Slavery Archives | HistoryNet

Tall and slender in stature, with wispy blond hair that revealed a high forehead, an angular face with round eyes, a long narrow nose, full lips, and protruding ears that kept him from ever being described as handsome, Clay rose quickly in state and national politics. After being elected to the lower house of the Kentucky legislature in 1803, he briefly filled a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, successfully defended Aaron Burr against charges of conspiring to invade Spanish territory (only later did President Thomas Jefferson order Burr’s arrest for treason, but lack of evidence led to Burr’s acquittal), and became speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives. Although even tempered, his blood could sometimes run hot, and he, like other Westerners, protected his personal honor with a rigor that occasionally led him into folly. In 1807, for instance, he quarreled with a fellow legislator over Jefferson’s Embargo, and when his political opponent called him a liar, he challenged the man to a duel, a showdown that ended with both men wounding each other. It was not the only duel he fought over politics.

Starting out as a Jeffersonian Republican, he slowly drifted toward Hamiltonian domestic policies that looked to the federal government for support of economic development, a policy that would aid commerce in the West and tie the nation’s separate regions together. Clay took a moderate position on the issue of slavery (he argued for the gradual manumission of slaves and later became a founder of the American Colonization Society, a group of prominent national leaders who sought to free slaves and pay for their return to Africa) and maintained an unbridled belief that the West was the great stronghold of democracy. In 1810, he filled a vacant U.S. Senate seat once more and spent a great deal of time crying out against Great Britain’s impressment of American sailors on the high seas and its failure to comply with the stipulations of the peace treaty of 1783 that ended the Revolutionary War—in particular, British refusal to abandon their forts and outposts in the West.

The Death and Rebirth of Ashland. Clay began building his estate, Ashland, outside of Lexington, Ky., in 1809. By the time of his death in the 1850s, however, the home was in such a state of disrepair, his son James tore it down and rebuilt as close to the original as possible. The mansion has been open for public tours since the 1960s.

The manor home at Ashland, built in 1811 for renowned statesman Henry Clay, who served as a U.S. representative, senator, and thrice-defeated candidate for president.

Clay and others, who became known as War Hawks, worked diligently in Congress for a declaration of war against Great Britain. Always eloquent and authoritative, Clay’s rousing speeches prompted John Quincy Adams to remark that the Kentuckian was a “republican of the first fire.” Over his long political career, he would become known as “the greatest natural orator the world ever produced,” which, naturally was a gross exaggeration, but his effectiveness in delivering a speech was never in doubt.

Having become a household name, Clay won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, which he preferred to the “the solemn stillness of the Senate Chamber.” When he took his seat in November 1811, he was elected Speaker of the House, an achievement that revealed how politically astute he was and how popular he had become. But the War of 1812 went badly for the country, so much so that Washington, D.C., fell into enemy hands, and the British unceremoniously burned the city, leaving behind the charred stone shells of the Executive Mansion, the Capitol, and the Library of Congress. In the meantime, President James Madison asked Clay to serve as one of five American envoys—John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, James A. Bayard, Sr., and Jonathan Russell—to negotiate an end to the war with a British delegation in Ghent.

In Belgium, the ebullient Clay played in earnest, often staying out all night, gambling and drinking to excess. His wanton behavior annoyed his more staid colleagues and damaged his otherwise high political reputation. After agreeing on a peace treaty that returned the warring nations to status quo ante bellum, which meant that the document failed to address any of the issues that caused the war in the first place, Clay returned to Congress, held the speakership once again, and began to put together the political components of what would become his “American System,” arguing for a high protective tariff to encourage domestic industry, a charter for a strong national bank (that is, a continuation of Hamilton’s Bank of the United States), and government support of internal improvements (roads, canals, steamboats), all of which he saw as steps to improve American unity, prosperity, and, in particular, Western progress. Clay promoted his American System not only for what he believed would be the benefit of the entire nation but also for the sake and well-being of his constituents—Westerners whose nationalistic and patriotic propensities soared just as high as his own.

This 1834 cartoon shows Clay sewing Andrew Jackson’s mouth shut, referring to Clay’s resolution to censure Jackson for his fight against the Bank of U.S.

Decades in the Thick of Politics. This painting depicts the signing of the 1814 Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812. Clay is seated at far right.

But Clay, who was immensely popular in Kentucky and the Old Northwest, could not avoid making political enemies. Clay opposed nearly every policy advocated by President James Monroe and his administration. His forceful and capable wielding of political power as Speaker of the House earned him respect, but also the disdain of friends and foes alike. He redeemed himself, however, by playing the mediator during the political battle that erupted in Congress over the admission of Missouri into the Union.

Privately Clay opposed slavery in Missouri, but in the House of Representatives he worked selflessly and tirelessly for compromise, a sign of his Western practicality and commonsense approach to overcoming political standoffs. He did not, as many have assumed, frame the basic provisions of the compromise, but he ensured—sometimes using questionable parliamentary tactics—that the separate legislation to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state passed in the House.

Clay’s role in the Missouri question won him national acclaim. The president of the Second Bank of the United States, Langdon Cheves, lavished him with praise: “The Constitution of the Union was in danger & has been Saved.” In Missouri, the state’s new U.S. Senator, Thomas Hart Benton, called Clay the “Pacificator of ten millions of Brothers.”

His skill at forging compromise became a hallmark of his political style and character. As early as 1813, he had declared his view that “the true friend to his country, knowing that our Constitution was the work of compromise, in which interests apparently conflicting were attempted to be reconciled, aims to extinguish or allay prejudices.”

Holding Off Civil War. Clay gained aclaim for the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which helped maintain the balance between free and slave states. Despite that success, Thomas Jefferson saw the issue as a “fire bell in the night” because slavery had become a national issue.

Decades later, as he brokered the legislation in Congress that would become the Compromise of 1850, he said: “I go for honorable compromise whenever it can be made. Life itself is but a compromise between death and life, the struggle continuing throughout our whole existence, until the great Destroyer finally triumphs. All legislation, all government, all society, is formed upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these, everything is based. …Compromise is peculiarly appropriate among the members of a republic, as of one common family.”

At the same time, his adroit ability as an orator boosted his fame and his popularity. Some regarded him as the “Cicero of the West,” thus placing him within the great pantheon of exceptional ancient orators. A colleague in the House of Representatives heard Clay deliver a four-hour speech and drew a memorable portrait of the great speaker in action: “His mode of speaking is very forcible—He fixes the attention by his earnest & emphatic tones & gestures—the last of which are however far from being graceful—He frequently shrugs his shoulders, & twists his features, & indeed his whole body in the most dreadful scowls & contortions—Yet the whole seems natural; there is no appearance of acting, or theatrical effect.”

In 1821, after the close of the Sixteenth Congress, Clay resigned his seat and returned to Lexington, where his personal finances lay in considerable disarray, mostly caused by the Panic of 1819. Two years later, after reestablishing his financial solvency, Clay won reelection to the House and regained his seat as speaker. He succeeded in advancing the cause of the American System, shepherding legislation through the House for an extension of the National Road beyond Canton, Ohio, and for a new protective tariff that raised custom duties, much to the consternation of Southern opponents. Almost from the moment he returned to Washington, he began running for the presidency.

Competing in a field of four (the others were John Quincy Adams, William Crawford of Georgia, and Andrew Jackson) in the election of 1824, Clay was the odd man out—a Westerner, like Jackson, but one who lacked strong support in the Southern slave states. He came in fourth, but none of the other candidates won a majority of the electoral votes, so the election went to the House of Representatives, in adherence to the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution. As speaker, Clay decided to vote for Adams, who won on the first ballot.

Shades of Gray. Fortunately, Clay lived long enough to be photographed. This image was taken circa 1850, not long before his 1852 death.

When Adams appointed Clay Secretary of State, Jackson and his followers cried foul and accused the president and his cabinet nominee of having entered into a “corrupt bargain” before any votes were cast in the House. It is unlikely that Adams and Clay made a deal before the House could decide the presidential election, but even if no explicit words were spoken or no handshake occurred between the two men, they each understood that Clay would vote for Adams and that the latter would thus feel obliged to reward the Kentuckian for his support. Whatever the case, Clay’s acceptance of the nomination and his tenure as Secretary of State haunted him for the rest of his political career, not because he had engaged in corruption but because the public believed that he had.

All things considered, he proved to be a mediocre Secretary of State. Clay’s temperament did not fit well with the requirements of an administrative position. Despite his celebrated affability, he kept making enemies, stepping on toes, offending his allies, and rubbing nearly everyone the wrong way. At the end of Adams’s term, Clay took to the stump to campaign for the president—something that no cabinet member had ever done before. Jackson, who had once more thrown his hat into the ring, attacked Adams and Clay relentlessly, keeping the epithet of bargain and corruption alive. In the end, Jackson won the presidency in 1828, and Clay was out of a job. He returned to Ashland, picked up his law practice, and plotted his return to politics. His eye was on the presidential election of 1832. In 1831, the Kentucky legislature obliged him by electing him a U. S. Senator, a political post he no longer scorned. Clay assumed a leadership role in the National Republican Party. In Washington, he opposed Jackson with fierce determination and took a stand to support the Second Bank of the United States, which Jackson succeeding in eliminating during his first term by vetoing a bill to recharter the bank, claiming that it was an aristocratic and monarchial institution created to supply exclusive privilege and other benefits to the rich.

