Girl in Black and White

by Jessie Morgan-Owens

  What Thoreau biographer Annie Russell Marble called a “crude and striking piece of china,” I regard as a proxy portrait of Henry Williams and Mary Mildred Williams. The child is as white as the man is black, and both wear snappy clothing. Eva stands upon Tom’s thigh, his hand around her hip. He wears a wreath of red flowers she has made him, and their redness is only a gradient lighter than her reddish hair. Her face is sweetly serious, while his wears a smile. Fiction and truth converged here, as the real-life father and daughter assumed a curious symmetry with a pair in American literature, like a transparency laid across a map. The press thought Ida May had been written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the two years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The tragic heroines of these two novels, Ida May and Eva St. Clair, were so similar as to be acted by the same young starlet on the same day. The press called Mary “Ida May II.” Her father gave Henry David Thoreau a statuette of Little Eva and Uncle Tom. Of these congruencies, which are merely associative, and which hold meaning?

  Uncle Tom and Eva, glazed ceramic figurine, gifted to Henry David Thoreau by Henry Williams in October 1855.

  No doubt Thoreau cleared obstacles on the day he and Williams had spent together four years earlier. Modest in his aid, Thoreau was humble even in his private journal. We cannot know how much practical support Thoreau or others in Concord gave Williams, because Thoreau did not write of it. Records note only fifty cents donated by Ralph Waldo Emerson. When Williams returned to Boston, after his brief sojourn in Canada, he found people who could help him to achieve his manumission and reunite with his wife and children. Something he remembered in Thoreau’s solicitous kindness—perhaps a word of encouragement, enlightenment, or introduction—required this memento of thanks.

  As Henry made his trip to Concord, Mary’s private life began. There is no evidence of a specific decision by the men responsible for her fame to end her public appearances. More likely all parties took a summer holiday and, upon their return, found interest in Mary dissipated.

  During the summer of 1855, Sumner went west, touring eleven free states and three slave states. Leaving directly after his New York appearances, he passed through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. He stopped in Kentucky, visiting Henry Clay’s family in Madison County, as well as Lexington, Paris, and Frankfort, towns “where I have seen much to admire, & much which I can never forget—the magnificent woodland pastures & the cattle—& the slaves. I was present at the sale of a slave on the court-house steps!” He tossed a silver coin to a grinning boy while his master looked on. He visited Mammoth Cave, then journeyed down the Cumberland River to St. Louis. A steamboat up the Mississippi took him as far as St. Paul. He was badly bruised in a carriage accident near Davenport, Iowa. He saw Chicago, Detroit, Madison, and Milwaukee, and back in Iowa on July 10, he visited the offices of the Dubuque Tribune for an interview. He toured the Great Lakes by boat. He hiked the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He apparently was in no hurry to return to his senatorial labors in Washington. “It seems to me that nothing but my interest in the Slavery Question would keep me there another session,” he wrote.2

  Mary, for her part, spent the summer of 1855 in Newburyport, which had the desired effect of ending her public career. She traveled to Newburyport with Carrie Andrews, without her parents or siblings.

  Mr. Higginson was much moved at the situation of this lovely child. He wished me to take her home with me and keep her for a while in my vacation, at Newburyport. While I was there he wrote me the most explicit directions in regard to her care and enjoyment, I thought he hoped at one time to adopt her, as after I had returned to my school, and given her back to her parents, he wrote sorrowfully to me, “My dream of Mildred is ended. I was not worthy of it.”

  —Caroline Andrews Leighton to Mary Potter Thacher Higginson3

  When Mary returned to her parents in the fall, her family was the same, but she was changed. For two months or more, she had led the life of a white child, the kind of life she might expect if she were adopted. Did her revelations about white society change her manner?

  Higginson visited Mary when he was in Boston, and with each visit came a renewed entreaty to her parents to let him take Mary to another life. He had attempted such an adoption years before, when a fugitive woman, who presented white, arrived with her two children in Worcester. She had been sent by Samuel J. May, and “we had them in our care all winter.”4

  She escaped 4 months ago from North Carolina, disguised in deep mourning, bringing her child three years old, also white. She has also a baby born since her arrival; they are her master’s [half-brother’s] children, poor creature; and she is coming here for safety. She has always been petted and waited on, and can do nothing except sew; but we shall probably get her into some family where she can do housework: and perhaps the elder child will be adopted, if she is willing.

  —Thomas Wentworth Higginson, quoted by Mary Potter Thacher Higginson5

  For the better part of a year, Higginson helped the woman from North Carolina make a full transition into white society through marriage to a white tradesman from Boston, who knew the woman’s story but married her anyway. Apparently, she was unwilling to give up her children to adoption. “She disappeared into the mass of white population, where we were content to leave her untraced.”6

  Higginson’s visits to the Williams family continued, his aid unrelenting. “When I was in Boston, I went to see my darling little Mildred Williams Ida May,” wrote Higginson, giving her two names, side by side. “They, you know, are free. She is as gentle and refined as ever with her delicate skin and golden hair.” He concluded, “She may be adopted by a member of Congress.”7 He could not adopt Mary himself, so he recruited another family.

