In May 1866 Evelina Bell married Robert Johnson, a notable member of Boston’s free black community, twenty-five years her senior. He had been a fugitive from Richmond, Virginia, arriving in Boston in 1829 at age eighteen. Johnson served as a deacon at Reverend Grimes’s Twelfth Baptist Church, and family lore remembers that his home—at 16 Belnap Street (now 69 Joy Street)—had a trapdoor that had once been used to secret William Lloyd Garrison from a mob. Though his occupation was recorded as “laborer,” he owned a small clothing recycling business at 5 Brattle Street, where Evelina’s skill as a seamstress would have been of benefit. Their marriage certificate lists Thomas Nelson as the bride’s father, Prue Bell as her mother, and Washington, D.C., as her birthplace.
They had two children: Charles William Johnson, born in 1868, and Adelaide, born at home the following year. Addie’s birth record lists her as colored. Addie did not have children, but Charles had a large family. Prudence Bell’s living descendants can be found among those who count Charles William Johnson as their ancestor. Robert and Evelina Johnson’s beautiful brick townhome on Joy Street was one block away from the white side of Beacon Hill, and one block from Charles Sumner’s Boston residence on Hancock Street.
Evelina’s husband, Robert, already had four grown sons, all soldiers: Henry West, Frederick, William, and Robert Jr. In January 1863, less than two weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, Sumner introduced a bill “to enlist 300,000 colored troops.” (Sumner spent much of the war in Boston, where he “took his seat with the air of a prince of blood at the table, close at hand to the Chief Magistrate,” Governor John Andrew.6) The bill was defeated, but Massachusetts’s wartime governor John A. Andrew had already taken up the cause at home. On November 27, 1862, Governor Andrew shared the Thanksgiving meal at the home of his friend, the black abolitionist Lewis Hayden, who convinced him to seek permission from President Lincoln to form a permanent regiment for colored troops.7 Secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton authorized Andrew to form a regiment of free colored volunteers, the 54th Massachusetts. Two of Frederick Douglass’s sons, Lewis and Charles, immediately signed up.8
On February 16, 1863, Deacon Robert Johnson and his sons joined the Douglass men in calling for a muster at the African Meeting House, to recruit their peers to enlist. By June, Robert Jr. and Henry West Johnson had joined Company F of the 54th Massachusetts. They had six months of service together before Robert Jr., now a sergeant, was captured at Botany Bay, South Carolina.9 Sergeant Robert Johnson, Jr. survived the filth of close confinement in Charleston Jail with fifty of his regiment. He wrote to the Liberator that he saw there “a disposition to release all free men, and as we come under that head, we hope a movement in that direction will soon be made.”10 The prisoners were permitted to come to the yard once a day for water and given one pint of meal each day for food. Every night for over a year, the men of the 54th Massachusetts sang songs in support of the Union for the benefit of their fellow prisoners. A song that Robert Johnson, Jr. wrote, to the tune of “When the Cruel War Is Over,” was a special favorite. The first verse gives us a sense of the conditions he faced.
I.
When I enlisted in the army,
Then I thought’t was grand,
Marching through the Streets of Boston
Behind a regimental band.
When at Wagner, I was captured
Then my courage failed;
Now I’m dirty, hungry, naked
Here in Charleston Jail.
CHORUS
Weeping, sad and lonely,
Oh, how bad I feel!
Down in South Carolina,
Praying for a good, square meal.
—Robert Johnson, Jr.11
Sergeant Robert Johnson, Jr. died of starvation shortly after his transport to Florence prison in Anderson County, a place far worse than the town jail: “Corpses lay by the roadside waiting for the dead-cart, their glassy eyes turned to heaven, the flies swarming in their mouths, their big toes tied together with a cotton string, and their skeleton arms folded on their breasts.” Thirty-nine men of the 54th Massachusetts were held at “Florence Stockade” for two months and nineteen days that winter, during which time a third of them died.12
“I did not seek the command of colored troops, but it sought me,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in the introduction to his camp diary, published in 1870 as Army Life in a Black Regiment.13 General Rufus Saxton had invited him to command the first regiment of freed slaves mustered into the Union Army, the First South Carolina Volunteers, later known as the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops. Harriet Tubman would serve with these men.
