All That She Carried
Page 7
The stinginess of these Ashley River planter records stings. They illuminate just how little enslaved women mattered to those who inscribed their names on these lists. Of all the Roses who appeared on these cold, monotonous inventories, only one I encountered carried the faintest outline of a story, but for the most awful of reasons. In 1853, Barnett H. Brown submitted a court claim to the state of South Carolina. He was seeking compensation for his “slave Rose,” who had been “executed for murder.” Who was this Rose, also called Rosanna in alternate records? Was she guilty of the crime for which her life was taken? And what would lead an enslaved Black woman to kill?
The most sensational and hence best-documented example of a comparable crime comes to us from the state of Missouri, where, in 1855, a nineteen-year-old woman murdered a man many years her senior. Celia, like most enslaved women, had no surname on record when she clubbed her owner, Robert Newsom, to death. Then she burned his body in the fireplace of her cabin and paid his grandson to sweep up and help dispose of the ashes. Celia’s was a crime of passion and a cry of pain. Newsom had been raping her for approximately five years, since his purchase of her when he was sixty and she fourteen. It is probable that Celia’s sexual initiation was violent and certain that her life under Robert Newsom’s tyranny was unbearable. When Celia found a Black man she loved and glimpsed the possibilities of chosen intimacy and family, she begged Newsom’s relatives to help her, pleaded with him to cease assaulting her, and finally lashed out to end the abuse. As a result of this desperate act of self-defense, Celia was tried, found guilty, and executed by the state of Missouri.
Only a few curt lines remain about this condemned Rose/Rosanna, who might also have killed and is named in the South Carolina records. The man seeking to recoup her monetary value and the functionaries of the South Carolina Legislature, which was disproportionately made up of slaveholders, were not interested in the facts of her case. The loss of “Rosanna the property of B. H. Brown” through execution was a cost the state was willing to underwrite. In 1855, the treasury office paid Brown $200 to cover the “value” of Rosanna’s spent life.9 So many Roses grew in the “reaper’s garden” of South Carolina.10 Each of them had a priceless life hidden within or buried beneath the indifferent record books of slavery. Each of them has an instructive tale about value judgments and misjudgments begging to be recalled and placed before our witness.
The life of every enslaved Rose shines with its own worth and brilliance, even as their lives taken together illuminate a sense of a larger whole, a society in which it was commonplace to both capture women and name them for flowers, and where, despite deep-seated cruelty, an African American people took root. Among these many Roses, how do we find and faithfully tell even one of their life stories? Here is where a surviving artifact tied to the word of a descendant saves the venture, encouraging us to pay respects to all of the Roses in slavery’s garden and, at the same time, gather up a particular one. The oral story Ruth recorded helps us to identify the bias grain, or tensile give, in the traditional archive, the place where the records can be stretched to reveal still more.11
Ruth’s Rose carried with her an identifying feature: her love for a child named Ashley. It was for lack of finding an Ashley along with a Rose in their records that led curators at Middleton Place to strike a sentence from their early catalog entry on Ashley’s sack. Whereas at first the text had read, “Searches through surviving Middleton family probate records from the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have revealed at least nine enslaved women named Rose,” that sentence was deleted before the artifact was put on display.12 Middleton family records included no enslaved girl named Ashley, which led curators to doubt the likelihood of the Middletons having owned this Rose. They chose to delete the line referring to Roses on the Middleton premises in an abundance of caution. The curators did not want to give the false impression that the existence of several Roses meant that one of these was Ruth Middleton’s ancestor. The presence of Ashley is an arrow pointing to Rose. A Rose without an Ashley, while precious, is likely not this particular woman. While Rose is a recurring name among enslaved women and girls in South Carolina, Ashley is a rarity. A search of the same documents that revealed nearly two hundred Roses produced only three Ashleys owned by residents of the colony, then the state. The name Ashley becomes more than an arrow in this sparse documentary environment; it is an arrow illumined with strings of lights.
This Drayton Hall “blanket list,” 1860, is one among many in South Carolina that includes a woman named Rose. Addlestone Library, College of Charleston. Photograph by Tiya Miles.
One Ashley among these records, the legal property of Archibald Conturien McDonald of Sumter County, appears in his will of 1838. No Rose is inventoried in McDonald’s rural estate, however. A second Ashley emerges from that same decade, belonging to a woman named Judith H. Wilson. Following her move to Bourdeaux, France, in 1836, Wilson sold Ashley to John E. Bonneau, a wealthy planter whose central estate was located in St. John’s Berkeley Parish, up the Cooper River from Charleston. Bonneau bought Ashley in a $400 lot with two other enslaved people, Sappho and Abraham. All three are described as “Mullatto.” While their relationship to one another goes undisclosed, we can guess that they may represent a family grouping. No woman named Rose appears here. Because enslaved people drew little attention from record keepers until property changed hands or someone died, we do not get another chance to trace this second Ashley’s story until John Bonneau’s death in 1849. But John Bonneau’s estate inventory of 1849, which lists more than ninety enslaved people, including a woman with a disability, blindness, valued at $0, fails to make note of Ashley. Neither does she appear in his will. This Ashley may have been sold or freed in the decade between her purchase and Bonneau’s death.
