by Rachel May
Harriet’s daughter Henrietta inherited Peter, Jane, Hager, Isaac, Louisa, Arthur, Anna, and Emma. So, many of the enslaved people who were first owned by Mary Ancrum Walker stayed together. These are the people who came with Mary to Charleston from North Carolina. In 1794, she owned twenty-four people who were listed as her property: Cupid, Felix, Hannibal, Tom, June, Alfred, Minerva, Statira, Cynthia, Roxana and her three children Nanny, Ned, and John; Venus and her three children Sarah, Diana, and Damon; Judith and her child Juby Ann (this is Juba); Hutt, or Huff; Minda and her two children Quash and Eliza. Of those people, Cupid, Felix, Hannibal, Tom, June, Minerva, Cynthia, Roxana, Venus, Cloe, and Hutt or Huff, were named in Mary’s previous marriage contract, meaning they’d remained in her property and therefore remained together.
There are Juba and her mother Judith, Diana and her daughter Minerva. Roxana had three children, Nanny, Ned, and John, but I don’t see them again in the contracts.
The genealogist was able to find people I was told we’d never find beyond the letters. It is so unlikely, historians had cautioned me years earlier when I set out to trace the enslaved people in the archive. But, the genealogist told me, Charleston is different. There are more records here; your odds are small, but slightly better than they would be in another town or city. And, after years of reading records and searching for another mention of these women, there they are—there is Juba, and a line drawn to her mother as well as her child Sorenzo; there is Minerva, with a line drawn to her mother as well as her children Cecilia and Samon. There are at least pieces of their family trees. It’s both thrilling to see their names again, and disheartening to know this is the most I will find. But just as Bishroom’s marriage offered a glimmer, so does Louisa’s marriage to Isaac. When I learn that Louisa and Isaac have a child, Francis, who lives with her, I see them together as a family, enslaved and living apart, but united. Francis never had to say goodbye to his mother as Frederick Douglass had to say goodbye to his; he likely endured many traumas, but not that of being torn from his parents. His mother, Louisa, never had to see him sold away from her. Louisa was owned by Harriet, and Isaac was owned by Dr. Holmes. On September 22, 1843, when Francis was six years old, his parents had him baptized, privately, by Reverend W.H. Barnwell, who was Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church.
The picture of the (almost) united family—Louisa, Isaac, and Francis—dissipates with the death record from September 24 to October 1, 1843. Just a few days to two weeks after he’s baptized, six year old Francis dies of scarlet fever, as does George Logan, a white boy, William and Henrietta’s son, at two years old. Henrietta lived in the same house with her mother Harriet, which means that the two boys, Francis, who was enslaved, and George, who was part of the white owner’s family, were in close proximity to each other, close enough for the disease to catch them both. They had different doctors; Francis’ doctor was William’s brother.
Six years later, in 1849, Isaac and Louisa lived together at 54 Coming Street, owned by Henrietta. Still enslaved, Louisa and Isaac were united in the same household, able to support one another in their grief over Francis’ death, to nestle together at night and feel each other’s chests rise and fall in sleep.
Eight years after that, in 1857, Hagar, Jane, Isaac, Anna, Juliet, and James were listed in Rosamond’s house. Isaac lived there, without Louisa. Did she die? Was she sold? On Sullivan’s Island, Hilton lived with Rosamond, who was his stepdaughter, and her family. He must have known Isaac. Did he know what happened to Louisa? Was Isaac mourning her in 1857, or did she live in another house in the neighborhood (if she’d been sold by Rosamond)? Did Isaac now sleep alone, or did he find love again?
In 1863, Harriet owned ten properties around the city, and when she died that year, her daughters Henrietta and Rosamond sold most of them. When the enslaved people were emancipated that year—if the daughters followed the law to emancipate them—where did Hagar, Jane, Isaac, Anna, Juliet, and James go? Where did they make their new lives? I thought that Juba Simons was the only person I'd find after the war, but then I learn that Jane made it, too, and claimed the name Jane Jones. She was a member of Zion Presbyterian Church.
