Introduction

On October 25, 1838, Avenia White, a young African American woman, sent her former master, Rice C. Ballard, a letter. In her letter White shared the difficulties she and another woman were having making ends meet. She was taking in sewing and laundry, and the other woman worked by the week as a live-in servant in Cincinnati. Their earnings, however, were not enough to feed themselves and their four children. They needed beds, she said. They also needed funds to buy fuel, as the nights were growing cooler. Money was so limited they had to borrow eight dollars from their landlord, an African American woman, who was sending a hello. White herself sent “love.”¹

What would make a former bondswoman utter this word to the man who had once owned and possibly raped her and, moreover, had probably done the same to another in close proximity to her? In considering possible answers to this question, this book offers one in particular: White and her former master had a level of intimacy that revealed itself in her use of the word love and in other ways, among them, that he had relocated her and the second woman and their children outside slave territory and had even sent financial support after they were freed.

Ballard did so on the eve of his marriage to a Natchez, Mississippi, woman. He and his wife would settle in Louisville, just 139 miles from Cincinnati.² Such appears to have been the level of concern he had for White, a woman one of his cronies once referred to as the “Old Lady,” a euphemism since the sixteenth century for a man’s female partner.³ Ballard evidently planned to be able to visit two households with ease and anonymity, away from the meddling eyes of acquaintances in the lower South where he had acquired an interest in several plantations.

The frequency with which white men freed enslaved women and their children is now generally known to those familiar with American history.⁴ Less is known about these men’s financial and emotional investments in them, the sort that increasingly found prominent politicians like William Seward of New York and Stephen Douglas of Illinois consulted for advice on how to ensure the safety of such women and their children.

As sectional conflict continued, a white Southern man’s pending marriage, aging body, or looming death often compelled him to free African American women and the children they produced with him. And as difficult as it may be for the modern mind to comprehend, some kind of connection, even if it was accompanied with a seemingly delusional utterance of love, existed between these individuals. Though they hardly stand excused for their ongoing claims to privilege, such men were hidden actors in freed women’s and children’s attempts to survive the rigors and challenges of life as African Americans in the years surrounding the Civil War.

Many such women and children, often of mixed race, were “fancy girls,” a brand name for enslaved women who were sold for use as sex workers and sexual partners before the Civil War. These were the sort of women on whom white men spent considerable sums and whom they even cajoled to leave other white men. Faced with sadder alternatives, some such women, White included, seemed to have obliged them.⁵

The white men in question turned to women like White not only as sex partners, but as companions who were eventually freed with their children in one place: Cincinnati. Before the Civil War, this six-squaremile city, surrounded on three sides by hills and on the fourth by the Ohio River, was filled with individuals who straddled racial lines. Their presence in Cincinnati and other cities ultimately revealed the ways in which race mixing occurred and occurs in the United States regardless of attempts to separate people on the basis of race.⁶ Indeed, by midcentury individuals who were young and female dominated the antebellum African American population in Cincinnati, which had the country’s highest per capita proportion of people of mixed race outside the South.⁷ By 1850, of the 3,172 African Americans residing there, 54 percent were of mixed race, a figure much higher than the North’s regional average of 31 percent. Only the Deep South had a higher number of “mulattoes,” 76 percent, among its free African American population.⁸

Previous research has largely taken for granted that the origins of most people of color in Cincinnati were two neighboring states, Kentucky and Virginia.⁹ Certainly among the migrants to Cincinnati were some of the nation’s most accomplished black leaders, including the Virginia-born lawyer and abolitionist John Mercer Langston and his brother Gideon, a fellow abolitionist who owned a livery stable business and a barber shop.¹⁰ They were the sons of a white Richmond-based domestic slave trader and a free woman of mixed race who both died in 1834.¹¹ But numerous other people of color also arrived from the cotton-growing regions of western Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and eastern Louisiana.

