The Bondwoman's Narrative

by Hannah Crafts

  I wrote earlier that I was pursuing the authentication of The Bondwoman’s Narrative using two separate procedures. One was the scientific dating of the manuscript, using sophisticated techniques that could ascertain the approximate date of paper, ink, writing style, type of pen, even the use of thimbles to affix paste wafers, and the other mysterious processes that Dr. Joe Nickell used to date the manuscript between 1853 and 1861. The second method on which I had embarked simultaneously was the exploration of census indexes and records, using research tools developed by the Mormon Family Library, especially its Accelerated Indexing System (AIS), which is an alphabetical listing of the names recorded in each federal census since 1790.

  I became familiar with this index when researching the identity of Harriet E. Wilson. When I found Mrs. Wilson’s residence in Boston in 1860, using the Boston City Directory for that year (essentially the predecessor of a telephone book, without, of course, telephone numbers), I thought that it would be a straightforward matter to find Mrs. Wilson through AIS, but she was not listed. My colleague at Yale, the great historian John W. Blassingame, encouraged me to examine the actual manuscript record of the 1860 census for the street on which Wilson was reported to be living. Reluctantly, I agreed to do so, asking a research assistant to travel to the Boston Public Library, where the manuscript was held. I presumed that Mrs. Wilson had moved, or died, or been away from home on the day that the census taker knocked on her door. My research assistant, to her astonishment and my own, found that the bottom of the page on which Wilson’s name appeared had been folded under. The photographer who had made the microfilm on which the AIS index was based had not realized this, hence lopping off an entire section of that neighborhood. Had not Blassingame insisted that I pursue my research to its original source, I could never have established Harriet E. Wilson’s racial identity.

  Numerous problems obtain with census records, not the least of which are human error, poor spelling, phonetic spelling, and the fact that some people will lie about their birth dates or birthplace, their ethnic identity, or their level of literacy. Not everyone wants to be located, locatable, or identified, especially if she has a reason for which to forge a new identity. Many former slaves never could be certain of their birth dates in the first place, and some even shifted this date (usually forward) decade by decade as a researcher tracks them through each successive census. Spellings can also be quite arbitrary, necessitating a broad approach to an array of phonetic possibilities for one’s subject. Crafts, for example, can be written as Krafts, Croft, Kroft, Craff, etc. Census records can be a blessing for researchers, but they cannot be used uncritically. Just as important, indexes of census records are not entirely accurate, as I discovered when I used my great-grandmother Jane Gates as a control for the 1860, 1870, and 1880 census indexes, since I possessed copies of her listings in those records, which our family had made ourselves at the relevant county courthouses. Nevertheless, she did not appear in the AIS index. Electronic indexes—on CD-ROM and on-line, none of which existed, of course, when I went in search of Harriet Wilson—can be enormous time-savers but can never replace examination of an actual document. Human error in the replication of such an enormous database as the U.S. federal censuses is inevitable.

  All of these caveats notwithstanding, I embarked upon a systematic examination of census records, using the Internet and a most efficient researcher at the Mormon Family Library in Salt Lake City, Tim Bingaman. Tim Bingaman was a godsend, not only because of his good humor and expertise with databases but because my travel was still restricted on account of my recuperation from hip-replacement surgery. I would phone Tim and request a search of this source or that, and back—by phone, fax, or mail—would come the result. Eventually, the search for Hannah Crafts would involve several archives: the Mormon Family History Library in Salt Lake City, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, Harvard, and the University of North Carolina, as well as family genealogy web sites and CD-ROM indexes, including the records of the Freedman’s Bank, recently published by the Mormon Family History Library.

  I began my research by compiling a list of all the proper names of the characters who appear in Hannah Crafts’s manuscript. As I have written, if I could find at least one actual person named among her characters, then it would be clear that Crafts based her novel on some aspect of her own experience; that the novel was, to some extent, autobiographical; and that she, quite probably, knew the institution of slavery personally and may even have been a slave herself. The question would be one of degree.

