Higginson had been interested in Mary since early March, and he owned a copy of Andrew’s broadsheet, “History of Ida May” (page 136).7 He might have picked it up at his stationer, Spauldings, in Worcester, which had advertised it, or when he was called to testify at Boston State House earlier that month, the day before Mary was there. As soon as he had a free moment, he went to Ware’s house to see Mary in person. They chatted, a church leader who loved children but had none, and a child who must have become accustomed to attention. He wondered at her precociousness and delighted in her laughter. Later that afternoon, he called again, and it was the same—the world disappeared, and there were only these two.
His wife, Mary Channing’s, degenerative illness had made his dreams of a family diminish. She did not allow him to lie with her, though he was her husband. Some days she did not leave her room. Higginson could hardly offer little Mary a suitable home, in the absence of a mother’s care. He knew she had parents—she spoke of them. But he dreamed that Mary might fill the void in his own family.
Higginson told Mary it would please him very much if she would have a picture made with him.8 After a few turns around a daguerreotypist’s gallery, they were invited to sit before the camera in a glass-paneled room at the top of the stairs. Higginson arranged his coat, reached down for Mary, and bounced her upon his knee. She struck her pose, seated still on his lap, practiced now in the art of picture taking, while Higginson did not stop smiling.
He took Mary back to Boston himself so he might meet her parents. While riding the train with her sitting next to him, he wished there could be no end to the clicking rails and the happy chatter. Just before Framingham, they passed a white lake, covered in snow, with a gray sky above. The lake was home to a community of swans clustered upon the ice. White upon white.
They arrived in Boston too soon, pulling into the station in the early afternoon, a three-hour journey passing by in the blink of an eye. Bundled up against a cold wind that threatened to unseat them from their cab, the two headed across Copley Square toward Boylston Street. They pulled into the close side streets of Beacon Hill and stopped in front of Mary’s door. Her father, Henry Williams, came bounding out to receive them. Her mother and grandmother were not at home. Higginson started at the sight of Mary’s brown father, and her brother Oscar standing behind him. The word used to describe white and black people who mixed without reserve was promiscuous.
Higginson explained to Henry Williams that he did not think it right for a young girl to be paraded about in the manner devised for Mary. She was a child, not an exhibit. Her sensibilities would surely see some effects from this publicity, and she ought to be given the shelter and anonymity of a loving home. Fifty years later, in his 1904 memoir, Higginson would remember the frustration he felt with John Andrew and others, who “exhibited” her to the public as Ida May, “as a curiosity.” This injudicious practice should have been “stopped.”
Mary’s appearance with Senator Sumner at Tremont Temple that weekend could be her last for some time. Neither man knew what would happen should Sumner’s speech be successful. Would Sumner ask to keep Mary by his side?
Sumner had arrived in Boston just after Mary and her family, on Sunday, March 11. He lived nearby at 20 Hancock Street. During the intersession months, he planned to resume his life of conversation with dear friends—Samuel Gridley Howe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the naturalist Louis Agassiz—at supper clubs. He had returned to his habit of taking the daily papers in the Athenaeum’s reading rooms. Given their proximity in the small neighborhood of Beacon Hill, Charles Sumner and Henry Williams must have met in person after their years of correspondence.
Sumner fundraised for the Williams family while in Boston. Longfellow, Sumner’s closest friend, gave six dollars “For Ida May, slave” on March 24, as marked in his account books under “Giving in 1855.” Perhaps Mary and her siblings visited Longfellow’s Cambridge mansion, the Craigie House, and met the poet and his wife, Fanny, in a house filled with children about the same ages as Oscar, Mary, and Adelaide.9
One thing was certain: interest in Mary would wane, and when it did, her family would be waiting to retrieve her.
Higginson offered the Williams family some help in this regard. He explained that he had been, until recently, the pastor of a congregation at Newburyport, a seaside town about thirty-five miles north of Boston. When summer came, perhaps Williams would allow his daughter to travel there? To go to the shore would hide Mary from the limelight, so that it would find another. Newburyport was a town friendly to abolition, it was the birthplace of William Lloyd Garrison, and where John Greenleaf Whittier’s family called home.