A Nationwide Following. This ribbon is from Clay’s 1844 presidential run as the Whig Party’s candidate. He lost to Democrat James Polk.

Cheap engravings allowed Americans to decorate their walls with images of politicians. Statesman Clay’s 1844 depiction shows him holding papers labled “American Industry,” with the Capitol in the background.

The Bank War, as the political contest came to be called, took center stage in the election of 1832. Clay ran a spirited campaign, but he could not overcome the breadth and depth of Jackson’s huge popularity. Nevertheless, Clay continued his leadership of the National Republicans, who soon changed their name to Whigs, the opposition party to King Andrew I. Even so, Jacksonian democracy ruled the day, and Clay’s attempts to push his American System in the Senate came to nothing. Instead, Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road Bill, which proposed extending the National Road into Kentucky.

In the meantime, a sectional crisis—far worse than the Bank War because it threatened the survival of the Union itself—descended onto the shoulders of the nation, this time precipitated by South Carolina’s nullification of the Tariff Act of 1828, an action taken in 1832 on the basis of John C. Calhoun’s theory of nullification, which held that a state possessed the constitutional authority to abrogate any federal law it disliked.

Well-known is President Jackson’s forceful response to South Carolina and his equally electric condemnation of the nullifiers. After asking Congress for a Force Bill to threaten South Carolina with military invasion if necessary, Jackson sought to avoid such a calamity by also requesting Congress to pass a tariff more acceptable to Southern interests. Into the breach stepped Henry Clay, the Great Pacificator. He worked behind the scenes, lining up crucial support for a compromise from Southern ultras (including Calhoun) and Northern pro-tariff manufacturers. Clay put together a compromise measure for a new tariff that would gradually lower rates over a period of nine-and-a-half years to a uniform 20 percent ad valorem. On March 1, 1833, Congress passed Clay’s compromise tariff and Jackson’s Force Bill together. The nullification crisis was over.

Clay was committed not only to the principle of compromise but also to the idea of Union. Yet, like many Westerners (including Abraham Lincoln) and Americans in general, Clay’s adherence to the Union came less from an ideological commitment to Union as a political idea and more from a visceral, emotional love for the Union as a unique thing in the world. Nowhere else in the world could such a federation of separate provinces (practically nations in their own right) be found. At the simplest level, the Union was something historical and something tangible, something to be loved with one’s heart, not with one’s head.

In the immediate aftermath of the tariff dispute and the consummation of the compromise Tariff of 1833, Henry Clay’s reputation soared even higher than before. But, as the Age of Jackson advanced, despite all the disagreements over tariffs, slavery, antislavery, and banks, Americans were nevertheless gaining more sophistication about how they perceived their political leaders and greater understanding of the forces that motivated men like Henry Clay. For the applause he received, many wondered just how much of him was selflessly devoted to the Union and how much was simply lust for political distinction and personal aggrandizement. To some, he was the “Savior of the Union.” To others, he was “a most precious scoundrel.” It is hardly surprising that Clay’s greatest popularity could be found in the West, among people who thought of him as their own. To Westerners, Henry Clay was “the Star of the West.”

Kentucky Couple. Clay and his wife, Lucretia. She successfully ran the Ashland household during her husband’s frequent absences, and also raised their 11 children. Her competentcy at home allowed Clay to spend time in Washington.

Clay wore the finely woven straw hat during hot Southern summers.

Westerners set great store by him, relied on him, looked to him to keep their section advancing toward a bright horizon of progress and protect the Union from being torn to pieces by pro-slavery apologists and antislavery proponents. Over and over again, his supporters in the West nominated him as a presidential candidate, but that prize eluded him, much to his own disappointment and that of those who loved him so dearly. His bad luck on the national political scene, however, never discouraged his dedicated followers.

It did, however, delight his enemies. “Harry the Available,” they called him derisively, but Clay put up a good front and continued in the Senate to serve Kentucky, his region, and the Union as best he could. Westerners found comfort in Clay the man and Clay the legend. At times in Congress, he was arrogant, cruel, domineering, jealous, and irritable, but his adherents in the West heard little about his less attractive traits unless they happened to read an anti-Whig newspaper, which they knew already could never be trusted to tell the truth. On the contrary, Westerners trusted Clay and never believed what his opponents might say about him. To them, Henry Clay was “the help and the hope of the West.”

In the years that followed Clay’s brilliant success in 1833, Westerners like Abraham Lincoln watched him display his formidable sagacity and shrewdness in the political arena and studied him as a political exemplar, the man in public office most worthy of emulation. In time, Abraham Lincoln came not only to admire Clay and his Whig politics, but held his fellow Kentuckian in such high esteem that he called the Great Compromiser the “beau ideal of a statesman.” Clay, said Lincoln, was someone he had supported “all my humble life.” Lincoln was not alone in his sentiments. Lincoln never met Clay, but he did see him deliver a speech once in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1847.

But Clay’s great powers could not last forever. At home, his beloved mansion, Ashland, began to crumble when its bricks became so porous one could stick a finger in them. The implacable deterioration of Ashland was a fitting metaphor for what Clay was witnessing, experiencing, and trying to remedy as his country drifted through the decades, suffering its own share of sudden fissures, impermanent mends, and unrelenting declension—all the result of the South’s ceaseless demands for political accommodations that would protect slavery forever, even while the turmoil over the peculiar institution weakened the ties that once had held the nation firmly together in a Union that many Americans, North and South, East and West, truly hoped would be perpetual.

After Clay’s unsuccessful attempt to obtain passage of the Compromise of 1850, a single piece of legislation—called an “Omnibus Bill”—with eight disparate parts, he let Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a Democrat, push the compromise through Congress as separate bills. For a short time, the Compromise of 1850 quieted the Southern extremists who had begun shouting for secession. In the meantime, Clay grew weak and ill. Death, rather than Life, had caught up with the Great Compromiser. On June 29, 1852, Clay died of tuberculosis in a Washington hotel. He was 75. With him—although no one could see it at the time— the Whig Party died, too.

No Compromise with Death. This remarkable photograph shows Clay’s hearse on a Lexington street. Black men wearing mourning sashes, perhaps some of the 120 people enslaved by Clay, lead the team of eight horses. Their presence an irony, as Clay brokered compromises to prolong slavery’s existence.

On July 6, Lincoln delivered a lengthy eulogy on Clay at the Hall of Representatives in the Illinois State Capitol. For this memorial gathering, Springfield businesses were closed, citizens stopped their normal routines, “and everything announced the general sorrow at the great national bereavement.” In Clay, Lincoln found the essence of America in his rise from poor family circumstances to one of the greatest political leaders in the country. “Mr. Clay’s lack of a more perfect early education, however it may be regretted generally, teaches at least one profitable lesson; it teaches that in this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” Needless to say, Lincoln could have been describing himself and his own path in life. For all his great contributions during his lifetime, said Lincoln, the nation should be more grateful for how Clay stood firm as a defender of the Union: “In all the great questions which have agitated the country, and particularly in those great and fearful crises, the Missouri Question—the Nullification Question, and the late slavery question, as connected with the newly acquired territory, involving and endangering the stability of the Union, he has been the leading and most conspicuous part.”

In Kentucky today, Clay is less remembered than he should be and less a household name than Senator Mitch McConnell. Kentucky’s other U.S. Senator, Rand Paul, takes pride in occupying Henry Clay’s Senate desk. But even Daniel Boone, never accomplished as much as Clay did. He served his constituents well by elevating Kentucky’s political prestige on the national stage. At the same time, he served his country with love and fidelity, nobly earning another nickname, the “Savior of the Union.” He was—and remains—one of the greatest U.S. Senators this nation has ever had, this man who deeply loved the Union, this Henry Clay, the Star of the West.

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History Emeritus at Western Kentucky University. He has written often for American History.

Clay’s Slavery Compromise

No matter how passionate Henry Clay felt about the Union, his was a Union in which whites alone enjoyed the blessings of liberty. But Clay’s emotion for the Union was a white man’s concupiscence. “I am,” pronounced Clay, “no friend of slavery. The searcher of all hearts knows that every pulsation of mine beats high and strong in the cause of civil liberty. . . . But I prefer the liberty of my own country to that of other people; and the liberty of my own race to that of any other race. The liberty of the descendants of Africa in the United State is incompatible with the safety and liberty of the European descendants.” Clay preferred to dream about colonization, although as a practical measure no one could afford to buy the enslaved their freedom and cover the costs of shipping them to Liberia, Africa.

