The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  When I read this paragraph in Nickell’s report, I thought of Dorothy Porter’s note to Emily Driscoll, pointing out that one John Hill Wheeler had held several government positions in the 1850s. Little did I know how important these clues would turn out to be.

  JOHN HILL WHEELER

  I have no idea how Dorothy Porter identified John Hill Wheeler as a possible candidate for the Mr. Wheeler in The Bondwoman’s Narrative. But she was correct. A painstaking search of federal census records for North Carolina and Washington, D.C., revealed that only one Wheeler in the entire United States lived in both North Carolina and Washington between 1850 and 1880. Every scholar embarked upon a search of this sort lives for a moment such as this. Not only had Wheeler served in a variety of governmental positions, he was also a slaveholder and an ardent and passionate defender of slavery, just as Crafts depicts him. But even more remarkably, John Hill Wheeler in 1855 became for a month or so perhaps the most famous slaveholder in the whole of America, and all because of an escaped female slave.

  By this time, I had decided to share the manuscript with a few other scholars, namely William L. Andrews, Nina Baym, Rudolph Byrd, Ann Fabian, Frances Smith Foster, Nellie Y. McKay, Augusta Rohrbach, and Jean Fagan Yellin. The generous, encouraging but rigorous, and sobering responses of these other scholars of nineteenth-century American literature would be important to me as I struggled to gain my bearings in the choppy sea of raw research that my searches through various archives were producing.

  One day William Andrews phoned to ask if I realized who Wheeler was. I told him what I had learned so far from several biographical entries, including that in the on-line American National Biography database, the most authoritative such listing of American lives yet compiled. In his searches, he replied, he had learned that John Hill Wheeler not only had been a slaveholder but was the petitioner in the infamous Case of Passmore Williamson, a fact that none of Wheeler’s biographers had thought to mention. This case was one of the first challenges to the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and it turned on Wheeler’s attempt to regain his fugitive slave, Jane Johnson. This single observation would turn out to be the most important clue in establishing crucial details about Hannah Crafts’s life as a slave.

  John Hill Wheeler was born in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, in 1806, the son of John Wheeler (1771–1832), the postmaster of Murfreesboro, and Maria Elizabeth Jordan (1776–1810). He died in Washington, D.C., in 1882. Wheeler graduated from Columbian College of Washington, D.C. (now George Washington University) in 1826, then studied law under John L. Taylor, the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. In 1828 he received an A.M. degree from the University of North Carolina, a year after he was admitted to the bar. Between 1827 and 1852, he served for various periods in the North Carolina House of Commons, first between 1827 and 1830. From 1837 to 1841, he served as the superintendent of the branch mint of the United States at Charlotte. In 1832 Wheeler became the secretary of the French Spoilations Claims Commission. He served as state treasurer between 1842 and 1844.

  In 1851 Wheeler published Historical Sketches of North Carolina from 1584 to 1851, then returned to the state legislature between 1852 and 1853. In 1854 he was named U.S. minister to Nicaragua, where he served until 1857, when he was forced to resign for contravening the instructions of Secretary of State William L. Marcy concerning the recognition of a new government. According to the historian Robert E. May, Wheeler was minister at the time that the American ‘filibusterer’ William Walker conquered Nicaragua. Walker eventually reestablished slavery in Nicaragua, in a bid to get southern support for his regime. Wheeler was extremely supportive of Walker’s reestablishment of slavery, and earlier recognized Walker’s regime prematurely, to the displeasure of the State Department.21 He returned to Washington in 1857, visiting North Carolina several times before the Civil War began. Between 1859 and 1861, he worked in the statistical bureau. He returned to North Carolina during the Civil War, undertook research in England for a second edition of his history of North Carolina between 1863 and 1865, and returned to Washington in 1865. Wheeler also published A Legislative Manual of North Carolina (1874) and Reminiscences and Memoirs of North Carolina and Eminent North Carolinians (1884). He edited Colonel David Fanning’s Autobiography (1861), and he left a diary, a Spanish edition of which (Diario de John Hill Wheeler) was published in 1974. Wheeler ran for Congress in 1830 but was defeated. He was married twice, first to Mary Elizabeth Brown between 1830 and 1836, and then after her death to Ellen Oldmixon Sully, whom he married in 1838. He had five children, three in his first marriage, two in his second.22

