Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  In June 1835, Stewart gave his speech to the citizens of Madison County, Mississippi, deep in the plantation country northeast of Vicksburg. One person in the audience was especially alarmed. She is identified in the published records only as a Mrs. Latham, from the small town of Beatie’s Bluff. In the days after Stewart’s appearance, Mrs. Latham grew progressively more worried about the behavior of her slaves. “Her suspicions were first awakened,” reported a pamphlet entitled Proceedings of the Citizens of Madison County, “by noticing in her house-servants a disposition to be insolent and disobedient.” The situation rapidly became worse: “Occasionally they would use insulting and contemptuous language in her hearing respecting her.” Soon she was convinced that “something mysterious was going on, from seeing her girls often engaged in secret conversation when they ought to have been engaged at their business.” Naturally she began eavesdropping. Her worst fears were confirmed: they were discussing—cryptically but, she thought, unmistakably—the coming insurrection. Here was the giveaway: she overheard one girl say that “she wished to God it was all over and done with; that she was tired of waiting on the white folks, and wanted to be her own mistress the balance of her days, and clean up her own house.”

  Immediately Mrs. Latham set out to raise the alarm. There wasn’t much in the way of official authority available in Beatie’s Bluff, so she consulted with the most respected gentlemen of the town. They heard her out and decided to investigate for themselves. At her house they closely examined the girls she had overheard. The finding of these gentlemen, according to the pamphlet, was that the statements of the girls “corresponded in every particular with the communication of the lady.” The gentlemen came to a simple and terrifying conclusion: there was indeed reason to believe that an insurrection of the slaves was imminent. They made urgent recommendations: that new committees of vigilance and safety be immediately formed and that the system of slave patrols be reinstated. The slave patrols, the author of the pamphlet observed, “had been entirely neglected heretofore.”

  It may seem odd that the slave owners had been so lax about security up until then. But their guiding principle had always been to make as little effort as possible—and, in particular, to spend as little money as possible—to keep the system of slavery going. Most of the plantations in central Mississippi had absentee owners who hired the absolute minimum number of white employees they could get away with—a few overseers (usually noted for their unyielding cruelty), a bailiff, and sometimes a doctor, or at least someone who purported to have a little medical training. By the 1830s, the ratio of slaves to whites in some rural counties of Mississippi was reaching fifty to one. The owners were trusting geography to do the work of security: their thinking was that since the slaves knew they were trapped in the middle of an entirely hostile country with no way of ever returning home, they would give up, accept their situation, and settle in to being docile and obedient laborers.

  The news that this might not be true galvanized the white community. A committee of vigilance was immediately formed in Madison County. It set to work questioning slaves with ferocious speed and determination. The interrogation technique was straightforward: the slaves would be flogged until they confessed something. Sometimes a slave was given dozens of lashes; sometimes it was hundreds. The interrogation went on for hours or days. But sooner or later the committee heard what it wanted to hear. Then the slave would immediately be hanged.

  Most of these confessions were vague. A slave would admit to having heard some sort of indistinct talk about trouble coming. The talk would usually be attributed to some other slave—most often a known troublemaker on another plantation. That slave would be brought in and flogged, and would then admit to having heard something about the trouble from some other slave on yet another plantation. The committee relentlessly followed this trail from plantation to plantation until, eventually, one of the slaves would admit that there had been some talk concerning the insurrection with a white man.

  The committee wasn’t looking for any specific white man. Sometimes they heard about a nameless stranger who’d been loitering along a country road; other times it was one of the disreputable locals known to consort with slaves at the darky parties. But most promising were the odd hints about a group of shadowy white instigators making grand promises, the way the Mystic Clan was supposed to be doing. One slave, surely realizing that he was a dead man no matter what he said, came out with a particularly garish confession that might have been straight from Stewart’s pamphlet: he claimed that it was the plan of the slaves “to slay all the whites, except some of the most beautiful women, whom they intended to keep as wives; said that these white men had told them that they might do so, and that he had already picked out one for himself; and that he and his wife had already had a quarrel in consequence of his having told her his intention.”

  After several such confessions the committee believed that the situation was now clear. Proceedings of the Citizens of Madison County summarized the committee’s findings:

  They ascertained that they were not to contend alone with a few daring and desperate negroes, and such of their deluded race as they might enlist in their daring and bloody enterprise, but that these negroes were instigated and encouraged by some of the most wicked and abandoned white men in the country; highway robbers, murderers, and abolitionists, who were to supply them with arms and ammunition, and lead them on to the work of massacre and carnage, conflagration and blood.

