THE MASON-DIXON LINE, Part VIII - MANASSEH & EPHRAIM CUTLER

                                                                    MANASSEH CUTLER

            The determining factors for the establishment and operation of the Underground Railroad in the Mid-Ohio River valley were a matter of geography, politics and religion.  For all practical purposes, the groundwork supporting the Underground Railroad was laid when Manasseh Cutler authored Article 6 of the Ordinance of 1787 of the United States Constitution, which excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory.  In 1785, a group of former Revolutionary War officers from New England, led by General Rufus Putnam, formed the Ohio Land Company in order to purchase a large tract of land in the Northwest Territory and sell it in parcels to other American settlers.  The first settlement was at Marietta in Washington County, at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers.  These pioneers with the Ohio Land Company greatly influenced the anti-slavery attitude not only of early settlers in Ohio, which became the 17th state in 1803, but in the other states formed within the Northwest Territory as well.

            Manasseh Cutler was born in Killingly, Conn., on May 3, 1742, and worked on his father's farm while being tutored for college by the Rev. Aaron Brown.  Cutler graduated with honors from Yale University in 1765, then married Mary Balch of Dedham, Massachusetts, the following year.  After studying law, he was admitted to practice in Massachusetts courts in 1767.  The next year he was licensed to preach at Hamlet Parish, at that time a part of Ipswich and, later, of Hamilton, MA.  During the Revolutionary War Cutler served as chaplain in Col. Ebenezer Francis's 11th Massachusetts Regiment.

            At the close of the war, he returned to Hamlet , where he undertook the study of medicine in order to be able to minister to both the spiritual and physical welfare of his congregation.  Notwithstanding the many duties of his active life, Cutler continued his habits of study and found time for research in astronomy, meteorology, botany and kindred sciences.  He was the first to scientifically examine the flora of New England; some 360 species were examined and classified by him.  As a scientist, he was second at this time only to Benjamin Franklin, a friend whose tastes and interests in life he shared.

            When the Association of Revolutionary Officers was organized for the purpose of settling on bounty lands in the Northwest Territory, awarded to them for their service in the war, Dr. Cutler took an active interest in the movement.  He was one of five officers appointed to draft a plan for the  Ohio Company, whose directors appointed him in 1787 to purchase land along the Muskingum River, a tributary of the Ohio.  Because Dr. Cutler's land purchase was dependent on the form of government chosen for the Territory by Congress, he became engaged in writing relevant provisions of the Northwest Ordinance.  His success in uniting discordant political elements made possible the enacting of Article 6 forbidding slavery in the Territory.

            In December, 1787, the first company of men under General Rufus Putnam left Ipswich by flatboat for the Muskingum, arriving in Marietta on April 7, 1788.  The following year, Dr. Cutler started a 29-day, 750-mile journey in his horse-drawn sulky to visit the new settlement, arriving in Marietta on August 19th, 1789, in time to attend the opening of the first court in the Northwest Territory.  Before returning to New England Dr. Cutler visited a number of ancient native American earthworks in the vicinity of Marietta with his son Jervis.  For a while he contemplated moving his family to the new settlement but finally judged that it would require too much sacrifice and abandoned the project.   

                                                 Judge Ephraim Cutler

                                                            JUDGE EPHRAIM CUTLER

            Manasseh Cutler's eldest son Ephraim was born April 13, 1767, and brought up in Killingly by his grandfather Hezekiah Cutler.  He left Connecticut on June 15, 1795, with three shares of stock in the Ohio Company lands and arrived in Marietta three months later. Sadly, two of his young children died on the trip.  Early in 1799 he moved a few miles up the Muskingum to Waterford, where he was involved in the mercantile business before moving in May of that year to an 1,800-acre farm on Federal creek, where he erected a mill.  Shortly thereafter, Ephraim Cutler was appointed Judge of the Court of Common Pleas and Justice of the Peace by the first Northwest Territorial Governor, Arthur  St. Clair.  He was also appointed a member of the Northwest Territorial Legislature and in 1802 became Washington County's delegate to the Ohio Statehood Constitutional Convention.  His anti-slavery contribution at the convention was his introduction to the Ohio Constitution of the section that excluded slavery in the state.  Both Cutlers, Mannaseh and his son Ephraim, thus played a big role in Ohio’s becoming a free state, which in turn helped lay the track for Ohio's Underground Railroad.

