Tag: Slavery

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Andrew Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1864, “The war in Tennessee: Confederate massacre of black Union troops after the surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864, New York, New York Public Library.

It’s no accident that two of our most violent predecessors, Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877) and Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), were both from Tennessee. I had saved reading an Andrew Jackson biography for this trip, though I’d been thinking about it since President Trump’s election. President Trump compared himself then to President Jackson, and they were both arguably Men of the People, or at least some people anyway. There were also differences. Jackson was a man of great personal bravery, a brilliant general, devoted husband, and from all indications he didn’t really want to be President. Jackson ended up on the $20 bill, though to our modern sensibilities his presence is something of an affront. He was scheduled to be replaced by Harriet Tubman until President Trump’s election.

Hammatt Billings, The Battle of New Orleans January 8, 1815, Abbot’s Lives of the Presidents, engraved print, 1882, Library of Congress.

As a child Andrew Jackson was poor, even by 18th Century standards. He was poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, a slave trader, a commander in wars against the Creek and Seminole, and an under-qualified justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court (though to be fair no one else was probably qualified either). He married a married woman, gambled big time on horse racing, and was an uncompromising and violent general, the sort of general who during the Creek War (1814-15) stood in front of potential deserters and told them that if they tried to leave he would order the canon at their back to fire. Of course he was also in front of the canon. To modern sensibilities his greatest sin was the forced removal of the Southeastern tribes to Oklahoma, and the deaths of thousands in that removal.

As a Tennessee congressman David Crockett opposed Jackson’s Indian policies. Defeated for a third term in Congress, Crockett was in Mississippi when a third Tennessean (and Jackson protege), Sam Houston, got in trouble in Texas. Crockett went there to help, leaving us with his immortal line, “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”

Whatever his failings, Jackson was a true believer in democracy in its broadest sense, and the great unionist of his age. The reason Jackson is on the $20 bill is that Lincoln needed Jackson. As President, Jackson had first faced down South Carolina’s threatened secession in the 1832 Nullification Crisis, receiving Congressional authorization to send troops to South Carolina to enforce Federal law. It wasn’t over slavery, it was over tariffs, but it was North-South, and Jackson gave Lincoln his precedent for a military response to preserve the Union. It didn’t hurt Lincoln either that Jackson was Southern. Hence Jackson enters the American pantheon, not merely as a man of action, but as a man central to an idea, the Union, and it was an idea that Jackson revered, both as a general and as President. It’s no accident that his Texas protege, Governor Sam Houston, resigned when Texas voted to secede.

Pierre Langlume, General Andrew Jackson, lithograph, c. 1824, Library of Congress.

***

In his study of slavery, Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis suggests a number of conditions for slavery to exist, but one of his suggestions, and here I’m paraphrasing, is that we simply have no clue how hard and violent the lives of these people were. They were surrounded by death (50% of infants never reached adulthood), cruelty (corporal punishment of soldiers and sailors wasn’t that different than corporal punishment of slaves), privation, and violence to both man and beast.

I have a family story that I ponder when I think about these people. One of my 16 fourth great-grandfathers (along with 16 fourth great-grandmothers, nature being demanding that way), one Andrew Davidson, was born in 1768 in Rocky Gap, Virginia, and died in 1853 in Bedford, Tennessee. I don’t know much about Davidson, but he is famous enough to have a historical marker in West Virginia:

Even with a historical marker, Davidson isn’t famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, but there are plenty of descriptions of what happened to Mrs. Davidson. Mrs. Davidson, a Rebecca Burke, was pregnant, and she gave birth shortly after her abduction. The raiders drowned the newborn. Two of her other children were murdered and one was taken from her and subsequently died by accident. At some later date she was sold to a white family in Canada. All of her children, the newborn, two daughters, and one son, were dead. Lord only knows what she endured.

Davidson, to his credit, went looking, and it took about three years for him to find her in Canada. He brought her home, and then she died. She was 28. I think about that story when I try to imagine the outlook of these people, the level of violence that must have been, if not exactly their norm, at least not uncommon, certainly not as uncommon as it would be for us. The violence of Jackson and Forrest would not have been alien to Andrew Davidson. Andrew Davidson would probably have admired them both without reservation.

Davidson, by the way, remarried (this time to one of my 16 fourth great grandmothers) and had more children, for which I am grateful.

***

I read H.W. Brands’ biography of Jackson. There were others, including at least one newer, but Brands’ seemed to have the best reviews. Then I read some stuff about Shiloh, and after went on to read Jack Hurst’s biography of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Hurst starts out saying that he isn’t a Forrest apologist, but I suspect it’s impossible to write a biography without empathy for the subject, even if the subject is Nathan Bedford Forrest. Notwithstanding his disclaimer Hurst is a bit of an apologist.

