Chaneysville Incident (53 page)

“The Cherokees were a civilized people,” I said. “They had had a representative government since 1820, and they were busy as beavers building roads and raising grain and making cloth, and in order to make cloth they were growing cotton, and in order to raise all that cotton the Cherokees used exactly the same method the whites used. Chattel slavery. And there were quite a few slaves on the Cherokee plantations that were half Cherokee the same way there were a lot of slaves on white plantations that were half white. C.K. made one more.

“He slaved in the Cherokee cotton fields for nearly two years. He knew enough about survival in the woods by then to escape, and while he probably couldn’t have eluded a bunch of Cherokee trackers forever, he had a chance of making it, and it was probably worth a try. But he didn’t try. He concentrated on being a good little field hand, and on sneaking away whenever he could and panning for gold and hiding it, and on listening to what the Cherokees were talking about. And what they were talking about was their white neighbors, the Georgians, who had passed a law as soon as the Cherokees had set up their Nation, declaring that the Cherokee Nation should come under Georgian law. The Cherokees weren’t stupid; they knew the purpose of the law was to get their land. Some of the hotheads were ready to go to war, but John Ross counseled calm, because the Georgia law wasn’t supposed to take effect until June 1, 1830, and Ross’s old army buddy, Andrew Jackson, had been inaugurated President in March of 1829. In September of 1829, C.K. allowed some of the gold to fall into the hands of a white man. The word of the Cherokee gold spread like wildfire, and in December of 1829 Andrew Jackson made a speech to Congress and said that he didn’t think the Cherokees had a right to independent government so long as they stayed inside the state boundaries of Georgia, and suggested that if they wanted to be independent, the Cherokees ought to move West. What he proposed was that they move to lands set aside as Indian territory, which was Oklahoma, where there sure as hell wasn’t any gold, or any cotton plantations either, and that they should do it voluntarily. But if they didn’t, they would only be able to keep the land they needed to live on—not farm on—and they would be under Georgia law. And Congress passed a bill to that effect in May of 1830.

“On June 3 the Georgia authorities initiated actions to parcel out the Cherokee lands to the adjacent counties, and the Cherokees went to the federal courts, and the mess lasted nearly a decade, not that the delay did the Cherokees any good; they ended up marching west on what they came to call the Trail of Tears, and thousands of them died, and they were so angry they ended up fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War, but none of that made a lot of difference to C.K. because at the end of June 1830 he escaped from the Cherokee plantations, eluded pursuit, recovered his hidden gold, and made his way to Philadelphia.”

“So,” she said. “He was free.”

“Yes,” I said. “He was free. Unless somebody kidnapped him, remember.”

“Don’t tell me…”

“No,” I said. “No, nobody kidnapped him. In that sense, he was free. And Pennsylvania was a pretty liberal place when it came to slavery. The first known protest against slavery had come from the German Mennonites way back in 1688. But Pennsylvania had always been sudden death for free blacks. Early on, in the eighteenth century, they were punished as severely as slaves: execution for raping a white woman—there wasn’t any penalty if the rape victim was black—for homosexuality, murder, burglary, and the second offense of interracial fornication—providing, of course, the male was the black; castration for attempted rape of a white woman; flogging for carrying arms or gathering in groups of more than four. In 1725 they got around to passing a special law, ‘An Act for the Better Regulation of Negroes,’ and they made it pretty clear what they thought about free blacks. The preamble said ‘free negroes are an idle, slothful people, and often burdensome to the neighborhood…’ and so they said a master couldn’t free a slave unless he put up a bond insuring the slave’s good behavior, and giving any magistrate the power to bind into service any black who was able to work and didn’t, and they ordered that all children under twenty-one, and male children under twenty-four, be bound out—”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You mean the children of slaves…”

“I meant what I said. Women under twenty-one, men under twenty-four. Blacks. All.”

“But you said that if the mother was free…”

“That was in Louisiana.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Oh,” I said. “I forgot. Under that law I could be bound into service for seven years for living with you. You’d have to pay a fine, though. Of course, if we were to get married I’d be sold into slavery immediately. Only it would never get that far; they would have killed me after the second time we made love.”

She didn’t say anything.

“But then, I never would have met you; if somebody had caught me more than ten miles away from home, I would have been whipped. Or outside at all after nine at night. Of course—”

“All right,” she said. “This isn’t 1725.”

“No,” I said. “But it’s still Pennsylvania.”

“So why did he come here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess because he didn’t know where else to go. And even though the law was the way it was and public sentiment was the way it was, there were some hopeful signs in Pennsylvania. By 1780 the manumission act was passed, and for some strange reason the legislature had never gotten around to saying blacks couldn’t vote—maybe because the property restrictions on suffrage made it unlikely that a black man could vote. But when C.K. arrived in Philadelphia there was a large body—the largest in the United States—of free blacks. They had formed a society of free blacks in 1787. In 1797 four blacks who had been freed in North Carolina even though it was illegal, and who had come to Philadelphia, sent the first petition from blacks to Congress, and another petition from Philadelphia blacks in 1800 had Congress in an uproar for a while. The first fully independent black church was begun there in 1816, and the next year they sent another petition to Congress, protesting the American Colonization Society. By the time C.K. got there, there were at least forty-three black societies, sixteen male, twenty-seven female, paying out relief moneys, and Philadelphia had hosted the First National Negro Convention. I don’t know if he knew all that before he went; possibly he had picked up word of it when he was going through the North the first time. But he went to Philadelphia, and he bought land, and set about becoming involved in the community. In 1832 he had satisfied all the requirements, and he voted in the elections, and in the beginning of 1833 he was hard at work in the Philadelphia Negro Library, which had just opened.

