1 The Most Inhuman System That Ever Blackened the Pages of History
A memory that would stay with Thomas Smallwood all his long life mixed pride with wry wonderment. As a young boy he was taught to read by the couple who enslaved him, a skill that distinguished him not just from other enslaved children but from most Black adults as well. In their rural community of Bladensburg, just east of the District of Columbia boundary, he became a sort of neighborhood spectacle, asked repeatedly to perform for the friends and neighbors of his owner.
They were amazed at the fact that a black or colored person could learn the Alphabet, yea, learn to spell in two syllables. I appeared to be a walking curiosity in the village where I then lived, and when passing about the village I would be called into houses, and the neighbors collected around to hear me say the Alphabet and to spell baker and cider, to their great surprise, (which were the first two words in the two syllables of Webster’s Spelling Book.)
It is an affecting scene—the cute Black prodigy wowing his white and Black neighbors with his mastery of the leading primer of the day. The passage presages Smallwood’s dual identity in adulthood, as a Black man but one whose literacy, wide learning, and political consciousness would set him apart, first in slavery and later in freedom. He would develop the power to operate behind enemy lines in a slave society, studying the enslavers and their allies while rarely attracting notice.
Yet years later, as he wrote his memoir, Smallwood did not linger for long on the sentimental appeal of his childhood skill at spelling. Characteristically, he went straight to the larger context and its bitter significance in politics and power. He knew his boyish feats were seen as extraordinary only because he was Black and enslaved:
This may afford the reader a glimpse into the abyss of intellectual darkness into which the African race in America has been so long purposely confined, to serve the avarice and ends of their tyrannical oppressors.
This poignant childhood memory and Smallwood’s brutally clear-eyed adult understanding of it capture a critical fact about Smallwood’s early life. He was born into slavery, but unlike the vast majority of people in bondage, he benefited from unusual enslavers who helped him educate himself and obtain his freedom. His “slave narrative,” as his memoir has sometimes been labeled by the few scholars to take notice of it, is no catalog of the horrors he suffered. Instead, he devotes only a few paragraphs to the thirty years he spent in slavery, lingering mainly on his luck in the owners he got by virtue of a will and a wedding.
Smallwood was born on February 22, 1801, in Prince George’s County, a Maryland jurisdiction of tobacco plantations and small farms bordered to the west by Washington, D.C. When he sat down decades later to write his memoir, he said not a word about his parents, a curious omission that may have signaled lingering personal pain. It is quite possible that Smallwood, like so many enslaved children, was separated permanently from his parents in very early childhood, either because they were dispatched to different farms by the dictates of an estate settlement or because his parents were sold to a slave trader who shipped them to the Deep South. Archival records shed no light, but Smallwood would later write fiercely of the domestic slave trade: “Who can calculate the amount of suffering occasioned by the sudden snapping of conjugal and parental ties, among those poor creatures, by an unrighteous law?”
What is known is that as small children Thomas and his sister, Catharine, called Kitty, were inherited by a Prince George’s County woman, Sarah Ferguson, and her children. In 1808, Sarah Ferguson married a cousin, John Bell Ferguson. It turned out to be a stroke of luck for Thomas, then seven. John Ferguson was a Methodist minister who frowned upon slavery, but by Smallwood’s account he was constrained by the terms of his wife’s inheritance:
Myself and Sister had been bequeathed to the Lady whom he married and to her children. Although by the terms of the will he could not dispose of us, at pleasure, yet by paying the amount at which we were valued he could do so by mutual agreement with those interested. That he did (for he was no friend to slavery) by paying $500 for me, but with the amount he paid for my sister I never became acquainted.
For both John and Sarah, it was a second marriage, and both brought children to the match. Because Thomas and Kitty had been bequeathed jointly to Sarah and her children, Ferguson was obligated to buy them from his new wife and stepchildren. Having spent the considerable sum of $500 (a very high price for a child at the time, some $15,000 today), he chose not to immediately grant Thomas his freedom. Instead, Ferguson told young Thomas that he would have to go to work and gradually pay off the $500 debt, not an unusual arrangement at the time.
Unlike many slaveholders, though, Ferguson put legal weight behind his promise of eventual emancipation. He went to the Prince George’s County courthouse and filed a document in 1815, when Thomas was fourteen, pledging to free him when he turned thirty. Ferguson may have intended his deed of manumission, witnessed by his neighbor Thomas Bowie, to reassure Smallwood that the promise of freedom was sincere and irrevocable. He might also have wanted the scheduled emancipation placed on the record in case Ferguson should die in the meantime, to preempt any move by Sarah or her children to ignore the arrangement and try to reenslave Thomas Smallwood for life.
