Charleston's Daughter

by Sabra Waldfogel

  He looked at the earbobs. “Do you know what they’re worth?”

  Emily smiled. “They were a gift from my mother. I never thought about it.”

  His gaze went from the earbobs to Caro, who stood mute, her eyes cast down. “They’re worth as much as that slave of yours.”

  Still smiling, Emily said, “I had no idea.” She closed her fingers over them and extended her hand to McHenry. “Take them. I’m sure your wife will like them.”

  He opened his hand for the earbobs and let them rest there. The diamonds sparkled and the gold gleamed. “I reckon she will,” he said, closing his hand over the jewels.

  He slipped the earbobs in his pocket, and Caro was suddenly sick with fear again. Would he pull out a pistol? Would he raise the alarm? But he removed his hand and said, “I’ve been very much mistaken.” As he left, he doffed his hat to Emily. “A good evening to you, Mrs. Morris,” he said, as Emily closed the door.

  They spent that night in fear, starting awake and waking each other, thinking that they heard a tap on the door. They remained in their cabin the next day, too worried to care that they hadn’t eaten.

  When the knock on the door came, it was Mrs. Reynolds. She asked Caro, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Caro said, her head down. The coffee had worn off, and she was her usual ivory color.

  Mrs. Reynolds entered the cabin. She asked, “Mrs. Morris? How are you?”

  Emily, who was tired and hungry and the worse for wear, sat up in bed. She said, “A little better but not well enough to walk about.”

  “Should I ask the clerk to bring you something?”

  “No, Mrs. Reynolds. I’m all right.”

  Mrs. Reynolds said, “I saw that man at your door last night. The broker. Did he trouble you?”

  “No, Mrs. Reynolds. He thought he knew me from Charleston, but he was wrong.”

  “Was he inebriated?”

  Emily was trembling. “No, just forward.”

  “He won’t trouble you again.”

  For a wild moment Caro thought, He’s fallen overboard, or he’s been arrested.

  “Since the boat docked at Baltimore, I haven’t seen him.”

  Still trembling, Emily said, “So he’s gone.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Emily lay back on her pillow. “I believe I’ll rest for a while,” she said. “I may want supper later.”

  Mrs. Reynolds patted her arm. “You do that, dear.”

  They stayed in the cabin until the ship was well past Baltimore. The sea, which had been a grayish blue, was now gray with a tinge of green, and the birds that swooped over the water were unfamiliar.

  They stood close together at the window, watching as the birds followed the ship, diving toward the water in its wake. Caro thought, Everything will be different in the North, even the birds. She thought of the hiss of the turkey vultures and for a moment felt a twinge of regret that she might never see them again.

  They disembarked in Philadelphia in midmorning to a late summer day that held a whisper of the autumn to come. The dock in Philadelphia was a crowded place, much more heavily traveled than Charleston, and everyone in the crowd seemed to be in a hurry. Emily paused and beside her, so did Caro, trying to get her bearings as people jostled her in their rush to get wherever they hoped to go.

  “How will Mr. Aiken find us?” Caro asked Emily.

  Emily stood still. All the journey’s weariness showed in her face. “He’ll find us,” she said, and she began to walk the wharf.

  A man came through the crowd, breasting it as though he were swimming the ocean, so intent on his search that people stood aside to let him pass. His frock coat was unbuttoned, and his bright-red cravat, which was about to come undone, streamed behind him as he hurried. When he came close enough, his bearded face blossomed into a grin of delight, and he held out his hands to Emily. He clasped them. “Emily, dearest Emily,” he said.

  “Joshua, beloved,” she said, her eyes brimming.

  He embraced Emily so tightly that he lifted her in the air and kissed her with such vigor that her bonnet slipped from her head to fall onto her shoulders. They held each other like that, cleaving together, without speaking.

  When he released Emily, he straightened his cravat and composed himself. He turned to Caro. Holding out his hand, he said, “Miss Caroline Jarvie. I am overjoyed to see you, too.”

  “The feeling is mutual, Mr. Aiken.”

  At Joshua’s elbow stood a short woman in a plain black dress, her brown face welcoming above the white collar that was her only adornment. He said, “This is Mrs. Williamson, a good friend, who is also a good friend to those who travel north. She can help you.”

