Ebony and Ivy (45 page)

Numerous friends have read or listened to parts of the book on more than one occasion. My departmental colleagues Harriet Ritvo and Elizabeth Wood read chapters. Graham Russell Hodges, Joseph Cullon, John Ehrenberg, Jonathan Soffer, and Diana Linden were kind enough to critique parts of the manuscript. Michael Green and Deborah K. King read final versions of the book. I have presented this work with colleagues and students in the Bard Prison Initiative and on the Bard campus. Jeff Ravel, Jack Tchen, David Gerwin, and other friends have provided opportunities for me to share this material. As this project expanded, I had to give up the fantasy that I could acknowledge in writing all the librarians and archivists who have assisted me during a decade of research, but I have thanked them all in person.

I could not have completed this project without Zoë Pagnamenta, who placed the book with Peter Ginna and the Bloomsbury Press USA group. Several years ago, Zoë and I bonded over a cup of coffee and a long chat that drifted from British sitcoms to colonial history. She has been a reliable advocate for my work ever since. Peter Ginna patiently permitted the project to evolve and skillfully helped me move ideas into words. He allowed me to make mistakes and discoveries. I deeply appreciate his dedication to telling this story.

Finally, I have to thank my sister. For two decades, Dr. Gloria has provided medical care to thousands of children living in Washington, D.C. I have had the honor of sitting in audiences to watch my sister receive awards, but I have not had a chance to acknowledge her influence on me. Long before these successes, she protected me, time and time again, from the dangers of growing up black, male, and poor in the United States. Gloria believed that we had something to offer. I was, truthfully, quite doubtful. This is a little tribute to my first and best friendship.

1
. Henry Watson Jr. to Henry Watson, 10 November 1830, 16 November 1830, and 16 December 1830, Henry Watson Family Papers, 1803–1823, in the John Spencer Bassett Papers, Box 32, Folder 23, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Chandos Michael Brown,
Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 35–49.

2
. Henry Watson Jr. to Henry Watson, 10 November 1830; Brown,
Benjamin Silliman
, 35–49.

3
. On 18 May 1705, Tamar, a slave, was accepted into First Church in Hartford.
Historical Catalogue of the First Church in Hartford, 1633–1885
(Hartford, CT: By the Church, 1885), 26; Bushrod Washington, “Address of the American Colonization Society to the People of the United States,”
Christian Herald
, 13 September 1817;
Memorial of the President and the Board of Managers of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States: January 14, 1817. Read and Ordered to Lie upon the Table
(Washington, DC: William A. Davis, 1817).

4
. Henry Watson Jr., “Dr. [J. C.] Warren's Anatomical Lectures, Harvard College, May 1829,” in Henry Watson Jr. Lecture Notes, 1829, II:139, Rare Books and Special Collections, Neilson Library, Smith College; Samuel J. May,
Discourse on the Life and Character of the Rev. Charles Follen, L.L.D., Who Perished, Jan. 13, 1840, in the Conflagration of the Lexington. Delivered
Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, in the Marlborough Chapel, Boston, April 17, 1840
(Boston: Henry L. Devereux, 1840), 7–22; “Biographical Notices of the Late Dr. Charles Follen,”
Monthly Miscellany of Religion and Letters
, February 1840.

5
. Henry Watson Jr. to Henry Watson, 16 December 1830, 30 December 1830, John Spencer Bassett Papers, Box 32, Folder 23, Library of Congress.

6
.
General Catalogue of Dartmouth College and the Associated Schools, 1769–1900, Including a Historical Sketch of the College Prepared by Marvin Davis Bisbee, the Librarian
(Hanover, NH: For the College, 1900), 169; Henry Watson Jr. to My Dear Father, 19 June 1830, John Spencer Bassett Papers, Box 32, Folder 23, Library of Congress; Henry Watson Jr., “Journal of Horseback Ride from Erie, Alabama, to East Windsor Hill, Conn[ecticut], May 20th to July 8th, 1831,” Rare Books and Special Collections, Neilson Library, Smith College.

