Snow-Storm in August

by Jefferson Morley

  Anna could only listen in silence.

  “Now I am harassed and disturbed,” she wrote in her diary. “Oh my god, support & strengthen me under all trials.”

  Anna grimly attended to the details. She sold Arthur for $750 to the president’s friend John Eaton, who in turn sold him to a young white man named William Stockton, also an acquaintance of the president, who was going to Pensacola, Florida, to work his stagecoach and steamship business. Anna hoped he might get training to become a steward on a steamboat.

  “I never intended to sell him for life, but could not now avoid it,” Anna wrote. “I hope & pray that he may lead a new life and be happy.”

  On the second floor of the City Jail, the guards unlocked the leg irons that Arthur had worn since December. He was destined not for the gallows but the docks of Georgetown, where he met his new owner, Mr. Stockton. If Arthur was given a chance to say good-bye to his mother and to the woman who had saved his life, Anna did not record it. In any case, the affection between Arthur Bowen and Anna Thornton was unlikely. He might have killed her on that cool night in August. In his intoxicated state who could say what his intention truly was? And she could have delivered him to his death anytime after his conviction, if she only had put down her pen. But he did not and she could not. Through hate and love, they had both survived. The foolish boy whose bid for freedom ignited the capital’s worst cataclysm since the British invasion of 1814 lived to see another day—as a young man in bondage bound for the Florida Territory. If Arthur looked back as he left the jail, he might have had one glance at the Capitol that William Thornton designed. At least he would not die in its shadow.

  PART VII

  THE EPICUREAN RECESS

  The irrepressible Beverly Snow advertised his favorite fare in Toronto’s Globe newspaper on June 5, 1847. (illustration credit p.7)

  47

  OF ALL THE damn fool things Beverly Randolph Snow ever did in his long life, his decision to return to Washington City in the summer of 1836 had to rank high among them. Few other men, colored or white, would have even contemplated the notion, much less carried it to fruition. But Beverly did. Why was a question that confounded his friends and enemies alike. After all, less than a year before, a large assemblage of the local white citizenry had nearly lynched him, and the larger society of white people could not or would not stop them. Such was the rage of his assailants that when they could not lay hands on him, their fury could only be appeased by running riot over the whole capital city of the United States of America. He was a self-made man of pleasure, a disciple of Epicurus, who embodied an idea—multiracial citizenship—that disgusted and terrified many a white man and woman, a notion that was timeless yet decades, if not a century, ahead of the time.

  Did he return to prove that he wasn’t a fiend, merely a fellow American? Whatever possessed him to think anybody else would see the matter his way?

  “Temerity and foolishness,” said John O’Sullivan, who was no friend of the man. Those more disposed to Snow would have attributed the surprise visit to self-confidence and naïveté. Beverly had always made his way with wit and a sure conception of himself, relying on Epicurus as his mentor. Indeed, he returned to Washington City in the summer of 1836 so equipped. When asked later why he returned, Beverly said he intended to pay off some debts owed to his former business partner, William Walker, and to others. Shouldn’t an honorable man pay his debts?

  In the event, Beverly felt no compunction about walking down Pennsylvania Avenue on the evening of Friday, August 12. The city looked grander than when he first arrived from Lynchburg six years before. If he looked east, he saw the ever-present Capitol. If he looked west, he saw the new Treasury Building under construction on Fifteenth Street. But Congress was not in session, and the Avenue was uncrowded. The hotels were almost empty, the boardinghouses dark. Beverly walked down the street with a friend.

  It was nearly dark when a group of four white men first recognized him. They called his name and started following him, speaking loudly. Beverly realized he might have overestimated his prospects, requiring him to accelerate his pace. At the corner of Eleventh Street, he turned right past Claggett’s dry-goods store. As soon as he was out of the sight of the men, he took off running north at full speed. His companion, never identified, bolted in another direction. Beverly raced north past Mr. Dubant’s barbershop and Mrs. Charles’s boardinghouse, with the white men now giving chase. After he passed F Street he veered right into a hollow of trees on the grounds of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Out of sight of his pursuers, he spotted a gully and dropped to lie down in it, covering himself with his cloak.