  By my count, thirty-one characters appear by name in The Bond-woman’s Narrative. At least two characters—Mr. Trappe, Hannah’s mulatto mistress’s torturer, and Mr. Saddler, a slave trader—were certainly named allegorically. Then, too, the slaves listed by first name would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find, since the slave censuses listed slaves by age and gender under the name of slave owner rather than by the name of the slave. So I set the names of slaves such as Catherine, Lizzy, Bill, Jacob, Charlotte, and Jane aside. Then I began to pursue each name in alphabetical order, using the 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 federal census indexes.

  The mountain of research that these searches produced and the frustrations, false starts, and dead ends attendant upon this kind of research will be analyzed and duplicated in a scholarly edition of this novel. Here I can only summarize my results. But let me say that the peaks and valleys of exhilaration and frustration when pursuing this sort of research are extreme, and not for those easily discouraged. Finding Harriet Wilson, as difficult as it was, by contrast was much simpler because it was more localized, confined initially to Boston. In this search, we cast our net wide, of necessity.

  I was convinced that the success of the historical search for Crafts’s characters would turn on locating her masters, especially Sir Clifford de Vincent. Either in Virginia or in the United Kingdom, I believed, Sir Clifford would be found. When he was not, I began to despair that Crafts’s tale was entirely fabricated, or at least she had changed the names of all her characters—just as Harriet Wilson had done—and that this avenue of research would lead to a dead end. Even worse, no one named Hannah Crafts was listed in any census indexes that we initially searched. Still, she had located the first part of her narrative in Milton, Virginia—and the Milton that is found in Charles City County, on a bend in the James River, southeast of Richmond, fit her description of the region so very well. An extended, alphabetical search just might yield some clue about the real identity of perhaps one or two of her characters. So, rather than abandon this aspect of the search, I pressed on.

  The first indication of a name in a census matching a name in the text was that of Charles Henry, the second of the novel’s three characters having a first and last name. (Sir Clifford was the first.) Two Charles Henrys are listed in the 1850 Virginia census, and one in the 1860 census. “Charley” Henry, in the novel, was the son of “Mr. and Mrs. Henry,” Hannah Crafts’s kind new masters.

  Crafts’s characters Mr. and Mrs. Cosgrove, who took possession of the Lindendale plantation after the death of Mr. Vincent, would be difficult to trace, given the absence of a first name of either. But the 1840 Virginia census lists one Cosgrove, the 1850 Virginia census lists three Cosgroves, while the 1860s census lists four, all living in various parts of Virginia.

  These similarities in surname were obviously too vague to be of much use, given the absence of first names. Only geographical proximity could help connect them in some way. The first promising association came with the location of Frederick Hawkins, the novel’s third character with two names. The 1810 and 1820 Virginia censuses list a Frederick Hawkins living in Dinwiddie County. No Frederick Hawkins appears, however, in the censuses between 1830 and 1850. The distance between Milton and the closest northwest boundary of Dinwiddie County is about thirty kilometers, or 18.6 miles. When we recall that Hannah and her first mistress, the tragic mulatto, became lost on their way to Milton, it is at the home of Freder
ick Hawkins that they arrive. This was a very promising lead, seemingly too much of a correspondence to be entirely coincidental.

  Once I had a location for Frederick Hawkins in Dinwiddie County, I could then return to the Virginia census listings in search of the Vincents, the Henrys, and the Cosgroves, to see if any lived near either Milton in Charles City County or in a nearby county, such as Dinwiddie. Nathan Vincent and Elisa Vincent lived in Dinwiddie County in 1830. Edward Vincent, Joseph Vincent, and William Vincent lived in Henrico County in 1840. In 1850 Nathan Vincent lived in Dinwiddie County and Jacob Vincent lived in Hen-rico County. Thomas Cosgrove lived in Henrico County in 1840, John Cosgrove lived there in 1850, and Frank Cosgrove lived there in 1860. Twenty kilometers separate Milton from the southeast border of Henrico County. Similarly, seven Henrys are listed as living in Henrico County in 1850, and one John H. Henry is even listed as a Presbyterian clergyman, age thirty-three, born in New York and living in Stafford County, which is eighty miles from Milton. It seemed possible to me that the Cosgrove, Henry, and Vincent families in the novel were named after these families living relatively close to Milton. The names of these characters, like the name of Frederick Hawkins, do not seem to have been arbitrary; the fact that the surnames of these characters matched real people who lived so closely together in one section of Virginia suggested that it was at least possible that Hannah Crafts had named her characters after people she had known in Virginia as a slave.

