by Rachel May
I had the pleasure of selling her and her mother a large quantity of goods for the said purpose as I presume for the wedding was to take place immediately but in consequence of Mrs. Shrivers having a slight attack of fever it will be consummated soon.
He sells her goods from the general store. His friend is making not a marriage but a “speculation,” an investment. Winthrop asks, “Is not that worth having?” To Winthrop, the “negroes” represent wealth. Based on the way this paragraph is composed—the question posed in the negative, the list of benefits Shriver will supposedly gain—Eliza must have been morally opposed. The enslaved people are wealth, he seems to be saying to her, and, the woman whom his friend Shriver will marry is “accomplished, intelligent, amiable,” so it happens that the woman is pleasant, to boot. It’s all for the good, he seems to think.
I wonder again how siblings end up with such different politics, how families become so divided. The sisters had to marry, or face living with their parents under strained financial circumstances for the rest of their lives. They didn’t have the option, as the mill girls did, of going to work on their own—but of course, the mill girls didn’t have access to the education and other luxuries afforded Emily, Susan, and Eliza Williams. Eliza Williams was married and then consigned to living with her sisters’ families for the rest of her life, as a widow. Their sister Abby married Mr. Elles and gave birth to many children, several of whom died, six of whom survived; she seems to have been in physical pain—back pain—that immobilized her much of the time. Franklin describes her as lazy, but she seems to have suffered from chronic pain and depression as a result of her children’s deaths.
At one point in the 1830s, overwhelmed, Abby sends her boys out to board with a woman nearby, to ease Abby’s workload. She could sometimes afford to hire a girl to help, and sometimes could not. She and her husband lived in upstate New York, and then, when they moved to New York City, they became wealthy with his printing business that included sales of “cambric” (cotton) notebooks. The cambrics were another product of the cotton and textile industries, of course, grown in the South and woven in the North.
Emily married a man who would help propel Winthrop and Hilton’s trade and who profited from it himself, as the trader of their goods in the North. Did Emily see the contradiction in this, if she was also opposed to slavery? Did she have any choice in the matter, even if she did see it?
The microfiche machine whirred and paused, whirred and paused, as I scrolled through the pages to the section for ads. I was in Charleston, in the South Carolina Room at the public library, reading a year’s worth of newspapers in search of an advertisement for the man Hilton said ran away.
That man resisted. Maybe he went to see his wife, or one of his children, at a home or plantation nearby. Maybe he spent those days of freedom eating hardboiled eggs gifted from a woman he knew at a neighboring farm on the outskirts of the city. Maybe he hid in swampland, or in the trees, or at a local grog shop where he spent time with friends. Maybe he looked up at the stars each night and, like Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman, thanked God he was free, at least for those moments: “Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s airth [sic] a free woman—I would.”
I searched for hours, and then, it was closing time and I’d reached the dates when Hilton said he found the man and sold him. The man was not listed in the newspapers, so I had no more clues—nothing about his skills, how he might have looked, what he wore—anything that, even though given through Hilton’s eyes, could have provided some clues as to who this man was, a blurry portrait from which I could piece together a part of his story.
Across town at the archive where paper contracts are held, I rolled apart great metal shelves and lifted five-pound books from the shelves, one by one, running my finger across lines of loopy cursive. There were no windows in this room. It was quiet, still. I searched, hoping for something that would lead me to this man’s story. But, there was no listing of a sale by Hilton in that year. There was nothing that could tell me more about the man who ran away, who claimed a spell of freedom for himself. Frustrated, tired, my eyes aching from squinting to read small handwriting under fluorescent lights, I leave the library. As I emerge into the sun, I imagine that maybe it’s meant to be that this man left no trace in these papers. I thought of a man moving in the early morning light, the sky blue at the edges of the world, holding in his movement, in his hands, a secret. He is walking to freedom. He never dies.
When we read accounts of Nat Turner’s rebellion today, even in contemporary articles, the number of white people murdered by enslaved people is emphasized, while the number of enslaved people murdered by white people after the rebellion is listed secondarily, if at all. That second number is twice as large as the first.
