SURVIVING NEW ORLEANS
Emily did not know him and Mary did not remember him, but it did not take long for Hamilton to become a trusted member of the Edmonson family. The girls had heard stories about him, but they never expected to meet their runaway brother; finding Hamilton was their one experience of joy since they had arrived in New Orleans. Hamilton had not only survived, but thrived, even in the South.
Hamilton tried to do all he could to help his brothers and sisters. At the New Orleans slave pen, Emily and Mary slept on the floor in the female section with about 20 or 30 other women. Mosquitoes and other insects swarmed the room at night, and every morning the girls woke to find their feet itchy and swollen with bug bites. Hamilton and Richard approached the slave trader and asked him for permission to have Emily and Mary sleep at Hamilton’s house, with the understanding that they would return to the showroom each morning. The trader wanted his slaves to look as healthy and free of disease as possible, so he agreed to the arrangement, knowing that the promise of a life-threatening beating would be enough to prevent the girls from trying to run away.
On the first night in Hamilton’s home, Emily lay down on a mattress free of bugs and woke feeling more rested than she had in weeks. True to their word, she and Mary promptly returned to the slave pen to present themselves for sale.
Not long after, Emily’s confidence was shaken when she saw the overseer take Samuel away in a carriage. They had no chance to speak or say good-bye. When they learned that he had been sold, they were not allowed to weep or appear sad; they needed to appear joyful and industrious on display. Emily did not know if she would ever see Samuel again, but the following day he returned to the slave pen and told the girls that he had been sold as a butler to Horace Cammack, a wealthy cotton merchant who had paid $1,000 for him. Hamilton may have helped him secure the position, but the details aren’t known. Relieved that Samuel had avoided the harshness of field work, Emily found peace in knowing that he had found what he thought would be the best possible arrangement under the circumstances. The similar sale of Ephraim and John, the two other enslaved Edmonson brothers in New Orleans, followed.
While Emily waited to be sold, she noticed that many of the enslaved people in the showroom fell ill, complaining of fever, nausea, and headache. Some bled from their mouths or vomited a substance that looked like blackened tar. As the days wore on, a growing number of those around her turned a ghastly shade of yellow, a sign of liver failure and the final stages of the disease known as yellow fever.
Every day more people succumbed to illness. Surrounded by death, the Edmonsons did not know how long they would be spared. They were not used to the weather and conditions in the South, and purchasers often hesitated to pay full price for slaves who might come down with “yellow jack.” Would they fall victim to disease before they had a chance to experience freedom?
Just as abruptly as they had been sent to New Orleans, Emily, Mary, and Richard were ordered to go back to Virginia before they became sick. On July 6, after three weeks in the South, they boarded the Union for the second time. Emily may have hesitated to return to the ship, but she longed for home more than she feared seasickness. The slave trader had told Emily and Mary that their family had raised a significant amount of money on their behalf. Richard was returning to life as a free man and the girls hoped that when they arrived, freedom papers would be waiting for them, too.
Beware! Yellow Fever
Yellow fever was a serious health problem in 1848. The year before, the disease had claimed almost 3,000 lives in New Orleans. When the disease began to spread among the slaves, no one had any idea how many would die. To minimize the risk of losing valuable property, traders often moved their slaves out of the area when disease broke out.
At the time, no one understood that yellow fever is a virus spread by the bite of an infected mosquito. Three to six days after being bitten, a person would experience headache, muscle aches, fever, flushing, loss of appetite, vomiting, and jaundice (yellow skin and eyes). After three or four days, these symptoms would disappear; some people would recover at this point, and others relapsed after about 24 hours. If the disease progressed, an infected person experienced organ failure, seizures, coma, and death. In 1848, there was no prevention or cure for yellow fever. Today there is a vaccination for the disease and there are modern treatments for the symptoms.
The mosquito known as Stegomyia aegypti is responsible for spreading yellow fever.
ELEVEN
$2,250: The Price of Freedom
AS SOON AS Emily boarded the Union, she realized that the return trip to Baltimore wasn’t going to be much easier than the trip to New Orleans had been. The belowdecks cargo area that had been crowded with slaves during their journey south was now packed to the ceiling with bales of cotton, barrels of molasses, and loaves of sugar. Emily and Mary were left with a space about eight or ten square feet directly under the hatchway door. To keep from getting seasick, Emily decided to avoid the confined cargo space, instead spending as much time as possible on deck in the fresh air. To make them more comfortable during the trip, Richard had been able to acquire and bring along a mattress, blankets, and extra food and drink.
After 16 days at sea, they arrived in Baltimore. The slave trader took Emily and Mary back to the same pen where they had been held the month before. Emily anticipated good news of her release when she met Jacob Bigelow, a Washington lawyer, who arrived a few hours later. He told Emily and Mary that he came to make sure that Richard was not delayed or harassed on his trip home to his wife and children, but, he explained, they were to remain. Not enough money had been raised to pay for their release. Devastated, Emily realized that this time she and Mary would have to manage without the support and protection of their brothers.
