Dan Snow's History Hit - A Story of Slavery and Restitution
Episode Date: June 3, 2020I was delighted to be joined by Caleb McDaniel, History professor and author of the Pulitzer prizewinning book, “Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America”. He tol...d me the remarkable story of Henrietta Wood. Born into slavery in Kentucky, she was freed as an adult and worked as domestic worker. In 1853, her employers conspired to trick her into crossing the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, where she was recaptured and taken to work in the harrowing conditions of the Mississippi cotton fields. At the end of the Civil War, Wood was freed for the second time, where she sued her kidnapper for $20,000. Although she only received $2,500 (more than $60,000 today) it allowed her son, Arthur H. Simms, to buy a house in Chicago, and attend Union College of Law, now Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello everyone, welcome to Darren Snow's History. The rest of the world watches as America is
buffeted now not just by pandemic disease, by economic depression, but also by confrontations
between crowds and police, police violence, looting, and anguished cries for a focus on
racial justice. We're long overdue a reckoning on many of the issues raised by the appalling death of
George Floyd, and it's beholden on the rest of us to listen and then to act. I am lucky enough to
be joined this week by two scholars, both of whom have written extensively on slavery, its legacy,
and racial justice in the USA. Today, this podcast has Rice University's history professor Caleb McDaniel.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for history for his book Sweet Taste of Liberty. It's a remarkable
story of Henrietta Wood, a woman who in 1870 sued a man who abducted her and took her into slavery.
It's a true story of slavery and restitution. This was last week's live podcast.
It was a Zoom webinar or something, I guess you'd call it,
in which subscribers to History Hit TV were able to join the call,
ask questions as usual.
I stole the best questions.
It really helped me look better at my job than I actually am.
But it was great to have you on the call.
And thank you to Caleb McDaniel for staying around afterwards and answering some more questions from subscribers.
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He grew up on the south side of Chicago in a largely segregated neighbourhood. He's now
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moment all around us. So that podcast will be going up in the next few days.
In the meantime, everyone, here's Caleb McDaniel. Enjoy.
Caleb, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
This is an extraordinary success story.
You've written a Pulitzer Prize winning history book.
Who's the lead protagonist of this history that you've written?
The book is about a woman named Henrietta Wood, who was living as a free woman in Cincinnati,
Ohio in 1853, about eight years before the American Civil War, when she was kidnapped
and sold into slavery.
And after a long ordeal after the Civil War, she returned to Cincinnati and
filed a lawsuit for restitution against the man who had kidnapped her in 1853. What's most
remarkable about her story is that after eight years of litigation, she won the lawsuit and a
U.S. court awarded her $2,500, which was the largest amount that I know of that a U.S. court ever gave to a
formerly enslaved person in restitution for slavery.
So can you talk me through the process by which free Americans were kidnapped, tricked,
placed into a condition of enslavement?
How does that work?
Cincinnati is right on the Ohio River, which in the antebellum period was a border
between the free states and the slave states. So Kentucky was a slave state. And because of the
federal structure of American government, state laws really determined the legal status of people
when it came to their freedom or their enslavement. So it was very dangerous for
African Americans, free people who were living on the border with slave states in sort of the
lower north. They were always at risk of violent kidnapping or being tricked across the river,
which is only about a quarter mile of water separating them from the slave states. And so
we know more now, historians are investigating more
about the extent and scale of those sorts of criminal kidnappings. There's a historian at
University of Maryland who's also just published a book called Stolen, and he refers to this
movement of free people into the South as a sort of reverse underground railroad. And according to this particular author,
Dr. Richard Bell, the extent of the reverse underground railroad may even have been as large
as the underground railroad. So there were a lot of people who suffered the same fate as Henrietta
Wood. What was unusual about her was not so much that this had happened, because we know of many
other kidnappings. Solomon Northup from the memoir and movie Twelve Years a Slave is another famous example.