After the Civil War, Forrest considered a plan to invade Mexico. He said he had been promised 20,000 muskets. It’s not clear who made the promise, or whether they were able to deliver, but it’s not unusual for a lack of clarity to surround Forrest and his deeds. This was during the 1867 elections when Forrest was almost certainly the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Forest is often reported as the founder of the Klan, but he wasn’t; it had been around a bit before he joined. There’s considerable speculation about Forest’s role in the Klan, but during its first incarnation, first as a social club born in Nashville and later as a violent means of suppressing black and white Republican votes, he was the Grand Wizard. He was almost certainly integral to its post-1868 election violence. The sheets, by the way, were to give the Klansmen the appearance of Confederate ghosts.

The Klan died out in Tennessee by 1871, in part because of Federal suppression, but also because it had accomplished what it wanted: suffrage for former Confederates and suppression of Southern Republican voters, black and white. Some of the credit for the first death of the Klan probably goes to Forrest, who for whatever reasons seems to have ordered it disbanded. It would next rise in Georgia in 1915, in part because of the popularity of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Brady-Handy Collection, 1862-1865, Library of Congress.

Forrest shares a lot with Jackson. He was poor as a child, poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, and a slave trader. Forrest made a fortune before the War trading slaves, while Jackson seems only to have dabbled and to have made his fortune as a planter. Forrest was never an Indian fighter, the Southeastern tribes having been removed during Jackson’s presidency. As a boy he did once shoot at a man over an ox, after he’d shot the ox. He gambled at cards, and was an uncompromising and violent field commander. During the war he was shot four times, had 29 horses shot out from under him, and claimed personally to have killed as many Federal troops as he had lost horses. He didn’t drink. He was devoted to his wife and children.

Forrest is considered to be one of the great cavalry commanders, not just of the American Civil War but of any war, with an extraordinary sense of field tactics and leadership. Of all the Confederate generals of the Civil War, he was probably the most consistently successful. Forrest was born to fight in the violent West, the western theater lacking the patina of gentility present in the east, and part of Sherman’s strategy on his March to the Sea was to keep just enough troops in Tennessee and Mississippi to keep Forrest busy and out of his hair.

During his lifetime, Forrest was most notorious for the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Western Tennessee. Forrest always denied that he had ordered the massacre, but 300 Union forces, many of them African-American, were murdered after the fort’s surrender. It is probably the greatest battlefield atrocity of our most atrocious war, and at the time was widely known, now largely forgotten. Instead of Fort Pillow being Forrest’s legacy, his legacy is the Klan.

At the end of his life, Forrest seems to have found religion and was, perhaps, one of the few Southern voices for reconciliation, not only between North-South, but between whites and blacks. Maybe it was too little too late. Like Jackson and Lincoln he’d come to view the Union as the most important thing, the only economic path forward for the destroyed South, and I suppose he deserves some credit for it. Of course that’s not why there are public (and private) statues of Forrest in Tennessee.

Brent Moore, photographer, Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on private land on I-65 in Nashville, 2006. While there are plenty of moral sensibilities that could be offended by a statue of Forrest, I’m not sure that the moral offense isn’t matched by the aesthetic offense of this particular statue. It would deserve to come down even if it wasn’t a statue of General Forrest. That is one ugly piece of fiberglass.

***

Meantime the fishing near Houston, both for bass and redfish, has been outstanding. I had maybe my best day fishing for redfish ever, not so much in the landing, but in the seeing, and Kris did almost all of the day’s poling. The next day I sat in my canoe and watched what must have been a four-pound bass come out of the water to eye level after dragon flies. I never caught that bass, but I caught plenty of other stuff. And sometimes the seeing is the best part.

Now if I’d just remember to get my hand out of the way of the fish photo.

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Delaware

Aaron Arrowsmith and Samuel Lewis, Arrowsmith’s 1804 Map of Delaware, 1804.

Delaware has a population of less than 1 million people, but at only 1,982 square miles, it has 469 people per square mile. That’s a lot. It is the sixth densest state. Montana, which has a few more people, has only seven people per square mile. Standing in your mile of Delaware you can rub elbows with 462 people you’d never meet in Montana.

All of the states denser than Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland, are its neighbors. There are other states with more people, but crammed into that northeast corridor are the densest states with the most people and the least land per person. One doesn’t choose Delaware for a wilderness experience.

