NOTES

Introduction

1. Avenia White to Ballard, October 25, 1838, Folder 25, Rice C. Ballard Papers (hereafter Ballard Papers), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

2. Kentucky Death Records, 1852–1953, at www.ancestry.com (accessed October 23, 2012); 1850 U.S. Census at www.ancestry.com (accessed June 12, 2013); Mississippi State Gazette (Natchez), January 8, 1820, Vol. 7, Issue 2, p. 1; John B. Jegli’s Louisville Directory, 1845–46 (Louisville: Jeglis, 1845), 32; Lewis Collins, History of Kentucky (Covington: Collins & Co., 1882), 38–41; John E. Kleber, The Encyclopedia of Louisville (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

3. Isaac Franklin to Ballard, September 27, 1834, Folder, 15, Ballard Papers; “old woman, n.,” OED Online, June 2013 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 1993, 1997), www.oed.com/view/Entry/130999 (accessed June 24, 2013).

4. Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), vii.

5. Such women and even girls were highly valued typically because of their fair skin. Such bondswomen and girls, who were often found in Southern port cities through which men and money moved, could bring as much $5,000 on the auction block, far surpassing the $2,500 average price of an adult male slave with blacksmithing skills. But not all prospective customers were drawn to fancies, nor had they the money to pay for them. Some customers preferred dark-skinned bondswomen and girls, who were often assumed to be freer from disease than fair-skinned ones who were likewise believed to have been “handled” more. Still, the greater evidence of white men’s ties to fair-skinned women before the war suggests a preference for them owing to attitudes that held that any individual—especially a woman—whose appearance approximated that of whites was more desirable. Frederic Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J. H. Furst Company, 1931), 131; J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 137; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 1979), 155; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 416–17, 423–24; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, [1985] 1999), 34–38; Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States American Historical Review, 106.5 (December 2001): 1619–50; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 113; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 125. For more on the sexual objectification of women of African descent as a racially gendered concept, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

6. The birth of biracial people has escalated markedly in recent years. Susan Saulny, “Census Data Presents Rise in Multiracial Population of Youths,” New York Times, March 24, 2011; Sharon Jayson, “Census Shows Big Jump in Interracial Couples,” USA Today, April 26, 2012; U.S. Bureau of Statistics, 2010, Table 60, www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0060.pdf (accessed June 3, 2014); Jeffrey S. Passel, Wendy Wang, and Paul Taylor, “Marrying Out: One in Seven New U.S. Marriages is Interracial or Interethnic,” PEW Research Center, A Social and Demographic Trends Report, June 15, 2010.

7. James Oliver Horton and Stacy Flaherty, “Black Leadership in Antebellum Cincinnati,” in Henry Louis Taylor Jr., ed., Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 81.

8. Ibid.

9. David Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 17; Horton and Flaherty, “Black Leadership in Antebellum Cincinnati,” 81; Joe William Trotter Jr., River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998).

10. Their brother Charles was also politically active in Ohio. William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek, “John Mercer Langston,” in Taylor, Race and the City, 29–69.

11. Ibid.

12. Gerber, Black Ohio, 37; Darrel Bigham, Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005); Taylor, Race and the City; Trotter, River Jordan.

13. Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: New Press, [1974] 2007); Michael P. Johnson and James Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

14. National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 21, 1855, in Carter G. Woodson, ed., The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters during the Crisis, 1800–1860 (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2010), 371.

15. Gerber, Black Ohio, 8, 22.

16. Ibid., 19; Frederick A. McGinnis, History of Wilberforce (Blanchester, OH: Brown Publishing Company, 1941); Wanda M. Davis, “First Foundations: An Enquiry into the Founding of Three Selected African American Institutions of Higher Learning” (EdD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1994); Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery (New York: HarperOne, 2007); William Wilberforce, Robert Isaac Wilberforce, and Samuel Wilberforce, eds., The Life of William Wilberforce, Cambridge Library Collection—Slavery and Abolition (Volume 1) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Though its chief focus is Southern institutions of higher learning, for more on the history of higher education for African Americans during the bellum and postwar years, see James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

17. Eliza Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 171.

18. Gerber, Black Ohio, 4–6; Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 2, 28–36; Curry, Free Black in Urban America, 245; Cheek and Cheek, “John Mercer Langston,” 31–32.

19. Ibid.

20. Gunther Barth, The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 3.

21. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 11–13.

22. Ibid., 24; Horton and Flaherty, “Black Leadership in Antebellum Cincinnati,” 74; Cheek and Cheek, “John Mercer Langston,” 31.

23. Clark once stated that the American frontier explorer William Clark, younger brother of George Rogers Clark, the renowned northwestern frontier military leader, was his paternal grandfather but later recanted his story. Surviving documents suggest that John Clark, William and George’s father, had an enslaved African American woman as a sexual partner. Nikki M. Taylor, Americas First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 61–86, 226–30.

24. Ibid., 85.

25. Ibid., 86.

26. Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of Freedom after Slavery, (American History and Culture) (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 9. For more on the responses of newly freedpeople, see David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation for All (New York: Verso, 2014).

27. “Woman,” “girl,” “gal,” and “wench” were habitually used to discuss women like White when they were enslaved. This study uses the words woman or girl, bondswomen or “bondsgirls, and even mate in the rare instance when it seems appropriate. “Concubine,” the label some researchers have used to refer to such women and girls, is so closely associated with ancient societies that invoking it for the antebellum period introduces profound interpretational problems. If the purpose of language is to contextualize a specific era, concubine is not fitting here. The word mistress is one possible alternative. Certainly one cheeky visitor to Cincinnati noted the numerous “unmarried women who had been the mistresses of planters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.” But its use is also problematic because the term is firmly embedded in nineteenth-century notions of white womanhood, which assigned a place of honor to them via the “cult of domesticity” and in doing so rendered women of African descent in far less favorable light. The terms bondsman, bondswoman, bondsboy, or bondsgirl dates to the biblical era and well into the nineteenth century to refer to enslaved people. See “bondsman, n.,” OED Online, March 2014, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/Entry/21290?rskey=pGY5jf&result=2&isAdvanced=false (accessed June 8, 2014); Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 135; Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 6–9; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For more on “the cult of domesticity,” see Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Anya Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

28. William H. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

29. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Migration and Trans-Racial/National Identity Re-Formation: Becoming African Diaspora Women,” Black Women, Gender and Families 5.2 (Fall 2011):.4–24.

30. Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Michel Foucault Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, [1972] 1980); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978); Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, [1988] 1999).

31. In acknowledging this flux in their social condition, this study cautiously addresses the work of power in Southern race and class relations. It does so by cautiously reflecting on the “psychology of power” in such relations, a task that requires ongoing study. Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 193.

32. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

33. Ibid., xi.

34. Jennifer Morgan uses the word messiness as a way of describing the complexities of interracial relationships involving white men and black female slaves in the “New World.” Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 195.

35. New Orleans’s reputation as a site for interracial relationships is well documented. As Carolyn Morrow Long has written in her study of Marie Laveau, the renowned voodou priestess, men and women there worked across the color line to form domestic partnerships and “employ strategies to circumvent the increasingly repressive laws against the amalgamation of African and European blood and the flow of white prosperity into black hands.” Laveau descended from white French colonialists, Africans, and free mixed-race people of color and thus serves as a “paradigm for race relations during the first two hundred years of Louisiana’s history.” Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 3.

36. But as the historian Stephanie M. H. Camp has written, we can still closely read archival documents and speculate about their broader significance as many incidents reflected wider practices. Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 95

37. See also Mark Scott, “Permira to Buy Ancestry.com for $1.6 billion,” New York Times, October 22, 2012, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/permira-said-to-buy-ancestry-com-for-1-6-billion/?_r=o (accessed July 2, 2013).

38. See two contracts for partnership in the slave trade between Ballard, Franklin, and Franklin’s nephews James Franklin and John Armfield dated 1833 and 1835, Folder 421, Ballard Papers. Franklin’s elder brother, James Rawlings Franklin, was also a domestic slave trader. Robert H. Gudmestad, “The Troubled Legacy of Isaac Franklin: The Enterprise of Slave Trading,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 62 (Fall 2003): 193–217. For more, see Wendell Holmes Stephenson, Isaac Franklin: Slave Trader and Planter of the Old South; With Plantation Records (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press; [1938] 1968), 89; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12.

39. Receipt for clothing, November 27, 1837, Ballard Papers.

40. Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad: Being a Brief History of the Labors of a Lifetime in Behalf of the Slave, with the Stories of Numerous Fugitives, Who Gained Their Freedom through His Instrumentality, and Many Other Incidents (Cincinnati: Robert Clark & Co., 1880), 287, 481. http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc (accessed September 5, 2012).

41. Illustrative of his callous side toward blacks are his actions during an 1832 cholera epidemic in Natchez. The disease threatened to wipe out the bondspeople Ballard shipped from Virginia. He urged Franklin to abandon them. “We had better loose [sic] them all and begin again than loose ourselves,” Ballard wrote in one of the few le tiers he copied for his own records. Ballard to Isaac Franklin, December 2, 1832, Folder 8, Ballard Papers.

42. Ballard to Isaac Franklin, September 7, 1832, Folder 7, Ballard Papers.

43. For more, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

44. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Johnson, Soul by Soul; Camp, Closer to Freedom.

45. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 111.

46. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

47. One way of coping was to foster intimacy with such men who might eventually free them and contribute to their financial future. To say “intimate” is to say the white men and African Americans before us did things that allowed themselves to become “familiar” with one another in ways that improved the condition and influence, however minor, of the weaker party, namely black women and children. One aside: for labeling purposes, the terms black and African American are used in this study while acknowledging that many of the people discussed were of mixed race. In fact, well into the nineteenth century, such individuals were often designated as either being of mixed race or otherwise—for example, some were called “black” if brown or dark-skinned—in many surviving documents, both private and public. However, in using the terms black and African American, this book ultimately acknowledges that individuals of mixed race have more often been characterized by the dominant culture as being of African descent to the exclusion of other ancestry.

48. Morgan, Laboring Women, 2.

49. Ibid.

50. Paul J. Lammermeier, “The Urban Black Family of the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Black Family Structure in the Ohio Valley, 1850–1880,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35.3 (August 1973): 441–43; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage, 1956); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976); Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 5.

51. Speaking partly to this point is the controversy involving the notes Thomas Jefferson made in the margins of a 1792 report, calculating the profits he planned to make on the birth of slave children. It has been suggested that these notes demonstrate that he cared only about his own wealth, not the enslaved, Sally Hemings included. Some have argued no genuine warmth can ever exist between two unequal bodies, for to be enslaved was to be forced into a legal arrangement that excluded the possibility for expressive moments. Such beliefs were and continue to be so widespread that Jefferson’s “relationship” with Hemings is sometimes dismissed as fiction, a view that doubtlessly persists because Hemings was never freed. The experiences of certain freed women and children offer an opportunity to rethink this logic. Jennifer Schuessler, “Some Scholars Reject Dark Portrait of Jefferson,” New York Times, November 26, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/books/henry-wienceks-master-of-the-mountain-irks-historians.html?pagewanted=all&_r=o (accessed December 4, 2012); Annette Gordon-Reed, “Engaging Jefferson: Blacks and the Founding Father,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 57.1 (Jan. 2000): 178.

52. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), 11.

53. In the past decade, a growing body of literature has addressed the emotions of historical actors. Such research is a result of the scholarly community being fully attentive to its usage of the words emotion and emotional. Barbara H. Rosewein has argued that when emotions are referenced in historical writing, it is far too often an attempt to make one’s writing livelier. She points out that sociologists now claim that the origins “of emotion, its governing laws, and its consequences are an inseparable part of the social process,” something historians and others are only beginning to appreciate. While this study is attentive to the emotions of antebellum people of color and whites, it relies more on the words and actions of such individuals than on exploring emotions as a part of their socialization. What is at stake here is investigating how the words and behaviors of historical subjects permit us to learn more about certain freedpeople, and further, how their relations with white men can reveal more about black-white intimacies during the nineteenth century. This study, thus, assumes the emotional entanglements of such individuals were ever present, but the emotions themselves—be they anger, fear, etc.,—are not the primary focus. Barbara H. Rosewein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1. For more on historical approaches to examining emotions, see Susan Broomhall, Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Nicole Eustace, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

54. Some of slavery’s most invasive forms of violation indeed occurred when enslaved women willingly gave their bodies to ensure their safety and that of their children. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42.

55. Moreover, the favor the freedwomen and freed children under scrutiny received was not the kind associated with the “cardinal rule” of slaveholding, which is to say the sort that occurred when slaveholders indulged “well-behaved” enslaved men, women, and children. Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 203.

56. Evidently not only Southern white men did as much. In Southern port cities where free people of color acquired wealth, male slaveholders of African descent may have also done as much with women and children they owned. Though he may be more representative of an extreme case of Old World concubinage than an example of this particular phenomenon, Jean Montanee, an African-born New Orleans slaveholder and conjurer, also known as Dr. John, reportedly made at least fifteen enslaved women his “concubines.” These women “bore him children in great multitude.” His sexual partners also included a “white woman of the lowest class.” In addition, creators of imagined works have presented him as a mentor, lover, and rival of the voodou priestess Marie Laveau. Long, New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 137, 146.

