An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  His letter home in 1835 marks the start of his career, and he’s learned quickly—not only how to make profits off of enslaved people’s labor but also how to behave as part of the master class. “It would not answer to do otherwise,” he writes, meaning that their mother could not cook for herself as she did at home; she’d have to let the “negroes” cook for her—and she would hate their cooking. Winthrop couldn’t have been accustomed to southern cuisine yet, and here, he perpetuates the myth of the slovenly, bestial “negro” who doesn’t care about the quality of her food and simply adds bacon lard to everything, “sometimes strong enough to cut your throat.”

  I still wince when I read how Winthrop, Susan, and Hilton write about the enslaved people who take care of them, who meet their every need and do the tasks that Susan’s sisters and mother find so difficult at home. When I first read the phrase, in that fabric notebook that their descendant Franklin compiled, probably for slave gowns, I was surprised and suddenly disgusted by the quilt that I’d fallen in love with. Looking back, I’m embarrassed at my naïve reaction. This is an object from 1830s South Carolina made by a white merchant family; of course they owned enslaved people. But they had come from the North, I thought, and wasn’t the North abolitionist by then? Shouldn’t they have been abolitionists, not slave owners? Most enslaved people had been freed by 1830 in New England. How did the Williams siblings slip so easily into this life? And what was Hasell’s background, which allowed him swift entrée into Charleston’s master class and the wealthy Sullivan’s Island community as a new doctor?

  It’s a rhythmic sound that comes from each machine as the heddles rise and fall, the belts hum, the shuttles run through the weft threads. The roar comes when each machine’s rhythm overlaps the others; it all becomes one great clatter.

  This is the clacking roar—chacka-clack, chacka-clack, chacka-clack—constant, a rhythm that echoes in the fan I hear above me later in the day while stretching my legs. Once I’ve been with the sound, I can’t forget it. It’s a roar that deafened women or left them with forever-ringing ears. A mill girl was lucky if she didn’t die of white lung—inhaling tiny cotton fibers all day long—lucky if she left factory life without losing fingers let alone her life; sometimes, the warp threads caught a woman’s loosened hair and pulled her in, scalping her. Her screams couldn’t be heard above that roar.

  Hilton’s lumber business is now thriving. He owns a mill in Charleston that he says is doing the most business of any in the city, and he frequently ships lumber back and forth between Providence and Charleston, occasionally bringing down rare lumber that Charleston builders want from the North, but most often sending up what is needed from the South. He uses his father’s merchant and Providence connections to find northern buyers and supplies some of Providence’s most prominent builders, Tallman and Bucklin, with South Carolina lumber for their projects.

  John Lewis Krimmel, Black Sawyers Working in front of the Bank of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, c. 1811–1813.

  Susan gave me this to write a few lines but as I am much engaged in business it will be but a few. We were all very much pleased to hear of Emily’s engagement in fact I suspected such would be the case when I was on and it gives me pleasure to congratulate her. I would like very much to be on at the wedding but it will be impossible. My business occupies all my time. Tell Father that Mr. Fall has brought out a very large Cargo of dear Northern Boards which we have purchased.

  At other times, he ships as many as forty thousand boards to his father, to be sold to Tallman and Bucklin, who built Rhode Island Hall on the Brown campus where Hilton’s uncle had studied, and many other buildings around Providence (sometimes in partnership with Russell Warren). Rhode Island Hall was funded by “wealthy” Brown donors, much of whose money was connected to the slave industry, and perhaps made with boards cut and planed by enslaved people in the South. Tallman and Bucklin designed Rhode Island Hall, now Brown’s “fourth oldest building on the main green,” which once housed the department of taxidermy: “Rhode Island Hall, the fourth oldest building on the main green, has seen a variety of occupants since its construction in 1840. It was originally built as ‘another College edifice for the accommodation of the Departments of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Geology, and Natural History’ (letter from Nicholas Brown to the Corporation, March 18, 1839), and was largely funded by donations from wealthy Rhode Islanders—explaining the building’s name.”

  The slave trade was booming in Bristol into the start of the 1800s. Jay Coughtry writes that “Throughout the eighteenth century, Rhode Island merchants controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the American trade in African slaves. . . . [T]hey soon surpassed Massachusetts as the chief colonial carrier, and by 1770, controlled 70 percent of the trade.” The entire Rhode Island economy was tied into the slave trade in ways no other state was. Coughtry writes, “From 1725 to 1807, what has been called the ‘American Slave Trade’ might be better termed the ‘Rhode Island slave trade.’” The end of the international trade was coming, by 1800, but then, with the pulse of industrialization and the need for cotton, it would shift to domestic trade.

  I would never have guessed, walking the Brown campus, that their buildings on campus or elsewhere in the city might have been made with lumber made by enslaved people. I’d have assumed that the materials were sourced locally, or shipped down from Maine’s forests. But this was the Atlantic mercantile economy, sending goods up and down the coast as the nation developed its own products for export. Just as raw cotton was shipped north in the 1820s to ’50s, to be spun and woven at the northern textile mills, so raw materials from the South were sent north for construction. Hilton’s enslaved men—Boston, Bishroom, Adam, and George, among many others whose names I don’t know—worked at his mill, hauling and cutting the lumber, shaving rough logs into fine boards that could be used in construction for those northern buildings amidst which Hilton had grown up. Coughtry writes the “majority of workers employed by the Gibbes and Williams Steam Saw Mill,” Hilton’s mill, were enslaved people.

