The Bone and Sinew of the Land

by Anna-Lisa Cox

  While the costs and legal challenges were daunting, the journey to the frontier held its own dangers unique to free people of African descent. Nancy, Daniel, and all the Lyles family knew that in leaving they were risking what little freedom they already had.

  They had their families, their funds, and their freedom, but all that could be lost, for they were walking wealth. They were traveling through a nation that valued them more as chattel than as citizens, and once they left their home they became rich pickings. Even though they were sure to have their free papers with them, those were just pieces of paper. But their bodies, their bodies were ready cash to any white man who could overpower them. And it was not a little amount. By 1837, with the international slave trade now officially shut down and whites on the slave frontier in America demanding more forced labor to clear their land, the market value of a healthy man of African descent was $1,300.53

  And Daniel and his brothers were such healthy men.

  There could be attempts to kidnap them before they ever left the South. Thomas Weaver had only been traveling for a few days through North Carolina on the way to Indiana when his family stopped in a village. He was young, but he was playing with another boy who was traveling with them, and his mother must have only looked away for a minute. But by the time she looked round the two boys had been lured away by some white men in a shop with promises of a shiny new tin cup. A missing child is every mother’s nightmare, but Thomas’s mother, Elizabeth, would have known of the horrors of slavery and what could happen to her child if he were taken. The men who had offered Thomas the tin cup saw him only in terms of pounds, inches, and cash, but he was his mother’s heart, her life. Even with the help of a sympathetic witness who had seen what had happened, it took Elizabeth hours to find her son.54

  Then there were the Waldens and their group, who were also trying to get to Indiana, but from North Carolina. Like the Lyles family, they had sent ahead a few men to scout out and buy land before the wagon train left. But even after they crossed the Ohio River, they were not safe. As they traveled through Indiana a gang of white men stopped them, seeking to make a fortune from the Waldens’ flesh and blood.55

  The gang was highly organized, shoving thick poles through the wagon wheels to bring them to a deadly halt. They had obviously been preying on the African Americans flooding into Indiana, and now they were putting an end to every hope these pioneers had for the future.

  One of those pioneers was Martha Walden. Her father, Drewry Walden, was born free in Virginia in the 1760s and had fought as a patriot in the Revolutionary War. Martha had been born on the Walden estate, three hundred acres her parents had settled in Northampton, North Carolina. Her father would have been able to vote, worship freely, and educate his children in that state, but now he—and all of them—had lost those rights.

  Martha had given up so much to make this move, and now she faced the loss of her family and freedom. Did she look down at her hands, their skin almost as pale as the men who now surrounded her? No matter how light her skin, it could not protect her from prejudice and the loss of rights in North Carolina, but it could be a possible protection here in Indiana. Gathering all the courage she had, this daughter of a Revolutionary War hero must have stood up to scold her attackers, telling them that she was the white owner of the people they were trying to steal. She may have even threatened them with legal action. Whatever she said, she was so confident that the attackers became confused, withdrawing and taking the wooden poles from the wagon wheels so the pioneers could move again, and Martha and all her beloved kin and community continued northward toward their new home.56

  Not everyone was as lucky as the Waldens and the Weavers. There can be no knowing how many pioneers lost their freedom on the journey to the Northwest, but the Conner family never forgot the one they lost on the way. William Bright Conner and his wife, Elizabeth, traveled to the frontier with their family in the 1840s. They left behind not only a lucrative turpentine plantation in Greene County, North Carolina, but free roots in that state reaching back to the seventeenth century. On their trek they were stopped many times by whites demanding to see their free papers. Along the way, however, an aunt lost her papers and was stolen from them by white “patrollers.” This devastating event so terrified them that, despite their free status, they decided to travel only at night until they reached the free states. Their caution was not misguided, for on the southern banks of the Ohio River, they barely escaped capture by whites scouring the area for African Americans to sell into slavery.57

  No, the journey would not be easy for the Lyles family. But they finally made the hard decision to be pioneers again. They loaded the wagons, then lifted their elderly parents onto the high seats, the same way those parents must have once lifted them onto wagons all those years ago in Virginia.

  Everyone who had the strength to walk would be walking, even Nancy, keeping watch over her children. Did she promise herself that she would make Indiana feel like home, a place of shelter and comfort to the family she and Daniel were growing?

  Daniel gave the call and the oxen would have started walking, moving them to the Great West as the cities of the North burned.

  We inform our opposers that we are coming—coming for our rights—coming through the Constitution of our common country—coming through the law—and relying upon God and the justice of our cause, pledge ourselves never to cease our resistance to tyranny, whether it be in the iron manacles of the slave, or in the unjust written manacles for the free.

