by Rachel May
An Abomination
Peace depends on cotton and negroes.
—Winthrop
In places, Winthrop’s letters can be entertaining. In 1840, he accidentally shoots himself in the hand while bird hunting and tries to dispel the rumors that he did it from being spurned by a woman—that it was an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He misses home and the company of the boarders at his parents’ house; he finds the ladies in Columbia wanting in looks but resourceful—unlike his sister Susan, who sends home for fabric and dresses to be cut by the Providence seamstress they know. (Columbia women cut and sew all their own dresses because the tailors and seamstresses there are too costly.) He writes about a failed hot air balloon “ascension” he’d paid to witness, and jokingly asks his family to demand a refund from the man when he brings this scam up north. He reveals a lot about his family and his adjustment to the south. He hopes a northern man will take the place of the clerk who’s just left the store in Columbia; he can’t stand Hasell’s “disagreeable” brother, Charles Crouch, nor his wife, Eliza Crouch. He writes to his sister Eliza Williams for shirts, as his are about to wear out. He asks if the family has the same cow they had when he was home, and if she still gives milk, and writes about two local cows whose deaths he believes he expertly diagnosed.
There were two cows died here a few nights ago from eating of the wild cherry. The people could not find out just what killed them until I happened to see the cherry trees lying near the places where they died and told them that was what had killed them. They could hardly believe me for they had never heard of it before. Ask Father if it is not a fact that the leaves of the wild cherry will kill them.
He’s so invested in this diagnosis of the cows, so certain of himself. And the more I read of him, the less I can tolerate this sense of certainty, his bravado, his claiming authority on all things, even down to cow-milking, which he says, in the 1860s, he can do better than the people he’d enslaved, denigrating them in his anger that they’ve been emancipated. He is so invested in his sense of superiority as a white man and membership in the master class as, throughout the 40s and 50s, he acquires more and more wealth earned from enslaved people’s labor. He is the most passionately racist member of his family. He and Hilton, who was less lucky in business but was served by his wife’s inherited enslaved people even in difficult financial times, enriched themselves with the labor of enslaved people. They chose this life; Hilton bought and sold people for his mill, found and sold the man who ran away, sold Adam and George with the mill. Winthrop’s son, Winty, inherited Patty and Amelia from his mother’s estate; those women likely served Winthrop until Winty came of age.
Winthrop writes about how he gained his wealth, working in the store, moving from the cotton building to the front where he had to serve the ladies and gentlemen in the shop, and then, to his relief, moving again to the cotton building and back of the shop. He writes that he “sees by the papers” that the infantry from Providence are traveling to Boston, and he asks for more papers to be sent south. He and Hilton say they’ve sent by the brigs Commerce, the Mary, a package of figs or hominy or peaches for the family, and later, Winthrop says he’s sent bales of cotton north to be conveyed to his brother-in-law or to his father to sell for him. He relays to his northern family the news he’s gotten in letters from Susan and Hilton in Charleston. But most interesting of all—to me, at least—he writes about the news of the North and South. As Franklin notes at the bottom of the pages on which he’s transcribed these letters, Winthrop slowly becomes a wealthy cotton trader; he’s for states’ rights to sustain enslavement, but not secession. It’s strange to watch from the distance of nearly two hundred years a person change over the course of his lifetime, to hear in his letters the shifts in voice—first ebullient and hopeful for his future, and then, by the time the Civil War begins thirty years later, he is weary, afraid, and tired. In those thirty years, he married, had four children, built a fortune and lost it all. It’s hard not to despise him when he writes about how he built that wealth, the system he took so easily in stride as he adapted to the South, his complaints about his enslaved people and then about freedmen after emancipation. In the first letter in which he talks politics with his sisters, noted by Franklin as the beginning of his transition to conservative southerner, he begins to draw a line between himself and his sisters, the South and the North. He echoes a letter Susan sent to her parents, wishing they had more “help.” He starts the letter by bemoaning the fact that his family in the North can’t “get as good help,” meaning enslaved people, as Winthrop has in Charleston. In Providence, Susan and her family hire domestic workers; those who are mentioned in his sisters’ letters are Irish immigrants, but when Winthrop and Susan were still children living at home in 1820, their family had in their household a woman listed as “colored” and “servant.”