  A year passed. Mary was not adopted by the “member of Congress” as Higginson had arranged. A new benefactor was in the picture, a woman, who had offered to adopt Mary. Higginson also had a new family in mind, one that could offer advantages. He wrote “to Madam,” to confirm her good intent. He does not give her name or address.

  March 23, 1857

  Dear Madam,

  I take the liberty of writing to you, in regard to a little girl in whom I am deeply interested, Mary Mildred Williams.

  She was here when she first come from Washington, & won all our hearts. Since then I have not seen her till lately, owing chiefly to absence from this country. But I have just visited her again, in hopes of fulfilling a plan I have long had, to procure her adoption into some other family.

  I would gladly have taken her myself, (having no children,) had my wife’s health and other circumstances permitted. I have now, however, made arrangements for her adoption into an excellent family, where she would have every advantage of education and careful training,—when, on calling on Mrs. Williams, I found that you had formed a similar plan.

  Of course, you have the first claim, especially as the child has already staid with you, and become attached to you. But as I understand that they have not heard from you for some time, I am anxious to know whether you still desire to take her?

  I should deem it a favor, if you would inform me in regard to the matter, as early as convenient, in order that I may carry out my own plan (to which the family seem willing to consent) unless yours is fulfilled.

  Very respectfully yours,T. W. Higginson8

  Mary had stayed with “Madam” before. “Madam” was a stranger to Higginson but not to Mary, who was “attached” to her, even though she had not been in touch, “for some time.” She was likely a fellow reformer.

  Higginson had known Mary for two years, almost to the day, when he wrote this letter. He assumed that “the family seem willing to consent” to his plan of adoption, but he could be mistaken. The urgency with which he pursued his plan may have to do with his concerns that her associations in black Boston would reveal her origins. As a racially mixed child, adoption away from her father and brother would have removed her contextual markers of blackness and permitted her to pass into white society. In the era of Dred S
cott, adoption would have meant that Mary had the rights of a U.S. citizen, the privileges afforded upper-class whites, and the future expected for an educated white woman. But did her parents consent to Higginson’s plan? Would Elizabeth and Henry allow for the removal, by “social promotion,” of one of their fair daughters? Elizabeth held her child close that winter.

  18

  “The Crime Against Kansas”

  Washington, May 1856

  Out west, proslavery and antislavery factions erupted in violence as “Bleeding Kansas” reached a point of no return in May 1856. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had established “popular sovereignty” as the determining factor behind whether the former Indian Territory known as Kansas would be incorporated as a slave or free state. Proslavery settlers, their numbers swelled by “border ruffians” from Missouri, had elected a legislature that wrote a proslavery constitution for Kansas, with a statute that called for five years imprisonment of any man who “questioned” the rights of slaveholders. In defiance of this statute, and to tip the balance of popular sovereignty, the New England Emigrant Aid Society recruited nearly nine thousand antislavery voters and their families to move to Kansas. Then in a decisive blow to the cause of liberty, President Franklin Pierce came out in open support for the proslavery constitution. He asked Congress to incorporate Kansas as a slave state and sent federal troops in support. Violence escalated. Eight hundred proslavery men sacked the antislavery settlement at Lawrence. The territory was no longer safe for antislavery.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson left Massachusetts to bring “supplies” to the settlers: 92 pistols and 5,900 rounds of ammunition.1 Members of his Worcester congregation had emigrated to Kansas, and he went there in support. In the communities of Lawrence and Topeka, Higginson would be known as “the Reverend General.” He would hold services at the “Church Militant,” a makeshift structure of packing crates covered in buffalo skins.

  In Washington, on May 19, Charles Sumner delivered a vitriolic five-hour speech to a packed, hot Senate chamber. The hopes of the Free Soil movement were being trounced in Kansas, and Sumner’s diatribe flew in the face of convention and decorum. In “The Crime Against Kansas,” he verbally assaulted politicians he felt to be responsible for the bloodshed in “Bloody Kansas”: President Franklin Pierce, for his collusion with a proslavery territorial government; and Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the policy of popular sovereignty and the lawless behavior of “border ruffians” in attacking the “peaceful settlers” of Kansas. Sumner called Douglas “the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.”

  Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina was another especial target. The previous February, Butler had relentlessly interrupted Sumner’s midnight appeal, and despite Butler’s alleged drunkenness on that occasion, he had cornered Sumner into admitting a treasonous policy of disregard for the Fugitive Slave Law. In response to the fighting in Kansas, Butler had called for the disarmament of the people of Kansas, which Sumner called the “Remedy of Folly.” In the most famous lines of his 118-page speech, Sumner viciously maligned Butler and his state.

