An American Quilt

by Rachel May

  Abraham owns twelve enslaved people who run their home. His wife, Sophia, the boys’ mother, died a month after Hasell was born, when she was just twenty-one. She was descended from the elite planter class through her mother. Her mother, Hasell’s grandmother, was Mary Ancrum Walker, and she owned a large plantation, at least two thousand acres, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and then in 1808, she became a respected part-time resident of Charleston. As a widow with her own protected property, she was able to operate as a feme sole, passing down her enslaved people to her grandchildren. Married women were counted as one person with their husbands, and their husbands maintained all control, while single women could have slightly more autonomy. Hasell and Charles inherited from their grandmother several enslaved people, and were “gifted” Jenny by her. The record is incomplete, but also listed as Mary Ancrum Walker’s property or that of her daughters’ (to whom she passed down her property) are Flora, Chloe, and Minerva. In her second marriage settlement, when Mary Ancrum Walker married a second time, she listed as her property to be passed to her daughter Sophia and then to Sophia’s children 24 enslaved people including Roxana and her children Tom and William, Cynthia, Damon, Diana, and Juba and her son Sorenzo.

  Hasell and Charles inherited some of these people. Minerva. Juba and Sorenzo. Hasell and Charles grew up being cared for by enslaved women who worked as their nurses, housekeepers, and cooks. These women soothed them to sleep each night and dressed them each morning, probably longing to soothe their own children to sleep, to wipe their own babies’ faces clean, to feed their own children such great feasts of fine food. These boys would come to own these women. In 1830, when he graduated from Brown, Hasell gave a commencement speech on the “necessary evils” of slavery. The papers reported his speech to have “enlisted the favor of the audience from the candid and unassuming manner in which the subject was discussed.” So, his delivery was appreciated, even though the topic wasn’t “exactly fitted for a Rhode Island atmosphere.” In 1830, Rhode Islanders, at Brown at least (which was founded by slave traders and funded at least in part with money made from enslavement), had more abolitionist leanings, after all.

  In 1819, when Hasell was just ten years old, he might have looked upon the miniature their father had done of his wife the year they were married; perhaps Hasell gazed at her big eyes, oval face and narrow chin, ran his fingers over the locks of hair in a fleur-de-lis on the back of the frame, surrounded by pearls. Their mother died on September 10, 1809, a month to the day after Hasell was born. Maybe she died of complications from childbirth, or from a disease, an accident of some sort, or of infection. Perhaps he felt guilt alongside the pain of his loss, perhaps blaming his own birth for her death.

  While the people enslaved in Abraham’s house aren’t named in the census records, they likely included the people passed down to Sophia from her mother; their presence is indicated by twelve tick marks on the 1820 census. There could have been six women and their children to care for the boys, cook the meals, and clean that tremendous house, and six men who acted as butlers or waiters, hauled the coal and wood for the fires, chopped the wood, fed and groomed the horses, tended the stable, drove the carriage. These people were possibly born in the United States (the international import of slaves having been outlawed in 1808), and may have been sold away from their own parents as children. Since Mary Ancrum Walker had owned several generations in one family, though—Judith, her daughter Juba, and her son Sorenzo—maybe there were other people who were able to stay with their relatives as well. Juba probably did everything she could to keep her children with her, making them indispensable to Abraham so that he wouldn’t sell one away without the other—staying up later than anyone else to prepare the morning meal, churn the butter thick and creamy, dice carrots into the smaller pieces as he preferred. Maybe Roxana spent hours mending Hasell’s suits with the tiny, even stitches that she knew made her more valuable as an object, and, she knew more deeply, more talented as a woman. Imagine she was given this skill that allowed her some bargaining power, becoming her last mistress’s favorite, recommended to Abraham’s late wife by her last mistress and sold, therefore, along with her children Tom and William.