Cincinnati was an attractive site for relocating African Americans for several reasons. It sat on a river that connected to the Mississippi, which stretched south into slave territory and thus offered easy access to the Deep South. It was also on the border of the upper South. In addition, it was a major port community in which free people of color could pursue the wage work less easily found in the South. It also helped that Cincinnati had an abolitionist presence, which generally assured African Americans of having local allies in a region where free people of color from the South could expect much if not more of the same racism they had experienced in slave territory, despite the presence of white antislavery supporters.¹² Racism led to the swelling migration of blacks outside slave territory as the century approached the halfway mark.¹³ In 1855 a weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society printed a letter from a black Cincinnatian who highlighted the advantages of living in Cincinnati in particular:

But location, potential allies, and a convenient river were not the only positive features of this region. Southern white fathers of mixed-race children and the children and women themselves were drawn to educational opportunities in the state. Ohio has long been known for having some of this country’s first schools and institutions of higher learning for African Americans. Black migrants who could “pass” for white attended public and private grade schools throughout Ohio. Others populated schools that welcomed African Americans.¹⁵ Oberlin College, about two hundred miles northeast of Cincinnati, opened in 1833, and Wilberforce, a prep school and later university, opened in Tawawa, a resort town sixty miles northeast of Cincinnati, in 1856.¹⁶ Some of the earliest students of these educational institutions were the children of Southern white men and black women. “All our institutions are filled with gentlemen’s children sent from the South,” said Eliza Potter, a Cincinnati woman of mixed race who heard and saw much in her position as a hairdresser to elite whites. In Oberlin, she reported having seen “between three and four hundred children[,] … two-thirds of them being gentleman’s children from the South.”¹⁷

But when settling in Cincinnati, many such African Americans did so with considerable angst, as White’s letter demonstrates. “Black laws” were enacted as early as 1804 to deter black settlement.¹⁸ These rules prevented tax-paying blacks from serving on juries or testifying against whites. Black Cincinnatians were also barred from the militia and schools.¹⁹ Local white antagonism, the most severe in the state, had to do with outright racism but also job competition, crowded living conditions, and other stresses of emergent urban life.²⁰ Cincinnati, a once-small settlement, initially comprised white men who in 1788 took advantage of federal land grants. By the 1820s it was a rapidly growing city with many attractions because of its place on a major river, which lured commercial traffic²¹ that was furthered by its importance as a site for shipbuilding, pork processing, and whiskey production.²²

As the century matured, determined black Cincinnatians, among them the Langstons and the intellectual and black activist Peter Clark, put pressure on local and state authorities to aid their efforts to improve their lives by, among other things, educating African American children in public schools.²³ Aided by abolitionists as well as working-class Germans, African Americans demanded more. By 1856 local blacks successfully lobbied to have control over their own school board.²⁴ Within ten years Cincinnati opened its first black high school.²⁵

Given local white hostility, Cincinnati and Ohio were often mere way stations at which recently freed people assessed their options before moving elsewhere. Some of the African Americans in question scattered to places as different as Kansas, Colorado, Washington State, Canada, and Mexico. Others even returned to the lower South. Altogether, this sort of movement caused many whites grief as they realized that these favored ones were testing the waters of autonomy in ways that most African Americans would not do until the postbellum period.²⁶ As the often racially ambiguous children in particular drew on their white fathers’ capital, many feared the world would be turned upside down.

Examination of correspondence, diaries, news reports, and other sources reveal that the contemporaries of these African American women and children were sometimes nonplussed by their inability to categorize them.²⁷ However, it is now possible to situate them in bigger stories that point to more than just their general oppression. Some of these stories concern what it means to be urban, what it means to be American, and what it means to be free.²⁸ For sure, Southern white men—whether they intended to do as much or not—participated in the “urbanization” of black women and children in this instance, particularly when these women and children had earlier lived primarily on farms or plantations. That such men did as much allows us to see the degree to which black women and children fit squarely into narratives concerning emerging urban life in America and rising industry. In the end, it appears their being freed was often no mere act of charity but an act unveiling the inconsistencies in human behavior.