            When Ohio became a state in 1803, Washington County already had a small but vocal population of anti-slavery advocates.  With the invention of the cotton gin and passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1793, anti-slavery advocates had gradually come to realize that slavery in the United States was never going to end by negotiated emancipation.  During the period 1806-1810, through his extensive contacts among Quakers and other anti-slavery advocates in Ohio, Judge Ephraim Cutler began informally to enlist assistance from abolitionists for fugitive slaves crossing the Ohio River.

            In 1806 he established his family in a new home on the Ohio side of the river six miles below Marietta in a community later named Constitution.  His home became the model for Underground Railroad stations on the northern side of the river.  By 1810 settlers in Ohio were becoming increasingly aware of the brutalities of slavery as related, and demonstrated, by these fugitives.

            The exact date when Cutler began operating an Underground Railroad station at his home is not clear, but by 1810 he and his friend Colonel John Stone, who lived a few miles down-river in Belpre, OH, were helping fugitive slaves from Wood County, Virginia, begin the first leg of an Underground Railroad line  (roughly following present-day Washington County Rt. 3) that ran northwest from Constitution through heavily forested hills and across Barnett Ridge to the James Lawson station at Barlow, also in Washington County.  The village of Cutler, named for Ephraim Cutler's son William Pitt Putnam, also became an Underground Railroad Station in western Washington County.  From this time and place the Underground Railroad spread very rapidly along the “River Jordan” separating free and slave states, not only to other points in Ohio but, over the following decade, westward to Indiana and Illinois as well.

            In the meantime, Judge Ephraim Cutler introduced the first bill in Ohio for the regulation and support of public schools and became a trustee of Ohio University at Athens in 1820.  He was the author of the ad valorem system of taxation, the foundation of a tax credit enabling Ohio to build and maintain canals, and was also active in the Presbyterian Church.  From 1842-1853 he operated the first post office, the only one in the nation named for the U.S. Constitution, from his stone house by the Ohio River.  Cutler died peacefully at home at the age of eighty-six in 1853.

            Today Constitution is located on State Route 7 in Washington County, six miles south of Marietta and about four miles north of Belpre, OH.  Besides its importance as an early Underground Railroad station, the rural community was the site of the Constitution Grindstone Co., one of several firms in Washington County that supplied 90 percent of the heavy millstones in the United States in the 19th Century.  The hard work furnished employment for many local residents, including a number of African-Americans living in that part of the county. 

The above plaque, erected at the Ohio River Museum in 2008, is one of 24 for which Henry Burke secured funding from the Ohio Historical Society. (Two others were funded by the West Virginia Division of Archives and History.) All were made by Sewah Studios of Marietta, OH. The text on the front of the plaque (above) reads: "People living in Marietta and along the Muskingum River shared a history of slavery opposition. Manasseh Cutler, from Massachusetts and an Ohio Land Company agent, helped draft the Ordinance of 1787 that prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. General Rufus Putnam, Captain Jonathan Stone, and other Ohio Land Company Revolutionary War veterans, founded Marietta at the mouth of the Muskingum River in 1788 bringing with them their anti-slavery sentiments. A proposal to legalize slavery in the proposed state of Ohio was vetoed largely due to the efforts of Marietta’s Ephriam Cutler and General Putnam at the 1802 Ohio Constitutional Convention. These conditions were precursors toward the formation of the Underground Railroad as fugitive slaves crossed the Ohio River seeking freedom. From 1812 through 1861, large numbers of fugitive slaves fleeing toward Canada were aided by descendants of early settlers who operated Underground Railroad Stations along the Muskingum River."

THE MASON-DIXON LINE, Part VII - AUNT JENNY

                                                                  AUNT JENNY 

     There was a slave woman known to local history as "Aunt Jenny" who lived in Parkersburg, Virginia on the Ohio River. US Highway Route 50 (then known as Arlington Pike) ran west across present day West Virginia and was used by fugitive slaves heading for the Ohio River and the Underground Railroad beyond. Because this road crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, a formidable barrier, I assume most fugitive slaves used the Arlington to access Pennsylvania rather than crossing the mountains and foothills to the Ohio River.

     From west of Clarksburg, Virginia, however, fugitive slaves used the Arlington Pike to reach the Ohio River at Parkersburg in Wood County. There they sought out Aunt Jenny, who worked with Belpre, Ohio, Conductor John Stone of the Underground Railroad in southeastern Ohio.   

