That year the brothers funded a campaign to mail abolitionist pamphlets to churches around the South. Learning that a load of those materials had arrived at the Charleston, South Carolina, post office, a crowd broke in and seized the mailbags. Three thousand people cheered as rioters burned the pamphlets and hanged Arthur Tappan in effigy. Southern newspapers offered rewards to anyone who kidnapped Arthur to be tried for inciting slaves to rebel. Dismissing the threats, Arthur commuted daily from his Brooklyn Heights home to his Manhattan store. Told he had a $50,000 price on his head, Tappan said, “If that sum is placed in the New York Bank, I may possibly think of giving myself up.”

In truth, the Tappan brothers considered Blacks inferior to whites. Arthur Tappan once sat in a church pew with a mulatto minister; mortified by the ensuing public outcry, he vowed never to do so again. Nor did he ever hire a Black man for any job but porter. Lewis disparaged Black abolitionists and Underground Railroad leaders, saying he had never met a Black man who could be trusted with money.  

On December 16, 1835, fire raced through downtown Manhattan’s commercial district, south of Wall Street. The blaze destroyed 650 buildings, including Tappan & Company on Hanover Square. Black neighbors had enough time to transfer some of the Tappans’ inventory to a safe warehouse before the building and contents, including $500,000 in notes from creditors, burned. Tappan & Company went bankrupt in 1837. 

To cover debts, Arthur Tappan cut back his charitable giving. The company limped along for a few more years before folding. 

In 1840, the American Anti-Slavery Society broke apart. The conservative Tappans believed the Constitution protected slavery but thought they could end the practice by appealing to Southerners on moral grounds. William Lloyd Garrison’s wing of the society believed the Constitution to be illegal and that only political upheaval would eradicate slavery. Garrisonians demanded the North secede from the Union and re-form in a federation mandating equal rights for all. The last straw was when the radicals, flouting convention, elected a woman to the society’s business committee. The Tappan brothers and 300 adherents formed the conservative American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. 

In the early 1840s, his health fragile and his fortune gone, Arthur withdrew from public antislavery activity. Lewis stepped up: In 1840, 52 Africans kidnapped in what is now Sierra Leone took over the slave ship Amistad and ended up in New Haven, Connecticut, charged with piracy and murder. Lewis Tappan organized the escapees’ defense. It took two years and two trials but the “Amistads” were freed. 

Lewis Tappan resigned from Tappan & Co. in 1841 to organize a credit-reporting firm, the Mercantile Agency, which for a fee researched small-town merchants seeking capital. Lewis, determined to enforce morality in the marketplace, recruited a far-flung network of analysts including a young Abraham Lincoln. Many “correspondents” were fellow abolitionists. “The M[ercantile] Agency is now quite popular here,” Lewis wrote in 1843. “It checks knavery, & purifies the mercantile air.” Lewis retired in 1849, insisting that bankrupt brother Arthur, by then working for a nephew, replace him. In 1854, Arthur sold his interest to Benjamin Douglass, who in 1859 sold the business to Robert Graham Dun. The outfit thrives today as Dun & Bradstreet Inc. 

Privately, the Tappan brothers continued their antislavery work, and prepared to violate the Fugitive Slave Law. Lewis Tappan, who had moved to Brooklyn Heights, occasionally helped Black leaders including the Rev. Amos Freeman hide and transport fugitives on the Underground Railroad. Arthur stabled a horse near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania for fugitives’ use. 

By the late 1850s, overshadowed by a younger generation of radical abolitionists, the Tappans mostly were supporting Christian missions to Blacks in the West Indies. Lewis got Arthur out of several financial jams. Arthur died July 23, 1865, at age 79. Lewis, who spent his last years writing an admiring biography of his brother, died June 21, 1873, at his Brooklyn home. He was 85. His funeral took place at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church. Beecher spoke but the service was conducted by Amos Freeman, Lewis Tappan’s Underground Railroad compatriot. —American History senior editor Nancy Tappan is a distant cousin of Arthur and Lewis Tappan.