  In 1842 Wheeler moved from Hertford County to Lincolnton in Lincoln County, where he ran a plantation. According to the Dictionary of American Biography (1999), Wheeler not only was “a plantation owner,” he was also a “staunch advocate of slavery, and firm believer in American’s manifest destiny to annex parts of Central America and the Caribbean.” In fact, in 1831 Wheeler’s brother raised a volunteer company from Hertford County that participated in the suppression of the famous Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia.23 Wheeler was quite passionate not only about defending his own right to own slaves but also about defending and protecting the entire system of slavery.

  According to the 1850 North Carolina census, Wheeler owned twenty-five slaves, ranging in age from one year to fifty. Fifteen were males and ten were females. Four of the female slaves were between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five; one was twenty-one, while three were twenty-five. Could one of these four women have escaped to freedom in the North, and then, as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs had done, turned her pen against her master? I began to research Wheeler’s role in The Case of Passmore Williamson in search of possible clues for Hannah Crafts, growing increasingly curious about this Jane Johnson.

  THE CASE OF JANE JOHNSON

  The case of Passmore Williamson—or, more properly, the case of Jane Johnson—became a cause célèbre in Philadelphia in 1855. According to a pamphlet published by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in that year, and according to the black abolitionist William Still, who wrote about Jane Johnson’s escape in his book, The Underground Railroad (1872), John Hill Wheeler arrived in Philadelphia on Wednesday, July 18, 1855, on his way from Washington, D.C., to Nicaragua, to take up his position as “the accredited Minister of the United States to Nicaragua.”24 Traveling with Wheeler were Jane Johnson, whom he had purchased in 1853 in Richmond, and her two sons, one six or seven, the other eleven or twelve.

  When the foursome arrived in Philadelphia, Wheeler took them to Bloodgood’s Hotel, located near the Walnut Street wharf. When Wheeler went to dinner in another part of the hotel, Johnson “spoke to a colored woman who was passing, and told her that she was a slave, and to a colored man she said the same thing, afterwards adding, that she wished to be free.” William Still, chairman of the Acting Vigilant Committee of the Philadelphia Branch of the Underground Railroad, wrote in a letter published in the New York Tribune on July 30, 1855, that he was handed a note at 4:30 in the afternoon “by a colored boy whom I had never before seen, to my recollection.” The note read as follows:

  M. Still—Sir: Will you come down to Bloodgood’s Hotel as soon as possible—as there are three fugitive slaves here and they want liberty. Their master’s here with them, on his way to New York.

  Still, “without delay,” ran to Passmore Williamson’s office. Williamson was the secretary of “The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and for the Relief of Free Negroes unlawfully held in Bondage, and for improving the condition of the African Race.” The society was incorporated in 1789, and Benjamin Franklin served as its first president. Williamson told Still to go to the slave and get the names of both the slaveholder and the slave; then he would telegraph this information to New York, where they would be arrested when they landed there by boat. By the time Still arrived at the hotel, however, he discovered that Williamson had changed his mind and decided to go himself.
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br />   Williamson and Still were told that the slaves and their master had left the hotel and had boarded a boat. Still interviewed one of the four black people who had seen them at the hotel, and was told that the slave “was a tall, dark woman, with two little boys.” Still and Williamson rushed to the boat and found Wheeler and his slave, Jane Johnson, along with her two sons on the second deck; they then implored Jane to leave her master, flee with them, and seek her freedom in the courts. “If you prefer freedom to slavery, as we suppose everybody does,” Still recalled saying to her, “you have the chance to accept it now. Act calmly—don’t be frightened by your master—you are as much entitled to your freedom as we are, or as he is.”

