4 /  “Has anyone heard from Willis?”: The Progenies’ Crossing

As a new century approached, Charles Osborne Townsend, an African American silver miner and sometime barber living in the hills of Georgetown, Colorado, sat down to write a letter.¹ The recipient was his brother Thomas, a lawyer who resided in Huntsville, Alabama, a place in which both men had once been enslaved. Their white father had owned the land on which they lived and had claimed them as his own. Though enslaved, Osborne, as he often called himself, as well as his siblings occupied an ambiguous space. It was one in which they enjoyed some of the benefits and anxieties of freedom.² Even whites around them detected that their young bodies were testing the waters of autonomy in ways that most African Americans would not do until the postbellum period.³ As Osborne recalled in his letter to Thomas, before the war one of their siblings had jumped over a fence onto the land of “Mr. and Mrs. Tate,” their white neighbors.⁴ Mr. Tate came running after this child to scold him. The sibling jumped back over the fence to escape Mr. Tates wrath. The commotion got so out of hand that Mrs. Tate intervened. The child “hollered so that ole Mrs Tate made old Mr Tate leave [them] alone,” Osborne wrote, reflecting on the incident.

Mrs. Tate’s response might have been an outcome of a charitable disposition. Or it might have stemmed from her ability to see that the child was no ordinary slave. Perhaps he resembled his father. Perhaps she had seen him get away with things other slaves could not. Because he looked mixed-race, it probably did not take much for her to put two and two together. This was the child of Samuel Townsend, who, judging by his subsequent actions, made clear his concern for his children. There were nine in all, from five enslaved women who were hardly fancy girls but rather more ordinary slaves. They demonstrate the scope of Southern white men’s desire. These women were not the ones for whom men posted advertisements or traveled to port cities in search of brand-name bedmates. Instead, men such as Samuel Townsend turned to women already on their plantations or those of business associates, male relatives, and friends. Some were dark-skinned women. Still, among them were individuals Southern white men would later free.

FIGURE 11. Page 1 of the December 12, 1882, letter that Charles Osbourne Townsend, a Colorado barber and sometime miner, wrote to his brother Thomas Townsend, a Huntsville teacher and farmer turned lawyer. MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Septimus Douglas Cabaniss Papers, Special Collections, Stanley Hoole Library, University of Alabama.

In addition to Osborne and Thomas, Samuel Townsend manumitted Wesley, Willis, Parthenia, Caroline, Bradford, Susanna, and Milcha. He also freed Elvira, his housekeeper, who was Thomas’s half sister. Before his death in 1856, Townsend not only sought to free these children; he also sought to leave them the bulk of the proceeds from the sale of his estate. That year Townsend called on Septimus Cabaniss, a Huntsville lawyer, to revise an earlier drafted will, expressing this wish.⁵ At the time Townsend’s property was worth approximately $200,000.⁶

FIGURE 12. Page 2 of the December 12,1882, letter from Charles Osbourne Townsend to his brother Thomas Townsend. These half brothers are descendants of Samuel Townsend. MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Septimus Cabaniss Papers, Special Collections, Stanley Hoole Library, University of Alabama

As in previously discussed cases, a Southern white man was a hidden actor in the Townsends’ attempts to survive the rigors and challenges of life as black people in the years surrounding the Civil War. From the looks of it, Samuel Townsend established a level of intimacy between himself and some of his bondspeople that others discerned. Such intimacy contributed to these individuals’ eventual manumission, but prior to that it gave them the boldness to do things other enslaved people would have been more hesitant about doing, like trespassing on a white neighbor’s land. The ways in which such children and others were well positioned to do such things is the subject of this chapter. I earlier examined a portrait of the complicated, sometimes contradictory Southern men who bedded and established intimate relationships with African American women, who themselves were often equally complicated, but the voices of the children born from such relationships were impossible to hear. The Townsend siblings and other children discussed in this chapter are valuable in this regard. They help us hear what Harvey or Elizabeth, the children mentioned in the postscript of Avenia White’s letters to her former master, or Elizabeth, the daughter of freedwoman Louisa Picquet and her former master John Williams, might have said had they written a letter that survived.

There was, however, one crucial difference between the Townsends and some of the subjects discussed earlier. The former were materially much better off. Nevertheless, the circumstances of their lives as bondspeople and freedpeople mirrored those of other mixed-race children. Despite their more comfortable material situations, they endured racial discrimination not unlike that experienced by the women and children discussed in the two previous chapters. Likewise, they endured because they looked to others, including one another, for strength. That they did so demonstrates that kinship was vital for even the best-positioned African Americans in order to survive white hostility.⁷

As was also true of the subjects of the two previous chapters, Cincinnati figures into the Townsends’ lives, though more peripherally. As their father’s lawyer attempted to settle matters pertaining to their inheritance, one brother initially settled in Athens, Ohio, a little over 150 miles east of Cincinnati. Here he oversaw his siblings’ eventual settlement in Xenia, about 55 miles northeast. There some attended nearby Wilberforce University, at that time just a boarding school. After the Civil War began, the school closed and the Townsends scattered to places as diverse as Kansas, Colorado, Mexico, and Mississippi. Some returned to Huntsville. But one brother went to Cincinnati, where he worked as a waiter on a steamboat.

While rebuilding their lives as freedpeople, the Townsends remained in touch. In fact, the several dozen surviving letters they sent either to one another or to whites interested in their affairs serve as proof that they were the children of a white man that one called “father.”⁸ Samuel Townsend invested himself emotionally and financially in the lives of these children, aiding their efforts to improve their condition. That he did again reveals the complexities of black-white intimate encounters as well as race and class relations in America.

Like Rice Ballard, the slave trader-turned-planter, Samuel Townsend was from Virginia. And like Ballard, Townsend and his brother, Edmund, amassed considerable wealth in the Deep South as cotton planters. While Ballard’s landholdings were spread primarily across Louisiana and Mississippi, Samuel Townsend’s fortune, much of which apparently arrived as inheritance from a brother who died before him, was largely built on land in Huntsville, Alabama.⁹

Huntsville’s beginnings can be traced to the arrival of Captain John Hunt, a Revolutionary War veteran, in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains. In 1806 Hunt built a log cabin in this area, which was part of the Tennessee Valley. Five years later the land surrounding his dwelling became the nucleus of the city of Huntsville. In the early days, “improper women,” small farmers, card-playing hunters, and racehorse aficionados populated Madison County, where Huntsville sits. A local racetrack, set up beside an area hostel, drew the likes of Andrew Jackson, an admirer of the sport. By 1825 locals were shipping cotton, an increasingly lucrative crop in Madison County, to New Orleans, already a major commercial hub. Efforts were made to build a canal between Huntsville and New Orleans, but the project failed. Another canal was commenced a year later, this one successful. Huntsville then began its initial growth spurt.¹⁰

FIGURE 13. An 1875 map of Madison County, Alabama, revealing proximity of Samuel Townsend’s land to the Tates’. Courtesy of Geographic Information Systems, City of Huntsville and Cartographic Research Laboratory, University of Alabama.

Farmers fleeing failing farms in upper South states soon arrived in the area. To them, the fertile land of Huntsville held great promise. That it did was reflected in the rising population of the town’s main labor source: slaves. In 1816, some 4,200 slaves made up about a third of the 14,200 residents of Madison County. By 1850, 14,765 slaves comprised more than half of the county’s total population of 26,451.¹¹

Among those arriving in the 1820s were Samuel and Edmund Townsend, two brothers from Lunenburg County, Virginia.¹² The Townsends initially settled in Hazel Green, Alabama, just outside of Huntsville. In 1829 and 1832, Samuel Townsend purchased land, totaling 305 acres, in Huntsville proper and continued over subsequent years to buy additional tracts, some as large as 600 acres. His property holdings increased following the 1852 death of Edmund, who had owned two plantations in Madison County and another in Jackson County, Alabama. By the time of his own death in 1856, Samuel owned eight plantations, seven in Madison County and one in Jackson, totaling some 7,560 acres.¹³

Unlike Rice Ballard, who, perhaps to distance himself from his slavetrading past, conformed to the planters patriarchal image, Samuel Townsend never married. He seems to have sought out at least five enslaved women for companionship and sex. These women would appear to be of little consequence to his life were it not for the fact that we can see that something of huge import took place when Townsend ensured the financial future of ten enslaved children. He even freed three of the women. The other two died before his manumission orders were carried out.¹⁴

Had they not been identified as people of mixed race, the Townsend children might have been shielded from the widespread prejudice evident in the United States at the time of their father’s death. Such prejudices were entangled in partisan politics by the time the century reached the halfway mark.¹⁵ The resulting tension led to the 1854 birth of the Republican Party. Composed of moderate and conservative Whigs and radicals but largely influenced by former Democrats, the Republicans believed that an economy that paid men a wage was far better than one relying on slave labor.¹⁶ The party protested the admission of Kansas and Nebraska as territories in which the slavery question was to be settled on the basis of popular sovereignty, possibly allowing for its further expansion.¹⁷ Before he died Samuel Townsend probably watched such developments with anxiety. While his wealth had been built on slave labor, he had enslaved children whose financial futures he desired to provide for. Prior to his death in 1852, Edmund Townsend had tried to do the same.

