The justice of the peace, Robert Hunter, confirmed that though the judge’s offices were kept open all day to receive depositions on behalf of Jesse Nelson, no one had come. Jesse lost his suit.17
On March 6, 1855, Judge Neale promised to try to accomplish for Jesse and Albert what he had for Ludwell. “If I fail in this, I promise you, that he shall be free and so shall all of them, according to my original promise to these poor creatures.”18 Judge Neale’s promise of her sons’ imminent release—“It shall be done”—convinced Prue to leave Washington.
John Cornwell did not free Jesse or Albert Nelson until July 1856. These young men were the most valuable members of the family, as no doubt their father had intended by their careful training. They were the first to be sold and the last to see freedom.
PART THREE
BECOMING IDA MAY
8
Mary Hayden Green Pike
Calais, Maine, November 1854
Charles Sumner was charmed by Mary’s older brother Oscar, when he met him in Washington after their manumission. Oscar, at ten years old, was “bright and intelligent, [with] the eyes of an eagle and a beautiful smile.” When Sumner first met Oscar, he asked: “You are free, young man. Do you know what that means?”
Oscar replied, “I now belong to myself.”
Sumner laughed. “Well! There is a definition which philosophy might borrow.”
On February 13, Sumner divulged his plans for Henry and Elizabeth’s children: he would launch a publicity campaign around Oscar’s “bright and intelligent” little sister, Mary. He chose Mary for her light skin color and her vulnerability to trafficking in the sex trade in young enslaved girls.
Sumner sketched out a campaign around Mary’s appearance: first she would be photographed, then her daguerreotype would travel northward to be copied and displayed. The entire family would be publicly exhibited as they made their way north, first in New York and then in the State House in Boston, where Mary would be presented to the legislature. Sumner would join them in April, at the close of the senatorial session. He would present Mary at his lecture in Tremont Temple in May.
In his response of February 16, Andrew gave his support to Sumner’s plan: “I feel also desirous that Members of the legislature shall have a sight of those children.” He agreed with Sumner that they would add “impressiveness” to the business then under way in the Boston State House. A petition was circulating to render the Fugitive Slave Law ineffectual in the state of Massachusetts. The other high drama on the docket that spring was the removal of Justice Edward Loring from office: the judge had mishandled, in popular opinion, the trials leading to Anthony Burns’s rendition.
As for Henry Williams, “He is very anxious to see his family; but, he is willing to submit to your judgment.” Three days later Williams stopped by Court Street to let Andrew know that, over the weekend, he had arranged for his family’s luggage to be shipped to his workplace.
Boston, 4 Court Street, February 19, 1855
Dear Sumner,
Seth calls in to say that, when his folks come, they may put their baggage in charge of Adams Co’s Express.
That will save all trouble to them, weary her person, from the care of it, and Adams & Co. will probably bring it free of expense.
It should be directed
“Henry Williams—
Cornhill Coffee House
Boston”
“Care of Adams & Co. Express”
That being the name he wears in Boston, having adopted it, when he was a fugitive.
Yours Faithfully, J. A. Andrew1
The speed at which Sumner moved on his plan suggests that he intended to act first and ask permission later. That same day he sent a letter and Mary’s daguerreotype to Dr. James Stone, fully expecting Stone to send the letter to the press.
Washington, Feb. 19, 1855.
Dear Doctor—I send you by the mail the daguerreotype of a child about 7 years old, who only a few months ago was a slave in Virginia, but who is now free by means sent on from Boston, which I had the happiness of being trusted with for this purpose. She is bright and intelligent—another Ida May. I think her presence among us (in Boston) will be a great deal more effective than any speech I could make.
Meanwhile I send this picture, thinking that you will be glad to exhibit among the members of the Legislature, as an illustration of Slavery. Let a hard-hearted Hunker look at it and be softened.
I send another copy in a different attitude to John A. Andrew. Her name is Mary.
Ever yours, CHARLES SUMNER.
P.S. Such is Slavery! There it is! Should such things be allowed to continue in the City of Washington, under the shadow of the Capitol?