Their proximity to white men had earlier permitted mixed-race children and their mothers to develop a certain kind of familiarity across the color line, disrupting prescribed scripts. Indeed, these women of color produced racially ambiguous children who bewildered those who could not distinguish their lineage or understand their access to white men’s money and affection.²⁹ Attempts by observers to shape these children and their mothers as being “less than” were put to the test with each privilege they received.³⁰ Negative characterizations of African Americans, African American women especially, as unworthy and promiscuous were sometimes suspended although never discarded even by the men who extended favor.

Still, some such women and children seemed to adopt new personalities owing to their proximity to white men.³¹ Though marginal actors, they tested the limits of laws intended to render marriage, wage work, and slavery in absolute ways in the years surrounding the Civil War.³² While married white women faced legal and social restrictions on where they could go and what they could own, the unmarried African American women seemed to reap certain benefits. The latter emerged as extraordinary creatures in some circumstances while remaining victims in others.³³ Such women were ultimately part of a testing ground for human interaction.

With a thorough reading of the surviving evidence, the curtain on these women and their children can be parted, and we can finally make known long-hushed stories and unveil a world that was changed by their complicated interracial relationships.³⁴ We can do this by first moving the story of the fancy girl from New Orleans and other Southern port cities, where it is often situated, to a northern industrial city, Cincinnati.³⁵ Because the narrative is largely centered on a metropolitan area, it also allows us to see how African Americans plotted their futures alongside white Americans and Europeans in an increasingly urban and modern world. This foreshadowed later attempts of social Darwinists to designate them as racially inferior. The financial and educational investments white men made in these African Americans suggest that some such men believed in their abilities, no matter the obstacles that white men themselves created.

The extent of white men’s generosity has earlier been hard to plot for an obvious reason: lack of evidence. Few antebellum Southerners left behind socially damaging information about their comings and goings, especially if it revealed their regard for black Americans, enslaved ones in particular. The lack of sources—especially from the point of view freed women and children of color—figures into how even the stories told in this book seem to emerge as case studies.³⁶ However, it is possible to infer from the evidence that black-white unions, coerced or consensual, were more widespread than has been documented.

Knowing more about the experiences of Rice Ballard, the man who freed White and five others, is possible because of the more than six thousand documents in existence at the time of his death. White’s letter was one of thousands to him that he preserved, suggesting her importance in his life. When her letter and other documents are considered together, we can see how Southern white men made different kinds of investments in human capital. That they did so was not easily discussed in their lifetimes and remains polarizing today. Yet the growing contemporary interest in genealogy suggests that many people now want to learn more about African Americans who benefited from white men’s assistance, no matter their ongoing persecution.³⁷

White’s persecution was ongoing. Ballard had not properly provided for her, the second freedwoman, and the children before his departure for the South, leaving room for us to ponder his true intentions. He had freed them, though with many tasks before him. He was spending most of his time in Natchez, where he had recently started investing in cotton plantations in the lower South after a brief but profitable career as a domestic slave trader in his native Virginia. There he had a long-distance partnership with Isaac Franklin, reputedly the most successful domestic slave trader in U.S. history.³⁸ By the mid-1830s, both men were preparing to leave trading behind to become planters. Ballard even bought clothes to look the part. He purchased a fine overcoat for $45, a pair of pants for $18, and a vest for $10, all from a New Orleans shop.³⁹ If he was lucky in the boom-or-bust economy typical of the early nineteenth century, he stood to do well.

Discretion was in order, however. He was not like the two men Levi Coffin, the well-known abolitionist, recalled once meeting. They arrived with two mixed-race women and announced their plans to settle in the area because they could not marry in Mississippi. Coffin told them Ohio’s laws did not prevent such marriages and advised the men to marry their women. And they did.⁴⁰ Ballard’s aims were more suspect.

