The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  In the summer of 1854, after a few years of living and working on other people’s land, Jordan Spencer bought several hundred acres of his own. The land was just west of Jenny’s Creek, extending from the Colvin Branch of Barnett’s Creek over to Rockhouse Creek and spanning the ridgeline between them. It rose along steep banks to rocky knobs of mountain, broken by a low gap that could be crossed by foot or on horse or mule, a convenient path into town for people deeper in the hills. The property was a forest of black oak, buckeye, beech, dogwood, and poplar. Spencer bought it from a man who changed the color of skin for a living—a tanner, Lewis Todd. Sallow rawhides became mellow browns and reds with chestnut and hickory tanbark from trees on the land. Spencer probably used the bark to dye his hair.12

  Jordan and Malinda Spencer cleared their land of trees and thicket—the boys, at nine and seven, were old enough to help—split and hoisted fence rails, and broke the hillsides to plant their crop. The boundaries of the Spencers’ land ebbed and flowed with its contours, giving the family a community’s worth of neighbors. The Spencers would need them to help raise a cabin and shuck their corn. They employed and worked alongside Jordan and traded land and livestock and equipment. They ate and visited with the family regularly and found Malinda to be generous and hospitable—in their words, “clever.”13

  The men along Rockhouse got drunk with Jordan on Saturday nights and prayed with him at church on Sunday. The women would help Malinda through more than twenty years of childbirths and mourned the deaths of at least two babies from scarlet fever. George Washington and Andrew Jackson Spencer were soon joined by Benjamin Franklin, Christopher Columbus, and James Madison. By 1858 the Spencers had either run out of favorite historical figures or felt established enough in the world to name their next-born son Jordan Jr. By decade’s end their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, had two new sisters, Sylvania and Polley Ann.14

  Owning land made the Spencers stand out, but it also enabled the family to blend in. The mere fact of ownership signaled to their neighbors that they were capable of rising in the world and had gained enough acceptance to find someone willing to sell to them. The difficulty of mountain life guaranteed not only that the Spencers would rely on their neighbors but also that their neighbors would come to rely on them. With every cabin raised, every child born, and every ear shucked, it made less sense to ask whether the Spencers were different. By staying in one place, they were creating a cocoon of everyday experience—conversations and business deals and exchanges and debts—strong enough to shut out the rest of the world. In time they became part of the landscape. The farm became known as Spencer’s farm. The low gap through the hills—the pass through the land—was the Jordan Gap.

  When Jordan Spencer chopped down trees, he used some of the wood for his cabin, some for firewood, and some for furniture and tools. But from the start he was rolling logs down the hillsides and dragging them to Rockhouse Creek with a team of oxen. After a big rain he could float the logs out of Rockhouse and down Paint Creek. Three miles below, just past Paintsville, the creek emptied into the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Cornfields and marshy bottomland gave way to a boat landing and a small stretch of mills and taverns.15

  At the mouth of Paint Creek, Spencer sold his timber to Moses Preston. On Preston’s land, country silence yielded to the sounds of a larger world—the groans of men hoisting logs out of the water and loading lumber onto barges; the sawing grind of saplings being labored into hoop poles and older trees into barrel staves; the crack and scrape of tanbark chiseled off hemlock and chestnut oaks and stacked like ancient scrolls; and the scream of the first steamboats to make their way up the Levisa Fork. Preston had made a fortune supplying mill men and builders, coopers and tanners. His barges went north and west, 60 miles down the Big Sandy and another 140 down the Ohio to Cincinnati.16

  Rockhouse Creek was a lonely mountain hollow, but it was fueling the cities and industries and markets of a booming nation. Spencer’s trees went down the Ohio, and cash and goods and people and ideas flowed back up the river. It made Moses Preston the county’s richest man, someone who, an admirer marveled, “appl[ied] business rules to every department of his extended pursuits.” With his lumber wealth he bought several farms, built grand homes in and out of Paintsville, started a large general store in town, and opened one of the first coal yards in the county. Like many Southerners of means, he invested in human beings. In the 1850s Preston owned seven people—two men, two women, two boys, and a girl—more than anyone else in the county, where the slave population topped out at about thirty.17

