by Yunte Huang
Hark went to the door with an axe, for the purpose of breaking it open, as we knew we were strong enough to murder the family, if they were waked by the noise; but reflecting that it might create an alarm in the neighborhood, we determined to enter the house secretly, and murder them whilst sleeping. Hark got a ladder and set it against the chimney, on which I ascended, and hoisting a window, entered and came down the stairs, unbarred the door, and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. On which, armed with a hatchet, and accompanied by Will, I entered my master’s chamber, it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife, it was his last word, Will laid him dead, with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed. The murder of this family, five in number, was the work of a moment, not one of them awoke; there was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it.
Their tactic was to kill all the whites in the houses they struck, no matter their age or gender. “It was my object,” Turner said, “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.” In this fashion, they methodically struck house after house, farm after farm, recruiting more rebels and picking up more weapons along the way. By midday, they had hit eleven farms in the area and enlisted about sixty mounted insurgents. Thirsty for blood, revenge, and freedom, they were getting ready to attack the county seat, Jerusalem, when the better-equipped local militia stopped their advance and began to stage a forceful counterattack. Turner’s rebel band disintegrated. At daybreak the next morning, the militia had captured or killed all the rebels except for Turner, who had fled and would elude his pursuers for more than two months, his escape as dramatic a period in nineteenth-century American history as any, given the waves of fear that the revolt started. He hid himself in different shallow holes he had dug with a sword, until one day a hunting dog, lured by some meat Turner had kept in his cave, exposed his hideout. A local farmer captured him at gunpoint. It was Sunday, October 30.
Ironically, what had begun with a barbecue dinner also came to an end on a carnivorous note. The slaughtered pig turned out to be a sacrificial symbol of the extreme violence. Turner was put on trial in November and sentenced to die by hanging. The court judgment ended on a bloodthirsty tone, full of hatred and vengeance: “You . . . be hung by the neck until you are dead! dead! dead. . . .” After Turner’s execution, some claimed that he was skinned, his flesh fried into grease, his bones ground into powder and baked into ginger cakes.
Turner’s was not the only body that suffered mutilation in an insurrection defined by raw brutality. The rebel slaves as well as the militia assaulted their victims with animal ferocity. As a historian acknowledged, “Violence on the part of the slaves is precisely what a slave revolt is all about. A rebellion directed indiscriminately against men, women, and children, and fought largely with swords, axes, and farm implements might be expected to produce horrible scenes of cruelty and devastation.” In his confession, Turner repeatedly spoke of the almost perverted satisfaction of viewing “the mangled bodies as they lay,” and, almost like a modern-day voyeuristic photojournalist, he described scene after scene of butchery: “Having murdered Mrs. Waller and ten children, we started for Mr. William Williams’—having killed him and two little boys that were there; while engaged in this, Mrs. Williams fled and got some distance from the house, but she was pursued, overtaken, and compelled to get up behind one of the company, who brought her back, and after showing her the mangled body of her lifeless husband, she was told to get down and lay by his side, where she was shot dead.” Likewise, Virginia Governor John Floyd’s diary captured the degree of brutality perpetrated by the rebels: “Throughout this affair the most appalling accounts have been given of the conduct of the negroes, the most inhuman butcheries the mind can conceive of, men, women, infants, their heads chopped off, their bowels ripped out, ears, noses, hands, and legs cut off, no instance of mercy shown.”
What Governor Floyd forgot to mention, however, was that “blacks did not have a monopoly on decapitation and other forms of mutilation. One group of whites had cut off the head of rebel Henry Porter. It ended up in the hands of a militia surgeon who reportedly carried it with him around the county. The cavalry company from Murfreesboro decapitated as many as fifteen suspected rebels and placed the heads on poles for display. One head was posted at the intersection of the Barrow Road and Jerusalem Highway—a crossing which then became known as ‘Blackhead Sign Post.’ ”
Despite the degree of cold-blooded brutality, or maybe because of it, this slave revolt has been dubbed an “intimate rebellion,” an event that took place in a tight-knit community where everyone knew each other. In a sense, it was a homicidal drama that unfolded under the same roof shared by the masters and slaves as a family. In fact, “many of the 200 black and white casualties knew the people who killed them.” Like a plot from a Greek tragedy, familiarity bred hatred of greater intensity, and intimacy led to killing with more savagery.