      "Aunt Jenny" was really a code name; her real name was Edna Sutton, a black woman identified by Historian Herbert L. Roush in his book "THE UNKNOWN SETTLEMENT, A historical Narrative of Little Hocking, Washington County, Ohio (1789-1984).”

     According to Mr. Roush, Edna Sutton came to Little Hocking to work on railroad construction right after the Civil War. At first she had disguised herself as a man, and applied for work under the name Ed Sutton. She labored as a man on the railroad construction crew until the work moved too far from Little Hocking. Choosing to stay in the Little Hocking area, she revealed her true gender and was employed as a domestic by Horace Curtis.

     The most important clue that Edna Sutton may have been "Aunt Jenny" came from her own words when she explained that she had “blown the horn at Parkersburg.” She didn't know her exact age and had simply assumed the surname Sutton. The rest of her life she did a variety of odd jobs but always managed to take care of herself. Whatever her true name or origins, "Aunt Jenny" did a service in helping fellow slaves on their way to freedom. She died alone in Little Hocking around 1878 and is presumed buried at the Newberry Cemetery at Little Hocking.

THE MASON-DIXON LINE, Part VI - VAUCLUSE SLAVE AUCTION

                                             THE VAUCLUSE SLAVE AUCTION

            The former village of Vaucluse, later called Jonestown, is now a ghost village near present-day St. Marys in Pleasants County, West Virginia. According to a 1986 historical article by George Riggs of St. Marys, supported by Mrs. Jessie Radcliff's recollections of stories her grandfather told her, about 1789 a young French trapper named Pierre Vaucluse was paddling by canoe down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh on his way to the Northwest Territory’s first organized settlement in Marietta. On the Virginia side of the river, he spotted an interesting-looking hollow, found the place to his liking and built a cabin there. Others joined him and the settlement of Vaucluse grew along the southern shore of the Ohio.

            Eventually the Blacksburg Road, also known as the Northwest Turnpike, was extended westward to the little river port of Vaucluse. The road was heavily used to haul freight by horse and wagon from Clarksburg to the steamboats that began plying the Ohio River after 1811. Vaucluse had a slave auction to serve the domestic slave trade which used the Ohio to transport Virginia slaves to markets in the Deep South. Mrs. Radcliff states that her grandfather William Brown witnessed slaves being auctioned on a platform supported by a rock ledge when he was a small boy. Toward the end of its existence, Vaucluse was a busy place, with Clarksburg teamsters yelling at their horses, slave dealers bidding on slaves and steamboat whistles blasting away.

            Many disputes, often leading to violence and bloodshed, arose between suspected abolitionists and slave-owners. Mr. Riggs wrote about a slave cemetery located south of Vaucluse on the former Dye Farm, near WV Route #2 in the present-day community of Belmont in Pleasants County. The home of Arch Bradford is reported to have had a tunnel leading from the basement of his house down to the Ohio River, from which abolitionists in the area would help fugitive slaves cross to the Underground Railroad in Washington County.  The former Alexander Henderson Plantation (now the site of the American Cyanamid Chemical Plant at Willow Island in Pleasants County) possessed a number of slaves, and many of them reportedly used this tunnel.  Gangs of white men and some slaves, with bloodhounds, would beat the bushes looking for escaped slaves, only to lose them near the Bradford home. According to Mr. Riggs, the Henderson house, which is still standing within the perimeter of the American Cyanimid complex, used to have iron rings in the walls of the basement to secure the chains of errant slaves who were being punished.

            A short distance down the Ohio River at Bull Creek was a plantation owned by Solomon Harness, who purchased the property in about 1810. The owner before him had bought the property from President George Washington and built on it a cabin of native chestnut logs in 1790. The first evidence of slaves escaping from the Harness plantation is a reward posted in an 1820 edition of the Marietta Gazette, offering $100 for the capture of a slave named Tom. There were no doubt other Harness slaves who escaped between the years 1820 and 1843, when the well-documented escape of Jane and her seven children, for which this book is named, occurred.  The next plantation down-river from Harness belonged to William Corbett, who lost some of his slaves to the Underground Railroad, though details of those escapes are few and rather vague.