Ships hauling formerly enslaved people arrive in Monrovia, Liberia, 1832.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

Judge Pauses Removal of Confederate Memorial at Arlington Cemetery

Claire Barrett — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 18:52:26 +0000

At the 11th hour on Monday, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va. issued a temporary restraining order to halt workers’ efforts — which had begun several hours prior — in removing the controversial Confederate memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

The memorial remains one of the nation’s most prominent monuments to the Confederacy on public land and has been criticized “for its sanitized depiction of slavery,” writes The New York Times.

The removal, which was set to be completed by the end of the week, comes at the tail end of efforts across the United States for the past several years to remove symbols, flags and monuments honoring slaveholders and Confederate leaders.

According to NPR, a group called Defend Arlington, which is affiliated with a group called Save Southern Heritage Florida, brought their suit before U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston Jr. on Sunday.

The group is suing the Department of Defense, arguing that the “The removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker and impede the Memorial’s eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.”

They were granted the injunction by accusing the Pentagon of rushing its decision and circumventing federal law by not issuing an environmental impact statement. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

Fourteen years after Congress authorized Confederate remains to be reinterred at Arlington in 1900, the statue was dedicated by President Woodrow Wilson and funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy — an organization that helped to largely forge the Lost Cause ideology.

According to Karen L. Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the statues around the United States didn’t appear in great numbers for more than 30 years after the war. Founded in 1894, “an early objective of the UDC was the erection of monuments as tangible signs of pride and appreciation,” Cox writes.

As such, during the early 20th century, more than 700 monuments were erected across the South before World War II.

The 1914 Arlington unveiling, however, served as a watershed moment for the UDC. By allowing the burial of Confederate soldiers in Arlington and “accepting the monument to honor them, the federal government had fulfilled the Daughters’ conditions for reconciliation,” Cox posits.

The bronze and granite memorial stands in what is now known as section 16, towering over the remains of the Confederate soldiers buried there.

Last week more than 40 Republican members of Congress signed a letter demanding that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III halt the removal, the NYT reported. They argued that the memorial did not commemorate the Lost Cause ideology but rather the “reconciliation and national unity” between North and South.

Others, however, find the 32-foot pedestal more controversial. The 32-foot pedestal, designed by Confederate soldier Moses Ezekiel, features a bronzed statue of a beautiful woman that represents the South, standing over a frieze of figures that include two African Americans: “an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war,” the cemetery website reads.

Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been steadfast in his opposition to the removal but had secured a plan for the Virginia Military Institute — where Ezekiel was once a cadet — to take ownership of the statue and place it at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, writes The Washington Post.

The debate over “heritage, not hate” continues to play out on the national stage, yet, as David W. Blight, professor of American history at Yale University, tells HistoryNet, “History and memory are not the same thing. History is based on reasoned research. Memory is born of groups and forged in myriad ways; passed down generation to generation, it tends to be more emotional and sacred.

“Heritage” can make us want to own a past, a story, a place against all other possible narratives or interpretations. A person using a symbol in public or in official ways must understand how the public views their actions. There is always going to be more memory than there is history, but those of us who are devoted to the craft of history have a deep responsibility to push back against memory even as we genuinely respect its power.”

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

A Forgotten ‘Trail of Tears’

Mike Coppock — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 14:00:00 +0000

At times American history—and especially American Indian history—takes a dive down the rabbit hole with its twists and contradictions. The 1842 Cherokee Slave Revolt is one of those rabbit holes. The idea the Cherokee, or any tribe, owned slaves is not that alien a concept. For centuries before the arrival of Europeans on the continent American Indians had been enslaving captive enemies, and many tribes continued this practice well into the 1800s, much to the dismay of a paternal U.S. federal government. Each tribe had differing ideas on how to treat captives. Some regarded them, particularly young ones, as extended family members; others considered them disposable property. On an 1880 trip to Alaska with naturalist John Muir, Protestant Missionary S. Hall Young met one Huna Tlingit subchief who confessed to having ritually sacrificed two of his slaves, a husband and wife, in a bid to halt an advancing glacier.

But the slaves at the center of the 1842 revolt were black men, women and children working Cherokee plantations and farms in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The breakout came less than four years after the last group of Cherokees had walked the Trail of Tears from their traditional homeland in Georgia to hinterlands of the southern Great Plains. President Andrew Jackson had ordered the forced march of some 16,500 Cherokees, a quarter or more of whom died en route (estimates range upward from 4,000 to as many as 8,000 fatalities). To transport such a vast number of people federal troops used 645 wagons, 5,000 horses and oxen, and a steamboat. The cost of the Cherokee removal came to $1,263,338 and 38 cents, which the government unabashedly deducted from the $4.5 million in federal funds promised to the tribe as reimbursement for its seized homelands.

Yet, in the midst of this human tragedy, another human tragedy was taking place. The Cherokees, for all their personal suffering, dragged along with them nearly 1,600 black slaves—the mobile human property that had been working their plantations and farms. En route to Indian Territory these slaves hunted game, gathered firewood and performed other chores, in many ways softening the blow of the trek for their Indian masters. Yet neither the Cherokee Nation nor the U.S. government recorded how many of the slaves perished en route.

Joining the 1838 exodus of Cherokees from their tribal homeland in Georgia to reservation lands in Indian Territory were nearly 1,600 black slaves who had been working their plantations and farms in the South and would remain in bondage on the Plains. Some of the latter are depicted in the above work.

Cherokee Plantations

The seeds by which the Cherokees would imitate their white neighbors had been laid years earlier in the wake of continuous warfare between them and first the British and then American forces. The wars left Cherokee towns in ruin and disarray, while a primary source of meat for the tribe, the whitetail deer population, crashed due to overhunting.

George Washington had evinced sympathy for American Indians since his youth as a surveyor on the Virginia frontier. As newly elected president of a nascent nation, he sought to work the concepts of tribal sovereignty and Indian assimilation into his economic plans. As tribal chiefs noted, Washington was a hard bargainer who seemed to covet their land, but not all of it. He also had a reputation among the chiefs as a fair man, and a generation of tribal males grew up with a “George” or “George Washington” in their names in honor of the man.

Washington took direct action to aid the Cherokees. His administration assisted in the rebuilding of their towns and sent agricultural agents to show the Cherokees how to successfully manage domestic animals and a variety of cash crops.

What changed the dynamics of the Southern economy was Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop to process. But Whitney’s invention eased the labor costs of cotton production. American growers duly increased their crop yield to satisfy European demands for cotton, and the resulting industry boom in the South lasted well beyond the Civil War.

Like fellow Southerners, Cherokee growers went for the money crop in a big way. They increased their tillage, then bought additional black slaves to satisfy the corresponding demand for labor. Soaring profits in turn led more than 200 Cherokees to start their own plantations.

With the influx of black slaves into their culture, the Cherokees in 1819 passed strict codes to forbid intermarriage with slaves, regulate the buying and selling of slaves, set punishments for runaways and prohibit slaves from owning property. Another period Cherokee law called for a fine of $15 against any master who allowed a slave to buy or sell alcohol.

GET HISTORY’S GREATEST TALES—RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX

Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday.

There were differences between the Cherokee plantations and those of Southern whites. Cherokee plantations had fewer slaves for their size, and the Cherokees themselves worked alongside their slaves in the fields. Their slaves were also permitted to grow food for their own consumption.

Cotton and tobacco were less than ideal crops, as they drained farmland of nutrients. That sparked an increasing demand for virgin land, in turn leading to the rapid settlement of what became Alabama and Mississippi. Before long Southern whites were eyeing the large tracts of uncultivated Cherokee lands immediately to their west. That the Cherokees also had black slaves infuriated whites trying to start their own plantations and farms. After all, slaves were a status symbol denoting economic success.

Starting with Thomas Jefferson, presidents looked for ways to reinterpret Washington’s concept of tribal sovereignty. In 1802 President Jefferson signed a compact with Georgia, paying the state $1.25 million for its western two-thirds (present-day Alabama and Mississippi) and committing the U.S. government to obtain title through purchase to all Indian lands within Georgia itself. No longer would federal power be the shield for tribes it had been. Jefferson then created government trading posts on Indian lands, extending unlimited credit to tribal leaders. Eventually the federal government demanded repayment of such debts in the form of more tribal land. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson viewed the newly acquired region as a place Eastern tribes might be relocated. James Madison continued that policy. James Monroe initially sought to revert to Washington’s vision of relations between whites and Indian societies, though by his last year in office even he was calling for “Indian removal.” John Quincy Adams was likewise torn between the policies of assimilation and outright removal.

