Sherry Chandler

Mud Mothers

This morning, Allison Hedge Coke posted to the Wom-Po list a poem by Lenelle Moïse, “Mud Mothers,” which begins like this:

Mud Mothers

the children of haiti
are not mythological
we are starving
or eating salty cakes
made of clay

because in 1804 we felled
our former slave captors
the graceless losers sunk
vindictive yellow
teeth into our forests

what was green is now
dust & everyone knows
trees unleash oxygen
(another humble word
for life)

This poem reminded me that back on December 2, I mentioned Margaretta Mason Brown, wife of Kentucky’s first U.S. Senator, who wrote,to her husband that

the Monster Slavery may destroy the people of Kentucky before long [p. 57]

As I wrote then, Margaretta Brown was an emancipationist, one who favored a gradual freeing of the slaves. She made this statement because she was afraid of an uprising like that in Santo Domingo. She was afraid that the incendiary language of abolitionists would incite such a rebellion.

Once upon a time evangelicals were on the side of the angels, and in 1834, a particularly fiery abolitionist sermon by “a young Presbyterian minister, Mr. Davidson” in a church “to Galleries overflowing with Negroes,” caused Mrs. Brown to write to her niece:

The cause of gradual emancipation is gaining ground daily in the West, but these premature and violent measures, will have a tendency to create such a spirit of insubordination amongst the slaves, as will render it necessary to rivet their chains more closely in order to our self preservation, or they will be stimulated to take their cause in their own hands and the tragedy of St. Domingo may indeed be reacted here.

The passage above is from Helen Deiss Irvin’s Women in Kentucky. The paternalism of it makes me cringe, but it illustrates how the institution of slavery enslaved a whole culture. Look at this story from Irvin:

. . . Kentucky owners dreaded slave uprisings. Like other slaveholders, they feared poisonings and the hand raised against an owner that might begin some frightful massacre. [john W.] Coleman [author of Slavery Times in Kentucky] tells of a Lexington woman from Massachusetts, Caroline Turner, despised by whites for her insanely sadistic treatment of slaves. While she was whipping a young coachman in chains early one morning, he broke free and strangled her. Sympathetic as they had previously been toward the Turner slaves, Lexington citizens quickly closed ranks to hunt the young slave down and have him hanged. [p. 57]

It pains me to believe that the people of Haiti are still suffering because once they took their fates in their own hands. And yet, here is Pat Robertson illustrating that the memory of ignorant whites is long. If there is a devil involved here, I would say it has a white skin. How did such a man as this become the voice of evangelism, evangelism that once was on the side of freedom for all? I wonder how Mr. Robertson would react to being whipped in chains.

To learn more about the Haitian Revolution and how Robertson got it all wrong, see Juan Cole who reminds us that these things are never simple:

As Charles Tilly pointed out, all revolutions are multiple revolutions

Read more about the deforestation of Haiti here at the Alicia Patterson Foundation:

No matter how many environmental, agriculture and forestry experts in American and international aid agencies one talks with, there are no illusions that even the best techniques available today can save Haiti. It will never be restored to the richest jewel that adorned France’s colonial crown in the 18th century. The French brought a million African slaves to clear the forests for sugar and coffee. As a result, a huge part of Haiti’s precious woods were felled. This was followed by a procession of lumber companies in the 19th century that paid large sums to landowners and corrupt government officials for access to the forests. The Haitian peasantry also was in need of fuel, building materials and crop lands. They cut down more forests and ended up being blamed for the devastation, now in epic proportions.

(My emphasis)

To read more of Lenelle Moïse at her blog, where you will find links to donate to the Haiti earthquake fund.

__________
Added: Another good explanation of how Haiti came to be where it is today from The Guardian:

As Stephen Keppel of the Economist Intelligence Unit puts it, Haiti’s revolution may have brought it independence but it also “ended up destroying the country’s infrastructure and most of its plantations. It wasn’t the best of starts for a fledgling republic.” Moreover, in exchange for diplomatic recognition from France, the new republic was forced to pay enormous reparations: some 150m francs, in gold. It was an immense sum, and even reduced by more than half in 1830, far more than Haiti could afford.