57. Betty DeRamus and Emily West are among several researchers who have examined love, romantic and familial alike, involving enslaved or recently freed African Americans. One example of such love involves Lear Green, a black Baltimore woman who hid for eighteen hours in a sailor’s chest in 1857 to travel to Philadelphia in order to be with the black man she loved. There is also a case involving a white Mississippi physician who sought to leave his rural community to start a practice in New Orleans. In the process of moving, he hired out his bondsmen and bondswomen, requiring them to work for others in Baton Rouge for a fee that the physician himself received. His actions upset one enslaved man who understood that being hired out could destabilize the black family. This man did not want to be separated from his wife and told the agent orchestrating his master’s move as much. In fact, the enslaved man said he would rather die than be separated, even for a short period. Even though the slave was eventually sent on to Baton Rouge, he was permitted to remain with his wife for an additional six months. Betty DeRamus, Forbidden Fruit: Loves Stories from the Underground Railroad (New York: Atria Books, 2005), 29–35; Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco, CA), May 10, 1873, Issue 29, col. E; Cleveland Morning Daily Herald (Cleveland, OH), May 3, 1873, Issue 106, col. G; Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Johnson, Soul by Soul, 34–35.

58. However, burdened by societal expectations, white women were condemned for engaging in sex with black men, whose masculinity was so threatening to white men, and such black-white unions were often surrounded by shame and misfortune. Speaking to this point, as Emily West has written, as an infant, John C. Brown, a former slave from South Carolina, was found on a railroad track in “nice baby clothes,” abandoned by his white mother. His father was reportedly enslaved on his white master’s plantation. However, some white women, especially when wealth was involved, entered into marriage with men of African descent. For example, one Virginia white woman married a wealthy man whose mother was of mixed race and father was of French descent. Her husband had been sent to Paris to be educated. Many knew of his racial identity, but “on account of his millions and his father, nothing was said.”

Homosexual unions across the color line, intimate and otherwise, also existed in the antebellum South, though limited evidence of them survives. One unfortunate case is strongly hinted at in the 1861 memoir of Harriet Jacobs, the pen name of Linda Brent, an enslaved woman. Jacobs recalled how Luke, a slave, was required to wait on a bedridden young white man, sometimes wearing only a shirt. Sometimes chained to a bed, Luke was forced to “submit” to his master’s orders, which, according to Jacobs, were “too filthy to be repeated.” West, Chains of Love, 120–26. See also chapter 7 of Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs; Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 288–89; Potter, Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, 155.

59. DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor and Reginald H. Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts: Three African American Womens Oral Slave Narratives (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 3; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 164.

60. That amount in today’s currency is $5.5 million, http://futureboy.us/fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity=200000&currency=dollars&fromYear=1856 (accessed Sept. 20, 2012); Frances Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter” (Master’s thesis, University of Alabama, 1940), 8–10, 108–9; Deposition of S. D. Cabaniss, MSS 252, Box Number 251.056, Folder 04, Septimus Douglas Cabaniss Papers, Special Collections, Stanley Hoole Library, University of Alabama (hereafter Cabaniss Papers).

1 / Probing a Planter’s Hidden Life

1. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 31.

2. The occasion for this story was a portrait commissioned in Ballard’s honor following his large donation to a Natchez orphanage. “Colonel R. C. Ballard,” Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette (Natchez, MS), December 21, 1848, Issue 54, Col. D; John Wesley Monette, Observations on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of Natchez, and of the South-west (Louisville: Prentice and Weissinger, 1842).

3. 1860 U.S. Federal Census and New Orleans, Louisiana, Slave Manifests, 1807–60, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 12, 2013).

4. Bacon Tait to Ballard, August 16, 1839, Folder 28, Ballard Papers.

5. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 19.

6. While domestic slave traders have been considered unfavorably in Southern society, abolitionists’ earliest antislavery efforts in the late 1830s publicized human cruelty, including rape and maiming at the hands of slaveholders on plantations, not by traders inside the slave market. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 24–25, 54–55, 217; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 3.

7. A letter Ballard received from Henry Clark, a Virginian, strongly hints at Fletcher’s racial politics. Henry Clark to Ballard, October 10, 1838, Folder 18, Ballard Papers; Calvin Fletcher to Ballard, January 28, 1839, Folder 26, Ballard Papers; David Henry Shaffer, The Cincinnati, Covington, Newport and Fulton Directory for 1840 (Cincinnati: J. B. & R. P. Donogh, 1839), 181; Gayle Thornbrough and Dorothy L. Riker, eds., Diary and Letters of Calvin Fletcher, Vol. I (1838–1843) (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Historical Society, 1973), 210. See also a clipping of Fletcher’s obituary in an unidentified newspaper, which was placed in a November 17, 1860, diary entry by his cousin Calvin Fletcher who lived in Indianapolis. Filson Historical Society, Special Collections. Arnold Lloyd and Herbert G. Wood eds., Quaker Social History, 1669–1738 (London: Longmans, Green, 1950); William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); J. William Frost and John M. Moore, Seeking the Light: Essays in Quaker History in Honor of Edwin B. Bronner (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications; Haverford, PA: Friends Historical Association, 1986); and Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 16–48.

8. Also: “A list of balances due James Ballard & Company, 1 Jany [sic] 1838,” Folder 425a, and Folders 406 and 430 for business documents, Ballard Papers.

9. Thornbrough and Riker, Diary and Letters of Calvin Fletcher, 210.

10. The Indianapolis Fletcher described his cousin as being “a man of no pride who lives in a very ordinary house” and “far below his means.” Ibid.

11. Bernie D. Jones, Fathers of Conscience: Mixed Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South (Studies in the Legal History of the South) (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

12. Jones, Fathers of Conscience, 26–27.

13. Amrita Myers, “Public Rhetoric, Private Realities: Julia Chinn, Richard Johnson, and Debates over Interracial Sex in Antebellum America” (Paper presented at the 6th Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora [ASWAD], Pittsburgh, PA, November 3–6, 2011); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 167–98; Cheryl Crowell, Images of America: New Richmond (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2012), 1, 8–9, 43; Charles S. Sydnor, “The Free Negro in Mississippi before the Civil War,” American Historical Review 32.4 (July 1927): 767–77; Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 57; Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Womans World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 215–17; Sterling Lecater Bland Jr., ed., African American Slave Narratives, An Anthology, vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 310; Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 113.

14. Edmund Morgan, Oscar Handlin, Theodore Allen, Lerone Bennett, Nikhil Pal Singh, Kathleen M. Brown, and Claire Robertson are among the scholars who have examined race and gender as social constructions. Two important works that address these subjects are David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Brooklyn: Verso, 1991); and Morgan, Laboring Women.

15. Morgan, Laboring Women, 191–95.

16. Ibid.

17. The first, passed in Maryland in 1661, prevented marriage between white women and enslaved people of color. After the American Revolution, a growing number of states passed miscegenation laws. Even after passage of the Fourteenth amendment, which theoretically gave African Americans “equal protection of the laws,” many states that had repealed antimiscegenation laws reenacted them during the late nineteenth century. As late as 1944, thirty states had laws against interracial marriage, with the ban most often targeting black-white unions. Twelve southern states had miscegenation laws until 1967. Many of those laws remained on the books after 1967, although federal laws prohibited their enforcement. In 2007 interracial unions still accounted for just one percent of white marriages, 5 percent of African American marriages, but 14 percent of Asian marriages in the United States. These numbers reflect underreporting just has it had during the antebellum period because many consider interracial unions taboo. For more, see Thomas P. Monahan, “An Overview of Statistics on Interracial Marriage in the United States with Data on Its Extent from 1963–1970,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 38.2 (May 1976): 223–31; Irving G. Tragen, “Statutory Prohibitions against Interracial Marriage,” California Law Review 32.3 (September 1944): 270; Roland G. Fryer Jr., “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Trends in Interracial Marriages over the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21.2 (Spring 2007): 72–73.

18. Jeanne Boydston, Home & Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 20.

19. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 46–51.

20. For example, throughout the seventeenth century free white men outnumbered free white women in Jamestown, the first settlement in the United States, by three or four to one. Not until the end of the seventeenth century did these numbers begin to even out. As late as 1790 the sex ratio for free white Virginian men to women was 105.6 to 100, or 227,051 to 215,046. Herbert Moller, “Sex Composition and Correlated Culture Patterns of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 2.2 (April 1945): 128. For more on sex ratios in early America, see Edmund Morgan, “The Puritans and Sex,” New England Quarterly 15.4 (December 1942): 591–607; and D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters.

21. Philip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World,” in Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 42–84; Joshua Rothman, “James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia,” in Lewis and Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, 96–97; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

22. Building on the work of the South African sociologist Pierre van den Berghe, George Fredrickson borrowed the term Herrenvolk to describe America’s “peculiar” racism. For more, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, [1955] 1966).

23. Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 3. For more on slavery as an economic enterprise, see Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

24. Well into the nineteenth century, this kind of imagery generally characterized mixed-race women. Such characterizations figured into how such women were objectified in Brazilian urban music. “J am a vain mulata/ Beautiful, coquettish, adorable/ How many white women are not!,” went one popular song that revealed the gendered undercurrents surrounding mixed-race women in postemancipation societies. Martha Abrue, translated from the Portuguese by Amy Chazkel and Junia Claudia Zaidan, “Mulatas, Crioulos, and Morenas: Racial Hierarchy, Gender Relations, and National Identity in Postabolition Popular Song (Southeastern Brazil, 1890–1920),” in Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 272; Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determinism in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 87.1 (June 2000): 18; David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of the Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35.

25. Hilary McD. Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999), 33.

26. The literature does not make clear exactly when and how such unions took place. Placee arrangements had origins in early American quadroon balls. Although such arrangements continued well into the 1850s, public toleration of the practice waned with the growing restrictions on people of color in the 1830s following the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion. Stephanie Li, “Resistance, Silence, and Placees: Charles Bon’s Octoroon Mistress and Louisa Picquet,” American Literature 79.1 (March 2007): 87.

27. Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex and the Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 212.

28. Bynum, Unruly Women, 19.

29. Ibid., 6–9.

30. “fancy, n. and adj.” OED Online, September 2012 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 1993, 1997), www.oed.com/view/Entry/68025?redirectedFrom=fancy+girl& (accessed October 08, 2012).

31. The view of women of color as being uninhibited sexually was a “ubiquitous part of Europe’s critique of and encounter with Africa.” In 1727 one surveyor’s initial visit to the Gold Coast demonstrates this point. During his first view of the landscape, he was intrigued by the African women he saw, calling them “hot constitution’d Ladies.” Morgan, Laboring Women, 44–45.

32. Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky, 149.

33. Miles, Ties That Bind, 175.

34. Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, 17 5–76.

35. Here I am building on the ideas of the poststructuralist philosopher Judith Butler who has argued that being “female” is not a biological fact but rather a cultural performance. Though she has not fully probed the racial implications of such a position, Butler’s thoughts have special resonance with reference to the fancy girl, a term utilized to mark a particular mixed race being presumed to be in a “female” body, one intended for exploitation. For more, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Feminism and the Subversion of Identity) (New York: Routledge, 1990). Among the works addressing white men’s fantasies of female slaves are Monique Guillory, “Some Enchanted Evening on the Auction Block: The Cultural Legacy of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls” (PhD diss., New York University, 1999); and Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men.’”

36. John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 400.

37. The “tragic mulatta/mulatto” as a cultural character can be traced to the mixed-race American actress and poet Adah Isaac Menken, who was born outside New Orleans in 1835. Inspired by a British muse “immortalized” in the works of Benjamin Disraeli and Honore de Balzac, among others, Menken appropriated this “marketable identity” on a New Orleans stage in 1857. Since then, the “tragic mulatto” as a symbolic figure has entered the public imagination through creative works. Whether male or female, such a figure manifests as suffering owing to his or her being a person of mixed race. An example is the character evoked in “Cross,” a Langston Hughes poem: “My old mans a white old man/And my old mothers black/If ever I cursed my white old man/1 take my curses back/If ever I cursed my black old mother/And wish she were in hell/I am sorry for that evil wish/And now I wish her well/My old man died in a big fine house/My old mother died in a shack/I wonder where I’m gonna die/ Being neither white or black?” Arthur P. Davis, “The Tragic Mulatto Theme in Six Works of Langston Hughes,” Phylon 9 (1940–56), 16.2 (2nd Qtr. 1955): 196–97; and Kimberly Snyder Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 1–6.

38. Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South, 251.

39. Ibid.

40. James A. Ramage, Rebel Raider: The Life of General John Hunt Morgan (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 33.

41. Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky, 159.

42. Orville Hickman Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, vol. 1, 1850–1864 (1861: Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 2007), 139.

43. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 46.

44. Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South, 50.

45. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men,’” 1621; Adrienne Davis, “Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery,” in Sharon Harley, ed., Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 117.

46. Alexandria (VA) Gazette, August, 20, 1833. See two contracts for partnership in the slave trade between Ballard, Franklin, and Armfield dated 1833 and 1835, Folder 421, Ballard Papers; Deyle, Carry Me Back, 12; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 12, 16, 21; Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men,’” 1628.