My business has been good of its kind for a month past. The great changes of late have put steamers and boats out of use . . . I have about 1500 bales cotton on the way down now—a part has been on the river more than two months. It has put me to great inconvenience . . . Cotton is very brisk, chief sales from 11 ¾ to 12 ½ for new crop, old from 8 to 11 ½ and rice is selling at $4 ¾ but little coming in . . .”
In this letter, Winthrop notes, as a matter of course, between mentioning that Hilton is “in good health as well as his wife and her children,” and that he himself is “quite hearty,” and at the other end of the sentence, notes that his sister-in-law Eliza Crouch has had a baby girl, as yet unnamed—and, between these two comments he writes that Minerva, Susan’s enslaved woman, “has had a fine boy.” Winthrop doesn’t name him here, but this is Samon.
Before our group snored through the night at the Dodge Cabin, we visited a cemetery in Galena, Illinois, where a local historian guided our group of university and high-school students. We learned that because so many people came to Illinois from Missouri, Missourians came to be called “pukes,” and miners who lived on the side of the hills were called “badgers.” We learned that people “played word-games” to illegally bring their enslaved people here, calling them servants, or indentured servants (just as Rhode Islanders called their enslaved people servants to appear more genteel). We learned that a man named John Hall and his wife Minerva were born enslaved in Tennessee, near Covington, and that they died enslaved in Illinois. When John’s master was killed in the Civil War, John, who had been forced to accompany him, came home and married Minerva. She was the daughter of Moses Lester, who came to Galena, the town where we stood at the cemetery, to serve a family. John was a carriage driver and the city lamplighter. He lit all the gas lamps in the city and was charged with dealing with the loose animals in town—roaming or dead cows, dogs. It was John’s job to round them up and send them home, or haul them off and bury them.
These are the stories told to us by Scott Wolfe. He told us that John wasn’t always treated well. At least one incident of white boys throwing rocks at John occurred on his lamplighting nights. Probably, he faced worse than that.
Scott Wolfe is a white man, a war veteran. When I asked how he became so interested in the stories of enslaved people, he said it started with his interest in the Civil War, because he’s a veteran himself. But, I persisted, so many people might not care about enslaved people, or to tell the stories of people of color, and here you are, a white man, doing that in a small town in Illinois. Why? Why do you think some people turn into these stories, and some turn away? Why would some people—from the same family—embrace slavery, while others would be disdainful of it?
He didn’t have an answer.
The gravestones of John and Minerva, or Mernervery, as she was known, read: “John and Mernervery Hall.” “Born and Raised in Slavery.” John Barton: “Deprived of the rights of a citizen by odious and unjust laws, yet his whole life vindicated.”
His whole life vindicated.
I think of Isaac and Louisa and their little boy Francis; I think of Minerva and Jane and Juba and Eliza. Of Bishroom and Boston and George and Adam. I imagine, for them, too, a life lived by this phrase yet his whole life vindicated.
The exposed corner of the Dodge cabin, perhaps the logs that Toby shaped and nailed.
Oblivious to the humanity and struggle of the enslaved people he and his family owned, in 1837, Winthrop keeps marking changes in business, focused on his acquisition of wealth. He notes the “great changes of late” that mark slower business and the financial depression.
Our cotton market has for the last week been in a very inactive and dull state . . . the market closed yesterday very heavily, the sales during the week were about 4,000 bales, the smallest week’s business that has been d
one for many months. It is chiefly owing to the scarcity of vessels . . . This wet weather has operated very unfavorably on trade of all kinds during the week . . . Rice remains stationary . . .
Invoice for six bales cotton shipped by Ewart Williams & Co., aboard Schooner Pacific for Providence, RI, consigned to William J. Harris for sale on account of the ship . . .