. . . I wish you could get as good help as the people have here. The people at the North are making trouble sending incendiary publications among us. They had better be doing something else for there is no calculating what ever may result from them—I may say making trouble for themselves also for if this subject comes to an issue it will shake our country to its very centre. The people here have too much spirit to be humbugged or trampled on by any set of men.
Those “incendiary publications” Winthrop refers to were the abolitionist pamphlets being sent from the American Anti-Slavery Society in the North, led by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Garrison published The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper founded in 1831, the year that Nat Turner led his rebellion in Virginia. Turner organized fifty to sixty enslaved people who left the plantations on which they were held, and protested, recruiting more enslaved people as they went through the county—murdering their enslavers and other whites they encountered, who had perpetuated their torture for years—until at last, the group was finally thwarted and murdered by a white militia.
Just two years earlier, in 1829, David Walker, an African American man living in Boston, published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call to action for the immediate liberation of enslaved people. He writes: “The whites have had us under them for more than three centuries, murdering, and treating us like brutes; and as Mr. Jefferson wisely said, they have never found us out—they do not know, indeed, that there is an unconquerable disposition in the breasts of the blacks, which, when it is fully awakened and put in motion, will be subdued, only with the destruction of animal existence. . . .” Nat Turner’s rebellion, like the Christmas Uprising in Jamaica in 1831–32, when sixty thousand enslaved people revolted under the leadership of an enslaved man named Samuel Sharpe, is evidence of a more public moment when enslaved people seized their freedom with careful planning and organization that came from skillful communication strategies and determination. Imagine how hard it would have been to set a time and place to gather when it was illegal to write, to walk anywhere without a pass, to gather without permission, or to buy anything that might help a person escape and survive. At the end of the rebellion, twice as many people of color, many of whom weren’t involved in the rebellion, were murdered by whites in retaliation. Nat Turner’s rebellion, like Denmark Vesey’s in 1822, inspired fear in the white master class in Charleston and Columbia, as they saw the possibility of their lives and livelihoods overturned.
Those stricter laws that attempted to control enslaved people’s lives were strengthened in the aftermath of The Stono Rebellion in 1739. This rebellion was led by Jemmy or Cato, outside Charleston. George Cato, great-great-grandson of Cato or Jemmy, was interviewed in about 1937 as part of the Works Progress Administration project—founded, of course, to employ those who suffered in the Great Depression—to document the lives of formerly enslaved people. There are thousands of stories from formerly enslaved people transcribed in volumes that anyone can read in text or online. In the 1930s, two hundred years after the rebellion, George was interviewed by a white man hired by the federal government to carry out the WPA project. Historian Mark Smit
h, who discovered the significance of George Cato’s narrative, reminds readers that this is an interview from a person of color by a white person in the Jim Crow era, with all the inescapable power dynamics that would have been attendant at the time. Interviewees may not have felt free to tell—or may not have wanted to tell—all they knew to the interviewers. Scholars have noted that people may have not been as frank about the violence they witnessed and experienced when they were enslaved, or may not have wanted to implicate or denigrate their former owners in the face of a white interviewer who could so easily exact punishment. The note accompanying the narratives explains that in the 1930s, “white representations of black speech already had an ugly history of entrenched stereotype dating back at least to the early nineteenth century. What most interviewers assumed to be ‘the usual’ patterns of their informants’ speech was unavoidably influenced by preconceptions and stereotypes.” The documents therefore become evidence not only of the era of enslavement but also of the 1930s: “The result, as the historian Lawrence W. Levine has written, ‘is a mélange of accuracy and fantasy, of sensitivity and stereotype, of empathy and racism’ that may sometimes be offensive to today’s readers.” Smith explains that in spite of these complicated layers around the narratives, they’re reliable, and hold powerful anecdotes and testimonies whose facts have been verified in other sources.
