Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  “It’s good to see you,” I said.

  She smiled again and got up and went to the stove and poured herself some coffee. She came back and we sat there, drinking together, not saying anything, for a long time.

  “John,” she said finally, “how did you get here?”

  I looked up. “What?”

  “How did you get here? It sounds so horrible. It sounds like nobody wanted you here and you didn’t want to be here….”

  “Oh,” I said. “You mean black people. That’s a good story. Three stories. Well, four, but the last one isn’t very interesting. You see, the Hill has two sides, actually: there’s the Hill and there’s here, what they used to call Far Side, only nobody much calls it anything anymore. Anyway, the thing that separates them isn’t geography, it’s history. Because the people who lived over here all came from one place, the plantation of one Thomas O. B. Carter, in Fauquier County, Virginia. They arrived in a body in”—I stopped, set the mug down, and reached for the cards—“1849 or ’50. Anyway, they came because of—” I stopped again. Something had occurred to me. I took up the red cards, flipped quickly. I knew the date I wanted; I was checking details.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably nothing. But…yeah. John Marshall was born in Fauquier County.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “And you’re from Virginia too,” I said. “You ought to be ashamed.”

  “If I tried to remember the name of every Confederate colonel in Virginia…”

  “He wasn’t a Confederate,” I said. “Far from it. He was a Federalist, and he was a real bigwig around the turn of the eighteenth century. He was a relative of the Randolphs and the Lees and the Jeffersons, as in Thomas. But they didn’t get on, because, like I said, he was a Federalist and supported Adams against Jefferson in the 1796 election. He was Secretary of State for a while. But mostly he was the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He sat on the most important cases in history, the ones where they were still trying to figure out what the Constitution was all about. Marshall wrote the opinion of Marbury v. Madison, which established the power of the Supreme Court to declare a legally passed law void because it violated the Constitution. Up until then nobody was sure whether or not the Constitution was the supreme law or just the first one. And he wrote the opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland, which said the U.S. Constitution superseded state laws. He was pretty much a liberal; he wouldn’t let Jackson forcibly relocate the Cherokees. Jackson did it anyway.”

  “And he came from the same place these people did? Did he have something to do with their being here?”

  “No,” I said. “Probably not. Still, you never know. There are connections and there are connections. No, actually, John Wesley had more to do with their being here than John Marshall.”

  “John Wesley,” she said. She was looking at me as if I were crazy.

  “Yep,” I said. “John Wesley started the Methodist Church. And Methodism got exported to America just about the time the Colonies were going through a really crazy period of religious fervor. John Wesley was right up there with William Wilberforce when it came to not liking slavery. He published a pamphlet on the subject in”—I stopped and flipped quickly through the gold cards—“1774. Thoughts on Slavery. He may have thought a lot about it, but he sure didn’t think much of it; he said that slave buyers were ‘on a level with man-stealers’ and that the people in England who owned plantations, or stock in the companies, were ‘principally guilty of all these frauds; robberies, and murders.’ Well, that little broadside didn’t have too much of an effect for a while, since Americans were too busy getting their own freedom to worry about anybody else, but it was a part of the Methodist Doctrine: no slavery. There was a conference in Baltimore in”—I flipped quickly, knowing it would be in a leap year—“1784, right around Christmas, and it was voted that every member of the church should emancipate his slaves, and do it legally and formally, and if they didn’t want to do it they could get out; they were still members, I suppose, but they were to be excluded from communion; after 1784, no slaveholder was supposed to be allowed to take communion in the Methodist Church. That didn’t last, of course; by 1796 they were waffling all over the place, saying now that slavery was an evil, and that no slaveholder should be admitted to the church until the minister had spoken to him, and that it was all right to buy slaves, so long as they were only kept in bondage for a stated period of time and if the children were freed at twenty-five if they were men, twenty-one if they were women; the only thing they were adamant about was that nobody should sell any slaves. And things got less and less stringent after that; by 1820 the Methodists weren’t even discussing slavery anymore. But for a good long while there, any man who was a slaveholder and a Methodist and who lived in the Upper South had to make a choice between going to heaven later or going into bankruptcy now.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “You lost me.”