What was unusual about her was not that her freedom was taken away,
but that she was able to seek some justice and some restitution for what had happened after the Civil War.
after the Civil War. So we need to think about the gangs who crossed the river and would just snatch people from the streets of Ohio at night in unguarded moments. Why would African Americans
live? I suppose they had no choice. They lived under that threat. Well, it was terrifying. And
in fact, many people did move farther north to Canada or safer places in the farther north.
north to Canada or safer places in the farther north. But many of them did not have much economic mobility, many funds that they could use to escape. They still had family and community ties
to those areas. But especially after 1850, when a federal fugitive slave law was passed that
made it much easier for would-be kidnappers to argue in court that the person
they were taking was a fugitive slave or runaway slave. That especially increased the danger for
people like Henrietta Wood. And so that was a sort of turning point, not only for African-American
communities living in places like Cincinnati, but for the whole nation. This struggle over
kidnappings played a big role in the coming of the Civil War
as people living in the Free North increasingly saw how slavery could encroach on their own
communities and endanger the freedom and safety of their own neighbors. What do we know of Henrietta
Wood's period of enslavement? Is this recounted in judicial process or did she also write a memoir
like the other case you mentioned? She was not able to read or write as far as we can tell. So
she was not able to write a memoir like Solomon Northup's. However, what she did do was tell her
story to two Ohio reporters in the 1870s at great length. And so we have about 4,000 words or so of these interviews that are recounted
as told in her own words. And that allows us to glimpse more of her experience than we would in
the case of many formerly enslaved women in the United States. So had those interviews not existed,
it would have been difficult to sustain a book-length
narrative of the kind that I wrote. And even with those interviews, there are still many gaps in the
record. But what the interviews did tell us was that she had a very detailed memory of the places
that she was taken, the people who enslaved her, and using the details in those interviews,
it was possible for me to work outwards to other archives and find other sources that
fleshed out the story and corroborated her memories.
What were those experiences?
I mean, on that first occasion when she was kidnapped, that must obviously have been extraordinarily
traumatic.
Was it a targeted attack or was it a sweep for any people of color that could end up
as slaves?
In her case, she was actually betrayed by her employer.
She was lured into a carriage and told that she would just be going on a brief ride across the river with her employer at the time.
She worked in a boarding house in Cincinnati.
And when they crossed the river, she was met on the road by a gang of men who then took her into their custody.
And her enslavement, her long ordeal in the South really began then. I should say that her story begins in slavery because she was born around 1818 or 1820 when she was born in northern Kentucky to an enslaved mother.
So she knew slavery, but she had managed to acquire her
freedom around 1848 in Cincinnati. So this is one of the reasons I was so captivated by her story,
is that she was a woman who was twice enslaved and twice freed. And that allows us to think a
little bit about the permeable border between slavery and freedom. I think it's a mistake to imagine freedom as sort of a light bulb moment or a switch that's flipped.
And once a person was free, they were always free.
Her story indicates that in the antebellum United States, that wasn't always true.
And there were people who moved back and forth across the line of freedom
or the geographical border between the slave states and free states with a terrifying frequency.
What were the conditions like that she had to endure a condition of enslavement?
kept in Kentucky, partly because she was able to file a freedom suit in a local Kentucky court arguing that her freedom had been illegally taken away. But that suit was ultimately dismissed,
and after that, the man who'd kidnapped her, a man named Zebulon Ward, sold her to slave traders
who took her to Mississippi. And she was sold there in Natchez, Mississippi, to one of the largest
slaveholders anywhere in the American South on the eve of the Civil War, a man named Gerard Brandon.
And he, like most Deep South slaveholders of any size at that time, cultivated cotton on multiple
plantations along the Mississippi River. And so she endured the cotton fields.