Then came the 1828 election of slave-owning Southern plantation owner and land speculator Andrew Jackson. In the colonial era Jackson had fought the Cherokee and every other major tribe in the Southeast and had personally profited from the sale of seized Cherokee lands. In 1830, at President Jackson’s urging, the Indian Removal Act passed the Senate 28–19 and the House of Representatives 101–97. In vain Cherokee leaders repeatedly visited the White House to ask Jackson to safeguard their property rights, including those governing their black slaves. Though the respective parties still needed to negotiate an actual removal treaty, most Cherokees saw the handwriting on the wall. Some 600 moved west to future Indian Territory on their own. Other Cherokees sought refuge in east Texas, in February 1836 signing a treaty with President Sam Houston, president of the newly independent republic. By the time the U.S. Congress ratified the Treaty of New Echota with the Cherokee Nation that spring, the tribe had split into four component bands.

Tensions Rise

Despite tensions between the Cherokees who had preceded most others to Indian Territory and those who later arrived on the Trail of Tears, the tribe as a whole rebounded surprisingly fast. The Cherokee Nation set up schools, a court system and law enforcement as individuals set to work establishing farms.

While most Cherokees lived on farmsteads in simple log cabins, more than 300 families started Southern-style plantations, living in two-story mansions and growing cotton using black slaves. The plantations ranged in size from 600 to 1,000 acres and put to work some 25 to 50 slaves. The Cherokees cultivated wheat, corn, hemp and tobacco and raised cattle and horses. Cotton remained king, however, and by 1840 the nation, thanks to its plantations, boasted a higher standard of living than that of neighboring Arkansas, Kansas or Missouri.

More than 300 of the Cherokee families transplanted to Indian Territory picked up where they left off with Southern-style plantations of up to 1,000 acres on which several dozen slaves labored in the cotton fields. While the standard of living among such plantation owners was high, slaves still crammed into shacks like that above.

But tensions in the nation were on the rise. For one, it had become common knowledge among the Cherokee slaves that Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829. A decade later incoming Texas President Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar drove the Cherokees from his republic. While most fled north into the Cherokee Nation as refugees, others crossed into Mexico. The number of blacks in the nation was also on the rise, not only through the purchase of additional slaves, but also with the arrival of runaway black slaves seeking refuge. Like their Southern white counterparts, however, the Cherokees only responded with a stricter slave code.

Adding to tensions was the manifest disparity between the lot of Cherokee slaves and those held by the Seminole. Seminoles passing through the Cherokee Nation in those years were technically captives from the ongoing Seminole wars in Florida en route to federally allotted lands farther west. Shipped up the Arkansas River from New Orleans, many disembarked at the Cherokee trading post of Webbers Falls to await transportation west. Striding down the riverboat gangplanks alongside their masters were flamboyantly dressed black Seminole slaves, many of whom bore arms. For Cherokee slaves witnessing their arrival, the blurred line between master and slave among the Seminoles must have been galling.

In the summer of 1842, given the rising prosperity the Cherokee Nation was enjoying, Sequoyah—the creator of the Cherokee alphabet, then in his 70s—led a small party into Mexico to find and return home with those Cherokees who had fled from Texas across the Rio Grande. He hoped for the unification of his people. (As it turned out, Sequoyah wouldn’t return home; he died in Mexico of a respiratory infection the next year.)

Whether inspired by the sight of the black Seminole slaves or the reawakened siren song of freedom in Mexico, slaves on the Cherokee plantations around Webbers Falls reached their threshold that fall. In years past black slaves had fled from their Cherokee masters back East and in Indian Territory, but only singly or in pairs. Dozens now waited for a signal.

Daring Escape

In the predawn darkness of November 15 the slaves on neighboring plantations rose quietly, made their way to their respective masters’ houses and overseers’ quarters, and barred the doors from the outside to ensure their occupants did not have an easy time getting out. Then they gathered at a predetermined rallying point for the planned breakout for Mexico.

Joseph Vann

Most escapees hailed from the plantation of mixed-race Cherokee Joseph Vann. In 1834, after being evicted from his family estate in Georgia, Vann had established a large plantation in southeast Tennessee. Then, in 1837, a year before the main Cherokee removal, he preemptively moved to the newly relocated Cherokee Nation, settling on promising ground around Webbers Falls. On the backs of labor provided by 200 slaves, the Vann family prospered, ultimately holding title to thousands of acres ranging from the Kansas border to the southern boundary of the Cherokee Nation. The rich soil yielded consistently profitable crops of cotton and corn, which Vann plowed back into his ever-expanding holdings of land and slaves. By 1842 he had 300 slaves and even owned a steamboat, named Lucy Walker after a favorite thoroughbred.

On leaving their rallying point, the escapees made their way to Webbers Falls, where they broke into a store for supplies, weapons and ammunition. With the coming dawn many lost their nerve and scattered into the surrounding woodlands. The remaining 20 men, women and children headed southwest into the neighboring Creek Nation on stolen horses and mules. A few were riding Vann’s blooded racehorses.

Meanwhile, back on their plantations, the bewildered Cherokees finally broke out of their lodgings. There was no sign of their slaves. Mounted owners and overseers were soon scouring the countryside. As the patrols drove their wayward property from the woods individually and in small groups, it became apparent many were missing. On questioning the slaves, the Cherokees discovered the fugitives had struck out for Mexico.

Miles to the southwest, soon after the runaway Cherokee slaves crossed into the Creek Nation, 15 slaves from the Bruner and Marshall plantations joined them in the bid for freedom, swelling the party’s number to 35. On their heels galloped some 40 armed Cherokees with dogs, soon joined by a smaller party of Creeks equally determined to retrieve their property.

The combined Cherokee-Creek posse caught up with the fugitives in the Choctaw Nation, 10 miles south of the Canadian River. Spotting their approaching pursuers across the prairie, the runaways sheltered in a buffalo wallow big enough to hold them and their horses. Though few of the slaves had ever fired a gun, they decided to fight it out. In the ensuing skirmish the posse managed to kill two fugitives and recapture a dozen others. Fortunately for the remaining 21 escaped slaves, however, the firefight convinced the Cherokees and Creeks to turn back for reinforcements.

With no time to savor their victory, the fugitives continued their race south for Mexico.

Though Cherokees and enslaved blacks had been forcibly removed from their respective homelands, Cherokees exhibited little empathy for their slaves. Tribal plantation owners worked alongside slaves in the fields, but runaways were still considered property to be returned.

Pursuit and Capture

The next day, 15 miles from the battle site, the fugitives happened across a pair of slave hunters wholly unaware of the breakout from the Cherokee Nation. James Edwards, who was white, and Billy Wilson, a Delaware, were transporting eight black captives—one man, two women and five children—belonging to a white man named Thompson who had married into the Choctaw Nation. In their own bid for freedom the Choctaw slaves had bolted west, hoping to link up with a Plains tribe, when another white in the nation spotted them and told Edwards and Wilson.

In a reversal of roles, however, the Cherokee and Creek runaways demanded Edwards and Wilson turn over their Choctaw captives. When the pair refused, the fugitives shot them. Though the five additional children would slow their progress, the party welcomed the Choctaws to join them on the road to Mexico. They would need to hurry, as their pursuers were regrouping.

On November 17 the Cherokee National Council authorized a company of tribal militiamen under the command of Captain John Drew to pursue, arrest and deliver the fugitive slaves to Fort Gibson, a U.S. Army post 20 miles north of Webbers Falls. The council also passed a resolution absolving the nation of any liability to the plantation owners if their runaway slaves were killed while resisting arrest. The Cherokee treasury would recompense Drew’s men for supplies and ammunition, while the commander at Fort Gibson loaned the captain 25 pounds of gunpowder.

John Drew

Captain Drew left Webbers Falls on November 21 with 87 well-armed militiamen. Arriving at the skirmish site in the Choctaw Nation on November 26, they picked up the fugitives’ trail and soon found the bodies of slave hunters Edwards and Wilson.

Two days later the Cherokee militia finally caught up with the runaways some 7 miles north of the Red River—the border between the United States and the Republic of Texas. Had they managed to cross it, the fugitives still would have had to traverse the expanse of slave-holding Texas to reach Mexico. But they had already run out of supplies and were starving.

The exhausted, dispirited fugitives offered no resistance. They must have picked up additional runaways, as Drew tallied 31 men, women and children, and two men off hunting remained at large. The militia and their captives reached Webbers Falls on December 7. The Cherokee National Council ordered five of the slaves held at Fort Gibson pending investigation into the killings of Edwards and Wilson, and two were tried for murder, though their cases appear to have been dismissed on technicalities. The Choctaw slaves were held until Cherokee authorities had determined Thompson’s claim to them.

The remaining Cherokee slaves were turned over to Vann, who put the runaways to work shoveling coal on his growing fleet of steamboats plying the Arkansas, Mississippi and Ohio rivers. In an instance of poetic justice, two years later a boiler explosion on one of his steamboats killed Vann.