Maybe you’ve seen an image of the rebellion. It’s a woodcut titled Horrid Massacre in Virginia, and the white people are on their knees, begging for mercy from black men with raised arms; one of the attackers holds an ax, and the other, presumably Turner with his celebrated sword, raises his arm ready to murder a white man who kneels, wearing a suit, hair coiffed. The men of color are in shirts open to reveal their chests, their work clothes, osnaburg—not the fine suits of the white men. Behind the kneeling white man, a mother kneels with four children, her arm raised to a man with an ax. The children cling to their mother. Here, the white people are weak. The black men are powerful, dangerous, and violent. The caption reads, “1. A Mother intreating for the lives of her children. –2. Mr. Travis, murdered by his own Slaves. –3. Mr. Barrow, who bravely defended himself until his wife escaped . . .” On the right side of the image, a white man raises his sword against Turner’s men, while a woman in the background escapes with her baby in her arms. Underneath the scene of the attack, the army—dozens of men on horseback and pulled in carriages—race after three men of color who retreat into the woods. The image is labeled “Authentic and impartial narrative of the tragical scene which was witnessed in Southampton County. [New York], 1831.”
The white people are pictured as helpless, the black people as violent murderers.
This was fear, perpetuated: Prevent a rebellion. Enslaved people—black people—pose a threat. Keep them down.
Uprisings were the master class’s worst fear.
Knowing all we know about Jackson, it’s alarming to read the work of white historians who debate how he should be remembered—complicated, they say, both hotheaded and sensitive. Hotheaded? I ask myself. Really? He tortured and murdered thousands of people, whom he told Congress were “savages,” after promising those people that he had their best interests at heart—after the leader of the Cherokee nation saved his life. I pull book after book about Jackson off the shelf in the library, dismayed. They say that because he was the first president to come from working-class roots and wasn’t elite, the public could relate to him. His inauguration party became raucous and had to be shut down, because, they said, working-class people attended for the first time in the nation’s short history. Jackson wasn’t well educated. He defended democracy, say some. He did both wonderful and terrible things, they say. I want to ask, And what were the wonderful things? Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, casts white historians’ assessments into perspective: “The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator . . . that the ‘essential American soul’ is a killer.”
Genocidal sociopath. The essential American soul is a killer. Jackson left the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, for which he was valorized, with soldiers who made reins for their horses out of the “skin stripped from Muskogee Bodies, and they saw to it that souvenirs from the corpses were given ‘to the ladies of Tennessee.’” Jackson had begun what Dunbar-Ortiz calls “career building through genocide,” enacting what distinguishes the United States as
a nation with the “willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land.” How can anyone, no matter their political leanings, let Jackson off the hook by categorizing the genocide for which he fought, which he validated and supported and set into motion, as simply horrible? We don’t give Hitler any qualifiers, no “but’s,” no excuses nor calls to look at “both sides” of his character and actions, as if he’s redeemable. Jackson set the tone for the way the US government would treat indigenous nations and individuals, with violence both rhetorical and physical that resonates into the present moment, into every second of this present moment. The current US president cites Jackson as one of his heroes.
Jackson’s actions and beliefs about enslaved and indigenous people resonated with Winthop. The nation needed land for the production of cotton, and Jackson was the man to get it. On his plantation, The Hermitage, lived 120 enslaved people he owned. Both he and Winthrop were decidedly “in favor of the System.”
Cotton has fallen some. It is now worth 15c for the best.
Winthrop is making his way in Columbia, working at the store, welcoming in a new clerk when the old one leaves out of dissatisfaction with his salary. A circus comes to town in December of 1835, filling his boardinghouse, “Mrs. Gandy’s,” along with “countrymen who come in to sell their cotton and buy their necessaries.” I imagine enslaved people and free people of color attending that circus alongside poor whites and the wealthy white master class. Circuses were moments of integration, a cause for celebration for all. Historians surmise Harriet Powers witnessed one in her lifetime, inspiring the animals pictured in her quilts.