  Tracing the locations of key characters.

  JOHN COSGROVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B

  THOMAS COSGROVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B

  FREDERICK HAWKINS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C

  REV. JOHN H. HENRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . A

  EDWARD JOHNSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B

  ELISA VINCENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . C

  NATHAN VINCENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C

  WILLIAM VINCENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B

  I wrote above that I had been pursuing Hannah Crafts along two parallel research paths. While I awaited the scientific analysis of the manuscript itself, I was gathering raw data from a variety of archives and sources. If Hannah Crafts had drawn upon her own experiences as a slave in Virginia and North Carolina as the basis of the events depicted in her novel, then sooner or later these two paths of research would have to overlap, or mirror each other, in their findings. Despite this expectation, nothing prepared me for the fascinating manner in which this mirroring would occur.

  Joe Nickell had suggested near the end of his report that he felt that “the novel may be based on actual experiences.” Why did he think this possible? Because of Crafts’s peculiar handling of two of the characters’ names:

  There are changes that may be due to fictionalization of real persons or events, such as the change of “Charlotte” to “Susan” [pp. 46 and 47]. More telling, perhaps, is the fact that the name “Wheeler” in the narrative was first written cryptically, for example as “Mr. Wh——r” and “Mrs. Wh——r,” but then later was overwritten with the missing “eele” in each case to complete the name [pp. 148–152).20

  What these manuscript changes imply is that Hannah Crafts most probably knew the Wheelers and that Wheeler was their actual name. Even more surprising is the fact that she has disguised their name initially, and then filled it in later, suggesting that the reasons she had wanted to veil their identity no longer obtained when she decided to fill in their names. Moreover, it is clear that she wanted to leave no doubt about the Wheelers’ historical identity, about who they actually were.

  When I read this paragraph in Nickell’s report, I thought of Dorothy Porter’s note to Emily Driscoll, pointing out that one John Hill Wheeler had held several government positions in the 1850s. Little did I know how important these clues would turn out to be.

  John Hill Wheeler

  I have no idea how Dorothy Porter identified John Hill Wheeler as a possible candidate for the Mr. Wheeler in The Bondwoman’s Narrative. But she was correct. A painstaking search of federal census records for North Carolina and Washington, D.C., revealed that only one Wheeler in the entire United States lived in both North Carolina and Washington between 1850 and 1880. Every scholar embarked upon a search of this sort lives for a moment such as this. Not only had Wheeler served in a variety of governmental positions, he was also a slaveholder and an ardent and passionate defender of slavery, just as Crafts depicts him. But even more remarkably, John Hill Wheeler in 1855 became for a month or so perhaps the most famous slaveholder in the whole of America, and all because of an escaped female slave.

  By this time, I had decided to share the manuscript with a few other scholars, namely William L. Andrews, Nina Baym, Rudolph Byrd, Ann Fabian, Frances Smith Foster, Nellie Y. McKay, Augusta Rohrbach, and Jean Fagan Yellin. The generous, encouraging but rigorous, and sobering responses of these other scholars of nineteenth-century American literature would be important to me as I struggled to gain my bearings in the choppy sea of raw research that my searches through various archives were producing.

