The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  Once they decided to run they were betrayed, shot at, beaten, imprisoned, and betrayed again.

  At one point, John was captured and jailed, chains binding his hands and feet. His cell was on the top floor, so he broke through the ceiling, jumped off the high roof, and crawled for miles on his hands and knees, while the stunned jail keeper searched the building, convinced that no man in chains would jump to certain death off that roof.

  When Eliza’s shoes wore out on the long walk north, John gave her his own to protect her bare feet while his feet bled. She walked in them until they fell apart. But still they walked north.

  Later, they both agreed that the most terrifying part of their journey was trying to cross the Ohio Bottoms, a heavily forested swamp that bordered stretches of the Ohio River. Walking across the more settled lands along the riverbank would have meant certain capture, so they had to travel through a region that most people avoided. John remembered, “The water was black and deep. I bound our packages on my wife’s back, placed her on a log as a man rides on horseback, and I swam, pushing the log, holding it steady, to keep her up. Had the log turned right or left, she would have slipped off, and the packs would have sunk her. It would have been death, sure.” Eliza added, “The water in some places was very deep,—it was black, dirty water. I was scared all but to death.” John admitted, “I almost repented I had started, but on I went.” After all, both agreed, “worse than death was behind us, and to avoid that we risked our lives.”48

  Keziah would have known about people just like John and Eliza, people willing to risk death for freedom. There may have been mothers, like herself, with children the age of Malinda, now too exhausted to walk. Keziah could well have seen children carried by parents whose backs still bled from the whip, their arms still bruised from beatings—those parents willing to endure any pain to see their children safe and free.

  These refugees from slavery had come far, but they knew that even the Griers might not be trustworthy. Some refugees and their allies in the region reported that even men of African descent would betray and hunt others.49

  Keziah knew that as a woman she would seem safer, and with Malinda at her side, she would look safer still.

  It is hard for children to keep secrets. But Keziah knew that when she and Charles decided to help people find liberty, all their children would have to become secret keepers as soon as they could talk, for talking of helping the hungry, the thirsty, the terrified could kill them all.

  How do you explain that to a child?

  Their life was so fragile. And helping the refugees did not make them any safer.50

  There was not much that Keziah could give to those who were running from bondage. Some food, some comfort, some warmth and directions. She would have to explain that even though they were in a free state, the refugees had to keep walking north. The Griers would have known that in 1815 eight people who had escaped bondage and had been living nearby in the Indiana Territory had been denied their freedom when they had pled their case in the Gibson County Courthouse. Even this wilderness north of the Ohio River was too far south to be safe.51

  But the Griers could always provide some warm cornmeal from the pot over the fire, and sometimes they could spare a little smoked meat. By this time they had learned to gather the sweet sap from the maple trees around them, rendering it down into thick syrup or a brown sugar that could cure meat or sweeten their food.52

  And they could give refugees something to keep them warm as they continued their journey north.

  Wool from their sheep was safest. Anything purchased could bring suspicion. Not that she and Charles had the money for fine linen, and cotton came from a tortured source. But she had sheep, so she had wool, and no one need know how many sweaters and shawls she was knitting, or for whom.

  Shearing took effort from both Keziah and Charles, one of them holding the sheep, the other carefully clipping the mass of wool that had grown all year. And the sheep would complain—grinding out their rough cries, some even fainting in distress as Keziah held their sagging weight.

  Then her work could really begin.

  First the wool had to be washed. It must have looked an impossible task, the raw wool sitting in a massive mound, fluffy and filthy. The pile would have tempted the children, who probably didn’t mind that it was caked with mud, full of burrs and bugs, for it was so soft and bouncy.

  The water involved would have been more than they used to bathe the whole family. They had to haul gallons and gallons to the house and heat it. Keziah used soap she had made from the rendered fat of their slaughtered pigs. The wool resisted getting wet, it was so full of the oil that coated each strand and protected the sheep from the rain and cold. So she had to push it down hard and work it into the warm soapy water. After some tough kneading and squeezing, she could pour off the dirty water and do it all over again, and again, until the water ran clear.

  Once the wool was clean she had to dry it, squeezing it out as best she could, then hanging it in the sun or by the fire. But it was still a mess, all tangles and knots. So it had to be carded.

  She would have taken two wooden paddles lined with sharp little nails pointed outward, like a torturer’s idea of hairbrushes. She would work a small bunch of wool between the two paddles, the repetitive motion hard on arms and shoulders, getting every tangle out and fluffing the wool into large soft puffs ready for the spinning wheel.

  There was not much on the farm that Keziah and Charles did not work on together, but spinning had long been women’s work. It was a valuable skill—allowing Keziah to clothe all of them and create yarn and knitted items for sale. The thump of her spinning wheel as she pushed the treadle with her foot over and over again to make the wheel spin must have been as constant and familiar to her children as a heartbeat, pulsing throughout the day and into the evenings in the dying firelight. Later, as she checked each of them, pulling their blankets up and tucking them in, her hands would have been soft from the grease that still clung to the wool she had been working with.53

  Now Keziah would have been teaching Malinda how to spin. The shawl Malinda would certainly have worn so proudly may well have been her first, made from wool Malinda had spun into yarn and knitted. It may have been a little lumpy, the yarn a bit uneven, but it was warm, and Malinda could have held it close around her small shoulders as she watched the woods with her mother in the morning.