  Hilton’s family connections in the North help him build his lumber business. He often asks his father what lumber is going for in the North, and whether it’s advisable to send deliveries or not. Sometimes, his father sends certain “dear” northern lumber not available in the South, down to South Carolina for Hilton to sell. In May 1836, he writes home that Susan is very busy with the children, they wish they could be there for Emily’s wedding, and then he shifts into the business of his lumber:

  The business has increased wonderfully. I am in expectation of sending Tallman and Bucklin a quantity yet, for the last 6 weeks there has been but a very small quantity that came to market. In about a week or ten days there will be an immense quantity. I would like Father to see [Tallman and Bucklin] and say that Lumber has risen. I would like them to write us.

  His father’s proximity to the architects allows Hilton to negotiate prices and keep them apprised of his business and plans for shipments. A month later, he writes regarding another client, William Brown, who had written to Hilton’s father the fall before to ask about getting lumber from Hilton. Now Hilton writes that he needs to return to him a “belt,” perhaps something for the mill.

  Sometime since I sent by the Grand Fork a Bundle containing the belt that Captain William Brown sent me. You mentioned that it was not received. If it has not yet come to hand, I would like Father to call upon him and pay for them. I intended to mention it in my last letter but forgot it. . . . We are now loading a vessel for Tallman and Bucklin. Lumber is coming in now plenty but very high, almost double what it was last year.

  A month and a half later, that shipment is sent off to Tallman and Bucklin—Hilton notes they’ve sent about 150,000 feet of lumber to the partners—and Hilton says he’s too busy to visit Providence that summer or fall, as he’d hoped to do.

  . . . for our business to go on profitably, at the same time it requires the attention of one of us to be constantly in the yard
to deliver lumber and one to overlook the Negroes and keep them at work, and it is as much as one can attend to in doing our collecting. Now if I am away, one of [my partners] must suffer, for I cannot hire any one that will pay the same attention to it that I do.

  We have done a very good business this season for Charleston has improved very much within five years. There are many buildings going up at this time and very many more will be put up next season. We shipped a cargo of lumber to Tallman and Bucklin yesterday.

  Archived contracts reveal that he bought two men, Bishroom and Boston, on February 17, 1835. They’d have worked at the steam mill when it was over one hundred degrees, pushed logs through the planer, and shaped boards into tapered shingles that would come to grace houses and roofs in Charleston and Providence. They must have been skilled laborers to have been bought for the steam mill. Hilton bought Bishroom from Edward McCrady, another resident of the city who held strong beliefs about secession and how enslaved people should be “managed.”

  Hilton wrote that Boston and Bishroom and the other men working beside them were being supervised by himself or his partner, Mr. Gibbes. Hilton likely kept the men at work in inhumane conditions, including high heat and humidity, with mosquitoes biting, without good food and with little water to keep them hydrated. Hilton said he’s best at it. I wonder what this means. That he delivers the best beatings? That he’s the most severe and exacting, or reminds the men most often of his power over them? Franklin describes him as the “gentler” brother, but it’s hard to see him as anything near gentle in this light.

  In 1799, Hilton’s uncle William Hilton Williams was a student at Brown, and his notes are in the archive. I read his loopy handwriting, looking for answers to how this family became who they were, why they engaged in the trade to the West Indies, why they moved south and bought enslaved people, if they understood the implications. William wrote in his notebooks:

  1.Happiness consists in health and the free exercise of our mental and corporal faculties.

  2.Virtue and patriotism are the brightest ornaments of the citizen.

  3.Riches and idleness are the enemies of virtue.

  He then translated each line into Latin, phrases that were meant to improve his language skills but also espoused the morals of the day. Hilton was taught these same values—that his worth was in his honor. He was born almost a decade after his uncle passed away at sea while working as a supercargo, a manager of a mercantile ship, in Suriname. Thirty years later, here is Hilton, carrying forth these values as a young businessman new to South Carolina, managing his own enslaved people.

  One of my negroes ran away during my absence and I caught him the day after my return. I have since sold him for $600. I gave $500 for him about seventeen months since, he was a great rogue, would steal from me every opportunity he had. I bought another fellow last week for $462 that I think will answer my purpose much better. Negroes are now selling very high. The other negroes behaved very well during my absence.

  We don’t get the names of the enslaved men in this letter, but in the 1840s, Winthrop would recount the loss of Hilton’s enslaved man, Boston, saying that the man’s death wasn’t such a great loss to Hilton because he’d been drinking and acting unreliably for weeks. He meant, of course, Hilton’s financial loss when he spoke about Boston’s death. Whether or not Boston had really been drinking for weeks, we don’t know. If he had been, maybe he was trying to ease some of the pain he felt—whippings, degradation, the loss of his wife or children, the loss of his home. Maybe the bottle he could buy from the local grocery owned by a free black woman helped him slip away from the hardest edges of his sorrow.