Over the next few weeks, Emily and Mary fell into a predictable routine. In the mornings they were forced to exercise by marching around the yard to the music of fiddles and banjos; in the afternoons they washed and ironed, slept some, and often wept.
A few weeks later, Emily had a chance to see her father, Paul Edmonson, and her older sister, Elizabeth Brent, when they traveled to Baltimore to try to negotiate for the girls’ release. The slave trader told Paul that he had two weeks to raise the funds or the girls would be moved to another slave market.
That night Elizabeth stayed with Emily and Mary in the women’s area and Paul slept in the room above his daughters. Emily could hear her father crying and groaning through the night. In the morning, Paul stood in the yard of the slave pen and watched the slaves marching around. The yard was narrow and the girls walked past him, so close that their skirts almost brushed up against him, but they had to keep walking and he had to let them go. Overwhelmed with grief, Paul could not stop from crying out, “Oh, my children, my children!” Emily knew that her father feared that he would not have enough time to raise the necessary funds to buy his children’s freedom.
BACK TO BRUIN & HILL
Weeks passed and Paul Edmonson did not return. Instead, Joseph Bruin, the slave trader from Alexandria, came to reclaim Emily and Mary. He roused the girls from their cell at about eleven o’clock at night and told them to come with him because they were returning to Virginia.
This time, Emily did not dare to consider the possibility of freedom. Surely, if she and Mary were to be free, Bruin would tell them. He said nothing.
At about 2 a.m., they arrived at Bruin & Hill in Alexandria, Virginia, the first place they were taken after leaving the Washington City Jail. They were placed in the same room where they had been held after their initial capture. Weeks had passed and they were back where they started.
Emily and Mary spent the sweltering days of August in the Alexandria slave pen washing, ironing, and sewing. Sometimes they were allowed to work in Bruin’s house, located less than a block from the slave pen. They spent a lot of time looking after Bruin’s children, seven-year-old Mary and four-year-old Martha, who developed a special affection for their caregivers.
COMING TO TERMS
Several weeks later, Paul Edmonson visited Bruin in Alexandria, trying once more to negotiate for his daughters’ freedom. He planned to go north to raise funds but he wanted Bruin to state in writing the exact terms that he would accept for their release.
In response, Bruin drafted the following document:
Alexandria, Va., Sept. 5, 1848
The bearer, Paul Edmondson, is the father of two girls, Mary Jane and Emily Catherine Edmondson. These girls have been purchased by us, and once sent to the south; and upon the positive assurance that the money for them would be raised if they were brought back, they were returned. Nothing, it appears, has as yet been done in this respect by those who promised, and we are on the very eve of sending them south the second time; and we are candid in saying that if they go again, we will not regard any promises made in relation to them. The father wishes to raise money to pay for them; and intends to appeal to the liberality of the humane and the good to aid him, and has requested us to state in writing the conditions upon which we will sell his daughters.
We expect to start our service to the South in a few days; if the sum of twelve hundred ($1,200) dollars be raised and paid to us in fifteen days, or we be assured of that sum then we will retain them for twenty-five days more, to give an opportunity for the raising of the other thousand and fifty ($1,050) dollars; otherwise we shall be compelled to send them along with our other servants.
Bruin & Hill.
Paul Edmonson took the paper and left.
THE COFFLE DEPARTS
Emily and Mary waited anxiously for a letter or message from their father, but day after day passed without word from him. The letter stated that their father had 15 days, until September 20, to raise the ransom. Emily watched as the deadline approached—and then passed. Had the price been set so high that he would be unable to raise the money? Since Bruin had not received any payment, Emily realized that he was free to sell them any time he wished.
Just as Bruin had promised, he began preparations to send about 35 slaves in a coffle to South Carolina. Emily and Mary would be part of that chain gang.
The girls were given bright calico fabric and ordered to sew the show dresses that they would wear when they arrived and were exhibited for sale. Emily did as she was told, although all the time she spent cutting and stitching the fabric she felt as if she were sewing her own funeral shroud. Would she and Mary have to endure the same horrors and humiliations they had experienced in New Orleans?
The night before the coffle was to leave, Emily and Mary went to Bruin’s house to tell his family good-bye. His young daughters clung to Emily and Mary and begged them not to go. Mary explained that they did not want to leave, but they had to obey her father. Emily told Bruin’s daughters that if they wanted them to stay, they should go and talk to their father. The children ran away to beg their father to allow Emily and Mary to remain in Virginia.
That night, Emily and Mary wept in the darkness of their cell. Bruin heard their cries and came up to see them. Mary begged for compassion, urging him to think of his own dear daughters. Bruin listened to Mary’s words and hesitatingly agreed that if his business partner, Captain Henry Hill, approved, he would not force them to join the coffle leaving in the morning. That said, he warned the girls not to expect special treatment, since Hill had already said that he thought the girls should have been sold long ago.