  Probably, at some point in these women’s lives, they were raped by their masters or the white men around them. Charleston socialite Mary Boykin Chestnut writes in her Civil War diary about how common “mulatto” children were: “The mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children [in everybody else’s household], but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends to think so.” I wonder if Sophia or Susan made similar observations in their days. White men’s rape of enslaved women, their use of enslaved women as “mistresses,” was an open secret. Stephanie M.H. Camp writes that “By the antebellum period, planters has so thoroughly assimilated ideas that reduced enslaved people to their bodies that they often referred to them by their parts: ‘hands’ was a common term and ‘heads’ was not unfamiliar . . . Women slaves . . . were as one with their farming tools and called, simply, hoes.” How many times have I heard this word, and never known its origin? Camp goes on to say that “Planters, and white southern men generally, had also learned of black women’s tough, sexual nature, and preyed on them shamelessly.” Of course, here Camp is also emphasizing the problem of white men and women stereotyping black women as “tough” and “sexual.”

  I don’t know if Abraham visited local high-class brothels after Sophia died, nor if he ever raped Minerva or Juba or Jenny, or any of the other women his wife Sophia owned. But if he was like most of the other white masters in Charleston at the time, it’s more likely than not. William and Ellen Craft, who ran to freedom and wrote their story, say that, “It is common practice for gentlemen, (if I may call them such), moving in the highest circles of society, to be the fathers of children by their slaves, whom they can and do sell with the greatest impunity; and the more pious, beautiful, and virtuous the girls are the greater the price they bring, and that too for the most infamous purposes.” Bernard E. Powers writes that “the largest single group of emancipated slaves gained freedom by the last will and testament of their masters.” Sometimes, he says, “masters emancipated their mistresses along with their illicit offspring.” Thus, “In 1860, 75 percent of the free black residents of Charleston County were mulattoes,” while only “8 percent” of the “county’s slave population . . . was mulatto.” In 1820, manumission was limited by law, but some enslaved people, Powers says, found ways around this by saving money to buy their relatives.

  Imagine that, several decades into the future, one of Minerva’s children is sold away from her. Her child wouldn’t have a portrait to hold to trace his or her mother’s face. Maybe somewhere there was an eleven-year-old boy working in a field in Georgia, on a hot day when his thirst was heavy, dreaming of the mother who, by an accident of birth, was forced to care for a white woman’s child instead of her own son.

  Susan cut the hexagons from fabric her parents sent her from Providence via the brigs that ran the coast. From her house, she’d have been able to hear echoes of the harbor’s daytime hustle—the shouting of merchants and captains and food sellers hawking their wares. She’d have sent Juba to buy for the cooking, and walked along the harbor past the Exchange building where Hasell’s father once worked as a customs inspector. Her sister-in-law, Eliza Crouch, lives nearby. Now, in the night, it’s quiet. She’s sent the women to bed, all but Minerva, who stays up to undress Susan before retiring for the night.

  The mosaic quilt that Susan and Hasell began together was popular with elite Charleston women since the pattern was published in women’s magazines similar to Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1835. Paper piecing had been practiced in Charleston since the early 1800s, perhaps introduced from England by a visiting lady. In 1835, Susan wanted to be accepted by these women. She longed to know their ways. She said as much when she asked for Winthrop to give her someth
ing in commemoration of her wedding. “Such things here are talked more about that they are with you. They are made such secrets of.” She was trying to break into a new society. She was learning quickly, like her brothers, Hilton and Winthrop, that if she were to thrive in Charleston, she had to prove herself a lady who followed the codes of the master class. It probably wasn’t easy for Susan to fit in with Charleston women; she didn’t seem to have many friends around except for Mrs. Carpenter (the wife of Penuel, who helped Winthrop get his job in Columbia), from the North, and her sister-in-law, Eliza Crouch. When Susan prepared for her confinement in the winter of 1835–36, she feared she’d be alone the whole the time.