“The long and the short of it is that Haiti was paying reparations to France from 1825 until 1947,” says Von Tunzelmann. “To come up with the money, it took out huge loans from American, German and French banks, at exorbitant rates of interest. By 1900, Haiti was spending about 80% of its national budget on loan repayments. It ­completely wrecked their economy. By the time the original reparations and interest were paid off, the place was basically destitute and trapped in a ­spiral of debt. Plus, a succession of leaders had more or less given up on trying to resolve Haiti’s problems, and started looting it instead.”

The cruelties of women

Since I am on this sad subject, I had marked this passage to share with you from Rebecca Smith Lee’s Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (University of Texas Press, 1962).

After Horace Holley’s death in 1827, Mary decided in 1829 to return to the Louisiana sugar plantation La Bonne Espérence, where the owners, the LaBranche family, had offered her a position as governess to their small daughters and where she could also teach her young son. Thus she experienced New Year’s Day on the plantation and “finishing the sugar.”

The weather was perfect for merrymaking, soft and bright and warm. After the slaves had feasted on fresh beef and casks of wine, they donned their best blackcoats and deresses, the women wearing colored kerchiefs round their heads and the men waving bright scarves as flags. Then they paraded in the dusk to the door of the big house shouting “Bonne Ann&ecute;e pour vous!” and making their bows to the master and mistress, to the noisy accompaniment of violins and kettle drums and tambourines.

There was one ceremonial Congo dance, done in the old, old manner. The most elderly of the men approached the master, bending first on one knee and then on the other, singing all the while in a weird minor key. It was an ancient ritual of homage from a faraway homeland, and the sight of the rapt black faces moved Mary Holley profoundly and in a curious way. She felt that Mr. Hermogene [LaBranche, the plantation owner] and the dancers were actors in a strange and primitive drama, controlled by inexorable forces, a drama in which she herself was not personally involved. By thus detaching herself from the tragic implications of the scene, she arrived at the mixed attitude toward slavery held by most of the people she knew in Kentucky. As she closed the letter to her daughter she could still hear the throbbing of the drums in the quarters half a mile away and she commented that the “rigors of slavery seem softened since I have seen these poor wretches in their gala time and witnessed so much benevolence in their master and mistress.” [p. 202]

This was, of course, the fairytale all the white plantation class told itself.

I’m not exactly sure where Lee stands on this. This book was written when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was just beginning to heat up. But it is intended as a flattering biography of one of the Texas Austins. So it walks a thin sort of line that looks barbaric to our 21st century eye.

Compare it to this short passage from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

When Mary was nineteen, her father was on the jury during the trial of an abusive mistress, Caroline Turner, who, among other depravities had thrown one of her slaves out a window. Her husband accused her of murdering half a dozen of their African-American charges—his tales were another catalogue of horrors, signs of slavery’s brutal effects. [pp. 22-23]

Helen Deiss Irvin shows us a somewhat less reverential side of the slave/mistress relationship in stories of Sophia Ward, a slave born in Clay County in 1837:

The mistress had an old parrott and one day I was in the kitchen making cookies, and I decided I wanted some of them, so I took out some and put them on a chair; and when I did this the mistress entered the door. I pick up the cushion and throw over the pile of cookies on the chair, amd Mistress came near the chair and the old parrot cries out, “Mistress burn, Mistress burn.” Then the mistress looks under the cushion, and she had me whipped, but the next day I killed the parrot, and she often wondered who or what killed the bird. [p. 51]

Or there was Sarah in Bourbon County:

Sarah is the biggest devil that ever lived, having poisoned a stud horse and set a stable on fire, also burnt Gen. R. Williams stable and stack yard with seven horses and other property to value of $1500. She was handcuffed and got away at Ruddles Mill on her way down the river, which is the fifth time she escaped when about to be sent out of the country. [pp. 51-52]

In spite of the gracious surface of life in antebellum Kentucky, there was always an undertone of fear. Margaretta Mason Brown, wife of Kentucky’s first U.S. Senator, wrote, in a letter to her husband that

the Monster Slavery may destroy the people of Kentucky before long [p. 57]

Margaretta Brown was an emancipationist, favoring a gradual freeing of the slaves. She feared that abolitionists would incite an uprising like that in Santo Domingo.

