Flee north, p.4
Flee North, page 4
Inside Washington’s small free Black community, threatened as it was by the oppressive majority, there was by no means always peace and comity. In 1833, Smallwood had been a founder of the Wesley Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on West D Street—the Wesley African Society for short. But in early 1841 he clashed with Abraham Cole, the founding minister of the church, denouncing him at a church leaders’ meeting for sexual impropriety and a passive attitude toward the slavery issue. Their dispute divided the congregation and led to the expulsion of Smallwood and an ally, Israel Wallace, in March 1841, that was chronicled in tit-for-tat letters to the newspapers. That December Smallwood filed suit against Cole, accusing him of slander and a deliberate attempt to undermine his shoemaking business. It was a bitter intramural struggle, but it grew in part out of consequential differences over how to confront slavery. The dispute with Cole eventually would have serious repercussions, even endangering Smallwood’s freedom.
This personal battle, the rioting of hostile white laborers, the persecution of abolitionists, and the excruciating experiences of friends fighting for their freedom made for a tumultuous backdrop to Smallwood’s life as he sought to earn a decent living, raise his family, and make his way in the world. Together, all these experiences may be a clue to the seeming paradox of Smallwood’s life: How did a man whose personal experience with slavery was, by his own account, relatively benign come to devote himself at huge risk to obtaining freedom for others who were not so fortunate?
The answer seems to be that Thomas Smallwood, while expressing no rancor, only gratitude, toward his own former enslaver, was a thoughtful, principled, and sometimes pugnacious man who had closely observed the abuse of African Americans. He had seen many free acquaintances suffer, and he understood that full freedom was not available even to those Black Americans who were given their manumission papers. But he also knew that any fight for rights had to begin with the humiliating, brutal, arbitrary, and cruel nature of slavery; he had seen how its tentacles continued to grasp even his neighbors who managed to get to court to insist upon their freedom.
He had participated in heated debates over the morality of slavery; he had seen through the machinations of white promoters of Black emigration; he had heard abolitionists of various stripes denounce what was beginning to be called “the slave power.” He had read widely, and by the end of the 1830s he had concluded that the practice of bondage in America was, as he put it later, “the most inhuman system that ever blackened the pages of history.”
Smallwood turned forty in February 1841, perhaps a goad to reflect on what he had done in his life so far and what he still wanted to accomplish. He had acquired for himself an extraordinary, if piecemeal, education, from John McLeod’s bookshelves to the overheated meeting halls of summertime Washington. He was, perhaps, a little fed up with endless debate. His family life and business were in reasonable order. He was ready to wage his own personal war on slavery.
Charles Torrey’s portrait and signature, from the posthumous memoir compiled by Joseph C. Lovejoy, 1847.
2
Until No Slave Should Be Found in Our Land
Charles Torrey sat in the decrepit Annapolis jail in January 1842, eagerly questioning members of the two African American families who were his fellow inmates. For a while, the aspiring abolitionist reporter forgot his own predicament. He heard how the death of a Maryland slaveholder, John D. Hutton, had thrown the lives of these thirteen men, women, and children into turmoil and uncertainty. Hutton had freed them toward the end of his life, but he had died in debt, and now his creditors were trying to seize them as valuable property. Already, they had been jailed and released twice and then arrested once more as the complex probate case made its way through the courts. Now they were awaiting possible sale south, to be converted to cash to pay Hutton’s debts, which would likely mean their separation to suit the whims and needs of new enslavers.
The keen attention of Torrey, twenty-eight, a slender, frail, and hyperactive white man, must have surprised them. Torrey was a New Englander who had long condemned slavery from afar but was now on his first extended visit to the south. He had been jailed partly at the demand of and partly for protection against a mob of slaveholders who didn’t like the inquisitive northerner who had showed up at their convention. In his newspaper dispatches, Torrey was given to dramatizing his own situation, as if he were simultaneously speaking and watching himself speak. But this time he had stumbled into a drama of genuine pathos and consequence.
“I could not help weeping as I looked at the two little infants about a year old, in their mother’s arms, smiling in sweet unconsciousness of the bitter doom their parents were anticipating, a sale to the trader,” he wrote to The Emancipator, the newspaper whose longtime editor was Torrey’s friend Joshua Leavitt.
So Torrey made a vow to return to the same jail cell—to mark what he hoped would be the abolition of slavery in less than a decade:
After listening to the history of their career, I sat down and wrote, and signed and prayed over a solemn re-consecration of myself to the work of freeing the slaves until no slave should be found in our land. May God help me to be faithful to that pledge made in Annapolis jail. In that cell, God helping me, if it stands, I will celebrate the emancipation of the slaves of Maryland, before ten years more roll away.
