2. For a comprehensive view of the legal codes governing free blacks in Virginia, see John Henderson Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1913). For North Carolina, see “Slaves and Free Persons of Color. An Act Concerning Slaves and Free Persons of Color,” Documenting the American South, 1826 c21 s1, http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/slavesfree/slavesfree.html. For Maryland, see “Passed 3d of Jan. 1807. No free negro shall emigrate to this state, &c.,” Session Laws of 1806, vol. 608, p. 234, msa.maryland.gov. These laws had the additional effect of curtailing runaways holding forged free papers.
3. Kitty Cornwell v. John Catesby Weedon, deposition of Kitty King, Alexandria, Va., May 14, 1849.
4. Cornwell v. Weedon, deposition of Kitty King.
5. This word mulatto/a is offensive and not an appropriate term for persons of mixed race. I will use it in this book only when it appears in quotations. Unfortunately, the word was used liberally by my white sources.
6. Cornwell v. Weedon, deposition of Catherine Appleby, July 18–19, 1848.
7. The Beverley/Chapman’s Mill is now a historic site undergoing preservation efforts: www.chapmansmill.org.
8. Kitty Cornwell v. Thomas Nelson, 1844, affidavit of Seymour H. Storke, submittted October 11, 1839.
9. Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (2000). See also Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p 240.
10. Kitty Cornwell v. Thomas Nelson, 1844, affidavit of John Cooper, submitted November 1839.
11. Cornwell v. Nelson, 1844, deposition of John Tansill.
12. Adelaide Payne is listed on United States Census of 1850 as a “mulatto” woman of thirty years of age, born in Virginia, living in the wealthy DeKrafft household. She could not read.
3. Jesse and Albert Nelson, Washington, 1847
1. Jesse Nelson v. John Cornwell, deposition of Catherine Appleby, March 18, 1854, in O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family, http://earlywashingtondc.org/doc/oscys.case.0267.008#.
2. Louis Berger Group, Archaeology of the Bruin Slave Jail (Site 44AX0172), prepared for Columbia Equity Trust, Inc., https://bit.ly/2Npu3hu. See also the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, African American Historic Sites Database at: http://www.aahistoricsitesva.org/items/show/67.
3. Mary Kay Ricks, Escape on the “Pearl”: The Heroic Bid for Freedom on the Underground Railroad (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), pp. 127–30.
4. “Williams’ Private Jail (Slave Pen),” Histories of the National Mall, Library of Congress http://mallhistory.org/items/show/45; and Theresa L. Kraus, “Was FAA HQ the Site of a Notorious Slave Pen?” https://www.faa.gov/about/history/milestones.
5. As one foreign observer noted in 1853: “Mrs. J wished to have a negro boy as a servant, and inquired if she could have such a one from this place. ‘No! Children were not allowed to go out from here. They were kept here for a short time to fatten, and after that were sent to the slave market down South, to be sold.’ ” Frederika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt (New York: Harper & Bros., 1853), p. 1:492.
6. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby & Miller, 1853), pp. 38–43.
7. I have found counterevidence scattered through the Prince William County register that John returned to Prince William County in the early 1840s. For example, from 1844: “John Cornwell, free negro, hired out for delinquent taxes, 1843.” Free blacks in Virginia paid taxes on income and a $1.50 poll tax, though they could not vote. If he was forced to labor in Prince William County, he could not also have maintained a position in Georgetown from 1840 to 1847. Possibly he made the mistake of returning to Prince William County in 1843 and found himself locked up in Brentsville and forced to labor. He might have served his time and returned to his position and family in Georgetown.
8. Billy King remembers, “He left the state of Virginia in the year 1828. I did not know where he went to and did not hear of him until the year 1841 when my family was at the house of John Cornwell in George Town.”
9. Cornwell v. Weedon, Judge Neale to Judge Scott, amended suit, September 5, 1849.
10. Cornwell v. Weedon, John C. Weedon’s demurrer to the bill of complaint brought against him by John Cornwell, October 18, 1848.