  The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress, to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean, the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words . . . The frenzy of Don Quixote, in behalf of his wench Dulcinea del Toboso, is all surpassed. The asserted rights of slavery, which shock equality of all kinds, are cloaked by a fantastic claim of equality. If the slave States cannot enjoy . . . the full power in the national Territories to compel fellow-men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction block—then sir, the chivalric Senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union! Heroic Knight! Exalted Senator! A second Moses come for second exodus! . . .

  Has he read the history of ‘the State’ which he represents? He cannot surely have forgotten its shameful imbecility from slavery, confessed throughout the Revolution, followed by its more shameful assumptions for slavery since . . . Instead of moving, with backward treading steps to cover its nakedness, [Senator Butler] rushes forward, in the very ecstasy of madness, to expose it, by provoking a comparison with Kansas . . .

  Were the whole history of South Carolina blotted out of existence . . . civilization might lose—I do not say how little, but surely less than it has already gained by the example of Kansas, in its valiant struggle against oppression, and in the development of a new science of emigration. Already, in Lawrence alone, there are newspapers and schools, including a high school; and throughout this infant Territory there is more of mature scholarship, in proportion to its inhabitants, than in all South Carolina.

  —Charles Sumner, May 19, 18562

  Disunion was not to be feared but welcomed as an occasion for these imbeciles devoted to owning slaves to depart. After Sumner delivered the first half of his speech on Monday, he was chastised for his offensive language and personal attacks. During the second half, proslavery senators made a show of nonattention. They talked audibly, laughed and stood about in groups, despite calls to order. Stephen Douglas was writing letters, with not one eye on Sumner.

  Then, after completing the second half of the speech on Tuesday, Sumner faced open rancor. A livid Douglas rose to ridicule him. For weeks, Douglas said, he and his colleagues had been hearing rumors that the Senator had a new speech “written, printed, committed to memory, practiced every night before the glass with a negro boy to hold the candle and watch the gestures, and annoying the boards in the adjoining rooms until they were forced to quit the House!” The Senate chamber erupted in laughter. According to Douglas, Sumner’s speech was no extemporaneous attack on Butler, nor an appeal to end the bloodshed in Kansas, but an array of “libels” and “gross insults” that were “conned over, written with cool, deliberate malignity, repeated from night to night in order to catch the appropriate grace.” Sumner’s carefully prepared speaking style that had been lauded as graceful in Boston was labeled premeditated and cruel in Washington.3 Douglas recalled that Sumner and the rest of the “Black Republicans” had openly promised to defy the Fugitive Slave Law, citing a higher power that put them above the Constitution they were sworn to protect.

  “I am in doubt as to what can be his object,” Douglas said. “He has not hesitated to charge three fourths of the Senate with fraud, with swindling, with crime, with infamy, at least one hundred times over in his speech. Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?” Did Douglas incite violence with this comment?

  “You arrange it on the opposite side of the House to set your hounds after me,” Douglas continued, “and then complain when I cuff them over the head, and send them back yelping. I never made an assault on any Senator; I have only repelled attacks. The attack of the Senator from Massachusetts now is not on me alone. Even the courteous and the accomplished Senator from South Carolina [Mr. Butler] could not be passed by in his absence.” Did Douglas defend his remarks with a threat?

  In response, Sumner called Douglas “offensive” and “noisome.”

  When the Senate adjourned that day, a House Republican, John Bingham of Ohio, caught up to Senator Henry Wilson and warned him, “You had better go down with Mr. Sumner; I think there will be an assault upon him.”

  “Do you think so?” Wilson asked.

  “I have heard remarks made,” Bingham replied. “ . . . I think an assault will be made.” Wilson took the warning seriously, but for his own reasons, he did not share this information with his colleague from Massachusetts. Instead, Wilson simply said to Sumner, “I am going home with you to-day—several of us are going home with you.”

  No, Sumner would not have
an escort. “None of that, Wilson.”

  Wilson rallied Anson Burlingame, from the Massachusetts fifth district, and Schuyler Colfax of Indiana to protect Sumner. “Walk down with us,” he urged these men, “for it is possible there may be some demonstration against him.”4

  While Wilson was making arrangements with Burlingame, Sumner “shot off just as I should any other day,” slipping out from Wilson’s accompaniment by means of a side door.

  On the street, Sumner overtook William Seward; they had plans for dinner. They walked together as far as the omnibuses, which Seward proposed they take to dinner together. But Sumner had to stop by the printer’s office to review the proofs of “The Crime Against Kansas,” so he walked home from there alone and unmolested. He dressed and kept his dinner appointment.

  Two days later, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, Butler’s second cousin, went after Sumner in the Senate chamber, seeking retribution for the speech. The Senate adjourned at twelve forty-five that afternoon, and when the last woman had left the chamber audience nearly an hour later, Sumner could still be found at his desk, signing the first edition of “The Crime Against Kansas.” Brooks approached Sumner and made this pronouncement:

  “Mr. Sumner, I have read your Speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible and I feel it is my duty to tell you that you have libeled my State and slandered a relative who is aged and absent and I am come to punish you for it.”