There was something self-regarding about this young white man and his brash pledge, which he so obviously hoped would prove historic. Was his vow really about enslaved African Americans, or was it more about their self-appointed savior, who had already failed quite spectacularly at two professions and was searching for a new way to make his mark? Despite his self-centered pose, Torrey would soon prove himself deadly serious about the antislavery cause, risking everything to pursue the goal he had set.
* * *
Torrey had moved to Thomas Smallwood’s Washington just a month earlier. After receiving an education as prestigious as any available to an American at the time, the pious young man had tried his hand at teaching and preaching, but both efforts had ended badly. Then he had been drawn into the burgeoning campaign to abolish slavery, which was centered in his native New England, far from those on whose behalf the abolitionists were fighting. Now, leaving behind his wife and two children in Massachusetts, he had relocated quite deliberately inside the belly of the beast. Using his connections, he had arranged to become a correspondent for abolitionist newspapers, reporting on the debates in Congress—and also acting as a firsthand witness of the slave system he so stridently opposed.
Suddenly the evil he had preached and lectured about from a distance was all around him. Settling into Mrs. Padgett’s boardinghouse on Thirteenth Street N.W.—where it happened that Elizabeth Smallwood did the laundry—Torrey was shocked to see slave traders operating openly on the Mall between the Capitol and the White House. He called on the few radical abolitionist members of Congress, introducing himself and asking for their help with his reporting. And he began to visit Black churches, including Smallwood’s Wesley African Society, where in the same month—December 1841—the feud between Smallwood and Abraham Cole had grown into a lawsuit. Torrey attended a class, not a service, but found himself deeply moved, as he wrote to his wife:
I have not enjoyed the “communion of saints,” so much, for a long time, as when mingling with that little band of despised colored people, partly slaves; and, when one of the poor women, nearly white, spoke of the “persecution” she endured, with sobs, I felt my heart filled with new energy to make war upon that hateful institution that so crushes the disciples of the Lord to the earth.
There was condescension in Torrey’s earnest description; surely not all of the free, proud members of this Black church class would have welcomed being called a “little band of despised colored people.” Torrey’s attention to the skin tone of enslaved people and the euphemistic reference to a woman’s rape by her enslaver were standard in abolitionist writing. But his introduction to the racial dramas that were playing out daily in the nation’s capital was clearly thrilling for him, and he seemed to use every encounter to renew his vow to battle slavery.
And then, almost before he had a chance to write his first dispatch, he stumbled onto some news—a highly unusual event called the Slaveholders’ Convention was scheduled to start January 12 just thirty-five miles away in the courthouse in Annapolis, Maryland’s capital. With the license of a newspaper correspondent, he thought he could safely eavesdrop on the enemy, reporting to his readers on the perfidious plans of the owners of human property in Maryland. He hastened to the scene.
It was the first such gathering in Maryland, and it reflected the swelling anxiety among slaveholders about what they perceived as threats to their economic and political position. Most were wealthy men with large acreages planted in tobacco and the newer grain crops. They were a formidable power in the Maryland General Assembly and faced few truly powerful opponents. But they were worried nonetheless about the growing free Black population in the state, which they feared might infect their enslaved workers with dangerous ideas and someday swamp the white population. They were also worried about the increasing problem of runaways. And they were concerned that the rise of the abolitionist movement in the north over the previous decade might erode their advantage in both the Maryland legislature and in Congress.
Torrey’s reports from the convention captured the anxious tone and extreme demands of some speakers. A slaveholder from Prince George’s County, where Smallwood had been born, declared that “he took it to be an axiom, that two races that could not be mingled, could never be happy in the same community.” Another speaker noted that the state’s branch of the American Colonization Society had for years been receiving $10,000 a year in state money to, in his words, “remove the free colored population.” But in fact, he complained, since the payments had begun, the number of free African Americans in Maryland had actually increased by thirty thousand!
One of the planters proposed that the state should “pay a high reward for the arrest and conviction of any person who aids a runaway slave.” Another demanded that police should be “appointed to watch the arrival and departure of all steamers, railroad cars, etc., to prevent runaway slaves from traveling in them.” Children of free Black people should be taken from their parents at age eight, another speaker proposed, and forced to work for white people until age eighteen for women and age twenty-one for men—at which point they would be “induced” to leave their native state, never to return. Negroes should never be allowed to hold meetings after dark or to own firearms. Should they somehow acquire any real estate, it should be sold by law at the time of their death. These ideas were the slaveholders’ notion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for their Black fellow Americans.
* * *
Torrey duly took notes on what he called “such a system of diabolical propositions.” Though he was by no means a well-known figure, some in attendance became suspicious of the slight man with the moustache scribbling so furiously as plantation magnates took their turns at the lectern. Others may have been warned by friends in Washington to be on the lookout for a troublemaking journalist. A doorkeeper demanded to know whether Torrey was a delegate, and asked him to leave the meeting room when he said he was not.