  John Hill Wheeler. (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill)

  “Mrs. John Hill Wheeler (Ellen) and Her Two Sons” by Thomas Sully. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Capt. John R. Brasel, U.S.N.R., 1967)

  One day William Andrews phoned to ask if I realized who Wheeler was. I told him what I had learned so far from several biographical entries, including that in the on-line American National Biography database, the most authoritative such listing of American lives yet compiled. In his searches, he replied, he had learned that John Hill Wheeler not only had been a slaveholder but was the petitioner in the infamous Case of Passmore Williamson, a fact that none of Wheeler’s biographers had thought to mention. This case was one of the first challenges to the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and it turned on Wheeler’s attempt to regain his fugitive slave, Jane Johnson. This single observation would turn out to be the most important clue in establishing crucial details about Hannah Crafts’s life as a slave.

  John Hill Wheeler was born in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, in 1806, the son of John Wheeler (1771–1832), the postmaster of Murfreesboro, and Maria Elizabeth Jordan (1776–1810). He died in Washington, D.C., in 1882. Wheeler graduated from Columbian College of Washington, D.C. (now George Washington University) in 1826, then studied law under John L. Taylor, the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. In 1828 he received an A.M. degree from the University of North Carolina, a year after he was admitted to the bar. Between 1827 and 1852, he served for various periods in the North Carolina House of Commons, first between 1827 and 1830. From 1837 to 1841, he served as the superintendent of the branch mint of the United States at Charlotte. In 1832 Wheeler became the secretary of the French Spoilations Claims Commission. He served as state treasurer between 1842 and 1844.

  In 1851 Wheeler published Historical Sketches of North Carolina from 1584 to 1851, then returned to the state legislature between 1852 and 1853. In 1854 he was named U.S. minister to Nicaragua, where he served until 1857, when he was forced to resign for contravening the instructions of Secretary of State William L. Marcy concerning the recognition of a new government. According to the historian Robert E. May, “Wheeler was minister at the time that the American ‘filibusterer’ William Walker conquered Nicaragua. Walker eventually reestablished slavery in Nicaragua, in a bid to get southern support for his regime. Wheeler was extremely supportive of Walker’s reestablishment of slavery, and earlier recognized Walker’s regime prematurely, to the displeasure of the State Department.21 He returned to Washington in 1857, visiting North Carolina several times before the Civil War began.
Between 1859 and 1861, he worked in the statistical bureau. He returned to North Carolina during the Civil War, undertook research in England for a second edition of his history of North Carolina between 1863 and 1865, and returned to Washington in 1865. Wheeler also published A Legislative Manual of North Carolina (1874) and Reminiscences and Memoirs of North Carolina and Eminent North Carolinians (1884). He edited Colonel David Fanning’s Autobiography (1861), and he left a diary, a Spanish edition of which (Diario de John Hill Wheeler) was published in 1974. Wheeler ran for Congress in 1830 but was defeated. He was married twice, first to Mary Elizabeth Brown between 1830 and 1836, and then after her death to Ellen Oldmixon Sully, whom he married in 1838. He had five children, three in his first marriage, two in his second.22

  In 1842 Wheeler moved from Hertford County to Lincolnton in Lincoln County, where he ran a plantation. According to the Dictionary of American Biography (1999), Wheeler not only was “a plantation owner,” he was also a “staunch advocate of slavery, and firm believer in America’s manifest destiny to annex parts of Central America and the Caribbean.” In fact, in 1831 Wheeler’s brother raised a volunteer company from Hertford County that participated in the suppression of the famous Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia.23 Wheeler was quite passionate not only about defending his own right to own slaves but also about defending and protecting the entire system of slavery.

  According to the 1850 North Carolina census, Wheeler owned twenty-five slaves, ranging in age from one year to fifty. Fifteen were males and ten were females. Four of the female slaves were between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five; one was twenty-one, while three were twenty- five. Could one of these four women have escaped to freedom in the North, and then, as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs had done, turned her pen against her master? I began to research Wheeler’s role in The Case of Pass-more Williamson in search of possible clues for Hannah Crafts, growing increasingly curious about this Jane Johnson.