Jump Ship to Freedom
Page 13
Our story of what came to be known as the Constitutional Convention is taken from letters and diaries of the day. So are the details of American life, the villages, towns, and countryside as we have presented them. Daniel Arabus and his story, however, is fiction. A message of the kind he carried down to Philadelphia was in indeed brought by somebody in order to bring about the compromise over slavery between those who favored it and those who opposed it. But we are not absolutely sure who carried the message or exactly what it said.
Peter Fatherscreft is also a fictional character. However, there were several people like him who were at the same time members of Congress and also of the Constitutional Convention and went back and forth between Philadelphia and New York. Philadelphia had a large population of Quakers who were leaders in the antislavery movement. Pennsylvania even today is known as the Quaker State. The little black girl whom Daniel called Nosy is also fictional, and so are such minor characters as the Trenton tavern keeper and Big Tom.
Captain Ivers is based on a real Captain Ivers who lived in Stratford, Connecticut, and sailed from the harbor there. We know very little about him, though, and most of the details of his life and character as they appear here are invented. However, we do know one thing about him: he owned a slave name Jack Arabus and sent him to serve in his place in the Revolution. Indeed, the whole story of Jack Arabus’s service in the army for six or seven years, his return and Ivers’s attempt to reenslave him, his jailing and his suit at law in New Haven, is entirely true and historically accurate as we have it here. The sketchy details we have are found in the official Connecticut law reports. The story of his friendship with Washington is borrowed from the life of another black Connecticut soldier named Samuel Bush. We do not know how or when Jack Arabus died, or whether he had a wife or children. That part is made up.
William Samuel Johnson, of course, is real. His son’s house, in which Dr. Johnson lived in his old age and died, still stands in Stratford, and you can visit it there. Dr. Johnson was a member of both the Congress in New York and the convention in Philadelphia at the same time. Later he was one of Connecticut’s first senators under the new constitution. The little harbor of Newfield is now Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city. The Iverses’ house we portray in this story still exists, preserved and moved to the grounds of the Bridgeport Museum of Art, Science and Industry. It was the house of Ivers’s stepson, John Brooks, and you can visit it and walk around in it. The storm at sea is taken from Captain John Brooks’s own journal of one of his voyages on the Junius Brutus. John Brooks and three of his sailors were actually washed off the deck, and Brooks and one sailor really were washed back on. You can read about it in his own handwriting in the journal preserved at the museum.
The Junius Brutus was a real brig, of which the real John Brooks was captain. The ship we describe here is taken partly from Brooks’s journal and partly from a real brig, the Beaver II, a floating museum in Boston that is a replica of the famous “Tea Party” ship. You can visit it and climb all over it as we did.
Black Sam Fraunces is also a historical character. Fraunces’ Tavern still exists in New York City, in Lower Manhattan. There is a restaurant there, and there is also a museum where you can see artifacts of Revolutionary times. The present building sits on the original foundation, but the tavern burned down completely twice in the nineteenth century. The current building was designed to be typical of the large inns of the eighteenth century, but we cannot be sure that the original tavern looked exactly as the present one does.
Sam Fraunces is quite an interesting character. He came from the West Indies in the 1750s and supplied food to the army during the Revolution, at which time he established a friendship with George Washington. Earlier he had purchased the tavern, which became one of the best-known inns in the United States. George Washington bade farewell to his officers at the end of the Revolution there. When Washington became our first president under the new Constitution, he asked Fraunces to serve as steward in his household. Actually, at the time of our story Fraunces had sold the tavern and was managing a farm in New Jersey, but he continued to have business interests in both Philadelphia and New York and visited the tavern quite frequently. Whether he knew Jack Arabus or not, we do not know; but the case of Arabus v. Ivers was well known among black Americans, and it is probable that he would have heard of it, at least.
Curiously, we are not sure whether Fraunces was in fact black. Trying to find out with certainty was one of the most interesting and intriguing research problems we encountered in writing this book. He was called Black Sam, and he did come from the West Indies, where there was a very large black population. Most modern writers have assumed that he was a black man—including several historians of colonial New York. However, the first United States census, which was taken in 1790, lists him as a “white male.” It is our guess that he was of mixed blood. Perhaps he was part French, because his name was spelled Frances before he changed it—probably to conform to the way it was pronounced. Or maybe he was simply a dark-skinned white man.
Historians disagree about the major compromises of the Constitutional Convention. For years most historians believed that the disagreement most difficult to resolve was that of whether to give the most populous states more representatives and votes than the least populous states. That problem was solved by the Connecticut Compromise, which gives each state two senators no matter what its population is, but gives each state members of the House of Representatives proportionate to their population. During the past generation, however, through new research and study, many historians have come to see the slavery question as most important. Some say that the people of the United States missed their best opportunity to abolish slavery in 1787. Others say that was impossible given the conditions and attitudes of the time. In any event, we do know that the compromise described in our story did come about, and probably as a result of messages between the convention and Congress. Of course, we also know that slaves became more numerous and slave conditions became worse after the new government came into being. Finally, seventy-eight years after the days of our story, slavery was abolished as a result of a terrible Civil War.
This book, then, is a mixture of fact and fiction. We have tried, however, to capture a feeling of what it was like to live at the time this nation was being put together by the Founding Fathers.
Also Available
We hope you’ve enjoyed this ebook!
Other great ebooks from AudioGO by James and Christopher Collier include:
• My Brother Sam is Dead
• Who is Carrie?
• With Every Drop of Blood: A Novel of the Civil War
• War Comes to Willie Freeman
• Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787