Not the Last Struggle for Freedom

The 1842 revolt inspired other slaves to seek their freedom. Four years later Cherokee plantation owner Lewis Ross, a brother of Principal Chief John Ross, discovered his slaves had been collecting and hiding guns and ammunition. By 1851 nearly 300 blacks had attempted escape from plantations owned by members of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole). Most fugitives tried for Mexico, taking their chances with the slave hunters of Texas, while others headed north for the unorganized territory that in 1854 would become Kansas Territory, where slavery was prohibited.

True to form, the Cherokees reacted with stricter slave codes, expelled freedman from the nation and established a slave-catching or “rescue” company to prevent additional losses. Prior to the revolt such units comprised non-Cherokee slave hunters, like the pair killed by the fugitives in 1842. That changed in the wake of the revolt, as economically struggling Cherokees realized the money to be made catching and returning runaway slaves. The nation authorized them to charge any ammunition and supplies used in their hunts to the tribal treasury.

By the 1861 onset of the Civil War the Five Civilized Tribes held more than 8,000 black slaves, representing 14 percent of the population of Indian Territory. Members of the Cherokee Nation alone held 4,600 slaves.

An oddity in the Cherokee slave code held that blacks with even a trace of tribal ancestry were considered quasi members of the nation and thus granted certain rights, such as marriage into the tribe and the possibility of eventual citizenship. In 1847, when slavers kidnapped two such mixed-blood girls—whose father was Cherokee and mother was black—and took them across the border into Missouri, newspaper editorials within the nation demanded their return. Cherokee Sheriff Charles Landrum of the Delaware District took it on himself to enter Missouri with two deputies and rescue the girls before they could be sold. The Cherokee National Council financially reimbursed Landrum and his men for their daring “invasion” of Missouri.

Other blacks enslaved by the Cherokees weren’t as fortunate, at least until another president emancipated them on paper and hundreds of thousands of Americans spilled one another’s blood to affirm that proclamation.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

For further reading on the topic author Mike Coppock recommends The Cherokee Nation: A History, by Robert J. Conley, and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Miles Tiya.

Follow in the Footsteps of Firebrand John Brown

Gordon Berg — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 14:03:39 +0000

John Brown’s body had almost no time to molder in the grave before the first biography of his life appeared in 1861. Since then he has been the subject of full-length biographies, novels, poems, plays, songs, even an opera. So is there anything new to say about the abolitionist firebrand?

For readers interested only in the history-altering raid and not in the complicated life that led Brown to the picturesque town at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, this detail-filled and briskly written story adds rich context to an oft-told tale. Of course, readers have to get past Dennis Frye’s “Twilight Zone” foreword, an eerily atmospheric sense of place that would make Rod Serling envious. But Frye, the longtime National Park Service historian at Harpers Ferry, understands the power of the landscape and Gilot and Pawlak build on the symbiotic relationship between Brown, the raid, and the town, which culminated in the 36-hour occupation that failed to free any slaves but helped spark the irrepressible conflict that exploded 18 months later.

The authors quickly dispose of Brown’s early life and his bloody exploits in Kansas. They explain that Brown carefully chose Harpers Ferry not merely because it was a transportation hub and the site of a federal arsenal with its thousands of arms. “The mountainous topography of the South Mountain range and the Allegheny Mountains farther to the west,” they write, “offered Brown the ideal terrain to launch his ‘lightning raids’. Believing he could destabilize the slave market in the border South, Brown hoped economics would prove more lethal to slavery than the sword.” Throughout the summer of 1859, Brown’s “army” arrived by ones and twos, slipping by at night into the nondescript farmhouse Brown had leased about seven miles above Harpers Ferry. Gilot and Pawlak build their narrative with a sense of anticipation and dread that must have prevailed among the raiders as they awaited details of Brown’s intentions.

Brown’s audacious plans called for “slipping into Harpers Ferry and holding the town and government facilities while slaves and hostages were gathered. From there, they would strike plantations, gathering slaves and retreating back into the mountains, the sort of lightning strikes that had long appealed to Brown.” Not all in his irregular army agreed; even his three sons and daughter Annie opposed it. But after a vote was taken, all decided to stay with Brown and his plan, finally launched on October 16, 1859.

The book thankfully includes a number of fascinating anecdotes and a detailed timeline, and some historical myths are dispelled (e.g., Brown kissing a slave child on his way to the gallows). A feature seen in other Savas Beatie “Emerging Civil War” monographs, there is an excellent walking tour of Harpers Ferry as well as a self-directed driving tour of pertinent nearby places, enabling modern-day enthusiasts to follow in the footsteps of Brown and his raiders from their initial hideout to the gallows in Charles Town, where Brown and six of his followers were hanged for treason on December 2, 1859. (Ten raiders died of wounds incurred during the abortive raid, and five escaped.) This is a satisfactory examination of the incursion that sparked the Second American Revolution.

John Brown’s Raid

Harpers Ferry and the Coming of the Civil War
By Jon-Erik M. Gilot and Kevin R. Pawlak, Savas Beatie, 2023

get it on amazon

If you buy something through our site, we might earn a commission.

Reconstruction Failed. Why?

Carl Zebrowski — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 13:00:00 +0000

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?

Rich Condon.

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

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.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

Lincoln in His Own Words: The 16th President’s Musings About ‘negro equality’

Ross E. Heller — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:30:00 +0000

Capt. James N. Brown

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.

The Great Debates. Lincoln gained great fame for his deft verbal jousting with Stephen Douglas in their 1858 Illinois debates.

Abraham Lincoln’s note.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

In Dealing with Pro-Slavery Border States, This Union Colonel Tested Federal Limits When It Came to Emancipation

Daniele Celano — Mon, 01 May 2023 12:37:00 +0000

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.

Besides his time in Kentucky with the 92nd and later with Sherman’s armies, Colonel Smith D. Atkins fought at Fort Donelson and Shiloh.

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

After Being Shown a Slave Collar, This Author Was Inspired to Cycle the Underground Railroad

Melissa A. Winn — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 12:30:00 +0000

The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in the open: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, retired climate scientist and author David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad. On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad covers his odyssey. It’s a comprehensive and engaging look at the history of the places he stopped at along the way, but it’s also a personal journal, documenting the journey of self-discovery both physical and emotional that happens on a bike ride of a lifetime.

What inspired you to write a book about the Underground Railroad?

I am a climate scientist and have written two books about that. I also like to ride my bike. While riding through the small town of Vandalia, Ill., I stopped at a museum and a woman there handed me a heavy brass ring and asked, “Do you know what this is? It’s a slave collar.” She said Vandalia had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and that’s what got my curiosity going, the idea that I was crossing this invisible river where people on the run were coming up from the South. The book is based on a couple of rides over a few years. On the Eastern ride I followed Harriet Tubman’s route. She was enslaved in Cambridge, Md., and ultimately took her family to a little chapel in the town of St. Catharines, Ontario. That route took me through all kinds of familiar places that were not really very familiar to me—New York and Philadelphia. Almost like the undersides of cities, and where these formerly enslaved people were on the run.

The second part of the book is about riding from New Orleans, which was the predominant center of the slave trading market, to Lake Erie and a lot of the western routes of the Underground Railroad.

How was riding the route on a bike different than traveling it by car?

I thought that I could get closer to the experience of formerly enslaved people by being on a bike. A bike gives you the sense for the terrain. When I was riding along the Ohio River, I got the sense of how scary it could be for the formerly enslaved people, because the slave hunters were on both banks. But once you get up in the hills above the Ohio, there was shelter. There were Quaker towns, safe houses, and Underground Railroad houses. Being on a bike can give you some kind of a feeling of what these people were going through. Of course, I was also riding during the daytime, in safety, with Gore-Tex and nice gears and spokes. You also bump into people on the bike and conversations happen. There was once when I was coming up a real steep hill in Kentucky and I was watching a squall come across a field. A guy from a nearby house says to me, “Come on inside quick!” And he gave me a whole story about working in coal mines in Kentucky. Those kind of things happen.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

What was it like for you to tackle the history of somebody so mythologized as Harriet Tubman?

What’s interesting is that Harriet Tubman is very well-known now. She’s going to be on the $20 bill! But at the time, she was a wraith. Quite intentionally she made herself as close to invisible as she could. She’s a very tiny woman, but prodigiously strong. In one of her more famed escapes in Troy, N.Y., she disguises herself as the mother of the man she is trying to free. She gets into the marshall’s office and grabs him and yells to this mob outside, “Come on! Let’s get him!” And they manage to free him. At the time, the other conductors are amazed by her. She shows up in Philadelphia with another half dozen people that she’s brought up through Maryland and Delaware. She has all kinds of ingenious escapes along the way, including one in Wilmington, Del., where she smuggles freedom seekers out past slave hunters in a wagon of bricks. It was very easy to find her route in Maryland and Delaware, but after Philadelphia it took a lot of research. And she took many routes. We have all these digital footprints today, and you can’t go anywhere that somebody can’t track you. But even now people in places that are known Underground Railroad safehouses may say, “We think she was here, but we don’t know.” There’s this element even now that one of the most famous Americans is a ghost.

