GO TO LIST OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN HARPERS FERRY

VARIOUS PERSONAGES INVOLVED

IN THE

FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dr. Martin Robison Delany. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, Doctor Delany, the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer’s and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas,” to the tune of $25,000.

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, one of Captain Brown’s lieutenants, was born April 17, 1833, in Indiana, the son of John Anderson. His maternal grandfather, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley VA, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. He went to school at Galesburg IL and Kossuth IA and worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in “Bleeding Kansas” in August 1857. He was twice arrested by the proslavery activists, and for ten weeks was held at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the First US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder on his own doorstep by border ruffians, of a Mr. Denton. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. On July 5, 1859 he wrote of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.” He was killed by a bayonet-thrust of one of the Marines at Harpers Ferry. “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.”

John Anderson ? ? Private < 30 of color

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color

Osborn Perry Anderson, “O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson,” the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield PA. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated….” Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a noncommissioned officer, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war, to die a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like Frederick Douglass whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

Frederick Brown No No No Supporter white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas.”

Jason Brown No No No Supporter 38 white

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in “Bleeding Kansas,” and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

Oliver Brown Yes Yes Captain 20 white

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin, Ohio on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855, with his father, and returned to North Elba in October 1856, where he married Martha E. Brewster (Martha Brewster Brown) in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry and he was shot dead at the age of 20 while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge.

Owen Brown Yes No No Captain 35 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in “Bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824 at Hudson, Ohio. With a withered arm, he had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers and was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit and his endurance that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader managed to make it out. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names on an oil-well crew in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He was the only one of the 5 escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war. He would never marry. He would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with 2 of his brothers, and then migrate west, and would be the final survivor of the raiders when he would die on January 9, 1891 at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak” near Pasadena, California. A marble monument marked the mountain grave, until during July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the grave was not a registered historical landmark, and not in a cemetery, there would be no investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that “The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves.” Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

Watson Brown Yes Yes Captain 24 white

Watson Brown, born at Franklin, Ohio on October 7, 1835, got married with Isabella M. Thompson during September 1856. His son by this union would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive him, because he was sent out by his father John Brown to negotiate at the federal arsenal and was shot down by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and lived on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a considerable period, expiring on October 18th. Recovering the body, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks, before heading off to her retirement in California.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born in Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College on account of some student indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He had gotten married with a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18th, 1859. After being sent out by Captain Brown to collect weapons, and having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching the events transpire, and after having evaded capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food and was captured on October 25th, 8 miles from Chambersburg. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting, Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save himself by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas.” Despite his confession, and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end, one of the last, be also hanged for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was an Oberlin, Ohio carpenter and freeborn Black who was the son of a slave. He was active in the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society. It was rumored that he escorted John Price to Canada after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Copeland later participated in the raid on the Harpers Ferry armory with John Brown. He got trapped in “Hall’s Rifle Works” along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi. When the 3 made a run for the Shenandoah River they got caught in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker would assert in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been “the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly.” Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– “Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out.” On the day that he died Copeland declared, “If I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause — I had rather die than be a slave!” (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON: RESPONSES TO JOHN BROWN AND THE HARPERS FERRY RAID that his middle name was “Anthony” rather than “Anderson.”)

Barclay Coppoc Yes No No Private < 21 white

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, was born in Salem OH on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in “Bleeding Kansas” in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

Edwin Coppoc Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant- abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale IA. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to “Bleeding Kansas” as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was

“sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.”

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “Secret Six” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color

Dr. Martin Robison Delany. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, Doctor Delany, the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Frederick Douglass No No No Supporter 41 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in “Bleeding Kansas”, Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original “low animal condition” (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson No No No Supporter white

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. “Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you,” or something to that effect. We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

Hugh Forbes No No No Lieutenant white

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another country. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits, and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery.

George B. Gill HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

George B. Gill had come to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black “mumper” (con artist) named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of liberation plots who were being discovered and offed. Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the Harpers Ferry area did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free Negroes. Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859. Census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry while the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%.

Reverend James Gloucester No Financial support of color

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester of Brooklyn.

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared “I make no promise that I am unable to perform”) and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as “Emperor,” although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James H. Harris

James H. Harris

Lewis Hayden HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from Kentucky had been aided by Delia Webster in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

Albert Hazlett Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name “William Harrison,” was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16, 1860. George B. Gill said that “I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving “Bleeding Kansas”.” To Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring he wrote on March 15, 1860, the eve of his execution, “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

The Reverend Thomas Went- No White worth Higginson

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson of the Secret “Six” believed that “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others” (it was therefore up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated). After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Richard J. Hinton HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard J. Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, JOHN BROWN AND HIS MEN (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — James Redpath and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators of the Secret “Six” finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear — and would be imprisoned for a period but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

John Jones No Support white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Jones was a Chicago businessman of color (John Brown stayed at his home). He and his wife Mary Richardson Jones were active abolitionists, agitating for the repeal of the Illinois Black Laws. (Not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free in order to enter the state, but once they were in state these laws barred them not only from visiting white homes, but from owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contracts.)

John Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War, 24 white adjutant

Although John Henry Kagi was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era reveal him as the best educated of the raiders. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville, Ohio in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). During 1854/1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown, Virginia but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and been compelled to return to Ohio with a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s (“Colonel Whipple’s”) 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in “Bleeding Kansas” he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a proslavery judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Elmore got off 3 shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long with his family in Ohio recovering from these wounds, but then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got ca in crossfire and Kagi was the first killed, his body being left to float in the river. [Eyal J. Naveh in CROWN OF THORNS: POLITICAL MARTYRDOM IN AMERICA FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (NY: New York UP, 1990) described Kagi as black (Page 31: “Even though black followers of Brown, such as John Henry Kagi, were also executed in Virginia, for blacks, John Brown became the most famous martyr for their freedom.”), but this was just another of the long series of tendentious but uncontested errors which make such literature so unreliable.]

Amos Lawrence No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Amos Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas”, needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior.

Lewis Sheridan Leary Yes Yes Private 25 of color

Lewis Sheridan “Shad” Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio, a saddler and harness maker whose father had been a freeborn black harness maker as well. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the “lost colonists” left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 17, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry, he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.

William H. Leeman Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

William H. Leeman was born on March 20, 1839 and was recruited in Maine as a 17-year-old very impressed with John Brown. Being of a rather wild disposition, he had early left his home in Maine. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell ME, he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill MA at the age of 14. In 1856 he entered “Bleeding Kansas” with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and became a member of Captain Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars” on September 9, 1856. He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years old. Owen Brown found him hard to control at Springdale, Iowa. George B. Gill said of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20. On October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, he made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to swim down the Potomac River but two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet in the river. His body would be used for target practice for hours by the drunken citizenry, until the hail of bullets pushed it into the current and it was carried downstream. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with but one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for Meriam to join Brown’s guerrillas. He was not captured or killed at Harpers Ferry because he had been left in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse during the raid. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempt them. In an engagement under General Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

Charles Moffett Yes

Charles Moffett, a drifter from Iowa about whom little is known.

Edwin Morton No

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six”. He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with his family, and after the raid, while the congressional investigation was going on, he fled overseas and chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, very tall and with a splendid physique, was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town VA, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet, but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the two white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it.

The Reverend Theodore No White Parker HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of 4 or 5 men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece when had in sufficient quantity:

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six”, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans.

Luke F. Parsons

Luke F. Parsons, 22 years old and already a mercenary fighter seasoned in “Bleeding Kansas”, a petty thief in need of a paycheck and a legitimating excuse.

Richard Realf

Richard Realf was a 23-year-old Englishman, the son of a rural constable. In 1852 he had put out a collection of poetry, GUESSES AT THE BEAUTIFUL, and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of Lady Noell Byron, widow of George Gordon, Lord Byron, he was led to the United States of America by “instincts” which he characterized as “democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical.” He had been introduced to John Brown at the end of November 1857 in Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette. It has been John Edwin Cook who had persuaded him to sign up with Brown’s god-squad.

James Redpath

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way.

G.J. Reynolds HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

George J. Reynolds, a light mulatto blacksmith or coppersmith of Sandusky, Ohio, from Virginia although saying he was from Vermont, with native American as well as black African heritage, age 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad.

Richard Richardson of color

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now-well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him.

Judge Thomas Russell No White

Mary Ellen Russell visited John Brown in jail a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years, and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the fact that Thomas Russell was a prominent member of the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that “Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Judge Russell.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.)

Gerrit Smith No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of consideration). He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” fully grasped from the earliest moment that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies, in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans, toward the generation of a sectional civil war.

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lysander Spooner

The anarchist Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith in January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast, at threat of execution should Brown be executed.

George Luther Stearns

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six,” fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to foment a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, born in Lisbon, Connecticut on March 15, 1831, had run away from home in 1847 at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment in Mexico. He made himself proficient with the sword. At Taos in May 1855, he received a sentence of death for “mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George A.H. Blake” of the 1st US Dragoons. This was commuted by President Franklin Pierce to 3 years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name “Whipple.” He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into “Bleeding Kansas”. He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received four bullets and was taken alive. The never-married Stevens was of old Puritan stock, and his great- grandfather had been a captain in the Revolutionary army. Because of a relationship with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, after his execution on March 16th he would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, “Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew.”

Stewart Taylor Yes Yes Private 23 white

Stewart Taylor, the only raider not of American birth, had been born on October 29, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 he went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with John Brown through George B. Gill. He was a spiritualist. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23, 1860 that he had been “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause. An excellent debater and very fond of studying history. He stayed at home, in Canada, for the winter of 1858-1859, and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington IL, and thence to Harper’s Ferry. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. He was overcome with distress when, getting out of communication with the John Brown movement, he thought for a time that he was to be left out.”

Eli Thayer No HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in “doing well by doing good,” formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas” and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He would instance that there was never “any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.”

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was “very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes.” His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. The two brothers were shot dead at Harpers Ferry.

William Thompson Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. In Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He had started for “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body into the Potomac River.

Henry David Thoreau No white

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo ME in 1834 and had emigrated to Kansas in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Tabor in 1857 he became one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who returned to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857-1858 encampment of the Brown forces in the Iowa Territory, he “ruined” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away from Springdale, Iowa during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County PA. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne NC. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail.

Henry Watson No of color

Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

MAJOR MARTIN ROBISON DELANY

BORN 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 DIED HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1812

May 6, Wednesday: Martin Robison Delany was born in Charles Town, Virginia, which of course is now Charlestown in Virginia. Although his father was a plantation slave, the law was that the status of the child followed the status of the mother (for obvious reasons in this miscegenating era), and in this case this worked out for the benefit of the child as its mother was a free black seamstress. (As a child, Martin would play with the white boy, John Avis, who eventually would become the jailer of John Brown.) In search of appropriate education for their children, the Delany family would while Martin was a child move from Virginia to Pennsylvania.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 4th day 6 of 5 Mo// Our friends set off pretty early in the morng with an head wind & pretty fresh. - We hope however that they have arrived safe in Greenwich before night. It has been a day of much Stir & noise as it allways is on days of the General Election, but I think this has been as orderly & rather more so than common ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1820

At some point during this decade, after Virginia authorities threatened Martin Robison Delany’s free seamstress mother with prison for attempting to teach her black children to read, she would take up her children and vanish into western Pennsylvania.

In this year, while John Thompson was about 8 years of age, a white boy whom he was escorting, Henry Ashton, would be teaching him how to read out of WEBSTER’S SPELLING BOOK and INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH READER: I was sent to the school house with the white children, to carry their dinners, it being a distance of two miles, and therefore too far for them to go home for them. There were two of these children relatives of my master, whose father had once been rich, but who, through misfortune, left his children almost penniless at his decease. Little Henry, one of the children, was one morning, while walking leisurely to school, repeating over his lesson, when I said to him, “How I would like to read like you.” “Would you?” said he, “Then I will learn you.” I told him, if his Uncle knew it, he would forbid it. “I know it,” he answered, “But I will not tell him; for he would then stop you from going with me, and I would have to carry my own dinners!” Thereupon we made a mutual promise to reveal our secret to no person. Henry was about my own age, being the elder of the two children; his sister, Jane, being about five years old. He commenced teaching me from his book my letters. We sometimes started an hour or two before school time, that we might have more leisure for our undertaking. We had a piece of woods to pass on our way, which also facilitated the practical operation of our plans, as we could, by going into them, escape the observation of the other school children, or of passers by in the road. We even sometimes took Jane to the school house, leaving her to play with the other children, while we returned to our school in the woods, until the school bell rang. I made such rapid progress that Henry was encouraged and delighted. When my father knew of the matter, he gave Henry some money with which to purchase me a book, which he did of one of the scholars, who, being advanced into a higher lesson, had no longer use for this book. I now lost no time, but studied my lessons every leisure moment, at all convenient times. I went thus with the children to school about three years, when I became the body servant of John Wagar, and had to give my attention to him and his horse. John being six miles from home, at a boarding school, was only at home from Saturdays until Mondays. During his absence I had to attend to his pony, and do small jobs about the house, which HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

did not prevent my continuing my studies, although my opportunities to do so were not now as good as formerly; still, my little teacher improved every chance that offered of giving his instructions. I soon got through my first book, Webster’s Spelling Book, after which Henry bought me the Introduction to the English Reader. He also commenced setting me copies, as he thought it time I was commencing to write, though he still kept me at reading until I had nearly completed my second book, when our school was broken up by the return of John Wagar from the boarding school, he having completed his education. John, whose father was very rich, hardly treated Henry, a poor orphan boy, with common courtesy or decency, and was unwilling even to sit and eat with him at table. Mrs. Ashton, Henry’s mother, noticed this conduct of John’s, and also that his father sided with him in all his complaints against Henry, and knowing the cause she did not wish longer to remain where she was; so she, with the children, removed to Alexandria, where Henry is now doing a large dry goods business, in which, by honesty and skill, he has accumulated considerable wealth. When Henry was about to leave the plantation, he said to me, “I am sorry, John, that I cannot teach you longer, as I had intended to learn you through the English Reader, and also to write a good hand. But you must not forget what you have learned, and try to improve what you can by yourself.” This parting filled my heart with sorrow, for I loved Henry Ashton like a brother. I followed him with my eyes until distance closed the view; and my affectionate prayers and good wishes always have, and always will, follow him, for to him I owe the rudiments of one of my greatest blessings, my education. Through this I have been enabled to read the Word of God, and thereby learn the way of salvation; and though I could never repay these services, yet God has doubly paid him, for before I left Maryland his name ranked among the most respectable and wealthy of country merchants.