Rather than joining the other reporters waiting in the lobby, Torrey climbed to the gallery and kept on writing. The doorkeeper returned and escorted him to the floor of the meeting, where “a Babel-like confusion of opinions was uttered as to what should be done” with this interloper. What Torrey described as “the mobocratic part” of the crowd began to threaten violence, and he was ushered out by more civil delegates, who urged him to leave town. He returned to the tavern where he was staying and retrieved some books he needed to return to the editor of the Annapolis paper. But when he reappeared on the street, the mob, by now a collection of the more militant convention delegates and ruffians drawn to the unrest, confronted him again:
They were now at a loss what to do. Some urged to take me five miles out of town and let me go. Others were for hanging, tar and feathering, etc., but too many respectable Annapolis people had now gathered around to allow this, and I believe the perfect composure I was enabled to maintain calmed them.
Despite his “perfect composure,” more rowdies showed up, out for blood, so a “kind and worthy, but timid magistrate” wrote up an arrest warrant and escorted Torrey to jail, with a crowd of two or three hundred screaming men and boys following. It was in the “old and ruinous” jail, where “a jackknife would free any prisoner in two hours,” that Torrey met and was so taken with the two Black families who seemed likely to be sold south at any moment.
Torrey’s lively, sometimes witty account shows how the unexpected turn in his first major reporting venture left a huge and lasting impression. He had arrived in Washington a few weeks before, a virtual unknown. Now he had managed single-handedly to disrupt and throw into confusion a large gathering of slaveholders. Despite the excitement of the crowd and the shouted threats, he didn’t seem to be seriously frightened; as an educated white man, he may have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the mob would not dare harm him. It is hard to avoid the impression that he was enjoying the adventure, jail and all. He was decidedly the hero of his own story.
A volunteer legal team was assembled to defend Torrey—though against what charges remained unclear. The judge overseeing Torrey’s case, after listening to a contradictory collection of witnesses, decided to have him held over the weekend. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts congressional delegation, having heard of the jailing of a journalist with deep roots in their state, asked a prominent Boston lawyer who happened to be visiting Washington to take on his defense, and by Sunday David A. Simmons had joined the defense team. By Wednesday the judge had “found no cause to detain me, not one of all the allegations and suspicions having even a plausible or any proof whatever to sustain them.”
Torrey was thrilled to hear one delegate to the Slaveholders’ Convention grumble that the hoopla surrounding his detention and court appearances, and the associated antislavery agitation, “would destroy all the effect of the Convention.” Indeed, newspapers around the country had picked up the story of the brave abolitionist reporter who had dared go into the lion’s den and who had been jailed in retaliation. “GREAT EXCITEMENT,” said the headline in the Boston Daily Mail. “Arrest of an Abolitionist Reporter,” cried the Newark Daily Advertiser.
“I can only say, that if my imprisonment has such an effect,” Torrey wrote, relishing the attention, “I shall devoutly thank God for it.”
The Annapolis escapade had lit a fire under his embryonic journalism career, but, more important, it had given him a taste for action. In the drama to come, Torrey would opt for being a participant rather than a mere chronicler.
* * *
When Charles Torrey was a child—one already orphaned—he had a strange and striking dream that he would long remember, feeding a compelling sense of religious mission in a world of haunting moral conflict:
In my childhood, when about seven years old, I dreamed I was dead and in hell! It seemed not unlike the scenery of our world. Its devil, not unlike a smiling man! He offered to the lost, beautiful and fragrant fruits, that turned to bitter ashes in the mouth; and still he smiled! There seemed no restraint on men’s motions, or intercourse. Their sufferings were in their hearts. Full of anguish at being shut up with the wicked, I approached the low wall that seemed to divide the place from heaven. Child as I was, I could see over it; but had no power to climb it.
When he wrote about the dream more than twenty years later, it had lost none of its emotional power. He recalled seeing his grandparents on the other side of the wall and calling for their help, but “they only looked at me mournfully, and passed on.” The seven-year-old Charles had to find his own way out of the predicament, and he formed a lifelong habit:
For the first time in my life, I knelt, and tried to pray, not to be saved from hell; for it never had, in all my life, any terror to my mind; but to be reserved from such a just punishment. The habit of secret prayer then formed, was never wholly lost, through long years of youthful folly and sin.
If the young Charles Torrey was obsessed with religious faith and hyperfocused on judging his own conduct and state of mind, he came by his extreme Christianity honestly. He was descended from the Puritans, who believed God had chosen them for a special covenant and who had fled England to settle on the rocky Massachusetts coast. His early childhood was a series of losses to tuberculosis: his father, when he was about two; his infant sister, the following year; and his mother, the year after that. His memories of that time have an authentic feel:
I think I remember playing with my little sister; remember my glee at the “pleasant ride” I thought we had when she was buried; my father’s great coat, which hung in a particular place; my mother’s sick bed; aunt Amanda’s parching corn for her; my playing about father’s house, near a board fence.