In 1850, Eliza M. Bonneau, John’s executor, sold his plantation villa in St. John’s Berkeley Parish with no Ashley listed in the property valuation. Five years later, when Bonneau heirs Peter and Martha Bonneau sold thirty enslaved people hailing from the estate, Ashley still does not appear. But this time, a woman named Rose does. It seems that John Bonneau had, at some point during his last years of life, owned an Ashley and a Rose.13 The sale of Bonneau’s Rose following his death as part of the redistribution of his estate was a shared trauma for many enslaved people. The earthly demise of a master often meant separation from home and family for those enslaved. But this Rose and Ashley’s story is unlikely to be that of Ruth Middleton’s ancestors. This Ashley appears on the scene too early to be the grandmother of Ruth, a woman born at the turn of the twentieth century. And if this Ashley had been a daughter of Rose, they would more than likely have both appeared in Bonneau’s legal papers when Judith Wilson, Ashley’s former owner, moved away. Finally, this Ashley was sold to John Bonneau more than a decade before Ruth’s ancestor Rose gifted a sack to Ashley. In the marshes and swamps of St. John’s Berkeley Parish, this Ashley and this Rose may have toiled together, sung together, watched in tandem the rise of the sun, but their personal story, so far as we know, lies buried with the boggy estate of John E. Bonneau.14
Sometimes our third try carries the charm. The Ashley whose name is caught next in the documentary net is a girl inventoried as part and parcel of Milberry Place Plantation, the country estate of one Robert Martin, “late of the city of Charleston.” Ashley is listed among one hundred unfree people in the inventory of Martin’s enslaved property taken in the year 1853. Her attributed value of $300, in comparison to that of other women listed at $500 and $600 in the cotton boom decade of the 1850s, suggests that she may have been a younger or relatively unskilled worker. Robert Martin’s rural plantation, named after his “beloved wife,” Milberry Serena Daniel Martin, was located in the Barnwell District of South Carolina, approximately one hundred miles northwest of coastal Charleston. Here Martin directed his manager to direct his drivers to direct his slaves to plant and harvest short-staple cotton, a he
arty, stout-flowering variety of the plant that grew more readily in the interior than the sea island cotton that had brought so much wealth to Lowcountry planters. No woman named Rose appears on the list of the Martin family’s country slaves, who are seamlessly followed in the record by mules (also listed with personal pet names and valuations), and then by horses, calves, and hogs, followed by blacksmith and carpentry tools. But like many of his wealthy fellows in the planter class, Robert Martin had acquired more than one slave-run estate. He kept a plantation in the countryside, where most of his wealth was consolidated in the capital of enslaved bodies and was, at the same time, being produced by the labor of those bodies and minds. In addition, Martin possessed a manor house in Charleston, where he could oversee business dealings and keep his family properly situated in the social rituals of urbane society. Martin’s house in town was inventoried in a separate appraisal upon his death. Here, he owned pricey china, fashionable carriages, a pair of horses, one cow, stocks and bonds in numerous companies, and seven enslaved men and women, one whose name was Rose.15
This Rose, listed with the value of $700 beside her name, was the most expensive woman on Martin’s urban estate. She must have been in her prime age of life. She may have been highly skilled. However much we hate to confront it, she may have been priced at this amount because of her sexual appeal to white men. She could have been valued for any one or all three of these qualities in the slaveholding household of Robert and Milberry, but she certainly was prized for more than these qualities by those she loved. This Rose is also the one most likely among the existing South Carolina records to be the mother of Ashley. Circumstantial evidence in the documents points directly to this woman. She is the only Rose in the surviving and searchable slaveholder records of South Carolina who is shown as owned at the precise time (the 1840s through 1850s, when sacks like the one Rose packed were being manufactured) by the same person who held a girl named Ashley.16
This “Inventories, Appraisements & Sales” volume in the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, in Columbia, contains an Ashley and a Rose listed as the property of Robert Martin. Photograph by Tiya Miles.
ALL THE FORMS OF BUSINESS
This person who owned the two of them, Robert Martin, was described by a judge of the district court as “a man of experience, and sagacity, and acquainted with all the forms of business.”17 Indeed, Martin was a successful planter by the time of his death; shortly thereafter, in 1853, his inventoried estates, confidently entered as “True and Perfect” by the attorneys, listed Ashley as well as Rose among his property holdings. Robert Martin got his start, however, in lowlier ranks, as a peddler of common necessities. He made his place as a merchant and businessman rather than by inheriting a spot in the landed gentry of Charleston’s first aristocratic families, like the Middletons. He was, in the language that nineteenth-century narratives love, a self-made man.