Higginson did not say yes right away, but agreed to take the post after he traveled to Beaufort, South Carolina, to meet the men he would command. “I had been an abolitionist too long, and had loved and known John Brown too well, not to feel a thrill of joy at last on finding myself in the position where he only wished to be,” Higginson recalled. John Brown had given his life for the dream of a mighty force that would rise up from the ranks of slaves, and now, Higginson found himself as its commander. The regiment that he met three days before Thanksgiving 1862 was “as thoroughly black as the most faithful philanthropist could desire; there did not seem to be so much as a mulatto among them.”14
Thomas Wentworth Higginson as a colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, carte de visite. Photograph taken by James Wallace Black, 1863, for Portraits of American Abolitionists.
He felt a burden to prove these soldiers to be the equals of those born to freedom, and he had every intention of putting them through the same the drill and discipline that their white compatriots in Massachusetts underwent. “Fortunately, I felt perfect confidence in their ability to be so trained.”15 He quickly noted how readily these men took to drill, and how free of complaint was their labor.
The first three days passed like three years, his time “devoted almost wholly to tightening reins” before the Thanksgiving holiday, which finally permitted him the time to take it all in. Watching his men through the windows of the broken Smith plantation, he wrote rapidly, in an eager effort to retain all he could of his profound transformation.16
Already I am growing used to the experience, at first so novel, of living among five hundred men, and scarce a white face to be seen,—of seeing them go through their daily processes, eating, frolicking, talking, just as if they were white. Each day at dress-parade, I stand with the customary folding of the arms before a regimental line of countenances so black that I can hardly tell whether the men stand steadily or not; black is every hand which moves in ready cadence as I vociferate, “Battalion! Shoulder Arms!” nor is it till the line of white officers moves forward, as parade is dismissed, that I am reminded that my own face is not the color of coal.
—Thomas Wentworth Higginson, November 27, 186217
Two weeks later Higginson found his company to be made up of mysterious “grown-up children.”18 Nature, he complained, had “concealed all this wealth of mother-wit” under visages that appeared to him hopelessly inscrutable. Cato, an older soldier, looked by day in the cotton fields “as a being the light of whose brain had utterly gone out,” but to Higginson’s surprise, he could tell a campfire yarn fit for Ulysses.19 Though his life depended upon theirs, he never wavered in infantilizing his troops in word and action. He walked in the darkness of his own bias, even if he had answered the call several times over to fight for justice.
While Higginson labored through his prejudice, a soldier named Henry Williams (a man much younger than Mary’s father, born into slavery in Beaufort), the first sergeant of Company K under Colonel Higginson’s command, led an expedition to Pocotaligo, South Carolina. On November 23, 1862, Company K traveled deep into rebel territory, raided the Heyward plantation, and freed twenty-seven people.
The Union occupation of Prince William County, Virginia, was complete by 1862. On October 6, 1863, Capt. Joseph Keith Newell of the 10th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers wrote that General McClellan had sent
him from nearby Manassas, along with a detail, to dismantle and retrieve bricks found in Brentsville’s courthouse and jail.20 When he arrived at Brentsville, Captain Newell found that the clerk of the county, Phillip D. Lipscomb (who had once hired Ludwell Bell Nelson) had “carelessly left all the county records and papers, when he stepped out,” that is, escaped the occupying Union Army, “and at this date they were in bad condition. The floors of four rooms were covered, fully two feet deep, with the papers and documents, some of great antiquity.” The clerk of Prince William County had left Virginia’s archive to rot: “Marriage certificates of parties whose grandchildren, if they had any, have long since joined them in the tomb, and the millions of papers that would accumulate in such a place, in two centuries of time.” Newell’s men dug up (and pocketed) priceless documents: military orders from the third year of the American Revolution, signed by John Jay; a certificate of membership in the Cincinnatus Society signed by “H. Knox, the secretary, and George Washington, President.” Wartime Brentsville was now ungovernable and outside history.
