by Lee Sandlin
6
Bloody Island
FOR NEARLY TWO DECADES, from the early 1830s until his death in 1851, William Johnson kept a diary. He was a barber in Natchez, and was in a position to hear all the local gossip, but the ordinary round of small-town infidelities and scandals left him cold. One subject did fascinate him: the casual violence on the streets.
Mr Bledsoe and Mr Hewitt had a small fist fight. After a blow or two, Mr Bledsoe went and got his pistols.
Today Mr James in a small dispute with Mr Stanford struck him with his fist twice. Stanford drew a dirk and Mr James ran into his store and got a hatchet.
Jim Welch and Oblenis had a fight in the sheriff’s office.
Johnson rarely bothered to record what the fights were about. There was no point: they could have been about anything. Any event at all, no matter how benignly it began, could end up in a riot.
I rode out today to see the balloon ascend, but the man did not attempt to put it up at all, and told them that they would put it up tomorrow. A mob was soon raised and they tore it all to pieces, destroying everything as they went.
It was as though they were all walking around in a perpetual state of rage. They’d lash out at each other about politics, or a gambling debt, or the outcome of a lawsuit; they’d explode over a mistimed joke or a long-simmering feud. They would often get into fights over other people’s fights—even the fights of people they’d never met. Johnson records one fight that broke out over the question of whether a celebrated duel in South Carolina had been a sham: “When Mr Charles Stewart stated that those gentlemen that fought actually fought with bullets, Mr Dahlgren said that they must have fought with paper bullets. Mr Stewart then said that if any man would say that they fought with paper bullets that he is a damned liar and a damned scoundrel and a damned coward.” The two men began pummeling each other, Stewart with a walking stick and Dahlgren with an umbrella. They then pulled out pistols and began shooting at each other. Dahlgren was wounded in the side and Stewart was hit in the jaw. When Stewart fell to the ground unconscious, one of his friends went after Dahlgren with a bowie knife, and by the time the bystanders finally managed to break it up, Dahlgren’s head had been slashed twice, the palm of his hand had been split open, and one of his fingers had been almost entirely severed. “It was,” Johnson concludes, “one of the gamest fights that we have ever had in our city.”
Johnson doesn’t ever appear to have taken part in the fights himself. He preferred to remain a spectator. In fact, his diary is the work of an exceptionally prudent man—as it piles up, day after cautious day, year after quiet year (the most frequent entry is a relieved note, “Nothing new”), it reveals itself to be the autobiography of someone who spent his whole life trying, and ultimately failing, to stay out of the line of fire.
Johnson’s situation might seem to be inherently precarious. He was a free man of color living in the heart of the slave country. But that wasn’t in itself all that unusual. Tens of thousands of free people of color lived in the lower valley. There were two hundred living in Natchez alone, out of a total population of three thousand. Most of the women were domestic servants; the men were farmers, or small-time craftsmen—typically coopers or smiths—or in Johnson’s trade, barbering. Johnson stood out only because he was so successful. He owned several pieces of land and he also owned many slaves. (This was also not unusual—any prosperous man of color would as a matter of course be a slave owner.) He did so well that he was able to buy the shabby clapboard building where he had his barbershop, tear it down, and replace it with a sturdy three-story building with a brick façade. It cost three thousand dollars, a fortune in those days, but he paid for it out of his own pocket. He opened a second shop around the corner from the first, in the lobby of an upscale hotel, and eventually a third shop in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. This shop was the result of yet another civic campaign to clean up Natchez-Under-the-Hill by encouraging respectable businesses to move in. Johnson was one of the first businessmen the campaign approached.