FROM THE PLATFORM, auctioneer William Walsh greeted the 200 bidders milling in the large hall with one side open to cold March winds and announced the first item for sale—a Negro family standing on the platform, available for inspection. Would-be purchasers studied the catalogue, which identified the lot on offer:

1.     George, age 27, Prime Cotton Planter
2.     Sue, 26, Prime Cotton Planter
3.     George, 6, Boy Child
4.     Harry, 2, Boy Child

Walsh started the bidding at $300 per head, cajoling the men milling on the floor to compete with one another until somebody had bought the whole family for $2,400. As the slaves stepped down to meet their new owner, Walsh gaveled the next lot onto the platform. Bidders carefully inspected the slaves, checking arm and leg muscles, ordering each to walk and squat, pulling open mouths to reveal teeth. A slave named Primus stepped onto the platform with his wife Daphney, their three-year old daughter, and a newborn. Daphney had wrapped a

blanket around her shoulders and the baby she clutched to her breast. This pose irked some bidders.

“What do you keep your n—— covered up for?” one bidder yelled. “Pull off her blanket.”

“What’s the matter with the gal?” another man said. “Ain’t she sound? Pull off her rags and let’s see her.”

The auctioneer explained that the mother was merely trying to keep her baby, born only 15 days earlier, warm. Daphney removed the blanket, exposing her child and herself. The family sold for $2,500.

It was March 2, 1859. At Ten Broeck racetrack outside Savannah, Georgia, Pierce M. Butler, a playboy from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was selling 429 slaves. The sale was taking place under duress.

In the 1820s, Butler’s grandfather, also Pierce Butler—Founding Father, hero of the Revolution, U.S. senator—had left his namesake

and the boy’s older brother John plantations totaling 10,000 acres on Butler Island and St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, along with the hundreds of Negroes who worked those cotton, rice, and tobacco fields. To inherit this fortune, the youths had only to change their family name, Mease, to Butler. The boys did so, divvying ownership of the slaves. In 1834, Pierce Butler married British actress Fanny Kemble. An abolitionist as well as a celebrity, Kemble was appalled by the treatment accorded her husband’s slaves. The couple argued over the matter. Later, back in Philadelphia, Kemble caught Butler cheating. Their 1845 divorce cost him plenty, and then he squandered what remained of his fortune on the stock market and the high life.

Deep in debt by 1859, the profligate planter sold his Philadelphia mansion. But his debts outran those proceeds, so he decided to liquefy another asset: his half of the island plantations’ work force. The United States had outlawed the importing of slaves in 1808; in the ensuing decades bondsmen had become a valuable commodity across the South. Now, Butler decided, auctioning his 429 slaves could save him from bankruptcy. His one concession to human decency: Though slave dealers commonly broke up families, Butler insisted that husbands were not to be separated from wives; parents and young children were to be kept together. 

The Butler auction, managed by slave dealer Joseph Bryan, was the largest such event staged in the country in years, perhaps the largest ever. The proceedings at Ten Broeck attracted hundreds of planters and slave dealers, as well as Mortimer Thomson, a correspondent for the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley’s newspaper. Like many journalists of the era, Thomson wrote under a goofy pseudonym—Q.K. Philander Doesticks. He usually contributed humorous pieces—about fortunetellers, boxers, bohemians, and P.T. Barnum’s baby beauty contest. This time the assignment was deadly serious.

Southerners detested the Tribune for its frequent denunciations of slavery, so Thomson posed as a prospective bidder. He arrived early in Savannah and for days sauntered the racetrack grounds, watching buyers inspect slaves housed temporarily in stalls usually reserved for horses. Like the slave dealers, Thomson used his copy of the catalogue to make notes, surreptitiously transcribing conversations he overheard.

“Well, Colonel, I see you looking sharp at Shoemaker Bill’s Sally,” one buyer said to another. “Going to buy her?”

“I think not,” the other man replied. “Sally’s a good, big strapping gal, and can do a heap o’ work, but it’s five years since she had any children. She’s done breeding, I reckon.”

Throughout the two-day auction, a cold rain blew into the hall where bidding took place. Bidders warmed themselves with whiskey sold at a bar downstairs. The slaves could only shiver. Thomson closely watched black men and women as bidders vied to acquire them. Some slaves “regarded the sale with perfect indifference, never making a motion,” the newsman wrote. “Others strained their eyes with eager glances

from one buyer to another as the bidding went on…Sometimes two persons only would be bidding for the same chattel, all the others having resigned the contest, and then the poor creature on the block, conceiving instantaneous preference for one of the buyers over the other, would regard the rivalry with the intensest interest, the expression of his face changing with every bid, settling into a half smile of joy if the favorite buyer persevered and secured the property, and settling down into a look of hopeless despair if the other won the victory.”