John would later be able to continue his efforts to learn how to read, and then to write, with the assistance of a poor Englishman: After this I continued to read and write at every opportunity, often carrying my book in my hat, that I might lose no chance of using it. When I was with Richard Thomas, in the south part of the State, I became acquainted with a poor Englishman, who lived near the plantation. He, seeing my strong desire to learn, proposed to instruct me, after exacting from me a promise of secrecy in the matter. He continued to teach me from the first of March until the October following, when he and his daughter, (his whole family,) died. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1831

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Martin Robison Delany held down a day job while studying nights, with Lewis Woodson and other future black leaders, at a black church. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1839

By this point, by having worked under the careful supervision of two doctors, Martin Robison Delany had attained competency as a doctor’s assistant, and in dental care. After working in medical care in the South and the Southwest, he would return to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and develop a weekly newspaper, the Mystery. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1847

Summer: Martin Robison Delany and Frederick Douglass first met. Delany would begin to work in conjunction with Douglass in Rochester, New York in the publication of the North Star.

This would continue for approximately 18 months, until Delany would win admittance to Harvard Medical School. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

December 3, Friday Frederick Douglass has invested £445 raised by British and Irish supporters in hiring Martin Robison Delany as co-editor and beginning a 3d antislavery publication. Because the Liberator was published in Boston and the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City, covering the Eastern Seaboard, Douglass wisely chose to begin the new paper in Rochester in upstate New York where he has not only friends but greater freedom from head-on competition. On this date the new paper, the North Star, first appeared:

Its motto would be:

RIGHT IS OF NO SEX — TRUTH IS OF NO COLOR — GOD IS THE FATHER OF US ALL, AND WE ARE ALL BRETHREN. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

December 3, Friday: At the printing office of the Rochester Democrat, William Cooper Nell, Frederick Douglass and Martin Robison Delany examined the initial issue of the North Star.

For the time being this gazette would be being printed in the basement of the local Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion church. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1849

Elizabeth Smith Miller, a white woman needless to say, appeared on the streets of Seneca Falls, New York, in “turkish trousers,” soon to be known as “bloomers.”

George Washington Briggs, a white man needless to say, printed up an American edition of Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

Learn how the hoity-toity live! Be aware of the anguish and torment and uncertainty of their social striving!

At very much the other end of the accepted local social scale, Henry Bibb presented his NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY BIBB, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. [T]he only weapon of self defence I could use successfully, was that of deception.

We know that Bibb wrote the narrative himself because we have the testimony of the editor Lucius C. Matlack –a white man needless to say– that he not only personally witnessed some of this self-writing but also then preserved the evidences of it in order to remove any possibility of doubt: [T]he writer of this introduction is well acquainted with his handwriting and style. The entire manuscript I have examined and prepared for the press. Many of the closing pages of it were written by Mr. Henry Bibb in my office. And the whole is preserved for inspection now. An examination of it will show that no alteration of sentiment, language, or style was necessary to make it what it now is, in the hands of the reader. The work of preparation for the press was that of orthography and punctuation merely, an arrangement or the chapters, and a table of contents — little more than falls to the lot of publishers generally. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Also, in Wilmington, Delaware, Mary Ann Shadd put out a 12-page pamphlet, “Hints to the Colored People of the North.” This focused on antislavery reform and building a collective consciousness for blacks. Writing to the free Black community of the northern states, Shadd targeted the economic fragility of the antebellum Black proto-bourgeoisie: “We forget that we are, as a people, deficient in the ‘needful’ to support such things.” What was important was a collective liberation: “what profits a display of ourselves? Is it to be seen by one another? How does that better our condition?” Frederick Douglass’s North Star would take note of this pamphlet’s identification of “black imitation of the conspicuous consumption of whites” as a problem. Martin Robison Delany would characterize its author as “a very intelligent young lady, peculiarly eccentric.” Following this pamphlet, Shadd wrote to Douglass’s North Star about the corrupt influence of the black church over the freed blacks and insisted that the way to improve the condition of free blacks was to reject materialism “without waiting for the whites of the country.” She invited blacks to be “producers instead of mere consumers.”

In this year in which Harriet Tubman was escaping from slavery in Maryland, the Maryland Supreme Court, in response to a suit by Benjamin Roberts to have his daughter admitted to a white school, was establishing the doctrine known as “separate but equal” — and Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who it goes without saying was a white man, was announcing the unanimous decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the case of Roberts v. Boston, that the city had the unimpeachable power to racially segregate its schools if it chose to do so. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141

In this year, also, a British naval commander –who it goes without saying was a white man– was confessing that their 19th-Century war upon the international slave trade had been quite as utterly ineffectual as today’s “War on Drugs,” with a slippage rate of some 95 captives out of every 100 being successfully spirited past their blockading ships and retailed into their destination markets: During 26 years, 103,000 slaves have been emancipated [in the course of our naval anti-slavery patrolling activities] while in the same period, 1,795,000 slaves were actually landed in the Americas. THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY

At about the age of 15, the right hand of Anthony Burns was mangled in machinery (machinery which as a matter of course was entirely unshielded) while working for, it goes without saying, a white man who had hired him from his master. Nearly an inch of bone would be left permanently sticking out from his right wrist. (In addition, his face in adult life would be scarred by a burn, which is presumably why in the image we have of him his pleasant countenance is turned to one side.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

By this point racial politics had become so divisive in the United States of America, that antislavery advocates were going back into our history and searching out items they might be able to turn to their advantage. The famous “Boston Massacre,” for instance, would be re-imagined to center on Crispus Attucks as a man of color,

and to make the point about a colored patriot being ruthlessly killed, the brawl would be displayed as more relevant than it actually had been, and Attucks would be displayed not only as more central to it than he actually had been, but also even as more black than he actually had been (it is, actually, very much a political choice we have made, to display such a person of very mixed background as a black man rather than as a red man, and just as it was to display his unusual tallness but not depict his unusual knock knees, and just as it has been very much of a political choice to give a political hue to this struggle of an assortment of offended HDT WHAT? INDEX

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individuals outside a Boston pub):

(We ought to note that originally, while this downtown brawl was being transformed into a political event, the fact that one of these killed “American patriots” gunned down by the “British” had not even been a white man had been a fact that had carefully been masked in the outraged Boston news reports.)

Martin Robison Delany began to explore the possibility for a black exodus to Central or South America. By this decade Delany and Frederick Douglass were beginning to square off against one another and define HDT WHAT? INDEX

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themselves as binary antagonists of one another on issues of the last importance.

This idea of a black exodus from the nation was not exactly what one might term an innocent one — at least, it was one which had not only black sponsors but also, behind the scenes, non-innocent white supporters of those black sponsors. “In those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery ... and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.” — Alexis de Tocqueville

In regard to this issue of freeing blacks versus being free of the blacks, in the early 1850s: It has been alleged by Michael Goldfield in “The color of Politics in the United States: White Supremacy as the Main Explanation for the Peculiarities of American Politics from Colonial Times to the Present” (in LaCapra, Dominick, ed. THE BOUNDS OF RACE: PERSPECTIVES ON HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1991, page 124), that: Until the early 1850s when Joseph Wedemeyer and other radical followers of KarlKarl MarxMarx whowho understoodunderstood thethe importanceimportance ofof abolition for the white workers, gained some small influence in the white workers’ movement, labor leaders as a whole were more interested in freedom from Afro- Americans than in freedom for them. The rallying cry of Free Soilism in 1845 was the Wilmot Proviso, which barred slavery from the new territories, but suggested that land rights should be reserved for whites only. Such an approach was counterposed to the more radical and more realistic approachapproach offeredoffered byby FrederickFrederick DouglassDouglass forfor Kansas in 1854. Douglass argued that 1,000 free black homesteading families settling in Kansas would put up a “wall of living fire” through which slavery could not pass. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Winter: Martin Robison Delany and two other black students were dismissed from Harvard Medical School on account of their untreatable hereditary skin condition, noninfectious but unfortunately such as would make it unfit for them to attempt to practice medicine anywhere in the United States of America.1

Harriet Hunt was also made unwelcome, on account of an inherent genital condition.

1. In his capacity as dean of the Medical School, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, was approached by 38-year-old Martin Delany. He had been turned away by four other schools, including the University of Pennsylvania. Might he study to be a doctor in America, at the Harvard Medical School? Two other candidates of color, Daniel Laing, Jr., and Isaac H. Snowden, also applied for admission, but their cases were easier as they were being sponsored by the American Colonization Society and they were pledged to get the hell out of America as soon as they obtained their MDs. Harriet Hunt had also applied, and she also was accepted, on condition that she not attempt to sit in the regular anatomy class. At this dilution of the privilege of white maleness, the white male medical students revolted. In December a majority, 60 students, approved a petition resolving that “we cannot consent to be identified as fellow students with blacks, whose company we would not keep in the streets, and whose Society as associates we would not tolerate in our houses,” and that “we feel our grievances to be but the beginning of an evil, which, if not checked will increase, and that the number of respectable white students will, in future, be in an inverse ratio to that of blacks,” while a minority, 48 students, signed an alternate petition that “they would feel it a far greater evil, if, in the present state of public feeling, a medical college in Boston could refuse to this unfortunate class any privileges of education, which it is in the power of the profession to bestow.” The faculty met for two evenings at Professor Holmes’s home to consider the issue, and predictably chickened out after being notified by some of the white male students of an intention to transfer. Harriet Hunt had already stopped attending, under pressure, and the black students would be dismissed at the end of the winter term. Delany would leave Boston in March. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

March: Martin Robison Delany, who had been expelled from the Harvard Medical School by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, upon protest from white students over the color of his skin, at this point shook the dust of Boston from off his sandals.

The itinerant preacher Daniel Foster accepted a temporary position filling the pulpit of the Trinitarian Church in Concord, Massachusetts (while living in Concord and for several years afterward, Deborah “Dora” Swift Foster would frequent the Thoreau home and become best friends with Sophia Thoreau).

William Mitchell’s article THE ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY appeared in the Christian Examiner (this would soon be bound as a 16-page pamphlet by Wm. Crosby and H.P. Nichols of 111 Washington Street, Boston and John Wilson & Son, Printers, 22 School-street, Boston). ASTRONOMY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1852

Martin Robison Delany’s THE CONDITION, ELEVATION, EMIGRATION, AND DESTINY OF THE COLORED PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES POLITICALLY CONSIDERED. When Frederick Douglass came out in favor of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN as demonstrating that the black people of the United States possessed a potential for elevation to the level of the white Americans, Delany attacked this as a naive celebration of the products of a mere racist colonizationist mindset. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

During this year or the next, Walt Whitman would visit Dr. Henry Abbott’s museum of Egyptian antiquities in New-York and there acquire a general interest in the whole topic.

In an effort to overcome segregation by Masonic lodges, Martin Robison Delany presented his THE ORIGIN AND OBJECTS OF ANCIENT FREEMASONRY. This was an attempt to reconstruct the history of freemasonry as out of “Ethiopia, Egypt, and Assyria — all settled and peopled by the children of Ham.” He seems to have claimed also that Euclid was a black man, since he was out of Egypt, “a colony from Ethiopia”:

(And, Moses was a fugitive slave, etc.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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John Mercer Langston graduated from the seminary associated with Oberlin College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

July: In anticipation of the national black emigration convention being organized by Martin Robison Delany in Cleveland, Ohio, Frederick Douglass declared that American blacks “will ever remain the principal inhabitants of the United States, in some form or other.”

August: Martin Robison Delany sponsored a national black emigration convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and lectured on “The Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent.”

The Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward was accompanied by Richard Griffiths, Esq., who could speak Welsh, on a visit to Wales. We visited Bangor, Holyhead, Beaumaris, Caernarvon, Llanberris, Snowdon, Aberystwyth, Welshpool, and so forth. My stay was so short that I can say but little of Wales, but must say that little with very great pleasure; for no country, no people, ever pleased me so much — excepting black people, of course. I spent a Sabbath at Bangor, preaching three times to audiences of whom some could not understand sufficient English to follow a discourse. They came, however, because they wished to encourage the cause I represented, and to show their interest in the gospel, though preached in a language of which they could understand but few words. In one instance, however, there was a sermon in Welsh from one of the native ministers. This gave those who could not understand me an opportunity to receive benefit in their own tongue. I had a very large anti-slavery meeting in Bangor, and the kind feeling of the audience was peculiar to that most benevolent people.... At Beaumaris I spoke on temperance, part of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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evening, and the other part, on anti-slavery; the same at Holyhead and Caernarvon. On one of the days of our sojourn at Bangor we visited the Penryn slate quarries, belonging to the Honourable Colonel Tennant. It is a most gigantic work: the number of men employed would make quite a town, in Canada. The good order, steady industry, and regular habits, of the workmen, were quite evident. The village near the castle, composed of the labourers’ cottages, and the schoolhouse and gardens, are the most beautiful and the most comfortable cottages in North Wales: indeed, I know of none equal to them anywhere. Lady Louisa, Colonel Tennant’s wife, had them erected according to models of her own drawing. The school, I believe, is at her expense. Neglected as the labourers of Wales generally are, it was most gratifying to see this specimen of kind carefulness. Beaumaris is quite a fashionable watering-place, and it is a very quiet, neat little town. It has a most capital hotel, quite equal to the great majority of English ones. The same may be true of Bangor; but the kindness of Mr. Edwards, our host, would not allow us to know. Caernarvon is, of course, rich in historic interest: its castle is a fine ruin. I spent some two or three days there very agreeably, being the guest of Mr. Hughes, a most kind and hospitable gentleman. From his house we made up a party to visit Snowdon — ascending it on foot, and returning in the same way. A more fatiguing journey of five miles it was never my fortune, good or ill, to make. What added to the discomfort of it was, that on reaching the top, we saw nothing but a thick Welsh mountain fog! but we had a most delightful view of the neighbouring hills and dales, from a point about half way to the summit. Being obliged to drive eight miles and speak that night at Caernarvon — to travel ninety-seven miles the next day, in a stage coach — and to preach three times the third day — made no small affair of the exercise. Reaching Aberystwyth late on Saturday night, I was glad to take the comfortable quarters offered to the weary in the Royal Hotel. It had rained all day; but, in spite of rain, it was most delightful to travel amid the beautifully diversified scenery betwixt Caernarvon and Aberystwyth. It is bolder than Irish scenery, and the cultivation is far better — though not so good, I thought, as the Scotch; but the farming of Wales is far from being indifferent. I spent some four or five days in Aberystwyth, making some acquaintances I shall ever remember: among them are the excellent pastors of the Churches, and the Rev. Mr. Davies and his excellent mother. I had the honour, too, of making the acquaintance of Mr. Lloyd, one of the leading gentry of the country, now Lord Lieutenant of Cardiganshire. Mr. L. took the chair at a meeting which I addressed; and was kind enough to say, one of his inducements to attend was, that the meeting was to be addressed by a gentleman from Canada. Having been in early life stationed there with his regiment, the gallant gentleman had acquired an interest in my adopted country which did not leave him upon his return to Wales. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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From Aberystwyth I returned to England by Welshpool, where I spent an evening, and attended a temperance meeting. The drive through that part of Wales is one of the most beautiful in this island of beautiful scenery. It reminds one of the valleys of the Genessee, the Susquehannah, and some portions of the St. Lawrence Valley. I know not when or where I have enjoyed a drive more than those through North and South Wales. Anybody else would be able to describe the scenery: all I can say is, it was most beautiful. What with the waving, ripened corn, the youthful-looking greenness of the recently mown meadows, the sparkling streamlets, the clear sky, and the gorgeously brilliant August sunlight, I was charmed beyond expression. I am sorry I cannot tell it better: please kind reader, accept the best I can perform. Since then, I have passed through portions of Wales in very rapid flying tours, as when returning from Ireland, last autumn and last spring; but have not had the pleasure of making any stay there. I think, however, that I have seen enough of Wales and the Welsh to have formed some tolerably correct views of their character. First, however, to record an incident of no small interest to me, which occurred during my sojourn at Aberystwyth. A gentleman named Williams, an agent for one of the wealthiest landlords in Wales, lives about a mile from Aberystwyth. I learned that a little boy, a son of Mr. Williams, who was ill, was anxious to see me, and that his parents wished me to call. The Rev. Mr. Davies kindly consented to accompany me, and we drove there. We found Mr. and Mrs. Williams most kind and affable persons; and upon being introduced to the chamber where their son lay, we were struck with his emaciated appearance; but in spite of this, his eyes beamed with intelligence, and about his lips a most cheerful smile played constantly. His mother told us he had been a great sufferer. His bones were but slightly covered with a wasted colourless skin. He could not stand or walk, from lameness; and I believe there was but one position in which he could lie. When we saw the helplessness of the child, we were glad that we had visited him. He had read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; he felt interested in the slaves, and daily prayed for them; he had carefully laid by the little presents of money which had been given him, and had a donation to give me, for the cause of the slave. But what made the deepest impression upon us was, his mother’s telling us that, in the midst of the very severe pains which tortured the little sufferer, he would cry out, but immediately check himself, saying “Mamma, I ought not to complain so. How much more did Jesus suffer, for me!” We left that house feeling that we had been highly privileged. We had learned the lesson of patient suffering at the bedside of that dear child — had seen a babe, as it were, praising God. That the child could long live, seemed out of the question; but the wheat of the surrounding fields was no more ripe for the sickle, than was that child to be gathered unto God. Since that day, I never suffer pain, complainingly, without fancying I see HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the bright, beaming eye of little Williams rebuking me, as he hushes his own cries, in the midst of anguish, by the recollection of “how much more Jesus suffered for him.” That child may, ere this, have been called to his rest; he may be with Him whose sufferings he learned so early to contemplate: but until I meet him in another world, I shall ever remember the lesson learned at his bedside. Since that time, some of the severest pangs I ever felt have been mine, both in body and mind; but their coming is accompanied by the remembrance of what that beloved child learned, in agony. And, blessed be God! the divine consolations which lulled his pains are abundant, infinite in efficacy! Wales is the most moral and most religious country, and her peasantry the best peasantry, that I know. Doubtless, many will differ from me; but such is my very decided opinion, based on the following reasons: — 1. The courts in Wales have fewer cases of scandalous crimes and misdemeanors to deal with than the courts of any other part of the kingdom, of the same population. The difference betwixt Wales and Ireland, in this respect, is immense. 2. But go to a Welsh town (such as Bangor), and how quiet and moral is it, compared with any town of the like population you can name in England, Ireland, or Scotland! Not a woman walking the streets for lewd purposes, not a drunkard brawling in the highways, no rows or fights; quietness and order reign everywhere. Holyhead is a seaport; it is the same there, and so in every town I visited. 3. The temperance cause has done more for Wales than for any other part of the kingdom. A drunken peasant is, indeed, a rare sight in Wales. The miners, the farm servants, and the ordinary labourers, all agree, somehow or other, to be temperate. Not that all are abstainers; but a more temperate peasantry, I am free to confess, there is not, even in Maine! 4. There is no begging in Wales. There are children who run after the carriages of tourists and cry, “ha’penny!” about the only English word they know; and this more for sport than halfpence. But there is little or no encouragement given to it by the inhabitants; and there is no such thing as a swarm of beggars at every corner, door, hotel, church-gate, and everywhere else, as in every part of Ireland. 5. The Welsh are poor as well as the Irish; and their landlords sufficiently neglect them, as to their dwellings: but the cleanliness of the peasantry is most striking. The contrast betwixt Holyhead and Kingstown, within four hours’ sail of each other, is most remarkable. One can scarcely believe that he has not been to two opposite sides of the globe, instead of across a narrow channel. The reader will now see why I blame the Irish for their defects, in contrast with the Welsh. 6. The industry of the poorer classes in the Principality is most commendable. I know this has much to do with any people’s moral and religious character. No one believes, as no one ought, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in a very high-toned and exemplary morality, or a very devoted religion, conjoined with idleness. I do believe that the Welsh labouring classes are more correct in this than even the Highlanders in Scotland. Patient though not overpaid toil, mitigated by few comforts, is not only the lot, but to all appearance the choice, of the Welsh peasant. I have seen more idlers in one street, in Kingstown — in a circumference of 300 yards, in Glasgow — or in a small village, in Essex or Norfolk — than one can see in the whole of Wales. 7. The Welsh population not only attend divine service, but are religious: I say “the population,” because it is not true, as in England, of a few persons only out of the many, but, like the Scotch, of the people generally. There are some curious and interesting facts in connection with this. In the first place, the Welsh are not Episcopalians: nine tenths of them dissent from the Establishment. It is most ridiculous to tax them for its support, for they do not go near it. Still, they quietly go to their chapels, and as quietly pay for their support. In the next place, they are not mere nominal members of Churches. The majority belong to the Calvinistic Methodist denomination, whose rules are highly and properly rigid. No laxity in morals is allowed to pass unrebuked. Besides, in travelling through Wales, it is seen that almost wherever there are a dozen houses, one of them is a chapel. The people feel their religious wants, and supply them. Moreover, the ministers of the denomination alluded to, and all others, take especial care and pains in looking after their flocks. Their preaching is deeply earnest, practical, scriptural, plain, and personal; also, most pathetic and affectionate. These combined influences are in constant operation, and are producing the very best effects upon a remarkably straightforward, simpleminded people. Compare these sturdy, honest preachers, with the priests of Romanism! Compare their flocks with the Papal populations of, I care not what country! I cannot consent to argue the case: in the living history of present fact it stands out in bold relief. It speaks for itself, in language clear and intelligible; its truths are undeniable, unquestionable: and though our fellow subjects of the Principality are less wealthy and less learned than some more flattered inhabitants of other portions of these islands, they excel us all in some of the best, noblest, traits that ever adorned human character. Should they diffuse education more thoroughly, cling with less tenacity to their mother tongue, draw more largely from the “well of English undefiled,” and mingle more with the other elements of British population, then that brave little Principality will one day be more often visited and considered: it will take rank as high in other matters, as in morals; and, in peculiar distinctive character, appear, to its present despisers, beautiful as its own valley scenery, elevated as Snowdon’s loftiest summit! I have spoken mostly of the labouring classes in Wales; and have only to add, that the better and higher classes are essentially HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Englishmen — with the exception, I must once more remark, of being very far behind Englishmen and Scotchmen (and, according to the papers of the day, behind Irishmen as well!) as landlords. They need to follow more closely the example set by the Honourable Colonel Tennant and the Lady Louisa, in caring for those who minister to their comforts and convenience. I am sure an one who visits the village referred to will join me in this remark. I know what will be said, in other countries than Wales, in reply to what I say of the chastity of the Welsh female peasantry. Reference will be made to the stupid system of courtship called “bundling” — a practice for which there is no defence: most certainly, I have no word to utter in its behalf. That it has not been attended with far worse consequences, is to me a marvel. But I have the great happiness to know, that the pulpit, which is more powerful in Wales than in any Protestant country elsewhere, has turned its whole power and influence against this barbarous practice, so that not even it, to any extent, forms a drawback to the remarks I have made upon the morality of the Welsh peasantry. It is to be hoped that a custom which has nothing better than its antiquity for its apology, but is liable to the very gravest objections on the score of morality and decency, will soon be known merely as a matter of history. Surely, when a custom so pernicious shall once be put away, all will rejoice, and all will wonder that a people of such sterling sense should have suffered it to continue so long. It certainly has outlived the former bad taste of the people; and therefore, if for no higher reason, it ought to live no longer. Most earnestly is it to be hoped that this abominable relic of ancient British barbarism will soon be so completely banished, as no longer to mar the otherwise good and exemplary character of the honest youths and maidens of that delightful Principality. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In addition to the Rowse portraits of Henry Thoreau2 and Waldo Emerson from this period, we have a photograph of Eddie, Waldo, and Edith that evidently dates to approximately this year:

DR.EDWARD WALDO EMERSON

[I find I am unable to show you Eddie Emerson’s sketch of his memory of Thoreau.]

2. Unfortunately the original crayon of Henry Thoreau has deteriorated to the point at which its copies are now better than it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

Thomas Chandler Haliburton retired from law and relocated from Nova Scotia to England. He remarried, with Sarah Harriet Owen Williams. They would reside in Isleworth.

Dr. Martin Robison Delany resettled in Canada and continued in medical practice.

Mary Ann Shadd got married with Thomas F. Cary or Carey, the Toronto barber she had met in 1853. This man already had three children, by a previous marriage. There would be two children of this new union, Sarah and Linton. After the marriage, Mary Ann Shadd Cary would continue to live in Chatham, approximately 180 miles from Toronto. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

May 8, Saturday-10, Monday: In Chatham, in the district now known as Ontario but then known as Canada West, where there was a large population of former American slaves, John Brown announced to a secret “convention” of Negroes and whites he had organized, at the home of Mary Ann Shadd Cady’s brother Issac

Shadd, that he intended to establish a stronghold in the Maryland and Virginia mountains for the shelter of escaping slaves. This was referred to as the Subterranean Pass Way scheme. A provisional constitution was adopted for the new government of the United States of America. The Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, Dr. Martin Robison Delany, and several other influential black leaders were among those who voted their approval of this “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” the charter formal of the fugitive society to be created in the remote fastnesses of the Alleghenies. (Delany would in 1868 allege that he had known nothing of the plan for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but others who had also been present at these meetings would mock such claims of ignorance.) Then it was decided that the flag for this new society would be the original flag used during the American Revolution, Captain Brown was voted to be commander in chief of this scheme, John Henry Kagi became his secretary of war, George B. Gill became his secretary of the treasury, and Richard Realf became his secretary of state. They had trouble finding a black leader willing to assume the dicey role of President of this new society, so it was decided to replace the function of a president, temporarily, with a 15-person council headed by Commander- in-Chief Brown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 16, Monday: Martin Robison Delany wrote to John Henry Kagi. (Delany would in 1868 allege that he had known nothing of the plan for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but others who had also been present at their meetings during May 8-10 in Chatham, Ontario would mock such claims of ignorance.)

August 16: Hear it raining again early when I awake, as it did yesterday, still and steady, as if the season were troubled with a diabetes.

P.M.– To Cardinal Ditch. I hear these birds on my way thither, between two and three o’clock: goldfinches twitter over; the song sparrow sings several times; hear a low warble from bluebirds, with apparently their young, the link of many bobolinks (and see large flocks on the fences and weeds; they are largish-looking birds with yellow throats); a large flock of red-wings [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] goes tchucking over; a lark twitters; crows caw; a robin peeps; kingbirds twitter, as ever. At sunset I hear a low short warble from a golden robin, and the notes of the wood pewee. In my boating of late I have several times scared up a couple of summer ducks (Wood Duck Aix sponsa) of this year, bred in our meadows. They allowed me to come quite near, and helped to people the river. I have not seen them for some days. Would you know the end of our intercourse? Goodwin shot them, and Mrs. ______, who never sailed on the river, ate them. Of course, she knows not what she did. What if I should eat her canary? Thus we share each other’s sins as well as burdens. The lady who watches admiringly the matador shares his deed. They belonged to me, as much as to any one, when they were alive, but it is considered of more importance that Mrs. ______should taste the flavor of them dead than that I should enjoy the beauty of them alive. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A three-ribbed goldenrod on railroad causeway, two to three feet high, abundantly out before Solidago nemoralis. I notice that when a frog, a Rana halecina, jumps, it drops water at the same instant, as a turtle often when touched as she is preparing to lay. I see many frogs jump from the side of the railroad causeway toward the ditch at its base, and each drops some water. They apparently have this supply of water with them in warm and dry weather, at least when they leave the water, and, returning to it, leave it behind as of no further use. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thalictrum Cornuti is now generally done. The hardhack commonly grows in low meadow-pastures which are uneven with grassy clods or hummocks, such as the almshouse pasture by Cardinal Ditch.

I am surprised to find that where of late years there have been so many cardinal-flowers, there are now very few. So much does a plant fluctuate from season to season. Here I found nearly white ones once. Channing tells me that he saw a white bobolink in a large flock of them to-day. Almost all flowers and animals may be found white. As in a large number of cardinal flowers you may find a white one, so in a large flock of bobolinks, also, it seems, you may find a white one. Talked with Minott, who sits in his wood-shed, having, as I notice, several seats there for visitors, – one a block GEORGE MINOTT on the sawhorse, another a patchwork mat on a wheelbarrow, etc., etc. His half-grown chickens, which roost overhead, perch on his shoulder or knee. According to him, the Holt is at the “diving ash,” where is some of the deepest water in the river. He tells me some of his hunting stories again. He always lays a good deal of stress on the kind of gun he used, as if he had bought a new one every year, when probably he never had more than two or three in his life. In this case it was a “half-stocked” one, a little “cocking-piece,” and whenever he finished his game he used the word “gavel,” I think in this way, “gave him gavel,” i.e. made him bite the dust, or settled him. Speaking of foxes, he said: “As soon as the nights get to be cool, if you step outdoors at nine or ten o’clock when all is still, you’ll hear them bark out on the flat behind the houses, half a mile off, or sometimes whistle through their noses. I can tell ’em. I know what that means. I know all about that. They are out after something to eat, I suppose.” He used to love to hear the goldfinches sing on the hemp which grew near his gate.