She was then, during the Civil War, forcibly marched all the way to Texas, near where I'm
talking to you right now, in a place called Robertson County. And she spent the remainder
of the Civil War years there. And so, again, going back to the idea of the border between freedom and slavery being somewhat permeable, even though the Emancipation Proclamation was issued
in 1863, and Union troops in the U.S. Army were able to liberate many enslaved people around
Natchez, Mississippi, where she had been taken, because she was forcibly marched by her owner to Texas, she was not freed
by the Emancipation Proclamation and in fact remained enslaved there until a year after the
Civil War concluded before she was able to regain her freedom in 1866. What were conditions like
both for her and for an enslaved person at this time working in cotton fields?
And did those conditions deteriorate as a result of the civil war and perhaps of the Emancipation Proclamation as well?
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echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week Well, this was brutal and back-breaking labor, of course.
You know, this was a year-long process to cultivate cotton.
Violence was used to enforce discipline on plantations.
She spoke about being whipped until she thought she would die.
She was, as a woman, especially vulnerable to other kinds of abuse, to sexual assault.
This was the kind of world in which many enslaved people in the Upper South and Kentucky spoke about being sold down the river to places like Mississippi as a kind of trip to hell, a place of no return. And so it was especially amazing to me that she survived that ordeal and returned to
seek justice against the man who was responsible for putting her in that position. It showed an
incredible resilience in her, and it showed a lot of determination, not just to win her freedom back,
but also to seek some reparation for what had been done to her.
So there's a sort of chaotic, almost anarchic period at the end of the Civil War.
Was there a kind of federal program to get these displaced people back to where they
might have come from?
Or did she just have to hike north and take her chances?
Well, there was some assistance provided to formerly enslaved people by the Freedmen's
Bureau, which was set up by Congress towards the end of the Civil War and continued into Reconstruction. And we have lots of evidence of enslaved people seeking to reunite
with family across state lines, people like Wood who had been sold into the domestic slave trade,
separated from the people that they knew. So there's a lot of, for example, very poignant
advertisements placed in 19th century newspapers of African-Americans seeking some information about the places where they had been sold from, the names of family members or friends that they were seeking to locate.
but they were overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and increasingly a sort of waning commitment on the part of Northerners to provide the resources necessary to enable the Freedmen's
Bureau to do that sort of work. And so Wood, at the end of the war, still had very few options
for her livelihood, for travel. In fact, she, for a time, returned to Natchez and worked for Gerard
Brandon, her owner before emancipation, under conditions that really would not have looked
like freedom. She had a contract with him to do laundry and cooking in his household, and
she was promised a minimal wage that she later recalled in her interview, she was never actually paid. So after about three
years in Natchez, she managed to save up $25 by raising poultry that she could sell in the
marketplace, you know, any way that she could sort of scrape together money. And then she used that
$25 in 1869 to buy a steamboat ticket back up the Mississippi River to the Cincinnati area,
where there's some evidence that she tried to relocate family members there,
and ultimately connected with a lawyer in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river
from Cincinnati, who helped her to file this lawsuit against Zebulon Ward.
Yeah, so it's the following year, 1870, she does that. Now, just how unusual
is it that somebody who until very recently had been enslaved, so a formerly enslaved person,
a woman with no formal education and no money would be able to access a lawyer and begin these
proceedings? Is this something that was going on at the time? And if it is unusual, why her? What
did she do? Well, it is unusual to find a case like this in the 1870s after the Civil War. You know,
you think about all of the things that had to come together to make that possible. She had to be able
to return to Cincinnati. She survived that long ordeal in the South. She had been free at one
point, been kidnapped and lost her freedom, which gave her a unique standing in court to file a
lawsuit against the man who had kidnapped her. That wasn't
true for every enslaved person. People who had been born enslaved under the laws of the Antebellum
South couldn't make quite the same case that she could in a court that they had special reason for
restitution. She made clear that she understood her lawsuit as about more than just the kidnapping
because she sued for the wages that she
had lost in the many years that she was in the Deep South. And so she really, I think, understood
the case as about slavery writ large rather than just about a kidnapping. Nonetheless, that kidnapping
did make it possible for her to file that suit in a way that many other people would not have
been able to. She had to find a lawyer.