47. Alexandria (VA) Gazette, December 3, 1832.

48. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 100.

49. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men,’” 1628; Deyle, Carry Me Back, 100.

50. James Franklin to Ballard, March 27, 1832, Folder 5, Ballard Papers.

51. Other domestic slave traders wrote “fancy” larger than other words in their letters to indicate their possession of a fair-skinned enslaved woman or girl who could be potentially marketed as a fancy girl. See Philip Thomas to William Finney, July 26, 1859, William A. J. Finney Papers, Duke University.

52. Isaac Franklin to Ballard, September 27, 1834, Ballard Papers.

53. Walter Johnson has addressed how designations of a bondsperson’s color were the slave trader’s way of delineating their complexion and racial lineage. Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” 16–17; Stephenson, Isaac Franklin, 167–78; and Nell Irvin Painter, “Thinking about the Languages of Money and Race: A Response to Michael O’Malley, ‘Specie and Species,’” American Historical Review 99.2 (April 1994): 398.

54. R.C. Ballard and Co. Expence [sic] Book, 1831, Box 11, Folder 425, Ballard Papers.

55. While his grave marker indicates that he was born in 1800, his date of birth is inconsistent in public records. He may have been born as early as 1798 and as late as 1803 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His parents were Benjamin Ballard and Ann Heslop. The spelling of his mother’s maiden name is also inconsistent in public records. Ballard had at least three siblings, two brothers and a sister. He would father twin daughters in 1847, one of which was named Ann. See 1850 U.S. Federal Census and 1860 U.S Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed November 21, 2006); Virginia Land, Marriage and Probate Records, 1690–1850, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 26, 2013); Virginia, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1607–1809, www.ancestry.com; Lyman Chalkley, Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in Virginia, 1745–1800 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1965); William Armstrong Crozier, ed., Virginia County Records—Spotsylvania County Records, 1721–1800 (New York: Fox, Duffield & Co., 1905), www.ancestry.com (accessed June 24, 2013); U.S. Federal Census Reconstructed Records, 1660–1820, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 24, 2013); U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560–1900, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 24, 2013). Also, again see “A list of balances due James Ballard & Company, 1 Jany [sic] 1838,” Folder 425a and Folders 406 and 430, Ballard Papers; 1850 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 15, 2013). Also see baptismal record for Warwickshire County, England, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 15, 2013).

Marie Tyler McGraw, At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia, and Its People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 35–37.

56. Ibid.

57. Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 7; McGraw, At the Falls, 108–9.

58. William G. Hewes to Ballard, November 27, 1832, Folder 8, Ballard Papers.

59. Creecy Smith to Ballard, March 7, 1838, Folder 22, Ballard Papers; and N. J. Duke to Ballard, March 17, 1838, Folder 22, Ballard Papers.

60. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 24–25.

61. Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 157.

62. Catherine Prince to Ballard, May 14, 1839, Folder 27, Ballard Papers.

63. Such a transition reduced some of the uncertainty they had earlier faced, including rising restrictions on interregional slave trading in the lower South. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 100; Stephenson, Isaac Franklin, 76.

64. For his holdings, see certificates of ownership for the Big Black and Karnac plantations in Warren County, Mississippi, and the certificate of release for the Laurel Hill plantation, also in Warren. See Rice C. Ballard Papers, Natchez Small Manuscript Collection, Box 2E549, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin. See account books for six plantations in Folder 396, Ballard Papers. Finally, a representative sample of letters in his business correspondence related to his cotton interests may be found in Folder 61, Box 2; Folder 110, Box 3; Folder 113, Box 3; Folder 401, Box 11, and “Collection Overview,” Ballard Papers; 1850 U.S. Federal Census; 1860 U.S. Federal Census.

65. Ballard hired Clay to advise him on legal matters concerning some of his slave sales in Mississippi. Ballard would later oppose Clay in a lawsuit. The Supreme Court decided in favor of Clay and ordered Ballard to pay him $4,000. Henry Clay to Ballard, June 23, 1841, Folder 42, Ballard Papers; Henry Clay to Ballard, July 4, 1844, Folder 75, Ballard Papers; John Anthony Quitman to Ballard, February 1, 1851, Folder 165, Ballard Papers; A. G. Nalle to Ballard, February 2, 1852, Folder 173, Ballard Papers.

66. Bacon Tait to Ballard, May 1, 1838, Folder 24, Ballard Papers.

67. Bacon Tait to Ballard, November 25, 1838, Folder 25, Ballard Papers.

68. Ann Redd, Ballard’s niece who was attending a boarding school for which Ballard paid the fees, wrote him a letter confirming as much when she asked Ballard to send a hello to Franklin and “Mrs. Franklin.” The circumstances under which he became a quasi-guardian of this child are unclear. Ann Redd to Ballard, September 24, 1839, Folder 28, Ballard Papers. See also Redd to Ballard, May 14, 1839, Folder 27, Ballard Papers.

69. Stephenson, Isaac Franklin, 18.

70. Ibid., 19.

71. Ibid., 21.

72. Ibid., 21.

73. U.S. 1850 Census (accessed June 11, 2013); Jesse Cage to William Cotton, August 27, 1839, Folder 28, Ballard Papers; “Slave Records 1719–1820,” www.ancestry.com (accessed June 18, 2014).

74. Jesse Cage to William Cotton, August 27, 1839, Folder 28, Ballard Papers.

75. Stephenson, Isaac Franklin, 19.

76. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2006), 23, 25.

77. 1860 U.S. Federal Census.

78. Thomas C. Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 88.

79. Virginia to Ballard, May 6, 1853, Folder 192, Ballard Papers. For more, see Philip Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White: Sentiment and the Slave Market Revolution,” New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Edward T. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 222–23; William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 213–16.

80. Virginia to Ballard, May 6, 1853, Folder 192, Ballard Papers.

81. Ibid.

82. C. M. Rutherford to Ballard, August 8, 1853, Folder 196, Ballard Papers.

83. Ibid.

84. Maria may have been a relative of Avenia White as a black woman named “Maria White” is listed on one of Ballard’s 1838 slave ledgers. If not, she may be a woman of “yellow complexion” that Ballard purchased in Natchez in 1840; 1850 U.S. Federal Census and 1841 Adams County, Natchez and Washington, Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 14, 2014); J. M. Duffield to Ballard, May 29, 1848, Folder 127, Ballard Papers; Magnolia Journal 1838–1840, vol. 11, Folder 429; Receipt, Folder 351, Ballard Papers.

85. J. M. Duffield to Ballard, May 29, 1848, Folder 127, Ballard Papers.

86. Ibid.

87. James was the cousin of the African American physician Edward C. Mazique. Florence Ridion, A Black Physicians Struggle for Equal Rights, Edward C. Mazique (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 33.

88. Ibid., 33–34.

89. Ibid., 34.

90. Ibid.

91. Schafer, Becoming Free, 25.

92. Potter, Hairdressers Experience in High Life, 176.

93. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 3, 6, 186–202.

94. In today’s currency, their personal holdings range from approximately $138,711.96 to $646,736.56. See 1860 U.S. Federal Census; Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 222–26. Also see http://futureboy.us/fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity=50000&currency=dollars&fromYear=1860; and http://futureboy.us/fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity=25300&currency=dollars&fromYear=1860 (accessed June 20, 2014).

95. To be clear, any sighting of power in the African Americans in question here requires us to never overemphasize their influence. Speaking to this point, Ann Douglas has studied the influence that Victorian Era clergy and middle-class female writers had on American readers’ tastes. As Douglas has written, to state that these individuals had “power” over the readers and listeners of one of the world’s most influential industrializing societies would be overstating their impact. It is more accurate to state that they had a hand in making a leisure activity like reading a counterpoint to an increasingly busy society. While the influence of the antebellum black women in question was similarly situated, any guess on our part is informed speculation. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 9–10. For more, see Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37.1 (Fall 2003): 113–24, Special Issue.

96. Elizabeth H. Pleck, “The Two-Parent Household: Black Family Structure in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston,” Journal of Social History 6.1 (Fall 1972): 17.

97. See petition in Folder 411, Ballard Papers.

98. Ballard was a member of the Whig party, possibly explaining his initial ties to the Kentucky politician and Whig leader Henry Clay. By midcentury ideology was the center of the nation’s political system. Economic differences between the parties were significant, subtle, and varied by region. As sectional conflict escalated, efforts to find agreement on the issue of territorial expansion and slavery resulted in, among other things, Clay and Stephen Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, drafting the Compromise of 1850, which required Northerners to participate in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. The record offers no answers about the fugitives’ presence in Ballard’s home. If they arrived after passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the Ballards were legally required to aid in their return. Notably, a letter from Joseph Alsop, the Virginia farmer who emerges as a confidant of Ballard’s allows us to see that even Ballard’s contemporaries were not always sure of his true political stance. In this letter Alsop stated, “What [do] you think of Mr. Polk and his Mexican war? Has it not cooled your Democracy a little?” Alsop was almost certainly speaking about U.S. President James Polk’s high-handed role in the Mexican-American War. Polk, who served from 1845 to 1849, was a prominent Democrat. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 80. For more, see Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); Eric Foner, Free Soil; Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Joseph Alsop to Ballard, August 31, 1848, Folder131, Rice Ballard Papers.

99. Delia to Ballard, October 22, 1854, Folder 217, Ballard Papers.

100. Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 4.

101. Joseph Alsop to Ballard, January 30, 1838, Folder 25, Ballard Papers.

102. Joseph F. Pierce to Ballard, October 7, 1838, Folder 25, Ballard Papers.

103. Bacon Tait to Ballard, November 1838, Folder 25, Ballard Papers.

104. Bacon Tait to Ballard, August 16, 1839, Folder 28, Ballard Papers.

105. Samuel Alsop to Ballard, September 20, 1839, Folder 24, Ballard Papers.

106. 1850 and 1860 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 12, 2013).

107. Joseph Alsop to Ballard, May 8, 1840, Folder 34, Ballard Papers.

108. U.S. City Directories, 1821–1989 (South Jordan, UT: Genealogy Research Associates, 2005); New Orleans Passenger List Quarterly Abstracts, 1820–1875, ancestry, com (both accessed June 12, 2013).

109. W. R. Glover to Ballard, March 24, 1840, Folder 32, Ballard Papers.

110. Ibid.

111. Receipt for room and board, August, 1840, Folder 351, Ballard Papers.

112. 1870 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 12, 2013).

113. Joseph Alsop to Ballard, May 12, 1841, Folder 41, Ballard Papers.

2 / The Wife and the “Old Lady” Speak

1. Kentucky Death Records, 1852–1953, www.ancestry.com (accessed October 23, 2012). See also 1850 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 12, 2013).

2. John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 51.

3. Having relatives who were early settlers of a territory was a shared attribute with her husband. Ballard’s original attraction to Kentucky was possibly also due in part to the presence of his cousin Bland Ballard, a Revolutionary War sergeant, who was among the Virginians relocating to Kentucky in the late 1780s. Ballard County and the city of Blandville, both in Kentucky, were named in honor of this relative. However, few documents from Ballard’s kin survive in his papers, suggesting possibly strained relations in his birth family. Kentucky Land Grants, 1782–1924; and U.S. Sons of the American Revolution Membership Applications, 1889–1970, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 14, 2014).

4. Louise’s mother first married Armstrong Ellis in 1811. The circumstances under which they parted are unclear. Ellis owned 82 acres in Yazoo County, Mississippi, in 1840, the year Louise married Ballard. Jordon Dodd, Early American Marriages: Mississippi to 1823 (Bountiful, UT: Precision Indexing, 1991); and Marriages to 1825, www.ancestry.com (accessed July 28, 2013); U.S. General Land Office Records, 1796–1907, www.ancestry.com (accessed July 28, 2013).

5. Mississippi State Gazette (Natchez), January 8, 1820; February 2, 1820; April 29, 1820.

6. See advertisement in Mississippi State Gazette, February 2, 1820.

7. 1860 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed July 28, 2013).

8. Her husband secured the house she lived in prior to their 1840 marriage. Based on the contents of a letter Louise and an unidentified man, probably a realtor, sent Ballard in 1848, the Ballards were within eight years looking to rent temporary lodgings while building a bigger home. On at least one occasion, Louise complained about living far from the center of town. Louise Ballard to Ballard, November 22, 1847, Folder 120; Louise Ballard to Ballard, February 17, 1848, Folder 123; Adams to Ballard, April 1, 1848, Folder 125, Ballard Papers; 1850 U.S. Federal Census and 1860 Census.

9. See Kentucky Land Grants, 1782–1924, and U.S. Sons of the American Revolution Membership Applications, 1889–1970, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 14, 2014).