It must not have been easy for White or the other freedwoman to know that both had slept with the same man. What they told the children about this arrangement we do not know. What we do know is that he freed them both along with their four children because some bond had been established. But freeing them did not mean he saw African Americans generally as deserving anything.⁴¹

His general care with money may help explain his not properly setting them up. Certainly in the early days of domestic slave trading, he once accused Franklin and his two nephews, who were also his business partners, of not reimbursing him in a timely fashion: “[You said] it was not worthwhile to send me funds when I lay in debt ever since last fall, eleven thousand dollars and now upwards of twenty.… I do not mean to complain on this subject any more. I know you will do what is right.”⁴²

While some black women, especially those who passed as white, arrived in Cincinnati with white men who enabled them to lead lavish lives, the ones Ballard freed were representative of the many others who arrived in more uncertain circumstances, with sometimes cranky men like Ballard by their sides. Still, arrive they did.

African American women and girls were positioned to apply leverage to men like Ballard. It is generally assumed that proximity to white men was dangerous for black women and girls. But in this instance Southern white men and the women and girls in question both wielded power, not necessarily because of their dependence on one another, but because they ultimately were addressing their own needs. Such needs included caring deeply for another human being while also tending to one’s self in an age when ideas about individualism and self-determination were ubiquitous. White men’s attachment and generosity made African Americans also act in independent, assertive, even defiant ways, emerging as rather individualistic too.

In the end, when numerous documents, many of them letters, are bundled together, a more unanticipated past that scholars are trying to understand reveals itself. White men invested emotionally and financially in black women and children during escalating sectional tensions over slavery and the South’s slave-based economy.⁴³ A select group of individuals moved closer to the promise of freedom while being only one or two degrees of separation from influential people who debated some of the most critical issues of the day, simultaneously condemning blacks during such deliberations and being discreet about their aid to this very population with whom they were or others like them were intimate.

Given the all too evident horrors of slavery, it is imperative to clarify what is meant by the word intimacy. Put simply, the word intimate suggests emotional and physical closeness between two human beings, even unlikely ones. The word sheds light, too, on the wins and losses of such closeness when one party has more power than the other but both still find a way to reap some benefit. For more than a generation we have understood that oppressed blacks in and outside rural communities across time and space had and have influence on their own futures.⁴⁴ While the kind of intimacy presented here is often manifested as paternalism wherein slaveholders “purchased” slaves in an effort to “save” them, it points to another dynamic: the two-way exchange between white men and the people they freed and often supported.⁴⁵ In order to uncover intimacy, it is useful to think about the groundbreaking work of the political scientist and anthropologist James Scott.⁴⁶ Scott studied interactions in peasant villages and slave cultures and revealed that power is always in flux. He decided that through everyday strategies such as slowing the pace of their work or feigning ignorance even the most oppressed individuals exerted some control over the quality of their lives.

Antebellum African American women and children thoughtfully coped with the difficult circumstances in which they found themselves by relying on similar strategies with Southern white men.⁴⁷ Whether or not sex was involved, whether or not the relationships were consensual, intimacy was still possible. In spite of having been exploited by her former master on the basis of her gender and on the basis of her African descent, there remained the possibilities for an improved future for Avenia White. When she used the word love she could have been performing in order to maintain her ties to an influential individual who engineered big changes in her life. Was she disingenuous? No, she was able to discern an opening and assess the likelihood of success or failure in taking a chance on one unlikely man really caring for her and others beside her.

That she and Ballard had a deep personal bond should not be surprising, for slavery did not necessarily define their lives in a way that progressed “singularly and steadily toward racism.”⁴⁸ The historical record shows that there was often reciprocal regard, warmth, and even caring in settings where whites and blacks became trading partners, shipmates, servants, allies, or lovers.⁴⁹ The word love may figure into a longer history between two people who observed and knew one another. That something of considerable import existed between Ballard and White—and the five others he manumitted with her—is strongly suggested by the fact that he freed her in a city where she and the others stood to do as well as could be expected, especially with his occasional presence and financial assistance.