George Cato said of his ancestor Jemmy or Cato: “I thinks de first Cato take a darin’ chance on losin’ his life, not so much for his own benefit as it was to help others. . . .” George Cato went on to explain that Jemmy or Cato was elected captain and that the group conquered a place that had been designed to render them helpless: “How it all start? Dat what I ask but nobody ever tell me how 100 slaves between de Combahee and Edisto rivers come to meet in de woods not far from de Stono River on September 9, 1739. And how they elect a leader, my kinsman, Cato, and late dat day march to Stono town, break in a warehouse, kill two white men in charge, and take all de guns and ammunition they wants. But they do it. Wid dis start, they turn south and march on.” Cato had been hiding for two months before he was found after the rebellion. “Commander Cato speak for de crowd. He says: ‘We don’t lak slavery. We start to jine de Spanish in Florida. We surrender but we not whipped yet and we is not converted.’ De other 43 men say: ‘Amen.’ They was taken, unarmed, and hanged by de militia. Long befo’ dis uprisin’, de Cato slave wrote passes for slaves and do all he can to send them to freedom. He die but he die for doin’ de right, as he see it.”
Cato was taught to read and write by his master, and used his skill to help others, as George Cato explained; his great-great-grandfather undertook the rebellion to “help others,” leading the group on a march to Florida to “join the Spanish,” who had promised freedom to any enslaved people who crossed into their territory. The men who were found in hiding were taken unarmed, George Cato said, posing no threat, and then hanged by the colonists.
In 1740, in the wake of Cato’s resistance, the colonists created the Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province, a brutal law with a placid name. This would be an improvement, the law’s name told the people, “better,” and there would be safety in “order.” Don’t be afraid, that law said, for we are cracking down. The law stated that enslaved people could not own or carry weapons, nor walk in public without passes from their masters; furthermore, anyone who attempted to insurrect would be put to death. This law held for another 120 years, until the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War in the 1860s.
Cotton has been coming in rather freely for a month past . . . As the market is now up to former prices we may look this week for an increase in business.
What does it mean that one of the best-known images of Nat Turner is that of his capture? In the sketch, he stands holding his sword, the weapon that came to symbolize his resistance, facing a grimacing white man holding a gun to Turner’s face. They emerge from the woods. Turner’s pants are torn at the knee, and he wears the same sort of light-colored, loose-fitting shirt open at the chest—though Turner’s appears to have buttons, undone in a gap at the stomach—that symbolizes the enslaved men in the engraving that illustrates the “massacre” and contrasts with the white gun holder’s buttoned shirt, neat jacket, and whole-cloth pants. The white captor is clean-shaven, wears boots and a hat. Nat Turner is pictured as barefoot, bareheaded, and with a beard.
The Confessions of Nat Turner were recorded—supposedly, as we don’t know how precisely his words were transcribed—by Turner’s white lawyer. How are we to interpret so many texts, so many images, made by colonists? How is a story of a person of color inevitably filtered in the hands of a white writer or painter or storyteller or lawyer? What does it mean to describe the images here, without reprinting them? Would it be better to reprint them? The forces of our culture, the ways in which we’re indoctrinated, are inevitable and unavoidable. Something seemingly as simple as a drawing can be interpreted so many different ways, depending on who’s looking at the image. The past, our institutions, are always present. How is my telling of this story shaped by who I am? How are the myths by which we live perpetuated by what we imagine ourselves to be, as individuals and as a nation?