Did you have specific stories or sites you wanted to cover?

One of the references I found was a book in the Library of Congress by Charles Blockson, one of the eminent scholars of Black history. His book had a driving tour of Harriet Tubman sites. So, I thought, “Okay. This is where I need to go.” Then there were particular places along the way, especially in upstate New York, Albany, the Myers Residence. We know that Harriet Tubman stayed there. In Peterboro, N.Y., there’s the National Abolition Hall of Fame built around Gerrit Smith, a prominent sponsor of the Underground Railroad and of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. It was fascinating to talk to the people who are keeping that history alive.

What was it like to tackle such a difficult subject matter as slavery?

You have to approach it with a certain amount of humility, especially from an old white guy looking at this subject. You have to be careful talking about the Underground Railroad. Best estimates are about 20,000 people traveled it to freedom, but when you compare it with the number of enslaved who were moved in the forced transport from the Upper South of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, the old tobacco plantations, to the cotton industry in the Deep South, there is a huge migration that takes place, on the order of a million people. There are places right around Washington, D.C., that are the center of this—for example in Alexandria, Va., the Franklin and Armfield firm, which some refer to as the Amazon of slave trading. People would be marched down the Shenandoah Valley, through Tennessee and onto the Natchez Trace and you can still see the signs of that.

One of the visuals we picked for the cover of the book is a photograph of the Old Trace from Nashville, Tenn., to Natchez, Miss., and it’s like a U-cut through the forest. There were thousands and thousands of chained feet that made that trek. I was riding the Natchez Trace Parkway, which is a beautiful road, and off to the side you see stretches of the Old Trace and you realize that those were people’s chained feet that formed that cut. So, the history bumps right up against you.

It’s not just a history book. It’s a travel journal. Tell us a little about the journey.

Well, I’ve done a lot of long-distance bike rides, and you get into a certain rhythm. People say it must be really hard, and because we have all our gear on the bike, it’s a pretty heavy load. I tell people, I have a job where I only have to work five hours a day. If I do 12 miles an hour and I ride for five hours, I have my 60 miles for the day. I would try to map out those days and end up someplace interesting.

A day’s ride is almost independent of the weather. Big electrical storms, yes, you need to get out of those. But otherwise, big winds, and heat, you have to ride through it. Some of the most interesting riding is in urban areas you know pretty well. Coming out of Philadelphia into New Jersey, there’s a huge suspension bridge. Bridges are windy and that was a lot different to ride on a bike than in a car. Also—the places you hear bad things about, you find out they’re not necessarily true. I had heard all kinds of bad things about Camden, N.J. It had a high murder rate, but it has changed a bit. It may not have fancy bike paths and such, but once again, we met people along the way, that wanted to help us on our way.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

Was ‘Bleeding Kansas’ Really That Violent?

Jerry D. Morelock — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 16:58:21 +0000

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.

In 1856 John Brown and his sons murdered pro-slavery settlers using swords.

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).

Newsman Horace Greeley hyped the Bleeding Kansas conflict.

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.”

Abolitionists held a rally on the day of John Brown’s execution.

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.

Slave-holders, fearing that escaped enslaved people would flee to a “free” Kansas, spread racist pamphlets.

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].”

During the conflict fiery articles roused supporters to action.

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

subscribe now!

Will Smith’s ‘Emancipation’ Exposes the Corruption Wrought by Slavery

Gordon Berg — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 14:00:00 +0000

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.

Will Smith in “Emancipation. (Courtesy of Apple TV+)

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.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

Book Review: ‘Beyond Slavery’s Shadow’: See How Free Blacks Survived and Fought Back

James Baresel — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 14:30:00 +0000

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

get it on amazon

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

Love Mac and Cheese? You Can Thank the Slave of a Founding Father for It

Claire Barrett — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 21:46:33 +0000

If you’re an American who has ever indulged in a hot, delectable, creamy, comforting side of macaroni and cheese, you can thank the slave of a Founding Father for bringing the dish to America.

While historians cite the 13th century Italian cookbook “Liber de Coquina” as the first written and recognized macaroni and cheese recipe — a dish called de lasanis — the classic American side item arrived by way of France — courtesy of James Hemings.

Born in 1765, Hemings was the sixth child born to Elizabeth Hemings, an enslaved woman, and owner John Wayles. Wayles, the father-in-law of Thomas Jefferson, fathered six of Hemings’ children — making them half brothers and sisters of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, according to Monticello Magazine.

Upon Jefferson’s marriage to Martha, Hemings and his siblings —including Sally Hemings — became property of the Founding Father to be.

Not only could Hemings read and write — a rarity for the times — he was also an accomplished chef.

GET HISTORY’S GREATEST TALES—RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX

Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Wednesday.

So, when Jefferson was appointed Minister to France from 1784 to 1789, the notorious Francophile and “foodie” brought along the 19-year-old Hemings with the intention of having him train among the Parisian elite.

According to the White House Historical Association, “French chefs were very expensive to employ, and Jefferson’s costs regularly outpaced his income. While Jefferson may have been short on cash, he did have an abundant supply of readily available enslaved labor, bound to serve him for life. To save money, Jefferson employed French chefs to train several enslaved members of the Monticello community in the delicate art of French cookery.”

This included, of course, what we now consider mac and cheese.

From Italy to the rest of Western Europe, the widespread culinary exchange happening in courts throughout Europe at the time morphed the Italian dish into an altered version that made its way to England, called macrows, and France. It’s disputed whether Jefferson first discovered the creamy pasta dish in Italy or France, but what isn’t under dispute is his love for it.

In 1807, Jefferson purchased 80 pounds of parmesan cheese and 60 pounds of Naples-based macaroni. His last grocery order, placed five months before his death in 1826, included “Maccaroni 112 ¾ lb,” according to EatingWell. (Despite such large quantities of simple carbohydrates and dairy, Jefferson did not, in fact, die of a heart attack. He did, however, contract a nasty infection on his buttocks which most likely developed into septicemia, causing his death.)

As Jefferson’s primary chef, Hemings is certain to have mastered the perfect balance of butter, cheese and macaroni.

During his time in France, Hemings apprenticed with a caterer, a pastry chef and even as a chef for the prince de Conde.

“For an American to go and learn that … was pretty incredible,” food historian Paula Marcoux — who has recreated classic French dishes of the era at Monticello, using the same types of cooking tools Hemings would have used — told NPR.

In 1787, Hemings was appointed chef de cuisine at Jefferson’s home in Paris, supervising white servants in the kitchen among other duties. And, in 1789, despite finding out that under French law, he was a free man, Hemings elected to return to Virginia with Jefferson, enslaved.

“Family,” historian Annette Gordon-Reed told NPR. “There was a real dilemma for many enslaved people: Do you take your freedom and separate yourself from your family?”

Hemings continued in his position as an enslaved chef under Jefferson, moving to New York and Philadelphia with the latter as he served as the secretary of state under President George Washington.

In 1793, however, Hemings successfully bargained for his freedom — with a caveat.

“Hemings would return to Monticello to train another enslaved person in French cooking to serve as a replacement chef. Once the replacement chef was properly trained, Jefferson agreed that Hemings ‘shall be thereupon made free, and I will thereupon execute all proper instruments to make him free,’” according to the White House Historical Association.

Hemings began training his brother, Peter Hemings, but it would be three long years until Jefferson assented to James’ freedom.

In the 1796 deed of manumission, Jefferson wrote, “I Thomas Jefferson of Monticello aforesaid do emancipate, manumit and make free James Hemings, son of Betty Hemings, which said James is now of the age of thirty years so that in the future he shall be free and of free condition, and discharged of all duties and claims of servitude whatsoever, and shall have all the rights and privileges of a freedman.”

Of the 607 men and women Jefferson owned during his lifetime, according to Susan Stein, senior curator at Monticello, only two had ever negotiated for their freedom. James Hemings was one of them.

Only several years after finding his freedom, Hemings tragically died by suicide in 1801.

While he left no memoirs, he did leave his recipes. And America — although not our cholesterol levels — is better for them.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

‘The Woman King’ and the Warrior Women of Dahomey: Has Hollywood Finally Gotten History Right?

Sean E. Cunningham — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 17:45:26 +0000

Quick question: What are the two most populous continents on Earth?

The first answer’s easy: Asia, with over 4.7 billion people. But the second? It’s Africa, with over 1.4 billion people. Indeed, the Cradle of Humankind may have more people than Europe and North America combined.

But, for the most part, Americans simply don’t know much about it. As Chris Rock joked, “The only thing I know about Africa is that it’s far, far away.”

“The Woman King” may help to change that. Having recently opened at No. 1 at the box office and racked up critical acclaim (95% approval on Rotten Tomatoes), it’s also now beginning to draw backlash, as online critics argue it ignores harsh truths about the figures who inspired it.

This is a look at the genuine history, as well as why “The Woman King” is important, even if its accuracy is imperfect.