Johnson was such a successful man because he was smart, civil, discreet, and unrelentingly cautious. His diary wasn’t a vehicle for self-expression or self-examination, but a way of keeping everything in his life precisely on track. The lurid violence he reported in the outside world was a kind of dark counterpoint to his abiding interest: the careful outlay of petty cash. The diary records the unending parade of odd objects he had to purchase for his barbershops—razors and razor straps, roller towels and hand towels, shaving brushes, toothbrushes, hairbrushes, hat brushes. He bought bottles of lemon water, orange water, lavender water, and rose water; his shops stocked expensive Macassar oil and cheap bear’s oil, imported cologne and exotic pomades and Crème de Perse and Winship’s Camphor Soap. He also recorded all manner of one-off purchases that sound almost like impulse buys: a barrel of sweet potatoes for $3.00; a keg of nails for shingles for $8.00; $8.50 for a satin vest and a pair of pants. He was always hungry for bargains—even when it’s hard to imagine what use he could have made of them. One time he recorded splitting with a neighbor the cost of a cask of bacon. The neighbor paid $13.00 and Johnson paid $16.25. Since bacon sold in bulk for around 3.25 cents a pound, that means the cask held almost nine hundred pounds.
The larger issues of his life ultimately came down to the same kind of accounting. When he rebuilt his barbershop, he decided to lay out extra money to add a bathhouse. It was an unusually risky move for him, because bathing had never been popular on the frontier—even the most respectable men avoided immersing themselves in water, which was thought to be unhealthy, and instead doused themselves with perfume and cologne (which is why Johnson did such a brisk business in both). But in the 1830s hot baths were becoming something of a fad, prompted by a popular form of alternative medicine known as Thompsonism. Its practitioners claimed to cure all kinds of diseases by means of saunas and sweat-boxes—Thompsonians were known as steam doctors. Johnson himself had no opinion on whether steam medicine actually worked; he just made a bet on its popularity, and it paid off. The bathhouse took in a small but steady stream of customers, giving Johnson a pleasant and consistent income even in hard times.
That was the one self-revelation the diary discloses: Johnson was secretly a bit of a gambler. He didn’t much like playing cards, and he was indifferent to roulette and other games of chance. But he did dearly love racing—horse racing in particular. He was a regular for decades at the local tracks, and he believed he knew horses well. But then he’d bet on any kind of racing. One time he bet a friend about which of two toy boats would get across a pond first.
He was as prudent in his vices, though, as he was in his virtues. He never risked any substantial amount of money gambling, and his diary never records any disappointment or guilt when he lost—which is fortunate, because he lost consistently. Johnson didn’t see that, or wouldn’t admit to seeing that; it was the one area of his life where he deliberately avoided totaling up his outlays. Like any longtime gambler, he preferred to think of himself as a sharp operator. In the diary he sometimes calls himself, with a kind of secret, self-amused pride, “the old shark.”
He was also a family man with a large and thriving household. His diary records the ceaseless dailiness of his doings with his wife, his children, his apprentices, his servants, and his slaves. He was a loving husband, a strict father, and a stricter employer. He was highly disapproving of his apprentices for consorting socially with his slaves; he frequently notes the occasions when one or another of the apprentices snuck off to attend a darky party, where the slaves and the free people of color would mingle. By his own telling, he wasn’t a particularly kind or indulgent slave owner. He dispassionately writes up the times when he had to flog one of his slaves for disobedience or drunkenness or theft. But he could also be secretly fond of the most difficult of them: the closest he comes to naked emotion in his diary is when he regretfully sells off a favorite slave on account of his perpetual troublemaking.
He didn’t aspire to b
e accepted by white society. He was always careful to be courteous with well-to-do whites—particularly those to whom he lent money. He had a brisk sideline in making small private loans at interest, and he cultivated a reputation as a trustworthy lender who’d never try to gouge a customer or violate his confidence. But none of this was to gain their friendship. It was a practical necessity: he needed to be able to call on the best people to pay back a favor by discreetly applying pressure to other debtors who’d fallen behind. Other than that, he never socialized with his customers. He certainly never recorded any feeling of envy, any resentment that he was permanently excluded from their world. His attitude can be best seen in the odd mocking pseudonyms he sometimes used in his diary for his prestigious customers: “Mr. Thermometer,” “Colonel Troublesome,” “Little Low Man.”
