Charles Henry Langston and the African American Struggle in Kansas by Richard B
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Charles Henry Langston and the African American Struggle in Kansas by Richard B. Sheridan harles Henry Langston’s career as an African American educator, civil rights leader, and politician has been ne- glected by comparison with the achievements of his younger brother, John Mercer Langston (1829–1899), and his grandson, Langston Hughes (1902–1967). The former, a graduate of Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, became a lawyer in 1855 and practiced in Ohio for fifteen years. His career was distinguished by his appointment as dean of the law school and later acting president of Howard University, president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Insti- 1 tute, minister resident to the Republic of Haiti, and representative from Virginia to the fifty-first U.S. Congress. The grand- son, of course, became perhaps America’s most famous African American poet, playwright, novelist, and travel writer, the C“Dean of Negro Writers in America” and the “Negro Poet Laureate.” Although overshadowed by a brother and a grand- Richard B. Sheridan earned his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is professor emeritus in the University of Kansas De- partment of Economics. His research interests include the history of slavery in Kansas and Missouri from 1854 to 1865. He edited and compiled Freedom’s Crucible: The Underground Railroad in Lawrence and Douglas County, Kansas, 1854–1865: A Reader (Division of Continuing Education, University of Kansas, 1998). 1. John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol; The First and Only Negro Representative in Congress from the Old Dominion (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1894), 1, 12–14; William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829–65 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 1–18. 268 KANSAS HISTORY In what came to be known as the Oberlin–Wellington Rescue, the "rescuers" stand captured and held in the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, jail court- yard in April 1859. Among these brave men is Charles Henry Langston (ninth from the right, holding his hat across his chest). son, Charles Langston’s was an exemplary life that seem- mitted, or freed, along with her daughter Mary. A man of ingly confronted and tried to correct racial injustice at landed wealth and many slaves, Captain Quarles had pe- 2 every turn. It is a life worthy of reconsideration. culiar and unusual views regarding slaves and their man- Born on a plantation in Louisa County, Virginia, in agement. He believed that slavery should be abolished but 1817, Charles Langston was the second son of Captain that the mode of abolition should be by the voluntary ac- Ralph Quarles and Lucy Jane Langston, his part Native tion of the slaveowner. The couple’s three sons, Gideon American, part African American slave whom he manu- Quarles, Charles Henry, and John Mercer Langston, were born free, and in his last will and testament of October 18, 1833, Ralph Quarles bequeathed to them the greater part of 2. Langston Hughes’s mother was Caroline Mercer Langston Hugh- 3 es, daughter of Mary S. Patterson Leary Langston and Charles H. his real and personal property. Langston; his father was James Hughes. His parents separated soon after his birth, and young Langston was raised by his mother and grandmoth- (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1940); Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston er. Until he was twelve years old, Langston lived chiefly in Lawrence, Hughes, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Mark Scott, Kansas, with his grandmother and an aunt and uncle. In later life he re- “Langston Hughes of Kansas,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central called with a mixture of affection and anger his boyhood experiences in Plains 3 (Spring 1980): 1–18. Lawrence. See Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New 3. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, 1, York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945); Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander 12–14. CHARLES HENRY LANGSTON 269 John Mercer Langston wrote in his autobiography that grated institution, the town and surrounding countryside his father was a “person of broad and varied education, also had numerous black residents and stations on the un- with a love of learning and culture remarkable for his day.” derground railroad that aided fugitive slaves on their jour- 6 Of his brother Charles, John wrote that the start his father ney to freedom in Canada. gave him in study was of large service throughout his life. Little time was lost after the Langstons arrived at Charles was sixteen years old when his father died in April Chillicothe before Gideon and Charles were sent to Ober- 1834. “He was not large nor apparently firm of body; but lin and enrolled in the college’s preparatory school. Regis- well endowed intellectually,” according to his brother John. tering in the fall semester of 1835, they were the first “His disposition and temper though ordinarily well con- African Americans enrolled in Oberlin. One of the trustees trolled, were not naturally of the easy and even sort. In his of the college wrote on February 10, 1836, that among the constitution, he was impetuous and aggressive; and under students were “two from Virginia of color & they are as discipline and opposition, he was always restive, yet, he well received & treated as others.” On March 6, 1836, both yielded with reasonable docility and obedience to the train- of the boys were baptized and received into membership ing to which his father, interested in his education, sought of the Oberlin church. Charles reenrolled in the preparato- to subject him.” During his adult years he was said to have ry school in 1842–1843. At this point in his life, Charles 4 “far surpassed his brother” John as a debater and orator. Langston was said to be a young man “of sound English In September 1834 the three Langston brothers were attainment, large reading, and general information gath- taken from the Virginia plantation to new lands beyond ered from contact as well as study.” He had been sent to the Allegheny Mountains in the free state of Ohio. A pri- Ohio to secure a liberal education, “the best furnished at 7 mary motive for the migration was the increasing restric- that time by any school to one of his class.” tiveness toward free blacks in Virginia, on the one hand, Oberlin College authorities encouraged the students to and, on the other, the opportunities for free blacks in Ohio teach in public or private schools in Ohio during the three- to take advantage of higher education, land purchases, and months’ vacation in the winter season. This policy enabled wage employment. They settled near Chillicothe in south- the students to earn some money and “make the most of central Ohio, where the Langston brothers lived on a farm themselves as scholars and useful members of society.” that had been purchased by their guardian and old family During one of the winter breaks, Charles was called upon friend Colonel William D. Gooch. By 1830 the black popu- by a committee of blacks from a settlement near Chillicothe lation of Chillicothe numbered about three hundred, one- “to advise with him as to the employment of a school- tenth of the total. Most worked as farmhands, town labor- teacher for the settlement during the winter.” They offered 5 ers, on the river and canals, or as domestics. to pay him ten dollars a month in cash and furnish board and room by living a week with each family patronizing pproximately 150 miles northeast of Chillicothe is the school. Charles, who had not reached his sixteenth the residential town of Oberlin, Ohio, the seat of birthday, agreed to teach the children of the all-black Oberlin College. The college was founded in 1833, school, and it is recorded that “everything in the school 8 and from the beginning it reflected radical views on all moved on to the entire satisfaction of all interested.” Amatters of reform, religion, education, and antislavery. The three Langston brothers were living in Ohio when John M. Langston wrote that “to Oberlin belongs the honor they reached the age of twenty-one and received the lega- of being the first institution of learning in the world to give cies provided for in the will of Ralph Quarles. Sparse data woman equal educational opportunities and advantages with man. To it, too, belongs the honor of being the first college of the United States to accept the negro student and 6. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, give him equal educational opportunities and advantages 97–103. Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), argued that the small college town of with the white.” Not only was the college a racially inte- Oberlin, Ohio, represented the most advanced Northern attitudes toward the issue of slavery and states’ rights in the period before the Civil War. 7. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, 89, 4. Ibid., 1, 11–12, 21–22. 82–83; Cheek and Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Free- 5. Cheek and Cheek, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Free- dom, 34–35, 84–85, 88–89, 97. dom, 19–47; Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, 8. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, 82–85, 23–53. 87–93. 270 KANSAS HISTORY has been found for Gideon Langston, who, after attending Langston would achieve new recognition as black leader 11 the preparatory school at Oberlin College in 1835–1836 and black Republican.” Moreover, the rescue of John Price and 1839, settled in Cincinnati and became the proprietor from his kidnappers represented a victory over the slave of a livery stable.