  I put the cards down and rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, well, it’s complicated. Because a lot of things were going on at the same time. The First Fugitive Slave Law was being passed in 1793. The slave trade was closing down, then reopening for a while, then closing down again, theoretically, although it never really did….” I stopped. “Okay,” I said. “There was a compromise in the Constitution, and it was agreed that Congress should not be allowed to illegalize the slave trade before 1808. I’m not sure that anybody was really all that hot to shut off the slave trade, but the important thing is that the Southerners accepted 1808 as a cutoff date. Which means they estimated that within twenty years or so from the ratification of the Constitution, they would have a sufficient slave population in this country to make the system self-sustaining. In fact, they beat the limit by quite a few years, and by the time the Christmas Convention was saying no more slavery for Methodists, there was a complex but highly effective breeding system in operation. It was essentially an internal slave trade; the states in the Upper South bred an excess of slaves and sold them to the states of the Lower South, where there was a demand for large masses of labor. By”—I stopped, flipped through, looking for the exact date—“1830, Virginia was exporting so many slaves that her own black population was just about stable; for the next thirty years she sold slaves at the rate of ten thousand a year, which was just about forty percent of annual interstate exports. In the same period Maryland exported twenty-five hundred a year. Slave breeding was big business, and it naturally affected the composition of the slave-holdings. Because if you were going to work the land you wanted men, but if you were in the breeding business, you wanted women, and you wanted to end up with a lot of children. There was one guy in Virginia who owned one man and eight women.”

  “What’s that got to do with the Methodists?” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah. The Methodists. Well, all those figures come from pretty late, but the Southerners could estimate capacity way back in 1787, and know there would be plenty of breeding going on in twenty years to meet demand. And the Methodists in the Upper South were some of the people who were going to do it. But then along comes the Christmas Convention and tells them to free their slaves, and even when things loosened up, by 1796, they were allowed to free their slaves, but they couldn’t sell them; the church was adamant about that, if nothing else. So there they were. They were denied their main source of revenue. They could always work the slaves, but that wasn’t enough to keep them afloat; they needed profit. But they couldn’t sell their slaves for profit, and they couldn’t get rid of unproductive slaves by selling them, they couldn’t get rid of women, who were maybe two thirds as productive as males, and who were always getting pregnant and producing children who couldn’t do enough work to support themselves for maybe six years and who couldn’t be sold, either. They couldn’t make money and they couldn’t cut their losses or reduce their overhead or even keep their costs from rising due to increasing unproductive population. The only way they could feed their slaves
was to plant more acreage in food crops, but they couldn’t buy more land so they had to divert acreage from cash crops, which meant that they had less and less work for the slaves to do. It was incredible; the Methodist Church took what had been a profitable, productive, sensible capitalist system and turned it into a welfare state complete with built-in inflation and a decreasing productivity spiral. So the slaveholders did about all they could think of to do—”

  “Gave up slavery?”

  “To do what? Slaves were the only labor supply available.”

  “They could have used them as free workers—”

  “Living where? Fed by whom? With what? And besides, most states had laws against either manumission or residence by freedmen. No, a lot of them quit Methodism. One of the reasons the Methodist Church changed its position was because some smart bishop looked at the membership rolls and discovered that they were attracting a whole lot of poor, enslaved blacks and losing quite a lot of rich, free whites; at one time the Methodist membership in America was about forty percent black. It couldn’t last; power follows money, and three rich slaveholders who made their slaves be Methodists were worth a lot more than three angry slaveholders leaving the church, and the church saw that. In the meantime, a lot of the slaveholders solved their problems by sending their slaves north. Not the productive ones. The excess. Women and children and older men. They’d give the overseer some money and send him north with a coffle with instructions to take up land for the slaves. Some of them made it, and some of—”

  “Wait a minute. What happened to the ones who didn’t make it?”