Captain Newell ended his account with a note of derision: “When next they begin to govern Prince William County, it is thought they will have to commence their county records where the war left off, and it is hoped they will appoint a county clerk who will take better care of his papers in future.”
Lost deep in those two feet of rotting papers were documents that might have answered a hundred questions that arose in the writing of this book. Were Prue and her family held at the Brentsville Jail while Cornwell v. Weedon progressed through the courts? Why did Powell’s Run fall off the county lists in 1837—did it burn down, or was it dismantled for new development? When did Gus Cornwell, Conney’s only son, die? What truly happened to John’s father, Juber? Perhaps the original of Conney Cornwell’s will, written by Nelson’s hand, the cause of so much strife, lay there buried in that historical mulch, along with that of her husband, Jesse Cornwell.21
Captain Thomas Nelson’s sons with Eliza Jane—ages sixteen to thirty-one when the Civil War broke out—all served in the Confederate Army. Their sixth child, Horatio Nelson, died a week after his twentieth birthday, after four years of service in the Confederate war against the North. Their eldest, Edwin Nelson, served first as deputy sheriff for the county and then was mustered as lieutenant into the 15th Virginia Cavalry. He fought in the front lines, in nearby Manassas and in Maryland.
While home on furlough, on June 21, 1863, Lieutenant Edwin Nelson was visiting his wife (and cousin), Bettie Weedon, when he was captured. He then underwent a harrowing twenty-two-month tour of Union prisons. He was initially taken to Point Lookout prison in Maryland, then was transferred to the Old Capital prison at Washington, then to the Philadelphia prison, and to the Officers prison on Johnson’s Island on Lake Erie. His family greeted his survival as a miracle, given the conditions he witnessed and the contagion he escaped. Bettie Weedon was his wife for fifty years.22
After the war, Edwin Nelson became the clerk of Prince William County, a post he held for forty years. He built a sturdy side-passage house with a stone basement that still stands across the lawn from his workplace, the rebuilt Brentsville courthouse and jail. He performed the task of housing the county records with the fastidiousness that Captain Newell missed in his wartime predecessor. Edwin Nelson put to right the records that, had they been intact, would have allowed this story of his father’s perfidy and adultery to be more easily told.
The Massachusetts state census taken May 1, 1865, in Lexington, Middlesex County, records 495 families, residing in 455 dwellings. To indicate the color of Lexington’s 2,215 white residents, the census-taker made no mark in column 6, “Color—White, Black, Mulatto, or Indian.”23 The Williams family appeared on page eighteen. Henry and Elizabeth Williams were both listed as forty-six, which is incorrect, with Mary, seventeen, and Adelaide Rebecca, fifteen. All four members of the family are listed with an “M” for mulatto, with Henry Williams listed as “laborer.” They maintained a single-family residence.
Besides the four Williamses, also living in Lexington were a young childless couple, Josephine and James Jackson from Louisiana and North Carolina, both listed as “mulattos,” and Henry Clay, a nineteen-year-old black man, who came from North Carolina in the company of a soldier he had served in the war. Fourteen-year-old Annie Lawrence, who was living as a maid at Dr. Dio Lewis’s girls academy, was close in age to Mary and Rebecca. She was also of white complexion; she had been owned by her father in Virginia, and her mother was still enslaved. Annie was redeemed by abolitionists. When she died of consumption two years later, her sister Mary Lawrence took her place, and she was adopted by the Lewis family. When Dr. Dio Lewis first asked his student body to vote on whether or not these “colored girls” should be allowed to attend his progressive private school, ten students voted no. When he asked again, a few years later, on behalf of his “colored daughter” Mary Lawrence, who was of white complexion, she was permitted to stay and study at the school.24
Why did Henry and Elizabeth choose to move to Lexington during the Civil War? It could be for the air. So many members of the family had been taken from them already, whether slowly by tuberculosis (which caused Oscar’s death in 1860), or quickly by typhoid fever or pneumonia (which took Prue and Jesse). According to contemporary medicine, the countryside offered the possibility of recovery, and they had the means to set up a home there. Around this time, Cornhill Coffeehouse changed owners. Henry Williams lost or left his position as a waiter, and he found work in Lexington.