  Susan was a middle-class merchant’s daughter, not an elite woman of leisure like the daughters of planters with whom Hasell grew up. Her parents had to run a boardinghouse to make ends meet, hardly a luxurious lifestyle. They hired a “domestic” to assist with housekeeping (in 1820, their domestic was a woman of color), but much of the work was done by Susan’s mother and single sisters. Susan and her sisters were educated at a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, and then came home before they were married. Thus, they fulfilled the middle-class ethos of education as a means of “self-improvement,” in addition to “encourage[ing] children to stay at home, sometimes into their twenties, a practice that maintained the parents’ moral influence and gave young people material support.” Winthrop and Hilton left home after high school, in their late teens, in pursuit of their careers: “As well as extending children’s time at home, middle-class parents in the first decades of the 19th century advocated and sustained educational institutions that prepared their sons for business and their daughters to marry upward.” This was precisely the path that Susan, Winthrop, and Hilton followed—Susan and most of her sisters married “upward” while Hilton and Winthrop founded their own businesses in Charleston. Hasell’s family valued education, too, and while they were from the upper classes, education was a means to further ones’ class and social connections; his father Abraham graduated from Brown and went on to become a lawyer before he became a customs house official. Hasell’s grandmother had stipulated that Hasell and Charles must be educated, and left money for that purpose. All Susan’s siblings, including Susan’s other sisters, were educated so that they could move up in the world, “acquir[ing] cultural capital and learn[ing] how to spend it wisely while maintaining a genteel status.” Susan wrote home in 1830 about her piano lessons and hoped her father would rent a piano so she could practice; because Hasell was indebted to Susan’s father for his father Abraham’s burial in 1826, Hasell gave her money—ten dollars—for the lessons. She planned to learn French, and to write to Winthrop sometimes in French to practice. And, for Susan and her sisters, this education included needlework.

  Writers in the early 1800s were espousing the benefits of a woman’s proper education: “Mrs. Friendly explained that a woman who lacked a well-furnished mind, well-governed temper, love of domestic pleasures, and the inclination and capacity for domestic employments would be unhappy in herself and a torment to her friends.” Women were better mothers when they were educated, writers argued, and a substantial part of that education, of the “self-construction of the middle-class person,” included “drawing and needlework.” Those mills that thronged on in Susan’s Providence and just north in Massachusetts were part of this construction of the middle class and Susan’s new role as a housewife (as opposed to her mother’s and grandmother’s more labor-intensive roles as colonial housewives). “In industrialized urban areas, servants were hired in order to relieve their employers from having to do many of the more arduous tasks themselves. As Christine Stansell writes in City of Women, ‘Being a lady . . . meant not doing certain kinds of housework.’” Since enslaved women and men did the household work for Susan, she was expected to develop her sewing and cooking skills. “Labor-saving technology slowly began to be introduced into the more affluent households in the 1830s and 1840s, but cooking largely continued over open hearths, for instance, and the work of supplying the most basic needs, such as heat, continued to be heavy labor. Along with the new technology, however, the standards of cleanliness increased and the aesthetics of the Victorian home became so ornate that leisure time did not increase.” Stansell explains that women of this new middle class had to assert their superiority over servants by proclaiming problems with them. She’s referring to life in northern cities, where immigrants served as “domestics” whom Susan’s mother and sister Abby hired (they complain about their “help” to one another in their letters, as Susan would do when she returned north later in life). Women who “were not entirely confident of their own class identity, assert[ed] judgment over the immigrant poor” to “[affirm] their position and status.”

  The same definition of self in contrast to other applied to define oneself as middle class—and master class—in the Charleston slave society. This—defining herself as not enslaved, as not just a woman but a lady displeased with the work of the enslaved people Eliza Crouch owns—this is what Susan did when she arrived in Charleston and complained about the enslaved women who were supposedly poorly managed by her sister-in-law, Eliza Crouch. In those early days, conflicted and trying to adjust to this new society, Susan also claimed she’d prefer to do the housework herself, as her mother and sisters did back home, because she thought she’d do a better job. And, she wished her sister could help her with the housework so she could keep her company in Charleston. “I do wish we could keep house it would be so much pleasanter it would seem more like home for I could have one of you with me then. But it will be an impossible thing until Hasell gets his profession.” But then, a year later, she sang Juba’s praises as her cook and nurse—the same woman she’d criticized while living in Eliza Crouch’s house—saying that Little Hasell called her “Mammy.”