  His pursuers, perhaps remembering how he escaped the mob by ducking under a bridge a year before, slowed down and found him lying in the darkness. They grabbed him with much threatening language. Now joined by others, the white men marched Beverly along Seventh Street, with some suggesting they take him to see Judge Lynch. Beverly spotted a passing constable and called out to him, asking that he be taken to the jail. Mr. Richard Burr, a veteran of the force, took control of the prisoner, escorting him to the jail for safekeeping. By the time they arrived in Judiciary Square, the crowd trailing them had grown to some two hundred people.

  Clement Coote, the justice of the peace for the neighborhood, was called, and so was Mayor Bradley. Francis Scott Key was not. He was at Terra Rubra, still mourning Daniel’s death. Mayor Bradley would not be rushed. He insisted the law be followed. Personally, his sympathies were with his friend Beverly. He saw no evidence that Snow, by law a free man, had violated any statute by walking down the street. He persuaded the crowd to disperse with the promise that Snow would be fully examined the next day.

  Beverly spent the night in the City Jail. He was among the most famous prisoners ever to reside there and probably among the most popular, at least on the second floor. The man whose style ignited rage among whites also lit warm admiration among his fellow blacks. The sensational news of his arrest was now spreading around the city, evoking memories of the rioting a year before and its many causes.

  “The name of Beverly Snow is inseparably associated with that excitement,” said the Metropolitan, “and there are few, perhaps, in our community who are not so well acquainted with all the particulars of last summer’s rioting, as to render even allusion to them unnecessary.”

  Beverly’s white friends immediately came to his defense. John Hampden Pleasants, editor of the influential Richmond Whig newspaper, had known Beverly since he was a young man in Lynchburg cooking for John and Susannah Warwick.

  “We know Snow, and shall be very much surprised if he has deserved in reality punishment designed for him,” Pleasants wrote. “We have known him for some 16 years, and have always seen him, rather consequential and theatrical indeed, but perfectly respectful and unencroaching. We hope that the Districters will let him off.”

  In the morning, Beverly was brought out and escorted to the city council’s chamber in City Hall. More than one hundred people had gathered, as well as a dozen constables, the entire city’s police force. Beverly’s ability to command attention was beyond dispute. While he was certainly reviled by many, including the mechanics, he also had his supporters. Members of both groups crowded into the chamber.

  Magistrates Coote and Morsell opened the proceedings by questioning Beverly closely. He responded coolly but correctly. When did he come to Washington? Last night. What was his object? To satisfy his creditors. Whom did he meet with? Friends. Did he have incendiary publications in his possession? No. Did he have witnesses who could confirm his story? Yes. And so it went for more than two hours. Nobody wrote down the interrogation, but it was intense. Some in the audience were suspicious of his answers. John O’Sullivan detected “some prevarication and falsehood” in what Snow said. But the magistrates could find no legal fault with his answers or his conduct.

  “There is no criminal charge against the prisoner,” Mr. Coote finally said to the assembled crowd. “He must be dismissed fr
om the custody of the officer.”

  Did that mean he was going to be turned over to the mob for summary justice? There was a lot of loud talk, but no one actually dared grab Beverly or even try to harm him. Mayor Bradley seized the moment to note that Snow’s registry, required for all free people of color who lived in Washington City, had expired. By law he was required to leave the city immediately. Bradley was a decent man who would not have the city disgraced by lynch law. But he would not defy public opinion and the letter of the law by letting Snow stay in his adopted hometown.

  Beverly had no problem telling the magistrates that he would leave. He had planned to do just that. Beverly departed from Washington City for the last time that day. He was headed for a destination he had already scouted, a city where an African in America might live freely. Beverly was bound for Canada.