She had to return, in essence, to kind of the scene of the crime in Cincinnati and find the culprit, Zebulon Ward, who was still there to be served paper.
So a lot of things I emphasize in the book sort of had to go right
in order for her to have this moment in court.
That said, we do know that enslaved people and formerly enslaved people
had a lot of legal savvy. There's a lot of great historical scholarship being done now to show that even in places like Mississippi before the Civil War, there were people filing freedom suits to try to argue that they had been illegally enslaved like Wood was.
was. And so historians like Kimberly Welch, Vanderbilt University's published a book about black litigants in the antebellum South. And it's a sort of an area that for a long time,
historians didn't know as much about because a lot of those cases are lost in crumbling records
in courthouses scattered across the American South. And it takes a lot of work to go in and
pour through these cases that never really went anywhere or beyond the local court level to reconstruct those kinds of stories.
So the answer is, you know, she wasn't totally alone in seeing the courts as an ally or a resource for her.
But a case like hers was highly exceptional and unusual in the period that she filed it and for the amount that she sought and won.
How did she find a lawyer?
Did he find out whether campaigning lawyers that would look to pick up these kind of cases?
Well, we know that there were lawyers who were't necessarily have any anti-slavery sentiments, but were happy to take on clients of any kind.
In her case, she did find a lawyer who I think did have some sort of more ideological reasons
for wanting to help.
He was a man named Harvey Myers, who was a staunch Republican.
And during Reconstruction in Kentucky, which had remained a union state,
but still had a lot of Confederate sympathizers, a man like Harvey Myers, who was strongly in
support of emancipation and civil rights for African Americans, was an outlier in the political
landscape of post-war Kentucky. And so I think it's very fateful that Harvey Myers and Henrietta Wood
met. It's not entirely clear from the record whether she started working for him before he
started working for her. In the U.S. Census of 1870, which is the first census in which she
appears by name, she is listed as an employee in the household of this lawyer, Harvey Myers.
she is listed as an employee in the household of this lawyer, Harvey Myers. And so in her interviews, she says that she sought Harvey Myers out and he helped her to file her case.
It may be that she was looking for a job and was hired by Myers and told her story as she had
before and that he knew how to help. Or it may be that she asked around and found what kinds of
lawyers might have been willing to help her with a case like this. How did she prove that she asked around and found, you know, what kinds of lawyers might have been willing to
help her with a case like this. How did she prove that she was free in order to win that court case?
That's a great question. And there's a lot of sort of complicated legal turns that the case
took that I dive into in the book. But that was, you know, at the heart of the case in the 1870s because the defendant, Zebulon Ward, tried to argue that he was faultless, that she was actually a slave in 1853 and not a free woman, that he had been within his rights to sell her.
for at least five years before the kidnapping.
According to the laws of Ohio at the time,
she had a legal claim to freedom just on the grounds of having established a home there in Ohio in that free state.
And so she made the argument that she was free,
that she had been kidnapped.
Zebulon Ward argued that she was not legally free
and that he had been within his rights.
And so, you know, I don't want to give away everything about the case because I hope that your listeners will read the book. But
in the end, she was able to prevail. She prevailed and was awarded this record sum. Do we know why?
Well, she actually sued for an even larger amount of money. As I said earlier, she understood
the case as about the
wages that she had lost during the long period that she had been enslaved from 1853 until 1866,
if you're counting her time in Texas, or 1869, if you're counting the time she worked without pay
in Natchez, a long period of time that she could have been earning wages in Ohio. So she sued for $20,000
in court. In the end, she was awarded $2,500 by the all-white jury that heard her case.
We have records of the case file, and so we know the verdict, and we know the amount.