More inexplicable was Henry and Elizabeth’s choice to leave Lexington separately. Sometime between 1865 and 1870, Elizabeth moved to Hyde Park, where she appeared on the 1870 census, with Mary, twenty-one, and Adelaide Rebecca, nineteen. They resided at 63 Summit Street, a property that Elizabeth purchased (worth $3,000 in 1870) in Hyde Park, a town south of Roxbury. The house was new construction, a two-story home of eight rooms with windows framed by shutters, set back from a quiet suburban street, with a large sloping yard at the back. Elizabeth, Mary, and Adelaide Rebecca lived there as white women, without Henry Williams.
We know Elizabeth did not remarry because she did not change her name. Both Henry and Elizabeth marked “married” on subsequent documents. They never again appeared to share an address. Henry Williams worked as a waiter in Cambridge. His common name can be found in listings for the city directory as a waiter at Memorial Hall house in 1880 and in 1887 as a waiter at the University Press. The prosaic possibility—the end of their relationship—is within the range of this scant evidence.
Without their father’s presence, two sisters of marriageable age could more easily pass into white society. Without Henry, Elizabeth was considered white, and that was how she would be known for the rest of her life. Whether or not her parents intended for her to have a white future, within the year Adelaide Rebecca had moved back across the color line when she married black coachman William Taylor in 1871. The young couple set up house in her aunt Evelina’s home at 69 Joy Street, where Adelaide Rebecca helped out with the little ones, her namesake cousin, Addie, and her nephew Charles. The sisters, Evelina and Elizabeth, now lived in two camps, one on each side of the color line. When living alone these women were considered white, but when living with black husbands, they were considered black. What emotional cost did these fluctuating identities demand of a marriage?
Adelaide Rebecca Williams Taylor died at her aunt’s home, two years after her marriage, of tuberculosis. She was twenty-three. She was listed on her death certificate, dated July 24, 1873, as “colored.” She did not leave children.
Evelina Bell Johnson chose to identify with the black community until the end of her life. The 1880 federal census-taker was unsure as to how to record her race; her entry shows another marking, “[Un? Mul?],” overlaid by “B,” for black. Evelina listed her birthplace in one place as Maryland, and in another, as Washington, D.C. Her origins appear to be willfully obscured. As Robert Johnson’s widow after tu
berculosis took his life on December 8, 1880, Evelina remained in the house on Joy Street for the next twenty years. She attended a black church, lived in a black neighborhood, and raised her two children there. She took Bell as her maiden name, leaving off Nelson. Upon her death, at her home on Joy Street on February 1, 1901, the city registrar for deaths listed Evelina Johnson as “col,” for “colored.”
In Hyde Park, Elizabeth and Mary Williams became Episcopalian and lived in a white suburban district. They took in two white orphans, Ella L. Bradley, as boarder, and Agnes Gagin, as servant, to help around the house, to assist them through illness, and to raise as their wards.
Elizabeth Williams died on March 5, 1892. Her death certificate gives her maiden name as Nelson and confirms her parents’ identities as Thomas Nelson and Prudence Bell. It lists her as white. She was buried at Mount Hope, as was her husband, Henry Williams, who died on January 19, 1898. In the space for Henry’s parents, the death registrar wrote “unknown.”
Mary Williams was the only member of her immediate family to survive into the twentieth century. She never married and did not have children. In April 1882, at thirty-three or four, she got a job as a clerk in the registry of deeds, and it paid well at $780 a year.25 She lived near home in Mattapan when she was hired, but some time after the position began, she found an apartment closer to her work, living at 755 Tremont Street in 1888. She maintained her position there for at least twenty years, a face in the secretarial pool.
At the turn of the century, Higginson remembered seeing Mary at work. He wrote in his memoir Part of a Man’s Life, “Another slave child, habitually passing for white, was known to the public as ‘Ida May,’ and was exhibited to audiences as a curiosity by Governor Andrew and others, until that injudicious practice was stopped. She, too, was under my care for a time, went to school, became a clerk in a public office, and I willingly lost sight of her,” he claimed, so that she could “disappear” more easily “in the white ranks.”26
Girl in Black and White Page 24