10. Kleber, Encyclopedia of Louisville, xvi.

11. Lowell Harrison and James C. Klotter, A New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 103.

12. Ibid.

13. Kleber, Encyclopedia of Louisville, 731.

14. Ibid., 105.

15. Ibid.

16. Receipt from Henderson and Gaines, New Orleans, January 9, 1841, Folder 352, Ballard Papers.

17. Receipt from Darwin Wordlief Co., New Orleans, May, 1841, Folder 352, Ballard Papers.

18. Receipt for wagon, February 24, 1841, Folder 352, Ballard Papers.

19. Receipt for Kentucky toll road, October 1, 1841, Folder 352, Ballard Papers.

20. The Daily Picayune (New Orleans), April 1840, 3.

21. A representative sample of business correspondence for these properties may be found in Folder 61, Box 2; Folder 110, Box 3; Folder 113, Box 3; Folder 401, Box 11, Ballard Papers. Also see, “Collection Overview,” Ballard Papers.

22. 1860 U.S. Federal Census at www.ancestry.com (accessed June 13, 2013).

23. Her name does not appear in the Louisiana property census entry. On the Arkansas property, the census taker wrote her husband’s name and her name, as well as that of her firstborn, but used quotation marks for her younger children, adding, “from best information cou[n]ted.” These words suggest the census taker received the information secondhand, perhaps from a plantation manager, not Ballard and certainly not Louise, 1860 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 13, 2013).

24. 1850 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 12, 2013).

25. Louise Ballard to Ballard, November 18, 1847, Folder 120, Ballard Papers.

26. Louise’s fears were characteristic of her day. At this time child mortality rates, even for white Americans of means, remained high—one in ten children died—which may have been a factor in the delay in giving her children names. Grateful to see healthy offspring, wealthy whites invested themselves in every aspect of their children’s lives even as moralists warned against indulging the young. Jacques Gelis, “The Child: From Anonymity to Individuality” in Roger Chartier, ed., A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1989), 309, 320; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 207; Steven M. Stowe, Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 211; Louise Ballard to Ballard, November 18, 1847, Folder 120, Ballard Papers.

27. Louise Ballard to Ballard, November 18, 1847, Folder 120, Ballard Papers.

28. Ibid.

29. Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 89.

30. Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 86.

31. Ibid., 87.

32. Ibid.

33. Louise Ballard to Ballard, November 22, 1847, Folder 120, Ballard Papers.

34. Lucile Tucker to R.C. Ballard, June 25, 1847, Folder 113, Ballard Papers.

35. Ballard had apparently left Tucker in the care of a man named R. W. Hanson, who had left for Mexico. Georgia, like other slave states, required enslaved people working independently to have guardians. The 1830 U.S. Census lists a Reubin Hanson in Coweta County, Georgia. The 1840 census lists a Reubin Hanson in Carroll County, Georgia. The 1850 census lists a Robert Hanson in Morgan County, Georgia. 1830, 1840, and 1850 U.S Census; Lucile Tucker to R. C. Ballard, June 25, 1847, Folder 113, Ballard Papers.

36. 1870 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 26, 2013).

37. Frank S. Jones, History of Decatur County, Georgia (Spartanburg: Reprint Company, 1996), 210.

38. Commercial sex was readily available in port cities and river communities throughout the United States in the nineteenth century, even amid midcentury moral reform campaigns. Beginning in the 1820s, it was especially visible in New York City, where black- and white-run establishments could be found even as many city residents frowned on interracial sex. In the South, enslaved women were generally not independent contractors when employed as prostitutes. One account from a former bondsman, Henry Bibb, illustrates this point: he stated that a Louisville slave trader forced his wife into prostitution. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: The Author, 1849), 98–99.

While the institution of slavery was integral to the South’s economy and fiercely defended, sex work was regarded as a carnal and intolerable profession in the religious climate of the antebellum period. Northern white ministers and abolitionists condemned slaveholders who prostituted enslaved women. Reverend Hiram Mattison, a white Methodist minister and abolitionist in Buffalo, deplored “the moral atmosphere [of the South] in which such monsters can live and breathe.” Mattison was obviously aware of the enslaved women and girls who were put to work in brothels in Southern port cities. Philo Tower, another abolitionist, once reported seeing a slave broker keep “whole barracoons of beautiful slave women” for use by “gentlemen” as “sleeping companions.”

As the century matured, the sex trade in the lower South blossomed. In the years surrounding the Civil War, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis experienced an increase in prostitution. After the war, Chattanooga, in particular, witnessed the arrival of “sporting” white women eager to cater to railroad workers.

During the postbellum period, iron ore deposits in Birmingham, Alabama, and newly built rail lines drew wealthy men desiring to open businesses and poor ones looking for work. Many of them were doubtless patrons of Louise Wooster, a local madam whose “great love” was John Wilkes Booth, the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

The most well known red light district in the nation was inarguably New Orleans’s Storyville, whose existence between 1898 and 1917 continues to fascinate writers and readers alike. The city’s origins as a site for prostitution can be traced to the French kings Louis XIV and Louis XV, who were said to have transported to Louisiana, their new colony, hundreds of “disreputable” women. By the first decade of the twentieth century, arriving single men were handed tiny guidebooks directing them to local prostitutes. Both in and outside New Orleans, however, lax or nonenforcement or the outright legalization of prostitution during the postbellum years created favorable conditions that allowed madams to earn enough money to purchase homes until 1920, when the “Golden Age of the Brothel in America,” as researchers have called it, ended. DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor and Reginald H. Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 84; Philo Tower, Slavery Unmasked (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 316; Beckles, Centering Woman, 31; Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York, 1849), 98–99, 112–16; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 29–30, 41–4; J. Winston Coleman, Belle Breezing: A Famous Lexington Bawd (Lexington, KY: Winburn Press, 1966, 1980), 8–9, 112–20; James L. Baggett, The Autobiography of a Magdalen (1911; Birmingham: Birmingham Public Library Press, 2005), 11–12; Ellin Sterne, “Prostitution in Birmingham, Alabama, 1890–1925” (MA thesis, Samford University, Birmingham, 1977); A1 Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974), ix, 5, 135.

39. Virginia to Ballard, May 6, 1853, Folder 192, Ballard Papers.

40. Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White,” 222.

41. Ibid., 212.

42. Louise Ballard to Ballard, December 5, 1847, Folder 120, Ballard Papers.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Financial concerns related to his plantations had overwhelmed Franklin, who considered selling his home in Tennessee. As late as 1856, Ballard and Armfield were still discussing how to settle receipts related to their slave trading. Outstanding debts related to the firm did not make the liquidation an easy matter. The 1837 panic, which did not show signs of easing until the mid-1840S, doubtless had much to do with Armfield’s and Ballard’s worries. John Armfield to Ballard, December 9, 1847, Folder 121, Ballard Papers; John Armfield to Ballard, January 4, 1856, Folder 238, Ballard Papers; Stephenson, Isaac Franklin, 106, 116, 293.

46. This letter writer addressed Ballard as “Col” (Colonel). Beginning in the 1840s, a great deal of the correspondence he received addressed him in this manner. This title suggests that many of Mississippi’s adult white male population was involved in the state militia, whose chief purposes were to put down slave revolts or insurrections. Landowners like Ballard were fitting officers. But also indicating the light-hearted attitudes some took regarding such titles is an 1841 letter in Ballard’s papers addressed to “Col John Armfield of the Bloody 4th Regiment of Mississippi Militia and the Hill at Natchez.” C.A. Moore to Ballard, May 12, 1847, Folder 111; Armfield to Ballard, May 25, 1841, Folder 41.

47. Louise Ballard to Ballard, December 11, 1848, Folder 135, Ballard Papers.

48. The Ballards paid a wage to at least one black servant in their Louisville home, which may not have been unusual given that slavery was not as pervasive in Kentucky as it was in the lower South. Perhaps Delia was the woman in question.

49. Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 89.

50. Woodson, ed., The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters, 371.

51. Delphine was put on trial in an attempt to prove that she did not deserve to be free. Witnesses characterized her as a woman who frequented one apothecary so often that men patronizing this shop were well acquainted with her. Some of the male patrons teased her, and her resistance via threats and even laughter proved such an affront that the proprietor threatened to report her behavior to local authorities. Her master reminded the proprietor of his patrons’ participation her ordeal. This story was retold in court. Delphine lost the case. Schafer, Becoming Free, 67–68.

52. Eliza Potter, the hairdresser of mixed race who observed up close the lives of wealthy antebellum white Americans, recalls a situation in which a woman was distanced from others for this very reason. Potter, Hairdressers Experience in High Life, 184.

53. Ibid., 121.

54. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 339.

55. Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries, ed. C. Vann Woodward and Elizabeth Muhlenfeld (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnufs Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

56. Chesnut and Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnufs Civil War, 15; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 348–49.

57. Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 92.

58. Ibid., 3.

59. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 28.

60. Ibid.

61. Louise Ballard to Ballard, February 17, 1848, Folder 123, Ballard Papers.

62. J. T. F. Cox to Ballard, April 14, 1847, Folder 110, Ballard Papers.

63. A letter confirms that Ballard had been seeking china. He did so via a commission merchant, men who served as both creditors and transporters of a planter’s cotton. Because fluctuations in the weather and the marketplace could lead to a good or bad year, men like Ballard relied on such merchants to purchase household luxuries and food staples on credit when money was not plentiful. A. G. Nalle to Ballard, May 25, 1847, Folder 111, Ballard Papers.

64. Ibid.

65. List of Purchases for the Year 1832, Box 11, Folder 420, Ballard Papers.

66. For an example of how slave dealers listed children in this manner, see Stephenson, Isaac Franklin, 166–67.

67. Expence [sic] Book, January 23, 1833, Box 11, Folder 425, Ballard Papers.

68. Ballard paid $237 for Avenia White, $425 for Susan Johnson, and $425 for Preston. The purchase price for Avenia was curiously low, suggesting Nathaniel White gave Ballard a deal that was recouped, perhaps, on the purchase price of other slaves. List of Purchases for the Year 1832, Box 11, Folder 420, Ballard Papers.

69. R. C. Ballard and Co. Expence Book, 1831, Box 11, Folder 425, Ballard Papers.

70. Isaac Franklin to Ballard, September 27, 1834, Folder, 15, Ballard Papers.

71. Stephenson, Isaac Franklin, 35–36, 44; and Shipment record, Franklin and Ballard Company, Box 11, Folder 421, Ballard Papers.

72. Such a transition from slave trader to planter was not typical, nor was it was unusual, for the 1830s witnessed a wave of land speculation unseen since the years immediately following the War of 1812. Pers. comm., Harold D. Woodman, July 5, 2010. For more on cotton production, see Harold D. Woodmans King Cotton & His Retainers: Financing & Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968).

73. This observation was made in 1901 by Felix Houston Hadsell, a Natchez resident. See Fork of the Roads: A Major Southwest Hub of Americas Domestic Slave Trade (Natchez, MS: Friends of the Fork of the Roads Society). 7. See also the public history exhibit on Fork of the Roads Site at Washington Natchez Trace (now D’Evereaux) and Old Courthouse Roads (now Liberty and St. Catherine Streets, one mile east of downtown Natchez).

74. Fork of the Roads, 6.

75. Coffin, Reminiscences, 519–520.

76. Sterling Lecater Bland Jr., ed., African American Slave Narratives, An Anthology, vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 310.

77. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 11–13.

78. Ibid., 2; Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 245.

79. Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Tracy E. K’Meyer, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, KY, 1945–1990 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).

80. Chesnut, The Private Mary Chestnut, 42.

81. For more on the geographic distribution of urban African Americans in the North during the nineteenth century, see Henry Louis Taylor Jr., “City Building, Public Policy, the Rise of the Industrial City, and Black Ghetto-Slum Formation in Cincinnati, 1850–1940,” in Taylor, ed., Race and the City; David Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Taylor and Dula, “Black Residential Experience,” in Taylor, ed., Race and the City, 102–19.

82. Gerber, Black Ohio, 100–104; Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 186; Taylor, and Dula, “Black Residential Experience,”, 100, 115.

83. Taylor and Dula, “Black Residential Experience,” 104.

84. Gerber, Black Ohio, 100–102; Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 196.

85. In White’s September 13, 1838, letter to Ballard, she describes having paid rent and board to Bruster, establishing that she and Susan and their four children lived in this house. Avenia White to Ballard, September 13, 1838, Folder 24, Ballard Papers.

86. The 1840 U.S. Federal Census spells Bruster’s name “Brewster.” Bruster, who was born in Virginia, may have been married to Thomas Brewster, an African American barber and hairdresser in Cincinnati. 1840 U.S. Federal Census; David Henry Shaffer, The Cincinnati, Covington, Newport and Fulton Directory for 1840 (Cincinnati: J. B. & R. P. Donogh, 1839), 468; Cincinnati Directory Advertiser for the Years 1836–7 (Cincinnati: J. H. Woodruff, 1836), 25.

87. This is confirmed in a May 1838 letter that Bruster wrote Ballard in Natchez. In the letter she mentioned that when they first met in New Orleans, he said he wished to make a friend of her. He almost certainly said as much because he wanted the women and children to reside in her home. Frances M. Bruster to Ballard, May 14, 1838, Folder 24, Ballard Papers.

88. Avenia White to Ballard, September 13, 1838, Folder 24, Ballard Papers.

89. Ballard may have wanted to move them sooner, but he was stricken with yellow fever in early 1838. Joseph Alsop to Ballard, January 30, 1838, Folder 20, Ballard Papers.