Winthrop advises William J. Harris, whom he addresses as “Brother Harris,” his sister Emily’s husband, about which sorts of cambrics to send to the south. And then, at the end of this officious letter full of business news, he writes that the lives of Eliza, John, Minerva and her children are irrevocably changed, in what amounts to, for Winthrop, another business deal. He closes: “Money is confounded hard to (get) had, times are worse here.” Susan has moved back to Providence, and her estate is managed by her brother Hilton, with Winthrop’s help. As a woman, she isn’t allowed to sell her own property, including enslaved people. He sells the people, and Hilton pays for a portion of the cost of Minerva and Eliza, why we do not know.
Maybe Hilton and Winthrop convinced themselves they couldn’t change the women’s fates by emancipating them because the law made it so difficult to do so. Maybe they told themselves they had to care for the “slaves” who could not care for themselves. Yet, hundreds of people were abolitionists by the 1830s. How did some people become abolitionists while so many others became slave owners and traders? Winthrop seems to have been blind to Louisa’s and Isaac’s lives. To Minerva’s and Eliza’s. He seems willing to do whatever it takes to propel himself upward.
I was very glad you sold the cotton at so good prices. You had better close the one bale J.H. at some price and send us sales and an a/c current of our transactions up to the 1st April, when we will commence anew just make up all your general charges against me in one general a/c current. I am sorry to hear that you do not find our cottons to work as well as Alabama and New Orleans the one bale January was of the finest quality of any cotton received here this season. Cottons have declined very much since the 1st July fully 1c per pound on all qualities the sales of the past week were 135000 bales at an improvement on the rates of the previous week—we now look for more steadiness in the market for the remainder of the season—shipping is very scarce so much so that the amount of cotton on shippers’ hands amounts to about 2/3 of the stock in the city, say 25,000 Bales.
The “finest cotton” was Sea Island cotton (among the sea islands are St. Helena and Hilton’s Head), with its longer, finer fibers that made for softer cloth when it was woven. The Sea Island cotton’s scientific name is Gossypium barbadense. In a 2015 study of the G. Barbadense genome, scientists showed that this cotton shows evidence of domestication, that it is “prized for its superior length, strength, and fineness of fiber,” while other hybridized cottons are known for their “superior yield.” This is a cotton that’s the product of selective breeding, the “inter-genomic hybridization between an A-genome-like ancestral African diploid and D-genome-like American diploid.” The scientists conducting this study have traced the genetic sequence of Sea Islands cotton and its progenitors, to understand how it came to develop its longer fibers rather than shifting into a high-yield but lower-quality crop. Winthrop is stockpiling the Sea Island cotton from the Lowcountry, along with the lesser quality cotton, to support himself and his family for years to come. By the start of the Civil War, he has tens of thousands of dollars in cotton bales stored in warehouses in Charleston and Columbia; this much cotton must have been picked by hundreds of enslaved people.
In the days leading up to the Civil War, the brothers still owned enslaved people. Hilton had one enslaved person in his name in 1860, and his house was kept by the people his wife Harriet, and then her daughter Henrietta, owned. Winthrop wrote about a couple he’d bought who were emancipated during the Civil War. Charles Crouch owned twelve people in 1860.
The price of enslaved people had steadily increased from the 1830s to ’50s, and Winthrop, wealthy from the cotton trade by the 1840s, was buying. As one historian notes: “A serious-minded Scotch traveler in 1857 recorded the epigrammatic judgment: ‘Niggers and cotton—cotton and niggers; these are the law and the prophets to the men of the South.’ Southerners firmly believed, as one of them wrote: ‘This alliance between negroes and cotton, we will venture to say, is now the strongest power in the world; and the peace and welfare of Christendom absolutely depends [sic] upon the strength and security of it.” Winthrop, now firmly rooted in the southern way of life and cotton-trading business, believed in this, too. He often noted the rising cost of enslaved people in his letters north to Susan back in Providence; in fact, he noted the changing prices of cotton, corn, and rice in many letters home. In June 1856, he writes about settling his servants and enslaved people into his Sullivan’s Island house:
Irish cook is pleased with the new kitchen, the cooking stove, and all new arrangements work well. Amelia [the enslaved woman his wife inherited] and Dianna have the wash room for their reception room. Amelia sleeps upstairs in the kitchen over the washroom and the Irish girl over the kitchen. Dianna and Sam have their old room under the last corner of the house. We have bought a house boy named William and [sic] proves a good quiet waiting man. He is 22 years old and cost $1000.00. He was Edwin P. Starr’s house servant. We have all the help we have use for. Eve is hired out. . . . I am sorry to hear you have such hard times with servants but such things seem very common at the north.