Slave traders advertised in newspapers and broadsides for the purchase of slaves.
Emily and Mary continued to weep and pray through the night. Morning dawned, but they had not been told that they could stay. Had Hill ignored their pleas? They gathered their few possessions and put on their bonnets and shawls. Had all their prayers gone unanswered?
Emily knew that in just a few moments, they would be forced to gather in the yard and line up—men, women, and children, two and two, the men handcuffed together, the right wrist of one to the left wrist of the other. A chain would be passed through the handcuffs, one after the other, linking the group together. The prisoners would form a line and travel on foot; the traders would travel on horseback on either side of the line, carrying whips to control both the horses and the people. At the time of their departure, they would be forced to set off singing—singing!—accompanied by fiddles and banjos, the steady crash of the chains creating the rhythm of the march.
From the 1881 book, A Popular History of the United States, by William Cullen Bryant. The men were typically handcuffed and chained together, while the women and children marched behind. The etching shows the U.S. Capitol as it appeared in 1815, without a dome.
Would they be able to survive the journey? Death was not unexpected when traveling on a chain gang.
Emily looked out the upstairs window of their quarters, watching the slaves gather in the yard below. When would she and Mary be called to join them?
The enslaved took their places in line, shackled together.
The fiddle and banjo began to play.
The gates to the pen opened and the coffle began to shuffle forward.
Emily and Mary watched them leave, watched the last person in line move out of the yard and the gates close behind him. They had been spared. When they understood they would not be going to South Carolina, they hugged each other and wept with relief. They were not free, but they did not have to go south, not yet, not that day.
What Emily and Mary did not know was that the night before the coffle departed, Joseph Bruin met with one of the Edmonsons’ supporters, probably William Chaplin, and worked out a last-minute agreement to keep the girls in Virginia. The man offered Bruin a $600 deposit, which he could keep if Paul Edmonson failed to come up with the balance of the money due by a new deadline.
Bruin, eager to pocket the $600 bonus, agreed to the arrangement. He no longer expected the Edmonsons to be able to raise the money. After all, they had been trying for months without success. Why would things be different this time?
Sorrow Songs
Coffles were often led by fiddle and banjo players to keep the enslaved marching at a steady pace and to conceal their sorrow. Frederick Douglass reflected on the meaning of music and song among slaves in his 1845 book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave:
I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. . . . The songs of the slave represent the sorrow of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.
Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895), a reformer and leader in the abolitionist movement, understood the extreme hardships of living within slavery. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey and changed his name to Douglass after escaping to the North.
TWELVE
Ransomed
PAUL EDMONSON ASKED everyone he knew for help raising the money he needed to buy his daughters’ freedom, but he had only limited success. When he approached abolitionist sympathizers in Washington, they didn’t have money to offer, but they did make arrangements for him to go to New York City to ask for assistance from the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. After a 12-hour train ride, Paul arrived in Manhattan and followed the directions he had been given to the main office of the society. He explained his situation and shared testimonials about the girls’ good character as well as a letter from Rev. Mathew Turner, the white minister at Asbury Methodist Church where the Edmonsons had worshiped, which stated that they were exemplary members of the congregation and worthy of support. A representative from the Anti-Slavery Society agreed to follow up by writing to Bruin to authenticate the facts of the case and to see if he would lower the ransom.
In the meantime, Paul was directed to the Rev. James W. C. Pennington, an escaped slave from Maryland who was also a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and pastor of the Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City. Pen
nington preached about the Edmonson case in his church the following Sunday and his congregation raised $50 in donations, a significant amount of money considering that most members of the church were quite poor and many were saving their money to free their own family members. Paul didn’t want to appear ungrateful—he did appreciate the efforts being made to help his family—but $50 wasn’t nearly enough for him to reach his goal in time. Pennington understood and sent Paul to visit the home of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a preacher and the editor of the New York Independent, an abolitionist newspaper.
This woodcut image titled “Am I not a man and a brother?” was originally used as the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England in the 1780s. It was widely used in the American abolitionist movement as well.
When Paul arrived at Beecher’s house in Brooklyn, no one was home, so he sat on the front steps to wait. Overcome with stress and grief, he could no longer hold back the tears and he began to weep. When Beecher arrived, Paul gathered his composure and explained his situation. Beecher invited him inside to his library to tell his story.
Before that time, Beecher had not taken up the cause of slavery from the pulpit, but Mary and Emily’s story horrified him. The girls were so young and innocent that he felt compelled to act. Beecher, who had led the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn for about a year, reached out to other churches and congregations, inviting them to attend a public rally to benefit the girls. This ecumenical appeal was the first time New York clergy from different denominations had come together to assist slaves in need.
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