Even though the revolt was repressed in a single day and it barely went beyond the county lines of Southampton, the slayings served as a toxin that spewed shock waves all over the country, sending a chill down the spines of Southern slaveholders. In Virginia, there were about half a million slaves, and the total throughout the South was about two million. Fanned by rumor and exaggeration, Southern whites, without any cause or provocation, dreaded the imagery of their slaves running wild and committing barbaric acts of murder, plunder, and rape. Many of them blamed antislavery Northerners for having incited the revolt. Chief among those suspected agitators was William Lloyd Garrison, who had himself penned a fiery editorial in the inaugural issue of The Liberator, condemning human bondage. It had also contained a poem that eerily portended the tragedy in Southampton:
Wo if it come with storm, and blood, and fire,
When midnight darkness veils the earth and sky!
Wo to the innocent babe—the guilty sire—
Mother and daughter—friends of kindred tie!
Stranger and citizen alike shall die!2
When word of Turner’s revolt came, Garrison wrote in the journal’s September editorial: “What was poetry—imagination—in January, is now a bloody reality.” But he took no credit and denied that his words had provoked the horror of revolt; instead, he blamed the slaveholders: “The slaves need no incentives at our hands. They will find them in their stripes—in their emaciated bodies—in their ceaseless toil—in their ignorant minds—in every field, in every valley, on every hill-top and mountain, wherever you and your fathers have fought for liberty—in your speeches, your conversations, your celebrations, your pamphlets, your newspapers. . . . What more do they need?”3
Garrison’s self-defense did not, however, stop Southerners from going after him. Within weeks of the insurrection, while the Vigilance Association of Columbia, South Carolina, offered a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward for the arrest and conviction of any white person disseminating “seditious” abolitionist literature, Georgia’s Senate passed a resolution offering a reward of five thousand dollars for Garrison’s arrest and conviction.4
This was not the first time Garrison had a run-in with the slaveholding class. In fact, the turning point of his career as a crusading abolitionist was a fight with one of his townsmen. Born in 1805 to a father who was a retired merchant-marine master, Garrison grew up in Newburyport and began an apprenticeship at the Newburyport Herald at the tender age of thirteen. Growing sympathetic with the antislavery movement, in 1829 he became coeditor of the Quaker newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore. “When he discovered that a fellow townsman from Newburyport, Francis Todd, owned the brig Francis, which transported seventy slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans,” he was resolved, as he proclaimed, to “cover in thick infamy all who are concerned in this nefarious business.” In the Genius, he excoriat
ed Todd for his part in the slave trade:
Exposing the source of their wealth, he labeled them “enemies of their own species—highway robbers and murderers.” “Unless they speedily repent,” Garrison warned, they would one day “occupy the lowest depths of perdition.” For his vituperative comments, Garrison faced criminal and civil charges of libel. Following a brief trial, the editor was found guilty and fined fifty dollars and costs. He refused to pay, and authorities imprisoned him in the Baltimore jail for seven weeks in 1830 until a wealthy New York abolitionist paid the fine.5
The imprisonment galvanized Garrison, turning him into a full-fledged crusader for the abolitionist cause.