Slavery is the worm at the heart of the rose of U.S. democracy. Or maybe I should say it is one of the worms, the genocide of the indigenous nations being the other. It puts a taint on the very real achievements of these 19th century women.

On the other hand, humanity produces very few saints and those it does produce are not always nice folk.

Camp Nelson

One of the horrors I discovered in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2007) was that the African-American soldiers fighting in the Union Army could be as badly treated by Northern forces as by Southern.

Here, from Helen Deiss Irvin, is a harrowing incident from Kentucky’s Civil War:

In the devastating war it took to free the slaves, many black men were impressed into or enlisted in the Union army, and black women were bystanders who often suffered. . . . black women journeyed in droves to Camp Nelson, where their husbands or sons were trianing as Union soldiers. The Union commander, Speed S. Fry, called this situation the “Nigger Woman Question.” He expelled the women and had those who returned whipped. But the strength of family ties led more black woman and children to Camp Nelson, where they settled in samll huts they themselves put up near the camp. Living conditions were miserable, and most were penniless. One old woman with several sons in the Union army washed and sewed to pay her way.

Without giving these people time to collect their meager belongings, the Union commander evicted 400 of them in late November, 1864. Gutman tells that they were “dumped” from wagons on roadsides “in extreme cold weather.” They suffered intensely. Having no other place to turn, about 250 made their way back to the camp. Of these, 102 died.

Still they came, often turned out by their former owners when slave husbands joined the Union army. By January, 1865, Camp Nelson was the residence of 3,060 slaves, mostly women and children. [pp. 60-61]

From the Camp Nelson website, there is a kinder side to this incident, which states that 10,000 African-Americans enrolled in the Union army there:

The families of the African-American Soldiers attracted the attention of the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist society founded prior to the Civil War. Reverend John Fee, the founder of Berea College, came to Camp Nelson in 1864 to teach and minister to the refugees at Camp Nelson. His efforts eventually led to the founding of Ariel College and church and finally the settlement of Hall. Fee believed passionately in the equality of the races and he sought to educate the freedmen to become independent, self-reliant members of an integrated American society The refugee camp for the families of the African-American soldiers was located near the present day community of Hall west of US 27. This was also the site of Ariel College.

And here:

Fry was severely criticized by the northern press, the U.S. Sanitary Commission and by the missionary to the refugees, Rev. John G. Fee. Fry’s actions also enraged the African-American recruits and undermined the recruitment of African-Americans in Kentucky. Because of the complaints and reactions, Washington directed Fry to establish a camp for the refugees within Camp Nelson

A direct result of Fry’s actions at Camp Nelson and the uproar which followed was the passage into law, in February 1865, of the act which freed the wives and the children of the ex-slave enlistees. This act resulted in an increase in the enlistment of enslaved African-Americans in Kentucky and other border states.

Here is a photo that I stole from the site of the refugee camp. I highly recommend that you go spend some time at the Camp Nelson webpage.

Slave state

Some snippets from Helen Deiss Irvin on slavery:

In the Kentucky social hierarchy, most powerless were black women. Subject to all of the abuses of slavery, they were vulnerable to additional ones as women. It was widely known, for example, that the slave trader Lewis Robards of Lexington sold black women into prostitution—a practice in which no one intervened—and other traders operated breeding farms for southern markets. Moreover, the exploitation of black women by their owners was not unusual, as evidenced by numbers of nearly white slave children.