  Standing there in the half light, her daughter beside her, Keziah must have looked like help. She must have seemed safe. And she would have been.

  Despite the danger, despite the risk, she was choosing to help—they all were.

  Did a person come slowly out, moving into the light? Hoping for charity, for survival, for freedom? Keziah made her choice once more—they would be met with kindness and comfort.

  But not everyone north of the Ohio River made such a choice.

  Keziah knew as well as anyone that crossing that river could mean freedom, but for some that crossing took them to a life of sorrow and terror beyond imagining.

  4

  “And secure the blessings of Liberty”

  Southern Illinois, 1819

  The first thing that Cornelius Elliott would have seen was the smoke. As they got closer to the Ohio River, the smoke would have filled the entire northern skyline. It must have looked as if the whole world was on fire.

  In some ways it was. The smoke was from the massive bonfires on the Illinois side that were constantly alight, blackening the sky by day and lighting it by night, to extract salt from water.1

  This may have been the frontier, but the salt springs of southern Illinois were among the most profitable enterprises in the new state. And the man bringing Cornelius Elliott into Illinois was the leaseholder of the largest of the mining operations.

  By 1819 the salt industry had burned so many acres of woodland that the territorial government had become alarmed and legislated how many acres of forested land could be burned a year. But the laws were pretty much ignored�
�as were most laws in that area.2

  Timothy Guard, who had just purchased Cornelius Elliott, was familiar with this fact. He would have been making sure that certain laws in the region were not upheld, for Timothy Guard’s salt spring was making a lot of people a lot of money, himself included.

  Salt springs: the term seems innocent enough. But some of the earliest work done by the newly created American government involved these salt springs. By 1803 Congress had already given the Treasury Department the right to lease the land out to individuals for 10 percent of the salt produced and a portion of the profits. Between 1807 and 1818 alone, the government received 158,394 bushels of salt in rent, and profits for that period were modestly estimated at $28,165. This was a formidable sum. When the mines were turned over to the newly formed state of Illinois in 1818, the leaseholders contributed nearly 25 percent of the state’s tax revenue.3

  Out there on the Illinois frontier these massive operations produced the wealth-generating salt that the mine owners, the state, and the newly created nation so desired. Soon the salt industry of Illinois was ruled by greed and infected with death.

  It hadn’t always been that way. The springs had long been valuable, even to the local indigenous people, offering a steady supply of salt almost 1,000 miles from the sea. The Native Americans of that region had figured out how to harvest it by carefully carving out large wooden pans where the water could be collected and allowed to evaporate in the sun, leaving behind the gleaming crystals.4

  But this was too inefficient a technique for the new American owners of the salt mines. To extract a higher yield, the water had to be evaporated from the salt at a faster rate. The leaseholders needed fire. So they started burning everything they could, cutting down the forests to create massive bonfires. But green wood is full of sap and does not burn clean, and the air was always thick with dark, wet smoke.

  Some of the earlier leaseholders had been happy to work with the salt water bubbling up to the surface, but Timothy Guard had a more ambitious plan: digging underground to get to the source of the salt springs. There was a problem, though: as any child who’s been to the beach knows, digging a hole in wet sand is difficult, for every shovelful is replaced with mud.

  No one wanted this brutal job, with the constant danger of drowning in salt muck. So Guard forced people to do the work for no pay. By the time he brought Elliott to Illinois, Guard and the other “salt barons” of the region were well on their way to owning more slaves than anyone else in the state.5

  Slavery was technically outlawed in Illinois, but where massive profit was concerned, loopholes were found, exceptions granted, blind eyes turned. Soon the forests were not the only things being destroyed around the salt springs of Illinois. Freedom was as well. By the time it became a state in 1818, Illinois had the highest number of people in bondage of any of the Old Northwest territories or states, thanks in large part to the salt works.6

  Guard and the other leaseholders were not particular about whom they forced to work to create their wealth. Native Americans, white indentured servants, and enslaved African Americans all toiled together. But it would have been hard for anyone watching to tell them apart as they worked the pits, all of them covered in mud, all of them stained from their wounds.

  But the easiest and most readily available workers were African American, and soon one of the pits was given the vile nickname “Nigger Spring.” Working at Guard’s salt springs was to exist in a hell that seemed straight from Dante’s imagination, complete with whippings, fire, smoke, and a muddy, ever-deepening pit.7

  In Timothy Guard’s hell, however, those managing the tortures stayed well away from the pit, for drowning was not the only danger; there was the salt water itself.