  “To the Citizens of Ohio” Convention of Colored Citizens, Ohio, 184958

  6

  “Burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people”

  Cincinnati, Late August 1841

  They were barely breathing, all of them quiet as they lay on rooftops and stood in alleys that bled into darkness. The night seemed to be holding its breath with them. It was so hot. The clouds were a lid holding in the stink of Cincinnati, that Queen City of 46,000 souls on the banks of the Ohio River.1

  The ghosts of millions of hogs slaughtered every winter in the city rose from the ground in a stinking steam. The pork business had given their city the nickname “Porkopolis.” In the winter many of the streams that drained the city couldn’t freeze, warmed by the blood running into them. They ran a mucky red, emptying into the Ohio River, staining the ice so that the entire city was rimmed with rankness.2

  Now it was summer, and the hog-slaughtering season was over. But James Wilkerson and his men knew that summer was the season for another kind of slaughter. For summer in Cincinnati was the time for war.

  The first battle had broken out in the heat of August 1829. A thriving community of over 2,000 African Americans reduced to 1,000. But the numbers only told part of the story. This was a peaceful entrepreneurial community of African Americans, trying to work and raise their families in one of the largest cities of the Great West, attacked because of their success.3

  They were supposed to be lazy, ignorant, and brutal failures. Many whites argued that African-descended people were born that way. Others had a shiftier argument—that while they were fully human, enslavement had ruined them, and that if liberated, they would fail at freedom. If they could be redeemed (which some whites thought doubtful), then it was only whites who could show them what hard work, a love of learning, and true faith really looked like.4

  The only problem was that African Americans were not failing as they were supposed to. They were starting successful businesses, founding churches, and building schools. They were organizing to change politics and the law in favor of liberty and equality. They were even outstripping white men in finance, with Jeremiah Hamilton becoming a famous and successful broker on New York City’s Wall Street by 1836. In the late 1820s a series of bigoted cartoons released in Philadelphia mocked the African Americans in that city, who, some whites thought, were becoming too successful. One shows a finely dressed African American couple with grotesquely drawn faces. The man asks the woman how she is
handling the hot summer weather. She replies, “Pretty well I tank you, Mr. Cesar, only I aspire too much!”5

  All over the nation, whites were turning in violence toward African Americans they considered to be aspiring too much. And Cincinnati, with its thriving African American community and active abolitionists—both black and white—saw one of the earliest and worst of these attacks.

  In 1829 there had been some warning, and many of Cincinnati’s African Americans had managed to escape to Canada, creating thriving communities north of the border. But some stayed, and there would have been men on the rooftops around Wilkerson who would have remembered 1829. The attack started at night and lasted for days. White men mobbing the streets, their hands filled with fire as their burning torches set African American homes and businesses alight.6

  But Wilkerson, the militia’s chosen leader, was not there. In 1829 he had still been enslaved in Virginia. Now, in 1841, he had only been free for six years, but he knew much of what the men around him had suffered, and they trusted him.

  Wilkerson had come up with the idea of arranging them on the rooftops and in the alleys of their neighborhood. It was he who was leading them this night. He was only a young man, but all the men he led called him Major. They knew he was the grandson of a Revolutionary War leader, and so they honored him, even though that grandfather may not have even known—or cared—about the existence of an enslaved grandson.7

  But Wilkerson and his men claimed that revolutionary blood, and now they were leading their own revolution. They understood Thomas Paine’s famous words better than most: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” They may have been summer soldiers, but they would not shrink from the service of their cause.

  But more than his ancestry made these men choose Wilkerson to lead them. Some African American men in the city had seen their homes burned, rebuilt, and burned again. There were men there who had invested in this community. But then there was Wilkerson, a preacher, literate and well traveled, a survivor of slavery, a man of deep courage and faith. And they trusted that he would lead them well in the defense of their community.8

  According to the laws, the courts, and the market, Wilkerson’s life was worth a great deal of money. And he had earned every penny of that worth, buying his own freedom. Now, finally, he owned his own body. His life belonged to no one but himself, and he was willing to give up that life for his new brethren in Cincinnati.

  Wilkerson had been born into bondage in Little York, Virginia, and like most enslaved people he was denied the knowledge of his birth day. But it must have been around 1810, when the United States was less than twenty-five years old. His mother labored to bring him into the world even as she must have dreamed of her own freedom. And she kept alive that dream in her son.9

  Her owners, and Wilkerson’s, were kin. All of them descendants of their common ancestor, James Wilkinson. That James, James’s grandfather, was widely known as a self-serving scoundrel. The foreman of the grand jury that investigated his treasonous activities during the Revolutionary War could hardly find words strong enough to describe his loathing for the man.10

  But even if his grandfather had done little to uphold the values of the American Revolution, his grandson had the true spirit of liberty in his heart. As soon as Wilkerson could escape, he ran. He ran, and then he ran again. But every time he was caught. Finally, in 1826 his owners, his own flesh and blood, decided to let him rot in prison after one of his escapes. They must have hoped it would teach him a lesson.

  It did, but not in the way they expected.