Delaware ranks 49th in total area–I suppose Rhode Island must be last. There are three counties in Delaware, New Castle, Kent, and Sussex. That’s it. Its largest city, Wilmington, is in the far north, with over half the state’s population and a population density of 1,312 people per square mile. Blacks make up 23% of Delaware’s population, whites 69.5%, Asians 4.1%, and everybody else the rest. About 8% of the whites are Hispanic.

Delaware is not a poor state. Its median annual income per household ranks 17th, at $64,805. Wealth though is tied to race. In Wilmington the median annual white household income is $60,772. The black median annual household income is about $47,500.

From Wikimedia Commons, User Golbez, Map of the Slave States 1861.

On December 7, 1787, Delaware, then a slave state, was the first state to ratify the Constitution. In 1790 in Delaware there were 8,887 slaves, and 3,899 free blacks. The 1860 census listed only 1,798 slaves, of a total black population of 21,677, of a total Delaware population of 112,266. Delaware had not freed its slaves when the Civil War began, though attempts had been made in its legislature and there was a strong abolition movement in the state. Its slaves were finally freed when the 13th Amendment ending slavery was ratified in 1865, after the Civil War.

Gratuitous Photograph of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman, from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.

How did slavery get to Delaware? The Dutch of course. Delaware was originally a Swedish colony, founded in 1636. Just think what we’d have gained if the Swedes had held on. We’d own Volvos. We’d have an excuse to post gratuitous photographs of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman. We’d all be tall and blonde. The Dutch (who still controlled New York) kicked out the Swedes in 1655. The Dutch thought African slavery was the very thing, and had already established slavery in what would be New York, which finally outlawed slavery in the 1820s.

The Dutch conquered the New World Swedes in 1655, and were in turn conquered by the English in 1664. There was some fussing over whether Delaware belonged to Lord Baltimore as part of Maryland, or the Duke of York who deeded it to William Penn, but ultimately it went to Penn. The Delawarians and the Pennsylvanians weren’t well-suited for a long-term relationship, and by 1701 Penn had agreed to a separation, though they continued to share a governor.

Contemporary Portrait, Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr 1577-1618. Baron De La Warr was English, not Native American.

A good name like Delaware should be Native American, but no. The Delaware Native Americans were the Leni Lenape, part of the Algonquins, and were also located in New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. They apparently didn’t observe state lines. By 1670 the Lenape were mostly gone, absorbed, killed by disease or otherwise, or pushed west. The Tribes of the Delaware Nation are now in Oklahoma. There were also Nanticoke people, who either moved west with the Lenape or north to Canada, but some remained in Delaware, and settled near the Indian River. The Nanticoke Indian Association is recognized as a nonprofit corporation by the state, which likes nothing better than a good corporation.

The Delaware Tribe in Oklahoma sports the same name as the state, the river, and the bay, and all of ’em were named for the first governor of Virginia, Thomas West, the Third Baron De La Warr. Delaware Indians must possess a finely honed sense of irony.

Physically Delaware is flat, coastal, and temperate. It has about 45 inches of rain a year, with average temperatures ranging from 76 degrees in summer to 32 degrees in winter, with winter temperatures along the Atlantic Coast averaging 10 degrees warmer in winter and l0 degrees cooler in summer.

Delaware Geological Survey.

Delaware is the 6th flattest state, one flatter than Kansas. The highest point in the state, the Ebright Azimuth, is 447.85 feet above sea level, or at least it was before the seas started rising. I guess now either all things are relative or the point from which we measure sea level is underwater..

Delawarians tend to vote Democratic, it is Joe Biden’s state and both senators and its congresswoman are Democratic, but even in Delaware there is a rural/urban divide. In 2016 the more urban New Castle County voted for Clinton; the less populous southern counties voted for President Trump. Like I said, all things are relative. It’s not like Sussex County’s 165 people per square mile qualifies as ranch land.

We were going to lump our trip to Delaware together with our trip to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but getting ready we both read John McPhee’s The Founding Fish, which is McPhee’s paean to shad. Terry Peach at A Marblehead Flyfisher said that the shad most reliably run in the Brandywine River for the two weeks surrounding Mother’s Day, this year May 10, so now we’re going May 17. After all, who wouldn’t want to fish the Brandywine? Of course it doesn’t run through Hobbiton until somewhat further north than where we’re fishing. We’ll probably manage two breakfasts anyway.

Shad. If everything works we’re going to fish for shad.