We don't have records that allow us to know for certain the reasons for the jury's
decision or what they deliberated about as they came up with that sum. It's possible that they
ultimately decided to award her damages for the kidnapping in 1853, but didn't buy her lawyer's
argument that she was owed restitution for all of those years of lost wages. It's not easy to tell. Nonetheless,
that's a large amount of money that she was awarded. In today's terms, it would be about
60,000 US dollars or 65,000 US dollars, somewhere in that range. And so it was a significant sum of
money at the time, even though it wasn't as much as she had asked for. And then one of the most
emotional bits of your fantastic book is what she spent that money on. Right after the case, she relocated to Chicago with her son,
who I'm not sure if I've mentioned yet in our conversation, but during her ordeal in Mississippi,
she gave birth to a son named Arthur, who remained with her on this long journey back to Cincinnati.
who remained with her on this long journey back to Cincinnati.
And after her successful suit, they moved to Chicago,
where a few years later, he enrolled in law school in Chicago.
And he became, at the end of the 1880s,
one of the first African-American graduates from what became Northwestern University's law school
and was a practicing lawyer on the south side of Chicago
until his death in 1951,
midway through the 20th century. But one of the most exciting discoveries that I made in doing
the research for the book was that right before he began his legal education, he was able to
purchase a house on the south side of Chicago in Hyde Park near where the University of Chicago stands today.
And he purchased that house outright for about $1,300. And so it stands to reason, I think, that
he probably used some of the capital that his mother had won just a few years before
in this court case in order to buy that house and then turn it into a fruitful asset for himself
and his family. He took out several mortgages on the house to obtain some cash and some credit
that helped to fund his legal education and put him and his family on a path to the middle class
in Chicago that many descendants of formerly enslaved people did not have in that period of American history.
And perhaps his descendants watched in Hyde Park as 60 years later,
Barack Hussein Obama made his first address as president-elect. It was an area of the city not far from where Michelle Obama grew up in her childhood.
Can we finish just by talking about restitution?
Where does this story fit in within this wide?
I mean, you've given a very brilliant description of the effect that some working capital can have for a formerly enslaved
person it's a it is their entree to the middle class denied to nearly all of those formerly
enslaved people was this story considered important at the time in terms of restitution
did it lead for wider debate around restitution and do you think it still matters today for those
voices who are
saying that this is still a piece of history, a piece of business that needs finishing?
Well, those are great questions. I was certainly drawn to the story partly from contemporary
conversations that were going on in 2014 when I first began the research about the sesquicentennial
of the Civil War, about reparations, the same year
that Ta-Nehisi Coates published a very widely read article on American magazine The Atlantic
about the case for reparations. And so when I first came across her story, you know, I was
interested in knowing more about it, partly because there were lots of cases being made
for reparations or against reparations at the time. But it seemed to me that here was a case of restitution of a kind that could inform those debates.
I think, as you put it, it's a case that does show how even a small amount of money could make a big difference for a formerly enslaved person and her family.
a formerly enslaved person, and her family. At the same time, it was a limited victory in the sense that her individual triumph did not necessarily bring an end to the wider systems
of white supremacy and discrimination and segregation that outlived slavery. In fact,
the defendant in the case, Zebulon Ward, fought tooth and nail to resist paying her the money and never admitted
fault.
And I think that that's sort of emblematic of a wider inability of white Americans after
the Civil War and up into the present to reckon with the legacies of slavery.
So, you know, her case is one that shows the difference that restitution can make materially,
but it's also one that shows the need for thatitution can make materially, but it's also one that shows
the need for that larger reckoning that I think many advocates of reparations today are most
anxious for. It's not just about payment, but it's also about truth-telling and making sure that
stories about slavery are heard and told truthfully so that we can come to grips with
this part of our past.
Caleb McDaniel, the book is called?
Sweet Taste of Liberty,
A True Story of Slavery
and Restitution in America.
Pulitzer Prize winner, man.
Congratulations.
And thank you so much
for coming on the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally
understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money,
makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever
you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review,
I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all
the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome,
but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. you