HARMAN BLENNERHASSETT AND CAJOE PHILLIPS

     Original Blennerhassett Mansion - Since restored on Blennerhassett Island 

           Harman Blennerhassett was born in 1767 of Irish parentage in Hampshire, England. He studied law at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and was admitted to practice in 1790. In 1796 when his father died, Blennerhassett inherited a fortune in pounds equivalent to $100,000 1800 U.S. dollars. The couple came to America in 1797, according to some historians because of the scandal attached to Blennerhassett’s marriage to his sister's beautiful daughter, Margaret Agnew. Received among the wealthy class of Americans, the Blennerhassetts traveled to Marietta, Ohio, where they spent the winter looking for a property to buy. In the spring of 1798 they purchased the northern 174 acres of a 500-acre island in the Ohio River, just below present-day Parkersburg, West Virginia. Now named Blennerhassett, the Island had originally been claimed by George Washington in 1770.

            Micah "Cajoe" Phillips, born in Tidewater Virginia around 1740, claimed not only to have fought with the 16,000 American and French forces under Washington's command at the siege of Yorktown but to have been personally acquainted with General Washington. Contrary to Washington’s decree that African-American slaves who fought with the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War would be freed, Cajoe was not granted freedom for his military service. Instead he was sold to Harman Blennerhassett who purchased him while in Richmond, Virginia, along with some other slaves.

Cajoe's main job on the Blennerhassett Plantation was moving the ferryboat back and forth between the Virginia (now West Virginia) shore and the island plantation. Later in life, he reported that Blennerhassett was an occasional slave trader who sometimes treated his slaves cruelly.

In 1806 Blennerhassett, who had a penchant for bad business deals, was introduced to Aaron Burr when he visited the island plantation. Blennerhassett loaned Burr a substantial amount of money for the so-called "Burr Conspiracy," reported to have been an ill-fated plot by Burr and others to take over some Spanish-Mexican territory and form an independent nation. Most details of the alleged plot remain a mystery because Burr never revealed his full intentions, but James Wilkinson, one of Burr's close associates in the project, denounced him to President Thomas Jefferson, who had Burr arrested in 1806. Burr was indicted for treason but after a six-month trial in Richmond, Virginia, was acquitted.

            Blennerhassett was also indicted and acquitted but didn't fare as well as Burr. He was held in Richmond as a material witness for 53 days before being released. During his time in jail the Virginia Militia occupied his plantation, and the Blennerhassetts’ magnificent home was burned to the ground and his wife forced to flee. Some historians blame the fire on the militia, while others blame a tipsy female slave.

Cajoe Phillips

            The Blennerhassetts abandoned the island, and Cajoe Phillips, advanced in age, left the plantation to settle across the Ohio River. At first he settled in Marietta, then moved to Waterford in Washington County. There he established the Waterford Underground Railroad station and lived out the rest of his long life assisting fugitive slaves from his native Virginia. Cajoe didn't quite live to see the end of slavery, dying at the extraordinary age of 120, on December 8, 1861. He rests on a quiet knoll on his former farm near Waterford.

             

THE MASON-DIXON LINE, Part V - AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY

                                        THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY

            At the end of the American Revolution many white citizens of the new United States began to think seriously about the moral aspects of slavery.  The valuable service rendered by some free African-American soldiers during the Revolutionary War brought the issue of slavery to bear upon the consciences of many Americans, who had so recently won their own freedom from England.  A few slaves had also earned their personal freedom fighting in the war.

            During the fledgling years of the nation the Abolitionist movement slowly began to take shape throughout the original 13 states.  The northern states had all individually abolished slavery between 1784 and 1804.  This action established the political boundaries between North and South, free and slave states.  Even southern states had a brief 10-year fling with abolitionist activity.  During the 1780s Virginia narrowly defeated a bill to abolish slavery in the state.

            An issue on many European-Americans' minds was how to deal with all the free Negroes if and when slavery ever came to an end.  This was of more concern in the South because of its much larger per capita black population.  Though free Negroes in the North had been able to survive, they lacked the numbers to exert any real political influence.

            In many parts of the South, however, where blacks outnumbered whites, the latter were afraid that if freed and allowed to vote the former slaves could exert considerable influence on southern politics.  This concern prompted many southerners who might otherwise have favored abolishing slavery to decide against such a move.