By the end of the sale’s second day, auctioneer Walsh had sold all 429 slaves for a total of $303,850—about $700 per man, woman and child. The auctioneer popped corks on bottles of Champagne. Buyers sipped the bubbly while Pierce Butler strolled among his former chattels, handing each a parting gift of four shiny 25-cent pieces fresh from the Philadelphia mint. Thomson caught a New York-bound train and started writing. Instead of his usual comedic skylarking, he simply described what he had seen and quoted what he had heard, striking a tone of muted outrage and understated irony:

“Guy, chattel No. 419, ‘a prime young man,’ sold for $1,280, being without blemish; his age was twenty years, and he was altogether a fine article. His next-door neighbor, Andrew, chattel No. 420, was his very counterpart in all marketable points, in size, age, skill, and everything, save that he had lost his right eye. Andrew sold for only $1,040, from which we argue that the market value of the right eye in the Southern country is $240.” 

Thomson lost his cool only when describing buyers making smutty wisecracks while pawing female slaves: “This sort of thing makes Northern blood boil, and Northern fists clench with a laudable desire to hit somebody. It was almost too much for endurance to stand and see those brutal slave-drivers pushing the women about, pulling their lips apart with their not too cleanly hands, and committing many another indecent act, while the husbands, fathers and brothers of those women were compelled to witness these things, without the power to resent the outrage.”   

On March 9, 1859, the Tribune published Thomson’s 9,000-word article under an ironic headline: “American Civilization Illustrated.” Two

days later, by popular demand, the Tribune reprinted the story. Soon Thomson’s chronicle of the great slave sale was appearing in newspapers around the North, and in the Times of London. The American Anti-Slavery Society published the article in pamphlet form. Thomson went back to his beat. Two years later, when civil war broke out, he covered the conflict for the Tribune.

The Ten Broeck auction dispersed Butler’s former property to new locations across the South and financed a lengthy European vacation for their former owner. In 1863, Fanny Kemble, 18 years divorced from Butler, published Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, a book composed of letters she’d written 25 years earlier detailing the wretched lives of the black men and women she had observed on Butler Island and St. Simon’s Island in 1839. Journal became a bestseller in America and England, prompting another repackaging of Thomson’s article, this time as a slender volume billed as A Sequel To Mrs. Kemble’s Journal.

After the war, Butler returned to Georgia to manage his plantations, the land now worked by gangs of sharecroppers that included many of his brother’s former slaves. He died of malaria in 1867. His ex-wife, famed as an actress, playwright, poet, and memoirist, outlived him by 26 years. Thomson died in New York in 1875. Like most reporters, he was quickly forgotten—a fate he shared with the 429 slaves sold on the two days that came to be known as “the weeping time.”

_____

 Up from the Stacks

Famous in its day, Mortimer Thomson’s article sank out of sight, available only in libraries inclined to keep obscure old books or microfilms of the New York Tribune. Digitized online, the original is available at publicdomainreview.org/collections/what-became-of-the-slaves-on-a-georgia-plantation-1863/. A brief excerpt:

 THE LOVE STORY OF JEFFREY AND DORCAS

 By Mortimer Thomson

            Jeffrey, chattel No. 319, marked as a “prime cotton hand,” aged 23 years, was put up. Jeffrey being a likely lad, the competition was high. The first bid was $1,100, and he was finally sold for $1,310. Jeffrey was sold alone; he had no encumbrance in the shape of an aged father or mother, who must necessarily be sold with him; nor had he any children, for Jeffrey was not married. But Jeffrey, chattel No 319, being human in his affections, had dared to cherish a love for Dorcas, chattel No. 278; and Dorcas, not having the fear of her master before her eyes, had given her heart to Jeffrey…. Jeffrey and Dorcas had told their loves, had exchanged their simple vows, and were betrothed…

            Be that as it may, Jeffrey was sold. He finds his new master; and, hat in hand, the big tears standing in his eyes, and his voice trembling with emotion, he stands before that master and tells his simple story, praying that his betrothed may be bought with him. Though his voice trembles, there is no embarrassment in his manner; his fears have killed all the bashfulness that would naturally attend such a recital to a stranger, and before unsympathetic witnesses. He feels that he is pleading for the happiness of her he loves, as well as his own, and his tale is told in a frank and manly way.

