GIRL IN BLACK
AND WHITE
The Story of
Mary Mildred Williams
and the
Abolition Movement
Jessie Morgan-Owens
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
NEW YORK | LONDON
Mary Mildred Williams, crystalotype (card photograph), found in a copy of Richard Hildreth’s White Slave (1852).
For my mother and grandmother
“Every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming, and constructing a total view of reality. Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle. Hence the necessity of our understanding a weapon which we can use and which can be used against us.”
—JOHN BERGER, UNDERSTANDING A PHOTOGRAPH, 1968
“It is the picture of life contrasted with the fact of life, the ideal contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible. Where there is no criticism there is no progress—for the want of progress is not felt where such want is not made visible by criticism. . . . Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “PICTURES AND PROGRESS,” 1861
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE Boston, May 29, 1855
PART ONE: BONDAGE
1Constance Cornwell, Prince William County, Virginia, 1805
2Prudence Nelson Bell, Nelson’s Plantation and Mill, 1826
3Jesse and Albert Bell Nelson, Washington, 1847
4Henry Williams, Boston, 1850
PART TWO: MANUMISSION
5 John Albion Andrew, Boston, 1852
6Elizabeth Williams, Prince William County, 1852
7Evelina Bell, Washington, February 1855
PART THREE: BECOMING IDA MAY
8Mary Hayden Green Pike, Calais, Maine, November 1854
9Julian Vannerson, Washington, February 1855
10Richard Hildreth, Boston, March 1855
11Charles Sumner, Washington, March 1855
PART FOUR: SENSATION
12“A White Slave from Virginia,” New York, March 1855
13The Williams Family, Boston, March 7, 1855
14“Features, Skin, and Hair,” Boston, March 1855
15Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Worcester, Massachusetts, March 27, 1855
16“The Anti-slavery Enterprise,” Boston, March 29, 1855
PART FIVE: PRIVATE PASSAGES
17Private Life, Boston, October 1855
18“The Crime Against Kansas,” Washington, May 1856
19Frederick Douglass, Boston, 1860
20Prudence Bell, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1864
EPILOGUE Hyde Park, Massachusetts, 2017
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
GIRL IN BLACK
AND WHITE
PROLOGUE
Boston, March 29, 1855
Charles Sumner, the young senator from Massachusetts, rose to address his supporters. Not one more person could have fit into Boston’s Tremont Temple, because the organizer, Dr. James Stone, had purposely sold more tickets than there were seats. Spectators thronged the aisles. Dr. Stone had provided a pool of journalists with front-row desks and inkwells, and at this moment, they busily recorded the governor’s introduction. Senator Sumner leaned over to whisper to a little girl who sat on stage in a chair too big for her. She smiled up at him, placed her hands on her lap, and stilled her swinging feet. Pulling at his brocade vest as he took the podium, Sumner delivered his lecture in subdued tone.
“First, I begin with the necessity of the Anti-Slavery Enterprise; this necessity is apparent in a simple statement of the wrong of Slavery, as defined by existing laws. A wrong so grievous and unquestionable should not be allowed to continue. For the honor of human nature and for the good of all concerned, it should at once cease to exist. On this proposition, as a cornerstone, I found the necessity of the Anti-Slavery Enterprise.”1
Supporters sent up a hurrah.
“I do not dwell on the many tales which come from the house of bondage; or the bitter sorrow there endured; or the flesh galled by the manacle or spurting blood under the lash; or the human form mutilated by the knife or seared by red hot iron; or the ferocious scent of bloodhounds in chase of human prey; or the sale of fathers and mothers, of husbands and wives, of infants, brothers and sisters at the auction block; or the prostration of all rights, all ties and even all hopes . . .”
Sumner paused in his delivery of this bloody catalog to return to the key principle, that slavery was an abomination that ought to be immediately redressed. He gave lectures, not speeches.
He turned to Anthony Burns, the twenty-year-old redeemed captive seated on the platform next to the little girl. A stowaway who escaped from slavery, Burns had been recaptured on the streets of Boston at the direction of his Virginia master on May 28, 1854. His court hearing had been interrupted by unsuccessful efforts to free Burns by force. The president had sent in the Marines. Despite the public outcry, federal officers marched Burns, in shackles, back to slavery on June 2, 1854.
Antebellum Boston made a rapid response. On the summer morning when Justice Edward G. Loring, in adherence to the Fugitive Slave Law, condemned Anthony Burns to return to slavery—only five days after he was first arrested—an estimated fifty thousand protesters lined the streets in witness and outrage. Bostonians draped buildings in funereal black bunting and flew flags upside down. Crowds yelled “Shame! Shame!” and “Kidnappers!” at the column of two thousand troops that marched the captive from the courthouse to the waterfront. A coffin painted black with the word LIBERTY in white hung above State Street.