            From 1810 through 1860 the opposing views on slavery drove the North and South further apart.  A common view today is that there were only two choices: freedom or slavery for African-American slaves.  There was another view, however, shared by a sizable group of American citizens.  Although they held slavery to be wrong, they believed for a variety of reasons that it would be best for freed slaves to return to Africa.  Some felt the Negro could never get a fair deal in America.  Others feared the former slaves' competition for jobs.  Still others were sure the two races would never be able to get along together.

            In 1816 a group calling themselves the American Colonization Society was founded.  Six years later they established an American colony on the northern bulge of West Africa and named it Liberia, calling to mind the word "liberty."  The ACS encouraged free Negroes to emigrate to Liberia, where they were promised the proverbial 40 acres and a mule to help them build a new life

            Every state in the United States before the Civil War had state and county chapters of the American Colonization Society.  In southeast Ohio’s Washington County there were frequent debates between the county Abolitionist Society and Colonization Society over the issue of free Negroes.

            The ACS thought all freed slaves should go to Liberia, and the Abolitionist Society believed they should be given full U.S. citizenship.  Southern states paid the ACS for each free Negro resettled in Liberia.  Virginia, for example, passed an act in 1833 paying the ACS $28 for every free person of color who emigrated there.

            In 1847 Liberia became the first independent republic in Africa, its institutions of government modeled after those of the United States.  Monrovia, the capital and principal city, was named for the fifth American President.  There are nine Liberian counties: Lofa, Cape Mount Bounty, Monterrado, Bong, Nimba, Grand Bassa, Grand Gedeh, Sinoe, and Maryland.

            Following is a letter written in 1834 by Beverly Wilson, an emigrant to Liberia from Richmond, VA.:

            "The emigrants that went out with us all had the fever, of which five have died, viz.: one woman of 75, two children under 12, and the wife of the Rev. Mr. Wright.  The rest are all convalescent.

            "I am not prepared to tell you much about the distant parts of Africa at this time: as far as I have seen I am well pleased.  Monrovia is improving very fast; the town contains 220 dwelling homes, besides stores and other buildings; there are about ten warehouses built of stone, and a number of their dwellings have stone basement stories, and are neatly finished.

            "There are many vessels on the coast, which are going out and coming in every day.  We have also many foreign vessels here.  The harbor has not been clear since I arrived.

            "We have fruit in abundance, and the varieties are too numerous to mention at this time.  We have also horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, jacks, and all kinds of poultry that we have at home.  The fish are very fine, I have seen them weigh up to 187 pounds.  Porgeys, mullets, and sunfish are very plenty.  I am told by some who are acquainted with farming that the land is as good as any in America.

            "We have two sabbath schools in Monrovia, and an every day school for male and female pupils.  I have seen at the Methodist Sabbath School about 100 children.  We have also sabbath schools at Grand Bassa, about 100 miles from Monrovia, at Millsbourg, and Caldwell; and have established three others among the natives.

            "Since I have arrived, we have purchased land (40 acres) on the Junk River which is good for farming, and the water is abounding with excellent fish and oysters.

            "We have a number of different tribes to visit us from the interior; I have seen them from as far away as Arabia.  I have seen the Mahometan [sic] priests in the colony; they read and write, and are anxious to converse on the Scriptures.  They ask us many interesting questions.

            "I believe that this bids fair for a good country.  We only want means for the people, who are sent here unprepared for farming and anything else.  I have seen the sugar cane and coffee-tree both very thriving."

            [signed] Beverly Wilson

THE MASON-DIXON LINE, Part IV - CLIMATE, AGRICULTURE & SLAVERY

                                            CLIMATE, AGRICULTURE & SLAVERY

            After years of research I have concluded that, due to climate, two distinct forms of slavery diverged in the colonies.  Starting in Virginia and moving north, tobacco was the most important crop for the first century of English colonization.  Its reliability as a staple crop, however, diminished the farther north it was planted. 

            Although tobacco requires a fair amount of attention, crops like cotton, rice, indigo and sugar cane, which need the hot wet climate that prevailed in the southern colonies, are extremely labor-intensive; and more African slaves, who could tolerate this kind of climate, were required to cultivate them.  Combined with the relative isolation of the deep South's plantations, this spawned the use of extremely cruel methods to control slaves.  To add to the problem, the rich planter class encouraged the help of those without slaves in case of insurrection.