—Charles Sumner to Dr. James Stone, February 19, 18552
Notice that Sumner did not mention Mary’s color directly but instead alluded to “another Ida May.” Ida May was the title character of a sentimental antislavery novel by Mary Hayden Green Pike, which had been published under the pseudonym Mary Langdon three months previous.
Widely considered the successor to the enormously influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Pike’s Ida May was an immediate success, selling 10,500 copies on the first day, 11,500 by the end of the week, and 60,000 copies by the end of the season that Mary shared its spotlight. A celebratory review of Ida May published in the Boston Telegraph and reprinted in Frederick Douglass’s Paper said this book was capable of providing a national “moment of clarification or illumination” and so bringing a generation of readers to antislavery: “We believe that IDA MAY is but one of a series of books which will successively electrify the reading public, and quicken the impulses of all right-thinking men and women.”3
Ida May’s release had to be delayed, twice, because the printers could not keep up with demand. After finally hitting the bookstores on Thanksgiving 1854, it outpaced every other book that Christmas—even an autobiography by circus man P. T. Barnum. The year Ida May sold 60,000 copies, Charles Dickens sold only 70,000 copies of Hard Times by the end of the run. Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave sold approximately 27,000 copies in two years, 1853 and 1854. During his lifetime, Herman Melville sold a total of 35,048 copies of his novels.4 The audience for sentimental antislavery novels, a genre dominated by white women authors, was unmatched in the mid-1850s.
The New York Evening Post’s celebrated editor William Cullen Bryant received an advance copy of Ida May from his friend, the publisher and marketing genius J. C. Derby (who had also published Twelve Years a Slave). On November 11, 1854, the Evening Post ran—on the front page—four columns of extracts from Ida May and its first review. Bryant initially made a strong claim that the author of Ida May was Harriet Beecher Stowe, saying, “No other living author could have written it.”5
Days later, the publisher Phillips, Sampson, & Co. thanked the paper for the complimentary association with Stowe but affirmed that Ida May was “the production of an author as yet unknown to fame.”6 The Post retracted, but the debut made Ida May newsworthy, and the hunt for its author continued. They had “puffed” Ida May onto the bestseller list.7
We were remarking only a few months since that the most popular living novelists, in the strictest sense of that term, were women; that the fictions of American females had attained a wider circulation than those of either sex of any other nation. The author of Ida May strengthens that supremacy, for it is admitted by the publishers that this is her first book, and that she is a recruit to the already strong array of talented women engaged among us in writing fiction. Why her name is longer suppressed we can only conjecture. It is probable that her relations with the South are of such a nature as to indispose her to any more personal notoriety than is inevitable.
—New York Evening Post, December 6, 1854 8
Meanwhile the author, Mary Hayden Green Pike, was at home in Calais, Maine, protected by the privacy of her pseudonym “Mary Langdon.” She was busy supporting the nascent political career of her husband, state senator Frederick Augustus Pi
ke, who supported the gradual abolition of slavery.
However, Mary Pike did not agree with her husband’s political conservatism; her view was far more radical.9 She hoped her books would do the good work that she could not. In doing so, she joined the ranks of women novelists who turned to writing to influence a political sphere that was not open to them. When Senator Sumner spoke of her book with such familiarity, she had proof that she hit her mark.
◆
Mary Hayden Green was fourteen when the seed of her politics was planted. A young agitator named Ichabod Codding came from Vermont to her small town of Calais, Maine. Sitting on the edge of an immense wood and an icy river, Calais was a small forestry town that waited for the summertime, when the St. Croix River brought people and ideas from other places.
Mary Hayden Green Pike, portrait photograph, date and photographer unknown.
Ichabod Codding was in his second year with the American Anti-slavery Society, and two years out of Middlebury College, when he arrived in Calais in the summer of 1838 to speak to those of its two thousand residents who would listen to his message. Upon his arrival in Calais, no town hall, schoolhouse, or church would host his lectures. He rented a small private hall and lectured for three evenings to increasing audiences on the “sin and wrong of negro slavery.” On the fourth evening, Deacon Samuel Kelley invited Codding to speak from the pulpit of the Calais Baptist Church that weekend, where Mary and her family were pew-holding members.
