Ellison family. - Black masters: a free family of color in the old South

BLACK

MASTERS

A FREE FAMILY

OF COLOR IN

THE OLD SOUTH

Michael P. Johnson

and James L. Roark

W.W.NORTON & COMPANY

New York London

TO OUR FAMILIES,

Anne, Ian, and Sarah

AND

Martha, Michael, and Benjamin

T HIS book aspires to be a history of a remarkable man named William Ellison. In reality, it is both more and less than that. Less, because William Ellison was not a major historical figure whose every act was recorded; much that should be included in a full history of his life remains unknown and unknowable. More, because William Ellisons life was so intimately bound up with his family that his history is inseparable from the history of his family. More also, because William Ellison was inexorably pulled into the maelstrom of antebellum politics by his race. A man of mixed white and black ancestry, Ellison was one of a quarter of a million individuals in the slave states in 1860 whom well-spoken whites referred to as free Negroes or free people of color. Four million other Afro-Americans were slaves in 1860, as Ellison himself had been when he was born in 1790. Ellisons experience in slavery and freedom spans the history of the slave states from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Despite Ellisons best efforts to live a quiet, private life of freedom, his fate was linked to other free people of color and, through them, to the politics of the slave South. William Ellisons history, therefore, is his familys life and times.

William Ellison confounds expectations we are tempted to project onto him from our own times. A brown-skinned man who would be called black today, Ellison did not consider himself a black man but a man of color, a mulatto, a man neither black nor white, a brown man. At a time when most Afro-Americans, like other Americans, worked the soil, Ellison was a cotton gin maker, a master craftsman. When nearly all free Afro-Americans were the poorest of the poor, Ellison was one of the wealthiest free persons of color in the South and wealthier than nine out of ten whites. Ninety-four out of one hundred Afro-Americans in the South were slaves in 1860, but Ellison owned a large cotton plantation and more slaves than any other free person of color in the South outside Louisiana, even more than all but the richest white planters.

Although William Ellison was hardly typical, his history sheds light on the collective experience of free Afro-Americans in the antebellum South. By illuminating the prerequisites for rising above the degraded circumstances of most free Negroes, his story reveals the obstacles that prevented other free people of color from prospering as he did. Ellisons economic achievement set him apart from other free Afro-Americans, but he remained bound to them by his race. Elsewhere in the New World, money sometimes whitened. In the American South, the color Ellison shared with four million others proved indelible. Simply to survive as a free person of color in the slave South was no mean feat. William Ellison shared that accomplishment with tens of thousands of free Afro-Americans. His history discloses the thin line separating freedom from slavery, even for those at the pinnacle of worldly success.

Ellisons history would still be hidden if three little white girls had not made a fortuitous discovery in 1935. While playing under their house in the South Carolina upcountry on a hot summer day, the girls found a box containing some old letters that they showed to their father, who saved them. The letters, written by and to members of the Ellison family, had somehow ended up underneath the house where the Ellisons had lived for almost a century. The South Caroliniana Library acquired the letters early in 1979, and we first saw them that spring.

We studied the letters for more than a year before we could imagine writing a history of William Ellison and his family. The letters contain a fascinating tale all their own, and at first we did not recognize it as a pivotal moment in the life of the Ellisons. Furthermore, we simply did not believe sources existed to sustain an account of the private life of an obscure, though extraordinary, free man of color. Gradually, as we searched out documents hinted at in the letters, tracked down leads given us by archivists and colleagues, and looked for and found more than one needle in a haystack, it became clear that we were wrong, that a history of William Ellison was possible.

In 1860, Daniel R. Hundley published Social Relations in Our Southern States, which sorted the Souths inhabitants into eight categories. Hundley constructed a descending pecking order that ran from gentlemen and cotton snobs through yeomen and poor white trash to the lowly slaves. Nowhere did he find a place for the Souths free Negroes. Hundleys omission suggests the anomalous position of free Negroes in the stratified, hierarchical society of the slave South. Negroes were supposed to be slaves. Free people were supposed to be white. People who were free and Negro did not fit neatly into idealizations of Southern society, yet 250,000 of them unquestionably existed in the slave states in 1860. When white Southerners gravitated toward secession as the best defense of slavery, many of them decided it was also time to bring their society into perfect conformity with their ideas by solving, once and for all, the free Negro problem.

Unlike Hundley, historians of the antebellum South have not neglected free Negroes. Their studies document the harsh repression visited upon free Afro-Americans by the white majority and the abiding assumption of most whites that all Afro-Americans were inferior beings suited only for slavery. Based largely on laws regulating free Negro behavior and on the writings of contemporary whites, these histories focus on how free people of color were thought of by whites and how they were treated by courts and legislatures. Inevitably, these studies tend to portray free Negroes as objects rather than subjects, as people who received rather than participated in their history. The scarcity of records created by free Afro-Americans makes it difficult for historians to avoid this portrait. Their work is a major contribution to a full and honest history of the obfuscations in nineteenth-century white Americans celebrations of democracy and freedom. But the views of free Afro-Americans are missing.

There are still precious few historical documents that record what free Afro-Americans in the antebellum South did, much less what they thought, believed, feared, or dreamed. Although we had the good fortune to have access to the unique Ellison letters, we ran into countless dead ends in our search for corroborating evidence, systematic comparisons, and many basic facts. We turned up enough evidence to be certain about many matters, but the absence of crucial pieces of evidence has forced us to speculate. The only way to avoid speculation was to ignore important questions, to mimic Hundley. We have chosen to ask questions we cannot fully answer, to consider possibilities, and to imagine what was likely. We have rooted our analysis in what is known about William Ellison and his society, and we have tried to be equally candid about our ignorance and our knowledge. We expect to be held as accountable for our interpretations ventured with meager documentation as for our arguments steadied by a heavier ballast of evidence.

Compared to nearly all other free persons of color, William Ellison left a well-marked trail of documents. Fragments of his experience are scattered among deeds, wills, estate papers, court records, tax books, census lists, parish registers, ledgers, newspaper advertisements, medical records, the diaries and personal letters of white planters and their wives, reminiscences of white and black acquaintances of the Ellisons and their descendants, and among the tombstones in country graveyards. When assembled around the Ellison letters, these pieces allow us to see the antebellum South through the eyes of Ellison, his family, and his free Afro-American friends. Looking through somebody elses eyes is always a tricky business. But unless we have completely mistaken our vision for his, William Ellison saw a South quite different from the one witnessed by white planters and black slaves. What he saw and the sense he made of it defy brief description. We have written a rather long book trying to reconstruct his perspective and to understand it. At the very least, Ellisons story makes clear that he and his free Afro-American friends were active, resourceful human beings who did what they could to make their own history. Like the rest of us, however, they did not have a clean slate to write upon.