Nice word: exploitation. But to continue:

. . . The sales in Lexington of Eliza, only one sixty-fourth black, and of two sisters who were graduates of Oberlin College—all three the daughters of their white masters—were causes célèbres, as J. Winston Coleman, Jr., relates in Slavery Times in Kentucky. But black women, children, and men were sold every court-day, and no one turned a head. It was whiteness, the obvious kinship with the white ruling class, that distressed onlookers. [pp. 48-49]

Coincidentally, NPR recently ran a story about a study showing that people who approve of Barack Obama perceive his skin tone to be lighter than it is while those who disapprove see it as darker. Obviously we have not got beyond this prejudice for the white.

With African-American slaves as with Native Americans, there was a great fear of miscegenation that did not apply to white men. Here is a key paragraph from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

From the earliest years of settlement, the rising birthrate of mixed-race children induced authorities to attempt to resolve “miscegenations” with a stroke of the pen: In 1662, the Virginia assemply passed legislation declaring that slave offspring inherited the status of the mother (partus sequitur ventrem) This law provided white males with an incentive to prefer slave women as illicit sexual partners—as they could not be charged with bastardy. [p. 23]

Clinton tells the story of Richard M. Johnson, a friend of Mary Lincoln’s father, John Robert Todd, and an exception to the rule of “exploitation,” the one that said these sexual liaisons would be politely ignored. Johnson would serve as vice president under Martin Van Buren but before achieving that high estate, he created a scandal in Lexington not only by acknowledging his two mixed-race daughters, offspring of his long liaison with his “housekeeper,” but also by trying to arrange advantageous marriages for them with white men. He accomplished this in part by settling lands and money on them, thereby adding fuel to the fire (see “bribed” below).

Like the sisters sold at auction, Johnson’s daughters were well educated. When Lafayette stayed with Jonson on his visit to Lexington in 1825, Clinton quotes a neighbor as reporting the event thus:

Evry thing that was necsary for the occasion was prepared in fine order. Johnson’s Two Daughters they Played on the piano fine. They Ware Dressed as fine as money Could Dress them & to one that Did not no they ware as white as anny of the Laydes thare & thare ware a good many. [p. 24]

I daresay the daughters, Imogene and Adaline, could probably spell better than the reporter, too.

Lexington Society might have tolerate such socializing from a wealthy powerful war hero, but with their marriages, Johnson had gone too far. George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal, explained the situation thus in 1835:

The author of the Declaration of Independence had his faults, but he was at least careful never to insult the feelings of the community with an ostentatious exhibition of them. He never lived in open intercourse with an “odoriferous wench”; He never bribed “his white fellow citizens” to “make such beasts of themselves” before the open eyes of the world as to stand up in the church, grasp the sable paws of negresses and pronounce the sacred vows of wedlock. [p. 25]

Prentice was a Unionist, an ardent Henry Clay supporter, and a member of the Know-Nothing Party but his writing style was broadly satiric and the liberal peppering of quotation marks in this passage leads me to wonder just where his barbs were falling.

Clinton reports that Adaline died of a “broken heart” in February 1836 because of all her father suffered on his daughters’ account [p. 25].

Horace and Mary Austin Holley were instrumental in bringing Lafayette to Lexington, by the way. Mary Holley would, no doubt, have been one of those white women present at Johnson’s plantation, Blue Springs in 1825. In 1818, when Mary Holley first came to Lexington with her husband, who was to be president of Transylvania University, she was uneasy about having slaves as servants. She soon adjusted, however, and when the Holleys were preparing to leave Kentucky in 1827, Rebecca Smith Lee records that:

[Horace Holley] reckoned up his own financial condition carefully . . . and wrote to Orville that he was leaving Kentucky worth at least six thousand dollars, counting his books, furniture, land, and two slaves. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (Univ Texas Press, 1962), p. 172]