“To all whom it may concern,” Ferguson wrote in the wordy, official style of such documents, he had “released from slavery liberated manumitted and set free and by these presents do hereby release from slavery manumit and set free my Negro Boy Thomas.” The deed incorrectly makes Thomas a year older than he was, saying he was fifteen “and able to work and gain a sufficient livelihood and maintenance.”
Given the treatment of most enslaved people at the time, Smallwood appears to have found the arrangement fair. He later spoke fondly of Ferguson. Though he reached the end of his term of enslavement in 1830 with a small debt to Ferguson remaining, Smallwood insisted on carrying out his end of the bargain to the letter: “Hence it left me in debt at the end of my service $60, which I subsequently paid to the last farthing.” His gratitude to Ferguson was surely due in part to John and Sarah’s decision to teach the enslaved boy to read—a legal but highly unusual step in Maryland. “What little I know of the letter,” Smallwood would write, referring to literacy, “was obtained in the following manner, for I never had a day’s schooling. The gentleman before mentioned, as my master, and his wife, learned me the English alphabet, and to spell in two syllables.”
Smallwood’s earliest years showed him how random events and decisions in the world of white people could determine the fate of the enslaved. Perhaps because of those early lessons, he would later take particular satisfaction when the actions of enslaved people—taken with his own determined help—turned the tables and upset the plans and comfort of their enslavers. But in his case, the lottery of white power happened to break in his favor. The sense that he was the beneficiary of rare good fortune seems to stand behind his later decision to act so boldly on behalf of those still in slavery.
* * *
One feature of the despicable treatment of enslaved African Americans was to leave them out of official records except when their existence was noted in a legal accounting of a slaveholder’s possessions. It’s not quite right to say they were erased from history—in many cases, there was no record that could be erased. They were “chattels,” the chilling word (often used ironically by Torrey and Smallwood) that meant movable property and came to be applied routinely to people in slavery, stripping them of humanity and character. The United States Census collected only the sex and age of enslaved people in a household, not bothering with their names. Other official records were just as sketchy, and newspapers took little note of people in bondage except when they ran away or were accused of a crime. To trace the early life of a man like Smallwood requires looking for places to glimpse his reflection, however distorted or imperfect, in the lives of his owner and employers and in the events that shaped his time and place.
We know, for example, that from early childhood Smallwood lived with the Fergusons in Bladensburg, a modest river town about six miles northeast of the U.S. Capitol. In the early nineteenth century, Bladensburg was a significant port on what was then called the Eastern Branch of the Potomac River—today the Anacostia River. But by the time Smallwood was a teenager it had become clogged with silt and lost business to the wharves downriver in Washington, where he and his owner would eventually move. A momentous event when Thomas was thirteen, old enough to be paying attention, was the Battle of Bladensburg in the War of 1812. British troops overwhelmed a poorly organized American militia in August 1814, swept across the bridge over the Eastern Branch, and marched to the heart of the capital, where they famously burned the presidential mansion, later called the White House. The Americans’ helter-skelter retreat was memorialized in newspaper sarcasm as the “Bladensburg Races.”
One striking element of the invasion surely reached young Thomas Smallwood by word of mouth: fighting with the British force under Major General Robert Ross in Bladensburg and Washington were units of the Corps of Colonial Marines, composed of Black troops recruited from among thousands of enslaved Americans who had responded to a British promise of freedom for those who joined their fight. Men who looked like him were dressed in splendid uniforms, armed with muskets and swords—and marching to victory. In addition to those who had joined the Colonial Marines, hundreds of African Americans who had fled slavery in the Chesapeake region tagged along with British forces to avoid reenslavement.
“A great number of negroes, delighted at the unhoped-for freedom our expedition had placed within their reach, followed the army,” one British officer recalled, declaring that some of the enslaved who joined the invaders “possessed infinitely more sense and judgment than their late owners gave them credit for.” Some of the Black men who fought for the British, like others who had joined the British side in the American Revolution, were subsequently given land grants in the British colonial territory of Canada, homesteading there years in advance of the thousands who would flee American slavery and settle there in the ensuing decades.
Three weeks after the rout at Bladensburg, a Washington lawyer named Francis Scott Key, watching from a ship off Baltimore as the British bombarded Fort McHenry, penned the poem that would become the national anthem. Few Americans know that its rarely sung third stanza appears to denigrate those who fled enslavement by crossing over to the British side: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” But the villains of Key’s rhyme may have been heroes to an impressionable young Black man. Such were some of the complex contradictions of freedom and bondage, loyalty to country or to principle, that might have reached the young Smallwood, who would himself, much later, acclaim and enjoy liberty on Canadian soil.