7
. Roger G. Kennedy,
Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization
(New York: Free Press, 1994), 7–22; Gregory D. Wilson,
The Archaeology of Everyday Life at Early Moundville
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008); William Leete Stone,
The Mound-builders: Were They Egyptian, and Did They Ever Occupy the State of New York?
(New York: A. S. Barnes, 1878); Paul Kelton,
Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 1–46, 101–59.

8
. Watson, “Journal of Horseback Ride from Erie, Alabama, to East Windsor Hill, Conn[ecticut].”

9
. James Kent was a charter member of the Yale chapter. In 1793 Kent began lecturing on law at Columbia. Chief Justice John Jay, Justice John S. Hobart of the New York State Supreme Court, Dr. Samuel Bard, and Edward Livingston helped secure him an appointment as professor of law. The trustees approved a law school in 1858. The abolitionist William Jay eventually drew Kent out of the colonization movement. James Kent,
An Address Delivered at New Haven, Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, September 13, 1831
(New Haven: Hezekiah Howe, 1831), 14–15; James Kent,
Dissertations: Being the Preliminary Part of a Course of Law Lectures
(New York: George Forman, 1795); Theodore W. Dwight, “Columbia College Law School, New York,”
The Green Bag
, 1889, 141–60; John Theodore Horton,
James Kent: A Study in Conservatism, 1763–1847
(1939; Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2000), 310n; Robert A. Trendel,
William Jay: Churchman, Public Servant, and Reformer
(New York: Arno, 1982), 188; William Kent,
Memoirs and Letters of James Kent, LL.D., Late Chancellor of the State of New York, Author of “Commentaries on American Law,” Etc
. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898), 54–59, 99–100, 180, 229.

10
.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
is a novel about slavery; perhaps more accurately, it is about a people who had failed to acknowledge their long reliance upon the enslavement of other human beings. Mark Twain assures his readers that the history beneath his story is factually if not chronologically accurate. He wrote and published the novel a quarter century after the Civil War, while he was living in Hartford, Connecticut, in a house neighboring that of his friend Harriet Beecher Stowe. A postbellum American would not likely imagine a journey through time that did not include encounters with Africans and Native Americans. “Negroes” and “Indians” are present throughout this ironic juxtaposition of the sixth and nineteenth centuries. Struck on the head in his Connecticut workshop, Hank Morgan wakes to find himself shackled and sold alongside the king of England, who is shocked to discover how easily a free man can be converted to chattel, offended by the injustice of his own laws, and humbled by his unflattering market value. Twain uses the fictionalized world of Morgan's enslavement to unleash a passionate indictment of the real slavery that had only recently existed in the United States. This abolitionist lament, however eloquent, was merely retrospective. Moreover, Twain's references to Native peoples treat them as romantic primitives, noble savages, and cultural artifacts. Morgan describes King Arthur's Camelot as a barbaric society governed by bravado, force, and honor, but never intelligence. The Round Table is “just a sort of polished up court of Comanches, and there isn't a squaw in it who doesn't stand ready at the dropping of a hat to desert to the buck with the biggest string of scalps at his belt.” James Oakes,
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
(New York: Vintage, 1983), 121, 125, 199–209; James L. Roark,
Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction
(New York: Norton, 1977), 71–72, 132; Kenneth M. Stampp,
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South
(New York: Vintage, 1956), 386; Herbert G. Gutman,
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925
(New York: Vintage, 1976), 155–67; Mark Twain,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
(New York: Harper, 1917), esp. 102, 119, 186–90, 298–99.

11
. Gutman,
Black Family in Slavery and Freedom
, 155–59; Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 376.

