Like others in the colonies, he had reason to hope that the leaders in England had seen the repeal of the Stamp Act not merely as an expedient to quiet the situation but as a balancing of the scales of justice. Justice was much on his mind at this time. In 1768, he ran for, and won, a judgeship on the Fairfax County Court. He had no experience, of course. As he had done as a teenager who was eager to learn etiquette, and again when he assumed command of an army, he purchased a self-help book—The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer—and studied it for guidance.
Justice was on Venture’s mind too. In one way or another, justice was probably on the minds of all of the 254 blacks who lived in Stonington, Connecticut (out of a total population of 3,900), the majority of whom were slaves.
The world was changing fast. Stonington was growing, and on every trip into town Venture picked up news. A new highway was laid out from the Road Church, north of town, to the waterfront in neighboring Mystic. Two new businesses—a weaveshop and a tannery—opened up in Captain Richard Wheeler’s old house. Jeremiah Browning, from Block Island, bought up a huge tract of land in the western part of Stonington with the intention to develop it. People took up a subscription to build a schoolhouse on a site between Asa Elliott’s house and Nathan Chesebrough’s meadow.
While all this was going on, the white people were chattering about freedom: about England, the Stamp Act and its repeal. They demanded justice, and were pleased when they got it.
Justice. One day Venture was working in the barn and heard a sudden racket coming from the house. The master was away “a gunning” on Long Island. Fearing the worst, Venture ran to the disturbance. He, Meg and their children apparently lived in the main house, possibly in the attic or in a wing off the kitchen. Besides Venture’s family, Thomas Stanton likely had only a few other slaves; while about one out of every three farms on New England’s “slave coast” kept slaves, the numbers were usually small, which meant a certain intimacy between them and their owners. It wasn’t like in George Washington’s Virginia. Slaves with knowledge of conditions in both the North and South definitely preferred the North. James Mars, who was born a slave in Connecticut to a father from New York and a mother from Virginia, had learned the difference from his mother, and he spelled it out succinctly: “The treatment of slaves was different at the North from the South. At the North they were admitted to be a species of the human family.” When his owner, a Congregational minister, announced he was planning to move to Virginia, Mars’s father took his family into hiding in an effort to avoid southern slavery.
But life in the North came with its own difficulties. The larger groups of slaves on a southern plantation helped to maintain traditions and a sense of community. The close living quarters in the North meant slaves were more strictly controlled: they might be locked in their rooms at night. And living under constant scrutiny exacerbated tensions. As it happened, Meg and the mistress, Sarah Stanton, had a testy relationship. Venture reached one of the rooms and discovered the two women in front of the hearth locked in a vicious fight, with the mistress beating his wife. Venture got between them and was able to determine that the “violent passion” was over a trifle. “I earnestly requested my wife to beg pardon of her mistress for the sake of peace,” he said later, “even if she had given no just occasion for offense. But whilst I was thus saying my mistress turned the blows which she was repeating on my wife to me. She took down her horse-whip, and while she was glutting her fury with it, I reached out my great black hand, raised it up and received the blows of the whip on it which were designed for my head. Then I immediately committed the whip to the devouring fire.” That ended the confrontation. But it wasn’t the end of the affair. Venture had put himself in a position of power over his mistress; he knew there would be repercussions. When Stanton returned from Long Island, his wife recounted the episode for him, apparently with either Venture or Meg present. Stanton said nothing. For the next several days, his silence became progressively more ominous. Then one morning while Venture was bending down to put a log on the fire Thomas Stanton came up behind him, raised a two-foot club and brought it down on Venture’s head. The wound was bad, but Venture didn’t lose consciousness. He staggered to his feet in time to see Stanton raising the club again. Venture grabbed it in one hand and Stanton in the other and hauled the man outside. Stanton ran off. Venture knew where he was going: to get his brother.
Venture didn’t wait. He took the club and made his way to a justice of the peace, where he laid the weapon down before the man as evidence, showed his bleeding wound and told what had transpired. Venture knew that slaves had some rights in Connecticut, including a right not to be mistreated. On the other hand, the overriding concern of the justice system, in all of the colonies, was the maintenance of the economic status quo, which included the institution of slavery. Judges tended to side with owners provided there was not a wider social cost. Beating a slave in public, for instance, could incite other violence, and therefore might be grounds to punish the owner. But that didn’t apply in Venture’s case. The judge advised Venture to go back to Stanton and be dutiful and submissive; if the violence was repeated, he said, then Venture would have grounds for a complaint.
Just then Thomas Stanton appeared at the door along with his brother Robert. The judge, Venture said, “improved this convenient opportunity to caution my master. He asked him for what he treated his slave thus hastily and unjustly, and told him what would be the consequence if he continued the same treatment towards me.” Then he let them go. They headed back to the Stanton farm with the two brothers on horseback and Venture walking between. “When they had come to a bye place,” Venture said, “they both dismounted their respective horses, and fell to beating me with great violence. I became enraged at this and immediately turned them both under me, laid one of them across the other, and stamped both with my feet what I would.”