  In 1835, Winthrop was becoming a cotton factor, in charge of getting the cotton from the plantations around Charleston to the city’s docks and selling it north and abroad. Beckert writes that factors were “American middlemen” who “accepted planters’ cotton on commission, transported it to ports, and then sold it to merchants. . . . This service was of enormous benefit to planters, as it enabled them to sell their products in large coastal markets or even in Europe, giving in effect even the remotest of them access to distant markets.” He explains that factors also did the work Winthrop described in his letters, “provid[ing] planters with manufactured goods and food supplies.” Factors played a significant role in the cotton industry, and Winthrop seized this window of opportunity. He and Mr. Ewart would found their business in 1836. He wrote about the wagons that brought the cotton in. He wrote about how when the weather was bad, the wagons couldn’t come. He wrote about how, by the Civil War, he’d stored enough cotton bales for himself to support his family for years to come. He lost more than $50,000 worth of cotton and goods in the Civil War’s destruction. Whenever I tell African American historians in Charleston that he was a cotton factor or trader, they chuckle and say, “Oh sure!” meaning: Cotton trader is a nice way of saying he was trading slaves, that this was his guise in the 1830s. He may have been a trader, but I haven’t found evidence of this in the contract files. There are no extant records of his purchase or sale of enslaved people, except for what he writes in the letters. His brother, Hilton, on the other hand, is listed as a “trustee” for the property of several people on contracts for enslaved people in the 1840s and ’50s, benefiting from his wife’s inheritance of enslaved people from Mary Ancrum Walker, Sophia Jane Withers’ mother. How Harriet was related or connected to Mary Ancrum Walker isn’t clear. But, as her sister was Eliza Crouch, married to her husband’s Uncle Charles, Hasell’s brother, it’s possible that the enslaved people owned by Hilton, Charles, and Hasell were related, as they all came from the same North Carolina plantation and at least some of them had managed to stay together as multi-generational families—Juba, Judith, and Sorenzo, as well as Minerva, her children, and her mother Dianna.

/>   Winthrop’s business was tied up with industrialization and the northern mills, and thus with enslavement. Factors “were the most significant deliverers of capital into the cotton-growing regions of the U.S. South, channeling credit to planters who used the money to acquire the supplies they needed to tide themselves over until the next cotton harvest and to purchase more land and more slaves to expand the production of cotton.” Factors weren’t necessarily “the wealthiest traders in the empire of cotton,” Beckert writes, but they were “the most numerous.” And, because they were extending credit to planters, which might have been “advanced by European merchants” and others in the northern states, too, when the planters couldn’t pay, their enslaved people were used as collateral for the debt. This was in the 1840s and 50s, decades after England had banished slavery. And yet, here they were, still bound up in the system.

  Winthrop sent his cotton to Providence and Lowell, as well as Liverpool. As plantations shifted from the production of rice and indigo to cotton, the northern landscapes changed, too. “Between 1826 and 1836,” when Lowell’s textile mills were booming after their founding in 1821, “Lowell’s population jumped from twenty-five hundred to eighteen thousand. . . . The population continued to grow steadily into mid-century, when it declined briefly because of the discovery of gold in California.”

  As the industrial north’s landscapes and routines changed with technological advances, so did the personal lives of every person living through the time. The production and distribution of readymade cloth and other household goods changed Susan’s life as a housewife, Hasell’s work as a doctor, Susan’s brothers’ careers in the lumber mill and cotton trade, and the lives of the enslaved people they owned. While Susan strived toward status as a lady, Minerva, Juba, and Eliza probably loathed that concept. Thavolia Glymph writes that some of enslaved women’s first acts upon emancipation were to buy themselves new dresses and household goods, not in an attempt to mimic white women's engagement with domesticity but to claim their own identities in the clothes and items they chose, to declare their liberty to buy what they selected rather than what someone else demanded they wear and use. Minerva, Eliza, Juba, and Boston’s lives were determined by “the long night of American enslavement,” as Ira Berlin calls it, their enslavement seemingly even more certain now that vast quantities of cotton needed to be planted, cultivated, and picked each season.