Higginson’s friend Caroline “Carrie” Cushing Andrews, along with her sister Jane, had agreed to enroll Mary in the Sunday school they ran in the summer months at Newburyport. During the school year, Carrie Andrews worked at a school in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where she lived and taught in a small colony of abolitionists founded by her neighbors Sarah and Angelina Grimké, and Theodore Weld. Her work was in the education of freed people. Mary would be in good hands, and she could study and prepare for the coming school term along with children her own age. All three Williams children could enter school the following year, since integrated public schools had recently opened in Boston. The timing was good.
The Williams family could finish touring Mary with the senator before embarking on a new partnership with this new benefactor. Williams and Higginson had more than Mary in common. They had both dropped in on Henry David Thoreau at his home in Concord in 1850, unannounced. Carrie Andrews had long been Thoreau’s friend and correspondent. They shared a love of Thoreau for the liberation he offered to each.10 And both men would attend Sumner’s upcoming lecture at Tremont Temple and subsequent events. They could discuss Higginson’s offer then, when Elizabeth and Prue would also be available to meet him.
In the days that followed, Higginson measured his mixed impressions of the Williams family against the happiness of his friendship with Mary.
It happened during these anxious days that Sumner bought a Negro family and gave them their freedom. One of the children was white, and Mr. Higginson conceived of the plan of adopting her and thus filling the vacancy in his own family. He wrote: “I have made a new acquaintance, most fascinating to me—the dear little white slave girl whom Mr. Sumner purchased—‘Ida May’ they call her—but her real name is Mary Mildred something. Fancy a slender little girl of seven . . . with reddish hair, brown eyes, delicate features and skin so delicate as to be a good deal freckled. She came up to be shown at a public meeting here, and it was love at first sight between us, she was like an own child to me, and when in Boston this morning I restored her to her tall mulatto father and her handsome little dark brother and sister, it gave me a strange bewildered feeling. They were owned in Alexandria; the mother and grandmother are described as almost white. I am going to see them. There is a photograph of the little girl, but not nearly so good as a daguerreotype which was taken here, of her sitting in my lap—her face is lovely in the picture, but mine (my wife declares) is spoiled by happiness.”
—Mary Potter Thatcher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of his Life 11
16
“The Anti-slavery Enterprise”
Boston, March 29, 1855
In the fall of 1854, Dr. James Stone had organized the “Independent Lectures on Slavery” to build on the antislavery sentiment in Boston following Anthony Burns’s rendition. The fifty thousand Bostonians who had taken to the streets to witness one man’s extradition could stand to learn more about the three million living in slavery. Reformer Caroline Healey Dall, in her column for the National Anti-Slavery Standard, said that when she moved home to Boston in 1855, she found that the mood had shifted. “Whole families who would not speak upon the subject when I left New England, now entered upon it of their own accord.” However, these new converts were at best, uninformed, or at worst, “self-deluded” apologists for slavery.1 Mean
while, she found the hardline “rebellious few were more bitter than ever before.”
The lectures took place in the renovated Tremont Temple, which had seating in the thousands. Tickets cost fifty cents a couple, and Ticknor’s and Jewett’s bookstore offered for sale subscriptions for the entire lecture series.
The organizing committee invited abolitionism’s brightest stars and also, with magnanimous intent, voices from the proslavery opposition. Few supporters of slavery honored the committee with a response, and fewer still made an appearance. Senator Sam Houston, who delivered his address on February 22, was the exception. In January Sumner and Houston had met in the Senate chamber, and shared a few words about the upcoming lectures. In a letter to Samuel G. Howe marked “confidential,” Sumner asked if it would be possible to plant questioners in the audience when Houston represented the proslavery argument.