Like Samuel, Edmund never married. Like Samuel, Edmund fathered enslaved children with his slave women, in his case, two daughters, Elizabeth and Virginia. Upon his death, Edmund left instructions to give his estate, worth approximately $500,000, to the two girls.¹⁸ Though Edmund made arrangements to manumit Elizabeth and Virginia and took legal precautions before his death to ensure that they received their inheritance, a court voided his will and divided his estate among his white relatives. They then made Elizabeth and Virginia the joint property of Samuel and John E. Townsend, another relative.¹⁹ After watching this proceeding, Samuel had “a great dread of his children [also] becoming the slaves” of his relatives.²⁰ In 1854 he secured the services of Cabaniss, a Huntsville attorney. By the time of Townsend’s death, Cabaniss had drafted not one but two wills to ensure that the children would be manumitted and inherit his wealth.

Edmund and Samuel Townsend were not unusual. Many other Southern men, particularly during the colonial era, made arrangements to leave property to their mixed-race offspring. This practice was particularly prevalent in states with large free people of color populations like Louisiana. Before the Louisiana Supreme Court outlawed such bequests in 1840, many Southern men made similar arrangements.²¹ But Samuel Townsends white relatives’ opposition created so much turmoil that Cabaniss left his practice in 1858 to attend to Samuel’s case full-time. Some of the white Townsends were almost certainly upset because, like many if not most white Americans at the time, they believed that Samuel’s children were not entitled to such favor. In their view, the social capital they possessed on account of their whiteness would be jeopardized if these half-black children received their inheritance.

After a four-year battle, Cabaniss successfully blocked the white Townsends’ claims, but his efforts to carry out Samuel’s wishes were interrupted by the Civil War. In June 1861, a chancery court ruled that the children, who were now manumitted and living outside the state, could not make further claims on their father’s property because they were residents of the United States, which the Confederacy regarded as a foreign country.²²

After the war, Cabaniss spent five years paying Townsend’s debts, suing his debtors, foreclosing mortgages, and, finally, liquidating the estate. During this period and well into the subsequent decades, he periodically disbursed funds to Townsend’s offspring. While the estate was “significantly diminished by 1870,” he was able to pay not only Townsend’s children, who were called “first class” slaves in Townsend’s will, but others, among them the children’s surviving mothers, who constituted the “second class.” By the time the estate was finally settled in 1896, the children had received $33,719.57, less than a quarter of the intended amount. Some died before “reaping the full benefit from their inheritance.”²³

Prior to Townsend’s death and the provisions made for these former slaves, he lived on 1,700-acre property called the Home Plantation.²⁴ He was hardly alone. Sixty-three bondspeople resided with him, some probably his children. The Home Plantation was the center of Townsend’s agricultural operations. There stood barns, tools, a blacksmith’s shop, and a cotton gin, the latter two used by Townsend and his neighbors. Among the bondspeople who learned how to shoe horses and sharpen hoes on this property was Wesley, Townsend’s eldest enslaved child.²⁵ Wesley’s education in this regard was not unusual for fair-skinned African Americans in and outside slave societies. Color distinction prejudices in the United States typically privileged fair-skinned over dark-skinned blacks in learning skilled trades.²⁶ Blacksmithing was an especially important trade. Even as the nineteenth century became increasingly industrialized, a growing turnpike system carrying horse-drawn buggies and wagons still existed. Moreover, although railways were connecting urban areas by midcentury, travel in most cities and towns continued to rely heavily on horse-drawn transportation until the internal combustion engine arrived.²⁷ Finally, many of America’s farms continued to rely on horses and mules into the twentieth century. If a man of color was hired as a blacksmith, he stood to do well.²⁸ Hence, although a slave, Wesley was well positioned on his white father’s plantation, a place for which some of the Townsend siblings retained warm memories through their lives. This much can be gathered in the letters they and their relatives sent one another over the years. In one such letter, one of the Townsends of mixed race reflected nostalgically on their former days in the “old home.”²⁹ “I often long for news of my old home and friends,” this Townsend also said.³⁰ Like many white Southerners across time, although for different reasons, the Townsends longed for their old homes if not their old lives. The quieter pace of life in the country was appealing to another Townsend of mixed race, who recalled reminiscing on Sundays about “things that happened twenty years ago in the South.”³¹

The affection Samuel Townsend displayed for his children and their mothers, half siblings, and other relatives was apparently such that some of them could fondly recall their lives in Huntsville. That his mixed-race descendants did so permits us again to see the degree to which antebellum Southern white men were hidden actors in the lives of enslaved women and their children, complicating race and class hierarchies. The resulting level of intimacy benefited the children and their mothers in considerable ways, as their manumission and inheritance demonstrates. While he was alive there were less significant everyday benefits, too, as Wesley’s blacksmith training and Osborne’s anecdote about trespassing on the Tates’ property reveal. Townsend’s affection and indulgence were not unique in the antebellum South. A visitor to a Hilton Head, South Carolina, plantation saw a group of “six straight-haired, bright-looking mulatto children” ravenously eating boiled sweet potatoes while sitting on the porch of a dwelling.³² The old black man who fed them said these were his master’s children.

It was recognized that mixed-race children happened. And the less powerful did not generally complain, at least not publicly. In fact, lawyers, judges, and others were complicit in Southern white men’s sexual activities, at least those like Townsend who were capable of paying for their services.

Samuel Townsend seemed to have the respect of some of his neighbors but also some of the children he freed. In one of his several surviving letters, Osborne chastised his brother Thomas for what was probably an unintended oversight. “You did not send me the inscription on our fathers tombstone and also on Uncle Edmonds [sic],” Osborne wrote.³³ Like some of the African American women discussed earlier, the Townsend children had a sense of entitlement because of their relationship to a white man whose regard for them was on display despite their ongoing oppression as enslaved people.

Given Townsends affection for them, it is curious that he did not free his children prior to his death. A couple of possibilities may account for his delay. First, he was thrifty. Despite his wealth, Townsend lived simply. An inventory and appraisal of his home furnishings following his death revealed he made very inexpensive purchases.³⁴ Given the volatile economy characteristic of the early and mid-nineteenth century, he may have been concerned about the cost of having his offspring reside in another state. Then again, he may have wanted them nearby because he, like Ballard, desired companionship, although unlike Ballard, he did not have to worry about keeping his liaisons and progeny secret from his wife. Finally, Townsend almost certainly hesitated to relocate his children because he, like many other Southerners, did not believe the North was without its own problems.

Given the near-universal racism of nineteenth-century white American society, both South and North, Townsend probably concluded, quite reasonably, that his children were better off under his watchful eye and protection in Huntsville than they would be as freedpeople in an overwhelmingly hostile environment in the North. That calculus ended with his death, however, at which point remaining in the South became much more perilous for them—not to mention illegal if they were freed—than resettling in free territory. His apprehensions were warranted. As freedpeople they encountered the hardships and racism faced by millions of other African Americans after the Civil War.³⁵ The behavior of the Freedmen’s Bureau employees, the federal agency charged with aiding former bondspeople’s transition to freed, casts particular light on this matter. They were among many whites that struggled over what to do about bodies no longer enslaved, but which were black, or at least were regarded as black.³⁶ One Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Kansas, where some of the Townsends settled, described one of Townsends daughters as “nearly white[.] [W]ould hardly be taken for an African away from” her relatives.³⁷ Here was an individual whose job implied sympathy toward blacks, yet who could not transcend the racial prejudices of the era. Townsend’s daughter was “black” regardless of her complexion. That she did not appear “black” was not only disconcerting; it threatened the racial hierarchy.

More ominously, as Mary Niall Mitchell has observed, this “nearly white” child heralded what would follow slavery.³⁸ In these racially ambiguous bodies whites in the North and South perceived a future that would be vastly different from the past. African Americans would seek more of the privileges associated with freedom, privileges that had previously been largely monopolized by whites.³⁹

Some whites were fascinated by the origins of such children, as demonstrated by the brisk sale of photographs of mixed-race children that white abolitionists used as antislavery propaganda before the Civil War. Abolitionists hoped that others might realize how immoral behavior in the South led to the birth of white-looking “black” children.⁴⁰ However, the photographs also revealed the publics ongoing fascination with biracial bodies, as was also evident in descriptions of mulattas in midcentury novels.

The Southern slave market benefited from the existence of biracial girls who, when older, could give birth to children of mixed race who, if female, could be in turn exploited. That they could underscores the special implications that reproduction had for African American women and girls of mixed race and the instability of race and class relations in the Old South.⁴¹ Their ability to give birth to children who could be enslaved and create wealth but also serve as sexual partners and companions who exchanged sex for subsistence, education, and freedom for themselves and their children revealed the inconsistent, even contradictory nature of racial oppression in the South. Again, these children ultimately presaged slavery’s demise. Biracial children pointed to the numerous black-white intimate encounters that compelled some Southern white men to refer to some of their bondspeople as “their children” and that compelled the latter to refer to these men as “fathers.” Both disrupted long-held beliefs that blacks were inferior and not kin. This phenomenon figured into the complexities and contradictions of the peculiar institution of slavery. For example, the political ambitions of Cabaniss, the Townsends’ lawyer, led him to serve in the Alabama legislature from 1861 to 1863. His role as a defender of slavery was at odds with his oversight of the Townsend case. But Cabaniss’s willingness to fulfill his dead client’s wishes was evident in his continuing work on behalf of the Townsends following the Civil War. In doing so, he joined a network of white men who shepherded certain enslaved bodies to freedom. As Bernie Jones has observed, white slaveholders left money to black sexual partners and children so frequently that Southern judges routinely affirmed such transfers and property, “especially when precedents under the common law could be easily used to do so.”⁴² In some instances, jurists responded favorably because they demonstrated their moral obligation to care for their black children as they did for their white ones. For example, the Hancock County, Georgia, planter David Dickson left his half-million-dollar estate to his half-black daughter with Julia Frances Dickson, an enslaved woman.⁴³ Although enslaved, Amanda America Dickson received an education and experienced a genteel upbringing while receiving her father’s favor and even that of Dickson’s mother. In fact, Amanda became known as the wealthiest black woman in the postbellum South when the Georgia Supreme Court upheld her father’s will. So committed was she to her father that before he died she returned to live with him, bringing two children who were the product of her failed marriage to a white man.⁴⁴

These quiet efforts to attend to mixed-race children’s futures occurred alongside debates about the future of slavery. These debates involved some of the country’s most influential politicians, some of whom were not only aware of biracial children’s existence, but were consulted about their fates. In his search for the best place to settle the Townsend children, Cabaniss contacted men who, at first glance, appear unlikely to have any interest in the subject. He asked Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois whether settling them there would violate state law. Not only had Douglas, a pro-slavery politician, orchestrated the Compromise of 1850, which attempted unsuccessfully to settle the issue of slavery’s expansion, he reignited debate on the topic four years later with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He also initially backed the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision and went on to become the 1860 Democratic contender for the highest position in the land, president of the United States. Cabaniss also reached out to Clement Claiborne Clay Jr., Alabama Senator and distant relative of the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, who in turn sought the views of William Seward, a fervently antislavery New York senator. With these men’s input, Cabaniss crafted a plan to resettle Townsend’s children.

A year and a half after his client’s death, Cabaniss sent W. D. Chadick, a white Huntsville minister, on a fact-finding trip. The mission: to locate a home for the children. While Liberia, the African settlement where many free people of color had been resettled, was considered, Chadick’s destination was Ohio. Again, Levi Coffin, the abolitionist, was well aware of the Southern white men who brought their children with enslaved women north to be educated.⁴⁵ Coffin recalled the arrival of numerous “emancipated slaves … [who were] frequently brought to Cincinnati by their white fathers.”⁴⁶ Some of the men Coffin met wanted their offspring to live in Ohio because they believed they could lead happier and more prosperous lives there. Others clearly sought only to relieve themselves of social embarrassment or financial burden and were uninterested in ensuring their well-being. One such man, a Tennessee lawyer, arrived in Cincinnati with two slave boys who were his sons. With the help of a local agent, perhaps one familiar with such situations, the man was directed to Coffin, who was a frequent facilitator of resettlement efforts.⁴⁷ The boys’ father asked that his children be put in the care of someone who would place them in a “good school and look after their interests.” Coffin declined to assume such a responsibility. While admitting he had done as much before, he was overwhelmed with his business and abolition efforts. He also found such chores “troublesome.”⁴⁸

Coffin suggested that the boys be taken instead to the Union Literary Institute, an inexpensive boarding school opened in Indiana to aid people of color.⁴⁹ The institution was ninety miles from Cincinnati. But the man begged Coffin to take the children himself. Coffin acquiesced only because the lawyer left enough money to defray expenses for their first term and promised to send more. However, he failed to send additional funds and Coffin ended up having to advance money to cover the boys’ future expenses. Coffin said he “never succeeded in getting [the money he had spent] refunded.”⁵⁰ Coffin also aided a sixteen-year-old girl who, in his opinion, was as “white” in appearance as any of his own children.⁵¹ She had come from Mississippi, and her father wanted to have her educated. Because this man left funds and pleaded for assistance, Coffin and his wife enrolled the girl in a Cincinnati public school, one that she could attend because she looked so “white.” But the $75 her father gave Coffin soon ran out, and Coffin grew frustrated but not just because of the girl’s dwindling funds. She was also unruly, something Coffin attributed to the pernicious effects of slavery on her life.

Coffin wrote her father, demanding more money, and received a reply, though not the one he wanted. Her father said if “abolitionists were too mean to school the girl, they could send her back to slavery, where she would be better cared for,” because he would incur no further expenses for providing for her while she was outside the South. Coffin and his wife were only freed from the responsibility of caring for the girl when she “fell into bad company among the colored people,” although she eventually married a “respectable colored man” and ended her “improper associations.”⁵²

As the actions of Ballard, John Williams and his brother, and the Townsend brothers make clear, not all Southern white men so carelessly disposed of their half-black children. The wealthy brother of a judge who lived outside New Orleans kept a woman of mixed race as his common-law wife. The couple had eight children. Privilege abounded in this family, with bondspeople waiting on the mixed-race children. The three eldest were sent East to be educated. They were fortunate. The five youngest were still at home when their father died without a will. Having inherited four nieces and a nephew as his own property, the judge tried to raise them in the manner his brother would have done. Because Cincinnati was a well-known destination for people of mixed race, one of the children, a boy in his early teens, requested that he be sent there to be educated. His uncle contacted Coffin, who sent the youngster to the Indiana boarding school. The child’s bills were paid in a timely manner. Coffin also helped the judge bring the other four, all females, to Ohio. “On the arrival of the boat I met the girls at the river, and conveyed them to our house,” Coffin remembered.⁵³

Using $500 their uncle had sent, Coffin saw to it that the girl’s enrolled at Oberlin College, two hundred miles northeast of Cincinnati.⁵⁴ But one of the four, as earlier mentioned, returned to Louisiana to be with her white lover. Her sisters went on to receive their education at Oberlin, but it was disrupted by the war. Coffin and his wife reluctantly took them in while the school was closed. The couple grew frustrated because the girls were unaccustomed to housework, the kind of work the Coffins knew they could easily find for them, given general white attitudes concerning the abilities of African Americans. As well-to-do African Americans brought up in a privileged setting, these young women probably thought such work beneath them. Coffin noted that they were good at needlework. He was delighted when they eventually found mates and got married. Enchanted, as others had been, with their fair skin, his most vivid impression was that the three were “amiable and beautiful young women” and, moreover, “fair scholars.”⁵⁵

Other whites, among them Chadick, had similarly conflicted feelings about the mixed-race children of white men whose financial and emotional investments enabled them to live more comfortable and secure lives than most whites thought appropriate. During his visit to Cincinnati, Chadick was made aware of the city’s abolitionist presence by pro-slavery whites who played on his prejudices. He was told that these liberals “stripped” any money arriving freedpeople had. But he noticed, too, the general hostility in the city toward free people of color.⁵⁶ He was not alone in having made such an observation. The South Carolina planter and politician James Hammond, who reputedly had incestuous relationships with his enslaved kin, instructed his son to secure the futures of one enslaved woman and her children, saying, “Her second I believe is mine. Take care of her & her children who are both of your blood if not mine.… I cannot free these people & send them North. It would be cruelty to them.”⁵⁷

Having arrived in Cincinnati with Wesley, Townsend’s eldest at twenty-seven, Chadick moved on, taking Wesley with him. Chadick and Wesley visited several other Ohio cities. Chadick ultimately found Albany, a town in Athens County, about 160 miles east of Cincinnati, suitable. He heard that free people of color encountered less racism there because “tolerant” Virginians and Marylanders populated the area. But in his report to Cabaniss, Chadick also mentioned that he found the town’s pastoral atmosphere, which doubtless reminded him of the rural South, agreeable. Athens County, he said, was “one of the districts [in Ohio] in which a negro with no more than common sense could do well.”⁵⁸ Pleased that the county had fertile soil and a climate that he believed was favorable to “Negroes,” his logic reflected Southern beliefs that people of African descent were better fit to be agricultural laborers in generally warmer climates than to be workers in other occupations and more urban settings.

Chadick did see to it that Wesley, who was married and had a child, settled there and received training in order that he might quickly provide for himself, his family, and his siblings. Chadick enrolled Wesley, who was illiterate, in an industrial school in Albany, presumably so he could obtain the skills that would allow him to manage his and his younger siblings’ business affairs once they arrived. The school had sixty pupils “representing many southern states.” Though he could see the importance of education to the Townsend children’s future, chances are that Chadick, like many whites, considered vocational training to be more suited to African Americans’ supposedly inferior intellect than the liberal arts education they would get at schools like Wilberforce and Oberlin.⁵⁹

Though obviously well positioned in comparison to most bondspeople and former bondspeople, ongoing trials for even privileged free children were unavoidable. They encountered not only racism but also more universal sensations, among them, loneliness. In June 1858, Wesley wrote a letter to Cabaniss, expressing longing for his wife and children who remained in Huntsville. He also inquired about his father’s estate and announced plans to search for a job in a blacksmith’s shop once the school term ended. While he waited for an answer, his father’s white relatives continued to make claims on the black Townsends’ estate, delaying the arrival of his siblings. Not until January 1860 were the rest of the Townsend children and grandchildren manumitted: Caroline and her infant child Elizabeth, Thomas, Willis, Osborne, Parthenia, Joseph, Bradford, Susanna, and Milcha, along with the two daughters of their Uncle Edmund. Edmund’s son, Woodson, was also freed, as were Wesley’s wife, Jane, and his two children, Thomas’s half sister Elvira, and her infant child.⁶⁰

All were sent to Xenia, 100 miles northwest of Albany. Wesley relocated there and saw to it that his siblings were enrolled at Wilberforce four days after their arrival. He soon found himself in disagreement with some of them and with whites who attempted to manage their lives. In a letter filled with misspelled but legible words, Wesley told Chadick, “Dear friend Mr Chadick I will write you a few lines to give you som information how we are geting along.” Though his penmanship was childlike, his mind was that of an astute young man. He went on to express his unhappiness about paying $800 a month for the property where they lived in Xenia.⁶¹ He suggested that purchasing a house would be a better way to use their stipend.

Wesley had other worries. Some of his siblings almost immediately displayed a sense of entitlement arising from their upbringing. Elvira, Thomas’s sister, and Jane, Wesley’s wife, wanted money, and when Wesley refused their request they demanded to be returned to Alabama.⁶² In a separate letter, R. S. Rust, director of Wilberforce, informed Cabaniss that Willis had also demanded money from Wesley.⁶³ Indeed, Willis sought to bypass Wesley altogether, for on September 8, 1860, he wrote Cabaniss, asking him for money and instructing him to mail it to him and not Wesley.⁶⁴

The conflict between the Townsend siblings was also entangled with their dealings with whites around them. Their relationships with some were better than with others. Though Rust seemed to be concerned about the Townsends, Wesley found him disagreeable. “I think that our money is all that Mr Russ [sic] wants and is all the use he has for us,” Wesley said in a letter to Chadick, adding, “That made me right mad with him.”⁶⁵ Wesley next reported that his siblings were enrolled in school but that some had colds. Speaking in place of the father who was no longer there, he requested additional funds to purchase “bed clothes,” beds, stoves, chairs, a table, and house utensils.

While the Townsend children settled in at Wilberforce, Cabaniss decided that Kansas was the best site for their mothers and the other relatives Samuel Townsend had freed. Land in Kansas was affordable, and those with a small inheritance could thus maximize their investment. On February 25, 1860, barely a month after Wesley’s siblings had arrived in Xenia, twenty-nine more of Townsends bondspeople left Huntsville by train for America’s heartland.⁶⁶ The relocation of these individuals in Leavenworth, Kansas, presaged the movement of thousands of other rural African Americans from the South in 1879 and 1880.⁶⁷

As these former slaves settled in Kansas, they, too, encountered racism. White Kansans feared the presence of blacks would shift white migration from their state to Nebraska and Minnesota. One land agent questioned whether the Townsends he met even had enough money to buy land. “There is a colored man in this place, named Woodson Townsend … who calls on us frequently,” the agent said in a letter to Cabaniss, adding, “He is anxious to purchase land here and commence farming.”⁶⁸

Meanwhile, over the next year, Wesley tended to the needs of his siblings and two cousins in Xenia. In one letter to an unnamed brother, Elizabeth described an event she and the others attended: “The young men and the young lad[ies] had a social and we enjoyed ourselves.” Next, she relayed a bit of gossip.⁶⁹ Elizabeth announced that some of her cousins had become religious. “[A] few weeks ago we had a r[e] viv[a]l here[.] [A] good many of my schoolmates] profess religion. Sister has profess[ed] religion. Thomas and Milcha [and] Bradford all these have profess [ed] religion,” she said, referring to the evangelical impulse known as the Second Great Awakening that swept the nation during the late antebellum period.⁷⁰ Revealing a sense of independence that was especially pronounced among the Townsend women and girls, Elizabeth seems to have refused to follow the crowd.

That the girls and women of color who had benefited from familiarity with Southern white men were differently positioned than freed boys and men was revealed in their confident way of speaking. Many of them had worked in homes under the surveillance of whites. There they heard and experienced much. Though rape and other hazards existed, the proximity allowed African American women and girls to see noticeable discrepancies in white men’s behavior, enabling some to take advantage of their familiarity with powerful figures and others, too.⁷¹ For instance, Julia Frances Dickson, the enslaved woman who eventually produced a daughter named Amanda with the Georgia planter David Dickson, grew bitter after he had forced sex with her at a young age and reportedly “ruled” him and others in his household with an “iron hand.”⁷² The mothers of the Townsend children may have sometimes behaved similarly. Shortly after being freed, three of the women Samuel Townsend had once bedded were “the greatest trouble” for D. L. Lakin, a Huntsville man hired by Cabaniss to relocate them to Kansas. “I … have been forced Several times to Speak to them in tones of unmistakable command,” Lakin wrote Cabaniss as he journeyed north on a Mississippi steamboat with them.⁷³ He had not been compelled to speak so forcefully to their male relatives who were also on board.

FIGURE 14. First page of Elizabeth Townsend’s May 18, 1861, letter shortly after the beginning of the Civil War. She is describing activities at Wilberforce, a boarding school-turned-university in Xenia, Ohio. The letter is addressed to her brother Woodsen Townsend. Edmund Townsend, Samuel Townsend’s brother, is the father of these two siblings. Notably, she is inquiring about the status of her white relatives in Huntsville. Unlike Elizabeth and several of their freed cousins, Woodson was manumitted and relocated to Kansas—not Ohio. MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Septimus Douglas Cabaniss Papers, Special Collections, Stanley Hoole Library, University of Alabama.

FIGURE 15. Second page of Elizabeth Townsend’s May 18, 1861, letter. MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Septimus Douglas Cabaniss Papers, Special Collections, Stanley Hoole Library, University of Alabama.

FIGURE 16. Third page of Elizabeth Townsend’s May 18, 1861, letter. MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Septimus Douglas Cabaniss Papers, Special Collections, Stanley Hoole Library, University of Alabama.

As the Townsends forged ahead rebuilding their lives, the Civil War disrupted their efforts. Wilberforce was forced temporarily to close. The Townsend males who were of age served in a “colored” unit fighting on behalf of the Union, and the Townsend women and girls left Xenia to live with their relatives in locations outside the South. Perhaps because of their advantage when compared to other African Americans, they continued to attract the attention of whites around them, some of whom may have been their white kinfolk who desired to see them enslaved again. In May 1861, a month after the attack on Fort Sumter launched the beginning of the war, Wesley received a letter from John Duer, an abolitionist, who asked about their well-being after seeing an advertisement in an antislavery newspaper “inquiring after the former slaves of Samuel Townsend.”⁷⁴ Duer asked Wesley to “keep quiet” on an unnamed matter—doubtless related to their inheritance—until he heard from “a gentleman who is a ‘friend’ of colored people.” Duer was probably referring to a member of the Quaker community. He added that he hoped the Townsends would “reap substantial benefit” from their father’s estate but warned that doing so “will require great care and energy.”⁷⁵

Before the war ended, some of the siblings returned to Wilber force and again found themselves under surveillance by whites, even well-meaning ones, who struggled over what to do with bodies that revealed the great inconsistencies in white supremacist ideas. These were children who had obviously gained an understanding about their own self-worth in relation to a white man of means. Around such children, many whites proceeded carefully. It had earlier been true of Mrs. Tate, their Hunts-ville neighbor, and now J. K. Parker, a local white man.⁷⁶ At the request of Rust, Parker monitored them at the school. Parker initially hesitated, suggesting that such a task was inappropriate because he hardly knew the Townsends. “Being an entire stranger I felt embarrassed [to do this],” he stated in a letter to Rust.⁷⁷ Parker added that the Townsends had told him that they were accustomed to managing their own money. Perhaps under pressure from Rust, Parker eventually agreed to monitor the children’s expenditures. His report on the expenses of Susanna, one of the Townsend girls, illustrates his oversight. He noted every penny that had been spent by or on her in this manner:

FIGURE 17. Four of the Alabama planter Samuel Townsend’s mixed-race sons are listed on this page of Wilberforce University’s 1860 yearbook. Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society.

He added that a doctor’s bill needed to be paid but that the children “had no money.”⁷⁹

Parker’s announcement invites deeper scrutiny of the circumstances surrounding the Townsend children’s experiences in Xenia. Had they misspent their funds? Had they been given too little on which to survive? Had someone taken some of it? We have no concrete answers to these questions. It is possible that they, being reckless or inexperienced, had not managed their funds well or that Rust took advantage of them, as Wesley alleged. What cannot be doubted is that whites, even presumably sympathetic ones like Rust, did not appear to support the Townsends’ efforts to maximize the promises of freedom, at least from the Townsends’ perspective. Children of mixed race who remained in slave territory saw similar attitudes. Shortly before the Civil War, George Davis, the son of a white man and a “black servant girl” who resided in Boyd County, refused an offer by two white abolitionists to help him escape to Canada.⁸⁰ Davis did not leave owing to his status as the “well treated” and “trusted servant” of his father. Like the Townsends, he benefited from his proximity to a man who was still alive and had invested emotionally and financially in him. Their cases were not unusual. Edd Shirley, a former resident of Monroe County, Kentucky, was the son of a white man and a “colored” woman. Though Shirley was sold twice, his father eventually purchased him, revealing attachment on the part of the former.

Children like the Townsends, Davis, and Shirley were obviously positioned more favorably than other enslaved, even free African Americans.⁸¹ After the war and the abolition of slavery, such positioning had special implications for those who had earlier intimate ties to white men.⁸² Their sense of privilege emboldened them—again, the women and girls especially—to speak with unmistakable assertiveness. Consider the letter Elvira sent to Cabaniss. Elvira, who left Ohio for Leavenworth, where she married her cousin Woodson, wrote on September 10, 1865:

Of all the Townsends, Elvira seems to have been especially assertive, probably because she was not only the daughter of one of the slave women with whom Samuel Townsend slept but also his housekeeper. Such proximity probably resulted in a greater level of intimacy and familiarity between her and him than the other Townsends.⁸⁴ In challenging Cabaniss, she was not only drawing on her earlier experiences, but testing the shifting terrain of American society brought about by the war.

However, in her letter Elvira was unnecessarily confrontational. While he was pro-slavery, Cabaniss had not abandoned the task of settling the Townsends estate. Some of the letters from the Townsend siblings to Cabaniss and to each other confirm that he traveled to Kansas to check on some of them. In a September 1866 letter, Willis informed Cabaniss: “I received a letter from Osborne the other day telling me that you had been out to see them in Kansas,” adding that he sought news regarding the “estate of our Father.”⁸⁵

Willis was more even-tempered than Elvira when addressing Cabaniss, who sometimes appears in their letters as a wishing well around which they gathered, asking for money that should already have been in their hands. To be sure, not all were pleased with his efforts. Elvira’s husband, Woodson, was especially irked. He was jailed in Kansas for an unspecified crime during the war and believed Cabaniss should have done more on his behalf. “I think that the [guardians] of Samuels Townsend esstate has treated me mean very mean,” Woodson charged.⁸⁶ Doubtless the prolonged delay in receiving their inheritance generated tension in the family, for Woodson’s anger was also directed at his cousins, who he accused of trying to steal his share. He even believed that Cabaniss was aiding their efforts. Wrote Woodson, “I do not know of what interest it is for you to swindle me out of my money and give to Uncle Sams children. I think that you are trying to kep me in here [in prison] till Uncle Sams estate is wound up.”⁸⁷

Woodson’s ordeal wrecked his marriage. Elvira told him defiantly, but inaccurately, that she had enough money to live without him, providing further proof of her self-confidence and, by extension, the boldness so frequently exhibited by black women familiar with and willing to take advantage of the inconsistencies in white patriarchy when disrupted by familiarity, sentiment, and even attachment. She remarried in 1866, announcing to Cabaniss that she had married a “good” but “poor” husband.⁸⁸ They resided in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he had difficulties earning a living. She therefore demanded that Cabaniss send her some money as he “promised” to do. Elvira died there in 1868, having received a little over $700 from the Townsend estate. However, her two children, who were raised by her mother in Kansas, eventually received more than $2,000.⁸⁹

When the Townsends’ correspondence is considered collectively, one senses a family, like many others in their circumstance, attempting to find its way in a deeply racist country, where their mixed-race status carried only limited currency. Despite their ties to wealthy white men, they and many others endured a great deal of suffering, some of it owing to their own missteps but most of it resulting from the bigotry surrounding them.

The historian Martha Sandweiss’s study of the nineteenth-century romance between the white geologist Clarence King and Ada Coleman, an African American woman born a slave in Georgia, reveals similar trials endured by their offspring. Coleman relocated to New York after the Civil War, and there worked as a nursemaid. King, who had long been drawn to women of color, married her in 1882, “passing” as African American himself.⁹⁰ For decades, “James Todd,” as King renamed himself, explained his long absences from their Brooklyn and later Flushing, Queens, homes, first by pretending to be a Pullman porter and later a clerk for a steel company.

King demonstrated his regard publicly and legally through marriage.⁹¹ King’s absences took a toll on Ada and their children. But, as Sandweiss makes clear, for over thirteen years King was committed to Ada “and their children, at no small cost to his own financial and emotional well-being.”⁹² King’s devotion to Ada was revealed in letters he sent her over the years, letters that document a deep and genuine emotional bond between two unlikely bodies. In fact, when Ada made claims on King’s estate after his death, according to his wishes, she shared the letters with his white male friends, who kept them so that they would never see the light of day. But, perhaps knowing the issue could end up in court, they did not destroy them. In time, Ada learned that the money he sent to support her before and after his death often came via her husband’s friend John Hay, Abraham Lincolns private secretary and later U.S. secretary of state.⁹³ Again, the reach of mixed-race children was of considerable import. Many were often a mere degree of separation from prominent figures. Such reach often figured into their everyday lives. Often like their mothers, they moved through space with greater frequency than most other African Americans. Some attended schools. Some married whites. Two of the Kings’ daughters were so fair that they passed as white and married white men. Following his death in 1901, his marriage became public knowledge and was the scandalized subject of news reports.⁹⁴ Though King was the subject of several biographies in the twentieth century, it was not until Sandweiss’s book that Ada Copeland Todd King emerged as more than Clarence King’s “kept mistress.”⁹⁵ As Sandweiss boldly concludes, she was his wife.

Speaking to the difficulties historians have assessing the sincerity of emotional exchanges between interracial couples of the past, Sandweiss writes, “Public documents record the story that James and Ada Todd told the world, but they did not reveal what they said to each other.”⁹⁶ For example, while Ada had earlier told census takers that her husband was a Pullman porter from Baltimore, in 1900 she told one that he was a “black man born in the West Indies.”⁹⁷ Ada evidently struggled to explain the comfortable life her “husband” had given her in a mixed-race neighborhood on North Prince Street in Queens. Sandweiss ponders whether King told her to describe him in this manner or whether she surmised on her own that not all was “as it seemed” with her “husband,” so she offered her take on the subject to spare her family unwanted scrutiny.⁹⁸

Unlike Avenia White and Rice Ballard or John Williams and Louisa Picquet, details about the Kings’ relationship are revealed in his letters and other sources, allowing us to hear their conversations. In one letter that began, “My darling,” King told her to expect a gentleman visitor who would soon bring her money. “I don’t care for him to see the children. Always have the parlor looking nice, and when he comes put on a nice dress or a nice wrapper.”⁹⁹ It appears as if King acted as had Ballard, who years earlier used an intermediary—another white man—to deliver money to his former slave mistress Avenia White and her African American landlady, Frances Bruster. We also see the degree to which this relationship was orchestrated. Like Ballard, King was concerned about appearances. To counter myths concerning the promiscuity of black women, or displaying class-based motives, King asked his black wife to dress respectably. Perhaps Ballard felt similarly when he settled White and Johnson and their four children in a home far from Cincinnati’s seedy waterfront. Possibly like King, and no matter his offenses, he demonstrated his awareness of how people of color with ties to men like him continued to face white prejudice. Samuel Townsend’s children obviously did as well.

Like the Kings’ five children, even those who passed as white, the Townsends suffered systemic discrimination in a society that was generally antagonistic toward African Americans. It was something from which they could not escape, no matter how much money they inherited from their white father. But their determination to move forward in spite of the obstacles before them was sustained not just by their awareness of their promised wealth, but by reaching out to each other.

Osborne Townsend, Samuel’s fourth-eldest son, seems to have written most frequently. His letters reveal the kinship that existed in the family. They also reveal the loneliness that he and doubtless many other post-bellum African Americans felt. Growing wealth in this country was no substitute for personal contact with familiar faces. Osborne doubtless felt as much in Georgetown, Colorado.

Tucked at the eastern base of the Snowy Range, Georgetown is fifty-two miles west of Denver. Here, at an altitude of 8,530 feet, locals boasted about the pure mountain air and the areas generally mild climate. The town was named for George Griffith, who with his brother, David, arrived in 1859 from Kentucky and made first discovery by whites of silver in the region. As the prospectors flocked to the town, gamblers, “shady ladies,” and other fortune hunters came, too, from states as far away as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and from the Deep South.¹⁰⁰

Doubtless Osborne saw and felt much while living in Colorado, where in addition to prospecting for silver, he plied his trade as a barber, one of the more prestigious professions available to African Americans in the nineteenth century. He may have compared the hills of Huntsville to the mountains around Georgetown, a place he studied carefully. In one letter to his brother Thomas, the brother to whom he wrote the most, Osborne described the dwindling presence of Native Americans in the area.¹⁰¹ The topic came up owing to Thomas’s expressed desire for a robe made of buffalo hide. Osborne noted that he had “not seen an Indian in six years,” though he had once traded with members of the Ute tribe who had since been “moved several hundred miles southwest” of Georgetown. However, Osborne said he believed he could find such a buffalo hide robe in Denver. That these two siblings could speak so casually about a buffalo robe suggests that their everyday concerns departed from the basic material comforts on the minds of many if not most people of African descent in the United States during the nineteenth century and afterward. Certainly they did not long, as had Avenia White, for a bed. The Townsend siblings experienced many sorrows but many triumphs, too. Interestingly, some longed for long-ago moments. For example, in one letter to Thomas, Osborne said he missed their “schoolmates at Wilberforce” and a “good many of the old times live[d] there.”¹⁰²

But their worries persisted. Osborne often inquired about the whereabouts of another brother, Willis, who, the last he knew, lived in Ohio. Osborne might have been especially concerned about Willis because they shared a mother as well as a father.¹⁰³ “Wish you could let me know if Willis is in New Richmond,” Osborne asked Thomas in January 1876.¹⁰⁴ Osborne eventually ascertained more about Willis in news relayed by another relative. In a letter to her “Uncle Thomas,” Carrie Leonteen Townsend, Wesley’s daughter, mentioned that “Cousin Alice Townsend from New Richmond” was visiting. Alice was probably Willis’s daughter.¹⁰⁵

Willis had apparently followed his older half brother Wesley to New Richmond. Unlike Wesley, however, he stayed there. After the war Wesley lived briefly in Kansas and while there not only borrowed money from his relatives, but deserted his wife, Jane, when he relocated to New Richmond. In New Richmond he remarried, to a woman named Adelaide, and purchased a house, only to lose it.¹⁰⁶ Strangely, Wesley attributed his inability to pay the mortgage to locals not liking him. He was called a “butternut,” a derogatory colloquialism in the southern Midwest communities of Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana for rural Southerners who were different from modern eastern Yankees.¹⁰⁷

Unhappy, Wesley returned “home” to Huntsville, where he got a teaching job at Huntsville Institute.¹⁰⁸ Still restless, he subsequently relocated to Brookhaven, Mississippi, which was close to the Gulf Coast and New Orleans.¹⁰⁹ There he farmed land and earned enough money to afford a piano in his house and pay for Carrie’s piano lessons.¹¹⁰ Indeed, in her letter to her uncle Thomas, Carrie had equally important news to convey concerning herself: “I am not braging [sic] but you ought to see me play piano. I tell you I make ours sing.”¹¹¹ Before closing her letter, Carrie mentioned that she was attending New Orleans University. She wondered if her uncle could send her something. “A nice winter dress would be accepted,” she wrote, signaling that her tastes reflected those of elite Americans in her day.¹¹²

Thanks to the prosperity of her white grandfather and her father, she was a member of an emerging African American upper middle class. Her uncle Thomas was a claims lawyer for African American soldiers seeking war pensions and eventually a Huntsville city alderman who resided on Adams Street, one of the “choice spots” in Huntsville.¹¹³ In fact, her uncle was a neighbor of John David Weeden, a white man who had been a colonel in the Confederate army and was a lawyer himself.¹¹⁴ Like Carrie, other second-generation Townsends pursued educations at institutions of higher learning. Thomas Jr., the son of Thomas, attended Fisk University before transferring to Howard University.¹¹⁵ As well-positioned black Americans, the Townsends had opportunities to pursue education, obtain solid employment, enter the professions, open businesses, and travel. Each new experience and achievement suggests how far they had come as freedpeople. However, as people of African descent, they still struggled to achieve the full promise of freedom.

Among the advantages the Townsend children and their descendants had was the opportunity to make choices about their career paths, which may explain their desire to live in certain places. Demonstrating this point, Osborne once inquired about Thomas’s crops and wondered whether Thomas was overworking himself in Huntsville, farming and teaching.¹¹⁶ “It is no use to kill yourself trying to get rich,” Osborne once said to Thomas, apparently unaware of the irony of such a comment from one who was barbering while mining silver. Before he signed off, Osborne inquired again about Willis, saying, “I have not heard from [him] in years.”¹¹⁷

Why Osborne had such trouble learning about Willis’s situation is unclear. Had Willis deliberately distanced himself from his family? Or did he not want to communicate with Osborne? Whatever the reason, Osborne finally heard from Willis and was reminded that no matter their privilege, they would almost certainly struggle like other African Americans. Willis, who apparently had earned his living as a waiter on a steamboat, a once-prized job typically assigned to fair-skinned black men, had been affected by the decline of Cincinnati’s steamboat industry. This decline began during the 1850s, as railroads were built. Prior to the 1850s, no rail line offered competition to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.¹¹⁸ But the low-water seasons permitted developing railroads to gain a foothold by the mid-1850s, and the demand for water transportation declined significantly.¹¹⁹ From 1860 on, black boatmen were disproportionately affected by steamboat job losses.¹²⁰

But even as Cincinnati’s infrastructure lagged because of its poor rail system and the steamboat’s decline, the city became a major manufacturing center.¹²¹ From the 1860s on, Cincinnati, which had been hemmed in by a waterfront on one side and hills on the others, mushroomed into a manufacturing center. Between 1851 and 1910, the value of products made in Cincinnati increased from $54 million to $262 million.

In all likelihood, Willis encountered job competition from local whites, who dominated the best factory positions.¹²² During this period domestic work and manual laborer therefore became the dominant occupations for African Americans.¹²³ This labor transition occurred in a space that was more congested than it had been during the antebellum period. Only New York City was more cramped by 1870. Land that was increasingly separated by function led to the creation of street lines and cable railways, enabling whites to flee to valley and hilltop communities while people of color continued settling in the city’s basin.¹²⁴ A once racially integrated Cincinnati now segregated its residents by race and class. Even black Cincinnatians who had earlier benefited from relations with Southern white men faced such segregation.

Yet during the postbellum years, African Americans continued to migrate to Cincinnati and the state as a whole. Ohio’s black population grew from 36,673 in 1860 to 80,000 in 1880. This steady increase contributed to rising white hostility that was less evident in states like Indiana, where fewer blacks settled during the postbellum period.¹²⁵ For example, Cincinnati’s white printers ignored requests by skilled black printers for admission into their union. Such exclusions also applied to women.¹²⁶ As the century progressed, the city’s skilled white laborers also ostracized the “small, but significant number” of African Americans who worked in semiskilled positions.¹²⁷

Willis Townsend was not shielded from race-based hostility in Cincinnati, possibly contributing to his move to nearby New Richmond. While he worked as a waiter on a boat shuttling passengers between Cincinnati and Portsmouth, he, as had Louisa Picquet, relocated to this a racially more tolerant river town. During the 1870s, he earned $30 a month, or $360 annually, a solid salary considering the typical American mechanic earned $10 a week between 1873 and 1877, the most severe period of a global financial crisis, the world’s first.¹²⁸

In such an unstable economic atmosphere, it was not uncommon for Cincinnati workers to experience lengthy episodes of unemployment or part-time work.¹²⁹ Amid such social and economic uncertainty, men of color in particular struggled.¹³⁰ “Willis seems to sail under difficulties,” Osborne shared in a letter to their brother Thomas, possibly referring to the hurdles Willis encountered in Cincinnati during the mid-1880s and beyond.¹³¹ Either he had not managed his income well or his salary had not been enough to meet the needs of his family. His brother Osborne also felt financially strained as the federal government attempted to direct the nation’s economy and money supply.¹³² “If I had any money I would send some but declare I haven’t,” Osborne told Willis. “We produce two million of silver each year but the government takes” any profit in it.¹³³

While contending with an evolving economy, the Townsends continued to inquire about their father’s estate. Said Osborne in another letter to Thomas, “If there is anything coming to me out of that wreck I want it!”¹³⁴ With the aid of a second lawyer that they themselves hired in 1870, some of the Townsend offspring actively pursued their father’s money without Cabaniss’s help.¹³⁵

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century and beyond, the Townsends encountered many trials, some self-inflicted, others owing to racial bias. This was certainly true of Osborne, whose experiences expand our view of African American life in the Far West and the hardening racist attitudes at the turn of the century.¹³⁶ While moving west, some African Americans found employment as baggage clerks, cooks, porters, and even conductors on trains.¹³⁷ Some blacks passed as white in order to evade endemic racism, because, as Ariela Gross tells us, the malleability of race and the degree to which race is understood not only by what others see, but one’s environment.¹³⁸ Race was also determined by one’s deliberate actions in the face of bigotry. Illustrating this, Osborne’s son Thomas, who was born in Georgetown, was listed as “white” in the 1885 Colorado state census. Osborne was recorded as being “black” five years earlier in the 1880 federal census.¹³⁹ In the 1910 census, his son Thomas, now a resident of Deer Lodge, Montana, was listed as a “mulatto.”¹⁴⁰ This change in designation may have been a result of hardening racist attitudes among white Americans or something that a census taker noticed in Thomas’s appearance or actions as he aged, something that declared he was a person of part African descent. Perhaps owing to his ethnicity, he was unemployed. He also lived in a rented dwelling apart from Gertrude, who may have been dark-skinned and increased the chances of observers discovering that he was in fact of African descent. If so, he revealed the complex strategies that mixed-race men adopted during the postbellum years to maximize their ties to white America. During the antebellum period, it had been advantageous for mixed-race free men of color to marry women of mixed race to maintain their high position in the black community. Some may have done the same in later decades even as hardening attitudes toward African Americans of all complexions required new survival tactics.¹⁴¹ Having possibly married a dark-skinned woman, the fair-skinned Thomas was compelled to briefly live apart from her.

Thomas’s strategy mirrored those his father encountered as the century waned. Indeed, the experiences of Osborne’s son contrasted sharply with other well-to-do relatives, including his uncle, the lawyer in Huntsville for whom he was likely named. In the 1920 census, Thomas was a “black” resident of Seattle. With Gertrude beside him, he resided in a rented dwelling with three other individuals, among them, his older brother Charles.¹⁴² The two brothers worked as janitors, suggesting the limited benefits of being the grandsons of a white man.¹⁴³ Their relatives had received in a piecemeal fashion a sizable inheritance, but in their case not enough to move them beyond menial positions. White prejudice almost certainly figured into their ongoing oppression.

In the 1930 census, Thomas and Gertrude were still residents of Seattle but were the parents of a son named Thomas,¹⁴⁴ listed as being black. He and his family lived in a house on Angeline Street in a multiethnic, multinational neighborhood that contained a “Negro” couple from Antigua and their two children.¹⁴⁵ Possibly indicative of job instability related to the Great Depression, Thomas now washed cars in a garage.

The migration of people of African descent to Seattle announced great changes in American life, presenting other hurdles in an industrializing world. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the country was divided more or less equally between two spheres, rural and urban.¹⁴⁶ As a new century beckoned, more people moved into cities. Between 1860 and 1920, the national population tripled, from 31 million to more than 105 million. During the same period, city dwellers grew ninefold, from 6 million to approximately 54 million people. In 1920, more than 50 percent of Americans lived in cities and towns.¹⁴⁷ At the same time, racism escalated and expanded to encompass Asians and others. A white mob led to the forced removal of two hundred workers from Seattle’s Chinese district in 1886.¹⁴⁸ In the opening decades of the twentieth century, strained race relations often kept blacks and Asians out of Seattle’s labor unions.¹⁴⁹ In this hostile environment, African Americans continued to bend the “truth” about their identity in order to prosper. While Thomas was again recorded as being a “black” man in the 1940 census, within two years he was listed as “white” on his draft registration card.¹⁵⁰

Having a grandfather who was a wealthy planter obviously did not provide full protection to the Townsends. Their own actions and other factors, including the economy and discriminatory practices that relegated them to menial work, contributed to their personal woes. Some of the Townsends found life so trying, as had Louisa Picquet and perhaps even Avenia White, they took advantage of their racial ambiguity in hopes of securing some measure of protection from racism.

Other Townsends sought to better their lives by other means. Like Avenia White, William Bolden Townsend, son of Margaret, another Townsend who was freed and relocated to Kansas, recognized that education was vital to getting ahead. William once wrote the following to Cabaniss: There is a request that I have to me of you and if be granted I will consider it … a favor to me. It is this[:] you are aware that I am still going to school and I am trying very hard to become some person through and by an education[.] [I]t of course requires money and I have spent all the money that I have carried here.”¹⁵¹ His determination was sometimes rewarded. He went on to be a journalist, educator, politician, and lawyer in Kansas. Yet his education and professional attainment did not shield him from racial hostility—he was forced to flee Leavenworth for his safety.¹⁵² And he was listed as a “colored” lawyer in a 1920 Denver city directory.¹⁵³

The Townsends’ experiences as relayed in public documents and their letters should be read with caution. They wrote to each other in order to stay abreast of events in their lives while waiting for news concerning their Samuel Townsends estate. Had a relatives material condition improved? They would not know if they did not stay in regular contact. Several also stayed in touch with the lawyer Samuel Townsend had hired to see to their financial well-being. In 1884 Nettie Caldwell, a descendant of Townsends daughter Milcha, wrote a letter to Cabaniss to remind him that he promised he would send her an unspecified sum when she was old enough to select her own guardian. Evidencing the self-determination earlier seen in her aunt Elvira, Caldwell wrote, “I am old enough now to choose one. Please let me know if I choose one, will you send me some money? I don’t want to choose a guardian unless you send some money.” Caldwell also appears to have been enrolled in school, as she went on to say, “My books this session cost me eight dollars.” If Cabaniss had “any feeling for a motherless and fatherless child,” he should respond, she wrote.¹⁵⁴

The direct, even manipulative tone in Nettie’s letter cannot be missed. One may chalk her impoliteness up to youth or to something or someone else.¹⁵⁵ Her pushiness possibly bore resemblance to that of the enslaved girl whose owners decided she had grown too high-minded.¹⁵⁶ Despite her hardships, Caldwell seems to have had considerable self-esteem. She was the granddaughter of a white man, and a rich one. And like many other African American females, she could make a point forcefully.¹⁵⁷ This self-assertiveness was also seen in Carrie, the Townsend child who asked her uncle for a winter dress. Caldwell’s assertiveness reaped benefits, however. After receiving nearly $3,000 from the Townsend estate, some of which she spent on her education, she seems to have invested wisely. She owned property in Topeka, Kansas, at the time of her death.¹⁵⁸

The younger Townsends, with their sense of privilege if not entitlement, permit us to try something daring—to position them against whites in America, many of whom acted out of self-interest, too, and in doing so exhibited a very American trait. A sense of entitlement can be seen across the color line, but blacks who have displayed those traits across time have typically been viewed in a negative light by working-class and elite whites alike owing to pervasive stereotypes: dishonesty, laziness, and “uppity-ness.” Privileged African Americans were thus probably hyperalert to their own position and the image they conveyed to others, further revealing the complexities of race and class in America in the postbellum years.

FIGURE 18. Portrait of the Kansas African American lawyer William Bolden Townsend, descendant of Samuel Townsend. I. Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1891. Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

For example, although privileged, Osborne, the barber and sometime miner, was powerless to resist the government’s growing ability to determine how much he made. But he was fully conscious of his status and the threat posed to it by the actions and appearances of other blacks, who were under constant surveillance throughout the nineteenth century and long afterward. He once wrote his brother Thomas deploring the arrival of “loose negroes” in Georgetown.¹⁵⁹ Perhaps Osborne, like Louisa Picquet, felt superior to other African Americans. Perhaps he and Thomas were acutely aware of the resentment of others, both white and black, who could see their special position. As the number of educated African Americans increased, literature provided one way to challenge white supremacy and all that went with it: surveillance, segregation, miscegenation laws, and other forms of discrimination. Pauline Hopkins, an African American author, received her share of criticism for presenting characters of mixed race in her fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Among her critics was a white female subscriber to Colored American magazine. This woman had noticed that with few exceptions, the serial stories Hopkins wrote involved “love between colored and whites.” Puzzled and angered, this reader asked the magazines editors, “Does that mean your novelists can imagine no love and sublime within the range of the colored race, for each other?” The editors allowed Hopkins to respond to this reader:

Hopkins’s words announced the degree to which the mulatta as an “imagined” character was based on real women. Though race and sexuality were being policed in “deeply intertwined” ways by the late nineteenth century, a time when Jim Crow laws sought to separate white and black bodies, mixed-race characters in literature gestured toward long-established relations and intimacies between the same bodies.¹⁶¹ Hopkins allows us to see, again, what nineteenth-century whites feared about racially ambiguous bodies like the Townsends, which disrupted notions about race and class. Suggesting the political possibilities of such unions, Hopkins replied to her angry reader by writing, “Amalgamation is an institution designed by God for some wise purpose, and mixed bloods have always exercised a great influence on the progress of human affairs.”¹⁶²

FIGURE 19. Excerpt from Nettie Caldwells October 11, 1884, letter to Septimus Cabaniss, the lawyer hired in the mid-1850s to manage the estate of Samuel Townsend. Caldwell was Townsend’s granddaughter. MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Septimus Douglas Cabaniss Papers, Special Collections, Stanley Hoole Library, University of Alabama.

FIGURE 20. Second page from Nettie Caldwell’s October 11, 1884, letter to Huntsville lawyer Septimus Cabaniss. MSS 252, Box 252.054, Folder 01, Septimus Douglas Cabaniss Papers, Special Collections, Stanley Hoole Library, University of Alabama.

It is worth mulling over Hopkins’s motives for making this statement. What was the “wise purpose” in question, and what influence did people of mixed race really have when they themselves were discriminated against, too? For possible answers we may return to the requests for a winter dress by Carrie and for money by Nettie. These Townsends represented progress in human affairs because they resisted racial ideology, which insisted they deserved neither a winter dress nor their inheritance.

But do their requests make them appear to be self-seeking young women of color or self-seeking young American women? In sorting through possible answers, the observations made decades earlier by Frances Trollope, the antebellum British travel writer, seem pertinent. Upon visiting New Orleans for the first time, the often haughty Trollope wrote:

When Trollope arrived in New Orleans, she saw people of mixed race, females in particular, who were part of an American landscape about which she had much to say. She took note of such things in order to stress their novelty, but her biggest commentary seems to have been on the excess on display. New Orleans appeared brash and garish, even extravagant, as was suggested by Trollopes pointed reference to those elegantly dressed mixed-race women, many of whom were doubtless the mates of wealthy white men. Such excess troubled Trollope possibly because she believed that American greed and privilege was visible in women who had also been oppressed, though their oppression contrasted sharply with that of the downtrodden laborer. Such ironic conflict clashed with a more natural order of things like the land and the muddy river. The complicated hierarchies that Trollope saw were something that the Townsend siblings represented.

Though Osborne could condemn “loose Negroes” migrating to Colorado, he was well aware that local whites regarded him in the same manner, even if they could also see in his complexion evidence of his white ancestry and some earlier intimacy between a white man and a black woman. The latter failed to provide protection against ongoing hostility. Osborne subscribed to the Huntsville Gazette, which in the final decades of the century was filled with stories concerning both the triumphs and the escalating trials of people of color in the Jim Crow South. In one letter to Thomas, Osborne wrote, “I read gloomy reports of the condition of the colored man in the South.” In another letter, this one bearing the self-description “C. O. Townsend [T]onsorial Artist,” Osborne wrote, “I never expect to come South again until I can travel like other people.”¹⁶⁴

But Osborne had seen discrimination even outside the South. During a trip to Lawrence, Kansas, by train, he reportedly was denied first-class service even though he had purchased a first-class ticket. He was evidently sometimes well regarded by whites in Georgetown because the Colorado Miner, his local newspaper, was outraged about the incident, saying, “If corporations sell first-class tickets, the holders thereof are entitled to first-class fare.”¹⁶⁵

Osborne wrote this even as he, like his siblings and their children, was well aware of the advantages his family had. Many whites looked upon such advantages with regret even as some admitted that some if not all of the Townsends were respectable people. While writing her dissertation, Roberts, Cabaniss’s great-granddaughter, conducted a personal interview with the elderly Thomas Townsend. Pleased by his accomplishments as a lawyer and his demeanor, she wrote the following in the closing pages of her dissertation: “In all of his public life he conducted himself in such a way as to command the respect of both white and colored citizens of Huntsville.”¹⁶⁶ While complimentary, her comments stand in stark contrast to her refusal—as generally reflected in her dissertation—to acknowledge that the apparent failures of other family members were usually the outcome of systemic discrimination, beginning with whites’ efforts to deny them their inheritance, rather than the result of individual failings or innate black “inferiority,” an all but universal belief when Roberts was a graduate student. Thomas himself may have shared some of her sentiments because Osborne appears to have written him several times without receiving a reply. In one letter to Thomas, Osborne congratulated him on his marriage, which he learned about in the Huntsville Gazette.¹⁶⁷ Thomas may have intended no harm. Then again, he may have distanced himself from his half siblings’ financial troubles or behavior that he felt was discreditable.

Ultimately, their actions and other factors, among them, their head start as freedpeople, where they settled, community attitudes, and even luck, determined the degree to which the Townsends prospered. Any success they achieved was surely the kind for which their mothers—Rainey, Hannah, Celia, Lucy, and Winney—hoped while acquiescing or being forced to share a bed with their white father years earlier.

Although we do not know what agreements were made between these women and Samuel Townsend, there can be no doubt that agreements existed, compelling him to act favorably on their behalf or those of their children. Yet when settling outside the South in cities like Cincinnati, these migrants of color had merely crossed a legal boundary. They would have to strive to attain that for which their mothers and father had hoped.¹⁶⁸

From time to time, the Townsend children glimpsed or accessed a bit of white men’s power and in doing so laid claim to the promise of freedom at that time intended for only a few African Americans. Sometimes such claims manifested as a sense of entitlement to something as practical as a bed, something as extravagant as a winter dress, or something of larger importance such being freed or the ability to marry someone of ones own choosing. Consider the experience of Susanna, one of Samuel Townsend’s daughters. When Susanna and her siblings left Wilberforce following the outbreak of the Civil War, she relocated to New Richmond, where she resided with the family of her older brother, Wesley.¹⁶⁹ While there, she attended a school for free people of color and later Clermont Academy. Though still a teenager, she reportedly got pregnant with a child who died at birth, after having dated a young white man she desired to marry. “He is the nicest young man I ever did see,” she told Cabaniss in a June 1868 letter.¹⁷⁰ She asked Cabaniss for permission to marry her beau because Wesley was apparently angered that she had disgraced herself and the family. “Wesley treats me like I was a dog or some kind of … animal[,] Mr Cabaniss,” wrote Susanna of the brother she, probably because of their age difference, called “uncle.” She was so angry at him that she renounced her family connection, stating she was Susanna “forever” but not a Townsend.¹⁷¹

Between her birth in 1853 and her death in 1869, Susanna experienced slavery, a momentous war, and the beginnings of Reconstruction. Along the way, she, like many other people who straddled racial boundaries, attempted to realize the dream of autonomy. In her case, she wished to marry the man of her choice. Her naïveté is not what is most striking—her beau might only have wanted her money—but rather her nerve. Her boldness must not have come as a shock to her father’s lawyer, who had seen it in an earlier letter, one written when she was only thirteen years old. In it, she stated that she would not let anyone take her money.¹⁷² In it, too, there were echoes of Elvira’s assertiveness and that of other Townsend women and girls.

What encouraged free women and girls to make demands of Southern white men? Something intangible but unmistakable existed between themselves and such men, which made such utterances possible. It was an understanding born from an intimate relationship, not always a sexual one, although this dimension was rarely absent. It was something that even a former enslaved man like Wesley could not fully comprehend because he had not inhabited the complicated, always unequal, but often contradictory space between white men and black women and girls.

That space has been in the background of this study and frequently appears in the foreground, too, as in the case of Louisa Picquet’s bargaining with Mr. Cook, her second owner, and her domestic arrangement with John Williams, in which companionship, housekeeping, and sex were exchanged for the promise of eventual freedom. In all likelihood Avenia White, Susan Johnson, and Samuel Townsend’s sexual partners were also aware of and took advantage of the dynamic existing between themselves and white men, the sort that could and did reap benefits. Thomas Townsend’s mother certainly never envisioned that he would one day want a buffalo robe, but she may well have foreseen as she shared Samuel Townsend’s bed that he would be able to afford it.

FIGURE 21. Degree of separation chart demonstrating ties between enslaved and freed people of color and prominent antebellum white men. Sharony Green.

The voices of the women and girls in the Townsend family point to their self-awareness of their status as the daughters and granddaughters of a wealthy white man and black women. Elvira Townsend, Susanna Townsend, Nettie Caldwell, even the women that Lakin felt compelled to reprimand sternly—all demonstrated both independence and assertiveness. And so did Nettie when she bluntly told Cabaniss that she would not choose a guardian “unless you send me some money.” Nettie was not merely speaking her mind; she was laying bare the cracks and contradictions in the ideology of white patriarchy and America’s race and class relations, foreshadowing the emergence of a new social order. That order has yet fully to materialize, but immense strides have been made since Nettie let Cabaniss know her wishes.

Samuel Townsend was aware of laws limiting the full promise of his children’s lives and, seeing his imminent death, made determined attempts to secure their futures and those of their children and their surviving mothers. John Williams, Louisa Picquet’s former master, did much the same, and so did Rice Ballard. These Southern white men endeavored to offer protection, however imperfectly, to enslaved bodies in which they had invested themselves financially and emotionally in hidden and not so hidden ways—as the reports of Cincinnatians like Levi Coffin and Eliza Potter reveal. Such relationships were as complex as they were numerous. Examining their complexity will help us achieve a better understanding of the contradictions in human behavior when racial divisions are all too present.