  Wilkerson would later admit that what happened to him in that Richmond prison was “the most Providential circumstance probably on record,” for he met Lucy Harris there. Harris was a white Quaker woman whose home was Virginia but who had been educated at the Weston School in Pennsylvania—an unusual occurrence for a young woman at that time. In 1826 she was imprisoned in the Richmond jail for a debt she refused to pay. Instead, for four months she cared for the young Wilkerson, teaching him to read. Wilkerson would later point out that in doing so, Harris was technically breaking the laws of Virginia, which made it illegal to teach an enslaved person to read. But as the two of them reasoned, they were already in prison for breaking the law, so what did it matter if they broke one more?11

  So Lucy Harris taught Wilkerson to read, going through the Bible together. Harris must have pointed out the stories favored by abolitionists of that time, the stories of a blessed people struggling to be free of bondage in Egypt, their God parting the Red Sea in front of them so they could gain their liberty. But Wilkerson would be forever taken by the story of a young man called Joseph, sold into bondage by jealous brothers.12

  Later, when Wilkerson was taken out of that prison in chains and once again forced to labor in bondage, it may have seemed that little about him had changed. But Wilkerson had been heartened, his yearning for liberty strengthened. In later years, he would describe Harris’s help as a “most righteous and praiseworthy act,” and because of their work together, “the children were free.”13

  Wilkerson did not give up on freedom. Nor did other enslaved young men in Virginia, with the Bible in their hand and a love of liberty in their heart.

  Nat Turner lived not far from James Wilkerson, and when he led his revolution, it became very dangerous to be an enslaved man with the ability to read, a deep knowledge of the Bible, and a belief in a God who was “the author of all love and liberty.”14

  Wilkerson’s white kin—his owners—must have come to see Wilkerson less as an asset than as a liability, a risk, an impossible young man. So they sent Wilkerson down river to New Orleans. This was not unusual. It was happening to more and more people in Virginia, whose bodies were now worth more than the overfarmed soil they worked. So they were being taken away to markets, often sold to those who had an eye on the slave frontier. Wilkerson’s enslavers were not alone. Greed seemed to be hardening the hearts of many, who disregarded the cries of their enslaved kin as they severed them from their homes and families.

  It may have been hot that night in Cincinnati in 1841, but Wilkerson knew heat. He had already survived New Orleans in bondage, and that was its own kind of battle. He had seen the slave market of New Orleans, where a strong body could lead to death in the rice ponds of the Carolinas, and a beautiful body could lead to death in a brothel.

  Richard Clague was one of the men busy in that market, buying and selling. He was wealthy, with interests in various enterprises in the city from slave trading to banking. Somehow Clague discovered that Wilkerson was literate, and he purchased him. Indeed, Clague may have had first pick of a shipment of people from Virginia and selected Wilkerson before anyone else had a chance. Soon, like Joseph in the Old Testament, James Wilkerson was put in a position of trust by this American Pharaoh, for Richard Clague decided to put the literate young man to work in the City Bank, giving him the keys to all of its treasures.15

  Then a miracle happened: Richard Clague fell in love.

  Now Clague was already married to Marie-Delphine-Justine, a member of one of the most elite French Creole families in New Orleans. By the time Wilkerson arrived in chains in New Orleans, Richard and Marie had been married at least a decade, splitting their time between Paris and New Orleans, living in wealth and comfort with their three young sons.16

  Elite white men in New Orleans commonly took mistresses of African descent, some of them even free women. And Richard Clague was in a relationship with the free woman Adele Wiltz, and by the early 1830s they had a son together. Of course, Richard’s wife, Marie, would have been deeply familiar with this tradition. But there must have been something different about Richard Clague and Adele Wiltz, because in 1832, the Catholic Marie-Delphine-Justine did something that broke with tradition in that city: she sued for a legal separation from her husband—and won.17

  Many whites in both the South and the North hated mixed-race unions. Some abolitionists even argued that a white person could never love a person of African de
scent, because their differences were so great that repugnance could be the only emotion that arose. But the reality—and the laws created to stop that reality in both the North and the South—proved this was nonsense. What was considered a solid color line was not a line at all, for there was already kinship. Many nations ran through the veins of people in the United States, whether they were perceived as white or as “colored.”

  Soon after their separation, Marie Clague left with their three sons for Paris, and Richard Clague left for England with Adele Wiltz and their son. But before he left, he gathered together the people he owned in New Orleans, James Wilkerson included, and gave them the astonishing news that he was offering them their liberty.18

  To be fair, Clague was granting that liberty on his own terms. While he was gone, he gave those he enslaved leave to work for themselves, and if at the end of his time away they had raised the money he demanded as their purchase price, they could buy themselves. These were not easy terms or certain ones, but they offered a chance.

  Was it Adele Wiltz who influenced Richard Clague, or could it have been their young son? Did Clague hold his son’s hand in his as they walked together, that hand the same color as many of the young men Clague owned?

  And Clague was not alone. This was a fact that slavery supporters did not want in the public eye: there were other southern enslavers like him who were continuing to free the people they enslaved.19

  So when Richard Clague, Adele Wiltz, and their son boarded the Talmur for England, James Wilkerson went to work for his freedom.20

  Wilkerson took as many jobs as he could, working punishing hours in the New Orleans heat. His literacy allowed him to find employment in the city’s booming printing presses. Newspapers were the new medium of the period, and their popularity was rising. Wilkerson worked for many of them, receiving “the most liberal wages in particular of the editor J.G. Esq.” Wilkerson would never forget him.21