  Although the county had few slaves, slavery was never far away. In neighboring Floyd County, slaves were bought and sold and marched in chains, two by two, to markets farther south. Throughout eastern Kentucky, kidnappers worked with slave dealers in Lexington, stealing people for sale to Deep South plantations. During the 1850s the politics of the entire state increasingly revolved around the slavery question. More than 200,000 people were held in bondage in Kentucky, but freedom was within sight. For six hundred miles, the Ohio River was all that separated the state from the free soil of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Slaves had more opportunity to run away than almost anywhere else in the nation. When the river froze, as it did in 1850-51, 1852-53, and 1855-56, slaveowners lived in dread of mass escapes.18

  A robust antislavery movement had taken root in Kentucky early in its history, and homegrown abolitionists were quietly helping fugitives reach Ohio. As late as 1849 antislavery politicians were confident that they could rewrite the Kentucky Constitution to end slavery, and Cassius Marcellus Clay ran for governor on an emancipationist ticket in 1851. While Jordan Spencer was clearing his land in Johnson County, an abolitionist colony one hundred miles west in Berea was preparing to open a college to educate whites and blacks together.19

  Kentucky’s border fostered some moderation on the slavery question. The Great Compromiser in the United States Senate, Henry Clay, represented Kentucky. It was his conception that averted a national crisis over slavery in 1850 by allowing California to enter the Union as a free state while committing the North to returning fugitive slaves. In his home state, Clay publicly called for freeing all slave men at age twenty-eight and women at twenty-one.20

  Because of the open support for abolition and the ample opportunities slaves had to escape, Kentucky’s advocates of slavery responded all the more aggressively. From the pulpit, ministers like Henry B. Bascom in Lexington defended slavery as God’s will and warned that whites would be “butcher [ed]” if slaves were “let loose.” Others began grounding their support for slavery in terms not of morality or public safety but something more abstract and scientific. “We hold them in bondage,” declared Congressman William Preston, “because we are unwilling to amalgamate with them, and desire to keep our Teutonic blood pure and uncorrupted by any baser admixture.” Slavery was necessary because freedom would tear down a crucial barrier separating whites from blacks. “Left without coercion,” Preston said, blacks would “pollute our blood and destroy our progress.” Beyond words, proslavery Kentuckians used fists, clubs, torches, bowie knives, and pistols to disrupt speeches, destroy abolitionist presses, run activists out of town, and otherwise silence threats to their property and their purity.21

  Facing violent opposition, antislavery politicians also adopted the rhetoric of racial difference to broaden their appeal. They supported abolition, they said, not because they believed blacks were their equals but because slavery debased whites morally and unfairly competed with free white labor. As far as they were concerned, blacks should leave the state. “I have studied the Negro character,” wrote Cassius Clay. “They lack self-reliance—we can make nothing out of them. God has made them for the sun and the banana.”22

  As the Spencer family moved into Johnson County, the politics of slavery hardened year by year. In 1851 the Kentucky legislature required all newly freed slaves to leave the state. The next year Kentucky was on millions of people’s minds as Harriet Beecher St
owe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was largely set in the state and based on her travels there and on interviews she had conducted in Cincinnati with Kentucky runaways. The Democratic Party, which had nearly unanimous support in Johnson County, emerged as the party of slavery. By the terms of Kentucky’s debates over slavery, Jordan Spencer represented every side’s worst fears: a free man of color expecting equal treatment, marrying a white woman, and having children who were indistinguishable from everyone else—collapsing the divide between white and black and polluting the superior race.23