In 1835, northern abolitionists Garrison and Tappan helped launch the country’s first mass-mailing, which was possible only thanks to industrial printing machines; they harnessed industrial technology for an act of rebellion against its evils—the perpetuation of slavery due to mass production of cotton at the mills. The society sent more than a million pamphlets to southern slave owners and distributed them on sidewalks and at taverns. And southerners were enraged. The Charleston postmaster held the pamphlets when they arrived at his office, saying that he wouldn’t distribute “such unpatriotic material.” Alert to what was on hand at the post office, rioters in Charleston broke into the office and burned the pamphlets (which, incidentally, had been brought south via the Columbia, a ship that often took Winthrop’s, Hilton’s, and Susan’s letters north) before they could be distributed. They weren’t going to be, as Winthrop says, “humbugged or trampled on.” In other words, they were determined not to be stripped of their way of life, notably the enslavement of others that made their lives possible.
Winthrop echoes the views of Andrew Jackson, who was now in his second term as president. Jackson was against the abolitionists, going so far as to say he “might call them monsters” who were inciting a Civil War. Jackson proposed a law stating that abolitionist material couldn’t be sent by federal mail. John C. Calhoun, whose statue, today, stands stately in Marion Square in Charleston’s downtown, was, like Jackson, a slave owner, but while Jackson did all he could to sustain the Union, Calhoun helped spawn secessionism. He didn’t want the federal government to have the power to mandate what could or could not be dispersed, what could or could not be said; he thought it should be up to the individual states. So, Jackson and Calhoun, his vice president, agreed: The post office couldn’t meddle with mail and hinder free speech, and the federal government would feign ignorance when they did so.
Winthrop would have heard about the mob burning abolitionist pamphlets in Charleston—either from Susan, Hasell, Hilton, neighbors who traveled back and forth between the two cities on business, or the city’s newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, to which he’d have had access. He writes about the similar mode of law in Columbia.
There has been a Lynch Club formed in this town, their object is to punish and keep all persons of known ill fame out of the community also such pestilent ornery persons distributing Incendiary Tracts; they whipped a man by the name of Johnston a notorious counterfeiter, and sent him out of town about three weeks ago.
Those who sent around “incendiary tracts,” abolitionist papers and pamphlets, would be dealt with by the mob. Winthrop says he doesn’t agree with this sort of law, as he thought the lynch mobs were “Dangerous to the Supremacy of Law,” which was Andrew Jackson’s argument. However, Winthrop goes on to say:
There may be some cases where there is no other way of administering summary punishment . . . for instance . . . the case of the Barber that was lately whipped and tarred and cottoned in Charleston. It seems he had been taken up and tried several times, but had managed either to evade the Law or pay the fine imposed, which the profit of his illicit trade afforded ample means . . .
We don’t know what his illicit trade was, but his punishment—being whipped, then having hot tar poured over his skin and covered in cotton—was a severe punishment, though surely not the worst the lynch club exacted.
The mail crisis of 1832 was one in a series of instances that illustrated the growing tension between North and South, which Winthrop chronicles in his letters and illustrates in his expressions of frustration with family members who represent his political opponents, and with his sisters Eliza and Emily who were opposed to slavery. In many of his letters, he mentions the current price of cotton, whether it’s high or low, and often, also, the prices of “negroes,” corn, and rice. In a letter from April 1835, he refers to a friend, “the first person I have seen from home since I have been here.” He says they spoke of “home and bygone days,” and that it “gave me much satisfaction” to spend time with an old friend. This friend, Leonard Hyatt, is adjusting to his newfound life as well: “He is very much altered since I saw him last. He has become a southerner throughout but no nullifier.” Winthrop is referring here to the Nullification Crisis of 1832, just a year earlier, which also involved John C. Calhoun and was a dispute over the state’s versus the federal government’s power, and the balance of agrarian products in the South and industrial manufacture in the North. It almost resulted in a civil war, which, they couldn’t have known then wasn’t prevented but only postponed. Winthrop and Susan would find themselves on opposite sides of the battle lines. And yet, their ties between North and South would continue to serve them well, saving Winthrop’s son when he served as a soldier.