The following morning, a town meeting was called. Local politicians feared that Codding’s uncanny gift for influence might pull their constituents to the left of the Whig Party. Local ministers feared Codding could be a revivalist in abolitionist’s clothing, intent on bringing the Great Awakening back to Calais. They met at the church, a half hour before Codding was scheduled to begin, “to consider the question of allowing him to proceed.”
Both sides of the question were presented. “This fellow ought to be ridden out of town on a rail,” a local minister insisted.10 Reverend James Huckins’s church was filling with antislavery fire, and Deacon Kelley had invited it in without asking permission. Huckins said Codding owed him an apology “for the farce and buffonery of the evening before, and . . . for desecrating his house.” A local lawyer, “Mr. Chase,” offered resolutions for the town to consider. First, “Slavery was an evil in the abstract, but that we had nothing to do with it.” Secondly, “agitation disturbed the South and endangered the Union” (and, it went without saying, forestry profits). Third, the abolitionists had no right to disturb their peace or the sanctity of the Union. And finally, it was their duty to use all lawful means to stop abolitionists, those “enemies of the republic.” Mr. Chase then called on Calais to close all public houses to the abolitionists, and more immediately to Codding. The townspeople should vote for peace and prosperity with their feet and stay at home, giving Codding and his ilk no countenance.
Codding had anticipated this move against him—he’d seen it before. During his very first lecture on this tour, in Brighton, he had been pulled from the podium and down the aisle to a mob waiting outside the church. Congregation members saved him, and from that he learned boldness. Now in Calais, hat in hand, the young man requested the opportunity to speak on his own behalf. Once he had the podium, he commanded the town’s attention “and having got the floor, used his time to good purpose,” delivering a ninety-minute lecture on slavery.11 Chase, Huckins, and a lawyer named Bradbury tried to incite a general run out of the church, but Codding’s audience remained.
The following Tuesday evening, the scene reconvened, with the same result. The debates resumed to crowded houses on Wednesday and Thursday as well, until every town member had committed, battle-hardened, to a position. His speeches were “howled down with attempts to intimidate him.” On Friday, a vote was tallied for Chase’s resolution to run Codding out of town: yeas, 68, nays, 85. Unhappy with the result, “a set of desperadoes called ‘the Indians,’ from the fact that, dressed as Indians, they committed acts they dared not commit in their real characters,” rushed the church, clearing it with rotten eggs and “shouting, yelling, howling, like so many demons from the infernal regions.”
Mary Green saw her town consumed. When she was twelve, she had been baptized in the dead of winter, a hole cut in the ice for her holy immersion. Now she was baptized in fire. She sat with her family in their pew, rapt with attention and pride that Codding could deliver his lecture, unmolested, in her church.12
Codding’s early oratory has survived only in pamphlet form, hastily recorded by those who heard him. In one early lecture, he took as his text, “Train up a child in the way he should go.” When he spoke in a church, he followed the conventions of the sermon, which was to begin with exegesis, or to locate God’s design through the careful exposition and practical application of a biblical passage to contemporary life.
This commandment comes home to the heart of the slave father: he looks around upon the little children that God has given him . . . Oh, how he burns with internal fire to educate their moral and intellectual nature, and fit them for usefulness here and for that state of being that shall come after. He obeys by commencing to teach his child to read; the slaveholder comes in and says, “Not a letter shall that child learn.” The slave replies, “God commands me to do it.” The slaveholder retorts, “I will show you to whom that child belongs; I own it as I own the pig in the sty”; and the master proves his superior authority by triumphing over the express command of Jehovah. What a principle is here! . . .