  Virtue and patriotism.

  How did kinder, gentler Hilton move from Providence, Rhode Island, during the early days of abolitionism and not even question slavery? If he was taught to value virtue and patriotism, weren’t these the qualities that would make him question the institution?

  It takes time to learn all this—and to unlearn what I’ve been taught. I’ve made the mistake of thinking that because he’s the more sensitive brother, he’ll be more honorable and resist engaging in slave ownership. I stumbled on my twenty-first-century logic, reading him as a hypocrite. I didn’t yet understand the connections between honor—the basis of a timocratic society—and slave ownership. One didn’t negate the other; living in a society that valued honor above all else meant that Hilton was even more likely to own enslaved people. Hilton believed he needed enslaved people to make his living. He moved to Charleston to benefit from that system, and he bought enslaved people as soon as he could, proving himself a competent businessman and a member of the master class. His definition of self—a white man in antebellum Charleston—and his upward mobility depended upon his ownership of enslaved people. He defined himself in contrast to Boston. This is what W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells and James Baldwin teach. Baldwin famously said, What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I‘m not a nigger, I‘m a man, but if you think I‘m a nigger, it means you need it. Hilton could not be a master without a man to enslave.

  It takes years to find, but there is a glimmer in this story—one of several—and it is Bishroom’s autonomy, in spite of his enslavement. In 1822, Bishroom is mentioned in a class list at the Trinity Methodist Church as a married man. He’s listed with his “class,” people with whom he’d have studied Bible stories and verses, talked about his life, shared his story. They met on Thursday nights, so Elizabeth Vale, the woman who owned him in 1822, must have given him permission—or he must have claimed it for himself—to attend.

  Maybe on Thursday nights, he learns to read, or teaches someone else to read, claiming and sharing literacy, too. Maybe he and his friends talk about the news they read that week, covertly, in the Charleston Courier, or about Denmark Vesey’s plans for a revolt that they might debate whether to join or not. Maybe they mourn his death and the deaths of his co-resisters, when they’re later executed. Maybe they laugh and joke together about the ridiculously extravagant hat they saw a white woman wearing that week, or how their friend had gambled too much in the grog shops the week before and lost all the money he’d earned hiring himself out the month before. I imagine one of Bishroom’s friends sitting across from him, shaking his head as he chuckles, his face transforming into a more serious expression as he worries about his now-broke friend, knowing that man had planned to buy his wife’s freedom with the money.

  He had a wife, presumably a woman he loved, and he was able to marry her at a time when, in most of the country, marriage was illegal for enslaved people and often barred by owners. In Charleston, enslaved people found more liberties than they could have elsewhere. They had access to church communities and could be married in the church even when they were prohibited from doing so by the government. Bishroom “refused to simply be property,” as Clark-Pujara says all enslaved people resisted in various ways around the country. Now, I begin to wonder whom he loved, when they married, and whether they had children. There was a woman in the same class at Trinity Methodist, also listed as married—the only other married person listed—and her name was Mary. She, too, was owned by Elizabeth Vale, who said upon her death in 1834 that she wanted her enslaved people to remain together if possible, and she wanted them to be given mourning clothes—a substantial “gift” for people who would have typically been given one set of clothes a year.

  Was Mary Vale Bishroom’s wife?

  When Mary died in 1831, before Elizabeth Vale, before Bishroom was sold to Hilton, she was listed as being sixty years old. I don’t know how old Bishroom was when Hilton bought him, nor how old he was when he was sold again years later, if he ever was sold. Maybe he and Mary were a couple in their sixties who had been together for years, and lived together in Elizabeth Vale’s possession. Maybe they had children somewhere, even in Charleston. Maybe they’d met as older people and fallen in love.

  If Mary was ind
eed his wife, Bishroom would have been heartbroken in 1831 when he lost her. He’d have mourned her loss in the midst of his daily work—because, for all of Elizabeth Vale’s so-called kindnesses, she still owned enslaved people, and they still had to work. It was illegal to manumit enslaved people in Charleston as of 1820, except by going to court for a special ruling; since she couldn’t free her enslaved people, maybe Elizabeth was doing her best as a woman living in this time. Maybe. The genealogist tells me that, even with his pro-slavery commencement speech in mind, Hasell may have been a reluctant slaveowner because he, too, inherited the enslaved people he owned and wouldn’t have been easily able to free them. Minerva, Eliza, and John were able to rent themselves out and would have kept some of that money for themselves, perhaps saving for their own or their families’ freedom. But, Hasell also surely kept most of their earnings, and we know that he also used them to serve himself and Susan. One of the women was likely the nurse Susan said was so good to baby Emily, and Susan notes that Juba worked for her family since leaving her sister-in-law Eliza Crouch’s house. Hasell’s uncle Charles was a lawyer who could have gone to court to manumit the enslaved people for Hasell, if he’d so chosen.