We don’t know whether Garrison ever took issue with another of his townsmen—namely, Captain Abel Coffin—for his ownership of the Siamese Twins. Given Garrison’s outright condemnation of human bondage, it would not be surprising if he would have despised Coffin, a seaman like his own father, for exploiting slave labor by the twins. Nor do we know how Chang and Eng reacted to the news of a slave rebellion in a faraway place called Southampton, Virginia. Would they have felt sympathy with the plight and misery of the slaves? Or would they have objected to the brutality of the killing? Either way, at this point they would not know how the insurrection was somehow related to their own destiny—not only tangentially through Newburyport and its abolitionist native son Garrison, but also more directly. They would not know about their rendezvous with American history until they arrived in Virginia a few months later.
17
Old Dominion
At the height of the Nat Turner frenzy in that anguished fall of 1831, Chang and Eng continued to tour in New England, hitting small villages and big cities, working like a pair of mules yoked to a grindstone, churning out cash for their owner day in and day out. Even in Newburyport, the home base of the Coffins, they had enjoyed only one day of rest—on that fated Sunday of the Turner revolt—before a showroom was booked and they were put on display again.
In late October, unfavorable working conditions and his disagreements with Mrs. Coffin compelled James Hale to quit his job as the twins’ manager. His replacement was an Irishman, one Charles Harris, who, like Hale, was an accountant by training but listed his profession as a doctor. Like his predecessor, Harris accompanied the twins on tours, sometimes traveling with them and sometimes going ahead to make arrangements and drum up interest.
As winter approached, the mercury plummeted below zero. Frozen roads posed a big challenge for the small troupe endlessly on the move. Corduroy roads—primitive paths built of logs and saplings laid side by side—caused nightmares for travelers in carriages and threatened horses’ legs. Quite a few foreign travelers commented on the perils of this unique American construction mode and the overall atrocious state of the nation’s roads. Charles Dickens, during his 1842 trip, wrote, “A great portion of the way was over what is called a corduroy road, which is made by throwing trunks of trees into a marsh, and leaving them to settle there. The very slightest of the jolts with which the ponderous carriage fell from log to log, was enough, it seemed, to have dislocated all the bones in the human body.”1 Alexis de Tocqueville, who was then touring the country to study the American prison system and might have crossed paths with the twins in 1831, also deplored riding on stages—he called them “diligences”—driven at a fast trot on roads “as deplorable as those in Lower Brittany.” As he told his mother in a letter, “One feels quite rattled after a few miles.”2 Traveling from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in late November, a route Chang and Eng would follow in a few months, Tocqueville noted how cold the winter was, as “this would indeed turn out to be the most brutal fall and winter for at least fifty years.”3
On these roads in the dead of winter, riding in a buggy driven by Tom Dwyer and a single horse named Charley, the twins and their troupe brushed with disaster constantly. They had one bad accident on Schooley’s Mountain in northern New Jersey, putting the driver in bed for days. The wagon repair cost between four and five dollars. In central Pennsylvania, on their way to Shippensburg, they had another narrow escape. “After leaving Carlisle we got along very merrily & had completed 6 miles of the 21,” Charles Harris told Mrs. Coffin in a letter, “when the Axle of the Gig snapped & down came one side flat on the ground.” Frightened, Charley the horse set off at full speed, dragging the broken buggy for about seventy yards before the twins, experienced horse-whisperers, managed to calm it down. Getting out of the vehicle and assessing the damage, they found that the right side of Eng’s head was swelling. The twins sat by the roadside, trying to figure out what to do next. Fortunately, an empty carriage passed by, and they were able to get into it, “leaving the gig and broken wheel in care of a cottager near to whose house the accident took place.”4