He had his own circle. Mostly he associated with the other free men of color in Natchez who were as successful and respectable as he was. One of these was a farmer and landowner named Baylor Winn. Johnson and Winn never became close friends, but for many years they were civil enough. In 1848 they had a bet going on the outcome of the presidential election; Johnson untypically won. Johnson did note in his diary some unpleasant gossip about Winn, how he was known around town to have had bitter fights with his children over what they considered to be his tyrannical ways. But Johnson himself doesn’t seem to have been much troubled by any of that. He took for granted that a man’s family affairs were his own business. It certainly never prevented him from passing an hour or two with Winn in leisurely conversation whenever they met—a form of socializing known in Natchez as “stopping to light a cigar.” (Cigars were notorious for being difficult to light; getting one to draw was always a time-consuming process.)
Johnson even took Winn’s advice about property. In the late 1840s, at Winn’s urging, Johnson bought land in the marshy terrain south of town along the river—an area known unimaginatively as the Swamp. He then hired crews to clear it and cultivate it as farmland. After a few seasons, he began hearing from these men about a problem. Winn happened to own the adjoining property, which he was also having cleared, and his crews were taking the lumber downriver to the market in New Orleans. According to Johnson’s men, Winn’s crews were trespassing onto Johnson’s land to cut lumber there as well.
Johnson’s first response was typical of him: he went to Winn and offered to settle the issue with a handshake. But Winn refused to discuss it. After that their dealings grew increasingly tense. Johnson offered to pay to have a survey done of their properties in the Swamp to establish the exact boundary line. Winn became enraged and said that if any surveyors—or, for that matter, Johnson himself—came onto his land, he’d shoot to kill. Johnson refused to take the threat seriously and had the survey done. The results proved him in the right. He showed them to Winn, but Winn would not budge. Johnson then sued him. He knew that with the results of the survey in hand, he was certain to win—but just before the case was heard, he made another offer to settle, on terms far less advantageous to him than what he was likely to get in court. Winn accepted, and the case was dropped.
Johnson returned to his ordinary routine; his diary entries for the next couple of weeks show nothing but the usual daily drift:
The river rising tolerably fast. Mr James Curry’s son was drowned yesterday evening at the landing. He fell off a log. Business rather dull
I was up at auction today and bought a barrel or ½ pipe of gin at 30 cts per gallon
Business only so so.
I rode out today with the children and got a lot of blackberries Business extremely dull
Business very dull indeed but nothing like as dull as was yesterday.
On June 16, 1851, two days after this last entry, Johnson visited his property in the Swamp. He took along one of his sons and an apprentice. On the way back, they passed a farm belonging to one of Winn’s sons; Johnson decided to stop off to light a cigar. The conversation was perfectly amicable. Johnson’s son and his apprentice later remembered seeing Winn there, but as far as they could recall, he and Johnson didn’t speak.
Johnson’s party rode back toward Natchez. As they neared the outskirts of the Swamp, they were surprised to see that Winn was following them. They slowed down to wait for him; instead he left the road and began paralleling them through the heavy underbrush. They still weren’t alarmed. They went on down the road for a few hundred more yards. Then Winn began shooting. Johnson’s apprentice was hit in the shoulder; Johnson himself was wounded in the stomach. Winn rode off.
Johnson was brought back into Natchez. He was still conscious, and as he weakened, he described the attack to his family and to the sheriff. He died later that night.
Winn was immediately arrested. He would give no explanation for his actions. People who knew him, though, did report that he had been complaining constantly about Johnson; even with the settlement of the lawsuit, he supposedly said that he didn’t think the troubles between them would ever come to an end. But at his trial he said nothing about any of this. Instead he stymied the prosecution with a surprise legal maneuver. According to Mississippi law, people with Negro blood weren’t allowed to be called as witnesses except against defendants who also had Negro blood. Winn claimed that, even though he was a man of color, he had no Negro blood: he was part white and part Seminole Indian. If this claim was upheld, the case could not proceed. The only witnesses to what had happened were Johnson’s son and his apprentice; without them, there would be nobody to testify. The jury deliberated the claim for a day and a half. In the end they were deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial.