90. The low-water season on the Ohio typically began in late June and continued through late September, although the “fall rise” was dependent on arrival of heavy rains, which varied from year to year. Even then, unrestricted movement lasted just a few weeks because of either low water or ice between late November and early January. Five to six feet of water was necessary if a steamboat captain wanted to carry a full load. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 219–23, 251, 255.

91. Cincinnati Republican, September 19, 1838.

92. Taylor and Dula, “Black Residential Experience,” 115.

93. D. J. Kenny, Illustrated Cincinnati Pictorial Handbook of the Queen City (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1875), 295.

94. Cincinnati Republican, December 11, 1838.

95. Avenia White to Ballard, October 25, 1838, Folder 25, Ballard Papers.

96. Shaffer, The Cincinnati, Covington, Newport and Fulton Directory for 1840, 181; Thornbrough and Riker, Diary and Letters of Calvin Fletcher, 210; Frances M. Bruster to Ballard, November 29, 1838, Folder 25, Ballard Papers.

97. Ibid.

98. See a letter Ballard received in October 1838. Henry Clark to Ballard, October 10, 1835, Folder 18, Ballard Papers.

99. Avenia White to Ballard, December 30, 1838, Folder 25, Ballard Papers.

100. Calvin Fletcher to Ballard, January 28, 1839, Folder 26, Ballard Papers.

101. In the postscript, she stated that her landlord was waiting on money, presumably for the mortgage that was being sent via Fletcher. “When you write you can mention it to him,” White said. Avenia White to Ballard, January 20, 1839, Folder 26, Ballard Papers.

102. He also inquired about the African American man to whom the $100 draft should be written. He was William Stewart, a local pattern maker of mixed race. Fletcher told Ballard that Stewart appeared to be reliable. The reasons for Stewart’s presence in Bruster’s life are unclear. Maybe Bruster was purchasing her boardinghouse with Stewart’s assistance and that of other local African Americans. Given the degree to which black Cincinnatians during this era needed and depended on each other, Stewart might have been furnishing such help.

103. Avenia White to Ballard, February 2, 1840, Folder 31, Ballard Papers.

104. A letter Ballard received nearly fifteen years later suggests that Mary January was a woman of color. A man named P. B. January wrote him to request information on a “yellow woman” earlier purchased from Ballard by his uncle. A court determined that this woman was born free, kidnapped, and sold into slavery and should thus be manumitted. The letter writer may have been the former owner—or may have known the former owner—of Mary January, who likewise might have been or was related to the woman. The census offers no clear answers on January’s identity. There were several women named Mary January alive during the nineteenth century but none listed as living in Cincinnati in 1840. A sixty-year-old Virginia-born white housekeeper bearing this name lived in Greene, Ohio, about 60 miles north of Cincinnati, in 1880; a Virginia-born black woman bearing this name lived in Claiborne County, MS, in 1870; a widowed sixty-year-old Tennessee-born white woman with this name lived in Saint Mary, LA, in 1901; U.S. Federal Censuses 1870, 1880, and 1901, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 8, 2014); P. B. January to Ballard, November 29, 1854, Folder 207, Ballard Papers.

105. Avenia White to Ballard, February 2, 1840, Folder 31, Ballard Papers.

106. Isaac Franklin to Ballard, September 27, 1834, Folder, 15, Ballard Papers.

107. Bigham, Jordan’s Banks, 23.

108. List of Purchases for the Year 1832, Box 11, Folder 420, Ballard Papers. Also see “Negroes Shipped,” Box 11, Folder 417, Ballard Papers.

109. Though laws were passed in 1804 and 1907 to limit black settlement, the city’s black population grew from 700 in 1826 to more than 2, 000 in 1829. By 1840 the growth of the city’s black population was stunted. In that year, blacks numbered 2, 240, or 4.8 percent of the total population. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 2–3, 9; The WPA Guide to Cincinnati, 30.

110. Potter, Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, 11.

111. James Oliver Horton and Hartmut Keil, “African Americans and Germans in Mid-Nineteenth Century Buffalo,” in Horton, ed., Free People of Color, 170; Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 72; Amy Hill Shevitz, Jewish Communities on the Ohio River: A History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 24, 35.

112. The WPA Guide to Cincinnati (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1987), 59; Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 4.

113. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley (1832; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1974), 36.

114. Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi, 6, 20, 97; Taylor and Dula, “Black Residential Experience,” 115.

115. Horton and Keil have made this argument using antebellum Buffalo as a case study, though their findings can be applied to other areas with German immigrants, including Cincinnati. James Oliver Horton and Hartmut Keil, “African Americans and Germans in Mid-Nineteenth Century Buffalo,” in James Oliver Horton, ed., Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 170–71.

116. Coffin, Reminiscences, 528; Daily Cincinnati Enquirer, September 4, 1841; Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 117–25; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, September 6, 1841; Bigham, Jordans Banks, 41; Trotter, River Jordan, 36.

117. The Cincinnati Directory, for the Year 1842 (Cincinnati: E. Morgan and Company, 1842).

118. Woodson, ed., The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters, 241.

119. In 1830, 52, 317 people lived in Hamilton County, OH, which included Cincinnati, almost double the 28, 797 population of Henrico County, VA, which included Richmond, and more than three times the 14, 937 population of Adams County, MS, which included Natchez. Even more telling of how different these cities’ populations were is that 6, 055 people lived in Richmond proper and just 2, 789 in Natchez, compared to almost 25, 000 in Cincinnati. The last was home to 46, 338 people by 1840. Bigham, Jordans Banks, 7, 299; U.S. 1830 Census, www.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1830a-oi.pdf (accessed October 24, 2012); Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790–1970 (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Ann Arbor, MI), www.virginiaplaces.org/population/pop1830numbers.html (accessed October 24, 2012); Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 19–20.

120. Louis Leonard Tucker, Cincinnati: A Student’s Guide to Localized History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969), 10–11; Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 36, 39–40.

121. Cincinnati Republican, June 15, 1838; October 19, 1838.

122. Barth, The Rise of Modern City Culture, 3.

123. Cincinnati Republican, September 29, 1838.

124. For more on the colonial origins of this hierarchy, see Spear, Race, Sex and the Social Order in Early New Orleans.

125. Morgan, Laboring Women, 44–45.

126. A growing number of scholars have addressed intragroup conflict in the African American community on a range of topics, among them, the different approaches of black radicals and conservatives during the black freedom movement. Some see this recognition as the “old American tradition of seizing on black people’s disputes with each other to put down blacks as a people.” In his study of how kinship and property claims figure into African Americans’ survival tactics during the nineteenth century, Dylan C. Penningroth has addressed this issue, cautiously noting how blacks have argued among themselves. Here I do something similar as I acknowledge the ways in which African Americans often tiptoe around conflict in their own community because it is not easy to discuss how “we” oppress one another. Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow, eds., Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). See also Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 12.

127. Virginia to Ballard, May 6, 1853, Folder 192, Ballard Papers; Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White,” 222.

128. Cincinnati Directory Advertiser for the Years 1836–7, 82; Shaffer, Cincinnati, Covington, Newport and Fulton Directory for 1840, 182, 472.

129. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 101.

130. Gerber, Black Ohio, 19; Taylor, Race in the City, 6; Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 101–3.

131. Hills presence at this juncture of White’s life and, for that matter, White’s connection with Bruster is noteworthy because the boardinghouse on Elm Street was between Fifth and Sixth Streets, a neighborhood associated with abolitionist activity. Bruster might have been in the forefront of the city’s antislavery community. Certainly other black-owned boardinghouses in the city often provided refuge for escaped slaves. Perhaps hers did too. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 152.

132. For more on the hegemonic function of powerful men’s emotion-based actions, see R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

133. White may have married, taking her husband’s last name as her surname. She may have been widowed or divorced. Notably, “Avenia,” a then-uncommon given name, appears so infrequently in nineteenth-century census records that it invites speculation that Ballard preferred to address her by her unusual middle name rather than her common first name, in order to distinguish her from the many enslaved women and girls, Susan Johnson’s daughter among them, named Elizabeth. Also worth noting, while living in Greene County, Elizabeth Ward’s eldest child was a boy, apparently born in 1841. If this woman was Avenia White, she was pregnant with him in 1840, the year Mary January slandered her. Perhaps January told Ballard that she was having sex with this child’s father, who married her and also fathered the other three.

After the Civil War, this woman seems to have relocated to Lincoln, KS. The 1870 census for Lincoln lists a white woman named Avenia Ward, who within five years had relocated to Atchison, KS, more than 200 miles away, where, now listed as a “black” woman, she was one of two servants in a merchant’s home. The other servant was white. That the age of this “A. Ward” was off by just one or two years from the white Elizabeth A. Ward listed in the 1850 census is noteworthy, but so are more significant details about her. If Elizabeth A. Ward and Avenia Ward were the same person, why did she appear under two different given names? One possibility is that the census takers were simply inconsistent, one recording her first given name and middle initial, the other two the name by which she preferred to be called. Finally, though Elizabeth A. Ward and Avenia Ward are at least six years older than the eldest possible age of Avenia White listed in the 1840 U.S. Census, this is not entirely problematic given that the actual age of enslaved people is difficult to ascertain given the lack of formal documents about their birth. 1850 U.S. Federal Census, 1870 U.S. Federal Census, and 1875 Kansas Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 16, 2014).

134. For currency conversion, see www.futureboy.us./fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity+50&currency=dollars&fromYear=1850 (accessed June 17, 2014).

135. Preston, who appears to have been Avenia White’s son when she first arrived in Cincinnati, would have by now been in his late teens or early twenties and thus old enough to reside away from her. There are two Preston Whites in the 1860 U.S. Federal Census. Both are listed as white men. One, a schoolteacher, boarded with a Kentucky family; the other, a laborer, boarded with a family in Virginia. The former was born in 1836, the latter in 1838. Unless these men were unaware of their true age, neither was the boy whose name appeared beneath Avenia’s on Ballard’s 1832 slave invoice. Both lived, however, in states to which Ballard and Avenia had ties. The fate of Susan Johnson and her children is more vague. An African American woman bearing this name resided in Cincinnati in 1860. She had three children whose names are different from the ones in White’s surviving letters. This mother was unemployed but possessed $50—$1, 386.12 today—given to her in all likelihood by her adult sons. One was a blacksmith, and the other was a “daily” laborer, 1860 U.S. Federal Census; www.futureboy.us./fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity+50&currency=dollars&fromYear=1860 (accessed June 20, 2014).

136. R. F. Morgan to Ballard, May 19, 1852, Folder 177, Ballard Papers.

137. Receipt for passage of Negro girl, January 29, 1841, Folder 352, Ballard Papers; Receipt for passage of Negro girl, freight charges, and passage for Ballard and servant, May, 19, 1841, Folder 41, Ballard Papers.

138. Coffin, Reminiscences, 479.

139. L. Virginia Gould, “Urban Slavery, Urban Freedom: The Manumission of Jacqueline Lemelle,” in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 298–310.

140. Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Stephanie Li, “Resistance, Silence, and Placees: Charles Bon’s Octoroon Mistress and Louisa Picquet,” American Literature 79.1 (March 2007): 4, 6.

141. Emily West, Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

142. Ibid., 130.

143. Ibid., 134.

144. One of Louise’s half siblings was named William Ellis. The letter writer may have been her relative and his presence in Kentucky might have been another reason Ballard settled her and their children in this city. Ellis might have decided that he would be able to look after them in his absence. W. A. Ellis to Ballard, March 1, 1857, Folder 254, Ballard Papers.

145. Ellis added that he was aware that Louise’s father would soon be visiting, but he did not think it would help. In fact, it would make things worse. Charlotte, one of the Ballard’s twins, once mentioned an unspecified illness from which her mother was suffering in a letter to their father. W. A. Ellis to Ballard, May 18, 1857, Folder 177, Ballard Papers; Charlotte and Ann Ballard to Ballard, March 1, 1857, Folder 166, Ballard Papers.

146. Ella Ballard to Ballard, March 5, 1857, Folder 254, Ballard Papers.

147. Ella Ballard to Ballard, March 25, 1857, Folder 255, Ballard Papers.

148. This advertisement can be found in Folder 411, Ballard Papers.

149. Isabel Howell, John Armfield of Beersheeba Springs (Beersheeba Springs, TN: Beersheeba Springs Historical Society, 1983).

150. S. P. Johnson to Ballard, June 9, 1858, Folder 281, Ballard Papers.

151. For the date of his death, see lawsuit filed by Louise and her second husband, James Purdy, in the wake of losses caused by Union troops on the Ballards’ Outpost plantation in Carroll Parish, LA. James Purdy and Wife, Administrators v. United States, p. 2, Rice C. Ballard Papers, Natchez Small Manuscript Collection, Box 2E549, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin.

152. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History of Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 98.

153. His accumulated wealth enabled his daughters to marry well. Two months after his death, Ella married William Fontaine Bullock, a Kentucky circuit court judge. Ann and Charlotte eventually married two brothers, one a banker, the other a merchant. U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560–1900; 1850 U.S. Federal Census, 1880 U.S. Federal Census, 1920 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 13, 2013).