A prolific letter writer, Harris gave us a detailed account of those difficult days in late December 1831, when everyone else seemed to be celebrating the holidays—Tocqueville and his travel companion, Gustave de Beaumont, after a tough trip in the Northeast, were now relaxing on a Mississippi steamboat, while twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin had just set sail in the Beagle for the Galápagos Islands. The twenty-year-old twins continued to travel and work. Between Christmas and the New Year, Harris wrote, “The weather still continues sadly against us, but nevertheless we have today a Balance of nearly $150 remaining on hand.” Planning to send Mrs. Coffin the money, Harris enumerated how they had earned it by a series of whistle-stop shows in small Pennsylvania towns: Easton, $80; Bethlehem, barely enough to pay the bills; Allentown, $20; Reading, $50. They would set out for Lancaster the next day, stopping at Reamstown for the night and traveling at a speed of eighteen miles a day, weather permitting.5
The snow drove the twins farther and farther toward the South. In March 1832, the troupe reached Virginia, where nerves remained raw from the shock of Turner’s revolt. Here they hit a snag trying to put up a show and found themselves at the center of a public debate—or, in the view of a historian, their visit “opened up a can of worms” in state politics.6
In the wake of the violent revolt, brutal suppression, and summary execution of Turner, a fierce debate over the future of slavery broke out in the Virginia General Assembly. On December 14, 1831, William Henry Roane, grandson of the patriarch Patrick Henry, introduced an antislavery petition in the legislature, calling for emancipation. Roane was supported by Thomas Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and other delegates who wanted to cleanse “the escutcheon of Virginia of the foul stain of Slavery.”7 But they were met with strong resistance from delegates who argued that slavery was a “necessary evil”—necessary because the system provided the state with labor and wealth.
The Virginia debate encapsulated the tensions that gripped the nation after the Turner revolt. The fear of insurrections took hold in the white imagination. Traveling in New Orleans, Johann August Roebling, a German immigrant who would later build the Brooklyn Bridge, heard rumors that “the blacks . . . had made a plan to massacre the whites, and thus attain their freedom by force.”8 Roebling’s account was substantiated by another traveler, Sir James Alexander, who noted in his Transatlantic Sketches that “there was an alarm of a slave insurrection” in New Orleans.9 Rumors of a rebellion in North Carolina led authorities to arrest every free black in Raleigh. In Fayetteville, Tennessee, it was believed that a group of slaves had plotted to set fire to buildings and “commence a general massacre.” Jane Randolph, the wife of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, was so shaken by the horrors in Southampton that she even begged her husband to consider moving west to Ohio. The Turner event, she said, “had aroused all my fears which had nearly become dormant, and indeed have increased them to the most agonizing degree.”10
When Randolph rose in the Virginia General Assembly and spoke in favor of emancipation, he represented not just the declared principles of equality and justice but also the widespread, deep-seated fear of another black rebellion. But the opposition party, made up mostly of slaveholders from the Tidew
ater and Piedmont regions, was not willing even to consider the proposal for emancipation. The Select Committee, chaired by William Henry Broadnax, who had led the militia suppressing the Turner revolt, reported that it was “inexpedient for the present legislature to make any legislative enactment for the abolition of slavery.” In January, by a vote of sixty-seven to sixty, the emancipation proposal was tabled by the assembly, and the Virginia debate came to an end. “Unable to act against slavery, the legislature acted against what it believed to be the source of insurrectionary spirit,” as Louis Masur writes. “Within weeks, a colonization bill to provide for the removal of free blacks moved swiftly through the legislature. A ‘police bill’ further eroded the rights of free blacks, denying them trial by jury and allowing for their sale and transportation if convicted of a crime. The legislature also revised the black codes, barring slaves and free blacks from preaching or attending religious meetings unaccompanied by whites.”11
Such was the cauldron of racial tensions into which Chang and Eng walked. Unwittingly, their visit forced the legislature to consider again the question it had just put to bed. By provisions of a tax law passed in 1813, the state imposed a licensing fee of thirty dollars on “every exhibitor of a show” in every county, city, or borough. This meant that much of Virginia would be off limits for the twins—in small villages where they would stay for no more than a night or two, they wouldn’t even be able to gross more than $30 a day. On behalf of Chang and Eng, Harris had to make an appeal to Virginia’s General Assembly, hoping for an exemption from the prohibitive tax.12