  48

  BEVERLY SNOW WOULD never again figure in events as dramatic as the Snow-Storm of August 1835, not that he minded. He and Julia moved on from Washington City with considerably more dignity than some of his enemies retained in staying. He may have recalled what his friend Epicurus had said: The man “who is happy and immortal is no ways solicitous or uneasy on any account, neither does he torment nor tease others. Anger is unworthy of his greatness, and beneficence can not form the character of his majesty, for all these things are the property of weakness.” Beverly would never be so weak as the white mob of Washington had proven to be.

  In Toronto, Beverly and Julia found themselves in a sparkling city on Lake Ontario that was much smaller than Washington and much more pleasant, not the least because there was no slavery. The British parliament had abolished slavery in all its colonies three years before. When Snow arrived in Toronto, its ten thousand residents included about five hundred people of African descent, most of them, like him, American-born blacks seeking to escape the capricious laws of the slaveholding republic based in Washington. One of them was Thomas Cary, his friend and brother of Isaac, who had left Washington the year before. Now Cary was running his own ice business.

  As the Snow family settled in for the coldest winter they had ever known, Beverly prepared to open another restaurant. Naturally, he gravitated to Church Street in the commercial center of the growing city. It was a neighborhood full of promise for an enterprising man. One British supporter of emigration to Canada exulted over Toronto’s many charms, “its rows of splendid brick-built tin-covered houses; its magnificent churches, and number of places of worship; its banks; its floating palaces, its beautiful schooners; its magnificent stores, some of them rivaling those of the first city of the world, with their plate glass windows, their spacious areas, and their splendid contents.”

  Unlike in Washington City, Beverly did not need to mask his feelings about slavery in order to keep his customers. He had not been a public abolitionist in the American capital but he was now. In late 1837, Beverly joined a mass meeting that founded a new organization called the Upper Canada Anti-Slavery Society. When a local minister opened the gathering by offering a resolution calling for the “immediate and universal abandonment” of slavery, Beverly seconded the motion.

  Beverly first opened a coffee shop on the northeast corner of Church and Colborne streets and settled into a new life of working, saving, and moderate pleasure. A few years later he opened a new eatery called the Epicurean Recess. As its name implied, the place offered refuge from the cold weather and stoic style of the north. He fitted it with the best furniture and sought out fresh oysters and other luxury items shipped in from the markets of New York and Boston.

  Beverly had plenty of competition in the food business. On Church Street, Beverly’s customers could also dine at the Peacock Tavern, William Phair’s Inn, the Crown and Anchor Tavern, the Edinborough Castle Inn, and the Ontario Hotel. Within this bustling milieu Beverly expanded his business, becoming a caterer and wholesaler of foodstuffs and touting himself as “B. R. Snow, Purveyor to the Gentry of Toronto.” His outgoing personality won him new friends. He fell in with George Brown, the editor of the city’s newest newspaper, the Globe, which gave American antislavery forces a public forum. Brown enjoyed Beverly’s fare and admired his style.

  Beverly still relied on old advertising gambits, including that reliable command:

  LOOK AT THIS!

  To be served this day at the new Epicurean Recess … Splendid Green Turtle

  Although generous with friends, Beverly was known to drive a hard bargain, especially with those who did not share his republican politics. When the local Tories, political conservatives, held a banquet in one of Beverly’s smaller rooms, he offered them a limited menu for a dollar per man, wine included. Brown of The Globe knew Beverly well enough to be amused by his low quoted prices.

  “Snow … with his whole soul (if he has one) despises of all things in the world, a cheap dinner,” Brown observed as the bibulous scene unfolded. When the two dozen Tories gathered and got liquored up, they started calling lustily for more food and drink. Snow told the waiters to cut them off. “Snow had an abundance of good things remaining but not for a dollar,” Brown reported. A “precious row” ensued.

  The hungry Tories issued loud threats against the American caterer, which did them no good. They tried sweet blandishments to similar effect. Threats to annex the United States were ignored. Beverly simply refused to serve them. The Tories wound up paying him three dollars per man to finish their feast. He “knew the value of a dollar to the infinitesimal portion of a red cent,” said Brown.