  As the pit deepened, it yielded water with a higher salt content. This meant more profit for Guard and worse conditions for his enslaved workers, for too much salt in water has an unfortunate effect on the human body. There are few firsthand accounts from that period by those who actually survived the worst of the salt industry. Mary Prince was one survivor. She was enslaved in the British Caribbean, made to work the drying “ponds” that lined the ocean’s edge. She was soon suffering from “salt ulcers,” a condition caused by spending too much time in extremely salty water. Mary described them as “dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone, afflicting the sufferers with great torment.”8

  Mary’s torments occurred in the Caribbean, where conditions differed from those in Illinois. In Illinois, rather than salt ponds in the hot sunshine, there were fires in the forest. These created the smoke that Elliott had first seen when he got close to the salt works. By the time he arrived in 1819, the salt-work managers were piping the salt water from the pits to the rapidly receding edges of the forest. It was actually easier to bring the salt water to the fuel than to bring the massive trees, heavy with sap, to the springs. When he finally got close enough to the fires themselves, Elliott would have seen the massive pots, called “kettles,” hanging above them. Filled with the piped-in salt water, the kettles were kept over the fires until the water had boiled off, leaving the salt behind. This rendering process often caused the kettles to fail, spewing scalding sludge on the people tending them.9

  Why would someone work another human being to death? It doesn’t make sense. Indeed, some pro-slavery advocates before the Civil War argued that the horrors described by those who had witnessed the slave system firsthand were exaggerated. Any sane slave owners, they reasoned, would preserve the health, life, and even happiness of the people they owned. But this argument does not take into account the fact that when human beings are worth less than what they produce, their lives have terrifyingly little value.

  Timothy Guard understood just how deadly it was to work in his pit, but he was willing to make the investment, to buy lives for little money and turn deaf ears to the screams of the dying.

  No accurate count was kept of those who died in the salt works of Illinois—it behooved no one to do so. But Elliott, and all those who worked there, were witnesses to this terrible economy.

  Luckily Elliott was only a witness to the worst of it, for he was both blessed and cursed to be a skilled man whose body and its labors were worth a great deal to Timothy Guard, for Elliott was a cooper. As a cooper he made many of the tools that Guard needed: barrels for salt, buckets for hauling mud, and wooden pipes to bring salt water from the pits to the fires. Elliott had been about twenty-eight years old when Guard visited his enslaver (and possibly father), John Elliott, in Maury County, Tennessee. Guard must have hunted hard for an enslaved person like Elliott, skilled and available for sale, for without a cooper he could not grow his works. Elliott had been born in North Carolina around 1790, but before the birth of his younger brother, Aaron, his mother and brothers had been moved to Tennessee by John Elliott.10

  Like many enslaved people, Cornelius was unsure of his own birth year, but he knew that his skills made him a valuable man. This made his sale price high, $1,000 in 1819—an immense sum at a time when a healthy young man sold for around $300 and the wage for a free laborer in that region was about thirty-seven cents a day. Back east in more settled Sturbridge, Massachusetts, a farm with a home and all barns and outbuildings on almost a hundred acres of land could be purchased for $985. But Timothy Guard was a wealthy man, and with Elliott’s labor he planned on making himself even wealthier. He paid John Elliott the full amount.11

  Once in the Salines, surrounded by their horrors, no one could have blamed Elliott for losing heart, for giving in to despair, or for fleeing. The salt works were not a place to encourage dreams of freedom. But as Elliott trudged across the burnt lands checking the wooden pipes for leaks, as he hauled wooden staves out of the soaking bucket and forced yet another metal band over bent wood, he held on hard to hope—not just for his own freedom but for the freedom of his whole family. He dreamed beyond survival to success. He dreamed of his own land, his own farm, his own life.

  But to gain all of this, E
lliott had to become a freedom entrepreneur—a person willing to negotiate and work to purchase himself and the people he loved. And to do this he had to bargain with Timothy Guard. But Elliott had courage; after all, he had already survived the end of the world.

  In 1811, when Elliott was around twenty-one, the world seemed to start on a path toward destruction. First, a total solar eclipse darkened the middle portion of the American continent. Soon afterward, everyone could see a comet, hanging continuously in the sky for the whole fall and early winter. Then on December 16, the earthquake hit. Now called the New Madrid Quake, for the Missouri village at its epicenter, it is still the worst quake east of the Rockies in American history. But those who felt its full force were not thinking of history but of survival as the earth tore itself apart beneath their feet.12

  The noise was deafening, and the settlers who heard the sound of cracking and rumbling would have had little to compare it to. No bombs that powerful existed in 1811. Fountains of mud and sand spewed high into the air, and massive chasms opened up and swallowed people and animals. The earth rose so high under the Mississippi that sections of the river ran backward. The tremors shook the ground in Washington, DC, and rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina. At the time Elliott was living less than two hundred miles away from the epicenter.13

  He escaped the worst of the devastation but would have soon heard reports of the quake and understood its terrors. And December was not the end of it. Two more earthquakes hit in January and February. No mere aftershocks, these were huge quakes in their own right—the actual aftershocks numbered in the thousands. By early March everyone in that region must have wondered if the world was going to be constantly shaken until nothing was left standing or alive.