Born in South Carolina in 1791 to Irish immigrants, Martin ran a dry goods store on King Street, the hub (then and now) of commercial Charleston, in the 1810s. By 1827, he was operating a grocery at two locations. He may even have been involved in transporting goods between the city and countryside, an enterprise that eager traders took up as inland cotton plantations became more plentiful. A few years later, he had made the leap into the professional financial class, working as a “factor,” a handsomely paid accountant and broker, in a concern called Robert Martin & Co. If he already owned an enslaved person while working as a grocer, he would have increased his human holdings on a factor’s salary, as much for the sake of appearances at his townhome as for the smooth operation of the business, since Charleston was a place where owning others signaled one’s status more than any other accoutrement.18
The 1820s and 1830s were heady years for Martin, as he began to expand his entrepreneurial portfolio and to play at the buying and selling of slaves. In 1828, he married Milberry Serena Daniel, the daughter of a wealthy farmer in Kershaw District, in the interior of the state. Hailing from the White Oak plantation, Milberry Serena had grown up with greater means than her husband. Milberry’s father owned eight enslaved men, women, and children when he passed away in 1828. In his will, he left one of these, a girl named Leana, to Milberry. By the spring of 1829, Milberry had inherited from the White Oak estate and taken with her to Charleston a piano, a bureau, two feather beds, sundry furniture, and, we can surmise, Leana.19
The timing of this marriage benefited Robert as well as Milberry. He gained a measure of social status and “movable” property, and she gained an urban seat and a husband with ambitions. Robert continued to operate as a merchant and a factor, now on the action-filled wharf, where he could more efficiently broker rice and cotton trades for product coming in by water. His brokerage company had evolved into a partnership with three other men. Martin hustled to expand his financial profile and professional influence in this period, when the remnant record of his slave trading begins. In 1824, Martin, exhibiting no scruples about relocating children, sold “a certain Negro boy, slave named Cesar, warranted sober, sound, honest and no runaway” for $230. A man named Fortune was the next to be off-loaded; in 1825, he went for the sum of $200. In 1831, Martin sold “a negro woman about 28 years of age named Silvia and her son Robert” for $575. By that same year, he had successfully worked his way into the professional circles of Charleston’s upper echelons, accepting the job of financial representative with power of attorney for William Aiken, Jr., a future governor of the state (in 1844–46) and the owner of seven hundred enslaved people.20
Though still not a planter himself, Martin was a successful cotton-trade middleman, handling the finances of old-money clients in the city. His aspiration to join this class showed in his addition to Charleston’s elaborate architecture. Around the year 1834, Martin commissioned a stately brick Georgian mansion at 16 Charlotte Street, on the north side of town. A few years later, in 1839, he drew up an exacting last will and testament. In it, he predicted and ordered monetary dispersals and withholdings for various possible twists of fate in the lives of his heirs (the children’s deaths, his daughters’ marriages, his wife’s remarriage, his daughters’ husbands’ remarriages, should the daughters die after receiving their inheritance, and so on). Martin named his “beloved wife Milberry Serena Martin” his executor, and bequeathed to her “my House and Lot in Charlotte Street in which I reside with all its Appurtenances, furniture, house servants together with all the rest and residue of my estate of every kind.” Martin also directed his wife to liquidate much of his estate upon his death so that she could pay out “as fast as money for that purpose can be realized” $20,000 to every one of their children (nearly $500,000 each in today’s value) as income upon their twenty-first birthdays.21
By the late 1830s and early 1840s, Martin had come up in the world. He was a man gainfully employed in the field of “commerce,” according to the 1840 federal census, living at home with his wife, four white children, and eight enslaved people. The 1840s is probably the period when he acquired a young woman named Rose, who was listed among his Charlotte Street holdings a decade later. In 1843, Martin began buying tracts of land upstate in the town of Aiken and in the Erwinton community near the town of Barnwell, both in the Barnwell District. In 1845, he purchased an entire lot of slaves in Barnwell: Amy, Mingo, July, Lovy, Dinah, Leah, Cornelia, and a child, Reuben—presumably, to work that land. In 1846, Martin acquired twenty-five hundred contiguous acres along the Savannah River and pieced it together with additional parcels to enlarge what had become his rural estate. By 1849, apparently flush with cash, he paid $30,000 to purchase bonds on a mortgage for a Pee Dee River plantation in Richfield, South Carolina, and the enslaved people on it. Martin continued to work as a factor in partnership on the Charleston wharf, but by 1852 he had taken on a second, higher status. Having parlayed profits from sales and brokering into landed wealth, the dream of many a free southern man, he was now a planter.22
Martin proudly identified as “planter” rather than “factor” in the 1852 Charleston City Directory. In so doing, he joined the ranks of a second wave of wealthy Carolina planters, men who had missed the original aristocratic rice coast boom but breezed into luxury on the snowy-white sails of latter-day cotton. Martin was comfortably rich by an antebellum southern measure, plenty affluent, but not ensconced in a princely life of old rice money, palatial estates, many thousands of acres, and hundreds of unfree people to work them. He was wealthy and influential but not quite important enough to leave a trove of personal papers that would be carefully curated over the years. For this reason, we know less about the African Americans he owned than about people enslaved on the famous Middleton or Ball plantations. Still, Martin occupied a respectable rung near the top of Charleston society.