  I looked at her. “The average Southerner was not a slaveholder. About three fourths of the Southern population didn’t own a slave and wasn’t even related to anybody who did. But everybody knew that the key to wealth and power was the ownership of slaves, and the cheapest way to acquire a lot of slaves was to acquire a few female slaves. So now you figure: you’re an overseer for Marse Tom, a big Virginia slaveholder with a hundred and fifty slaves, a man rich enough to afford religion. Marse Tom decides he’d rather take communion than make money, but he doesn’t want to go broke, either, so he puts together a coffle of breeding women and young children who can’t work too well, say about twenty-five, and he gives you some money to take them north. But you aren’t rich and you don’t care about communion, and as soon as you get out of sight of Tara it suddenly comes into your head that you’ve got a little bit of money and a nice bunch of slaves, and you can either go on a long hard trip all for the benefit of a bunch of junglebunnies who don’t know what’s going on anyway, or you can take a little jaunt over the mountains and set up housekeeping in Kentucky or someplace, and become the wealthiest man in the region overnight, and—”

  “I get the picture,” she said.

  “Or maybe you’re tired of farming. You don’t want to be a planter; city living is more your style. You think you can make it big on the cotton market. So you take the money and herd the slaves south to the slave market in Alabama or somewhere. A prime field hand was worth maybe $1,500 on average. Of course, you probably didn’t have too many of those; Massa kept them home. But women were going for $1,200, depending on proven fertility, and if you couldn’t have them all pregnant by the time you got to—”

  “All right,” she said.

  “And the kids weren’t worth much; maybe only $875. And of course, if there was a light-skinned little girl in there you let her alone; she’d fetch a fine price in New Orleans—”

  “I said all right.”

  “And some of the overseers actually brought the people north.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course, most of those boys weren’t above making a quick buck. Massa said buy land, he didn’t say how much or where or what kind. Or maybe he did, but all he was going to know was what you told him; there weren’t any slaves who were going to write and tell him different. So they brought the people just across the Mason-Dixon Line and bought them the cheapest land available. And what could be cheaper than the northern slope of a hill full of rocks and hollows twenty-five miles from the Mason-Dixon Line? And that’s what happened. Mr. Thomas O. B. Carter got religion. Or maybe not; maybe Mr. Carter was like a lot of his fellows and figured out how dangerous it was to have too many slaves and not enough work for them; maybe there was no market…. I don’t know. I do know that the slaves sent included children; one of them was a two-year-old girl named Mary. She was one of Old Jack’s grandmothers.”

  “So that was this side,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “The other side, the Hill, was pretty much populated by the indigenous slave population—”

  “You mean ex-slave.”

  “I mean slave. Chattels personal, as the phrase went. Not indentured servants. Not apprentices. Slaves.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Good God,” I said, “don’t tell me you’re one of those people who thinks they only had slavery way down South im de land ob cotton? You probably believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny too.”

  “I’m not stupid,” she said. “And you don’t have to be sarcastic.”

  “So why the look?”

  She dropped her eyes. “I don’t know…. I guess I just don’t like to think about that sort of thing. And it just seems… John, this is such a pretty town.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Ain’t it? But what difference does that make? There were slaves here when there were slaves everywhere. The first record of slavery in the County that I can find was”—I pulled out the blue cards, flipped through quickly—“1763. Owned by an innkeeper named Pendergrass. That’s not too certain; it comes from a novel. But Hervey Allen was pretty reliable, for a novelist. The state started recording slaves in”—I flipped again—“1780. There were three slaves registered then. All males. One was fifty-four, one was thirty, and one was seventeen. So it sounds like there were a few women somewhere too. Anyway, after”—I flipped the cards again—“after 1780 slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania; at least, that’s the way it looked. But the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery was really a masterpiece of putting off to tomorrow the things you don’t want to do today. First of all, it applied only to blacks born after March 1, 1780, so anybody who was alive before then was a slave for life. Secondly, the blacks born after that weren’t free; they owed their masters a twenty-eight-year indenture. The life expectancy of blacks was about twenty-one, but that takes into account the high infant mortality rate—”

  “All right,” she said. “So the people who were brought here were free, and after the indenture the ones who were born here were free. Why did they stay?”

  “Why not? The transportees didn’t have it so good, true, but doing days work or any kind of free labor, or even trying to scratch out a crop on a rock pile, probably beat chopping cotton for Massa.”

  “Well, how about the others? The ones who became free. If it was so bad, why didn’t they leave?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they figured there wasn’t anywhere to go. Or maybe they were sentimental fools and didn’t want to leave their children.”

  She looked at me again, but this time the look wasn’t blank.