Johnson’s murder had been met with an upwelling of genuine shock and anger among the white people of the town. Johnson was “an excellent and most inoffensive man,” wrote a reporter in the Natchez Courier, “holding a respected position on account of his character, intelligence, and deportment.” It might be thought, then, that such a manifest injustice as the mistrial would lead to action by the local court of Judge Lynch. But the whites were prepared to go only so far in avenging a man of color; in this case they let the legal system take its course. Winn was duly retried. He raised the same defense: he could show that he had voted in at least one election and had once served on a jury at the trial of a white defendant. The result was another hung jury.
At the next trial the venue was changed. Johnson’s family paid for an investigation in Winn’s home state of Florida, where they found that there he had been legally classified as a mulatto—which meant that Johnson’s son and his apprentice could indeed testify against him. But the judge in the new venue would not allow this evidence to come in. The witnesses were barred from testifying. The trial then proceeded to a verdict. Winn was found not guilty of murder. After two years in jail, he was a free man.
In the diary, the highest term of praise Johnson had for any man, black or white, was that he was a “gentleman.” He never defined what he meant, but then he didn’t need to. Everybody in the river valley knew what a gentleman was, even if they couldn’t have explained how he got that way. It was breeding, it was dress, it was manners—but more than any of that, it was honor. A gentleman was concerned about his honor just as an ordinary man was obsessed with his rights. This provided people with a handy rule of thumb. Where an ordinary man might commit manslaughter, a gentleman would fight a duel.
The duel was the defining trademark of the aristocrat in the lower valley and throughout the South. Every gentleman was expected to know the Code Duello, as it was called—an elaborately ritualized etiquette of single combat adopted from the old European aristocracy that laid out what was and wasn’t a dueling offense, how challenges were to be offered and accepted, how the duel was supposed to be conducted, and when to shoot to kill. The core of the code was its uncompromising rigor. Gentlemen were expected to fight duels over any affront to their personal honor, no matter how slight or absurd it might seem to an outsider. A misunderstood word, a political dispute that turned personal, an invitation to a dance that
went awry—these were all legitimate occasions for a duel.
The code, if followed scrupulously, would have led any gentleman to fight duels on almost a daily basis. In fact, full-blown duels with real bloodshed seem to have been relatively rare. Going by Johnson’s diary—and this was the sort of thing he was sure to note down—Natchez saw on average only one formal dueling challenge a year, and almost all of these were settled without violence. When a duel was carried out to the point of actual combat, it became the subject of universal fascination.
One of the most famous duels fought in the river valley took place in St. Louis in 1831. The participants were both prominent Missouri gentlemen. Major Thomas Biddle was a distinguished veteran of the War of 1812, a quartermaster at the local army garrison, and a member of one of St. Louis’s most aristocratic families. The Honorable Spencer Pettis was a well-regarded local politician who had been Missouri’s secretary of state and was currently Missouri’s only representative in the United States Congress. The cause of their dispute was both personal and political. It centered on the Bank of the United States—an institution that seems during the few decades of its existence to have been the occasion for near-constant quarreling all over the country. In this case, Pettis was running for reelection and made the corruption and incompetence of the bank into a major campaign issue. Thomas Biddle’s brother Nicholas happened to be the president of the bank. Thomas regarded all attacks on the bank as attacks on Nicholas and therefore as affronts to the family honor. After Pettis attacked the bank in a speech, Thomas Biddle published a rebuttal in one of St. Louis’s newspapers, in the course of which he referred to Pettis as “a dish of skimmed milk.” Pettis replied with a letter impugning Thomas Biddle’s manhood. Biddle then escalated by breaking into Pettis’s room at the St. Louis Hotel early one morning while Pettis was still asleep and beating him with a rawhide whip. (Pettis later claimed to have been too groggy to defend himself, because he’d been tormented all night by a swarm of mosquitoes in his room.) Pettis then challenged Biddle to a duel.