At sunset paddled to Hill. Goodwin has come again to fish, with three poles, hoping to catch some more of those large eels. A blue heron, with its great undulating wings, prominent cutwater, and leisurely flight, goes over southwest, cutting off the bend of the river west of our house. Goodwin says he saw one two or three days ago, and also that he saw some black ducks. A muskrat is swimming up the stream, betrayed by two long diverging ripples, or ripple-lines, two or three rods long each, and inclosing about seventy-five degrees, methinks. The rat generally dives just before reaching the shore and is not seen again, probably entering some burrow in the bank. Am surprised to see that the snapping turtle which I found floating dead June 16th, and placed to rot in the cleft of a rock, has been all cleaned, so that there is no smell of carrion. The scales have nearly all fallen off, and the sternum fallen apart, and the bony frame of the back is loose and dropping to pieces, as if it were many years old. It is a wonderful piece of dovetailing, the ends of the ribs (which are narrow and rib-like) set into sockets in the middle of the marginal bones, whose joints are in each case between the ribs. There are many large fish- bones within the shell. Was it killed by the fish it swallowed? The bones not being dispersed, I suppose it was cleaned by insects.

August 30, Monday: The Central Board of the 3rd Emigration Convention held in Chatham commissioned Martin Robison Delany “to explore in Africa, with full power to choose his own colleagues.”

Having fled from the refuge he had been offered by the Wesendonck family –upon having spoiled that nest– Richard Wagner took up residence in the Palazzo Giustiniani in Venice.

August 30: P.M.– To bayonet rush by river. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Find at Dodd’s shore: Eleocharis obtusa, some time out of bloom (fresh still at Pratt’s Pool); also Juncus acuminatus (?), just done (also apparently later and yet in bloom at Pout’s Nest); / also what I called Juncus

scirpoides, but which appears to be Juncus paradoxus, with seeds tailed at both ends, (it is fresher than what I have seen before, and smaller), not done. Some of it with few flowers! A terete leaf rises above the flower. It looks like a small bayonet rush. The Juncus militaris has been long out of bloom. The leaf is three feet long; the whole plant, four or five. It grows on edge of Grindstone Meadow and above. It would look more like a bayonet if the leaf were shorter than HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the flowering stem, which last is the bayonet part. This is my rainbow rush.

All over Ammannia Shore and on bare spots in meadows generally, Fimbristylis autumnalis, apparently in prime; minute, two to five inches high, with aspect of F. capillaris. As I am now returning over Lily Bay, I hear behind me a singular loud stertorous sound which I thought might have been made by a cow out of order, twice sounded. Looking round, I saw a blue heron flying low, about forty rods distant, and have no doubt the sound was made by him. Probably this is the sound which Farmer hears [Vide three pages back.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

During this year the last known negrero was arriving in this nation which had supposedly outlawed the import of slaves without ever having convicted anyone of violation of said law: this was in Mobile Bay, Alabama, and this negrero was named the Clothilde.

But during this year and the next Dr. Martin Robison Delany would be leading a party of exploration, back to West Africa, to check out the delta of the Niger River as a suitable location for repatriation of American blacks.

Have you ever wondered what happened to people who got freed from slave ships? The anti-international slave trade squadron of the American Navy that was patrolling off the African coast at this point was beefed up with an additional four steam gunboats so it could set up a similar patrol off the destination end of the passage, the Cuban coast. Three American-owned slavers, the Wildfire of New-York, the William of Baltimore, and the Bogota of New-York, were captured enroute to Cuba from the Congo River and from Ouidah by the USS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mohawk, the USS Wyandott, and the USS Crusader, and brought into the port of Key West, Florida. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE Some 294 of the 1,432 Africans aboard died at Key West from illnesses brought on by their confinement in the holds and were buried on a local beach. After some 80 days in America, the survivors would depart Key West for Liberia, transported by the American Colonization Society with financial support from the U.S. Government. Hundreds more of them would perish before again sighting the shores of Africa, and be consigned to the waves. Key West, because of the power of the Union Navy, would remain in Northern hands, and a couple of years later Union soldiers would construct a fortification, West Martello Tower, atop the beach graves. The strip of sand would be doing service as a public beach during our current era, when some local historian would inspect an 1863 map and notice “African Cemetery” clearly marked on it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This was reported to have been the scene on the deck of the Wildfire:3

W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: A somewhat more sincere and determined effort to enforce the slave-trade laws now followed; and yet it is a significant fact that not until Lincoln’s administration did a slave-trader suffer death for violating the laws of the United States. The participation of Americans in the trade continued, declining somewhat between 1825 and 1830, and then

3. There are a number of images of this sort available at . HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reviving, until it reached its highest activity between 1840 and 1860. The development of a vast internal slave-trade, and the consequent rise in the South of vested interests strongly opposed to slave smuggling, led to a falling off in the illicit introduction of Negroes after 1825, until the fifties; nevertheless, smuggling never entirely ceased, and large numbers were thus added to the plantations of the Gulf States. Monroe had various constitutional scruples as to the execution of the Act of 1819;4 but, as Congress took no action, he at last put a fair interpretation on his powers, and appointed Samuel Bacon as an agent in Africa to form a settlement for recaptured Africans. Gradually the agency thus formed became merged with that of the Colonization Society on Cape Mesurado; and from this union Liberia was finally evolved.5 Meantime, during the years 1818 to 1820, the activity of the slave-traders was prodigious. General James Tallmadge declared in the House, February 15, 1819: “Our laws are already highly penal against their introduction, and yet, it is a well known fact, that about fourteen thousand slaves have been brought into our country this last year.”6 In the same year Middleton of South Carolina and Wright of Virginia estimated illicit introduction at 13,000 and 15,000 respectively.7 Judge Story, in charging a jury, took occasion to say: “We have but too many proofs from unquestionable sources, that it [the slave-trade] is still carried on with all the implacable rapacity of former times. Avarice has grown more subtle in its evasions, and watches and seizes its prey with an appetite quickened rather than suppressed by its guilty vigils. American citizens are steeped to their very mouths (I can hardly use too bold a figure) in this stream of iniquity.”8 The following year, 1820, brought some significant statements from various members of Congress. Said Smith of South Carolina: “Pharaoh was, for his temerity, drowned in the Red Sea, in pursuing them [the Israelites] contrary to God’s express will; but our Northern friends have not been afraid even of that, in their zeal to furnish the Southern States with Africans. They are better seamen than Pharaoh, and calculate by that means to elude the vigilance of Heaven; which they seem to disregard, if they can but elude the violated laws of their country.”9 As late as May he saw little hope of suppressing the traffic.10 Sergeant of Pennsylvania declared: “It is notorious that, in spite of the utmost

4. Attorney-General Wirt advised him, October, 1819, that no part of the appropriation could be used to purchase land in Africa or tools for the Negroes, or as salary for the agent: OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, I. 314-7. Monroe laid the case before Congress in a special message Dec. 20, 1819 (HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, page 57); but no action was taken there. 5. Cf. Kendall’s Report, August, 1830: SENATE DOCUMENT, 21st Congress 2d session, I. No. 1, pages 211-8; also see below, Chapter X. 6. Speech in the House of Representatives, Feb. 15, 1819, page 18; published in Boston, 1849. 7. Jay, INQUIRY INTO AMERICAN COLONIZATION (1838), page 59, note. 8. Quoted in Friends’ FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE SLAVE TRADE (ed. 1841), pages 7-8. 9. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 270-1. 10. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 698. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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vigilance that can be employed, African negroes are clandestinely brought in and sold as slaves.”11 Plumer of New Hampshire stated that “of the unhappy beings, thus in violation of all laws transported to our shores, and thrown by force into the mass of our black population, scarcely one in a hundred is ever detected by the officers of the General Government, in a part of the country, where, if we are to believe the statement of Governor Rabun, ‘an officer who would perform his duty, by attempting to enforce the law [against the slave trade] is, by many, considered as an officious meddler, and treated with derision and contempt;’ ... I have been told by a gentleman, who has attended particularly to this subject, that ten thousand slaves were in one year smuggled into the United States; and that, even for the last year, we must count the number not by hundreds, but by thousands.”12 In 1821 a committee of Congress characterized prevailing methods as those “of the grossest fraud that could be practised to deceive the officers of government.”13 Another committee, in 1822, after a careful examination of the subject, declare that they “find it impossible to measure with precision the effect produced upon the American branch of the slave trade by the laws above mentioned, and the seizures under them. They are unable to state, whether those American merchants, the American capital and seamen which heretofore aided in this traffic, have abandoned it altogether, or have sought shelter under the flags of other nations.” They then state the suspicious circumstance that, with the disappearance of the American flag from the traffic, “the trade, notwithstanding, increases annually, under the flags of other nations.” They complain of the spasmodic efforts of the executive. They say that the first United States cruiser arrived on the African coast in March, 1820, and remained a “few weeks;” that since then four others had in two years made five visits in all; but “since the middle of last November, the commencement of the healthy season on that coast, no vessel has been, nor, as your committee is informed, is, under orders for that service.”14 The United States African agent, Ayres, reported in 1823: “I was informed by an American officer who had been on the coast in 1820, that he had boarded 20 American vessels in one morning, lying in the port of Gallinas, and fitted for the reception of slaves. It is a lamentable fact, that most of the harbours, between the Senegal and the line, were visited by an equal number of American vessels, and for the sole purpose of carrying away slaves. Although for some years the coast had been occasionally visited by our cruizers, their short stay and

11. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1207. 12. ANNALS OF CONGRESS, 16th Congress 1st session, page 1433. 13. Referring particularly to the case of the slaver “Plattsburg.” Cf. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 10. 14. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, page 2. The President had in his message spoken in exhilarating tones of the success of the government in suppressing the trade. The House Committee appointed in pursuance of this passage made the above report. Their conclusions are confirmed by British reports: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1822, Vol. XXII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, III. page 44. So, too, in 1823, Ashmun, the African agent, reports that thousands of slaves are being abducted. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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seldom appearance had made but slight impression on those traders, rendered hardy by repetition of crime, and avaricious by excessive gain. They were enabled by a regular system to gain intelligence of any cruizer being on the coast.”15 Even such spasmodic efforts bore abundant fruit, and indicated what vigorous measures might have accomplished. Between May, 1818, and November, 1821, nearly six hundred Africans were recaptured and eleven American slavers taken.16 Such measures gradually changed the character of the trade, and opened the international phase of the question. American slavers cleared for foreign ports, there took a foreign flag and papers, and then sailed boldly past American cruisers, although their real character was often well known. More stringent clearance laws and consular instructions might have greatly reduced this practice; but nothing was ever done, and gradually the laws became in large measure powerless to deal with the bulk of the illicit trade. In 1820, September 16, a British officer, in his official report, declares that, in spite of United States laws, “American vessels, American subjects, and American capital, are unquestionably engaged in the trade, though under other colours and in disguise.”17 The United States ship “Cyane” at one time reported ten captures within a few days, adding: “Although they are evidently owned by Americans, they are so completely covered by Spanish papers that it is impossible to condemn them.”18 The governor of Sierra Leone reported the rivers Nunez and Pongas full of renegade European and American slave-traders;19 the trade was said to be carried on “to an extent that almost staggers belief.”20 Down to 1824 or 1825, reports from all quarters prove this activity in slave-trading. The execution of the laws within the country exhibits grave defects and even criminal negligence. Attorney-General Wirt finds it necessary to assure collectors, in 1819, that “it is against public policy to dispense with prosecutions for violation of the law to prohibit the Slave trade.”21 One district attorney writes: “It appears to be almost impossible to enforce the laws of the United States against offenders after the negroes have been landed in the state.”22 Again, it is asserted that “when vessels engaged in the slave trade have been detained by the American cruizers, and sent into the slave-holding

15. Ayres to the Secretary of the Navy, Feb. 24, 1823; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 31. 16. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 5-6. The slavers were the “Ramirez,” “Endymion,” “Esperanza,” “Plattsburg,” “Science,” “Alexander,” “Eugene,” “Mathilde,” “Daphne,” “Eliza,” and “La Pensée.” In these 573 Africans were taken. The naval officers were greatly handicapped by the size of the ships, etc. (cf. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), pages 33-41). They nevertheless acted with great zeal. 17. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, page 76. The names and description of a dozen or more American slavers are given: PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1821, Vol. XXIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 18-21. 18. HOUSE REPORTS, 17th Congress 1st session, II. No. 92, pages 15-20. 19. HOUSE DOCUMENT, 18th Congress 1st session, VI. No. 119, page 13. 20. PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS, 1823, Vol. XVIII., SLAVE TRADE, Further Papers, A, pages 10-11. 21. OPINIONS OF ATTORNEYS-GENERAL, V. 717. 22. R.W. Habersham to the Secretary of the Navy, August, 1821; reprinted in FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 47. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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states, there appears at once a difficulty in securing the freedom to these captives which the laws of the United States have decreed for them.”23 In some cases, one man would smuggle in the Africans and hide them in the woods; then his partner would “rob” him, and so all trace be lost.24 Perhaps 350 Africans were officially reported as brought in contrary to law from 1818 to 1820: the absurdity of this figure is apparent.25 A circular letter to the marshals, in 1821, brought reports of only a few well-known cases, like that of the “General Ramirez;” the marshal of Louisiana had “no information.”26 There appears to be little positive evidence of a large illicit importation into the country for a decade after 1825. It is hardly possible, however, considering the activity in the trade, that slaves were not largely imported. Indeed, when we note how the laws were continually broken in other respects, absence of evidence of petty smuggling becomes presumptive evidence that collusive or tacit understanding of officers and citizens allowed the trade to some extent.27 Finally, it must be noted that during all this time scarcely a man suffered for participating in the trade, beyond the loss of the Africans and, more rarely, of his ship. Red-handed slavers, caught in the act and convicted, were too often, like La Coste of South Carolina, the subjects of executive clemency.28 In certain cases there were those who even had the effrontery to ask Congress to cancel their own laws. For instance, in 1819 a Venezuelan privateer, secretly fitted out and manned by Americans in Baltimore, succeeded in capturing several American, Portuguese, and Spanish slavers, and appropriating the slaves; being finally wrecked herself, she transferred her crew and slaves to one of her prizes, the “Antelope,” which was eventually captured by a United States cruiser and the 280 Africans sent to Georgia. After much litigation, the United States Supreme Court ordered those captured from Spaniards to be surrendered, and the others to be returned to Africa. By some mysterious process, only 139 Africans now remained, 100 of whom were sent to Africa. The Spanish claimants of the remaining thirty-nine sold them to a certain Mr. Wilde, who gave bond to transport them out of the country. Finally, in December, 1827, there came an innocent petition to Congress to cancel this bond.29 A bill to that effect passed and was approved, May 2, 1828,30 and in consequence these Africans remained as slaves in Georgia. On the whole, it is plain that, although in the period from 1807 to 1820 Congress laid down broad lines of legislation sufficient, save in some details, to suppress the African slave trade to America, yet the execution of these laws was criminally

23. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 24. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 43. 25. Cf. above, pages 126-7. 26. FRIENDS’ VIEW OF THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE (1824), page 42. 27. A few accounts of captures here and there would make the matter less suspicious; these, however, do not occur. How large this suspected illicit traffic was, it is of course impossible to say; there is no reason why it may not have reached many hundreds per year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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lax. Moreover, by the facility with which slavers could disguise their identity, it was possible for them to escape even a vigorous enforcement of our laws. This situation could properly be met only by energetic and sincere international co- operation....31

Over the following 4 years, Dr. Martin Robison Delany’s BLAKE; OR, THE HUTS OF AMERICA: A TALE OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY, THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES, AND CUBA, a novel involving black insurrectionism, would be being serialized.