  But Jordan Spencer never became a symbol of anything larger. On Rockhouse Creek most people seemed unconcerned with the Spencers’ presence in their community. It was more than mere toleration: if anything, the neighbors encouraged the Spencers to move in and stay. When Jordan Spencer bought his land, he handed over $125 for the property, along with a promise to pay the seller an additional $200 over the next couple of years. Even though credit was not typically available to blacks, Spencer repeatedly mortgaged his farm. He lived most of his life in Johnson County in debt, never free and clear, always struggling to keep his land. At the same time he always made good on his loans. By going into debt, he became someone who was worth a risk, someone who had creditors with a stake in his success.24

  Although Moses Preston was a slaveowner and ardent Democrat, he happily did business with Jordan Spencer. Preston, like everyone else, knew Spencer was different. John Preston, Moses’s son, remembered Spencer as “dark complected” and “just about half negro.” But Moses Preston bought Spencer’s lumber and also lent him hundreds of dollars on multiple occasions. That money—and probably credit at the general store—enabled Spencer to buy supplies, pay off other debts, establish his family, and stay on Rockhouse Creek.25

  EACH SUNDAY THE SPENCERS worshipped a mile or two from their cabin, in the valley of Rockhouse Creek. The church was a plain room; low windows captured sparse shafts of Sunday-morning sun. The people crowding inside knew one another well, and for hours they cried and testified and fainted together. They listened to parables, situating their everyday struggles within biblical time and experience, and added amens to sermons shouted by weeping preachers. They sang hymns, repeated in call-and-response or committed to heart because few could read. Jordan Spencer’s voice rose above the crowd; old men would remember years later that he was a “pretty good singer.” Through faith and prayer, through willful transformation, an entire community could find comfort during freeze or flood, hunger or illness.26

  Moses Preston’s son John attended the old-style Methodist meeting at Rockhouse just once in his life. Jordan Spencer did not stand out; to the contrary, John Preston observed, half the congregation “had as much color as the Spencers did.” Although Johnson County’s churches were, in one neighbor’s words, “only what termed themselves white,” many of the worshippers at the church on Rockhouse were visibly dark. “Some of them were as dark as Jordan Spencer or darker,” Preston reported.27

  Most of the dark congregants were members of the Collins and Ratliff families. People with the same last names were spread throughout the mountains. For decades they and related families had puzzled neighbors, missionaries, sheriffs, and census-takers. They did not exactly look white. They insisted they were not black. Although the Collins and Ratliff families on Rockhouse Creek described themselves as “Indian,” they did not identify with particular tribes. Often families like them described themselves—or were categorized by others—in entirely new terms.

  These mountain clans confounded the era’s vocabulary of race and racial purity, with its pinched approximations of colors, continents, and “ancestral stock”—white and black and red, European and African and Native American, Anglo-Saxon and Negro. In southwest Virginia they were called Ramps, for the wild leeks that they gathered and ate. In the hills of eastern Tennessee they were called Melungeons, a word that does not exist in any language—perhaps it implied mixture, or derived from a common family name, Mullins. When Johnson County locals were asked to label their dark-skinned neighbors, one thought of them as “East Indians” and another called them “Black Dutch.” These “little races” were not confined to Appalachia. In every Southern state and up into Delaware, New Jersey, and New York, in tidewater and backcountry, whites and blacks encountered people called Wesorts, Croatans, Brass Ankles, Turks, Red Legs, Red Bones, Guineas, and more.28

  Many members of these communities shared last names with the first free people of color in colonial Virginia and Maryland—Goins, Gibson, Chavis, Bunch, Sweat—but they explained their origins in more exotic terms. They were “pure blooded Carthaginians,” according to one tradition described by a Chattanooga lawyer who represented a Melungeon woman in 1874, “as much so as was Hannibal or the Moor of Venice and other pure-blooded descendants of the ancient Phoenicians.” They descended from the lost English colonists of Roanoke or were Turkish or North African Berbers or Sephardic Jews.