Senate Chamber 24th Jan. ’55
Dear Howe,
Houston told me today that he wished to give me his platform. “I have but two planks” said he.—“The Constitution & the Union.” To which I replied—“Those are mine precisely; but we differ on the meaning in the Constitution.” He says that his whole lecture will be contained in those two points.
I think the General shews [sic] some sensitiveness, with regard to his address. Many here regard the whole thing as an important political step, calculated to affect his Presidential prospects.
I have promised the General a kind & cordial reception. This he will have surely. But I think that some person in the audience might properly address him, in the course of his remarks, some pertinent inquiries. You know that he is accustomed to such interruptions. For instance, ask him—Does he recognize ppty [property] in man? Where does the Constitution recognize ppty in man? Has not the South been the aggressor? In what has the North been the aggressor? Such questions as these would bring him to precise points. Think of them; but say nothing of me.
Ever Yrs, C. S.
—Charles Sumner to Samuel Gridley Howe, January 24, 18552
Illness prevented Sumner from making the first speech in the series, on November 23, 1854—the week Ida May was released. He suffered from what the press diagnosed as both rheumatism and a cold, but he called his complaint “his disability.” “Had it not interfered with public engagements, I should have stuck to my bed for a few days & nothing would have been known of it out of my mother’s house. I do not like being gazetted as a sick man.”3 Instead, he would end the series as its fourteenth lecturer, on March 29, after he returned from Washington at the close of the senatorial session. He still was not well. “He was looking so pale and ill that it made one’s heart ache to see him,” reported Caroline Healey Dall.
On the afternoon before his scheduled lecture, a line was already forming outside the Tremont Temple. “Between two and three hundred people applied to Mr. Hayes, Superintendent of the Tremont Temple, on Thursday afternoon and evening, in hopes to obtain tickets to the course of ‘Lectures on Slavery,’ by paying four dollars therefore. Nearly all were disappointed.”4 Hayes was a former policeman who had quit to protest the police role in slave catching. On the second evening, Sumner would praise him from the stage as “Mr. Hayes, who resigned his place in the police of Boston rather than be instrumental in the return of a fugitive slave,” and again, Mr. Hayes, who “for himself, he could imagine no place, no salary, no consideration which he would not gladly forego rather than become in any way an agent in enslaving his fellow men.”5
The lecture committee found only nineteen tickets returned by their subscribers, even though a premium of a dollar above the purchase price had been advertised for any subscriber who wished to sell. Hayes redistributed those nineteen tickets at sixteen times their price. Many people remained outside the rest of the evening, in the hopes that five dollars might get them in. An additional date, March 30, was added to accommodate the disappointed crowd, with tickets on sale at the bookseller. About six thousand people attended the lectures.6 “On the whole,” it was reported, “this may be the most successful course of popular lectures ever established in Boston.”7
A few blocks away at his Boston home on Hancock Street, Sumner took the sold out series as an occasion to declare victory. He had in hand a letter from John Andrew, sent that very day with the happy report that the Henry Williams case was complete. The broadsheet “History of Ida May” (page 136) had sold well, and the funds needed to free Ludwell had been secured. The manumission of the entire family would be complete within the year. He must congratulate Williams when he saw him later that evening.
MR. SUMNER’S LECTURE
There was a crowded audience last night at the Tremont Temple to hear Charles Sumner lecture on ‘the Necessity, the Practicability, and the Dignity of the Anti-Slavery Enterprise.’ The Governor of the Commonwealth, and many other distinguished citizens occupied the platform, on which also sat the liberated slaves, Anthony Burns and Ida May . . .
The practicability of the anti-slavery enterprise, Mr. Sumner said, was certain, because it was right. What ever it was right to do could be done. What was proposed to be done? Simply this. To secure to the slaves the marriage relation, to give them the right to learn to read and write, to give them an equivalent for their labor. Would any man say that these things could not be done? It was a libel on human nature and on the American people to maintain that they were impracticable. Yet do these things, give the slave his wife and children, so that they shall be his and not another’s, give him the right to education, give him remuneration for his labor, and slavery is at an end.
