A Disease in the Public Mind (32 page)

Their obsession with violence led the Browns to ignore attempts by moderate settlers to work out a compromise with the proslavery newcomers.
The moderates were “free soil” men, and they soon spelled out what that meant. They wanted to bar not only slaves but free Negroes from Kansas, a la the Wilmot Proviso. When John Brown Jr. freed two slaves from a nearby farm, the other members of his militia group, the Pottawatomie Rifle Company, were so angry that they voted to dismiss him as their captain.

John Brown Sr. was enraged by the antiblack attitude of the moderates and denounced them in a violent speech at a public meeting in Osawatomie in April 1856. He declared he was ready to see the country “drenched in blood” before he agreed to their view of black Americans. He considered them “his brothers and equals.”

Both sides held elections and claimed majority support. Each group had its share of wild men. There was a rash of killings, some of them personal arguments that had nothing to do with slavery.

Anger mounted on both sides. The proslavery men struck first, after a proslavery sheriff was shot while sitting in his tent. About 750 Missourians, Alabamians, and South Carolinians stormed into Lawrence, Kansas's largest antislavery town, and wrecked the place. They burned and looted houses of the antislavery leaders, blew up the Free State Hotel, and smashed up two antislavery newspaper offices. They did not kill anyone, largely because the most outspoken antislavery men had fled in advance of their arrival.
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The Browns lived twenty-five miles from Lawrence. By the time they arrived with their thirty-four-man rifle company, the attackers had departed. John Brown was infuriated by the sight of the ruined hotel and other houses. “Something is going to be done now,” he declared.

The following night, Brown, his four sons, and two other followers dragged five unarmed men out of their cabins along Pottawatomie Creek, known to be a proslavery stronghold. Brown ordered his sons to execute them before the horrified eyes of their wives and children, using two-edged cavalry swords that all but amputated arms and legs and heads. Perhaps most appalling were the murders of James P. Doyle and his two oldest sons, while Doyle's wife, Mahala, pleaded frantically for their lives and four other bewildered Doyle children watched the butchery. The Doyles were immigrants
from Tennessee who had come to Kansas seeking a better life. They had no interest in owning slaves.

The goal of this slaughter, John Brown said, was “to strike terror into the hearts of the proslavery people.” Its immediate effect was terror in the souls of his sons. Back in their camp, Owen collapsed in hysterical fits of weeping. “There shall be no more such work,” he sobbed. John Brown Jr., who had already shown signs of mental instability, wandered in a daze, babbling. Jason, who was seriously mentally ill most of the time and had not accompanied the killers, shouted in his father's face that it was “an uncalled for wicked act.” Brown grimly replied that he would let “God be my judge.”
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CHAPTER 18

The Real Uncle Tom and the Unknown South He Helped Create

Readers of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
had no idea that there was a real Uncle Tom. His name was Josiah Henson. He was born a slave in Maryland in 1789. Harriet Beecher Stowe admitted more than once that his story was part of the inspiration for her novel. But she never adequately explained why her fictional Uncle Tom was so different from the real one.
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The difference was and is profound. The real Tom should prompt modern readers to reevaluate slavery's impact on American blacks. The traditional story runs something like this: Slavery was a degrading, humiliating, demoralizing experience. Any black man or woman who endured it was reduced to subhuman status. Therefore they and their descendants, even when emancipated, would have to be treated like children, at best, or creatures from an alien planet at worst. Before and after the Civil War, this idea played no small part in poisoning the idea of black equality in the American public mind, North and South.

Mrs. Stowe never spent any serious time in the South. Almost everything she knew about the slave system was acquired from reading Theodore Weld's
Slavery As It Is
, from conversations with abolitionist friends, and from visits to nearby plantations during the ten years she and her husband spent in Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from Kentucky.