  Wheeler kept interrupting Still and Williamson as they sought to persuade Johnson to flee with them, saying that she had no wish to leave. To the contrary, however, Still wrote, Jane “repeatedly said, distinctly and firmly, ‘I am not freed, but I want my freedom—ALWAYS wanted to be free! But he holds me.’” According to Still, when Jane rose to leave, Wheeler attempted to interfere, taking “hold of the woman and Mr. Williamson.” Williamson shook off Wheeler, and the party left the boat. Once rested, Jane was said to proclaim that she and her sons had been so “providentially delivered from the house of bondage.” Still later informs us that Wheeler had instructed her twice not to speak to the hotel’s colored waiters or listen to their “evil communication.” If asked about her status, she should say that she was free. But Jane had said instead, “I and my children are slaves, and we want liberty.” Still describes Johnson as “tall and well formed,” with a “high and large forehead, of gentle manners, chestnut color, and seems to possess, naturally, uncommon good sense, though of course she has never been allowed to read.”

  Jane was spirited away, Williamson was sent to jail, and the “half dozen colored men” (including Still) who assisted with Jane’s escape were accused of “riot,” “forcible abduction,” and “assault and battery” and were forced to stand trial. Accompanied by Lucretia Mott (and three other female anti-slavery sympathizers), Jane Johnson made a most dramatic, and surreptitious, appearance in court, in an attempt to provide testimony that would free the accused.

  Still was acquitted; two of the other black men were found guilty of “assault and battery” and were forced to serve a week in jail. Williamson was found guilty of contempt of court and served a sentence between July 27 and November 3, 1855. Jane boarded a carriage immediately following her testimony, “without disturbance.” Wheeler would complain in his diary that he was never able to recover her and her sons as his property.

  I tried to locate Jane Johnson through the 1860 and 1880 censuses. In 1860 seventy Jane Johnsons were living in Pennsylvania alone, forty-seven of whom lived in Philadelphia. By 1880 more than one thousand black women named Jane Johnson were living in America. If Jane Johnson had wanted to blend facelessly into the African American community, she could have done no better than to select Johnson as her surname. In fact, Frederick Douglass tells us that he rejected the surname of Johnson when he escaped to the North precisely because it was so commonly used by other blacks.

  As I read these accounts of the case, I recalled a passage in The Bondwoman’s Narrative in which Mrs. Wheeler laments that her slave named Jane had run away, thus providing the motivation for acquiring Hannah. (Still reports that Jane had said that Wheeler had “sold all his slaves” within “the last two years” and had “purchased the present ones in that space of time,” though I have not been able to find any record of these sales in Wheeler’s papers or in the archives of Lincoln, North Carolina.) I suddenly realized that it was this Jane to whom Hannah Crafts refers in chapter 12 of her novel! Ironically, it was the character without a surname, Jane, whose identity I would most clearly be able to establish among all of Crafts’s black characters, contrary to the laws of probability applicable to this sort of historical research. This means that Hannah Crafts could not have written her manuscript until after 1855. It also means that Hannah would have been purchased after Jane’s escape, just as the novel claims. Jane, moreover, told the Philadelphia abolitionists that she had carefully planned her escape before she had left Washington on her trip with Wheeler: “I had made preparations before leaving Washington to get my freedom in New York; I made a suit to disguise myself in—they had never seen me wear it—to escape when I got to New York; Mr. Wheeler has that suit in his possession, in my trunk.” Hannah Crafts would also avail herself of a disguise in a suit in her escape to freedom—at least as depicted in her novel. Armed with these new facts about Wheeler and Jane Johnson, I returned to the search for the elusive Hannah Crafts by examining John Hill Wheeler’s diary.

  THE DIARY OF JOHN HILL WHEELER

  The biographies of John Hill Wheeler indicated that he kept a diary, now housed in his papers at the Library of Congress. Would this diary shed any light on Wheeler’s feelings about Jane Johnson’s escape and, even more important, about the identity of Jane’s replacement, Hannah Crafts?

  Wheeler wrote in his diary regularly from the time on his plantation located in Beattie’s Ford in the county of Lincolnton, in North Carolina (about 250 miles from Wilmington), during his residency in Nicaragua, and all during his various periods of residence in Washington, D.C. The period covered in the diary housed at the Library of Congress is May 30, 1850, to his death in 1882. The diary is intact, except for the year 1858, much of which is damaged or illegible for the first half of the year. The latter half of his diary for 1856 is lost after May 23.