When the troops marched below the offices of the Boston Commonwealth newspaper, they were showered with cayenne pepper from several stories up, and a bottle of sulfuric acid crashed into the rear section. But such attempts to disrupt the formation failed. Protesters met the soldiers at Long Wharf, crammed onto the wharves and vessels in the harbor, until Boston’s waterways were as crowded as the streets had been. They delayed the departure of the steamship John Taylor, with Anthony Burns chained below, but did not prevent it.2 In a single day, Reverend Leonard Grimes of Boston’s Twelfth Baptist Church raised $1,300 for Burns’s redemption and retrieval to a free life. In this first real test of the Fugitive Slave Law, Burns became at once a symbol of abolition’s collective might and also its relative powerlessness. He was not the first man to be recaptured under this law, but he was the first fugitive whose re-enslavement abolitionists could not prevent either by legal means or by force.
Citizens of Boston protest the rendition of Anthony Burns to slavery in 1854, engraving by E. Benjamin Andrews, 1895.
Acting quickly, Stone and his committee organized these activists and crowds into audiences for lectures. Moderate white Bostonians found that their position on the “slavery question” had been tested by the Fugitive Slave Law, and they wanted further education in the movement. Stone presented a lecture series on the slavery question at Tremont Temple—and it was Boston’s most successful to date. Tickets sold out for speakers such as William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Wendell Phillips.
Senator Sumner had been slated to appear first in the series, but illness postponed his appearance until the spring of 1855, when he would appear last. This delay, as he wrote to Stone, might have been serendipitous, for in the interim, he had met a “bright and intelligent” girl, and “her presence among us [in Boston] will be a great deal more effective than any spe
ech I could make.” 3
Now on stage, he turned to look at her, sitting next to Burns, then turned back to the crowd. “ . . . Or the deadly injury to morals, in substituting concubinage for marriage and changing the whole land of slavery into a by-word of shame . . .” Sumner risked censure by uttering this last impropriety. Sexual slavery was not openly spoken of in antebellum Boston.
Sumner gestured to the girl to join him at the podium. She hopped down from her seat and walked across the platform to stand alongside his knee. She nodded up at him, then turned with a still face to the audience. The girl needed no introduction. The assembled crowd knew her as the “white slave,” or “Little Ida May.” According to the newspapers, she and her family had been enslaved in Virginia. Now, thanks to Sumner, she was free. To the sound of applause, Mary Mildred Williams retook her seat.
This moment was the culmination of a publicity campaign around Mary that used photography to question the construct of race in the context of slavery. Mary was seven years old when antislavery activists had her photographed and exhibited as evidence that slavery was not racially bound. When she first met Senator Sumner, in Washington in the spring of 1855, she reminded him of the kidnapped heroine in an antislavery novel called Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible, published three months earlier. In the novel, five-year-old Ida May, a white child from Pennsylvania, is stolen, beaten unconscious, and sold across state lines. She is raised as a slave in South Carolina until her identity is recovered eight years later. The plot of Ida May was like Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, told from a girl’s perspective, and it fictionalized a national fear: that under the Fugitive Slave Law, free children would be kidnapped and sold into slavery, just as Solomon Northup had been. Trouble was, not everyone believed such a thing was possible—which was why Sumner introduced Mary to the American public.
“Meanwhile, I send this picture,” Sumner had written to Dr. Stone on February 19, “thinking that you will be glad to exhibit it among the Legislature, as an illustration of slavery. Let a hard-hearted Hunker look at it and be softened.” Stone agreed. He forwarded Sumner’s letter to the editor of the Boston Telegraph, Richard Hildreth, who published it in full the following Tuesday.4 A daguerreotype of Mary, from the same seating as the portrait on the cover of this book, was placed at the Boston State House for public viewing. In her daguerreotype, Mary looked like a middle-class white girl, and her appearance challenged deeply held beliefs about race and class that maintained the slave economy.
Mary’s daguerreotype was one of the first images of photographic propaganda and one of the first portraits made solely to prove a political point. It marks a forgotten moment in media history: when photography, introduced to the United States in 1839, first began to make its tenacious claim on our sympathies and on our political points of view. When a politician states, without equivocation, that a picture of a person has a purpose—when it is disseminated as a rhetorical tool to effect legislative change, to raise funds, or to create awareness—the subject of the portrait becomes appropriated as an object. The complexity of an individual life is flattened into a universal message. Sumner knew his white audience in a way that seems, in retrospect, to be both empathetically and politically astute, when he joked that Mary could convert white Boston to antislavery by her presence alone. Sympathy, he knew, works through resemblance.
The majority of photographs made in antebellum America were Daguerrean portraits. Each one was unique: the image was imprinted on a reflective mirror, typically in a compact size that was easily held, and protected by a case of brocade and brass. The Massachusetts Historical Society calls its daguerreotype of Mary, “Unidentified Girl, 1855.” She would have been lost among the images of children in their files but for a handwritten note enclosed in the box along with the daguerreotype, offering a clue to her identity: “slave child.”5
Taboo and obfuscation had trapped Mary in the archives. Unlike the title character from Ida May, Mary was not captured and bound into slavery. She was born into the slave system, which condoned and promoted rape as economic gain. Mary’s skin color indicted at least four generations of white American rapists, men who used their status in the master class to coerce enslaved women into bearing their children. Many of Mary’s ancestors and relations were so light in complexion as “to be taken to be white.”