  A year after Jordan Spencer bought property on Rockhouse Creek, witnesses in an eastern Tennessee courtroom described a Melungeon man as “Portuguese”—or as it was commonly pronounced, “Porty-gee.” On remote mountain ridges, families circulated stories of shipwrecked Portuguese pirates or stranded Spanish explorers who had married Indian women hundreds of years earlier. Although light-skinned blacks had long been described as having a “Portuguese” complexion—and the English had joked about the African “blood” that ran in Iberian veins since the days of the Armada—the Spanish and Portuguese were still Europeans, dark but white. Claims of Mediterranean origin emerged as a way for ambiguous people to assert that they were anything but black. On occasion, these claims also gave white communities a story that allowed them to accept dark people as equals.29

  In Johnson County and elsewhere, being white did not require exclusively European ancestry. Many whites did not hesitate to claim Native American descent. While Melungeons in Tennessee often lived apart and married among themselves, the Collins and Ratliff families in Johnson County were considerably less isolated. Half of the worshippers at the Rockhouse Methodist meeting had white faces, and light and dark families were neighbors along the nearby creeks. Many of the families themselves were mixed, like Jordan and Malinda Spencer’s. Their community offered them a path to assimilation. Although the Spencers were listed as “mulatto” in the 1860 census, dozens of Collins and Ratliff men and women were, at a glance, regarded as white. Jordan Spencer may have been dark, but there was such a thing as a dark white man.30

  JORDAN SPENCER FOUND HIS WAY to the crowd milling on an open field. At such gatherings, it would have been hard to hear birdsong or creek flow over the din: laughter and cheers and cussing and brawls, political speeches shouted over fife and drum, even “the squealing of pigs, neighing of chargers, barking of dogs, braying of asses.” As the day progressed, the noise would be equaled by the smell—sweat and filth, human and animal, fried chicken and roast pork, coffee and gunpowder and the sweet burn of whiskey. If Spencer held a rifle in his hands, it was the most natural thing in the world.31

  A generation earlier a militia muster had been a serious affair. All ablebodied white men ages eighteen to forty-five regularly practiced the military drills that would enable them to protect the nation from internal and external threat. The Kentucky militia had a proud tradition. They had helped clear the frontier of Indians in the 1790s, and they fought under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Although Jackson complained of their conduct, people across the country once celebrated their bravery with songs like “The Hunters of Kentucky”: “We are a hardy, free-born race, / Each man to fear a stranger; / Whate’er the game we join in chase, / Despoiling time and danger.” Johnson County itself was named for Richard Mentor Johnson, Martin Van Buren’s vice president, who rose to national prominence during the War of 1812, when he led the Kentucky militia to victory over the Native American chief Tecumseh.32

  By the 1820s, however, the need for a militia grew less pressing, and the muster was, to
one Kentuckian’s mind, “more or less a farce.” Militia days became “the big to-do,” and shambling, tipsy pantomimes of military drills occurred alongside an all-purpose festival of horse trading and races and cockfights. The militia companies assembled with men toting “old shotguns, rusty rifles, long untried fowling-pieces, cornstalks, and hickory sticks.”33

  In the mid-1850s the legislature eventually found no reason to keep requiring the militia to drill six times a year, but until then Jordan Spencer played his part on the muster ground. Someone could have objected to his presence. He was out in the world, publicly claiming a place in the crowd. Carrying a weapon was a serious offense for free people of color, an inevitable precursor, many feared, to claims of equality or outright rebellion.34

  But in the “pell-mell” of the Johnson County muster, it mattered little that Spencer had dark skin. Even if his appearance raised eyebrows, it was more important that he wanted to be white and acted accordingly. To treat Spencer differently, to police the color line, would have involved a level of time and expense and attention that no one was willing to spend. Even people who cared about racial mixing understood the convenient notion that unless it was impossible to say otherwise, everyone in Johnson County was white. “I always was in sympathy with the man,” said a Paintsville businessman about Jordan Spencer, “because he tried to be a good man, and tried to avoid looking like a darkey, and because he wanted to raise himself up instead of lowering himself.”35