“I don’t know too much about his day-to-day life. I know that he held a job as a laborer, but I don’t know if that was because he hadn’t brought enough gold to live on, or because he was afraid of attracting attention to his money and having it confiscated, and himself sold back into slavery. Probably the last; it was against the law for a free black to be idle in Pennsylvania, whereas an ounce of gold bought about as much goods then as it does now. But in any case he spent most of his time in the Negro Library, working to improve his reading and writing. On the advice of a man named James Forten, who was a Revolutionary War veteran and about the most prominent black in town, he began writing his personal history as a way of improving his writing—”

“Is that how you know all this?” she said. “You’ve got his diaries?”

“They weren’t exactly diaries. His personal history was an account of his life up until 1831, when he arrived in Philadelphia. It was pretty sketchy; in the beginning he couldn’t write all that well and just getting the facts down and the grammar right was an effort. So he left out a lot. Then, by the time he was getting to the end of the story, he was busy with other things, and his writing had gotten better, which was all he wanted out of the account, so he skipped even more. The style itself is a problem. At the beginning he couldn’t manage more than a straight declarative sentence, so the relationships he expressed seemed simple, even though they obviously weren’t, and it’s hard to tell how he felt about them. And when his style developed it got worse, in terms of information, because he cluttered up the facts with hyperbolic metaphors and literary allusions. It’s obvious that he loved writing, and he loved his own style, which is understandable; when you’ve been flogged for trying to read your own name and branded for trying to write your father’s name, it’s probably quite a thrill to not only read books but quote from them in your own hand, even if nobody else is going to read it. The journals are pretty much in the same pattern….”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “How did you get all these things?”

“I’m getting to that,” I said.

“Slowly,” she said.

“Okay. Mid-1830s. The Philadelphia blacks were the largest and most prosperous group of black people in the country, probably in the hemisphere, possibly, in some senses, in the world. They were civically minded, had access to the sciences and literature of the Enlightenment, and were proud of it all. They liked to think they were responsible, and they were. They were moderates; they would have approved of, mostly did approve of, nonviolent protest. But they were politically naive. In 1832, when the state legislature was considering laws that would have practically prohibited the immigration of free blacks into the Commonwealth, they had written a petition against it, going on and on about what good citizens they were, how the welfare rolls were only four percent black when the city population was eight and a half percent, and how black people paid over a hundred thousand dollars a year in rent, and how there was church and other institutional property owned by black organizations that was worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, and how black beneficent societies paid out over seven thousand dollars a year, and how there were four or five hundred blacks in trades, and some blacks were wealthy enough to send their children to private schools. They thought that would make the legislature recognize their worth; they didn’t see that their worth was the reason the immigration restrictions were being considered in the first place. Because if there’s one thing a white man hates more than a free nigger, it’s a free nigger who isn’t on welfare and who pays his rent on time and goes to a big church and has a good job and sends his kids to a decent school….”

“You mean ‘hated,’ ” she said quietly.

“I mean what I said. ‘Hates.’ It’s true now and it was true then, only then it was easier to see—the white folks tended to start riots. They started one in 1834. And C.K. Washington, on his way home from a meeting of some society or other, ended up in the middle of it. He got himself out of it, and while he was doing it he rescued a young woman named Priscilla Langley. I don’t know exactly how, he didn’t say. But anyway, he rescued her, and they fell in love, and a year later they married.” I stopped and took a sip of my toddy.

“They were married, on September 23, 1835, in Bethel Church, which was the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination; I don’t know if C.K. was a member, but they held the wedding there, and I know it was a risk, because C.K. could have been recognized by somebody. But he wasn’t. I don’t know much more than that for quite a while, but it seems he had an arrangement with a white Abolitionist whose name I don’t know, whereby the white man said C.K. was working for him, and was therefore not an idle black. But what C.K. was really doing was becoming more and more involved with the local black community. He was becoming an activist, a pretty prominent one, although he still tried to stay as anonymous as possible. He kept up his reading, and evidently his writing was approved of by the local people, because in March of 1838 they called on him to help draft a petition.

“What had happened was that way back in 1790, Pennsylvania had drafted a new state constitution, and the framers had specifically stricken out the word white as a qualification for franchise. But the public sentiment was against blacks in general and free blacks in particular, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court—the chief justice was a man named Gibson, who was part of the Springs crowd—had decided a case called
Fogg
v.
Hobbs
, which held that that was mistake, basically ignoring both the constitution itself and the minutes of the convention, which made the intent clear. There was no appeal from that, of course. So the black people concentrated on writing petitions to the convention that was supposed to produce a new constitution, asking them to restore the vote to blacks. They didn’t. So the Philadelphia blacks organized a mass meeting that was aimed at defeating the ratification of that part of the new constitution. And of course the way they protested was to publish a pamphlet. They entitled it
Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, threatened with disenfranchisement, to the people of Pennsylvania.
It wasn’t a badly written document in terms of style, but it was the same naive garbage about how in Philadelphia alone there were over eighteen thousand free blacks holding one and a half million dollars’ worth of property and such, and paying a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in rent, which would have made them good citizens if it hadn’t been precisely the reason they were being disenfranchised. But anyway, C.K. helped write it. How much of it he did, I don’t know, but there are a few ringing hyperbolic phrases in there that sound a lot like him. He stayed anonymous, of course; although I don’t know if the real reason for that was modesty or a fear of being discovered and returned to slavery. I don’t know if it would have made much difference; the
Appeal
appealed mostly to the already converted, and the constitution was ratified with no problem, and the black people went right on paying rent and taxes, so it was a pretty good deal from the point of view of the white power structure. But what had happened was that C.K. had gotten all involved in the Philadelphia moderate way of thinking about things, and he decided that the best thing to do was to publicize the prosperity and the responsibility of the black community. So after the
Appeal
was finished, he started writing a book.