154. “Generous Donation of Col. Rice C. Ballard of This City to the ‘Sisters of Charity’—the Notes Given for the Asylum, to the Amount of Three Thousand Two Hundred and Twenty-seven Dollars, Taken up,” Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette, April 20, 1848, issue 48, col. A.

155. “Colonel R.C. Ballard,” Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette, December 21, 1848, issue 54.

156. Ibid.

157. Mississippi Free Trader, January 26, 1848, 1; New York Spectator, August 7, 1848, vol. 1, p. 4.

158. At the time of the suit, she was living in Memphis with Purdy. See James Purdy and Wife, Administrators v. United States, p. 2, Ballard Papers, University of Texas, Austin.

159. Ibid., 1. For the age difference between Louise and James Purdy, see 1870 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 26, 2013).

160. By the time of his death, Louise lived on Broadway, five blocks from the house in which she had raised her children. By then, there were several Ballards in town, among them Charles, her first husband’s brother, who ran a mill in Louisville. See Louisville, Kentucky, City Directory 1886, in U.S. City Directories, 1821–1989, http://search.ancestrylibrary.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?rank=1&new=1&MSAV=o&msT=1&gss=angs-g&gsfn=Louise&gsln=Ballard&mswpn__ftp=Louisville%2c+Jefferson%2c+Kentucky%2c+USA&mswpn=32672&mswpn_PInfo=8-|0|1652393|0|2|3246|20|0|1508|32672|0|&msbdy=1820&msbpn__ftp=Mississippi&uidh=20x&pcat=ROOT_CATEGORY&h=868291961&db=USDirectories&indiv=1 (accessed June 13, 2013).

3 / “The stain on it”

1. Reverend Hiram Mattison, a Buffalo minister, took credit as the author of Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life (New York: The Author, 1861), which chronicles the experiences of Picquet. This study relies on the edited version of her memoir in Fulton Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts. See also 1840 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 26, 2013).

2. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 54.

3. Ibid., 55.

4. Horton had earlier served in the Alabama legislature. See /www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fho62 (accessed August 11, 2012); Matthew Ellenberger, “Illuminating the Lesser Lights: Notes on the Life of Albert Clinton Horton,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 88 (April 1985); and Ralph A. Wooster, “Early Texas Politics: The Henderson Administration,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73 (October 1969).

5. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 55.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 56.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid, 59.

10. Ibid., 60.

11. Ibid., 59.

12. Ibid., 61.

13. Ibid., 60.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 61.

16. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7.

17. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014).

18. So great was the hatred some enslaved women and girls felt, they resorted to violent measures to get back at their masters. One of them, a teenager named Celia, was tried and hanged in 1855 in Missouri for striking her master twice with a large stick, killing him, and burning his body in a fireplace. Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave: A True Story (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991). Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 59.

19. Such consideration did not extend to fieldhands on a large plantation, who probably had no direct contact with a master. An overseer might treat such a slave in brutal ways without the owner’s knowledge, much less his intervention. Still, those with whom a slaveholder was in regular contact—house servants and, above all, bed partners—were also likely to suffer because they were under constant monitoring. However, slaveholders, if they wanted to get their money’s worth from a purchase, were compelled to show a measure of concern for their slaves, no matter the degree of physical proximity they had with them. Consider an enslaved pregnant woman who toiled in the fields like an enslaved man. Though there were many cruel exceptions, especially during the seventeenth century elsewhere in the Caribbean, a reasonable amount of care had to be shown to such a woman if a slaveholder was thinking about his or her financial outcomes. Following westward expansion and the creation of a cotton region from the 1820s on, slaveholders were usually attentive to enslaved womens pregnancies. It was a matter of arithmetic. A successful birth ensured the eventual replacement of aging bodies that could no longer work or be a source of profit if sold. Some women who had recently given birth sometimes received lighter work assignments. Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the British-West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 13, 189.

20. Stephanie Li, “Resistance, Silence, and Placees: Charles Bon’s Octoroon Mistress and Louisa Picquet,” American Literature 79.1 (March 2007): 87.

21. Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

22. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 54–55.

23. Ibid., 3; Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 191.

24. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 164.

25. Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South, 57.

26. Ibid., 57.

27. Hunter, To Joy My Freedom, 2.

28. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion, 59.

29. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 71.

30. Ibid., 46.

31. Ibid., 39, 46.

32. Ibid., 46.

33. Ibid., 58.

34. Richard F. Brown, Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 4.

35. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 47, 80.

36. To Picquet, the male head of household where she worked as a servant was a “real good man,” one she would not have minded being her master, as he and his wife never whipped her. Ibid., 45–47, 54.

37. Ibid., 48.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Picquet’s experiences have resonance with those of Harriet Jacobs. Like Picquet, Jacobs relied on a white woman, in her case, her master’s wife, to protect her. Pretending to provide help, her mistress instructed Jacobs to sleep in a room “adjoining her own.” Strangely, once there her mistress sometimes approached a sleeping Jacobs and whispered in her ear, pretending to be her master. She then “listened to hear what I would answer,” Jacobs said. Overwhelmed, she became “fearful” for her life. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 48–49; Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 54.

41. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 51.

42. Ibid., 52.

43. Ibid., 53.

44. Ibid., 55.

45. Lucy’s relatives did not need her sister’s owner to purchase her as they were apparently members of the small mulatto slaveholding class of South Carolina. They were free people of color who owned slaves, some as capital investments. Others were purchased and then freed because they were relatives. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 58.

46. Whether these purchases were ways of reclaiming bodies to be used for labor on these men’s land, or whether there was a bond of emotion or kinship, we cannot know. Ibid., 47.

47. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 56.

48. Ibid., 59.

49. Mississippi State Gazette, May 13, 1820, Vol. Ill, Issue 20, p. 4.

50. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 57.

51. Ibid., 60.

52. Ibid., 61.

53. For more on the rise of the tea trade and its impact on global culture, see John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (New York: Scribner, 1994); and Sarah Rose, For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History (New York: Penguin, 2011).

54. Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 510–11.

55. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 61.

56. Sella Martin, house servant and boatman, in Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 703.

57. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 58.

58. Ibid., 61.

59. Picquet was lucky in this regard. Ann Marie Barclay, a mulatta who had lived with her slave-dealer master for seventeen years, almost lost her furniture. In the wake of crackdowns on people of color after the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, her master freed her in 1839 and sent her to Cincinnati. They lived apart for years, perhaps seeing each other only when he traveled north. When he finally died in 1856, he left her his piano and furniture. But she encountered difficulties claiming them. When she returned to the South, Barclay found not only her inheritance in jeopardy but also her freedom. Some questioned whether she was really free. In the end, a judge decided she should have the items and that she should remain free. Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free, 111.

60. Francis J. Mastrogiovanni, “Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1840–1850” (Master’s thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1972).

61. Bigham, Jordans Banks, 37–38. For more, see Thomas Paul Kessen, “Segregation in Cincinnati Public Education: The Nineteenth Century Experience” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1973).

62. Bigham, Jordans Banks, 38; Kessen, “Segregation in Cincinnati Public Education.”

63. Horton and Flaherty, “Black Leadership in Antebellum Cincinnati,” 84.

64. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 40; and National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, DC; Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers who Served with the United States Colored Troops: Infantry Organizations, 41st through 46th, Microfilm Serial M1994, Microfilm Roll 27.

65. Woodson, ed., The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters, 156. For more see, Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Claude A. Clegg, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).

66. 1850 U.S. Federal Census.

67. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 62–63.

68. Ibid., 62.

69. Ibid.

70. For more, see Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners; Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: New Press, 2007).

71. Gould, “Urban Slavery, Urban Freedom,” 208.

72. Ludwig von Reizenstein, The Mysteries of New Orleans, trans. and ed. Steven Rowan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Emil Klauprecht, Cincinnati, or The Mysteries of the West, trans. Steven Rowan, ed. Don Heinrich Tolzmann (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Henry Boernstein, The Mysteries of St. Louis: A Novel, trans. Friedrich Munch, ed. Elizabeth Sims (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990).

73. Reizenstein, The Mysteries of New Orleans, xxv; Klauprecht, Cincinnati, or The Mysteries of the West.

74. Reizenstein, The Mysteries of New Orleans, xxvii, 11.

75. Mayne Reid, The Quadroon: A Lovers Adventures in Louisiana (New York: G. W. Dillingham Co., 1856, 1897), 47.

76. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 40, 65, 71; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, October 15, 1860.

77. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 13, 51.

78. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 65.

79. Ibid., 65–66.

80. Ibid., 40; 1860 U.S. Federal Census.

81. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 67.

82. Mattison noted as much to the reader but only in order to allege that the image was Horton’s attempt to demonstrate to Northerners the supposed “superior condition of the slave.” Ibid., 70.

83. Ibid., 72.

84. Ibid., 73–74.

85. Ibid., 75–76.

86. Ibid., 86; and Cincinnati Daily Gazette, October 15, 1860.

87. Her mother also left behind her husband, the coachman who had been sold with her years earlier in Mobile. In 1860, unworried by the ongoing sectional tensions between the North and South, Horton went on to buy 58 slaves in Columbia, SC. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 79–80. See receipt for 58 slaves, Albert Clinton Horton Papers, Box Number 2E249, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin.

88. Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 41; and NARA, Washington, DC; Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers who Served with the United States Colored Troops: Infantry Organizations, 41st through 46th, Microfilm Serial M1994; Microfilm Roll 27; www.ancestry.com (accessed June 9, 2014).

89. Lyle Koehler, Cincinnati’s Black Peoples: A Chronology and Bibliography, 1787–1982 (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 1986), 52; and U.S. Federal Census, 1860, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 9, 2014).

90. Williston H. Lofton, “Northern Labor and the Negro during the Civil War,” Journal of Negro History 32 (1949): 251–73.

91. Bigham, Jordan’s Banks, 8; Crowell, Images of America, 31.

92. That amount in todays currency is $107.24. 1870 U.S. Federal Census; 1890 Veterans Schedule; www.futureboy.us./fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity+6&currency=dollars&fromYear=1870 (accessed June 22, 2014).

Faust has stressed that although the war was an “instrument of liberation” for many African American men, veterans and their survivors struggled during the pension claim process. Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 55, 255–60. For more on African American soldiers during the Civil War, see Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

93. U.S. Federal Census, 1880; Special Schedule for Surviving Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Widows, Etc. Minor Civil Division, New Richmond, OH, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 9, 2014); Mattison, in Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 41; Crowell, Images of America, 42.

94. Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 33.

95. Potter, Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, 17–18.

96. Ibid., 159.

97. Ibid., 176.

98. This phenomenon has a long history. The success of Rachel Polgreen, a mixed-race hotelier who lived in late eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, came at great cost to other black women. The cost for one woman in Polgreens care was merciless beatings. For more, see Marisa J. Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachel Pringle Polgreens Troubled Archive,” Gender and History 22.3 (November 2010): 564–84.

99. Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 15; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 348–49.

100. Potter, Hairdressers Experience in High Life, 183.

4 / “Has anyone heard from Willis?”

1. Biographical and other details about individuals discussed in this chapter are drawn from letters and documents consulted by the late Frances Cabaniss Roberts for her 1940 dissertation on the nine children of Samuel Townsend, an antebellum cotton planter in Huntsville, Alabama, and their cousins and other relatives. Roberts was the great-granddaughter of Septimus Cabaniss, Townsend’s lawyer. She donated her great-grandfather’s papers to the University of Alabama in 1952. In the intervening years since her dissertation’s completion, many of the letters and documents she quoted were recataloged. As a result, they are no longer easily traced in the collection. I will thus occasionally quote them from her thesis but also from the accessible recataloged documents. See Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 8–10, 108–9; Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, December 12, 1882, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

2. Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 12.

3. Gelis, “The Child,” 312.

4. The letter discussing a child who jumped over a fence is undated and unsigned, though mailed to Thomas Townsend. Osborne likely wrote it. Osborne Townsend to Wesley and Thomas Townsend, December 3, 1872, Georgetown CO, MSS 252, Box 252.05, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

5. Susanna’s name is also spelled “Susannah” and “Susan” in drafts of Samuel Townsend’s will and other documents in the Cabaniss Papers. See Deposition of S. D. Cabaniss, MSS 252, Box 251.056, Folder 04, Cabaniss Papers.

6. That amount in today’s currency terms is worth about $5.5 million. See http://futureboy.us/fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity=200000&currency=dollars&fromYear=1856 (accessed September 20, 2012); Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 105.

7. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 463.

8. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, December 12, 1882, MSS 252, Box 252.54, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

9. Their brother Parks S. Townsend also relocated to Huntsville and became a planter. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 5. See also Joseph C. Kiger, Some Social and Economic Factors Relative to the Alabama Large Planter, Masters thesis, University of Alabama, 1947, 64; 1830 U.S. Federal Census and 1840 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 20, 2014); and MSS 252, Box 252.048, Cabaniss Papers.

10. William’s Huntsville Directory, City Guide, and Business Mirror, Vol. 1–1859–60 (Huntsville: Coltart & Sons, No. 10 Commercial Row, 1859) 1–2, 10; and Victor B. Haagen, The Pictorial History of Huntsville, 1805–1865 (Huntsville, AL: Victor B. Haagen, 1963), 37.