28. Cf. editorial in Niles’s Register, XXII. 114. Cf. also the following instances of pardons: — PRESIDENT JEFFERSON: March 1, 1808, Phillip M. Topham, convicted for “carrying on an illegal slave-trade” (pardoned twice). PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 146, 148-9. PRESIDENT MADISON: July 29, 1809, 15 vessels arrived at New Orleans from Cuba, with 666 white persons and 683 negroes. Every penalty incurred under the Act of 1807 was remitted. (Note: “Several other pardons of this nature were granted.”) PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 179. Nov. 8, 1809, John Hopkins and Lewis Le Roy, convicted for importing a slave. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 184-5. Feb. 12, 1810, William Sewall, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 194, 235, 240. May 5, 1812, William Babbit, convicted for importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, I. 248. PRESIDENT MONROE: June 11, 1822, Thomas Shields, convicted for bringing slaves into New Orleans. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 15. Aug. 24, 1822, J.F. Smith, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and $3000 fine; served twenty-five months and was then pardoned. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 22. July 23, 1823, certain parties liable to penalties for introducing slaves into Alabama. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 63. Aug. 15, 1823, owners of schooner “Mary,” convicted of importing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 66. PRESIDENT J.Q. ADAMS: March 4, 1826, Robert Perry; his ship was forfeited for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 140. Jan. 17, 1827, Jesse Perry; forfeited ship, and was convicted for introducing slaves. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 158. Feb. 13, 1827, Zenas Winston; incurred penalties for slave-trading. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 161. The four following cases are similar to that of Winston: — Feb. 24, 1827, John Tucker and William Morbon. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 162. March 25, 1828, Joseph Badger. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 192. Feb. 19, 1829, L.R. Wallace. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 215. PRESIDENT JACKSON: Five cases. PARDONS AND REMISSIONS, IV. 225, 270, 301, 393, 440. The above cases were taken from manuscript copies of the Washington records, made by Mr. W.C. Endicott, Jr., and kindly loaned me. 29. See SENATE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 60, 66, 340, 341, 343, 348, 352, 355; HOUSE JOURNAL, 20th Congress 1st session, pages 59, 76, 123, 134, 156, 169, 173, 279, 634, 641, 646, 647, 688, 692. 30. STATUTES AT LARGE, VI. 376. 31. Among interesting minor proceedings in this period were two Senate bills to register slaves so as to prevent illegal importation. They were both dropped in the House; a House proposition to the same effect also came to nothing: SENATE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, pages 147, 152, 157, 165, 170, 188, 201, 203, 232, 237; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 63, 74, 77, 202, 207, 285, 291, 297; HOUSE JOURNAL, 15th Congress 1st session, page 332; 15th Congress 2d session, pages 303, 305, 316; 16th Congress 1st session, page 150. Another proposition was contained in the Meigs resolution presented to the House, Feb. 5, 1820, which proposed to devote the public lands to the suppression of the slave-trade. This was ruled out of order. It was presented again and laid on the table in 1821: HOUSE JOURNAL, 16th Congress 1st session, pages 196, 200, 227; 16th Congress 2d session, page 238. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January: The Weekly Anglo African Magazine began weekly publication of 25 installments of Dr. Martin Robison Delany’s BLAKE; OR, THE HUTS OF AMERICA: A TALE OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY, THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES, AND CUBA, a novel involving black insurrectionism which, according to Floyd Miller, amounted to “the first novelistic offering of a black writer to be published in the United States.” (The series would complete in July.)

February: Dr. Martin Robison Delany was living in New-York while raising funds for his African voyage. He wrote to William Lloyd Garrison: “I beg to call your attention to the Story of ‘Blake or the Huts of America,’ now being published in the ‘Anglo African Magazine’.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 24, Tuesday: Prideaux John Selby’s wife Tabitha Lewis Mitford Selby died.

Martin Robison Delany departed with others aboard the Mendi from New-York harbor toward Liberia. Is freedom going to be an option?

A great rally was held in Cleveland, organized by Joshua Reed Giddings, and featured as speakers the Rescuers’ black leader John Mercer Langston, and Ohio Governor Salmon Portland Chase. The rally was held in the jailyard and four of the prisoners were able to make speeches from cell windows. Until this rescue crisis, Chase had been a Republican moderate, opposed violence, and had been criticized for doing nothing in 1856 to help Margaret Garner who had tried to escape from slavery in Kentucky with her husband and parents and 4 children by crossing the Ohio River at Cincinnati. (When she had been caught, she had started to kill her children rather than allow them to return to slavery, killing one daughter before being stopped by the slavecatchers. When the steamboat she was being transported on collided in the river with another steamboat, one of her infant children drowned — and Margaret had wept with joy.) The two convicted Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, were allowed to post a letter from their prison.

May 24. What that brilliant warbler on the young trees on the side of the Deep Cut? Orange throat and beneath, with distinct black stripes on breast (i.e. on each side?), and, I think, some light color on crown. Was [IT] Blackburnian? or maculosa?? [Probably first.] Hear the wood pewee. Sand cherry flower is apparently at its height. I see (the 9th of June) that its fruit is an abortive puff, like that of some plums. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

July: The Weekly Anglo African Magazine completed its weekly publication of the initial 25 installments of Martin Robison Delany’s BLAKE; OR, THE HUTS OF AMERICA: A TALE OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY, THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES, AND CUBA, a novel involving black insurrectionism which, according to Floyd Miller, amounted to “the first novelistic offering of a black writer to be published in the United States,” serialization of which had begun in January.

Choosing not to join up with Captain John Brown and his raiders at Harpers Ferry, Dr. Delany departed for an investigation of the suitability of the shore of Africa for a colonization effort by American blacks.32

July 10, Sunday: Martin Robison Delany arrived on shores of Liberia at Cape Palmas.

July 10: Water ten and a half inches above summer level. 8 A.M.–Take boat at Fair Haven Pond and paddle up to Sudbury Causeway, sounding the river. To-day, like yesterday, is very hot, with a blue haze concealing the mountains and hills, looking like hot dust in the air. Hearing a noise, I look up and see a pigeon woodpecker pursued by a kingbird, and the former utters loud shrieks with fear. Paddling through the wild Sudbury meadows, I am struck with the regularity with which the phalanxes of bulrushes (Scirpus lacustris) occur. They do not grow in a continuous line, like pipes or pontederia, but in small isolated patches. At each bend, though it does not appear on Baldwin’s map, there is a bay-like expansion of the liver, now half emerged, thus:–

where the more stagnant water has deposited mud, and in each such place, with remarkable regularity, a phalanx of bulrushes presents itself as you ascend. It occasionally occupies a corresponding place as you descend, and also intermediate shores of a similar character. Yet it so constantly occurs in just this position as to be remarkable. It is not very common along our river, being mainly confined to the larger and wilder meadows,– at any rate to the expansions, be they larger or smaller. These phalanxes are from one to three or more rods wide,

32. Dr. Delany’s treaty with the Alake of Abeokuta for land to establish this colony would be annulled by the middle of 1861, as it seems that tribal headmen did not really have authority for such alienation of tribal real estate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and the rush is of a glaucous green, very interesting with its shafts slanting different ways. At one bend, especially, grows–and I have not noticed it elsewhere except in this meadow–the great Scirpus fluviatilis (how long out?). Yet the leaves are not so roughish nor so long as described. The Arundo Phragmites is not nearly out, though quite tall. Spartina cynosuroides well out. The green pipes border the stream for long distances. The high water of the last month has left a whitish scum on the grass. We scare up eight or a dozen wood ducks, already about grown. The meadow is quite alive with them. What was that peculiar loud note from some invisible water-fowl near the Concord line? Any kind of plover? or clapper rail? H. Buttrick says he has shot a meadow-hen much larger than the small one here. I hear in the ridge the peculiar notes of, I think, the meadow-hen,– same e.g. [SIC] where I got an egg and nest. The young are probably running there. Often hear it in the great Sudbury meadow. See many young birds now,–blackbirds, swallows, kingbirds, etc., in the air. Even hear one link from a bobolink. I notice at Bittern Cliff that the sparganium floats upstream, probably because the wind has blown thus.

The bottom of Fair Haven Pond is very muddy. I can generally thrust a pole down three feet into it, and it may be very much deeper. Young pouts are an inch long, and in some ditch s left high and dry and dead with the old. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 12, Tuesday: Martin Robison Delany arrived in Monrovia 300 miles from Cape Palmas to the west.

William Goodale of Massachusetts patented a machine for the manufacture of paper bags.33

On approximately this date John Brown was moving to the Kennedy farm near Harpers Ferry (one of the

33. This was not the grocery bag familiar to us from our childhoods, but an earlier and somewhat less cost-effective version. That square-bottomed design would not be invented until 1870, by Luther Childs Crowell. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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conspirators had married a local woman named Kennedy). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Kennedy farmhouse was about 5 miles outside the town, in Maryland. He positioned his 15-year-old daughter Anne Brown and his 17-year-old daughter-in-law Martha Brewster Brown in the farmhouse, providing it a familial appearance in the eyes of neighbors. He obliged his raiders to remain hidden in the loft during the hours of daylight, allowing them downstairs at night when no-one would be expected to approach the premises.

July 12: Another hot day. 96 at mid-afternoon.

P.M. – To Assabet Bath. The elm avenue above the Wheeler farm is one of the hottest places in the town; the heat is reflected from the dusty road. The grass by the roadside begins to have a dry, hot, dusty look. The melted ice is running almost in a stream from the countryman’s covered wagon, containing butter, which is to be conveyed hard to Boston market. He stands on the wheel to relieve his horses at each shelf in the ascent of Colburn Hill. I think I have distinguished our eriophorums now. There is the E. vaginatum, the earliest, out long ago; the E. polystachyon, well out June 19th; and to-day I see the E. gracile, which apparently has not been out quite so long as the last. Its leaves are channelled triangular. Saw yesterday the E. Virginicum, apparently in bloom, though very little woolly or reddish as yet, –a dense head. The taller dark rhynchospora is well out.

In the evening, the moon being about full, I paddle up the river to see the moonlight and hear the bullfrogs. The toads and the pebbly dont dont are most common. There are fireworks in the village,–rockets, blue lights, etc. I am so far off that I do not hear the rush of the rocket till it has reached its highest point, so that it seems to be produced there. So the villagers entertain themselves this warm evening. Such are the[IR] aspirations. I see at 9.30 P.M. a little brood of four or five barn swallows, which have quite recently left the nest, perched close together for the night on a dead willow twig in the shade of the tree, about four feet above the water. Their tails not yet much grown. When I passed up, the old bird twittered about them in alarm. I now float within four feet, and they do not move or give sign of awaking. I could take them all off with my hand. They have been hatched in the nearest barn or elsewhere, and have been led at once to roost here, for coolness and security. There is no cooler nor safer place for them. I observe that they take their broods to the telegraph-wire for an aerial perch, where they teach them to fly. They have gone to their beach.

August 16, Tuesday to August 21, Sunday: In Africa, Martin Robison Delany was returning to Cape Palmas to explore the Cavalla River.

The emancipation paper of Elias Watkins Napier, in Connecticut: The said Elias Watkins Napier is ten years of age. A light colored mulatto, with straight dark brown hair. Has a slight scar just over, and partly in his left eye brow, and a small dark mole under his left jaw, and has had the end of his middle finger and the end of his fourth finger on his left hand crushed, so that the nail has come off. He has no other special marks at this time. The said Elias Watkins Napier has heretofore owed HDT WHAT? INDEX

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service or labor to me, under the laws of the State of Tennessee, as a slave.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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While in Chambersburg near Harpers Ferry as agent for the raiders, John Brown’s 2d-in-command, John Henry Kagi, had been boarding with a Mrs. Mary Rittner. In this period Captain Brown met secretly at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania with Frederick Douglass. The meeting was staged in an abandoned stone quarry.

One of these persons at that quarry was the head of a general conspiracy, and the other was acting as one of its HDT WHAT? INDEX

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agents: how can we now establish which was which?

Two weeks prior to the mediated attack, Capt. Brown summoned me to meet him in an old stone quarry on the Conecochequi river, near the town of Chambersburgh, Penn. His arms and ammunition were stored in that town and were to be moved on to Harpers Ferry. In company with Shields Green I obeyed the summons, and prompt to the hour we met the dear old man, with Kagi, his secretary, at the appointed place. Our meeting was in some sense a council of war. We spent the Saturday and succeeding Sunday in conference on the question, whether the desperate step should then taken, or the old plan as already described should be carried out. He was for boldly striking Harpers Ferry at once and running the risk of getting into the mountains afterwards. I was for avoiding Harpers Ferry altogether. Shields Green and Mr. Kagi remained silent listeners throughout. It is needless to repeat here what was said, after what has happened. Suffice it, that after all I could say, I saw that my old friend had resolved on his course and that it was idle to parley. I told him finally that it was impossible for me to join him. I could see Harpers Ferry only as a trap of steel, and ourselves in the wrong side of it. He regretted my decision and we parted. Thus far, I have spoken exclusively of Capt. Brown. Let me say a word or two of his brave and devoted men, and first of Shields Green. He was a fugitive slave from Charleston, South Carolina, and had attested his love of liberty by escaping from slavery and making his way through many dangers to Rochester, where he had lived in my family, and where he met the man with whom he went to the scaffold. I said to him, as I was about to leave, “Now Shields, you have heard our discussion. If in view of it, you do not wish to stay, you have but to say so, and you can go back with me.” He answered, “I b’l’eve I’ll go wid de old man;” and go with him he did, into the fight, and to the gallows, and bore himself as grandly as any of the number. At the moment when Capt. Brown was surrounded, and all chance of escape was cut off, Green was in the mountains and could have made his escape as Osborne Anderson did, but when asked to do so, he made the same answer he did at Chambersburg, “I b’l’eve I’ll go down wid de ole man.” When in prison at Charlestown, and he was not allowed to see his old friend, his fidelity to him was in no wise weakened, and no complaint against Brown could be extorted from him by those who talked with him.

SHIELDS GREEN JOHN HENRY KAGI

The wife of Dangerfield Newby wrote to him (a letter that would be found on his corpse at Harpers Ferry): Dear Husband: Your kind letter came duly to hand, and it gave me much pleasure to here from you, and especely to here you are better off [with] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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your rhumatism, and hope when I here from you again, you may be entirely well. I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for if you do not get me some body else will.... Dear Husband you [know], not the trouble I see; the last two years has ben like a trouble dream to me. It is said Master is in want of monney. If so, I know not what time he may sell me, an then all my bright hops of the futer are blasted, for their has ben one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you, for if I thought I should never see you this earth would have no charms for me....