            From Virginia northward, however, slavery developed in a different manner.  From the very beginning Virginians were relatively tolerant with their slaves.  Many slave masters cohabited with their slave women to produce mulatto children.  ("Mulatto" is derived from a Spanish word meaning "cross-bred.")  It was not unusual for the master in this part of the country to set his mulatto children free to avoid embarrassment.  By 1700 a sizable population of free mulattos lived in America, many in such northern cities as Philadelphia, Boston and New York.  Neither white nor black, entirely free nor entirely slave, free mulattos were for the most part descendants of freed African indentured servants or children of masters and their slave women. 

            Generally restricted to their own communities and activities, these "free people of color" developed their own subculture, which offered little social interaction with the swelling numbers of new European immigrants.  Nonetheless, some free blacks gained influence in the north, especially in religious matters.  As an instigator of the "Boston Massacre" of 1770, Crispus Attucks, probably the descendant of freed African indentured servants, gained posthumous fame as the first American killed in action in the Revolutionary War.  Both the Abolitionist Movement and the Underground Railroad started in earnest after the American War of Independence.

            Another subculture developed among free African-Americans in the western region of Virginia, where a large group of very light-complexioned free mulattos formed small farming communities in the vicinity of Philippi.  In general they got along well with native Americans and there was considerable intermarriage between the two cultures. 

            Some free mulattos were offspring of European men who had married African women and moved west to avoid racial harassment.  On the western edge of the advancing American frontier these people developed their own rural subculture based on anti-slavery sentiments -- particularly after 1787 when the U.S. Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, named for the vast tract of land that would eventually become five Midwestern states and part of another.  Slavery was outlawed in the new territory.  Later, in Cutler, Ohio, a community in western Washington County a few miles north of the Ohio River, their descendants, along with white abolitionists, would help many fugitive slaves find their way through the rugged countryside of southeastern Ohio to freedom.

                                                           A HINT OF FREEDOM

            The following oral interview by reporter James Immel appeared in an obituary for Mrs. Sarah Burke, 96, one of Washington County's oldest residents, in the Marietta Times, Saturday, Feb. 10, 1940:

            "Yessir, I guess you all would call me an ex-slave cause I was born in Grayson County, West Virginia and on a plantation I lived for quite a spell, that is until when I was seven years old when we all moved up here to Washington County.  My Pap's old Mammy was supposed to have been sold into slavery when my Pappy was one month old and some poor white people took him to raise. He worked for them until he was a growed-up man, also till they give him his free papers and 'lowed him to leave the plantation and come up here to the North.

            "How did we live on the plantation?  Well -- you see it was like this: we lived in a log cabin with the ground for floors, and the beds were built against the walls jus' like bunks.  I 'member that the slaves had a hard time getting food, most times they got just what was left over or whatever the slaveholder wanted to give them so at night they would slip outa their cabins on to the plantation and kill a pig, a sheep or some cattle which they would butcher in the woods and cut up.  The wimmin folks would carry the pieces back to the cabins in their aprons while the men would stay behind and bury the head, skin and feet.

            "Whenever they killed a pig they would have to skin it, because they didn't dare to build a fire.  The women folk after getting home would put the meat in special dug trenches and the men would come erlong and cover it up.  The slaveholders in the part of the country where I came from was men and it was quite often that slaves were tied to a whippin stake and whipped with a blacksnake until the blood would run down their bodies."

            "I remember quite clearly one scene that happened jus' afore I left that there part of the country.  At the slaveholders home on the plantation I was at, it was customary for the white folks to go to church on Sunday morning and to leave the cook in charge.  This cook had a habit of making cookies and handing them out to the slaves before the (white) folks returned.  Now it happened on one Sunday for some reason the white folks returned before the regular time and the poor cook did not have time to get the cookies to the slaves, so she just hid them in a drawer that was in a sewing chair.

            "The white folks had a parrot that always sat on top of the door in this room and when the mistress came in the room the mean old bird hollered out at the top of his voice, “It's in the rocker.  It's in the rocker.”  Well the Missus found the cookies and told her husband, whereupon he called his man that done the whipping and they tied the poor cook and whipped her till she fainted.  Next morning the parrot was found dead and a slave was accused because he liked the woman that had been whipped the day before.  They whipped him until the blood ran down his legs.