Winthrop loves the southern air, and wishes his sisters would join Susan in Charleston for an easier winter than they’d have up in Providence. At one point, he wishes for more rain so that the rivers will rise and the steamboats can come up with their goods, and a year later, in July 1836, just after Little Hasell died, Winthrop writes, “We have a thunderstorm nearly every day for a long time,” and notes that there’s so much rain that the weather is good for fruits and vegetables but bad for cotton and corn. While at first he thinks the ladies at Charleston who leave everything to the servants aren’t as “smart” as the ladies of Columbia who have to do things for themselves, as he settles into South Carolina and acquires wealth from the work of enslaved people who pick and prepare the cotton he sells, he’s quite comfortable buying enslaved people to do his own work, too, on land that was stolen from indigenous people.
In 1836, he longs to see his family back home but recognizes that he’s in a better position to move up in class in South Carolina than he would be in the North: “Its inducements to settle [in Providence] are small to a young man without capital, are small indeed in comparison with other parts of our country . . . I am at something more than a competency . . . I am aware that a young man by close attention to business here can make a fortune in the course of ten years.” Winthrop is middle class, not a man with “capital,” but someone who will have to work his way up in class without a father’s inherited wealth—though he does rely on his father’s social capital and northern connections. He’s ambitious, chasing after “something more than mere competency,” which is all he thinks he’d gain in Providence. The South offers the land taken from indigenous people, now used for cotton plantations, as well as continued enslavement, and thus, for Winthrop, the hope of wealth.
In this letter in 1836, he describes his business plan, which includes five partners and will require him to “go to Charleston and open a commission house there for the transaction of the business of concern there, which is now done by Messrs Jas, Adger, & Co.,” the sale of cotton, with the capital for the business furnished by Mr. D. Ewart, Winthrop’s boss in Columbia. He’ll “buy forward and receive goods and sell the Cotton purchased here [in Columbia]; it will be pleasant on account of being near Susan and Hilton and you if you visit Charleston as you contemplate,” he tells his sister. He’s to be a partner. He’s awed by the chance: “This is an important period of my life. Whatever step I now take will influence the whole of my future life. It is my highest aim to keep in the path of virtue, it is my nightly prayer that I may not part there from and God grant that I may be so through life.”
Virtue and honor. He’s invested in the timocratic society that makes possible the System.
I have contemplated writing . . . but being engaged in taking stock, which when I tell you amount to $100,000 besides about $35,000 worth cotton . . . it is no small jot. It makes my head crack almost when it comes night so that I do not feel like doing anything but take a walk with my friend Barstow.
In Dodgeville, Illinois, it was late, and I was listening to the cacophony of snores—five people in various tones whistling and snorting around me—while I lay on the floor of the Henry Dodge cabin in Dodgeville, Illinois. My feet were pressed against a sleeping graduate student’s head, and when I rolled over, careful not to jostle the student’s head, there was my colleague beside me, creating the highest pitched sigh of the snoring chorus. The cold draft from the wall and window at my back chilled me. My neck hurt. My hip was sore from pressing into the hardwood floor.
This cabin was built in 1832 by Henry Dodge, according to the lore and pictures affixed to the wall, but in truth, it was the enslaved people who built this cabin; Henry brought his enslaved people with him to Illinois from Missouri. Toby is one of the men who built the cabin. I imagined how he would have felt, sleeping on the cold floor after a day of building.
Like the Kinzie house, one of the corners of this cabin had been cut away to reveal its shiplap and the mud that binds outer to inner layers. Joe McGill slept on the floor under the cutaway, and beside him were teachers Ms. C. and Mr. L., who organized this trip, and a man who filmed it all.