GET HISTORY’S GREATEST TALES—RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX

Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday.

The History of Dahomey’s Actual ‘Amazons’

Benin is on the west coast of Africa, bordered by Togo, Burkina Fasa, Niger and Nigeria. A portion of it used to be the Kingdom of Dahomey. Dahomey existed for roughly 300 years, from around 1620 to 1894. After the Second Franco-Dahomean War, it was brought under the control of France. Full independence was finally achieved again in 1960.

What’s always interested people most about Dahomey are the Agojie. These warriors were essential to the golden age of Dahomey and helped it dominate its neighbors. The warriors even drew the notice of the Europeans.

This could be seen as surprising. After all, Dahomey was hardly a massive empire. (At its peak, it only consisted of a portion of Benin; Benin in its entirety fails to crack the top 100 nations in land area.) And the force itself was relatively small, consisting of 6,000 members at its peak.

More on History vs. hollywood

So why the attention?

For one, the Agojie were undeniably intimidating: attacking at night, taking as trophies the heads of enemies who refused to submit.

For another, they displayed true fight-to-the-death courage. During the Second Franco-Dahomean War, reportedly 434 of them went into a battle. Just 17 survived.

Most importantly, they were women. Which is why the Europeans dubbed them “Amazons.”

Our knowledge of the Agojie is, at best, incomplete. The first mention of them is from 1729. It appears a driving force behind their evolution into elite warriors was a Dahomey’s ruler desire to have as large of a military as possible: Women may have made up 40% of the Dahomey army under King Ghezo.

Speaking of Ghezo, this is one of the two main areas of dispute about the film.

Who Was Real in ‘the Woman King’?

The characters of “The Woman King” are largely invented, most notably Viola Davis’s character, the general named Nanisca. Generally speaking, these are names associated with the Agojie, but we know little enough about them that they are essentially the script’s invention.

“The biggest eye-opener was how much misinformation there is about these women and this culture given that so much of their history was written from the colonizer’s point of view,” director Gina Prince-Bythewood said. “So it was really about separating the texts that were from that point of view, which were so disparaging and disrespectful, from the truth.”

Meaning that even when there is information, it could be so distorted as to be useless.

King Ghezo, played by John Boyega, is an exception. He did indeed exist, ruling from 1818 to 1859. “The Woman King” starts near the beginning of his reign, in 1823.

Of course, characters are regularly invented for historical films, whether by combining multiple actual people into a single, highly distorted figure or just creating someone new altogether. This does not even begin to address the implications of eliminating key historical figures from a film, usually based on the assumption that some people need to be lost if you’re going to have anything approaching a coherent plot or a reasonable run time.

The second controversy, however, is far bigger and more complicated.

Does ‘The Woman King’ Gloss Over Slavery?

The Kingdom of Dahomey played a role in the slave trade, selling Africans into slavery. The film acknowledges this, such as in a scene when Nanisca suggests that King Ghezo should abandon slavery and focus on producing and trading palm oil. And King Ghezo eventually did end Dahomey’s role in the slave trade. However, this did not occur until 1852, decades after the period in which the film takes place.

Online critics assert that “The Woman King” is intended as a tale of empowerment while downplaying or distorting or even flat-out denying the role of the kingdom in slavery. (Hence the #BoycottWomanKing hashtag.)

Others reject this view, believing the film does properly address Dahomey’s role in the slave trade.

The makers of “The Woman King” have pointedly avoided presenting the film as pure history, acknowledging that commercial considerations played a role in shaping it. (And, for that matter, enabling it to get filmed and widely distributed at all.)

“Most of the story is fictionalized. It has to be,” Davis told Variety,

Which is unsurprising. For there have long been hit movies that are “historical” but hardly accurate.

Does Hollywood Have an ahistorical Bias?

Hollywood and historical accuracy traditionally don’t mix. Take 1915’s “The Birth of a Nation.” A huge commercial success, it’s credited both with being a major step forward for filmmaking technique and a propaganda boon for the Ku Klux Klan. As “The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War” author Dick Lehr noted, it is a film based on the belief that “former slaves were some kind of lower form of life.”

Most “historical” films are neither so openly racist nor so wildly inaccurate. But there has been a consistent pattern: Major historical films invariably focus on white men. Indeed, even when the films were intended to offer insights into other groups, they invariably focus on white men, not to mention are directed and written by white men. (See, for instance, 1990’s “Dances with Wolves” or 2003’s “Last Samurai.”)

This isn’t to suggest these films are without value. Bu, according to their detractors, they limit the historical perspectives that reach mass audiences. This could have major implications on how we view history.

Here’s a small example. Today, Gen. George S. Patton is an almost mythic figure. This is thanks in large part to George C. Scott’s swaggering, Oscar-winning performance in 1970’s “Patton.” Other military icons, such as Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing, are arguably equally charismatic and more historically important than Patton. After all, Pershing’s leadership played a crucial role in winning World War I, after which Pershing became the first person to achieve the rank of General of the Armies and reorganized the Army. In his retirement, he amused himself by winning a Pulitzer Prize.

But no there’s no hit Pershing film, so he’s far less remembered in the 21st century.

Movies matter. Which is why something crucial happened in 2018.

Wakanda Opens the Doors Wide

In hindsight, “Black Panther” looks like a certain blockbuster. It was not only based on a Marvel property but was made by a director who’d already had a hit with “Creed.”

But it was still a movie with a Black director, with an overwhelmingly Black cast, set in Africa. It even included an army of warrior women clearly modeled on the Agojie. If “Black Panther” had earned $13 million instead of $1.3 billion, we wouldn’t be talking about the “The Woman King” film now.

With the success of “The Woman King” and the doubtless bonanza of “Wakanda Forever” later this year, it should be easier — if still not easy — to get movies made about Africa, including its history. Indeed, the impact of this popularity may be visible in Africa itself: This August, Benin unveiled a nearly 100-foot tall statute of Agojie leader Queen Hangbe. Some of these future films may even do a deep examination of the slave trade.

Because ideally, movies interest us in a topic and make us want to dig deeper … and producers, TV studios and publishers accommodate us by making varied new works on the topic available.

Or as “The Woman King” producer (and Davis’s husband) Julius Tennon mused,“The history is massive and there are truths on that that are there. If people want to learn more, they can investigate more.”

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

What Happened to the Escaped Slaves When Harpers Ferry Fell to Stonewall Jackson?

Alexander Rossino — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 15:14:48 +0000

The principal story of Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s victory at Harpers Ferry on September 15, 1862, is already well-known. Two days before the epic Battle of Sharpsburg, Md., Jackson succeeded in capturing the key twin-river Union bastion in nearby Virginia, forcing 12,500 Federal troops to surrender while losing barely 300 killed and wounded of his own. Typically overlooked is that, in the process, Jackson’s men also seized thousands of refugee slaves and freemen who were sheltering with Colonel Dixon Miles’ Harpers Ferry command.

Recommended for you

No official Confederate report on the Harpers Ferry operation made mention of these prisoners, which Northerners and Southerners alike called “contrabands” due to their legal status as property. Fortunately for posterity, The Richmond Dispatch covered their capture and transportation to the Confederate capital in some detail, mentioning the prisoners for the first time in an article that appeared on September 18, 1862. Stating “The whole garrison…surrendered on Sunday morning,” the Dispatch noted how “our forces captured about one thousand negroes.” Seven additional reports then appeared in the Dispatch and The Richmond Enquirer over the next five days outlining the story of what happened to these unfortunate human spoils of war after they fell into Rebel hands.

Following the Federal garrison’s surrender, Jackson assigned Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill to parole enemy soldiers and collect captured property for transportation to the rear. Hill commenced these tasks on September 15, and by September 16 thousands of Union prisoners began the long march from Harpers Ferry to Frederick, Md., and points beyond. At the same time, some of Hill’s men scoured the town for all the Blacks they could find, rounding them up for transfer south.

A witness to these events named Abba Goddard described them in her journal, writing, “Every nook, cranny, barn, and stye has been searched and men, women, and little children in droves have been carried off…our hospital laundresses, and our men servants, without a word of warning, were seized upon” and taken.

An unidentified Confederate major even tried to seize the Black men employed by Federal regiments, rather than let them go with the column of parolees heading to Frederick. This attempt to separate the Blacks led to a confrontation between the major and Colonel William H. Trimble of the 60th Ohio Infantry. Trimble had secured a pass for the Black non-combatants in his regiment, but when they tried to leave town the Confederate major attempted to separate them from the column anyway. Trimble pulled his sidearm in response and compelled the officer to step aside at gunpoint, saving the Black personnel in his command from being seized.

By September 20, according to The Richmond Dispatch, the number of contrabands Hill collected had ballooned to as many as 2,500—many of whom were marched to Winchester, Va., along with the guns, ammunition, and other materiel captured at Harpers Ferry. Additional details of the operation began to appear in the Dispatch by September 22, which reported that “a large number of contrabands…had taken refuge with the Yankee thieves…[including] negroes [who] belonged to citizens of Jefferson and adjoining counties. A letter before us states that one gentleman from Clarke [County], who had lost 31 negroes, found 28 of them in this lot.”