  When a fire swept through the premises of the Epicurean Recess in 1847, The Globe reported that Snow, “with his usual liberality,” paid a “handsome sum” to the neighborhood fire company that extinguished the flames. Beverly sold off the rest of the dining room furniture and kitchen accessories and put the proceeds into a new establishment called the Phoenix Saloon. He would rise from the ashes again. The new hotel and refectory, he boasted in a newspaper ad, “would be distinguished by its ‘assiduity and attention,’ with every comfort which ‘Home’ could possess.”

  The November 1848 opening of the Phoenix Saloon was no small affair. Beverly’s debut was the annual Masonic Ball, attended by some seven to eight hundred Masons from across Ontario. To sate so many palates Beverly offered a rich bill of fare. It featured many of his culinary specialties, starting with oyster and turtle soup, then proceeding to cold dishes of impressive variety: boned mutton, stuffed turkey, geese (boned and jellied), and lobster salad.

  The hot courses included venison with currant jelly, partridges with bread sauce, wild duck with claret sauce, and, of course, the final course of the turtle’s delight, the calipash and calipee. At the end of the evening Snow’s waiters brought out trays laden with desserts such as blancmange, an almond-flavored dish similar to vanilla pudding, as well as Málaga grapes from Spain, ice cream, and figs.

  “A more elegant ‘spread’ could not be desired by any one,” said the British Colonist newspaper. “Snow even surpassed himself on this occasion.”

  Among the city’s legal elite, Snow’s reputation as a caterer grew. The Law Society of Upper Canada, housed in an impressive two-story brick building called Osgoode Hall, often held functions for lawyers and judges and hired Snow to take care of the food. Beverly spent many gay and memorable nights working under the vaulted roof of the hall’s beautiful library, commanding a squadron of cooks and waiters who wordlessly executed each course of his intricate menus.

  As Beverly achieved a new level of professional success, he and his wife prospered. Back in 1843, the provincial government’s tax man had assessed Beverly’s worth at sixteen pounds in British currency, worth about seventy-five U.S. dollars of the day. Twelve years later, he was worth about twelve hundred U.S. dollars, a small fortune. Financially independent, he opened yet another eating house, the Exchange Saloon, in 1856. He was working there when he died suddenly on October 21, 1856, of unknown causes.

  If Beverly realized during his brief illness that his allotted time on earth had
come to an end, he might have thought one more time of his lifelong Greek friend who was said to have greeted death with constancy, if not joy. Suffering from a painful gallstone, Epicurus knew his time was not long. In the words of one eighteenth-century scholar, Epicurus contemplated his mode of thinking and what posterity would make of it.

  “He had the satisfaction on one side to find nothing but what was praiseworthy in the past and nothing but what would be glorious to him in the future,” said John Digby. “He therefore cheerfully embraced Death, as what would certainly suppress envy and render him immortal.”

  Beverly might have taken the same satisfaction for much the same reasons. After his passing, George Brown eulogized him in the pages of the Globe as a “long and favorably known … hotel keeper.” A few days later, Julia Snow and friends laid Beverly Randolph Snow to eternal rest in the Toronto Necropolis.

  As for the Snow-Storm of August 1835, Beverly apparently had never dwelled on it. Epicurus had recommended to his disciples a contempt for fame, a hearty dismissal of the notion that one’s individual existence had more than atomic significance, and Beverly seemed to subscribe. Sometimes late at night at Osgoode Hall, after the plates had been cleared and the brandy poured, visiting attorneys from the wilds of Canada would question him about the famous statesmen he had entertained in the American capital. Beverly would regale them with amusing stories of John Calhoun, the stony apologist for slavery; Henry Clay, the cynical bon vivant; and Daniel Webster, the humane giant—all of whom he had seated at his tables in the Epicurean Eating House. He might have even told the story of Arthur Bowen, the young man whose thirst for freedom had upended the National Metropolis. He had many a tale to tell of Washington if anyone cared to listen. As for his own story of bondage freedom, respectability, notoriety, and redemption—that would have to wait for another time and another teller.