  What was the next step in preventing this disaster? The committee believed that was obvious: they had to root out the white conspirators in their midst. By late June they had taken several suspects into custody. There was no thought about turning them over to the official legal system—the crisis was too urgent, and the testimony of the slaves (even assuming they’d been kept alive) wouldn’t have been admissible in court anyway. The committee carried on with the interrogations themselves. They made a great show of following the procedures of the legitimate courts: the anonymous author of the Proceedings pamphlet insisted (with considerable passion) that where the white suspects were concerned, the committee members conducted themselves in an appropriate legal fashion, with full respect for the rights of the accused. Henry Foote witnessed one of the interrogations and came away with a different opinion: “The examination was conducted in a very rapid and informal manner, and without the least regard to the established principles of the law of evidence.”

  In each case, there was only one piece of direct evidence: the confession of a slave obtained through torture. But, as the pamphlet author was careful to point out, there was plenty of supporting evidence and corroboration. There was one Joshua Cotton, for instance: he was a suspect because it was well known that he was “in the habit of trading with negroes.” Then there was a William Saunders, suspected because he was unemployed and because “his deportment was such as to induce his employer to discharge him.” There was an Albe Dean, who had several strikes against him:

  He was known to associate with negroes, and would often come to the owners of runaways and intercede with their masters to save them from a whipping. It was in evidence before the committee that he was seen prowling about the plantations in the neighbourhoods of Vernon, Beatie’s Bluff, and Livingston, ostensibly for the purpose of inquiring for runaway horses, which he did with great particularity—sometimes inquiring for a black, bay, gray, or other color that suggested itself at the time. It was evident that horse-hunting was not his business, but that he was reconnoitring the country, and seeking opportunities to converse with the negroes.

  All of these men were tortured; some of them did confess. Joshua Cotton finally admitted that he and the others were following “the plan laid down in Stewart’s pamphlet.” All of them were hanged.

  Then there was the case of Reuel Blake, a local gin wright (that is, one who built and repaired cotton gins). A slave of Blake’s had been named by several other slaves as belonging to the conspiracy. When this slave was brought before the
committee, Blake was as a courtesy allowed to take part in the interrogation. It did not go well. The slave refused to talk, and the committee invited Blake to whip him until he disclosed his part in the conspiracy. Blake was reluctant; he carefully informed the slave about the situation, explained what the flogging was for, and, as the Proceedings author remarked with incredulous italics, “requested him to tell all he knew about it.”

  Then Blake began flogging his slave. It was obvious to everyone that Blake’s heart wasn’t in it; he only lashed weakly, “occasionally striking a hard lick to keep up appearances.” The committee called a halt and asked him to step aside. Then they began the interrogation in earnest. Blake, standing a little off from the group, grew increasingly agitated. As the flogging reached a peak of intensity—and just as the committee believed the slave was about to confess—Blake burst back into the center of the action and proclaimed that if they were going to touch his slave again, they’d have to flog him first. The committee member doing the flogging immediately raised the whip to oblige him, and they got into a fistfight. The spectators broke it up and “from the best of motives,” according to the pamphlet, urged Blake to flee. He did so, and as he ran away from the committee, some of the boys in the crowd ran along with him for a few hundred yards, hooting and mocking him.

  Once Blake was out of sight, the committee talked over what had happened. At first everyone assumed that Blake was merely some kind of perversely softhearted sentimentalist. But as they went on talking, their views changed. Soon they all began to say that there was just something about the man they’d never trusted. They didn’t like the looks of him, for one thing: “He was of a cold, phlegmatic temperament,” the pamphlet writer explained, “with a forbidding countenance.” He had been living in Madison County for two or three years, and had never tried to fit in—preferring instead more suspicious company. “He kept himself almost aloof from white society, but was often seen among negroes.” He looked worse and worse the more they thought about it. “His character, as known to the citizens, was one of the darkest die. He was noted for cold-blooded revenge, insatiable avarice, and unnatural cruelty; had been detected in several attempts to swindle his fellow-citizens, who, if they exposed his rascality, were ever after the objects of his deadly hatred.” Lastly, he had said that he had gone to sea in his youth. “From vague hints he would occasionally drop, it was the general impression that he had been a pirate.” The case was closed.

  Blake was no fool. He understood from the outset how things were going. By the end of the afternoon, the committee had decided to try him on the grounds that he was likely a member of the conspiracy—but when they went to his house to arrest him, he was gone. He’d already gotten out of Madison County and was making his escape to Vicksburg.

  There he hid out in the boat city off the levee of Vicksburg Landing. He passed himself off as a boatman from Indiana. The disguise didn’t work for long. The Madison County vigilance committee offered a reward of five hundred dollars for him and posted it up and down the river; somebody in the boat city saw it and ratted him out. The committee arrived soon afterward and put him under arrest.

  Blake was brought back to the town of Livingston in Madison County under heavy guard. A mob surrounded him on his arrival and he was almost killed then and there, but the committee held the people at bay long enough to put him on trial at the lynching court. Unlike most of the other accused, he never made any kind of confession or admission. But he was found guilty and he was hanged.