11. Given that her family thought that she was seventy-three when she died in 1864, I have used that date throughout to determine Prue’s age, including my estimate that she was eighteen (and not ten or twelve) when Constance purchased her.
12. Cornwell v. Weedon, depositions taken at Brentsville for J. C. Weedon’s defense, October 5 and 6, 1848.
13. Cornwell v. Weedon, deposition of Kitty King, taken at the office of Christopher Neale, Alexandria, Va., September 14, 1849.
4. Henry Williams, Boston, 1850
1. Mary Niall Mitchell used the U.S. census slave schedules to locate Seth’s father. She believes he was a man named James Tolson, who in 1840 held “18 enslaved people in his household, eight of them under the age of ten, and only six of the total employed in agriculture.” By 1850, perhaps with Seth’s departure, the number was reduced to seventeen enslaved people. In 1860 the name appears in the census records as Folson, of “Stafford Store, Stafford County, Va.” In 1860 Folson hired out slaves to Prince William County, an arrangement that may have afforded Elizabeth and Seth the chance to meet. Examining Andrew’s handwriting in his letter to Charles Sumner of January 22, 1855, concerning Seth’s manumission, it remains inconclusive if this man was named Tolson or Folson. See Mitchell, “The Real Ida May: A Fugitive Tale in the Archives,” Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 61.
2. Folson is quoted in Andrew to Sumner, January 13, 1852, letter accompanying Seth Botts’s deed of emancipation, John A. Andrew Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
3. Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: Norton, 2015). William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), is the most faithful account of its activities through Philadelphia.
4. As reported in the Liberator.
5. The historical geography of the North Slope and Beacon Hill was identified in support of the Museum of African American History on Joy Street. See Kathryn Grover and Janine V. da Silva, The Historic Resource Study: Boston African American National Historic Site, December 31, 2002, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/discover_history/upload/BOAFSRS.pdf.
6. Congregation of Belknap Street Church, manifesto, October 25, 1850, as reported in Liberator, November 1, 1850.
7. Fugitive Slave Act, at Avalon Project, Yale Law School, avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/fugitive.asp.
8. Gary L. Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
9. Quoted in Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, p. 136.
10. The nearby Boston Athenaeum has in its archives twenty years of Cornhill Coffeehouse menus.
11. For Thoreau’s role in the Vigilance Committee and his services to fugitives sent to Concord, see Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 92–93. There is also a self-published one-act play about this encounter: Minot’s Cat and the Fugitive Slave by Dan Sklar.
12. John A. Andrew to Charles Sumner, January 22, 1852, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
13. Henry David Thoreau, entry for October 1, 1851, in The Writings: Journal, vol. 3, September 16, 1851–April 30, 1852, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 38.
5. John Albion Andrew, Boston, 1852
1. Henry Greenleaf Pearson, The Life of John A. Andrew: Governor of Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Boston: Hou
ghton Mifflin, 1904). Andrew makes a charming appearance in Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club, 1855–1870 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918).
2. Cyrus Woodman to E. Bond, in Brunswick Telegraph, July 22, 1887, quoted in Pearson, Life of Andrew, p. 20.
3. Quoted in Emerson, Saturday Club, p. 357.
4. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), p. 146.
5. Liberator, November 1, 1850.
6. The Massachusetts Historical Society has one box of records from 1846 to 1882 of the Boston Anti-Man-Hunting League.
7. John A. Andrew to Charles Sumner, January 22, 1852, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
8. In a letter published in the Front Royal Gazette of October 24, 1855, Clark admonished Burns for disregarding his biblical duty to obey. By a trick of history, Clark knew both Henry Williams, when he was Seth Botts, and Anthony Burns. He baptized Burns, and now that Burns had gained his freedom and a vocation as a minister, Clark, citing Ephesians, suggested that Burns take up his ministry between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, “where you will have frequent opportunities to turn the tide of the stampedes from Virginia and Kentucky, and bring the apostolic batteries to bear against the fugitives; and so by ‘doing good’ in that way, you may measurably make amends for the expenditure of $30,000 by the Government in your arrest, trial, and restoration to your legal owner.” Broadside made to circulate John Clark’s letter, Front Royal Gazette, October 24, 1855, Duke University Library.