The fact that hundreds of his neighbors were willing to abandon their homes to fight or flee with an enemy army must have left an impression. By his teenage years, Smallwood would have had a visceral understanding of the cruelty, violence, and bedrock unfairness of slavery—if not always from his own experience, then from the experience of those around him. Just a year after the Battle of Bladensburg came a horrifying episode that would become an oft-cited example of slavery’s particular atrocities. An enslaved woman from Bladensburg named Anna Williams, twenty-four, was sold to a slave trader and locked with her two children in a room above a tavern on F Street in Washington. They had been forcibly taken away from her husband, whom their owner happened not to want to sell at the time. Frantic with despair, Williams threw herself out the window and landed in the street below, breaking her back and both arms.
When an antislavery activist heard the terrible story and visited her, Williams told him she had come to regret leaping—not because of her injuries, but because the slave trader had sold both of her children. “I was so confused and ’istracted, that I didn’t know hardly what I was about,” Williams said, “but I didn’t want to go, and I jumped out of the window;—but I am sorry now that I did it;—they have carried my children off with ’em to Carolina.” She did not know, and would likely never find out, where exactly they had been taken. Both events, the woman’s leap and her children’s forced removal, were the talk of Bladensburg and surely reached fourteen-year-old Smallwood.
The activist who recorded Williams’s story, Jesse Torrey (no relation to Charles Torrey), learned that such wrenching episodes, and worse, were anything but rare in the daily life of a slave society. In the months before his visit, a woman sold in Bladensburg cut the throat of her child, and then her own throat, in the wagon taking them to a trader in Washington. Another woman, sold in nearby Georgetown, had cut her own throat as she was carted off to a slave trader in Alexandria, Virginia. It was just a tiny sampling of the horrors of slavery that rarely made the newspapers but were a daily conversation in the community of the enslaved.
What was the impact on young Thomas Smallwood of such horrific stories, some of them involving his neighbors? He surely had heard adults whisper about whipping, torture, rape, kidnapping, suicide, and the rest of the brutal baggage of the slave system. Some of the atrocities he had undoubtedly witnessed with his own eyes. Some terrible things had happened to people he had known all his life. The experiences would shape his growing understanding of the society in which he had been born and drive his grappling with what he might do about it.
* * *
By the time Smallwood was in his early twenties, John Ferguson and his family had moved a few miles from Bladensburg to settle in southeast Washington. Ferguson would become a respected figure in town, sometimes serving as a clergyman but mainly earning a living working at a lumberyard on the wharves along the Eastern Branch. He seems to have been a public-spirited man, inclined to charity. Licensed by the city as a “wood corder,” he was qualified to fairly certify an honest cord of wood. He was the chaplain at the city’s penitentiary, served on the board of health, and helped oversee the Guardians of the Poor.
In a second stroke of good fortune, Smallwood would credit a Scottish immigrant in the same southeast neighborhood with having an influence on his life nearly as great as Ferguson’s. He spent several years, he later recounted, working as a household servant for John McLeod, who had become one of Washington’s leading educators:
But for my advancement from two syllables to the little I now possess I owe a deep debt of gratitude to a family of that people who are proverbial for their love of learning and imparting it to others, viz. Mr. John McLeod a Scotch gentleman in whose excellent family I lived several years as servant. He had a large family of sons and daughters, these young gentlemen and ladies not only took great pleasure in learning me, but all the other servants about the house, who would take their teaching, for they were all colored, and hired help notwithstanding. He employed many servants about his house, he hired all; for be it said to his credit and humanity, he would own no slaves, although living in a slaveholding country.
In his later writing, despite the pose of modesty (“the little I now possess”), Smallwood would flaunt his impressive learning, quoting classical philosophers and contemporary British and American poets. His advance from mere literacy to deep learning and wide reading came at McLeod’s house. McLeod, who had started his first school in Washington in 1808 with just four students and the motto “Order is Heaven’s first law,” would go on over nearly four decades to found and operate a series of institutions: the Eastern Academy, the Central Academy, the Female Central Academy, the Columbian Academy. He occasionally feuded with rival schoolmasters and at times struggled to collect the tuition parents owed him, but he appears to have been widely admired. He served as president of the Washington Relief Society, which sought to help the poor, and, as Smallwood noted, he opposed slavery—he loaned his schoolhouse on F Street for meetings of Washington’s Abolition Society. One featured speaker was Francis Scott Key, whose record on slavery as an attorney was checkered but who had represented a number of Black people in freedom suits challenging their enslaved status.
From McLeod’s school advertisements, and others’ comments about him, it is easy to form an impression of Smallwood’s boss and mentor: a stern, old-fashioned pedagogue with affection for his students and a very dry wit who took full advantage of his location in the capital. At some school gatherings, the Marine Band, based at the Navy Yard nearby, performed for the parents and students. In June 1838, none other than the vice president of the United States, Richard M. Johnson, stopped by graduation ceremonies to hand out medals to top pupils. McLeod required students to start class at dawn and once denounced vacations in a deadpan newspaper notice that would find an echo in Smallwood’s future satirical prose:
Copyright © 2023 by Scott Shane