            “I loves Dorcas, young Mas’r. I loves her well and true. She says she loves me and I know she does. De good Lord knows I loves her better than I loves anyone in de wide world—never can love another woman half so well. Please buy Dorcas, Mas’r. We’re be good servants to you as long as we live. We’re be married right soon, young Mas’r, and de chillum will be healthy and strong, Mas’r, and dey’ll be good servants, too. Please buy Dorcas, young Mas’r.”

            Jeffrey then remembers that no loves and hopes of his are to enter into the bargain at all, but in the earnestness of his love he has forgotten to base his plea on other grounds till now, when he bethinks him and continues, with his voice not trembling now, save with eagerness to prove how worthy of many dollars is the maiden of his heart.

            “Young Mas’r, Dorcas prime woman—A-1 woman, sir. Tall gal, sir, long arms, strong, healthy and can do a heap of work in a day. She is one of the best rice hands on de whole plantation, worth $1,200 easy, Mas’r, and first rate bargain at that.”

            The man seems touched by Jeffrey’s last remarks, and bids him fetch out his gal. “Let’s see what she looks like.”

            Jeffrey goes into the long room, and presently returns with Dorcas, looking very sad and self-possessed, without a particle of embarrassment at the trying position in which she is placed. She makes the accustomed curtsy and stands meekly with her hands clasped across her bosom, waiting the result. The buyer regards her with a critical eye, and growls in a low voice that “the gal has good points.” Then he goes on to a more minute and careful examination of her working abilities. He turns her around, makes her stoop and walk; and then takes off her turban to look at her head, that no wound or disease be concealed by the gay handkerchief. He looks at her teeth, and feels her arms, and at last announces himself pleased with the results of his observations. Jeffrey, who has stood near, trembling with eager hope, is overjoyed and smiles for the first time. The buyer then crowns Jeffrey’s happiness by making a promise that he will buy her, if the price isn’t run up too high. And the two lovers step aside and congratulate each other on their good fortune. But Dorcas is not to be sold until the next day, and there are 24 hours of feverish expectation.

            Early next morning, Jeffrey is alert, and, hat in hand, encouraged to unusual freedom by the greatness of the stake for which he plays, he addresses every buyer, and of all who will listen he begs the boon of a word to be spoken to his new master to encourage him to buy Dorcas. And all the long morning he speaks in his homely way with all who know him that they will intercede to save his sweetheart from being sold away from him forever. No one has the heart to deny a word of promise and encouragement to the poor fellow, and, joyous with such kindness, his hopes and spirits gradually rise until he feels almost certain that the wish of his heart will be accomplished. And Dorcas, too, is smiling, for is not Jeffrey’s happiness her own?

            At last comes the trying moment, and Dorcas steps up on the stand.

            But now a most unexpected feature in the drama is for the first time unmasked: Dorcas is not to be sold alone, but with a family of four others. Full of dismay, Jeffrey looks to his master, who shakes his head for, although he might be induced to buy Dorcas alone, he has no use for the rest of the family. Jeffrey reads his doom in his master’s look, and turns away, the tears streaming down his honest face.

            So Dorcas is sold, and her toiling life is to be spent in the cotton fields of South Carolina, while Jeffrey goes to the rice plantation of the Great Swamp.

            And tomorrow, Jeffrey and Dorcas are to say their tearful farewell, and go their separate ways in life, to meet no more as mortal beings.

            In another hour I see Dorcas in the long room, sitting motionless as a statue, her head covered with a shawl. And I see Jeffrey, who goes to his new master, pulls off his hat and says: “I’se very much obliged, Mas’r, to you for tryin’ to help me. I knows you would have done it if you could. Thank you, Mas’r, thank you. But—it’s—very –hard.” And here the poor fellow breaks down entirely and walks away, covering his face with his battered hat, and sobbing like a very child.

            He is soon surrounded by a group of his colored friends, who, with an instinctive delicacy most unlooked for, stand quiet, and with uncovered heads, about him.