He emphasizes, again, how much more effective the southern slaveholding system is, how “obedient” and effective are his enslaved people at their work, while Susan has to contend with servants who don’t always “obey.” Around this same time, a cousin wrote to Winthrop, advising him that the best way to make a quick profit was to buy enslaved people in Washington, D.C. or Baltimore, and send them down the rivers to Alabama and Georgia, where, he said, slaves were always in high demand on the plantations.
In October 1860, Winthrop takes note of the impending conflict and is concerned about the future.
Politics look very alarming for the safety of the Union and from all I can learn of your city there are mad people there, as well as all over the North. But thank God there are some even in your state that are sound on the Constitution. Who is your ex-Governor (?) I never knew such a person in my day, don’t know the family, but he is a man every inch of him. But politics aside, I am sorry to see this storm brewing and even more grieved because I was once a resident of the North.
The separation between the families grows once the war is under way, but they remain loyal to one another in spite of their regional differences, Winthrop’s beliefs that there are “mad people . . . all over the North.” He’s sorry to see his world changing, sorry to see abolitionism growing in the land from which he came.
I have before me your letter date 17th March its contents being very acceptable except the fact of our being shared in the Bale Cotton $20. I guess I can make it up to you in this shipment now going on board the schooner . . . I have eight Bales Samples one [sic] bale and one small bale prime cotton for you’re a/c and 9 bales for sale on my own a/c—I will send invoices BL by mail—the Brig Eagle sending this.
In Illinois, our group visited another cemetery, this one on a hill that overlooked rolling farmland, a white house nestled into the hills that met below us. The sun was going down. It was the end of a long day, and the high school boys were restless. We pulled our small caravan over on the side of the road, and the boys spilled out of their van into the field, laughing. The light cast a glow on the greening fields. We were all grateful for spring after a long, gray Midwestern winter.
We walked through the cemetery, which held the bodies of people from the free community of color. This was Pleasant Ridge, founded by the Shepard family, who bought land from their former owner and later came to welcome, as the marker notes, “over 100 free and escaped slaves.”
There was one gravestone here that looked different. It was glossier, newer, and made of mottled red grani
te. Scott told us that this stone was bought and set here by a man who’s descended from the community, to mark the grave of his ancestors. There was an identical gravestone, this time, marking a new grave, not a memorial, which Scott found on a visit to that town. “People still want to be buried here,” he told us. “Imagine loving a place so much that you ask to be brought back to be buried there.”
This community thrived in the mid-1800s, until the start of the Civil War, when river traffic was halted and business suspended. Until then, town citizens worked as hotel staff, miners, and steamboat operators, building a strong community with its own school. Earlier that day, we saw a picture of a woman from this community; her name was America.
The boys wandered the graves, and two of them, unable to contain themselves, rolled down the great hill in the sunlight. I looked up to see them rolling, to hear their laughter, and beyond them, the great tree—still leafless yet—that stood at the top of the graveyard. The boys rolled seemingly without control, and they laughed at the simple thrill of it, just as boys in the 1830s must have done, maybe in this same spot. Mr. L. called out to them to be respectful, and they quickly got up and acted like proper young men again. But now, months later, as I sift through the ways this journey changed me, the sorrow of some of those places we visited, I remember the image of the boys’ rolling laughter down that green hill, how full of life, how hopeful and carefree they seemed in that moment in the midst of the graves.