In the next room over, eight high-school boys were pressed into a room together in sleeping bags on the floor. They came on this journey with the teachers from the private boys’ high school. The boys had been respectful all day, but just before bedtime, they were struck with giddiness and couldn’t stop laughing, even when Mr. L. called out to them (once, twice—“Boys!”) to be quiet and go to sleep. For a moment, the boys settled down. But then they couldn’t help making jokes and whispering, and before long, they were in fits again.
I imagined how Toby must have felt if he slept in this cabin in the 1830s, if he was forced to overhear his master and mistress snoring through the night, or if he tried to quiet his own children so they wouldn’t be punished for keeping the white family awake. How must it have felt to rise each day after sleeping through a cold night on a hardwood floor? How sore must his body have been as he set new logs in the fire, pulled his shirt or coat tighter, and started the work of the day? Meanwhile, at this same time, Susan and Hasell made their lives down in South Carolina, and Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane must have borne similar dreams and plans for freedom as Toby surely did, hundreds of miles away.
While Toby was building Henry Dodge’s cabin in 1832, John and Juliette Kinzie were in their fourth year at the Indian Agency House at Fort Winnebago in Illinois; this was the house our group toured. John’s job was to “manage” people from the Winnebago and Sauk nations. The nations came to challenge the violation of a treaty made decades earlier with the United States, in what would be known as the Black Hawk War, named for the leader of the resistance. (Abraham Lincoln, the president we admire for ending enslavement thirty years later, served in the Black Hawk War, though he wasn’t in combat. In 1862, Lincoln ordered thirty-eight Dakota men to be hanged in what remains the largest mass execution in US history. The men had defended their nation’s rights in the face of starvation, acts of racism from local colonists, and the US government’s violation of treaties. Dozens of colonists attended to watch the execution). At the end of the Black Hawk war, John and Juliette Kinzie moved to Chicago, and the US government tore the Sauk and Winnebago nations from their homelands, the place they’d always known and on which they’d subsisted for generations, and f
orcibly moved them west.
There has been 30 bales of new cotton brought into Market this week, the first this season. They were purchased by my friends, Chambers and Campbell for 20 ¼ cents per lb. The crop I expect will be pretty good as far as I can learn.
In their views of enslaved people, Hilton is no different from Winthrop. When cholera strikes the city, Hilton writes that “nearly all of our negroes have had it. We lost but one, a very fine fellow, indeed.” Hilton doesn’t see him as a person; for Hilton, his death is a cost incurred—but one, as if the man is an animal in a flock, indistinguishable from the others. We lost but one chicken to the sickness, one lamb. “A very fine fellow, indeed,” signifies that he worked well for Hilton, did not seem to cause him trouble. A fine fellow, but not a human who deserved his freedom. Hilton’s not concerned with the people this man must have left behind—a wife, children, dear friends, who probably honored his memory at a funeral or memorial service at one of the churches, or at least in a prayer. They must have talked about who he was, whom he loved, all that he’d given the world in the form of kindness, skills, generosity, laughter, love for those around him.
While Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane were forced to begin new lives in 1837-8, Susan, living back in the North, goes to visit her sister Abby in New York City. She visits the Astor House and marvels at the magic of cooking and bathing with water heated by steam. “I never saw anything so complete,” she says. Abby and her husband became wealthy with his new printmaking business in New York.
In Charleston, Mrs. Thorne, Hilton’s new wife, has two daughters, and though they declared bankruptcy in the 1840s when Hilton’s mill went out of business, they were still served by the enslaved people Harriet Thorne inherited from Mary Ancrum Walker; in 1830, Lavinia was about twenty-two, and had a daughter named Jane; Chloe was about seventeen; Peter was about fifteen, and Cyrus was about thirteen. The genealogist who helps me trace these threads tells me that, ten years later, Harriet’s daughter Henrietta inherited the people she’d owned. Henrietta’s husband sold Cyrus “out from under” Henrietta; her husband was not allowed to touch her property, the enslaved people, as they were protected under her marriage settlement. Cyrus was about twenty-three at the time. Henrietta took her husband to court for selling a man she believed belonged to her.