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Maryland

Steven Johnson, Wikimedia Commons

I suspect that Maryland has always felt the curse of being so close to Virginia, both in geography and demeanor, but always coming off as a bit the lesser. It got started  later, 1630 instead of 1607. It wasn’t quite as English, being a haven for Huguenots and Catholics and other non-Anglicans. For us outsiders looking in it feels more foreign, less so than Louisiana but still, foreign. Baltimore ain’t an Anglo Saxon sort of word. It was settled by more tradesmen and fewer gentlemen. It was more urban, with Baltimore the major Southern City in the 18th Century. Even it’s most famous corpse, Edgar Allan Poe, was raised in Virginia. Virginia produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. Maryland produced Spiro T. Agnew.

Virginia shows up in the state song, Maryland My Maryland:

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant’s chain,

Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain,
Maryland!

What Maryland seems to have done in the modern world better than just about anybody is produce slightly quirky but immensely influential musicians (and also John Waters, who fits right in): Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Frank Zappa, Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Mr. Glass.

Sorry.

Maryland, with +6 million residents and about 12,400 square miles, ranks sixth among states in population density. Modern Maryland is an urban state. Modern Marylanders do not identify as Southern, but historically Maryland was a slave state, with 87,000 slaves in 1860. Had Lincoln not suspended habeas corpus, declared martial law, and arrested the Confederate sympathizers in the Maryland Assembly, Maryland would likely have seceded. Not that there’s anything wrong with Mr. Lincoln, notwithstanding the Supreme Court ruling against him on the whole habeas thing. About a third of Maryland volunteers in the Civil War fought for the Confederacy. Of course the other two-thirds fought for the Union.

Again, Maryland My Maryland: 

She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!

So Maryland, like Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware–the other slave states that didn’t secede–was a bit on the cusp. It had always been different than its Southern neighbor. It had 87,000 slaves in 1860, but it also had 84,000 free blacks. However, if you asked Frederick Douglass, another Maryland famous son, whether Maryland was North or South, I’m pretty sure Mr. Douglass would say South, no question. It was in Maryland that Douglass was enslaved. It was from Maryland that Douglass escaped.

What Maryland is now is tougher to say. There are the D.C. bedroom communities: relatively wealthy, educated, urban. There’s agriculture, and there’s the Chesapeake Bay. There’s Baltimore, a city built to hold tens of thousands of stevedores but now coping with container shipping. It takes a lot fewer people to operate a crane. In 2017, Baltimore had the highest per capita murder rate of any city in the nation.

Notwithstanding its troubles, Baltimore is a fun city. Camden Yards is great, and the Astros won when I saw them there. I also had two great dinners in Baltimore, at a classic restaurant, Charleston, and an edgier place, Woodberry Kitchen. I’ve eaten the crab cakes while drinking local beer. We also had some good hipster donuts. If Brooklyn were in the South, it would be Baltimore. And in Maryland, on the Chesapeake, we’ll fish for stripers. I’ve never caught a striper. Don’t get your hopes up.

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Virginia

We fish in Virginia on May 14 on the South Fork of the Shenandoah River for smallmouth and May 17 in the Shenandoah Valley for trout.  I’ve been getting ready, both fishing-wise and Virginia-wise.

Virginia-wise, I have 4096 10th great grandparents. It’s nothing special: most people do. Half of them were women, which is how that works. The one 10th great grandparent I can identify  is pretty interesting, though with 4095 others out there somewhere our connection is pretty remote.  Her name was Cicely or Sisely or Cecily Reynolds Bailey Jordan Farrar. Husbands died off and she married a lot. Other than spelling, a lot is known about Cicely.  She even has her own Wikipedia page, though like a lot of Wikipedia pages written by descendants it includes some information and some wishful thinking. She arrived in Jamestown from England in 1610, right after starvation had killed off most of the colony, on the Swan.  She was 11, and her parents weren’t with her. While she likely did have parents, there’s not much certainty in their identity. Her probable daughter (there’s a bit of probability involved), Temperance Bailey Brown Cocke, my 9th great grandmother, was born in Virginia in 1617, making her one of the earliest surviving English children born in the New World.  To put things in perspective, the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth in 1620.

She was the first of my many English ancestors who arrived in Virginia between 1610 and the Revolution.  There was a pile of them. I suspect that’s not uncommon for Southern folk whose ancestry is mostly English. Oh sure, there were outliers. There were some Ulster Scots who emigrated to Pennsylvania, and an Irishman who emigrated to Maryland, but even they pretty much moved on to Virginia. They weren’t all English-Scots-Irish-Welsh either.  There was at least one set of French Huguenots and a German. But all-in-all Virginia seems to have been really good at importing English and Africans.