6. Elizabeth Williams, Prince William County, 1852
1. J. C. Weedon vs J. C. Goods & P. D. Lipscomb Slave Contract, January 1, 1852, Prince William County Clerk’s Loose Papers.
2. His source may be Elizabeth. Andrew mentioned that Henry and his wife, Elizabeth, corresponded during their separation, but I have found no trace of it.
3. John A. Andrew to Charles Sumner, August 3, 1852, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. The remaining letters cited in this chapter are held in the same collection.
4. Andrew to Sumner, February 2, 1855.
5. Andrew to Sumner, February 2, 1855.
6. Andrew to Sumner, January 22, 1855.
7. Andrew to Sumner, January 24, 1855.
8. Christopher Neale to Charles Sumner, January 27, 1855.
7. Evelina Bell, Washington, February 1855
1. Beverly Wilson Palmer edited and indexed Sumner’s papers. His scrapbooks are now held at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Only those that were preserved by his recipients remain. Palmer, Guide and Index to the Papers of Charles Sumner (University of Michigan, Chadwyck-Healey, 1988).
2. I have pieced together this conversation from Sumner’s papers at Houghton Library for January and February 1855, Andrew’s archive at the Massachusetts Historical Society for the same period, and a letter between Andrew and Neale archived at the Morgan Library.
3. Christopher Neale, February 14, 1855, in reply to Sumner, February 11, 1855 (not held).
4. John A. Andrew to Charles Sumner, January 24, 1855. Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Unless otherwise indicated, all the remaining letters in this chapter are held in the same collection.
5. Andrew to Sumner, January 31 and February 2, 1855.
6. Neale to Sumner, February 14, 1855.
7. Williams v. Ash, 42 U. S. 1 (1843).
8. Andrew to Sumner, February 2, 1855.
9. Neale to Sumner, February 14, 1855.
10. Andrew to Sumner, January 31,1855.
11. Andrew to Sumner, February 2, 1855.
12. Neale to Sumner, February 21, 1855.
13. Andrew to Sumner, February 2, 1855.
14. Andrew to Sumner, February 16, 1855.
15. E. S. Streeter, The Stranger’s Guide, or The Daguerreotype of Washington DC (Washington, D.C.: C. Alexander, 1850), pp. 12–13.
16. Andrew to Sumner, March 3, 1855.
17. “Jesse Nelson v. John Cornwell,” in O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family, ed. William G. Thomas III et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska), online at http://earlywashingtondc.org/doc/oscys.case.0267.008.
18. Neale to Sumner, March 6, 1855, John A. Andrew Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
8. Mary Hayden Green Pike, Calais, Maine, November 1854
1. John Andrew to Charles Sumner, February 19, 1855, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
2. The letter was published in Boston Telegraph, February 27, 1855.
3. Boston Telegraph, November 24, 1854.
4. Hard Times was produced to increase sales of the periodical; see “Discovering Dickens: A Community Reading Project,” Victorian Reading Project, http://dickens.stanford.edu/dickens/archive/hard/historical_context.html. On sales of Twelve Years a Slave and other slave narratives, see Philip Gould, “The Rise, Development, and Circulation of the Slave Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Moby-Dick (1851) sold 3,215 copies, http://www.melville.org/earnings.htm.
5. William Cullen Bryant, “New Novel by Mrs. Stowe,” Evening Post, November 11, 1854.
6. Evening Post, November 17, 1854.
7. For a detailed study of the publicity campaign behind Ida May’s success, see Donald E. Liedel, “The Puffing of Ida May: Publishers Exploit the Antislavery Novel,” Journal of Popular Culture 3, no. 2 (1969).