It is positively known only that Harriet Newby and her children were sold to the “deep south.” All that has been found out about the Newby family is inferred from the three surviving letters found on Dangerfield’s corpse. The story of this husband’s desperate attempts to raise enough money to buy his wife and children is one that is difficult to read — when he managed to raise the specified amount, the slavemaster simply demanded more.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR AUGUST 16th]

September 16, Thursday: Henry Thoreau surveyed some land on Bedford Road near P.J. Sexton and J.B. Moore (this would not be Jacob Bailey Moore of New Hampshire because he had died in San Francisco in 1853), for Waldo Emerson. His fee was $2.00.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/385.htm

September 16. Another and severer frost, which cut off all our vines, etc., lespedeza, corn, etc. P.M.– By the roadside, forty or fifty rods east of the South Acton station, I find the Aster Novæ-Angliæ, apparently past prime. I must call it a plant of this vicinity, then. I thought it “in prime or a little past” at Salem, September 21, 1858. I will venture to put it with the A. puniceus. Young Nealy says that there are blue-winged teal about now. Others are out after ducks. Nealy says he shot the first golden plover he has seen, this morning. [Does he know it??]34 How unpromising are promising men! Hardly any disgust me so much. I have no faith in them. They make gratuitous promises, and they break them gratuitously. When an Irishwoman tells me that she wouldn’t tell a lie for her life (because I appear to doubt her), it seems to me that she has already told a lie. She holds herself and the truth very cheap to say that so easily. What troubles men lay up for want of a little energy and precision! A man who steps quickly to his mark leaves HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a great deal of filth behind. There’s many a well-meaning fellow who thinks he has a hard time of it who will not put his shoulder to the wheel, being spell-bound, – who sits about, as if he were hatching his good intentions, and every now and then his friends get up a subscription for him, and he is cursed with the praise of being “a clever fellow.” It would really be worth his while to go straight to his master the devil, if he would only shake him up when he got there. Men who have not learned the value of time, or of anything else; for whom an infant school and a birchen rod is still and forever necessary. A man who is not prompt affects me as a creature covered with slime, crawling through mud and lying dormant a great part of the year. Think of the numbers –men and women– who want and will have and do have (how do they get it?!) what they will not earn! The non-producers. How many of these bloodsuckers there are fastened to every helpful man or woman in this world! They constitute this world. It is a world full of snivelling prayers, – whose very religion is a prayer! As if beggars were admirable, were respectable, to anybody! Again and again I am surprised to observe what an interval there is, in what is called civilized life, between the shell and the inhabitant of the shell, – what a disproportion there is between the life of man and his conveniences and luxuries. The house is neatly painted, has many apartments. You are shown into the sitting-room, where is a carpet and couch and mirror and splendidly bound Bible, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, photographs of the whole family even, on the mantelpiece. One could live here more deliciously and improve his divine gifts better than in a cave surely. In the bright and costly saloon man will not be starving or freezing or contending with vermin surely, but he will be meditating a divine song or a heroic deed, or perfuming the atmosphere by the very breath of his natural and healthy existence. As the parlor is preferable to the cave, so will the life of its occupant be more godlike than that of the dweller in the cave. I called at such a house this afternoon, the house of one who in Europe would be called an operative. The woman was not in the third heavens, but in the third kitchen, as near the wood-shed or to outdoors and to the cave as she could instinctively get, for there she belonged, – a coarse scullion or wench, not one whit superior, but in fact inferior, to the squaw in a wigwam, – and the master of the house, where was he? He was drunk somewhere, on some mow or behind some stack, and I could not see him. He had been having a spree. If he had been as sober as he may be to-morrow, it would have been essentially the same; for refinement is not in him, it is only in his house, – in the appliances which he did not invent. So is it in the Fifth Avenue and all over the civilized world. There is nothing but confusion in our New England life. The hogs are in the parlor. This man and his wife –and how many like them!– should have sucked their claws in some hole in a rock, or lurked like gypsies in the outbuildings of some diviner race. They’ve got into the wrong boxes; they rained down into these houses by mistake, as it is said to rain toads sometimes. They wear these advantages helter-skelter and without appreciating them, or to satisfy a vulgar taste, just as savages wear the dress of civilized men, just as that Indian chief walked the streets of New Orleans clad in nothing but a gaudy military coat which his Great Father had given him. Some philanthropists trust that the houses will civilize the

34. This “Young Nealy” (Edward Nealy or Neally or Nealey), would eventually be buried beneath an Indian grindstone which he would allege he and Thoreau had found together. There seems, however, to be a lack of evidence as to said grindstone: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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inhabitants at last. The mass of men, just like savages, strive always after the outside, the clothes and finery of civilized life, the blue beads and tinsel and centre-tables. It is a wonder that any load ever gets moved, men are so prone to put the cart before the horse. We do everything according to the fashion, just as the Flatheads flatten the heads of their children. We conform ourselves in a myriad ways and with infinite pains to the fashions of our time. We mourn for our lost relatives according to fashion, and as some nations hire professed mourners to howl, so we hire stone-masons to hammer and blast by the month and so express our grief. Or if a public character dies, we get up a regular wake with eating and drinking till midnight. Grasshoppers have been very abundant in dry fields for two or three weeks. Sophia walked through the Depot Field a fortnight ago, and when she got home picked fifty or sixty from her skirts, – for she wore hoops and crinoline. Would not this be a good way to clear a field of them, – to send a bevy of fashionably dressed ladies across a field and leave them to clean their skirts when they get home? It would supplant anything at the patent office, and the motive power is cheap. I am invited to take some party of ladies or gentlemen on an excursion, –to walk or sail, or the like,– but by all kinds of evasions I omit it, and am thought to be rude and unaccommodating therefore. They do not consider that the wood-path and the boat are my studio, where I maintain a sacred solitude and cannot admit promiscuous company. I will see them occasionally in an evening or at the table, however. They do not think of taking a child away from its school to go a-huckleberrying with them. Why should not I, then, have my school and school hours to be respected? Ask me for a certain number of dollars if you will, but do not ask me for my afternoons. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At about this point in time (which is to say, mid-month), Martin Robison Delany was sailing along the coast of Africa toward Lagos. He would be spending five weeks there.

At about this point in time, also, the handsome John E. Cook was reconnoitering Harpers Ferry on behalf of Captain John Brown’s guerrillas, when he hailed the debonair local plantation owner and slavemaster Lewis W. Washington on the street: “I believe you have a great many interesting relics at your house; could I have permission to see them if I should walk out someday?”

Cook was of course aware, as everyone was aware, that this Washington was a descendant of the General/ President George Washington as well as a special assistant to Henry A. Wise, the Governor of Virginia. When Cook would visit the Washington plantation a few days later, he would be especially fascinated by the neato pistol presented to General Washington by the Marquis de Lafayette after the Revolution, enough so as to inquire whether it shot well, and by the neato ceremonial sword which had been presented to General HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Washington by none other than Frederick the Great of Prussia.

<__ George Washington’s sword (in the famous Leutze painting).

October 27, Thursday: The trial of John Brown for treason and murder, before a jury of twelve white male citizens of Harpers Ferry, began.

At about this point of time, in Africa, Martin Robison Delany was traveling inland into Yoruba along the Ogun River, as far as the Egba capital of Abbeokuta where he was meeting with his expeditions’ fund-raiser in England, Robert Campbell, who had come from there.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR OCTOBER 27th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 27, Tuesday: Martin Robison Delany and Robert Campbell signed a treaty with eight African chiefs, headed by Ogubonna of Balagun, in Abbeokuta. The chiefs agree “to grant and assign unto the said Commissioners ... the right and privilege of settling in common with the Egba people on any part of the territory belonging to Abbeokuta, not otherwise occupied.” The Commissioners (Delany and Campbell) “agree that the settlers shall bring with them, as an equivalent for the privileges above accorded, intelligence, education, a knowledge of the Arts and Sciences, Agriculture, and other Mechanical and Industrial Occupations which they shall put into immediate operation by improving lands and in other useful vocations.” (The treaty was later dissolved due to warfare in the region, subversive opposition by white missionaries and the advent of the Civil War in America).

December 27. Grows cold in the evening, so that our breaths condense and freeze on the windows and in the morning,– HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

January 16, Monday: Martin Robison Delany explored further inland following the old trade route of the Oyo empire, a full 225 miles inland.

At about the midpoint of this month some 100,000 copies of Hinton Rowan Helper’s racist COMPENDIUM OF 35 THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH. BY HINTON ROWAN HELPER OF NORTH CAROLINA were being put out for distribution throughout the Northern states — not south of the Mason/Dixon line, of course, for there was absolutely no freedom of speech or of the press being tolerated anywhere there (Helper was referring to the imaginary wall around the South which kept out such incendiary literature as an “iron curtain”). Wherever it could be effectively distributed, William Lloyd Garrison was assisting with the distribution of this racist work.

January 16: P.M. — Down Boston road around Quail Hill. Very warm, — 45° at 2 P.M. There is a tender crust on the snow, and the sun is brightly reflected from it. Looking toward Billerica from the cross-road near White’s, the young oaks on the top of a hill in the horizon are very red, perhaps seven or eight miles off and directly opposite to the sun, far more red, no doubt, than they would appear near at hand, really bright red; but nowhere else that I perceive. It is an aerial effect, depending on their distance and elevation and being opposite to the sun, and also contrasted with the snowy ground. Looking from Smith’s Hill on the Turnpike, the hills eight or ten miles west are white, but the mountains thirty miles off are blue, though both may be equally white at the same distance. I see a flock of tree sparrows [American Tree Sparrow Spizella arborea] busily picking something from the surface of the snow amid some bushes. I watch one attentively, and find that it is feeding on the very fine brown chaffy-looking seed of the panicled andromeda. It understands how to get its dinner, to make the plant give down, perfectly. It flies up and alights on one of the dense brown panicles of the hard berries, and gives it a vigorous shaking and beating with its claws and bill, sending down a shower of the fine chaffy-looking seed on to the snow beneath. It lies very distinct, though fine almost as dust, on the spotless snow. It then hops down and briskly picks up from the snow what it wants. How very clean and agreeable to the imagination, and withal abundant, is this kind of food! How delicately they fare! These dry persistent seed-vessels hold their crusts of bread until shaken. The snow is the white table-cloth on which they fall. No anchorite with his water and his crust fares more simply. It shakes down a hundred times as much as it wants at each shrub, and shakes the same or another cluster after each successive snow. How bountifully Nature feeds them! No wonder they come to spend the winter with us, and are at ease with regard to their food. These shrubs ripen an abundant crop of seeds to supply the wants of these immigrants from the far north which annually come to spend the winter with us. How neatly and simply it feeds!

35. This book has been republished in Miami FL in 1969. His earlier book has been republished in Cambridge MA in 1968. For more on this guy and his not-all-that-novel conceit that the victims were victimizing him and needed to be trumped, see Bailey, Hugh C. HINTON ROWAN HELPER: ABOLITIONIST-RACIST (University AL: 1965). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This shrub grows unobserved by most, only known to botanists, and at length matures its hard, dry seed-vessels, which, if noticed, are hardly supposed to contain seed. But there is no shrub nor weed which is not known to some bird. Though you may have never noticed it, the tree sparrow comes from the north in the winter straight to this shrub, and confidently shakes its panicle, and then feasts on the fine shower of seeds that falls from it.

March: After 9 months of investigation on the coast of Africa, Dr. Martin Robison Delany was ready to return to his native land, America.36

36. Dr. Delany’s treaty with the Alake of Abeokuta for land to establish his colony would be annulled by the middle of 1861, as it would seem that tribal headmen did not really have authority to alienate tribal real estate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 10, Tuesday: Martin Robison Delany set sail from Lagos to England.

Senator Jefferson Davis returned to the federal Senate upon recovering from eye surgery.

That evening, Abraham Lincoln spoke in the Phoenix Hall at Bloomington, Illinois. A local newspaper would report: After a few apologetic remarks, the speaker proceeded to comment upon polygamy in Utah, and the recent action in the United States house of representatives on that subject. [Vermont Representative Justin S. Morrill’s HR7 to punish the practice of polygamy, etc., although it had passed the House on April 5th, would die in the Senate.] He said his main object in doing so was to call attention to the views and action of gentlemen who held to the doctrine of popular sovereignty, as related to the suppression of polygamy. These gentlemen, he said, were less than half the democratic members of the house — southern democrats voting for the anti-polygamy bill, because it favored the doctrine that congress could control the subject of slavery in the territories. But the Illinois democrats, although as much opposed to polygamy as any body else, dare not vote for the bill, because it was opposed to Mr. Douglas. Mr. McClernand, of Illinois, had proposed to suppress the evil of polygamy by dividing up the territory, and attaching the different portions to other territories. He admitted that he had not seen Col. McClernand’s speech on the subject; but proceeded to comment upon his action, nevertheless. McClernand’s proposition was in harmony with the views formerly suggested by Mr. Douglas in a speech at Springfield; and he gave him credit for consistency, at least. But, inquired the speaker, how much better was it to divide up the territory and attach its parts to others? It was effecting indirectly that which Mr. McClernand denied could be done directly. This inconsistency, Mr. Lincoln illustrated by a classic example of a similar inconsistency: “If I cannot rightfully murder a man, I may tie him to the tail of a kicking horse, and let him kick the man to death!” But why divide up the territory at all? continued he. Something must be wrong there, or it would not be necessary to act at all. And if one mode of interference is wrong, why not the other? Why is not an act dividing the territory as much against popular sovereignty as one for prohibiting polygamy? If you can put down polygamy in that way, why may you not thus put down slavery? Mr. Lincoln said he supposed that the friends of popular HDT WHAT? INDEX

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sovereignty would say –if they dared speak out– that polygamy was wrong and slavery right; and therefore one might thus be put down and the other not; and after supposing several other things of northern democrats, he proceeded to notice, what he called, Mr. Douglas’s sedition law. [On January 16th Douglas had introduced a resolution in the Senate for its Committee on the Judiciary to introduce a bill to protect a state or territory against invasion, etc., but on February 1st this had been tabled.] On the subject of the proposed law, he began by reading Mr. Douglas’s resolution as offered to the senate. Everything prohibited in the resolution, said he, is wrong, and ought to be prohibited and punished. There was now no such law against them, simply, as he supposed, because nobody had thought the crimes enumerated in the resolution would ever be committed. And, moreover, he declared, not one of them ever had been committed! He defied any one to point to a single instance where the authorities or the people of one state had invaded another: or where there had been a conspiracy or combination to interfere with the institutions or property of the people in one state by citizens of another! John Brown, to be sure, had made a raid into Virginia; but Virginia had been competent to deal with him and his confederates without a congressional law; and hence no such law was necessary. Insurrections had always been put down; hence no law was necessary against them. What, then, inquired the speaker, was the real object of Mr. Douglas’s proposition? He then quoted from that gentleman’s speech on the subject, in which he says that Brown’s raid into Virginia, and similar outrages, were the legitimate and logical result of the abolition teachings of the day. Then, said Mr. Lincoln, I conceive the real object of the proposed bill was to put down republicanism; to prevent republican meetings, and to shut men’s mouths! If, however, he added, the only object is to punish negro-dealers, he had no objection. But he denied that any body had ever conspired to steal negroes. The speaker then went on to comment on the proposed law, as if it was only meant to suppress free speech; addressed his remarks chiefly to Mr. Douglas, and throughout the speech seemed to consider him as the only man in the democratic party who was worthy of attention. A few words on the question why, if states and territories may introduce slavery, McLean county, or any individual may not, according to popular sovereignty, do the same, concluded the speech.