            "Spirits?  Yessir I believe in them, but we warn’t bothered so much by them in them days but we was by the wild animals.  Why after it got dark we children would have to stay indoors for fear of them.  The men folks would build a big fire and I can remember my Pappy a sittin on top of the house with a old flint lock across his legs awaiting for one of them critters to come close enough so he could shoot it.  The reason for him being trusted with a gun was because he had been raised by the poor white man who worked for the slaveholder.  My Pappy did not work in the fields but drove a team of horses.

            "I remembers that when we left the plantation and come to Washington County, Ohio, that we traveled in a covered wagon that had big white horses hitched to it.  The man that owned the horses was Blake Randolls.  We crossed the river 12 miles below Parkersburg, W.Va., on a ferry and came to Stafford, Ohio, in Monroe County where we lived until I was married at the age of 15 to Mr. Burke, by Justice of the Peace, Edward Oakley.  A year later we moved to Curtis Ridge, which is seven miles from Stafford, and we lived there for 20 years or more.  We moved to Rainbow for a spell and then in 1918 my husband died.  The old man Hard Luck came around cause three years later my home burned to the ground and then I came here to live with my boy Joe and his family.

            "Mr. Burke and myself raised a family of 16 children and at that time my husband worked at farming for other people at $2.00 a month and a few things they would give him.  My Pappy got his education from the boy of the white man he lived with because he wasn't allowed to go to school and the white boy was very smart and taught him just as he learned.  My Pappy fought in the Civil War too.  On which side?  Well, sho nuff on the North, boy."

            From the time that Africans were first enslaved they had resisted, but for most slaves resistance was futile under the increasingly discriminatory colonial laws which legitimized slavery.  In order to justify the perpetuation of slavery, the rich tobacco tycoons had to portray Africans as people with less than human qualities.  And under the controlled conditions of slavery, this was not terribly difficult, since those Africans unfortunate enough to become slaves in America had no knowledge of the English language, English Common Law or English culture.  In America only people with black skin could be held as slaves, and black skin readily identified a slave, making it easier to control the slave population.

            To keep African slaves ignorant, colonial slave laws were enacted to prevent Africans from becoming educated in European customs.  The central goal of the slave-owning class was to keep slaves in perpetual ignorance, denying them the means to resist.  Every aspect of a slave's existence was controlled to the smallest detail from birth to death.  The purpose behind slavery was to get the maximum amount of labor for the minimum expense, with no resistance.

            There was nothing subtle about the conditions that maintained the institution of slavery.  The threat of violence hung over the slave culture like an omnipresent fog, and slaves were punished for the smallest infraction.  Rebellious slaves were severely beaten and tortured to death while their fellow slaves were forced to witness the punishment to discourage further resistance.  Fear of their slaves’ reprisal weighed so heavily upon the conscience of slaveholders they became their own victims to the brutal slave culture they had created.

            Though nearly all slave-owners were white, the great majority of the white population in North America were never slaveholders.  Nevertheless, slave-owners were the powerful political and social class of their time.  As a consequence of being a minority, this slave-owning class had to expend great effort to gain and hold the support of the non-slave-owning class of whites in case of a slave rebellion.  This was accomplished, without giving up the enormous profits of slave labor, by inventing and perpetuating the myth of racial superiority.

            From the earliest days of the African slave trade in the 16th Century, there were some Europeans, especially those from clerical backgrounds, who recognized the inherent evils and brutality of slavery -- that no human being deserved to be treated like a draft animal.  It was from this concept that the Abolitionist movement would evolve, yet it took two centuries for the anti-slavery movement to gain sufficient support to become effective.  By 1760, the movement had spread over most of Europe, where it gained enough momentum to end slavery in most European countries by the beginning of the American Revolution.

            Many people in the former English Colonies of North America, including slaves, expected slavery to be abolished in the new United States soon after the Revolutionary War was successfully concluded in 1783.  During the dark days of the war General George Washington had, in fact, decreed that any slave who fought for American independence would be freed.  Consequently, individual northern states began implementing various methods for freeing their slaves as early as 1780.  In the euphoria of freedom that gripped the new nation immediately following the war, some states adopted immediate emancipation plans, while others took a more gradual approach to emancipation.  Even in some southern states, particularly Virginia, some slaves were freed.

THE MASON-DIXON LINE, Part III - KING COTTON

                                                                KING COTTON

            The genus Gossypium (Cotton) is divided into Gossypium Herbaceum, G. Hirstum, G. Barbadense and G. Arboreum, and there are many hybrids in each group.  The plant is indigenous to the tropics of Africa, Asia and south America, and is easily grown in all semi-tropical regions.  The southern-most latitudes of the European Continent are too far north for successful cotton cultivation.