  Wheeler lived in Nicaragua between 1855 and November 1856, according to a “Diary of Events” that he recorded in his diary. This chronology follows several pages of financial records, including that for the sale of a farm in Prince Georges County, Maryland, along with what appears to be the sales of three slaves, one named Joyce ($485.92), another named Gadis ($360.00), and finally Boker ($400.98). Wheeler moved from Washington to North Carolina during the Civil War, resettling in August 1861. He kept his permanent residence there until June 1865, when he moved to a farm near Washington. In 1873 he moved to a home in the city of Washington, apparently remaining there until he died. Even when he lived in Washington and Nicaragua, he returned to North Carolina several times, at least once accompanied by slaves.

  Wheeler’s diary for 1854 opens when he is assistant secretary to the president of the United States, Franklin Pierce. He reports a conversation with Pierce on June 2, 1854, during which Pierce was “delighted with the news from Boston that the slave [Anthony] Burns had been remanded by law to his master and that ‘the only fear [that abolitionists] had was of lead and steel.’” Two months later Pierce appointed Wheeler “Minister Resident of the U.S. for the Republic of Nicaragua, Central America.”

  Wednesday, August 6, 1854, reports his return to his plantation: “much exhausted about 10—and went forthwith to bed.” Wheeler complains, however, that he was unable to sleep “because my slumber much disturbed by the wake kept up by the Negroes over Captain Slade’s servant—who died today—and who I hope has gone where the good Negroes go.”

  The following July, in 1855, Jane Johnson’s escape occurs. Wheeler’s diary entry for July 18 describes it as follows:

  Left Washington City at 6 o’clock with Jane Daniel and Isaiah (my servants) for New York. D. Webster Esq. 6th Street Philadelphia in Co. Reached Philadelphia [a]t 1 1/2—went to Mr. Sully’s to get Ellen’s [i.e., Wheeler’s wife] things—and hurried to the Warf [sic]. The Boat had just left—so we remained until 5 o’clock—took dinner at Bloodgood’s hotel foot of Walnut Street. At 4 1/2 went on board of the Steamer Washington, and a few minutes before the boat started a gang of Negroes led on by Passmore Williamson an Abolitionist came up to us, and told Jane that [i]f she would go ashore she was free—On my remonstrating they seized me by the collar, threatened to cut my throat if I resisted, took the servants by force, they remonstrating and crying murder. Hurried them on shore—to a carriage which was waiting, and drove [stricken: “off”] them off.

>   Wheeler’s diary for July 19:

  I went to the Marshal’s Office and with his Deputy, Mr. Mulloy, went to Judge Kane, who ordered a Habeas Corpus—returned to town about 10 o’clock, to M.J.C. Hazlitt the Deputy Clerk—took out the writ, then we went to the House of Williamson who had absconded. At 1 o’clock I left Philadelphia, and arrived at New York at 6—and put up at the Washington House.

  Entries following, between July 19 and through much of August, refer to the trial of Passmore Williamson and that of the black men separately accused. Wheeler writes that Williamson had been confined to prison, “where he will stay until he gives up my property which he stole.” (July 27, 1855) Jane—Wheeler never uses her surname—“has been induced to make an affidavit that she wished to be free—all stuff!” (August 3)

  Wheeler reports that on August 15 he “engaged” two servants, Margaret Bina and Margaret Wood, both white, from the Protestant Servants Association in New York. In late August he returned to Philadelphia to testify in court, after which he reports attending a performance of “the Sanford Minstrels.” A day later, on August 30, he reports that Jane—“escorted by Lucretia Mott and others”—had given her testimony, which he characterized as the “most barefaced perjury committed by her and her black confidantes.” Wheeler’s entry concludes with the report that he “went to see Judge Grier—to have her arrested.” On August 31 he writes that a rumor had circulated that “the U.S. Officers would seize Jane—in Court at 10,” causing “much excitement.”