  Mrs. Williamson smiled and laid her hand on Caro’s arm in a caress as tender as a mother’s. “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”

  “Where is that?” Caro asked.

  Mrs. Williamson smiled. “Oberlin, Ohio,” she said.

  If You Enjoyed This Book

  Discover the Novels

  I’ve written a number of books that share a theme: stories of white and black, slave and free, often connected by kinship, in the decades on either side of the Civil War. Visit my website for more information about my other books at https://www.sabrawaldfogel.com/books/.

  The Georgia Series

  The first book in the series. Sister of Mine. Slavery made them kin. Can the Civil War make them sisters?

  The second book in the series. Let Me Fly. The Civil War is over, but it isn’t. For two women, one black, one white, a new fight is just beginning.

  A Tale of Mississippi

  Freedom’s Island. When Ambrose Byrd, retired Buffalo soldier, arrives in the all-black town of Willow Bend, Mississippi, he’s looking for peace, but he walks into trouble. Will he find a fight for freedom…or a massacre?

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  Want to stay in touch? Get the first look at new books: covers, back stories, and prepublication sneak peeks. And as a thank-you, I’ll send you a copy of my story “Yemaya.” When a slaving ship meets an avenging African mermaid…what happens? Find out at https://www.sabrawaldfogel.com/sign-up/!

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  Historical Note

  This novel is based on a now-forgotten aspect of antebellum Charleston’s history: the status of people of color, free and slave, and their fate during the reenslavement crisis of the summer of 1860 on the eve of the Civil War.

  Free Persons of Color

  Visitors to antebellum Charleston were struck by the sheer presence of so many black people on the streets of the city comporting themselves with dignity and confidence as though they were free. They did not know so many of them were truly and legally free. Charleston was unique in the antebellum South in having a substantial community of free persons of color, or FPCs, as they were designated in the city directory and the census. Most FPCs had either been manumitted by their masters or allowed to buy their freedom. Many of them were their masters’ children and were given special assistance by doting or guilty fathers.

  One of the foremost FPCs in antebellum Charleston was a man named Anthony Weston. He had begun life as the slave of Plowden Weston, a wealthy planter. Plowden Weston freed “Toney,” as he was then known, and acknowledged him as a son in his will. Anthony Weston became prosperous as a millwright; by 1860, his estate was worth $40,000.

  The FPCs of Charleston considered themselves an elite separate from the enslaved and the dark of skin. They practiced skilled trades—the free black Westons were well-known as tailors and dressmakers. They accumulated property, owning houses and land. They owned slave
s. While some of them owned their own kin—Maria Weston, a free woman who owned her husband, was a notable example—others used their slaves as servants and capital assets, just as white slave owners did.

  The FPCs of Charleston prided themselves on their education, cultivation, and refinement. Like the white planter families who were their relations, they educated their children, sending girls and boys alike to academies for free black scholars. The young men of the FPC community joined debating societies—the Clionian Debating Society was the best known—where the topics of debate echoed the curriculum of Charleston College. They amused themselves as the planter families did, at parties, picnics, and balls, where they mingled with each other and arranged marriages within their small circle.

  They consciously set themselves apart from the black and the slave. They founded the Brown Fellowship Society, a beneficent organization that provided for their burials, and even in death, they insisted on lying beside their peers. Slaves were buried in the adjacent but separate Black Fellowship Society cemetery. While they were not admitted as citizens in South Carolina—they could not vote or serve on juries, and they were levied with a capitation tax—the FPCs were keen in their sentiment that they were different from, and better than, persons who were slaves.

  Nominal Slaves

  In addition to the FPCs, Charleston was home to a much larger group of persons of color who were slaves according to a strict legal definition but who lived with varying degrees of freedom.

  Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the state of South Carolina made freeing a slave increasingly difficult. By 1820, badly shaken by the “uprising” organized by Denmark Vesey, the South Carolina Assembly enacted legislation that insisted that all petitions for manumission be approved by the entire body. In the forty years between the Vesey uprising and the outbreak of the Civil War, only one such petition was approved: it was for the man who had informed on Vesey himself. The old practice of freeing a slave in a will became legally impossible.

  The status of Lydia Weston, whose master died in 1821, was the result of South Carolina’s draconian approach to manumission. She was no relation to Plowden Weston, but he made provision to free her because she had nursed him through a long illness. However, her legal status did not deter her from living as though she were free. She paid the capitation tax levied on FPCs. By 1840, she had accumulated property, including two slaves; the slaves were gone by 1850, but the property remained in the family throughout the nineteenth century.

  A much larger group of Charleston slaves were unambiguously enslaved, but they were allowed a day-to-day freedom unthinkable on a plantation in the countryside. They were usually slaves with a skilled trade: men who were carpenters or masons or women who were dressmakers or laundresses. They were allowed to make their own contracts for work (“hiring out”) and their own living arrangements (“living out”). Their owners took half of their wages and allowed them the flexibility to live and work as they pleased. They were identified—and protected—by wearing badges that proclaimed their status as skilled slave workers. The system of hiring and living out worked greatly to a skilled slave’s advantage—it provided a day-to-day freedom that made life very different from that of a plantation hand or a house servant.

  Being allowed freedom was very much a matter of a master’s whim, and it was fragile. Slaves who changed hands—or whose owners changed their minds—could find their lives altered overnight. This was the case with Nancy Weston, who was likely related to the white Westons. She was housekeeper and companion to Henry Grimke, brother to Angelina and Sarah Grimke, South Carolina’s most famous apostates on slavery. After Grimke’s wife died, Nancy Weston became his de facto wife, bearing him three children. Henry Grimke died suddenly and bequeathed Nancy Weston and her children to his son, Montague, asking him that he treat them with kindness “as members of the family.”

  Montague left the care of Nancy and her family to his older sisters; they brought Nancy and her family to Charleston, built her a little house in Charleston Neck, and sent her sewing and washing to eke out a living. The Weston-Grimke family lived out of Montague Grimke’s sight until he remarried, and his new wife insisted on new servants. He brought Nancy’s older sons, Archibald and Francis Grimke, into his house as slaves, where they rebelled and ran away despite all his efforts to contain and punish them.

  The Reenslavement Crisis

  The reenslavement crisis of 1860, which conflated the status—and the fate—of free persons of color and slaves, had its catalyst in two events that white South Carolinians considered incendiary. One was the uprising at Harpers Ferry. Proslavery advocates saw it as a rebellion no different from the Vesey plot. The historical memory of Vesey—and of the rebellion in Saint Domingue, which had sent so many Huguenots to South Carolina as exiles—was exacerbated by the present-day possibility of insurgence fomented by northern abolitionists.

  The fear John Brown aroused was not allayed by the presidential election of 1860. Proslavery feeling ran so high that white Charlestonians began to feel that no person of color should be free. Charleston was the site of the 1860 Democratic convention, which could not resolve the issue of slavery and ended without a presidential endorsement. During the convention, the Charleston militia was out in force, arresting black people regardless of their status.

  Over the summer of 1860, the situation only became worse, and in August of 1860, the arrest rate soared. The old distinction between FPCs and other persons of color disappeared. Abuse and arrest could come to black or brown, slave or free. The FPCs of Charleston had learned how to live as anomalies in a South sharply defined by race. By August of 1860, there was no more middle ground.

  For the FPCs of Charleston, the events of August 1860 had the same effect as Kristallnacht had on Germany’s Jews in 1938. Their illusions about being different and protected were shattered. They gave up hope for a future in South Carolina. While FPCs had begun to leave Charleston in 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, they fled Charleston after the events of August 1860.

  Lydia Weston and her family left for Ohio, where they remained until the Civil War was over. Archibald and Francis Grimke, still enslaved, spent the Civil War as they had spent the years before it: rebelling and running away.

  Further Reading

  Johnson, Michael P. and James L. Roark. 2001. No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People on the Eve of the Civil War. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

  Johnson, Michael P. 1986. Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. New York: W. W. Norton.

  Myers, Amrita Chakrabarti. 2014. Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

  Perry, Mark. 2002. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. New York: Penguin.

  Wikramanayake, Marina. 1973. A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of South Carolina Press.

  Author Biography

  Sabra Waldfogel grew up far from the South in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She studied history at Harvard University and got a PhD in American history from the University of Minnesota. Since then, she has been fascinated by the drama of slavery and freedom in the decades before and after the Civil War.

  Her first novel, Sister of Mine, published by Lake Union, was named the winner of the 2017 Audio Publishers Association Audie Award for fiction. The sequel, Let Me Fly, was published in 2018.

 

 

 
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