April 10. Cheney elm, many anthers shed pollen, probably 7th. Some are killed. Salix purpurea apparently will not open for four or five days. 2 P.M. 44 and east wind (followed by some rain still the next day, as usual). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 16, Monday: When the chairman of the prestigious International Statistical Congress, Lord Henry Peter Brougham, recognized and honored Dr. Martin Robison Delany in the course of the group’s first meeting,

Augustus Longstreet led an infuriated American delegation out of the hall –walking out actually on an assemblage that included Prince Albert!– and so Delany seized the occasion to remind the august body:

“I am a man.” Frederick Townsend Ward had not gone to the Orient in order to be put off. His attack on the gate of the city of Sung-chiang had been detected and prevented by the Chinese Christian Army there, and many of his initial gang of rowdy sailors had been killed, but the reward offered him by the head of the Taki Bank of Shanghai, $133,000 for this adjoining city, still stood, and there were still Western cutthroats in port with nothing to do but carouse who had not yet gotten themselves killed. He persuaded everyone that the reason why his attack had failed was that he had had no cannon and had had no backup from regular Chinese footsoldiers. He managed to recruit another band, amounting to some 200. They attacked the gate again during the hours of darkness on this night, and this time, by the use of cannon and explosives to blow open the gates, and by the use of pistols, repeating rifles, and cutlasses, they managed to gain and maintain control over the gate structure and hold it until the morning. It was rough work, as the Christians on the stairs leading up to the tower presented them with a solid wall of meat that had to be hacked through body by body. Of the attacking force, 62 were killed and 101 wounded, among them Ward himself, leaving only 37 of the invaders entirely intact. Ward, however, had had his fun and would have his money.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 “Ward and Gordon: Glorious Days of Looting” of Jonathan D. Spence’s TO CHANGE CHINA, WESTERN ADVISERS IN CHINA, 1620-1960 (pages 57-92; London: Penguin, 1969): First he accepted the service of Vincente Macanaya, a young Filipino soldier of fortune with a great following among the Manilamen on the docks of Shanghai. Macanaya was able to bring with him about two hundred of his followers. To these Ward added half a dozen Western drillmasters (mostly deserters from the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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British navy) and a small amount of artillery. By the middle of July 1860, he was back in front of the wails of Sungkiang. With the help of accurate artillery fire, and after fierce hand-to- hand fighting with the Taiping troops, the city was taken.

December 29, Saturday: Martin Robison Delany arrived home in Chatham, Canada from his journey abroad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

Dr. Martin Robison Delany’s OFFICIAL REPORT OF THE NIGER VALLEY EXPLORING PARTY. From this year into 1865, he would be serving as a surgeon for the black men of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers.

Summer: The settlement expedition for Abbeokuta in Africa, though ready with passengers and funding, began to falter as Martin Robison Delany elected to stay in America to seek emancipation for the enslaved.

November 26, Tuesday: From this day until May 24, 1862, the remaining chapters of Martin Robison Delany’s book BLAKE; OR, THE HUTS OF AMERICA: A TALE OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY, THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES, AND CUBA, a novel involving black insurrectionism which, according to Floyd Miller, amounted to “the first novelistic offering of a black writer to be published in the United States,” would be being serialized by Robert Hamilton in his publication, Weekly Anglo African Magazine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

Frederick Douglass commented that Martin Robison Delany “has gone about the same length in favor of black, as the whites have in favor of the doctrine of white superiority.” Underlying this may have been an attempt by Delany to privilege himself in the identity politics of the era as an all-black man capable of speaking on behalf of the race, in contradistinction to that Douglass fellow who was only part black and was therefore not entirely to be trusted, not entirely to be considered representative, matched by an attempt by Douglass to privilege himself in those identity politics by instancing that he had had experience of slavery, of which Delany had had none. Who then would be the more representative leader for American blacks, the man who had had experience of slavery or the man who was entirely black? The sovereignty of Liberia, which had become an independent nation as of 1847 with the cutting of the American purse-strings, was belatedly recognized by the US government. But President Abraham Lincoln was considering closer ports, such as some in South America, to which American free blacks might be exiled at a somewhat lower transport expense. At this point Delany’s African colonization plans collapsed and he switched over to recruiting black men for service with the Union Army.

The last class was graduated from Theodore Dwight Weld and Angelina Emily Grimké Weld’s Eagleswood School of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. This school had since 1854 been open to the children of white townspeople as well as to the children of members of the Union. Whether one could at any time have termed it a “Quaker” school is problematic. What is not problematic is that it had taken physical education for girls seriously, something of an innovation for the time. (Although Marcus Spring, the founder of the Raritan Bay Union, had married Friend Rebecca Buffum, daughter of the very prominent Rhode Island Quaker Arnold Buffum, the extent to which he ever embraced the culture of the Friends is not clear. Almost immediately Spring would re-purpose the physical plant of this school as an all-male as well as all-white “Eagleswood Military Academy, with both a literary and military faculty.” Spring’s academy would close after the civil war was over, around 1867, after which the facilities in question would no longer function as a school of any sort.)

Many white Americans were ambivalent about this recruitment of black Americans to fight. Such racist ambivalence is well reflected in a work by W.E. Woodward entitled MEET GENERAL GRANT, published in a much later timeframe (NY: H. Liveright, 1928), which would attempt to deny that such events ever in fact had occurred: The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world ... that ever became free without any effort of their own.... [The civil war] was not their business.... They twanged banjos around the railroad stations, sang melodious spirituals and believed that some Yankee would soon come along and give each of them forty acres of land and a mule.37 HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

May 24, Sunday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis conferred with Johnston in Richmond, Virginia. US CIVIL WAR

The completion of serialized publication of Martin Robison Delany’s book BLAKE; OR, THE HUTS OF AMERICA: A TALE OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY, THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES, AND CUBA, a novel involving black insurrectionism which, according to Floyd Miller, amounted to “the first novelistic offering of a black writer to be published in the United States,” by Robert Hamilton in his Weekly Anglo African Magazine.

After being refused a presentation at the Exhibition of 1862, Inno delle nazioni for solo voices, chorus and orchestra by Giuseppe Verdi to words of Boito, was performed for the initial time, at Her Majesty’s Theater, London.

Per page 3 of the Bunker-Hill Aurora and Boston Mirror, “The Atlantic Monthly, for June, opens with a paper on Walking, by the late Henry D. Thoreau, of Concord, who well understood the subject.”

37. In point of fact, a promise would be made by our federal government, that each former slave, in partial compensation for his or her unreimbursed labors while in the condition of enslavement, would receive starting-out help in the form of 40 acres and a mule. –In point of fact, however, our federal government does not ever honor such commitments to minority populations as from time to time it sees fit to dissemble that it is making. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

After Frederick Douglass met with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss the treatment of northern black soldiers during the insurrection, he began to travel through the cities of the North, recruiting free black men to fight under the banner of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers.

Then Dr. Martin Robison Delany also began to recruit for this newly forming regiment.

Charles Lenox Remond also would recruit for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March: The Stevenson family of Edinburgh, on their 5-month tour of Europe with Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson and his nanny, passed from Montone in the south of France toward Genoa. They would proceed southward to Naples, then head north via Rome, Florence, and Venice o Innsbruck.

Dr. Martin Robison Delany’s son Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany and Frederick Douglass’s sons Lewis Henry Douglass, age 22, and Charles Remond Douglass, age 19, enlisted in the newly forming 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment.38

The 1st Conscription Act: Because of recruiting difficulties, an act was necessary in the North making all white US CIVIL WAR

men between the ages of 20 and 45 liable to be called for military service. Service could be avoided only by paying a fee or finding a substitute or persuading the recruiters that actually you were a colored man. The act was seen as unfair to the working-class whites, and as a result there would be Irish rioting in New- York. White Americans are white Americans wherever they are: similar conscription act in the South would provoke similar resentments.

38. The older son would become a sergeant major for the Union during the war but later, as a civilian, would be first refused admission to a printers’ union — and then blacklisted because he was not a union man. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: Waldo Emerson decided that war was one of his Good-Things-Leading-To-Human-Elevation:

I shall always respect War hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the Vistas it opens of ... reconstructing and uplifting Society.

The central building that had been created for the new University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee –the institute for Episcopal students– was destroyed by Federal troops.

US CIVIL WAR Dr. Samuel Kneeland, Jr. entered the corps of surgeons of volunteers and was placed in charge, successively, of the university hospital in New Orleans, and of the marine hospital in Mobile. (Hopefully, he would not murder any of the soldiers there in the course of medical experiments.)

When he would learn that his son Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany had been among the survivors of the frontal assault of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteers upon Fort Wagner, Dr. Martin Robison Delany HDT WHAT? INDEX

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would commit himself wholeheartedly to the cause of the war against the Southern states.

Frederick Douglass was assured personally by Secretary of War Stanton in Washington DC that in exchange for recruiting black Southerners as Union soldiers he would be receiving an officer’s commission. (—Q: Would Stanton keep his promise? —A: Stanton would be a white man.)

NO!

US CIVIL WAR

John Andrew, a Massachusetts lawyer and politician, offered the following words of encouragement to Robert HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Gould Shaw, the white leader of the black recruits:

I know not, Mr. Commander, where in all human history to any given thousand men in arms there has been committed a work at once so proud, so precious, so full of hope and glory, as the work committed to you.

Carleton Mabee’s BLACK FREEDOM

The Tappanite-related American Peace Society itself acquiesced in the war. In doing so, it indulged in the sophistry of considering the war not to be a war in the usual international sense, but merely the attempt of a government to punish its own subjects for breaking the law. Indirectly the peace society ... supported the federal conscription law as necessary without indicating concern to secure exemption for conscientious objectors.... Among the Concord transcendentalists, Thoreau, who had once advocated going to prison to shame the state into giving up both war and slavery, in a sharp reversal now believed that suffering in this war was regenerating the nation. Similarly, the once anti-institutional, individualistic Waldo Emerson now argued that government must have dictatorial powers during wartime and that participation in war taught self-reliance — surely not the same kind of nonconformist self-reliance that he had once valued. To the disillusionment of Moncure Daniel Conway, one of Emerson’s individualistic, antiwar, antislavery disciples, Emerson even accepted an appointment as an official visitor at West Point.

Pencil sketch of Fort Ridgely in the summer of 1863 after the race war HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December: Dr. Martin Robison Delany wrote to the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, volunteering “to recruit Colored Troops in any of the Southern or sceded [sic] states.”

The Union general in charge of occupied Louisiana, Nathaniel P. Banks, put freed slaves to work for their former owners as “apprentices” at a wage of $3.00 per month. Any former slave found away from his or her place of “employment” without a pass from his or her “employer” would be taken into custody by the Union soldiers. Daniel Foster was commissioned Captain of a unit that became the 37th U.S. Colored Troops. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1865

February: In an effort to fend off a last-minute move to impress slaves into the Southern army, the union government commissioned Dr. Martin Robison Delany a major (he was the first black to receive any sort of officer’s rank) and sent him to the island of Hilton Head to recruit the former slaves there for the Union forces.

US CIVIL WAR

April: Dr. Martin Robison Delany became an official of the newly formed Freedman’s Bureau.

April 14, Friday morning: There was another raising-of-the-flag celebration at Fort Sumter. The flag of the Union, lowered in the surrender of 1861 and raised again the previous Tuesday but without adequate ceremony, was again run up the pole. Some 30,000 African-Americans were present for this piece of theater, among them Dr. Martin Robison Delany and the son of Denmark Vesey. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was present and orated, and William Lloyd Garrison was present and sobbed. Federal photographers under the supervision of Matthew Brady recorded the flag-raising ceremony at Ft. Sumter, marking the anniversary of Major Anderson’s surrender to Confederate forces. They then moved through Charleston, documenting damage from bombardment and fire.39 US CIVIL WAR

Times change and attitudes change with them. In the aftermath of our civil bloodletting the Brooklyn, New York proslavery newspaper Brooklyn Eagle would celebrate the Reverend Beecher, our “Barnum of religion,” by means of a postcard of his magnificent statue in front of the borough hall of the municipality (see following screen).

39. A good time was had by all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1868

In Frances Rollin’s biography of Major Martin Robison Delany, we find a reference to his “pride of race, which even distinguishes him from the noted colored men of the present time. This finds an apt illustration in a

remark made once by the distinguished Frederick Douglass. Said he, ‘I thank God for making me a man simply; but Delany always thanks him for making him a black man.’” What Douglass actually had said, that provoked this, had been said in 1862: he had commented that Delany “has gone about the same length in favor of black, as the whites have in favor of the doctrine of white superiority.” Underlying all this may have been an attempt by Delany to privilege himself in the identity politics of the era as an all-black man capable of speaking on behalf of the race, in contradistinction to that Douglass fellow who was only part black and was therefore not entirely to be trusted, not entirely to be considered representative, matched by an attempt by Douglass to privilege himself in those identity politics by instancing that he had had experience of slavery, of which Delany had had none. Who then would be the more representative leader for American blacks, the man who had had experience of slavery or the man who was entirely black?