Unfortunately, when the Holleys left Lexington, they fell on hard times. They went to Louisiana where events did not work out the way Horace Holley thought they would. Ill and humiliated, he decided he had to flee the cursed south:

“One breath of air,” he cried out as Mary begged him to lie back on the couch by the window and let her fan his brow, “one breath of air from the Northern shore of freedom, though borne upon the eastern gale, were worth all the boasted luxuries of the ever-smiling scented South, alluring but to destroy!” [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, pp. 181-182]

But in order to book their passage, the Holleys had to have money:

He hastened to book passage for himself and wife and son on the Louisiana two weeks hence, and spent his scanty strength making preparations to leave. Most of his ready cash had gone toward equipment for the house and school, and a few days before sailing he was compelled to sell their excellent colored woman named Susanna for the sum of four hundred and fifty dollars, with Mr. Martin Duralde as witness to the transaction. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, p. 182]

Horace Holley never made it to the Northern shore of freedom. He died of yellow fever on the voyage. After his death, Mary Austin Holley returned to Louisiana to serve as governess on the LaBranche plantation.

The plantation wife

Helen Deiss Irvin (Women in Kentucky) forwards a version of southern culture/economy that I’ve heard elsewhere: that however frivolous the plantation daughters might be, however dashing and high flying the men, plantation wives were in fact the ones who ran the big plantations:

. . . a distinction must be made among wives and daughters of the wealthy. . . . Wives of large landholders, however, had heavy responsibilities. They might work harder than their husbands, although this fact they self-effacingly concealed. While many landholders devoted themselves to gambling, hunting, and sometimes the pursuit of women, their wives saw to it that the farms produced and the the slave work force was healthy and cared for.

One such hard-working woman was Lucretia Hart Clay. While Henry Clay advanced his career in Washington, she spent most of the time in Lexington, running “Ashland.” A hemp and stock plantation, “Ashland” made use of fifty to sixty slaves, the responsibility of Lucretia Clay.

Graced by a free and easy attitude toward money, Clay signed notes for friends rather casually. He also gambled for high stakes, once losing eight thousand dollars . . . and winning it back in one evening’s play. Money did not worry him: that was Mrs. Clay’s problem, and she managed the plantation with skill and frugalilty. Mother of eleven children, she found time to sell—often in person—butter, egges, chickens, and vegetables to the Phoenix Hotel and other Lexington hostelries. Clay appreciated her industry, which was good political capital as well, and said of her: “Again and again she saved our home from bankruptcy.” [pp. 33-34]

(I’m not sure what’s with the quotation marks around “Ashland.”)

Rebecca Smith Lee provides us with a description of Mrs Clay in her biography of that Boston bluestocking Mary Austin Holley (University of Texas, 1962):

She liked Lucretia Hart Clay, a small auburn-haired, friendly woman, who was a little older than herself. Lucretia had been no beauty even in her youth, but the years had bestowed on her the poise and dignity that were her birthright. She had married for love at sixteen, and was still devoted to her famous husband in a realistic sort of way. Their house was set in twenty acres of native trees and shrubs, with a garden that L’Enfant had planned for them. . . . Mrs. Clay was more practical than her husband. On afternoons when Mary called, her hostess was likely to be busy with the small children or conferring with young Amos Kendall, the tutor for the older boys, while she directed the servants in preparations for a formal dinner. When she “rested,” she usually picked up her needlework frame. Her husband supervised the blooded cattle and the racing stock on his extensive farms, but it was she who made Ashland a home place . . . [p. 128]

Those trees are a Clay legacy that still graces Lexington, Kentucky. My husband has carved some pieces from pecan trees that were planted by Clay and brought down by the ice storm of 2003, the one that hit Kentucky just before George W. Bush invaded Iraq. The wood was a gift from Robert and Pam Sexton.