11. Thomas W. Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1921), vol. 2, 926.

12. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 4.

13. Ibid. 5.

14. The children’s mothers were Hannah, Rainey and Lucy, Winney and Celia. The last two died before being freed. The other freedpeople included other relatives, among them, half siblings. Samuel Townsend Will, MSS 252, Box 0252.0050, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers; and Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 24–25.

15. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, ix, xxvi.

16. Ibid., xxvi.

17. The 1857 Dred Scott decision, which was first argued in early 1856 and involved an enslaved man who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom, also reflected ongoing tensions surrounding the future of slavery. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, 28. See also McPherson, Battle Cry, 170–82.

18. In today’s currency, $6, 930, 598, 020.60. See http://futureboy.us/fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity=250000&currency=dollars&fromYear=1854, (accessed June 20, 2014); Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 9.

19. Ibid. 9.

20. Deposition ofS. D. Cabaniss, MSS 252, Box 251.056, Folder 04, Cabaniss Papers.

21. Spear, Race, Sex and the Social Order, 210.

22. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 38; S. D. Cabaniss to Thomas Townsend, September 14, 1865, S. D. Cabaniss Letterbook, Outgoing Legal Correspondence, 1845–1865, MSS 252, Box 0252.022, Folder 13, Cabaniss Papers.

23. Cabaniss died in 1889 before the Townsend case was fully settled. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 11, 102, 105–6; and Septimus Cabaniss Biography, http://acumen.lib.ua.edu/u0003_0000252/ (accessed October 8, 2012).

24. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 6.

25. Ibid., 7.

26. Horton and Flaherty in Taylor Jr., ed., Race and the City, 87.

27. For more on these developments, see H. Roger Grant, The Railroad: The Life of a Technology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005), 82–83; Robert C. Post, Urban Mass Transit: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 2010).

28. Ibid., 81, 87.

29. The letter writer was Mary Townsend. She lived in San Pedro, an agricultural colony founded in thirty years earlier in northeast Mexico. This area was a refuge for African Americans, among them railroad workers, agricultural laborers, farmers, businessmen and professionals, who had been dismayed by the hardening color line and outraged over the growing number lynchings in the United States. Mary Townsend, February 20, 1901, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers; William Schell Jr., Integral Outsiders: The American Colony in Mexico City, 1876–1911 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 24.

30. Mary Townsend, February 20, 1901, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

31. Osborne Townsend, possibly to his brother Thomas, August 5, 1890, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

32. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, 361.

33. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, December 12, 1882, MSS 252, Box 252.54, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

34. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 8.

35. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt Brace, [1935] 1976), 352–53, 531.

36. For more on antebellum understandings of race on the basis of ones environment, see Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

37. Freedmen’s Bureau statement on behalf of Milcha Townsend, April 17, 1867, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

38. Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 3.

39. This was also true for white children in urban areas as a historical work in progress on the role of young people in nineteenth-century American democracy makes clear. See Jon Grinspan, “The Wild Children of Yesteryear,” New York Times, May 31, 2014, SR4, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/the-wild-children-of-yesteryear.html?_r=i (accessed June 1, 2014).

40. Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 55.

41. Jennifer Morgan credits Hazel Carby with such an assessment. Morgan, Laboring Women, 6.

42. Jones, Fathers of Conscience, 23.

43. Kent Anderson Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849–1893 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

44. Her husband was Nathan Toomer, the novelist Jean Toomer’s father. Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege, 64, 119.

45. Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, 477.

46. Ibid., 481.

47. Ibid., 475.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., 476.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., 479.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 480–81.

56. “Report of Mission to Ohio, 1858,” MSS 252, Box 0252.0050, Folder 6, Cabaniss Papers.

57. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 87; Leslie, Woman of Color; Daughter of Privilege, 8.

58. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 15.

59. Ibid., 16.

60. Ibid., 7, 10, 19–24.

61. The amount quoted is quite high, suggesting that Wesley may have mistakenly added an extra zero. To add perspective, White located a house for $13 a month in cramped Cincinnati. Cabaniss Roberts’s review of her great grandfather’s records reveals that the Townsends were in fact paying $96.44 for rent. The amount of their stipend is unknown. Wesley Townsend to Chadick, January 27, 1860, MSS 252, Box 252.54 Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers; and Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 21–22.

62. The executors of the Townsend estate decided to send Elvira and Jane to Kansas to join the Townsend childrens’ mothers and other relatives. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 24, 84.

63. Wesley might have been particularly displeased with Willis because he had lost his clothes on the train during their trip to Ohio, and $21.20 had been spent on replacing his wardrobe. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 22–23.

64. Willis Townsend to Cabaniss, February 8, 1860, MSS 252, Box 256.009, Folder 6, Cabaniss Papers.

65. Wesley Townsend to Chadick, January 27, 1860, MSS 252, Box 252.054 Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

66. Again, these former bondspeople included the three mothers of Townsend’s nine children. Two of the mothers had earlier died. The number of freedpeople exceeded those mentioned in Townsend’s will owing to the arrival of newborn children. Samuel Townsend Will, MSS 252, Box 0252.0050, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers; and Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 24–25.

67. The “Exodusters,” as these free people called themselves, were the “first, massive repudiation” of Southern racism. In connecting their struggles to those of the Jews during biblical times, these migrants’ relocation was the beginning of a social, if not economic, “reordering of Southern life.” The loss of these laborers was so worrying that white landholders often begged steamboat captains not to pick up black migrants. Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 4; Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi, 177–78.

68. Brewer and Pierce Realty Company possibly to S. D. Cabaniss, November 5, 1860, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

69. Elizabeth Townsend to unknown recipient, possibly her half brother Wesley, May 18, 1861, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

70. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 12.

71. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), 11.

72. Dickson reportedly was “free to leave the Dickson home place, free to leave her position as ‘housekeeper/ and free to terminate her sexual relationship with Dickson.” She probably stayed because her child was enslaved. Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege, 57.

73. The women in question were Hannah, Rainey, and Lucy, three of the five mothers of the freed ten children. The other freedpeople included their relatives. D. L. Lakin to S. D. Cabaniss, February 29, 1860, MSS 252, Box 251.056, Folder 03, Cabaniss Papers; Samuel Townsend Will, MSS 252, Box 0252.0050, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers; and Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 24–25.

74. John Duer to Wesley Townsend, May 22, 1861, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

75. Ibid.

76. J. K. Parker to R. S. Rust, January 5, 1865, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid.

80. A WPA interviewer speculated that Davis remained because Kentucky, unlike most other Southern states, did not secede from the Union. The interviewer also suggested that Davis remained because Kentucky was in the upper South, where enslaved people were reputedly better treated than in the Deep South. This belief was so widespread that some whites in lower South states looked at Kentucky with alarm. It and Arkansas were the only Southern states not to prohibit teaching slaves to read and write. Moreover, although Kentucky was a slave state, juries could not convict African Americans for crimes without a trial. Bigham, Jordans Banks, 14; Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, vol. 7, State: Kentucky, 70.

81. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, vol. 7, State: Kentucky, 23.

82. This phenomenon has an ongoing history, as suggested by South Carolina senator Strom Thurmonds attachment to the mixed-race child he fathered with a family servant in the early 1920s whose existence was only publicly revealed after his death in 2003. Meg Kinnard, “Strom Thurmond’s Mixed Race Daughter Dies,” Washington Post, February 4, 2013, www.washingtonpost.com (accessed June 15, 2014).

83. Elvira Townsend to Cabaniss, September 10, 1865, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers.

84. She possibly shared a bed with him—like her mother. For more, see R. Isabel Morales, “The Townsends: Reconstructing the Lives of Seven Enslaved Women, 1830–1856,” unpublished paper, www.acumen.lib.ua.edu/content/uoo15/…/u0015_0000002_0000006.pdf (accessed August 20, 2013).

85. Willis Townsend to Cabaniss, September 7, 1866, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 6, Cabaniss Papers.

86. Woodson Townsend to Cabaniss, February 16, year unknown, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers.

87. Ibid.

88. Elvira Townsend to Cabaniss, November 8, 1866, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers.

89. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 58, 75.

90. Sandweiss writes that King “seemed most attracted to those women whose race and class and educational background rendered them most unlike” his “needy” white mother. Remarking on the indifference one white male acquaintance displayed toward women of color during a trip to Tahiti and Samoa, King half-joked, “I love primal women so madly.” Speaking further of his attraction for women of color, perhaps for fair-skinned ones in particular (even though Ada was dark-skinned), King mentioned the woman as “lovely as mulatto lilies” he saw in Santiago de Cuba. Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line (New York: Penguin, 2009), 2, 125, 128, 173, 196.

91. To marry, he had to pass as black. He hid this marriage from his white associates.

92. Sandweiss, Passing Strange, 156–57.

93. Ibid., 288.

94. Ibid., 241, 278.

95. Ibid., 297.

96. Ibid., 215.

97. Ibid., 214.

98. Ibid., 215.

99. Ibid., 222.

100. Historic Georgetown: Centennial Gazette, 1866–1968 (Georgetown, CO: Georgetown Society, 1968), 3, 9, 21.

101. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, December 12, 1882, MSS 252, Box 252.54, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers. For more on Osborne’s experience in Georgetown, see Liston E. Leyendecker, Christine A. Bradley, and Duane A. Smith, The Rise of the Silver Queen: Georgetown, Colorado, 1859–1896 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005), 88–90, 211.

102. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, August 5, 1890, MSS 252, Box 252.54, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

103. Osborne Townsend to Wesley and Thomas Townsend, December 3, 1872, Georgetown, CO, MSS 252, Box 252.05, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers; Deposition of S. D. Cabaniss, MSS 252, Box 251.056, Folder 04, Cabaniss Papers.

104. Osborne’s yearning to learn more about Willis might have been an outcome of Osborne recently losing his wife in childbirth. He described himself as being “distraught.” His wife appears to have been the niece of “Aunt Clara” Brown, a former enslaved woman and Georgetown resident who invested in a black-owned mining company. Although he faced discrimination, Osborne appeared to have left an impression on local whites who were among the guests at his wedding, which received coverage in th local newspaper. Osborne Townsend to Thomas and Wesley Townsend, January 19, 1876, Georgetown, CO, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers; Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 97; Leyendeck, Bradley, and Smith, The Rise of the Silver Queen, 88–89, 211; Colorado Miner, February 28, 1873.

105. Willis’s eldest child was named Alice. 1880 U.S. Federal Census; Carrie Leonteen Townsend to Thomas Townsend, August 19, 1870, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

106. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 39, 82.

107. The term “butternut” originates from a dye made from the oil of butternuts and walnuts that was used in homespun clothing by this population, and also in Confederate army uniforms. Hence, in the case of the latter, the term was a synonym for a Confederate soldier. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 51–52; McPherson, Battle Cry, 31; James M. McPherson and James K. Hogue, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 19, 101.

108. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 94; 1880 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 20, 2014).

109. Ibid.; 1900 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed June 20, 2014).

110. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 95.

111. Carrie Leontee Townsend to Thomas Townsend, August 19, 1870, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

112. Ibid.; Alan Tractenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 9.

113. Thomas Townsend handled pension applications for himself and Wesley. Active in the Republican Party, Thomas also worked as a teacher, a journalist, and was a Huntsville city alderman. Wesley Townsend to Thomas Townsend, July 5, 1888, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers; Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 99, 101; Bernice Fearn Young, “Howard Weeden, A Rose of Yesterday,” n.d., Copy can be found in the A. S. Williams III Americana Collection, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama.

114. See “John David Weeden, 1840–1908,” www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~allauder/bio-weeden.htm (accessed April 27, 2014); and Thomas Townsend, Huntsville, Alabama, City Directory, 1908, 31, www.ancestry.com (accessed April 27, 2014).

115. For more, see Osborne Townsend, possibly to his brother Thomas, December 29, 1908, Item 46, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

116. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, August 5, 1890, MSS 252, Box 252.54, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

117. Ibid.

118. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 484–85.

119. Ibid., 484–85, 494.

120. However, between 1860 and 1870, African Americans were the preferred crewmembers on boats traveling on the upper Mississippi, owing to a belief that blacks were more “obedient” than Irishmen. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 450–51; Nancy Bertaux, “Structural Economic Change and Occupational Decline among Black Workers in Nineteenth Century Cincinnati,” in Taylor, ed., Race and the City, 142.

121. By 1850, there were 29, 401 workers in the city’s shops and factories, almost as many as the 30, 147 individuals working in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Chicago combined. In fact, not until the late 1860s did Chicago strip Cincinnati of its title as the biggest midwestern employer in the industrial sector. Ross, Workers on the Edge, 72–73.

122. Bertaux, “Structural Economic Change and Occupational Decline,” 127, 142–43.

123. While African Americans appeared to have more jobs than whites (54.8 percent were employed, compared to 47.2 percent of white Americans), these statistics reflected the growing number of black women in menial positions. In 1890 African American women made up as much as 28 percent of the city’s labor force. Bertaux, “Structural Economic Change and Occupational Decline,” 127–40.