Subsequent reports on September 23 and 24 also noted that the contrabands were captured “slaves” and “negroes, whom the Yankees had stolen.”

This Edwin Forbes sketch for Harper’s Weekly depicts a familiar wartime sight: enslaved people fleeing to Union territory. (Library of Congress)

According to one report that appeared in Southern newspapers, some of these individuals returned to their masters. “I met to-day hundreds of negroes taken at Harper’s Ferry going home with their owners,” the report’s author wrote from Winchester under the pseudonym ACCOMAC. “Most of them seemed in fine spirits, singing ‘Carry me back to Old Virginia,’ &c.” Major Andrew Wardlaw of the 14th South Carolina had a similar personal experience while enjoying the hospitality of the local Bell family, who “were delighted to see the Southern Army [and] had fifteen negroes at Harpers Ferry.” No fewer than “1200 negroes were captured & restored to their owners,” confided Wardlaw to his diary, including the helpful “Mrs. Bell [who] got 10 of hers.”

Still other contrabands ended up being confiscated by the Confederate army rather than returned to their owners. According to The Richmond Dispatch on September 24, this occurred because their “masters propose to offer them for sale in Richmond, not deeming them desirable servants after having associated with the Yankees.” Finally, on that same day, the Dispatch noted how “[t]wo car loads of negroes arrived in this city yesterday by the Central Railroad.” The men responsible for completing this task belonged to the brigade of Colonel Edward L. Thomas, according to A.P. Hill’s Maryland Campaign report. Noting that he “remained at Harper’s Ferry until the morning of the 17th…at 6.30 a.m., I received an order from General Lee to move to Sharpsburg. Leaving Thomas, with his brigade, to complete the removal of the captured property, my division was put in motion at 7.30 a.m.”

Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill left Harpers Ferry the morning of September 17, reaching Sharpsburg in time to foil a probable Union victory. (Library of Congress)

A wealthy planter before the war, Thomas commanded four regiments of troops from Georgia, including the 14th, 35th, 45th, and 49th Infantry, so it was likely these men who oversaw the transfer of the contrabands from Harpers Ferry to Richmond.

There is evidence that others in the Army of Northern Virginia knew about these events at Harpers Ferry. For instance, a letter written by Colonel Francis H. Smith of the 9th Virginia to Virginia Governor John Letcher on September 16 also appeared in the Dispatch on September 20. Writing that the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry had surrendered unconditionally, including “10,000 men, with all the arms, fifty pieces of artillery, ammunition, 100 wagons, quartermaster and commissary stores, and many cars, some of which were loaded,” Smith counted “600 negroes” among those seized.

Smith’s regiment belonged to Brig. Gen. Lewis Armistead’s Brigade in Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson’s Division of Longstreet’s command. As such, the 9th Virginia passed through Harpers Ferry on the way to Sharpsburg. It did not participate in the processing and removal of prisoners and materiel after the Federal garrison’s surrender. Thus, Smith either saw for himself, or received word from others, that a significant number of Blacks had been captured.

A commissary sergeant with the 13th Georgia, part of Brig. Gen. Alexander Lawton’s Brigade in Jackson’s command, also wrote home about the event, informing his fiancée that after Jackson had compelled the Federals “to surrender on the 15th September….We took 11,700 prisoners & small arms, 76 cannons, 3000 ‘contrabands’ and many stores of all kinds.”

When Confederates entered Harpers Ferry, they found this “contraband camp” on Washington Street, one of several established by escaped slaves seeking protection within United States lines. (Library of Congress)

Word also traveled through the civilian populace, as noted by Joseph Addison Waddell, a former newspaper editor and wartime clerk in the army quartermaster’s office in Staunton, Va. Recording in his diary that “Maj[.] Yost has just arrived from Harper’s Ferry,” Waddell confirmed “that…Gen. Jackson…had captured at Harper’s Ferry 11,000 prisoners and 1500 negroes, 50 pieces of artillery, all their ammunition, commissary and Quartermaster’s stores.”

Similarly, a brief mention of “1000 negroes” captured at Harpers Ferry made it into the local newspaper of Camden, S.C., in late September 1862, proving that some in the South far from the front heard about the event. The matter-of-fact language used in the article indicates, however, that it raised no special interest.

This remarkable incident demonstrates how at the same time they were fighting a war for Southern independence, General Robert E. Lee’s men also enforced standing state property laws concerning captured contrabands. The removal and sale of the Harpers Ferry captives would prove to be a foreshadowing of events to come when, during the Gettysburg Campaign, Maj. Gen. Richard Ewell’s Second Corps seized and shipped south Black men, women, and children in Pennsylvania with little regard for their legal status.

Alex Rossino writes from Boonsboro, Md. He is the author of Their Maryland: The Army of Northern Virginia From the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862 (Savas Beatie, 2021), from which this article is adapted.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

A 19th Century Black Success Story: The Downing Family

Sarah Richardson — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 13:30:00 +0000

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.

GET HISTORY’S GREATEST TALES—RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX

Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday.

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.”

Masses of Mollusks. Thomas Downing packed oysters into stoneware crocks that bore the Broad Street address of his establishment.

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

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.”

GET HISTORY’S GREATEST TALES—RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX

Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday.

Book Review: ‘The Age of Astonishment: John Morris in the Miracle Century — From the Civil War to the Cold War’

Mike Oppenheim — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 13:30:00 +0000

This ingenious biography tells of an ordinary man who lived through an amazing century — and not the current one. During recent decades medicine has produced no miracles to match antibiotics, vaccines, and aseptic surgery, journalist Bill Morris writes. Passenger jets travel only a bit faster than in the 1950s. Smartphones greatly improve on rotary phones but hardly constitute a revolution.

For Morris, the century of truly unrivaled progress began in 1870. Instead of penning a standard history, he writes of his grandfather, born in 1863 and a college professor of no particular note, detouring regularly to recount the great milestones. His oddball take works.

John Morris was born on a Virginia plantation during the Civil War. With its slaves freed at war’s end, Morris the elder found work as an English professor at the University of Georgia. Like most southern public institutions even before the Civil War, the university was underfinanced and behind the times, but Morris’s father made sure his sons—though not his daughters—received a university education as, a few hundred miles north, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers, and other innovators were working their magic, while in Europe Pasteur, Koch, and Nobel were not exactly slacking off.

GET HISTORY’S GREATEST TALES—RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX

Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday.

Having graduated, John taught for a few years, obtained a law degree, and failed at a law practice in Birmingham, Alabama. Collecting himself, he spent a year in Germany at the renowned University of Berlin where he took up philology, the study of language.

Following his father to the University of Georgia in 1894, John taught for 50-plus years, modestly adding to an obscure field and witnessing the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. A rare Georgia progressive, he endorsed Black civil rights, women’s rights, and pacifism but was no activist, limiting himself to deploring matters.

Southern racial troubles fill much of the text, but Professor Morris repeatedly notes events elsewhere. From electric lighting to flush toilets to the creation of scientific medicine in the 19th century to cinema, radio, automobiles, television, world wars, and the nuclear age in the 20th, he lived through them all. He was never a significant figure, even at his university, but the author has done a fine job recounting his grandfather’s career and domestic life as he passively witnessed what would be his grandson’s favorite century.

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

The Age of Astonishment: John Morris in the Miracle Century—from the Civil War to the Cold War

By Bill Morris
Pegasus, Cambridge UK, 2022

get it on amazon

This post contains affiliate links. If you buy something through our site, we might earn a commission.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

The Levi and Catharine Coffin House State Historic Site: The Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad

Terri Sinnott — Thu, 26 May 2022 16:15:18 +0000

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.

GET HISTORY’S GREATEST TALES—RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX

Subscribe to our HistoryNet Now! newsletter for the best of the past, delivered every Monday and Thursday.

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

Are We on the Eve of Another Civil War?

Gary W. Gallagher — Wed, 11 May 2022 12:00:00 +0000

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 lay in the existence of the institution 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

Pirates and the US Navy Both Hunted Down the Slave Ship Antelope and Its 270 African Captives

Daniel Laliberte — Fri, 06 May 2022 20:48:25 +0000

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.

A British hermaphrodite brig of the same type as the American-built privateer Arraganta.

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.

U.S. revenue cutter Vigilant chasing, firing upon, and subduing a renegade vessel. (DVIDS)

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.

Contemporary diagrams show how cramped conditions were aboard slave ships.

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.

Some slavers so overcrowded their ships that captives made the voyage in fetters on deck.

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.

A barque-rigged example of a privateer sailed out of New Orleans carrying 16 guns.

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.

Captives bound for the New World depart an African setting, mourned by those left behind.

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.

An 1839 revolt by kidnapped Africans aboard La Amistad led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling.

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