Before Venture could go back to seek justice, justice came to him. Stanton went to a constable to complain of a dangerously violent slave. The constable, with two strong men at his side, took Venture to a blacksmith, who fixed a pair of stout handcuffs onto him. Back at the house there was a gaudy little scene with Stanton and his wife gloating over their victory over the slave who had had the temerity to try to use the justice system against them. When Stanton and Venture arrived, Sarah Stanton brightly inquired whether Venture was indeed handcuffed. At the news that he was, she exclaimed with vengeful delight. Venture’s posture of reserve cracked. He presented himself before her, showed her his manacles and, with baleful impudence, thanked her for his “gold rings.”
The impudence infuriated Stanton anew. He had another slave wrap a heavy chain around Venture’s legs and snap it tight with two padlocks. So he stayed, barely able to move. But the imprisonment within the prison of slavery wasn’t enough to appease Stanton. He enacted another little scene for the slave. He went to the chest where Venture kept his belongings and took a piece of paper from it. Venture knew what it was: the promissory note that Stanton’s brother had signed, acknowledging that he had accepted 21 pounds in New York currency from Venture—Venture’s life savings—and guaranteeing to pay it back. With the chained slave watching, Stanton tore the note to pieces.
The central event of Venture’s childhood—watching his father die rather than divulge where his money was hidden—was still alive in him. It had always been there, glowing like an ember. Money was not just a means of exchange. Money was the essence of his life. He had painstakingly earned it, saved it, registering each new gain. It was all toward a secret goal: eventually buying his freedom. Much as it became for George Washington, money for Venture was the means to independence. Money was freedom. Stanton tearing up the note was an act of aggression that—Stanton surely knew—went right to the big African’s heart.
After Venture had lain in chains for about three days Stanton came to him again. The man’s anger hadn’t diminished; he spat contempt at the slave and asked if he’d had enough of the chains and wa
s ready to go to work. But Venture had had long hours to seethe and ponder. They were playing a game, and he wasn’t willing to lose. “No,” he answered. If Stanton figured he was teaching the slave a lesson, Venture knew that by staying locked up he was depriving Stanton of his labor. He would stay in chains.
“Well then, I will send you to the West Indies or banish you,” Stanton replied, “for I am resolved not to keep you.” Conditions in a Caribbean plantation meant a virtual death sentence.
Venture was ready for this. “I crossed the waters to come here,” he shot back, “and I am willing to cross them to return.”
Chapter 8
THIRTEEN TOASTS
Around the time that Venture was locked in his psychological standoff with Thomas Stanton, George Washington sat himself down, picked up a pen and, with anger tempered by resolve, began to write:
RAN away from a Plantation of the Subscriber’s, on Dogue Run in Fairfax, on Sunday the 9th Instant, the following Negroes . . .
As was his custom when angry, he let his sentences roam, loading the advertisement with extraneous detail that served more to vent his feelings than to inform (“they went off without the least Suspicion, Provocation, or Difference with any Body, or the least angry Word or Abuse from their Overseers”). As George Mumford had done when Venture ran off, Washington named and meticulously described each of the four slaves who had fled, down to the clothing they had on. “Whoever apprehends the said Negroes,” he wrote in closing, would have “Recompence paid them, by GEORGE WASHINGTON.”
Washington prided himself on treating his slaves humanely. He tended to their medical needs, and in selling them he never split up families. But by definition keeping people enslaved could not be a humane activity. People naturally resisted captivity. They ran off; they dragged their feet. To maintain order and establish a thriving business, he fashioned a dictatorial presence. Walking the grounds of Mount Vernon with him, a visitor was stunned at the change that came over the ordinarily genteel Washington when he turned to address his slaves: “he amazed me by the utterance of his words,” said the man, who found that in his sudden and violent expression of anger Washington was “quite another man.”
Washington’s expanding businesses all relied on slave labor, and he was determined to turn a profit. He worked his slaves from dawn to dusk six days a week. And while he did not divide families when he sold slaves, he often found it necessary to split them up in installing workers around his five farms. Since he preferred to have men as house servants, dressed in neat scarlet and white uniforms, a husband might be in the Mansion House during the week while his wife and children were on a distant farm loading dung, tending cattle and picking apples. Those families who lived together did so in conditions that European visitors found appalling. One noted the slave quarters consisted of “wretched wooden shacks” in which adults slept on a “mean pallet” while children huddled on the bare ground around “a very bad fireplace.”
When Washington felt that a slave’s impudence made him unusable, he resorted to precisely the solution that Thomas Stanton had threatened Venture with. In 1766 he wrote to the captain of a ship bound for the Caribbean that he was sending him a slave named Tom who was “both a Rogue & Runaway.” Washington had had enough of Tom; he instructed the captain to sell him “in any of the islands you may go to,” where the slave would find life much harsher. Washington thought Tom would sell for a good price “if kept clean & trim’d up a little when offered to Sale,” and suggested what he would like in return: rum, molasses, a barrel of limes and, to please Martha and her sons, “mixed sweetmeats.” In closing he noted to the captain that he would “very Chearfully allow you the customary Commissions on this affair.”