  “ ‘He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune,’ ” I said. “Sir Francis Bacon. He said it in 1625, but he could have been a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly.” I got up and went to the stove and pulled the kettle over the heat. “There were quite a few who didn’t stay,” I said, without turning around.

  “They moved on? Where?”

  “Not on,” I said. “Back. They were runaway slaves. They came north, those that knew which way north was, looking for freedom. There was an organization to help—”

  “The Underground Railroad,” she said.

  “That’s right. Most of the publicity went to Philadelphia and Cincinnati, because those were the most successful routes. There was another in eastern Pennsylvania. And there was one through here.”
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br />   “Here? Why here?”

  “Geography. The mountains run north and south, pretty much, but they curve away to the northeast. So if you wanted to go due north you had to cross them. So the people stuck to the valleys, the bottomlands where there were streams to lose the dogs in and—” I stopped, looked at her.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  I didn’t say anything, I just got up and went to the shelf and took down the folio. I brought it back to the table, opened it, drew out the map, spread it slowly. “This is the County,” I said. “The way it was in about 1849. This part here, the lower twenty miles or so, is the South County; before the Mason-Dixon survey cleared up the boundary dispute, it was legally part of Maryland—it had always been settled by Southerners anyway. So the sentiments were not precisely abolitionist sentiments; there was surely some slaveholding, but the records are a little sketchy, because it was better to register slaves in Maryland, where they would be slaves for life, than to do it in Pennsylvania, where they would be free after a while. Anyway, that’s the territory that runaway slaves had to come across. The first route they used was this one: up through Cumberland Valley, on the west side of Evitts Mountain, here, through these little towns, Evitts and Cruse and Centerville and Patience, and up here into town. But just about nobody made it that far, because the slave-catchers knew that route, and they’d just sit there, waiting. So after a while there was an alternate route, that split off somewhere south of the Line and came into the County east of Evitts Mountain. That route was safer, but not by a whole lot, because here, it came up along the western side of this…well, it’s not a mountain, exactly, more a hill, called Iron Ore Ridge, to this little town, Hewitt. There was another route, that came in from central Maryland, and it came along the eastern side of Iron Ore Ridge. So at Hewitt—or outside Hewitt someplace; nobody was stupid enough to go into a town—the two routes came together. That’s when it got dangerous. Because for the next six miles or so there was no place to go except north, or north by a little east, through this little valley—around here they’re called coves. About halfway between Hewitt and this town, Chaneysville, it’s extremely narrow—a half mile across, maybe less. It was easy to get caught there. But I don’t know how many did; not that many, it looks like. I don’t think the slave-catchers knew the land well enough to use that bottleneck. And they didn’t need to, because once the slaves got to Chaneysville, they either went this way, north by northeast, up Black Valley and into a town called…well, then it was called Bloody Run, and over here and into the North County, or they went this way, up over this ridge and along this valley through Rainsburg and Charlesville and on into town. There were people here who helped if they got that far. Old Jack’s grandfather was one of them, and there was a country man named John Graham who used to carry people in the bed of his wagon, hidden under hay, and there was a preacher named Fiddler and another man, named Rouse; I don’t know what he did. They hid people in a lot of different places; one was a butchershop. That was the Underground Railroad. And there were some white people involved in the Underground Railroad; a lot of them were Quakers, up here in Fishertown. But for everybody who helped, there were a few who didn’t. Which is why the slave-catchers didn’t bother going down into Southampton Township—that’s where Chaneysville is—and sitting around with dogs and horses and camping out. It was just as effective, and a lot more comfortable, for them to come in and take a room at one of the hotels and put out a few handbills and wait to see if some of the local boys didn’t want to do their work for them. There were quite a few local men who made a habit of latching on to strange black folks and turning them over for a reward. In one incident, two men, Crissmun and Mock, told two runaways they’d protect them, and then locked them up in a schoolhouse and sent for their master. Typical.” I looked at her. “Another funny thing about Fauquier County. About twenty-five years before Mr. Carter sent his overseer north, somebody—maybe even Mr. Carter—sent his slave-catcher up here. And he hauled back two runaways. Hunted them down in the mountains. One of them was named ‘George.’ The other one was named ‘Henry.’ ”