As a general rule the English-Scot-Welsh-Irish immigrants to Virginia were largely of two groups: relatively wealthy, relatively aristocratic immigrants who started arriving in the Tidewater in larger numbers in the 1630s, and their white servants and manual labor. Aristocratic British did not actually expect to do manual labor, and they received grants of land for each person they sponsored to bring over.  They apparently brought over cousins for company and the poor for heavy lifting, and Britain used the colonies to clean out its poor and its petty criminals. In her study of poor whites, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in American, Nancy Isenberg starts with the importation of Southern workers: the poor are always with us, but they were particularly with us down in Virginia where an underclass was imported as cheap labor.

It was really a pretty lousy deal.  If you came over as an indentured servant, you were the property of your master for five to seven years. Life expectancy in Colonial Virginia was less than 25 years. The chance of surviving a five-year term of servitude was roughly 50-50. You could be sold.  You could be beaten. You were dependent on the jerk who brought you over for your shelter and your daily bread. These were not kind times.

Of course there were worse things.  There was slavery. Slavery was for life, no 50-50. Children inherited the enslavement of their parents. Worst of all slavery was premised on the slaveholder’s certainty in the African slave’s moral and genetic inferiority (not that the British aristocrat wasn’t certain of the indentured servant’s moral and genetic inferiority). African slavery doesn’t begin in Virginia, African slavery was the norm in Portuguese Brazil and the West Indies, but by 1619 there were Africans in Jamestown, and by the late 17th Century the Virginia aristocracy ran out of white people–giving the lie to Bingo Long.  Birth rates were down in Britain, and the  British economy was booming. It needed its poor for its own devices. David Brion Davis in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World notes that in Virginia in 1670 white servants outnumbered black slaves four to one. By the 1690s slaves outnumbered white servants four to one. That’s a sea-change.

The Virginians had tried to enslave the Native Americans, but it didn’t work well.  They were susceptible to European disease and unfamiliar with industrial agriculture. Africans on the other hand were familiar with large-scale agriculture and European disease. But an odd thing happened in Virginia.  Throughout the New World–and these are very rough numbers–about 43 percent of slaves, mostly male,  went to Brazil, about 41 percent of slaves, mostly male, went to the West Indies, and about 5 to 7 percent, still mostly male, went to the North American British Colonies.  There were worse things than Virginia. Slave life on a Brazil or West Indies sugar plantation was short and brutal. Slaves were a replaceable commodity, and life expectancy for slaves was two to three years.

It doesn’t deserve praise, but raising tobacco or wheat was easier on slaves than sugar production, and the African population in Virginia grew. Importation of African slaves into Virginia slowed,  and over a few generations the original mostly male population became (as these things do) a mix of males and females.  By 1800 there were about 346,000 slaves in Virginia, most native-born. By the early 1800s the two largest slave markets in the U.S. were in New Orleans and Richmond. Virginia had more slaves than it needed for labor, and it exported its slaves, largely descendants of the Igbo from modern Nigeria, down South for cash.

Virginia also exported white people, though there was more self-determinism involved.  By the early 1800s I had no ancestors left in Virginia.  By the Civil War they had settled at one time or another throughout the South: Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri, and of course Texas.  The only Southern places missing seem to have been Louisiana, Florida, Delaware, and West Virginia, and as far as I can tell none went North.  At least for my ancestors, Colonial Virginia was our Ellis Island, and that’s not an uncommon Southern pattern for whites.  They also appear to have mostly married and had children with their own kind, and stuck to the same kind of cultural identity.  When my parents met and married in 1949 in Crane, way out in West Texas near Odessa, two of their separate family ancestors, two of my 9th great grandfathers (of which there are only 1024, and 1024 9th great grandmothers–that’s the way this works) were the two representative in the Virginia House of Burgesses from Henrico County, Virginia, in 1644. The families were still neighbors after 300 years.

There’s a good book on Virginia em- and im-migration, white and black, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, by Fischer and Kelly. Why is it that scholarly works all require a colon? There’s a bad joke there I think. In addition to English and Africans, the Virginians also imported brown trout, rainbow trout, smallmouth, and tobacco. My 10th great grandmother’s second husband’s land, Jordan’s Journey, bordered land owned by John Rolfe who brought tobacco to Virginia from the West Indies and married Pocahontas.

Meanwhile our saltwater skiff is still in San Antonio. The boat builder is repairing Harvey-damaged boats, so we need to be patient. I’m sill fishing for bass and sunfish, out of a canoe and from the bank, and have been trying to get some decent sunfish photos.  On Go-Pro I’ve use a chest strap and taken photos of my forearms, just above the fish, and a cap to take photos of the back of my head. I’m just not very good at it.