For one or two days after his confrontation with Thomas Stanton, Venture remained locked in chains. Then a man named Hempstead Miner appeared at the house. Like Stanton, Miner hailed from one of the founding families of Stonington. The two men had known each other all their lives but were not on especially friendly terms. Venture surely knew Miner as well. His house was in the center of town. Miner managed to get a private word with the bound slave. He asked if Venture would like it if he bought him. Figuring that life under Stanton’s roof would henceforth be unbearable, Venture said yes. Miner then got conspiratorial. He proposed that Venture continue his moodiness toward Stanton a bit longer so as to drive down the price. And he held out an irresistible carrot: if he could get Venture cheap, Miner promised that he would let him buy himself out of slavery.
Wrapped in chains, in the true depths of human bondage, Venture glimpsed a light of promise: nothing less than the future he had longed for from the moment he was captured by the army that invaded his home village of Dukandarra all those years ago. It was uncommon for slaves to purchase their freedom, for a slave owner to enter into such an arrangement, but it happened on occasion. Continuing to act sullen and recalcitrant was the easiest thing in the world for Venture. He did, and eventually Stanton had had enough. He agreed to sell the slave to Miner for 56 pounds, below the going rate for a healthy, skilled man. The moment the two men shook hands, Stanton unlocked the chains, and Venture stepped outside, headed toward Hempstead Miner’s house and the prospect of eventual freedom.
Once the transfer of ownership was complete, Miner revealed his actual motive. He didn’t need a slave; he had simply heard about Venture’s standoff with Stanton and saw a way to make some money. He would buy him cheap and sell him for a profit. Since everyone in and around Stonington knew the Stantons and knew of their big, self-possessed slave, trying to sell him in the area would be complicated. So he took Venture 60 miles inland to Hartford. There he offered him to a man named William Hooker. But Venture immediately disliked Hooker, and when he heard that Hooker proposed to take him to German Flatts, in central New York, he balked. In agreeing to be sold to Miner he knew he was playing a risky game: he had reasoned that while he would be separated from Meg and their children at least all of them would be in the same town, and he would have a chance to work for his freedom. Now that hope was gone and the situation was getting worse. German Flatts was 250 miles from Stonington. Venture told Hooker he would not go. Hooker liked the look of the big African, saw a lot of use in him, and was ready to tame him. “If you will go by no other measures, I will tie you down in my sleigh,” he responded. But while, as with Stanton, Venture knew that most of the advantages in the power struggle they were engaged in were on the other side, he also knew how to leverage his position. “I replied to him,” he said later, “that if he carried me in that manner, no person would purchase me, for it would be thought that he had a murderer for sale.” Hooker thought some, then backed off. This slave was too ornery, too wily. It wasn’t worth it.
Miner, who apparently needed fast money, then struck a provisional deal with a man named Daniel Edwards. He pawned Venture, essentially renting him to Edwards for 10 pounds. Venture didn’t resist; he liked Edwards from the start. For a short while he worked as a butler in the man’s Hartford residence: getting wine from the cellar, serving at table. When someone was fair with him, Venture responded in kind, so he worked well and efficiently, and Edwards quickly saw him as an asset. The two men found that they could be honest with each other. Edwards asked why Miner wanted to part with him, and Venture told him it was his surmise that Miner’s goal was “to convert me into cash.”
But the arrangement was not to last. Venture didn’t like being so far from his wife and children, and Miner eventually made it known that he was thinking of selling him to another man in Stonington. Edwards was decent enough to give Venture a horse and let him ride back to Stonington to assess the situation. His first stop was the Stanton farm, where he had a brief reunion with his family. But as soon as Stanton realized he was there, Venture hurried away. He went on to pay a visit to a man named Oliver Smith. Miner had been in discussion with Smith about possibly buying him, and Venture wanted to investigate him. He had achieved what was surely an unusual stature and presence for a slave,
such that white men tolerated him interviewing them and giving his opinion on whether one would make a suitable master.
Smith was about ten years younger than Venture. He was originally from nearby Groton. He had connections, and he seemed to have integrity. Venture determined that he could perhaps trust him in the answer he gave to the most important question Venture put to him: “if he would consent to have me purchase my freedom.” Smith said that he would, in time, give Venture the opportunity to do so. Venture therefore announced to Smith and Miner that, between the two of them, he would prefer to be owned by Smith. The two white men agreed on terms. Smith and Venture agreed on terms as well: the price for Venture’s freedom would be 85 pounds, a substantial sum, equivalent to a year’s salary for a skilled laborer, to be paid off gradually as Venture earned it. Venture had a new owner, one of his choosing, and a new chance at freedom.
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