Unmarried mothers of color in antebellum Cincinnati and elsewhere foreshadow future matrifocal urban trends in African American families that scholars have long studied but rarely with white males as part of the equation.⁵⁰ Such neglect might be a result of the greater visibility of less savory aspects of white men’s behavior.⁵¹ But proximity to white men has long provided African American women and girls with the ability to see what whites said and what some actually did.⁵² Some white men’s generosity is not hard to fathom if, as sociologists suggest, a person’s emotions cannot be divorced from social contact with another human being, even one deemed a mere commodity. Though intimacy and love are not always a consequence of sharing space (and a bed) with another human, sharing space has real psychological consequences, some of them thoughtfully or unknowingly cultivated by one or both parties.⁵³

That said, no matter the level of intimacy, oppression is always in view in the relationships before us—even if pleasure was part of the equation.⁵⁴ However, we risk being too reductive if we fail to acknowledge that not all white men were as exploitative as generally presented, nor was their behavior consistent.⁵⁵ And critical here is less what these former enslaved people did to obtain freedom and support than what white men permitted of themselves. Some might call such favor white hypocrisy, but how antebellum black women and their children and white men felt about it was probably shaped by other factors: the degree to which they understood not just master-slave relations, but male-female relations and even parent-child relations.

As these relationships are explored, it is useful to look at how interracial sexual unions have been stigmatized across time. The rise of the Cotton Kingdom figures into such a discussion. What follows is a generational portrait of Southern white men who invested emotionally and financially in the lives of enslaved women and children.⁵⁶ Some men were so committed to their own bigotry or wives and families as to never consider such investments. There were others who did so quietly but decisively. Among those men is Ballard, the man who freed White, the woman who sent him her “love.” In fact, a level of intimacy was so established between him and White that I will return to them again and again as a means of seeing how enslaved people had the capacity to “love.”⁵⁷ This is the case even though black-white intimacies before the Civil War more often than not took the form of coerced sex and outright rape of black women.⁵⁸ Still, sexual ties between white men and African American women, consensual or not, resulted so often in these women and their children being freed and financially supported that they should be studied for their broader significance. White’s relocation to Cincinnati and its larger implications are worthy of closer scrutiny.

How do we find meaning in the lives of women like White who sought to ensure their future and that of their children? Their exertions were of paramount importance in Cincinnati, whose economy was tied to river commerce and was subject to frequent droughts resulting in low water and slowed business.

And what do we make of these black women when their lives are juxtaposed to white women who suffered emotionally during their husbands’ absences for myriad reasons, including tending to the needs of black women and children? Indeed, the black-white intimacies in question took a toll on a wide circle of individuals. Much might be said, too, of the intraracial conflict in the African American community as many African Americans in and outside slave territory looked at the favor some freedwomen and children received with both jealousy and anger.

It is then worth it, too, to look at the personalities of freedwomen with whom white men had intimate relations. One such woman whose life I discuss is Louisa Picquet, who was purchased by a New Orleans man, among others, and serves as a model of such women. Curiously benefiting from Victorian ideas of womanhood that were not intended for them, women and girls of color like her with past or ongoing ties to Southern white men often acted forcefully, a trait long associated with women of color.⁵⁹ Aware of their privileged position in slave society, women of mixed race in particular emerge as being as complicated and contradictory as the men who once owned them.

Due attention is also directed to the children of antebellum white men and enslaved women of color, among them the descendants of Samuel Townsend, a white planter who left $200,000 to ten children from five enslaved women.⁶⁰ As the Civil War approached, growing legal restrictions on free African Americans in the lower South compelled some Southern white men to relocate the children and their mothers to free territory. Some hired lawyers to ensure the future of the children. I seek to illuminate the warmth between these men and their children even amid the latter’s ongoing struggles owing to racism. Altogether, the prevalence of both financial and emotional ties between unlikely individuals makes clear the paradoxes in American life across time.