8. “Who Wrote Ida May?” New York Evening Post, December 6, 1854. Someone has bracketed, in pen, this very passage in a giant folio of the year of 1854 Evening Post.
9. In 1853, while Pike was beginning to write Ida May, her brother-in-law James Shepherd Pike, a vehement opponent of the institution of slavery, was nonetheless writing such antiblack and racist columns for the New York Tribune that he was quickly censored by editor Horace Greeley. For more on the Pike family and their politics, see Jessie Morgan-Owens, introduction to Mary Hayden Green Pike, Ida May, ed. Jessie Morgan-Owens (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2017); and Robert Franklin Durden, James Shepherd Pike: Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850–1882 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1957).
10. Austin Willey, The History of the Antislavery Cause in State and Nation (Portland, ME, 1886), p. 115.
11. D. W. Bartlett, Modern Agitators, or Pen Portraits of Living American Reformers (Auburn, NY: Miller, Orton, & Mulligan, 1855), p. 216, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ABT6622.0001.001
12. Rachel Reed Griffin, The Life and Writings of Mary Hayden Green Pike, MA thesis, University of Maine, 1944.
13. Ichabod Codding, sermon based on Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child . . . ,” delivered December 6, 1850, Joliet, IL.
14. Rev. I. C. Knowlton, The Annals of Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick . . . (Calais, ME: J. A. Sears, printer, 1875), p. 138.
15. Frederick Pike accused Phillips, Sampson, & Co., of a “mercantile blunder” when it published Caste under a new pseudonym, with no indication that this was the second novel by the best-selling author of Ida May. Pike to Moses Dresser Phillips, June 21, 1857, manuscript collection, Boston Public Library.
16. I partnered with Broadview Press to publish an updated version of Ida May in May 2017.
17. Caroline F. Putnam, Liberator, October 21, 1859.
18. Liberator, “Ida May, The Kidnapped White Slave,” November 17, 1854.
19. The Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Church was split on the subject of slavery.
20. Mary Hayden Green Pike, Ida May (1854), chap. 3.
9. Julian Vannerson, Washington, February 1855
1. Someone has scratched the word Richmond into the frame of the daguerreotype, which offers contradictory evidence that Mary was photographed before leaving Virginia, at the Vannerson family studios in Richmond. I have found no evidence that Mary ever visited Richmond. Given th
at Sumner and Brainard used the studio in Washington, this seems like the most likely place for her photograph to have been made. Richmond was likely added later.
2. Contemporary advertisements and Craig’s Daguerreian Registry: American Photographers 1839–1860, https://bit.ly/2vmneXu.
3. The Boston Athenaeum has a copy of Brainard’s Portraits, which includes engravings of both Charles Sumner and John A. Andrew.
4. Since 1999, in my professional life as a magazine photographer, I have had to contend with three different ways of shooting, processing, and printing pictures: slide film, medium format film, and digital technologies of increasing capability. The only thing that stays the same is the sun.
5. Mary’s daguerreotypes, lost for many years, were found by Mary Niall Mitchell in the John A. Andrew Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society in 2010. I wrote my article “Another Ida May: Photographic Writing in the American Abolition Campaign” between 2006 and 2009, before I had reference to these images, so I too was unable to see the image Sumner describes.
6. Roy Meredith, The Faces of Robert E. Lee (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947).
7. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and Stereograph,” Atlantic, June 1859.
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fortune of the Republic,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), p. 11:539.
9. This historical construction and transformations of vision during this period cannot be overestimated. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 3; and Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), trans. Anthony Matthews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
10. “The White Slaves,” Independent . . . Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, . . . February 4, 1864, p. 4.
11. James Buchanan, Fourth Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union, December 3, 1860, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29501.
12. Sarah Grimké, quoted in “Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women,” Liberator, June 16, 1837.
Girl in Black and White Page 27