  The approach of the dread Fourth had the whites of rural Mississippi in a panic. That was a day when the plantation slaves of the lower valley were traditionally granted a certain amount of liberty. They weren’t required to work and were permitted to hold their own holiday celebrations with little or no interference from their overseers. On some plantations these parties were enormous events that slaves from other plantations were allowed to attend unsupervised. These were ideal conditions for the breeding of revolt.

  But even if all those celebrations were canceled, what good would it do? The interrogations of the committee had established, if nothing else, that slaves were already moving around the countryside with impunity and were in constant and casual contact from plantation to plantation. There was also the whole problem of the maroons, as they were called—escaped slaves who hadn’t fled north but were still living secretly in the plantation country and the wilderness. Nobody knew how many maroons there were, possibly thousands. Maroons were living in all the riverfront districts of the valley; there was known to be a sizable clandestine maroon community in New Orleans; maroon encampments were believed to be scattered through the wild country from the Everglades through the sea islands along the Gulf and up through the river delta. There were persistent rumors about a large and flourishing maroon city in the trackless bayous somewhere north of New Orleans, possibly led by a notorious escaped slave known as Squire. (Squire was finally caught and executed in 1837, but the city was never found.) If there were any maroons in Madison County, they were surely in touch with the slaves in the plantations—and were perfectly placed to help organize the revolt.

  By the beginning of July the towns of Madison County were on full alert. No one stayed alone after dark. At sundown, the women and children gathered in a central location—usually the public square—while the men formed posses and patrolled the outskirts of town and the surrounding countryside. There were no streetlights in these towns, so people built bonfires at the intersections. The stillness of the night would be broken by sporadic gunfire as the posses, deceived by the wild shadows cast by the bonfires, took shots at each other. Meanwhile, the women and children kept scanning the sky above the treetops, watching for the telltale glow that would mean the arsonists had set to work in the neighboring towns and the insurrection had begun.

  In Vicksburg, the Fourth of July was celebrated as it always had been, with a huge open-air barbecue. This was a gay and colorful event—the citizenry in their Sunday best, the militia in full uniform, the local band playing, and cannonades and fireworks at sundown. Nothing was any different that year: the disturbances in the rural counties had so far made little impression on the cosmopolitan river towns. (The governor of Mississippi had issued a proclamation on July 3 urging all citizens to be on the watch for any uprisings—he, too, blamed the threat on “lawless base villainous white men”—but in Vicksburg it was ignored.) Then something unpleasant happened on the picnic grounds. People were sitting at ease at the long tables set out under the trees when a man named Cabler, a gambler from Vicksburg Landing, “insolently thrust himself into the company” (as one newspaper later put it). He insulted one of the militia officers and took a swing at another guest. He was quickly and forcibly ejected.

  That was all. It should have been immediately forgotten. On the Fourth, as with all big public occasions, there were inevitably a lot of drunken quarrels and fistfights that blew over as quickly as summer squalls. But Cabler was unwilling to let the incident go. Later that afternoon, the militia officers moved into the town square and put on a public demonstration of their close-order drilling. Cabler showed up spoiling for a fight. He shouldered his way into the middle of the militia company and confronted the officer he’d earlier insulted. The two were immediately surrounded by the whole company. Cabler was seized and searched: he was found to be carrying a knife, a dagger, and a loaded pistol. Several officers carried him off into the woods. There they whipped him, tarred and feathered him, and ordered him to leave town.

  The parties resumed. Formal balls began in the mansions, and after sunset there were fireworks shows. Sometime that evening, the crowds of revelers scattered around town were swept by a rumor: Cabler’s gambler friends in Vicksburg Landing were planning revenge. Nothing overt had taken place—there was no sign of a war party coming up from the landing. But around midnight, as the celebrations were beginning to break up, a large group of citizens held an impromptu meeting at the courthouse to decide what to do about the threat. They agr
eed that it was time for drastic action. The waterfront district of Vicksburg Landing needed to be cleaned up once and for all. The crowd passed by voice vote a public declaration ordering all professional gamblers to leave the landing within twenty-four hours.

  As it happened, there were a lot of gamblers in Vicksburg Landing. Its reputation had grown almost as bad as that of Natchez-Under-the-Hill. People up and down the river had started calling it the Kangaroos, after its largest and rowdiest gambling house. Shock and consternation spread throughout the Kangaroos the morning of July 5, when its inhabitants woke late to find the walls and doors on every street and alley nailed with hastily printed posters announcing the resolution the townspeople had passed the night before. The Kangaroos was in a turmoil all day: Would the gamblers obey the order and leave? By nightfall some of the waterfront’s most notorious gamblers were in fact seen departing—at least as far as the boat city, just as a precaution.