During her visits to plantations in Kentucky, Mrs. Stowe saw blacks doing a remarkable variety of things. Often a black managed an entire plantation as the overseer. Others were blacksmiths, shoemakers, or tailors. But this, Mrs. Stowe believed, was only true of Kentucky, a border state. Elsewhere, especially on the Deep South's cotton plantations, slaves remained subhuman automatons.

To inspire outrage and pity, Mrs. Stowe portrayed her fictional Uncle Tom as an impossible mixture of competence and servility. She mentioned almost casually that he ran his master's plantation. But she never gave readers a glimpse of him at work. Instead she spent pages describing Tom as so kind-hearted that he verges on being a pathetic yes-man who rarely challenged his master's decisions.

Josiah Henson gives us a different picture of slavery in his autobiography, which was published in 1849. Henson left no doubt that the system could be brutal. His father got into a fistfight with an overseer who tried to molest his wife. He was given a hundred lashes and one of his ears was amputated. After that, the elder Henson became a morose sullen ghost of his previously cheerful self. A few years later, the master was drowned crossing a river on horseback and his slaves were sold by his heirs. Josiah and his mother were separated until she persuaded her new master to buy her son too.

These experiences did not break Henson's spirit. When he was still in his teens, his new master, Isaac Riley, began calling him “a smart fellow.” His fellow slaves predicted he would do “great things” when he became a man. Soon he was vowing to “out-hoe, out-reap, out-husk, out-dance, out-everything every competitor.” He did not hesitate to compete with white men as well as fellow slaves. He had a low opinion of the farm's sloppy, careless overseer. When he caught the man defrauding the master, Henson reported him.

Isaac Riley fired the thief, and Henson asked for a chance to oversee the farm. He was soon raising “more than double the crops, with more cheerful and willing labor, than was ever seen on the estate before.” Not only did he superintend the day-to-day work, he brought the harvested wheat and tobacco to market and bargained skillfully to bring home astonishing profits.
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The fictional Uncle Tom admired his incompetent master, even after he sold him south. “Set him 'longside of other masrs—who's had the treatment and the livin' I've had?” he told his wife. The real Uncle Tom had no such high opinion of Isaac Riley. He was “coarse and vulgar in his habits, unprincipled and cruel in his general deportment.” Riley sometimes cursed Henson for not getting a better price for a crop, and yet boasted to friends about his new overseer's skill at the marketing table. “He was quite incompetent to handle the business himself,” Henson added.

Riley was always short of money, thanks to his bad habits. He gave his slaves a minimum diet of cornmeal and salt herring. Henson secretly supplemented their allowances with selections from “the superior crops I was raising.” He soothed his conscience by reminding himself that he was saving Riley a “large salary” for a white overseer.

At the age of twenty-two, Henson married “a very well-taught girl, belonging to a neighboring family.” By this time he had become a devout Christian, thanks to the influence of his mother and a white man named McKinney, who was a part-time preacher to local slaves. Henson's religion helped him put up with Riley. Henson considered it his duty to be “faithful to him in the position in which he placed me.” For many years he made enough money to finance Riley's dissolute lifestyle.

Riley became involved in a lawsuit with his brother-in-law over some jointly owned property. This blunder created a scene that was the opposite of the slave servility so often pictured in
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Stumbling into Henson's cabin well after midnight, a drunken Riley fell on his knees before the fire and moaned, “O Sie [Josiah] I'm ruined, ruined!”

“How so, Master?” asked Henson.

“They've got a judgment against me and in less than two weeks every nigger I've got will be put up and sold.”

Riley began to curse his brother-in-law, who had won the lawsuit. Frantically, he threw his arms around Henson. “You can do it, Sie. Won't you help me? Won't you?”