124. Between 1870 and 1910 Cincinnati’s foreign immigrant population declined as it did in other midwestern cities. Only New York City, Boston, and San Francisco continued to draw large numbers of new immigrants. However, despite the immigrant population decline in Cincinnati, white immigrants and their native-born descendants continued to make up more than half of Cincinnati’s population in the 1850s. Taylor, “City Building, Public Policy, and the Rise of the Industrial City”; David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 20, 77; Ross, Workers on the Edge, 72.

125. In 1860, 11, 428 African Americans lived in Indiana. There were just under 40, 000 in 1880. Bigham, Jordan’s Banks, 140.

126. Ross, Workers on the Edge, 212.

127. Ibid., 262.

128. Willis’s employment on the river may have always been tenuous. The 1880 census lists his occupation as a porter. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 55; 1880 U.S. Federal Census; Ross, Workers on the Edge, 241.

129. Ross, Workers on the Edge, 241.

130. Bigham, Jordan’s Banks, 299–300.

131. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, March 21, 1884, MSS 252, Box 252.54 Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

132. As early as the 1850s, the country was becoming a more structured society with “new hierarchies of control.” Such change accelerated in the 1870s with westward expansion, the birth of industrial corporations, the rise of the metropolis, and revolutions in transportation, communications, and bureaucracy. Few areas of American life went untouched. Tractenberg, The Incorporation of America, 4–6.

133. Osborne Townsend to Willis Townsend, July 8, 1889, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

134. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, August 5, 1890, MSS 252, Box 252.54 Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

135. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 91–92.

136. For more, see W. Sherman Savage, Blacks in the West (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies (New York: Greenwood, 1977); John W. Savage, Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the Northern Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997); Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

137. Savage, Black Pioneers, 3.

138. Gross, Double Character, 129.

139. In this instance, he went by his first name, Charles. See National Archives Pacific Alaska Region (Seattle), Seattle, WA, Fourth Registration Draft Cards (WW II), www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013); 1885 Colorado State Census (accessed August 11, 2013); 1880 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013).

140. 1910 U.S. Federal Census.

141. Mark. E. Hill, “Skin Color and the Perception of Attractiveness among African Americans: Does Gender Make a Difference?,” Social Psychology Quarterly 65.1 (March 2002): 71–91; Trina Jones, “Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color,” Duke Law Journal 49.6 (April 2000), 1487–1557.

142. Thomas also had a brother named Willis who was surely named for their uncle who resided in New Richmond. 1880 U.S. Federal Census, www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013).

143. For more on the challenges African Americans faced while “passing,” see Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

144. 1920 U.S. Federal Census.

145. Ibid.

146. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr., The Rise of the City, 1878–1898 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1933, 1999), xxxvi.

147. Raymond A. Mohl, The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860–1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1985), 9.

148. John Putman, “Racism and Temperance: The Politics of Class and Gender in Late 19th-Century Seattle,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 95.2 (Spring 2004): 70.

149. Dana Frank, “Race Relations and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1915–1929,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 86.1 (Winter 1994–95): 35–44.

150. He was now employed by a firm used by the U.S. Army to store and distribute supplies for military posts. Thomas had evidently stretched the truth to get this position and in this way figured into an ongoing string of untruths made involving race mixing. Alma Fries, a white woman from Illinois who resided in a boarding house near his Seattle home was listed on his draft card as the person who “will always know” his address. He died in 1959 at age 76 in Seattle. A woman named Gertrude Townsend appears to have died in 1972. If she was his wife, they had parted ways. U.S. Social Security Death Index, www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013); National Archives Pacific Alaska Region (Seattle), Seattle, WA, Fourth Registration Draft Cards (WW II), http://search.ancestrylibrary.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?db=WWIIdraft&h=1o684930&indiv=try&o_vc=Record:OtherRecord&rhSource=6837 (accessed August 11, 2013); Washington, Deaths, 1883–1960, www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013).

151. William often went by his middle name, Bolden. William Bolden Townsend to Cabaniss, August 15, 1874, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers.

152. Brent M. S. Campney, “W. B. Townsend and the Struggle against Racist Violence in Leavenworth,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 31 (Winter 2008–9): 260–73; “William Bolden Townsend: Kansas Memory,” www.kansasmemory.org/item/213465 (accessed August 15, 2013); P. Clay Smith Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844–1944 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

153. He may be the lawyer to whom Frances Cabaniss Roberts referred when she stated that Thomas Townsend told her that one of Osborne’s sons was a lawyer practicing in Wyoming. U.S. City Directories, 1821–1989, www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013); Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 99.

154. Nettie Caldwell to S. D. Cabaniss, October 11, 1884, Louisville, KY, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

155. In 1865, Milcha Townsend married John Caldwell, a carpenter she called a “sober [and] industrious” husband. She gave birth to Nettie, whose father was the older brother of a Louisville woman named Nellie Bibb. Following Caldwell’s death in 1872 and the death of another child, Milcha struggled financially and gave Nettie to her mother, Lucy, who, unable to take care of her, gave her to Bibb. At the time of this letter, she was living with Bibb. “If you ever come to this city call me and see Nettie,” Bibb told Cabaniss in a letter four years before Nettie’s appeal to him. See Milcha Townsend Caldwell statement, April 17, 1867, Topeka, KS, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers; Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 87; Nellie Bibb to S. D. Cabaniss, August 3, 1880, Louisville, KY, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

156. Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South, 57.

157. Fulton Minor and Pitts, Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts, 3.

158. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 87.

159. Ibid., 96–97.

160. Quoted in Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 78–79.

161. Ibid., 80.

162. Ibid., 79.

163. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 7; emphasis added.

164. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, February 14, 1888, MSS 252, Box 252.54, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers and Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, July 27, 1889, MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

165. For more, see Leyendecker, Bradley, and Smith, The Rise of the Silver Queen, 88–89. See also Colorado Miner, September 28, 1871, 4.

166. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 101.

167. Osborne Townsend to Thomas Townsend, February 14, 1888, MSS 252, Box 252.54, Folder 01, Cabaniss Papers.

168. Scott Hancock, “‘From No Country?’ to ‘Our Country!’ Living Out Manumission and the Boundaries of Rights and Citizenship, 1773–1855,” in Brana-Shute and Sparks, Paths to Freedom, 265–66.

169. Wesley Townsend’s second wife, Adelaide, revealed as much in a letter to Cabaniss. Her request to marry was in vain for she apparently died at age sixteen the following year. Cabaniss Roberts, “An Experiment in Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter,” 48–50; Adelaide Townsend to Cabaniss, May 10, 1869, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 05, Cabaniss Papers. For more, see R. Isabela Morales, “Letters from a Planter’s Daughter: Understanding Freedom and Independence in the Life of Susanna Townsend (1853–1869)” (BA thesis, University of Alabama); and “Letters from a Planter’s Daughter: Understanding Freedom and Independence in the Life of Susanna Townsend (1853–1869),” University of Alabama McNair Journal 12 (March 2012).

170. Susanna Townsend to Cabaniss, June 4, 1868, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers; Adelaide M. Townsend to Cabaniss, May 10, 1869, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers.

171. Susanna Townsend to Cabaniss, June 4, 1868, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers.

172. Susanna Townsend to Cabaniss, January 1, 1866, MSS 252, Box 252.009, Folder 5, Cabaniss Papers.

Epilogue

1. Neely Tucker, Love in the Driest Season (New York: Three Rivers, 2004).

2. Genealogical records help fill in the silences, but not entirely. The same is true of other documents, among them archival newspapers that leave more questions than answers. For example, an undergraduate research assistant working on a newspaper advertisement database project with my colleague Joshua Rothman was intrigued to discover that one Alabama slaveholder ran numerous advertisements in several newspapers over one year asking for the return of a “small Negro boy, about two-years-old, of yellow complexion,” who was allegedly stolen. He offered a $100 reward for the child and a $200 reward for the thief. Was this a matter of property only, or also paternity? The archival record does not tell us. Courtnee Cook to Sharony Green, May 3, 2015; Huntsville Democrat, June 4, 1824.

3. One such television show is the 1980 drama In the Heat of the Night, inspired by a 1960s movie involving a black Philadelphia policeman and his encounters in a racist Southern town. During the “color-blind” moment when the subsequent television series was made, the town’s police chief (Carroll O’Connor) eventually married a black woman, something unthinkable when the movie was made. Equally unthinkable, the chief and his wife, Harriet, were married as Catholics, and ended up enforcing the law and running much of the city of Sparta, Mississippi. In one episode, a white man arrested for a crime sneeringly mentions the “pillow talk,” or intimate conversations, between Chief Gillespie and his “ole lady.” In the Heat of the Night (dir. Norman Jewison), 1967, www.imdb.com/title/ttoo61811/ (accessed October 17, 2012) and In the Heat of the Night (television series), 1988–95, www.imdb.com/title/ttoo94484/ (accessed October 17, 2012). The episode cited aired April 16, 2011, on WGN America, a Chicago-based cable channel.

4. This is almost certainly because, as Steven Spielberg once said, “one of the jobs of art is to go to the impossible places that history must avoid.” When Hollywood plays with the truth, audiences receive only glimpses of what really happened, but some of those glimpses are insightful. For example, in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained, the viewer cannot miss the favor that Broomhilda, an African American bondswoman destined to be a sex worker, had with the German bounty hunter to whom she has been given for the night by her master. The opening for such an arrangement is her ability to speak German, something that situates her and this man in a more intimate space, a hidden one, one in which they had a shared understanding about something intangible, owing to their familiarity with the German language, if nothing else. That they inhabit this space is intriguing for us but not for those of another age. Many nineteenth-century Germans arrived in the United States during a period when they and African Americans were mutually inspired by the other’s struggle and when antislavery campaigns in the United States converged with the upheaval in revolutionary Germany. As James Horton and Hartman Keil uncover, Germans in antebellum Buffalo lived beside and with people of color, some even marrying them. Lincoln (dir. Steven Spielberg), 2012, www.imdb.com (accessed September 26, 2013); Thavolia Glymph, “Untellable Human Suffering,” Chronicle of Higher Education, www.chronicle.com/blogs/conversation.author.tglymph/ (accessed January 2, 2013); Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino), 2012, www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/, (accessed January 21, 2013); James Oliver Horton and Hartmut Keil, “African Americans and Germans in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Buffalo.”

5. Sharony Green, ‘“Mr Ballard I am compelled to write again’: Beyond Bedrooms and Brothels, a Fancy Girl Speaks,” Black Women, Gender and Families 5.1 (Spring 2011): 17–40.

6. Estella Andrews Myers to Sharony Green, May 15, 2012.

7. I was deeply interested in doing as much while being aware that I might reveal details about the lives of others that were intended to stay hidden. I continued my research because I wanted to join other scholars who mine archival material with the hope of making new discoveries about people of the past in order better to understand ongoing attitudes and behavior. As I completed this project, I was pleased to discover that other scholars are having conversations about the ethics of our research and the risks involved in exposing information historical actors may have desired to remain private. I look forward to future conversations on this subject. For more on this issue, see Jessica Marie Johnson, “My OAH Tribute to: Stephanie M. H. Camp and Deborah Gray White,” Diaspora Hypertext blog, April 18, 2014, diasporahypertext.com/2014/18/my-oah-tribute-stephanie-m-h-camp-deborah-gray-white/ (accessed June 15, 2014).

8. As I put this book to bed, a nationwide outcry is raging about the treatment of African Americans in police custody in Baltimore, suggesting opportunities to discuss the complexities surrounding this and other subjects.

9. Cora’s husband, Isaac, a former bondsman, was politically active in Arkansas during Reconstruction. Her son Isaac Jr. studied at Yale University and the University of Cincinnati and her granddaughter Dorothy Gillam taught French in Cincinnati. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 68; Fay A. Yarbrough, “Power, Perception and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall Multiracial South,” Journal of Southern History 71.3 (August 2005): 584; Tom Dillard, Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics: A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans (Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press, 2010), 70.

10. Robert Smalls, freedman and native of Beaufort, South Carolina; American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission Interview, 1863, Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, 373.

11. Sarah Fitzpatrick, former enslaved servant in Alabama, interviewed in 1938, in Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, 639.

12. Annette Gordon-Reed, “Engaging Jefferson: Blacks and the Founding Father,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 57.1 (January 2000): 171–82.

13. Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

14. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood.

15. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Travellers Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States based upon three former volumes of journeys and investigations by the same author, vol. 1, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 60.

16. Jones, Fathers of Conscience, 185; Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood.

17. Milne’s use of “Enter” meant “recruit” or “enlist.” Alexander Milne to Charles Eden, April 21, 1860, National Maritime Museum, UK, Milne MSS MLN/116/3 [2].

18. Ibid.

19. If there was any remaining doubt about the extent of the inconsistencies in American slave society, they are present in the following words from Alabama lawyer and slaveholder, and later Confederate politician, Septimus Cabaniss on the subject of freeing his client’s enslaved children and their immediate kinfolk: “He expresses a preference for their settlement on the N.[orth] American continent, and desires that in making a selection of the country, his Executors will act with a view to the ultimate improvement and happiness of his servants. Emphasis added. S.D. Cabaniss to Stephen A. Douglas, Box 13, Folder 26, Stephen A. Douglas Papers 1764–1908, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago.