The Bone and Sinew of the Land Read online

  And the hunger for enslaved people was increasing.

  The trade that had brought her people to these shores had been stopped officially, but slavery was growing. It was supposed to be dying, and many people assumed—with all those states abolishing slavery, all those people freed, and the importation of slaves banned—that it would die. But all that fine land included in the Louisiana Purchase had added to a massive demand for enslaved labor.18

  Then in 1820 the unthinkable had happened: Missouri became a slave state. For so long almost everyone had talked about slavery as a curse on this new land. All those states that had ended slavery, all those people freed, even this frontier—their own Northwest Territory—free. But something was shifting.

  It must have seemed that so many people of European descent who had been revolutionaries alongside people of African descent were turning their backs on the ideals of equality and freedom.

  Keziah could not read, but she had friends who could, friends who were still sympathetic to the causes of freedom and justice. She and Charles still worshipped with Elder Wasson, and he may have told them the shocking news about Missouri. It was practically next door to them, and now it was a new slave state.19

  This was not just politics for Keziah, not just an issue of how many white men could sit and vote in the federal government; this was a change in her whole world. Saint Louis, Missouri, was less than two hundred miles west of them. Due west of them, a short trip down the Ohio River and then up the Mississippi River. If Charles did not go there himself to trade their goods, he could have easily sent their goods down to that city’s markets.

  This deliberate extension and growth of slavery was being championed by men who were rejecting the founding principles of the young nation. The Maryland senator William Pinkney, who fought so hard for Missouri to become a slave state, dismissed the revolutionary ideals of his forefathers. He scoffed, “The self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence are not truths at all, if taken literally.”20

  It took a few more years for the politician John Randolph from Virginia to state his feelings about his fight to grow slavery in Missouri and the nation, but only a few. By 1826 he was publicly voicing his opinion that the Declaration of Independence was a risky document, for it clearly asserted that “all men are born free and equal,” an idea he rejected “for the best of all reasons, because it is not true.”21

  Neither William Pinkney nor John Randolph had the Griers successfully homesteading nearby. But they must have been very myopic to miss all the free and successful African Americans who inhabited Washington, DC, at the very time they were fighting to extend slavery into Missouri. By 1819 the city had a thriving free African American community, and a number of schools had already been started by—and for—African Americans in the city. Ann Maria Hall, herself educated at an integrated school in Alexandria, Virginia, had her school right on Capitol Hill, a region of the city that was home to the “best colored families of Washington.”22

  Slavery’s advocates would go to amazing lengths. They seemed willing to ignore the obvious and even the law.

  The Griers’ friend Jacob Hawkins knew this all too well, for he had been enslaved illegally in Indiana. He now lived just a few miles away in Daviess County, but he had also come from South Carolina—Charleston to be exact, once the busiest slave-importation port in the United States and still a place of great wealth and suffering.23

  His enslaver, Eli Hawkins, was part of a group of pro-slavery people joining around the territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, as he made one attempt after another to grow slavery in the Indiana Territory.

  Long before she was married, Keziah may well have known Jacob and his sister, Ann. They may have even traveled together from South Carolina, catching a ship in Charleston that would take them out to sea to the mouth of the Mississippi River, then up north to the Ohio River, then up that river to the Wabash River, and finally up the Wabash to Vincennes. Vincennes, that town where Harrison was already forcing enslaved people to help build his huge brick mansion in the wilderness—trying to replicate the plantation homes of his birthplace just as he tried to replicate a culture of slavery, inequality, and privilege.24

  But the governor knew that popular opinion was against him. Even his own father-in-law, John Cleves Symms, a judge in the stretch of the Indiana Territory west of the Wabash River, was freeing enslaved people who were coming before him and complaining that they were being illegally held in bondage in a territory meant to be free.25

  Still, when Harrison’s petition to extend slavery into the Indiana Territory was denied, he was furious. So he decided to turn his back on the federal government and create a slave state, passing a law with the help of local judges that stated that while enslaved people could not be brought into the territory to live and work there, they could be brought in as indentured servants, and their enslavers could pick the length of their indenture bond without their agreement.26

  And in 1806 Eli Hawkins, the man who held Jacob Hawkins in bondage, had been first in line at the deed office in Vincennes with Jacob and Ann in tow. Once they were in front of the clerk, Jacob became the first person recorded in the new deed book. The language was formal and made it look as if Jacob and Eli were in agreement, but there was no chance of that. For Eli Hawkins decided that an appropriate indenture term for Jacob would be ninety years. And William Henry Harrison, who would become the United States’ ninth president, made sure that Jacob could do nothing about it.27

  Next was Jacob’s sister, Ann, who also had to listen to the clerk tell her that her bond was for ninety years of unpaid service.28

  Jacob and Ann had been taken away from their parents and family and brought to this cold and wild place. Were they told that they would be freed? Were promises made to their parents?

  But everything was being broken, their family and now their future.

  Most indenture bonds, even on the Northwest Territorial frontier, lasted a much shorter time than this, especially if the bond servant was white. They also included the guarantee that the indentured person would get something in return for their unpaid labor—schooling in a trade and sometimes even a formal promise that they would be taught to read. And when the indenture bond ended, some form of material reward was also promised, usually a gun, some items of clothing, some money, and the tools of the trade they had learned.29

  But Eli Hawkins promised nothing to Jacob and Ann, for he knew both would be dead by the time their bonds expired.

  Others were recorded that day, almost all of them recorded as being in their teens, although many may have been much younger. Their enslavers were dreadfully pragmatic: they were traveling to the very edges of the new nation where there were very few laborers, enslaved or free, so they wanted to bring with them the healthiest, strongest, and youngest people they could—even if taking them destroyed families and devastated children.

  And most of those children and young people in that deed book were signed up for indenture bonds of between ninety and ninety-nine years.30

  Governor Harrison had won. He had effectively extended slavery for almost a century in the vast territory he governed, and Jacob and Ann left Vincennes for Eli Hawkins’s homestead knowing they would not be free until 1896.

  Yet this same Governor Harrison, just a few years later, must have been grateful for the truly free African-descended people in his territory when he mustered a regiment of free African Americans to defend that far western border of the nation during the War of 1812.31

  Maybe this was about usefulness.

  And Harrison would continue to have a sweet tooth for the forced labor of African Americans. Indeed, in 1830, when he was no longer governor and had moved to Ohio, he continued to use every legal loophole to create something that looked like slavery in his home. In that year he placed an ad giving notice of a reward for the capture and return of “George W. West,” a young man “bound” to him by the overseer of the poor in Miami Township, Ohio.32


  But in 1816, the passion for liberty was still strong in the Indiana Territory. And when in that year Indiana became a state, its freshly written constitution made clear that slavery would forever be banned within its borders.

  Some people took this to heart. But others refused. Eli Hawkins must have felt safe in the fact that Jacob and his sister were indentured servants and thus, in the eyes of the law, technically free. But most could see the cynicism of his position. Indeed, years later when county histories were being written, those interviewed remembered Jacob and Ann as slaves.33

  Then five years later everything changed, and it was all because of Polly.

  Polly had been born into bondage in the Indiana Territory, as had her mother, around 1800, for their enslavers were the Lasselles, an elite French family in Vincennes that had managed to survive many wars and changes along the Wabash River since the 1760s.34

  This complicated Polly’s situation, because her bondage was allowed; the new United States did not want to anger the local French population whom it was trying to cultivate as allies in controlling the region.

  But for Polly and her mother these political decisions meant that, while others were being liberated, they continued to labor in bondage.

  Even so, when Indiana became a state in 1816, they were supposed to be free. But their enslaver, Hyacinthe Lasselle, was not going to give up so easily.

  Everyone knew Hyacinthe—how could they not? His father had been one of the original settlers of Vincennes. But Polly was determined to make Hyacinthe and the state of Indiana face up to forced labor and face her. And she had found a young white lawyer to represent her. Amory Kinney had just come to Vincennes from New York. Like her, he believed that freedom was the right of every person. So he took Polly’s case, even if it meant going against the powerful Lasselles.35

  Once the court agreed to hear Polly’s case, however, Hyacinthe did something terrible that forced Polly to sign an indenture bond. He must have been hoping he could take advantage of the same loophole that Eli Hawkins had used so successfully.

  It was not an easy case; in fact, it was legally impossible. Even before statehood, Governor Harrison had made sure that the Indiana Territory barred all people of African descent from taking a white person to court or even giving testimony as a witness in a trial involving a white defendant or a white plaintiff. Luckily, the state supreme court was unwilling to uphold that legislation and decided to hear Polly’s case.36

  And Polly refused to give up, even though she may have been tortured. The violence and threats that were made to force her to sign that indenture bond can only be imagined.

  When a young indentured African American woman called Phoebe, across the Wabash in Illinois, thought she was free because her bondholder had died, she discovered that she was not. Instead, like an enslaved person, she had been gifted in her bondholder’s will to his son. When she complained, the son brutally punished her, although he would later admit to only using “a little force and beating.” So Phoebe took him to court.37

  But Phoebe lost her case in Illinois. And now Polly hoped she would not lose hers in Indiana.

  Finally, in July 1820 the Indiana Supreme Court, in its new stone building on the central green of Corydon, Indiana, made its decision. It was considering politics as well. Chief Justice Isaac Blackford may have heard about the arguments for the Missouri Compromise that were attacking the Declaration of Independence. And there was the Missouri Compromise itself, bitterly contested in Washington, DC, since 1819.

  Justice Blackford would have known of all the ways in which Illinois courts were making a mockery of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery, including Phoebe’s failed bid for freedom. In Illinois, once a part of the Indiana Territory, many whites were intent upon making a success of forced labor, and they were deciding against every plaintiff like Polly, even making it legal to buy and sell African American indentured servants in the state.38

  With all of this in mind and more, the court decided in Polly’s favor.

  In his opinion the chief justice quoted a section of the 1816 Indiana constitution that he thought relevant to the case, even before he argued that the constitution outlawed slavery: “That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent and unalienable rights, among which, are the enjoyment and defense of life and liberty.”39

  Polly had won, and she had won freedom for everyone in that state who had been forced into indentured labor, including Jacob and Ann.

  In pursuing her case, Polly joined a courageous group of African Americans who had risked similar moves for liberty. Indeed, most states that ended slavery during and just after the Revolutionary War only enacted those laws when an enslaved person argued for their freedom in court. And often they were women, like Polly—women willing to risk the worst torture and torment their owners could inflict to gain freedom for themselves and all others in their state.40

  Jacob and Ann must have thought they would finally be free.

  Then again, they must have had hopes for liberty when their bondholder, Eli Hawkins, had died a few years before Polly’s case was won. But Jacob and Ann, like Phoebe in Illinois, found themselves still in bondage to Eli Hawkins’s widow. And now Eli’s widow had remarried and seemed even more intent upon keeping her unpaid laborers, despite the state supreme court’s decision.41

  But Jacob decided to fight. Maybe it was for his sister, Ann. Or maybe it was for Ellen Embry. Ellen had also come from South Carolina, and she and Jacob wanted to marry. But Jacob could not, not when his own life and body was contracted into bondage.42

  Did Jacob consider just running? That was an option.

  But it would mean leaving Ann and Ellen behind. And Daviess County was home to him now. He had spent almost half his life there. He knew this land, and he must have believed that he and Ellen could make a good life there, if only he were free.

  So Jacob decided to fight for the best ideals of the Revolution with his very life, because his life depended on them.

  He was not alone. Jacob and Ann had now been joined by Isaac, whom Eli Hawkins had “purchased” before he died.43

  Jacob and Isaac must have had to do everything in secret, but they had an ally. Polly’s lawyer, Amory Kinney, had moved to Daviess County—possibly because things had gotten a bit too hot for him in Vincennes after he won his supreme court case against one of that city’s most powerful families.

  And Kinney was trying to build his practice when Jacob and Isaac came calling.

  Now, Kinney knew that what Eli Hawkins’s widow was doing was illegal. He also knew that many of the wealthiest and most powerful white families in the area were of a like mind to that widow, and they would not be too pleased with his taking on Jacob and Isaac’s case.

  Kinney had been through a lot with Polly, and he was again trying to make a living as a lawyer. He could have told Jacob and Isaac to leave, insisting that since the state did not allow an African-descended person to take a white person to court, he could not represent them in their suit against Eli Hawkins’s widow. Or he could have just told them that he was not interested in yet another court battle that would damage his reputation and business.

  But Amory Kinney took their case, even if it meant he might be unpopular for a time in Daviess County.

  Did he ask about the safety of the men, how they would protect themselves and Ann while pursuing their freedom? He knew the risk they were taking. He might lose some clients, but Jacob and Isaac could be very badly hurt. In his heart did he wonder if they might back out? Eli Hawkins’s widow had married a harsh man, and he could do horrible things to Ann, things that could cause any brother to drop a case.

  Maybe they had managed to get Ann away, or maybe she had been the one urging them to go to court, for the worst may have already happened to her, and her life could have been a misery.

  Somehow, they decided together—this white lawyer and these three African Americans—that they would all take the risks before them. But
none of them knew how bad it could actually get.

  The death threats started as soon as Amory Kinney filed his motion at the Daviess County Courthouse. He later recounted his shock at this turn of events, that his own neighbors—and possibly some of his own clients—would sooner kill him than see freedom, justice, and the law upheld.44

  If a famous white lawyer like Kinney—who had just won a state supreme court case that had changed state law—faced such threats, the two young men and Ann must have had a terrible time of it. But they stood firm, and when Kinney argued their case before two judges, both decided in favor of freedom. Indeed, they extended their decision, making clear that no one was to be held in any kind of bonded labor in that county.

  They were all free. Jacob, Isaac, Ann, Ellen, everyone.

  Within a few months, Jacob and Ellen married. Now, in 1828, they were farming their own land and growing their family in Daviess County, right next to Gibson County, where the Griers lived.45

  But not everyone was so lucky. The Illinois courts continued to reject all pleadings for freedom from African American indentured servants, and even in Vincennes—Polly’s old home—people continued to keep others in bondage, even in outright slavery, and no law would stop them.46

  And the land to the south of them, over the Ohio River, was filling up fast with enslaved people. And while many tried to run, not everyone made it out.

  Keziah Grier would have heard Elder Wasson preach that love was stronger than death. And some of those people fleeing through their woods were willing to risk death rather than lose those they loved.

  It was love that made John and Eliza Little willing to risk everything to be free together, as they made their way north and across the Ohio River. This young couple from Tennessee had both been sold away from their parents. John Little was originally taken from his home in North Carolina and forced to walk enchained in a coffle for hundreds of miles until he arrived in western Tennessee.47