Complicated linguistic and legal codes arose to cover over the fact of sexual slavery in the United States. In ancient times, slavery had been a consequence of war, not passed on to the next generation. In American slavery, rape and pillage were ongoing modes of control and profit. Although sexual violence was a fact of American slave experience, it was not talked about openly and not written into historical records, which is why Mary’s story has remained untold for so long.
At Tremont Temple, Sumner, with Mary behind him, closed his lecture with an exhortation that we ought to follow: “The first essential requisite is that the question shall be frankly & openly confronted. Do not put it aside. Do not blink it out of sight. Approach it. Contemplate it. Study it. Deal with it.”6
White audiences in 1855 sympathized with Mary because of selective solidarity, or because she resembled them in color and manner. That easy sympathy, the sympathy of like to like, did not necessarily result in action on behalf of black and brown children. I write this frank truth as a white woman, the seventh generation on my father’s side born in rural Louisiana. Those white abolitionists in 1855 who promoted Mary to public attention made slavery white in order to make its hardships legible to other white men, who could vote but who did not always recognize the full humanity of those who could not. In so doing, abolitionists perpetuated the racial hierarchy that made slavery possible in the first place. I am also writing my way into the house of slavery from a photograph of one of its whitest inhabitants, in an attempt to name, and correct, these myopic failures of white sympathy.
Sumner’s audience in 1855 perceived this girl as both black and white, a person and a person’s property, a real girl and a fictional heroine, an orphan and a loving daughter. How comfortably did all these contrasting identities rest on Mary’s narrow shoulders? Without a doubt, wearing the mantle of these many identities would suggest she was quite the performer. But in all the documents where Mary, or “Little Ida May,” is said to have made an appearance, only one faint, and perhaps false, echo hints at her reaction to what was happening around her. Here it is: the Boston correspondent for the Worcester Daily Spy mentioned that “her eyes sparkled just like those of any other little girl” at the incongruity of the golden codfish hanging in the Boston State House.7 Though her contemporaries tirelessly discussed her appearance, these three words, “her eyes sparkled,” are all that remains of her interior life.
Walt Whitman, in an 1846 gallery review, wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle of the tragedy of photographic silence: “Ah! What tales might those pictures tell if their mute lips had the power of speech! How romance then, would be infinitely outdone by fact.” Mary, her mother Elizabeth A. Williams, and her grandmother Prudence Bell are mute protagonists in the archive and in this book. History is constructed from documents, and documents are selectively archived. Not a single word from these women appears to have been written down and preserved in archival sources. If the voices of men—Charles Sumner, John Albion Andrew, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Frederick Douglass—sound more loudly across these pages, it is because they left a paper trail that was preserved and made available to the public. Mary’s racial history began with her grandmother Prudence’s bondage, and so this book is, both by design and by historical necessity, a matrilineal history. To set the story in motion, I must begin this narrative with Conney Cornwell, the white woman who purchased Mary’s grandmother Prudence and great-grandmother Letty. Though the Cornwell women were illiterate, they were litigious and left good records.
Out of Mary’s silence, I have constructed a composite portrait from information in other sources, arranged radially around my un
known subject. This book takes its form from the “Life and Letters” biographies of the nineteenth century, which featured passages from the archival record held together with the adhesive of narration. Sentences in quotation marks are the words of historical actors derived from letters, diaries, depositions, or other manuscript sources. When archival documents best do the work of storytelling, I copy the archive directly into these chapters. I commit these transcripts to paper in an act of trust that you, dear reader, will exhibit more human tolerance and equanimity than some of their authors did.
PART ONE
BONDAGE
1
Constance Cornwell
Prince William County, Virginia, 1805
Constance Calvert Cornwell saw the carriage coming up the road toward New Market Tavern. She knew her husband was not inside, although it was his carriage, his horses. His daughters, too, were now gathering around her. His slaves were gathering in the yard. She hadn’t found the right time to tell them that Jesse was dead, and now she regretted that. The drive was short; the man was already stepping from the carriage. The horses were sweating profusely, and out of habit, she worried after them in the cold. Her hand gestured, as if on its own, both in greeting and as a direction to stable the horses before they cooled.
Francis Jackson climbed down from Jesse’s carriage, alone, and walked with his hat in hand to the front step. He paused there, with one leg up and one on frosted dirt. The five children stood stock-still, lined up on the porch, gaping at the empty carriage.
In Jesse’s carriage and pair, Jackson had brought home news of Jesse Cornwell’s death.1 That winter Jesse had been in North Carolina on pleasure and business: to visit his cousins and to see about a tract of land he had purchased. He arrived at Jackson’s Christmas Eve party and was just getting down from the carriage when his horse spooked. He reached for the reins and was dragged under. Jackson hesitated to relay the details to his widow and children: the wheel crossed Jesse’s abdomen, placing the whole weight of carriage, luggage, and tack on him, then crossed and recrossed that awful track twice more until he looked as if he would burst.
Girl in Black and White Page 1