Henson asked what he was talking about. Riley said he wanted Henson to take the farm's slaves to his brother Amos's plantation in Kentucky. There they would be safe from seizure and his brother would give Riley enough money for their services for him to survive in Maryland. Henson agreed to take the eighteen slaves (including his wife) beyond the reach of the Maryland court. He plotted a route, bought a wagon, and stocked it with food. They rode overland to Wheeling, West Virginia, where Henson sold the wagon, bought a boat, and sailed down the Ohio River to Cincinnati. There they encountered several free blacks, who urged them to head for Canada. Henson refused to double-cross his master.
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By mid-April 1825, they reached Amos Riley's Kentucky plantation. It was a large operation, with over a hundred slaves. Amos Riley, too, made Josiah Henson his overseer, and he successfully managed this much bigger business. A friendly Methodist clergyman gave Henson lessons in the art of preaching and urged him to seek his freedom. Henson persuaded Amos Riley to let him return to Maryland to visit Isaac Riley and black friends on nearby plantations. He had earned enough money from preaching in black churches in his Kentucky neighborhood to negotiate with Isaac Riley for his freedom. They agreed on $450, and Henson gave him $350 and a note for the balance.

Back in Kentucky, Henson learned from Amos Riley that he would have to raise another $650 to be a free man. Henson quietly planned and executed an escape to Ohio with his wife and four children. In a few weeks he was safe in Canada. There he started a sawmill that was soon selling thousands of feet of black walnut lumber in Boston and New York. He persuaded the Canadian government to let him start a manual-labor school to teach escaped slaves skills that would increase their earning power.

With help from affluent Canadian and American friends, Henson sailed to England to raise money for his school and to display the timber from his sawmill. He exhibited the gleaming wood at the 1851 London World's Fair.
With a mixture of pride and ruefulness, he noted that “among all the exhibitors from every nation in Europe, from Asia and America and the Isles of the Sea, there was not a single black man but myself.”

Toward the end of this visit to England, the Archbishop of Canterbury invited Henson to his palace and chatted with him for about ninety minutes. The prelate was amazed to learn that Henson had spent most of his life as a slave. “Will you tell me, sir, how you learned our language so well?” he asked.

Henson said he had always listened closely to the way white people talked and learned to imitate those who spoke most correctly. The contrast between this extraordinary black man's conversation and Uncle Tom's crude dialect is final proof of how different the real Tom was from his fictional counterpart.
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•      •      •

Josiah Henson was not some sort of mysterious exception to the rule in the slave world of the South. There were black men like him in almost every southern state. In South Carolina, William Ellison's master (perhaps also his father) apprenticed him to a cotton gin maker. Ellison swiftly learned this technology and soon had enough money from repairing gins to purchase his freedom and then the freedom of his wife and children. By 1860, he owned a thousand acres of land and sixty-three slaves. He was one of the richest planters in the state.

We have seen that George Washington appointed slave overseers at Mount Vernon in the 1790s. By the 1850s, black overseers were far more common than most Northerners of that era—and most Americans of the twenty-first century—have realized. Some historians estimate that blacks predominated in that position on roughly 70 percent of the plantations with a hundred or more slaves. On smaller plantations, the overseer was almost always black.
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The importance of these black men can be glimpsed in a cry of distress from a Louisiana planter when his slave overseer died. “I have lost poor Leven, one of the most faithful blacks that ever lived. He was truth and
honesty and without a fault that I ever discovered. He has overseen the plantation nearly three years, and has done better at it than any white man had ever done before.”
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Managing plantations was by no means the only goal to which a black man might aspire in the Deep South, in spite of being a slave. Twenty-seven percent of the adult male slaves in the city of Charleston were skilled artisans such as blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers. They operated as virtually free men. A slave carpenter or shoemaker would and could advertise his services, negotiate his own contracts, receive and pay money, and even live in his own house. His slave status required him to pay a percentage of his income to his owner. Otherwise he was a relatively free man.

Slave artisans frequently made enough money to buy their freedom. In the 1850s, with cotton soaring on the commodity exchanges, the price of a slave was high, perhaps $1,700 for a blacksmith. That a black artisan could earn this much money and pay his own living expenses and a portion to his owner is impressive. His slave status was in many ways more an artificial legality that a daily reality.