(Delany alleged at this point that he had known nothing of the plan for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but others who had also been present at the meetings in Chatham would mock such claims of ignorance.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1879

Dr. Martin Robison Delany’s PRINCIPIA OF ETHNOLOGY: THE ORIGIN OF RACES AND COLOR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1885

January 24, Saturday: Martin Robison Delany died in Xenia, Ohio. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1998

Tunde Adeleke’s UNAFRICAN AMERICANS: NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACK NATIONALISTS AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION (Lexington: UP of Kentucky). Key nineteenth-century American black nationalists —Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, and Henry McNeal Turner— are derisively portrayed in Tunde Adeleke’s UNAFRICAN AMERICANS. Professor Adeleke, educated at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) and the University of Western Ontario and currently employed at Loyola University (New Orleans), argues that Delany, Crummell, and Turner —all occasional emigrationists who themselves sojourned in Liberia— were collaborators in the late-nineteenth-century imperialist ideas and policies that led to the colonization of most of Africa. Adeleke understands his subjects as reaching toward black nationalism, or pan-Africanism, but failing because of two conditions: First, relatively few African Americans endorsed or envisioned emigration to West Africa, so the theoreticians of resettlement lacked the audience that might have pushed them further into black nationalism. Second, European businessmen and governments were interested in the natural resources and cheap labor that Africa seemed to promise. Hence, Delany, Crummell, and Turner were led into collaboration with economic and military forces that the black men thought might serve their interests but soon proved to be powerful beyond their influence. The strength of UNAFRICAN AMERICANS is its author’s frank presentation of the anti-African, or civilizationist, face of its subjects. The weakness of the work is its blindness to the historical background of emigrationism. Adeleke begins his story around 1850, but many of the patterns he analyzes —including the roles individuals like Delany, Crummell, and Turner played in commerce, governance, and migration— were established between 1780 and 1830. The black nationalists’ beliefs and actions look less individual and more structural, less idealistic and more self-serving, if we consider the earlier history. Moreover, the book conveys an overall uneasiness with the idea of black nationalism — an uneasiness the author does not confront but that is worth discussing in a review. Adeleke argues that, beginning with the approval of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, former integrationist Martin Robison Delany turned to Africa. Abandoning hope for liberty and self- governance for black people in the USA, Delany announced that African Americans could achieve civil rights in West Africa and, in 1859 and 1860, he traveled in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Niger Valley to arrange the future himself. In Abeokuta (birthplace of Wole Soyinka, Fela, and in the 1940s, a Nigerian women’s anti-collaborationist resistance movement) Delany HDT WHAT? INDEX

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contracted with local chiefs for land for African American settlers. Equality with indigenous peoples —whether cultural, economic, or political— was an impossibility for Delany, who was convinced that African American men would carry civilization, including Christianity, to West Africa and would be the governors of new states there. He thought that African American men could not achieve independence in isolation, but would rely on European markets for West African produce (cotton would be a prime export, he thought) and on cheap, indigenous labor for agricultural production. He envisioned what Adeleke acidly calls a “triple alliance” —collaboration among European industrialists, African American governors, and native laborers— in the development of new societies and commercial systems in West Africa. To this end, Delany traveled to Great Britain in 1860 and lectured to businessmen, scientists, and government officials about the value of African produce and the cheapness and availability of African labor. Tension between the American North and South in the 1850s gave him an opportunity to predict to British manufacturers the unreliability of the American cotton crop in the 1860s and to extol West African agricultural produce for manufacturers who needed steady sources of raw materials. He did argue that “legitimate” trade would muscle out the remnants of the slave trade. But his overwhelming vision was one of African workmen employed by African American settlers who traded with European manufacturers. As an episcopal priest, missionary, entrepreneur, “civilizationist,” and Delany’s host in Monrovia, Crummell could be seen as an even less attractive figure than Delany. Crummell presented West Africa as a field of rich natural resources waiting to be exploited by African Americans. He justified the use of violence against indigenous peoples, whether by African American settlers or Europeans. Not only did he assert the right of settlers to battle with native peoples, but he commended the Belgian government for its forceful moves against Africans in the Congo. (Adeleke does not note that other emigrations, like John Russwurm, saw the Americo-Liberian settlers as being in the same relationship that Englishmen had been with American Indians in the seventeenth century.) Moreover, Crummell argued that the slave trade and New World slavery were providential, were God’s way of preparing black people to enter the modern world of commerce, religion, and democratic governance. African American settlers, according to this argument, were divine instruments, forged in the New World, for civilizing and converting Africa. Turner, who went to Liberia some years after Delany and Crummell, echoed their ideas about civilization and commerce, but with some significant variations. After the federal retreat from Reconstruction and the Supreme Court’s recision of civil rights extended in the 1870s to African Americans, Turner began to speak of “reparation” to blacks for the sufferings and inequities of enslavement. He demanded of the federal government $40 billion to fund the travel of African Americans to West HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Africa and start-up costs for their agricultural and mining concerns there. He criticized American isolationism, contrasting it to European focus on Africa. He traveled as bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to South Africa and congratulated the Boer settlers for bringing civilization to the native peoples there. Turner had an aptitude for the infelicitous phrase. One day, he wrote, “millions will thank heaven for the limited toleration of American slavery” (p. 101). Adeleke’s distaste for his subjects is evident throughout his book, but he is also sometimes sympathetic to them. He resists the easy road of stating that Delany, Crummell, and Turner were so enthralled by European civilization that they dismissed African culture and, indeed, Africans’ lives. Instead, he argues, more complexly, that the three men aimed for black nationalism but were hamstrung by their context (insufficient interest in settlement on the part of African Americans and overwhelming interest in commercial appropriation on the part of Europeans). They were at heart American integrationists who had little true interest in Africa and who returned to the USA as soon as they felt the political climate was hopeful there. Crummell, for instance, lived in Liberia only between 1853 and 1872. They never knew, Adeleke reasons, the Africa they betrayed and abandoned. Consideration of the seventy years before Adeleke begins his analysis reveals that his subjects’ anti-Africanism can be explained in another way. Efforts to quell the slave trade by means of “legitimate trade” began in the 1780s, but were neither purely pro-African in intent nor antislavery in practice. The Sierra Leone Company, for instance, envisioned African laborers “liberated” from their traditional societies and social leadership and busy producing raw material for British manufacture and consumption. The same laborers were to become consumers of British finished goods. The “legitimate trade” campaign actually strengthened the institution of slavery in areas where goods for the Atlantic trade could be produced. The goods were produced and transported not by independent farmers but often by slaves. The first generation of Americo-Liberian settlers knew this and sought to take advantage of it. From its inception in the 1820s, Liberia was meant to be a commercial colony utilizing cheap African labor. Despite the rhetoric of carrying civilization and religion to the natives and undermining the slave trade, the Americo-Liberians and their white supporters envisioned Monrovia as an entrepot that would shuttle American goods (including such slave-produced goods as tobacco, along with whiskey, cloth, glassware, and guns) to Africans while returning African goods (including such goods as palm oil, camwood, and ivory, harvested and transported to the coast by slaves) to the United States. Records of the blacks and whites who traveled to Liberia in the 1820s under the aegis of the American Colonization Society reveal that they knew that slave labor could produce tremendous wealth and had few HDT WHAT? INDEX

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compunctions about dealing in slave-produced material even if they opposed the Atlantic slave trade. The violent disagreements between the Americo-Liberian settlers and the native groups, beginning in the mid-1820s, are usually described as disputes about land possession, but it is at least as likely that they were disputes about the misuse of local laborers by the settlers. Even less fortunate than the locals who ended up working for the settlers were the “recaptives,” who were rescued from slavers at sea only to be indentured to Americo-Liberian settlers. A tradition of the misuse of laborers would of course result in the investigation in the 1920s by the League of Nations the result of which was that Liberian officials were condemned for profiting from the unfree labor of indigenous people. The Americo-Liberian colonist is usually understood in American historiography as an abolitionist or freedom fighter, but he was really a middleman attempting to shuttle goods produced by unfree or semi-free black people to the Atlantic economy. He was someone who transferred the value of the labor of black people, often enslaved, to a larger economic system, hoping to retain a portion for himself. Perhaps a good example is Lott Cary, who is often seen as a black Virginian preacher and abolitionist who sought a greater freedom in Liberia. In the early nineteenth century, Cary was a hired slave in a Richmond tobacco warehouse — exactly the person through whose hands the value of slave labor passed. In the 1820s, he sailed to Monrovia, ostensibly as a missionary (one of his nineteenth-century hagiographers conceded that there was no evidence that he ever preached to the natives), but actually with plans to settle himself as an entrepreneur moving goods between the USA and areas around Monrovia. The move to Liberia was meant primarily to improve his position as a middleman. He became a scourge of the natives and died in a gunpowder explosion as he was preparing for one of many assaults on them. The large question, of course, is why someone like Cary has persistently gotten good press as an American freedom fighter. The importance of Cary and early Liberia for Adeleke’s book is that the role of middleman between black labor (whether it was cheap, semi-free, or slave) and the Euro-American economy was an established one into which men like Delany, Crummell, and Turner fell easily. It was part of the structure of the Atlantic world, not merely a choice Delany and company made. Although black nationalist rhetoric might be a part of it —Cary indeed said he was going to found a black nation— the role was essentially economic and suggested no abolitionist implications at all. Often skilled people with some experience of economic advancement, the Americo-Liberian settlers, about 13,000 between 1822 and 1865, migrated in an effort to ratchet up their positions in the Atlantic economy by availing themselves of indigenous land and labor. Perhaps the most accurate way to describe the American black nationalists of the mid-nineteenth century is that they stood at the interface of slavery and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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imperialism, drawing their assumptions about labor and markets from the past while gesturing toward the future forms of commerce and governance they understood only imperfectly. Crummell earns particular scorn in UNAFRICAN AMERICANS for the lengths to which he was willing to pursue the providential argument that God had planned the slave trade and New World slavery as instruments of a great good — the Christianizing and civilizing of Africa. The use of this providential argument in the 1860s was even worse than Adeleke relates, since it had been a standard application of theodicy to the slave trade and to slavery in the eighteenth century, but by the second half of the nineteenth century had lost its respectability. Had Crummell articulated the providential argument about a century earlier, as did Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, James Albert Ukawasw Gronniosaw, Lemuel Haynes, and Phillis Wheatley, he would have been in the black avant-garde, which was using providentialism to argue for its own role in the Atlantic world, but in his time he was at best out of date, at worst in bad faith. Crummell’s use of providence was entirely self-serving and out of line with mid-to-late-nineteenth-century Anglican theology. The omnipotent, omniscient God of the Protestant Reformation was an overruling deity who brought good out of evil by overruling the sins of humankind with events He wills to be. The most obvious example was the overruling of the Crucifixion by the Resurrection: the Reformed God worked in human affairs by bringing good out of evil. However, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century British Protestants began criticizing the idea that God works through human sin and suffering. Central to Arminian religion was the claim that suffering was not part of the divine plan. The older idea of a God who wounds with one hand and heals with the other (as the Puritans put it) retreated in the end of the eighteenth century into theology branded derisively the “New Divinity” and often called “hyper-Calvinism” or “consistent Calvinism.” This discredited theodicy did have one value to Crummell in exalting the person who could perceive and articulate the providential design in human suffering. Probably Crummell’s pronouncements on the divine design in the slave trade and slavery were not the defense of “religious optimism” (p. 102) against the pain of racism, but rather an effort to situate himself as the major interpreter both of centuries of the slave trade and enslavement and of the establishment of black settlers societies in West Africa. Unfortunately, Adeleke does not treat reparations in depth, but mentions the idea only as part of Turner’s program that had not appeared in Delany’s or Crummell’s. But one assumes that had he written more he would have argued that as an idea reparations signify an effort to deal with the costs of slavery, but in practice they are liable to become the property of elites like Turner. Funds for the establishment of a governing, entrepreneurial class of African Americans in West Africa can scarcely be seen as an honest effort at reparations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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UNAFRICAN AMERICANS shows an uneasiness with black nationalism, or pan-Africanism, that Adeleke does not seek to resolve. On the one hand, the author assumes that black nationalism, or pan- Africanism, in the sense of ideas and practices predicated on the unity of black people throughout the world and aimed at their common good, does exist and can be embodied in a state as well as articulated in a philosophy. Delany, Crummell, and Turner, Adeleke reasons, moved toward black nationalism but reached only an impure form of it. Black nationalism, or pan-Africanism, can inhere in an African state as well as in the hearts and minds of diasporic blacks. On the other hand, the author’s arguments imply the opposite — that there is no unity among black people and that African states are not embodiments of black nationalism. Hence, on the one hand, Adeleke writes that “a truly Pan-African and black nationalist program is one propelled by conscious efforts to harmonize, theoretically and practically, blacks in the diaspora and in the African continent” (p. 145) and “the spirit of Pan-Africanism ... emphasizes, a priori, solidarity between Africa and peoples of African descent in the diaspora” (p. 151). Yet, on the other hand, he acknowledges complexity, diversity, and conflict among black people and states that “to expect of black American nationalists absolute and unswerving commitment to Africanism and Pan-Africanism is unrealistic” (p. 148). A good example of the author’s irresolution is his argument that in “the articulation and defense of black/African interests” against European imperialism “one area of success was Liberia.” In reality, Liberia expanded its borders through aggression, provided unfree laborers for rubber plantations, and degenerated into various tribal and settler factions that have poisoned the country with carnage and mayhem. It is true that Adeleke addresses only a slice of Liberian history, but one questions the integrity of thinking about Liberia in the imperialist decades without also considering the colonizing decades as well as the years in which Nigerian-dominated ECOMOG forces intervened in Liberian politics in the name of stability. Adeleke’s comments about black and African interests and Liberia’s “success” are strange. Here, Delany and company are small fry: the real questions are the legitimacy of black nationalist philosophy and the legitimacy of African states that have relied upon it. If Adeleke is representative of current thinking about black nationalism, the philosophy is probably in much the same situation as American republicanism was in the post- Revolutionary years. A revolutionary ideology made virtually no allowance for differences and conflict among the white population and used various blunt instruments to exclude blacks and Indians from political life. Growth in the population, in the economy, and in the size of the nation blew away the revolutionary ideology forever and pulled forward a middle-class democracy in which diversity is accepted and in which the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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government must be responsive to a mass of politically-active citizens. Minority groups like blacks and Indians did not advance to equality quickly, but democracy has fostered their advancement in the long run. As democracy grew out of republicanism, older ideals like the mental and moral unity of the citizens (what Karl Popper called the mark of a closed society) were replaced by pragmatic notions like adaptation, inclusion, progress, and toleration (what Popper called the standard of an open society). Perhaps tomorrow’s black nationalism will grow out of today’s (or yesterday’s) just as democratic ideology grew out of republicanism. Acceptance of diversity and different interests among black people could reform black nationalist philosophy, and a reformed black nationalism could deflate the rhetoric of center and unity as well as guide a worthwhile political culture in nations like Liberia. Although he is not mentioned in UNAFRICAN AMERICANS, Wole Soyinka, one suspects, is the giant behind the book, particularly in his arguments about the importance of transcending the ideas and the politics of centralization while still maintaining the African nation-states that were formed in the imperialist and nationalist decades. John Saillant. “Review of Tunde Adeleke, UNAFRICAN AMERICANS: NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACK NATIONALISTS AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION.” http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/ showrev.cgi?path=25398919184889. Copyright © 1999, H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission questions, please contact hbooks@h- net.msu.edu.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: August 26, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.