—Boston Evening Telegraph, March 30, 18558
In the crowded hall, Mary would have had to listen carefully to Mr. Sumner to follow his speech. He was facing away from her on the stage; the lecture was complex. She watched the audience to determine their response as Sumner described her father’s path out of slavery. Sumner laid out three keys that would unlock freedom: marriage rights, literacy, and wages. Sumner and Andrew’s legal efforts had secured Henry and Elizabeth Williams’s marriage. The family had been taught to read and write, and their children expected to have an education in Boston’s schools. Williams now worked for wages, enough to buy them freedom and comfort. For this family, “slavery was at an end” in the very practicable way that Sumner set forth in Boston that night.
Sumner’s practical three-part proposal was better received than the one Ralph Waldo Emerson had proposed, earlier in the lecture series, when he called on the antislavery families of New England to forgo their cigars and carriages and instead buy and free one enslaved family each.
Sumner opened his lecture by recalling to the audience the early days of the antislavery movement, when it was still a radical fringe group. Two decades earlier, a mob had broken up the meeting of twenty or so members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society on Washington Street. But on this day, thousands had gathered without fear of interruption.
In the autumn of 1835, on the 21st Oct an association of ladies, known as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, was summoned to meet in an upper story of No. 44 Washington St.—in this good city of Boston & it was announced that several addresses were to be delivered on the occasion. The hall room was small & the company expected was not large. Sometime before the appointed hour of meeting, the door was surrounded by a loud & tumultuous crowd, who saluted the members, as they came, with all manner of vileness, & afterwards, during the prayers with which the proceedings commenced, actually hurled missiles at the lady presiding, &, finally by force & clamor, which were unchecked by the Mayor, dispersed the assembly. Intruders insolently seized the trunk of papers of the Society, & hurled them out of the windows into the street where they were madly destroyed. The simple sign on the building, bearing the words “Anti-Slavery Rooms” was next wrenched from its place & torn to splinters. The fury of the crowd, which now blocked the street with I understand to be thousands its uncounted numbers, next directed itself upon Wm. Lloyd Garrison,—known as the editor of the Liberator &
determined Abolitionist the originator of the Anti-Slavery Enterprise of [the] day—ruthlessly seized this this peaceable citizen, & with a haltar [sic] about his neck, amidst clamorous savage threats, dragged him through the streets, until at last, guilty of only of loving liberty, if not [ . . . ], too well, he was lodged in the common jail for protection against an infuriate multitude . . .
Since then a great unprecedented change has taken place. Instead of that small company of women, counted by tens, we have now this mighty assembly, counted by thousands; instead of that humble apartment, the mere appendage of a printing office, where, as in the manger itself, Truth was sheltered cradled, we have now this beautiful hall, ample in its proportions & adorned by art; instead of a profane & clamorous mob, beating at our gates, hurling our papers out of the windows into the street & tearing the sign with the name “Anti-Slavery” into splinters—even as the insane people populace of Paris once tore the body of the regicide Ravaillac—we now have now have peace & harmony at our unguarded doors, ruffled only by a generous contest to participate in this occasion; & instead of a hostile press, denouncing our attempts (as “rascally” & intolerable) appealing directly to mob rule & even declaring that such meetings should be prevented by the strong arm of the law, we find now kindly notices, encouraging words & a generous God-speed.
Here is a great fact, worth of notice & memory; for it attests the first stage of victory. Slavery, in all its many-sided wrong still continues, but here in Boston freedom of discussion is secured . . . It is the inauguration of Freedom. From this time forward her voice of warning & command cannot be silenced . . . On this I now take my stand. In undertaking to give expression to the thoughts suggested by the occasion, I am not insensible to the responsibility which I assume. Fully to herald our great cause would task an angel’s tongue. I can speak only in the plain words of an honest heart . . .
Girl in Black and White Page 19