The principle, then, is settled, that chattel slavery, absolutely, so far as the slave is concerned, does overrule the direct command of God, and asserts more than God dare assert! If the principle is settled that God cannot rule over all, then it is settled that he cannot rule over any. If I say, here is a portion of the human family over which God may not reign—it is settled thus with regard to the slave, it is settled with regard to all men; and if God reigns over others, it is by express permission of the chattel principle. It must be seen, then, that if God has no right to rule over any, he is no God: this would be No-godism—ATHEISM! . . .
For when I discover the massive moral power of these large and influential bodies pressing with ponderous weight upon the prostrate forms and crushed hearts of my Father’s children, and hear their suppressed sighs and groans, and see them striving, and struggling, and surging beneath the awful incubus, and all in vain, I must and will cry out, GET OFF—IN GOD’S NAME, GET OFF!
—Ichabod Codding, December 6, 185013
No expository sermon is complete without its exhortation. Mary’s father, Elijah Green, left with other members of the Calais Baptist Church to found a new congregation of like-minded members who saw abolitionism as inseparable from faith, and slaveholders as atheists and barbarians. According to the Annals of Calais, Codding left on Monday with fifty dollars for the causes of the slave, while Huckins left his post as minister to serve a more amenable congregation in Texas.14
The abolitionists won that round.
Ichabod Codding’s mission to Calais was but a single, forgotten episode in a full-scale campaign; this scene was replicated in towns across the Northern states. Where abolitionists could not show up in person, they sent pamphlets by the hundreds. One hundred and fifty slave narratives survive, and more surely wait to be found. Dozens of petitions, each with its own audience—Methodists, young children, Southerners, women—can be found in archives. Whole newspapers and subscription weeklies were dedicated to the cause. Abolitionists produced novels, children’s books, Christmas annuals, poetry collections, and short stories. Theirs was a mission conducted in words. The Pike brothers, James Shepherd and his brother Frederick, funded a library to keep the Calais community current on the circulating materials vital to American politics in the 1840s.
Mary Green and Frederick Pike were a like-minded match. They were married when Mary was twenty-one. Frederick became editor of the local paper, then mayor, then state congressman, and then rep
resentative for Maine in the U.S. Congress. Mary wrote three novels in five years. They adopted ten-year-old Mary Sterns, Mary’s second cousin, whose father had died in a steamboat explosion. They used the proceeds from Mary Pike’s first novel, Ida May, to build a stately home on Main Street in Calais. Her second novel, the mixed-race romance Caste: A Story of Republican Equality (1856), was published under the pseudonym Sydney A. Story. This second novel, which dealt with racial inequality and prejudice head-on, did not sell well, though Mary’s husband claimed its failure might be due to the change of pseudonyms.15 He demanded that her publisher take her third novel, Agnes (1859), a historical romance that featured the racial discrimination faced by Native Americans during the Revolutionary period. The publisher revealed Pike’s name on the title page, adding that she was the author of Ida May, in the hope that her notoriety would help sales. It did not, and Pike wrote only one further piece for publication, a memorial to John Brown, then returned to her watercolors and her husband’s political career. In 1870, fire destroyed the stereotype plates for her novels, and she chose not to take on the cost of replacement. By 1910, her obscurity would be complete.16
Shortly after Mary Pike’s name appeared as Ida May’s author in Agnes, the abolitionists Sally Holley and Caroline F. Putnam visited her at her home in Calais for the Liberator.
Calais, 30th. The authoress of Ida May, Mrs. Pike, has just left us, after giving us an hour’s entertaining and animated conversation. She resides in this place, and her husband, a member of the State Senate, gathered a fine audience for Miss Holley last evening. Mrs. Cooper, with whom we have a delightful home, and Mrs. P[ike], with another Maine lady, spent a winter in South Carolina, as invalids, a few years since, when Mrs. P learned much which suggested to her the narratives of Ida May and Caste. She has given us this afternoon many reminiscences of that Southern winter—some shocking atrocities which she could not shut her eyes to. How so do many Northern ladies visiting South? Once the Mayor of Aiken, S.C. waited on these ladies with a warrant! They were addressed, “Ladies, you are suspected of being Abolitionists!” Their landlord soothed the alarm of the town by favorable reports of their demeanor, and they were suffered to remain.
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