1
. This was not the first time that Europeans gave Native Americans as gifts. In March 1493 Christopher Columbus returned to Lisbon with Indian
prisoners and advice for the king and queen on enslaving the indigenous peoples of the Americas. As early as 1500 Bristol merchants had brought home three men from Newfoundland. French sailors seized a woman and a child in 1567 and brought them to Zeeland. In 1576 Captain Martin Frobisher took an Inuit man to London, where the prisoner committed suicide. A year later Frobisher returned to Bristol with a young Inuit woman called Arnaq, her infant child, Nutaaq, and a young man named Kalicho. In 1584 English adventurers presented Manteo and Wanchese, two men from coastal Carolina, to Elizabeth I, whose reign saw the spread of public spectacles involving American Indians. By 1603, the year of her death, Londoners watched two Powhatans from Virginia row the Thames in canoes. Kidnapped Indians worked as guides and interpreters for colonial proprietors such as Walter Raleigh, of Virginia and Guyana, and Ferdinando Gorges, director of Maine. Tisquantum from Patuxet (Plymouth) was a victim of serial kidnappings. He was the fabled Squanto in the Pilgrim Thanksgiving story. After the 1603 ascendance of James I over Scotland, England, and Ireland—the grandfather of Sophia of Hanover—such “exotic souvenirs” were regularly exchanged. James's daughter, Princess Elizabeth, had a “Red Indian” theme for her marriage. In 1616 Pocahontas arrived in London as a dignitary, marking a shift in the perception and treatment of Native delegations.
Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts
(Boston: By the Society, 1920), XX:99–100; Alden T. Vaughan,
Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–112; Robert Zemsky,
Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods: An Essay on Eighteenth-Century American Politics
(Boston: Gambit, 1971), 102–4; Susi Colin, “The Wild Man and the Indian in Early 16th Century Book Illustration,” in Christian F. Feest, ed.,
Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 5–29; Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley Jr., trans.,
The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 1492–1493, Abstracted by Fray Bartolomé De Las Casas
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 394–95; Luis N. Rivera,
A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), 93–98; William C. Sturtevant and David Beers Quinn, “This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577,” in Feest, ed.,
Indians and Europe
, 61–112, 113n; Dagmar Wernitznig,
Europe's Indians, Indians in Europe: European Perceptions and Appropriations of Native American Cultures from Pocahontas to the Present
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007), esp. 1–5; William Bradford,
Of Plimoth Plantation, 1620–1647
(Boston: Wright and Potter, State Printers, 1898), 114–23; James Rosier,
A True Relation of the Most Prosperous Voyage Made This Present Yeere 1605, by Captaine George Waymouth, in the Discovery of the Land of Virginia: Where He Discovered 60
Miles Up a Most Excellent River; Together with a Most Fertile Land
(London: George Bishop, 1605); Thomas Gorges to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, 19 May 1642, in Robert E. Moody, ed.,
The Letters of Thomas Gorges: Deputy Governor of the Province of Maine, 1640–1643
(Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1978), 94–95; Walter Raleigh,
The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (Which the Spaniards Call El Dorado)
… (London: Robert Robinson, 1596); Paula Gunn Allen,
Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat
(New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Camilla Townsend,
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); 107–58; Christian F. Feest, “Pride and Prejudice: The Pocahontas Myth and the Pamunkey,” in James A. Clifton, ed.,
The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), 49–52.

2
. Boston's Latin School opened in 1635. Lorenzo J. Greene, “Slave-holding New England and Its Awakening,”
Journal of Negro History
, October 1928, 496–97. The college was under its 1642 organization, which included the governor among the overseers. Obituary for Andrew Belcher,
Boston News-Letter
, 4 November 1717; Henry F. Jenks,
Catalogue of the Boston Public Latin School, Established in 1635, With an Historical Sketch
(Boston: Boston Latin School Association, 1886), 41–43;
Harvard University Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates, 1636–1920
(Cambridge, MA: By the University, 1930), 13, 141; Michael C. Batinski,
Jonathan Belcher, Colonial Governor
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 167–70.

3
. John Langdon Sibley,
Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
(1881; Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1996), IV:446–48; Zemsky,
Merchants, Farmers, and River Gods
, 99–128; entries for 13 October 1748 and 24 September–7 May 1755, “The Minutes of the Proceedings of the Trustees of the College of New Jersey,” vol. I, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.