Mary Holley, by the way, was at first uneasy about having leased slaves for her householdservants. but she adjusted fairly quickly, finding

. . . her new servants were industrious and obedient and wonderfully kind, especially with the children [p. 120]

The Southern Belle

If, in 1777, Esther Whitley was defeating all the men in a shooting match, and if in 1789, Jenny Wiley was trekking through the wilderness to escape the Shawnee, within the lifetimes of both these women, as early as 1820, women in Kentucky had transformed into a collection of Scarlet O’Haras.

Here is Richard C. Wade in The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities 1790-1830 (Univ Chicago Press, 1959):

The most sheltered group in transmontane cities were the daughters of the rich, whom Mrs. Trollope called “a privileged class.” Carefully guarded by socially sensitive mothers, screened from the world outside from birth, and educated in fashionable schools, they lived well removed from the rest of urban society. Leisure and frivolity increasingly occupied their time. Timothy Flint, himself a representative of the mercantile community, complained of their total uselessness, asserting that they never put “their own lily hands to domestic drudgery” and that they had no higher interests than dressing smartly, reading romances, and playing the piano. . . .

Nor did this relaxed life end with marriage. Matrimony merely set off new social rounds, with domestics handling the household chores. [pp. 208-209]

According to Wade, these domestics were more and more often African-American slaves.

According to Helen Deiss Irvin in Women in Kentucky, Mary Austin Holley, who moved to Lexington from Boston in 1818 when her huband became president of Transylvania University — a move she did not want to make:

. . .was astonished that local ladies made morning calls in silks and satins. By Boston standards, they overdressed. Like her uncle Moses Austin a critical newcome to Kentucky, Mrs. Holley clearly regarded her new acquaintances as pretentious, dull, perhaps a bit nouveau riche.

Nor did she care for another new feminine style: reticence and submissiveness. . . . Mrs. Holley found the new reticence boring. . . . “[She] preferred the more forthright manners of the early Republic in which she had been reared.” [pp. 31 -32]

Mrs. Holley wrote poetry and, according to her biographer Rebecca Smith Lee, read the works of that shocking Swiss intellectual, Madame de Staël. She thought Boston the pinnacle of American intellectual society and had no desire to move to some frontier backwater, to some troubled upstart college run by dour Presbyterians. But her husband thought he could rise above all that. Besides, he was delighted to be courted by none other than Henry Clay.

He was also beguiled to find paved streets.

Elizabeth F. Ellet, writing her history of Pioneer Women of the West in 1873, also marked the decline:

The progress of improvement, art, and luxury tends to change the female character so that even a return of the perils of war, the necessity for exertion, would not develop in it the strength which belonged to the matrons who nursed the infancy of the Republic.

Alas, I think it was all a matter of conspicuous consumption. Where pioneering man needed a sharpshooter wife, plantation man needed a wife who was a mere trifle and a showpiece.
.

It’s all about property

From Women in Kentucky (Univ Press of Kentucky, 1979) by Helen Deiss Irvin

During the relatively brief period when Indians and newly arrived settlers lived in proximity in Kentucky, an almost mythic fear of miscegenation haunted the frontier. Like the similar fear that would be directed in the next certury toward blacks, this attitude did not apply to white men and Indian women, as it would not extend to white slaveholders and their black women slaves. The mixing of races in itself was not the issue: what was forbidden was the white woman’s part in doing so.

. . .

This prohibition may have stemmed in part from the view that women were property, not to be shared, involuntarily or voluntarily. And possibly Indians, like blacks, were perceived as close to nature, possessing a primitive power, a superior vitality that threatened white males.

Whatever the cause, there is evidence that white women captives who retruned home were devalued, objects of gossip and a kind of ostracism or unspoken disapproval, as if suspected of cohabiting with the enemy. Some experienced melancholy, perhaps because they had survived and others, often their own children, had not. Perhaps, too, their neighbors were uneasy around them. The end of their captivity was not the end of their ordeal. [p.20-21]

Proving, I guess, that where women are concerned, blaming the victim is not a new thing at all.