            Cotton has been held in high regard by many cultures over the centuries.  The earliest mention of cotton in literature was made by Herodotus 440 years before the birth of Christ.  A century later Alexander noticed cotton when he invaded India.  He described it as "wool that grows on trees."  Europeans first encountered cotton, like Alexander, in India [when?], and native American cultures were the first to use it in in Central and North America.            

            Cotton was introduced into the English Colonies from the Island of Barbados about 1664.  In 1778 a planter on John's Island, a few miles south of Charleston, South Carolina, clothed his slaves with cotton cloth grown and woven on the plantation.  While there was a great market for raw cotton, the time-consuming process of removing seeds from the fiber by hand limited its production.  The work was tedious and often painful. One person could remove the seeds from only about one pound of cotton per day.

            The man most responsible for the drastic rise in cotton's production was Eli Whitney, an American best known for his invention of the cotton gin.  Whitney was born in Westboro, Massachusetts, and educated at Yale.  In 1792 he visited the plantation of Catherine Greene, widow of the American revolutionary war general Nathaniel Greene, near Savannah, Georgia.  There Whitney designed and built a model of the revolutionary machine that would separate the seeds from the fibers of the short-staple [what is that?] cotton plant.  He completed his first cotton gin in 1793.

            This invention was to have great impact on development of the southern United States.  With the gin, cotton could be cleaned 50 times faster than previously possible -- so efficiently, in fact, that cotton became the most important crop in the South and the basis of the region's enormously profitable agricultural economy.  Whitney entered into partnership with Phineas Miller, manager of the Greene plantation, to manufacture cotton gins at New Haven, Connecticut.  A disastrous factory fire prevented the partners from making enough gins to meet the demand, and manufacturers throughout the South soon began to copy the invention.  Although Whitney and Miller received a patent on the gin in 1794, a decision protecting their patent was not rendered until 1807; and in 1812 the U.S. Congress denied Whitney's petition for renewal of the patent.

            Although Whitney himself profited very little from it, the invention of the cotton gin had a dramatic affect on the world economy and the lives of millions of Africans.  Many were legally imported into the South between 1793 and 1808, when the United States joined Europe in banning the shipment of Africans to the New World as slaves.  This legislation had as much to do with addressing both northern and southern fears of a society overrun with slaves as it did with ending the evils of slavery and, in fact, created a shortage of free labor which greatly increased the American domestic slave trade.

            By 1800, tobacco cultivation in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey had pretty much depleted the soils in this region; immigration and the need for real estate development began replacing many of the old tobacco plantations.  Many former planters had already emancipated a large number of slaves, but there was still a surplus number of slaves in these states, so by 1810 many slave-owners began selling their American-born slaves to cotton plantations further south.  This period saw some 1.5 million slaves working on plantations in the South.

            Plantation records from Col. Williams of Society Hill, South Carolina, who operated one of the most productive plantations in the state, furnish us with an example of a slave plantation's annual expenditures and profits.  This plantation consisted of 4, 200 acres on the Great Peedee River, where in 1849 254 slaves worked from daylight until dark six days a week, with Sundays to rest, attend church and do personal chores.

            The following sales, expenses and profits are for the year 1849:

EXPENSES:
Item		Quantity	$/Cost
bagging		3,980 sq. yds.	636
rope		3,184 pounds	191
taxes		254 slaves	193
property		4,200 acres	70
wages		3 Overseers	900
slaves' doctor bills			317
blacksmith iron		400 pounds	100
cloth (home spun)			810
shoes (homemade)		316 pr	175
woolen blankets		36 blankets	25
oil cloth capotes		350 sq. yds.	125
calico dresses		75 dresses	82
Christmas pres.			175
maint: carts/wagons			100
maint: cotton gins			80
molasses		400 gallons	100
tobacco		3 kegs	60
flour		2 barrels	10
freight & commissions			2,069.00
		Sub total:	$6,218.00
INVESTMENT TAXES @ 7% OF APPRAISED VALUE
Item			$/Cost
Land			4,410.00
Slaves			6,228.00
mules			260
cattle			140
hogs			70
		Subtotal:	$11,108.00
		Taxes/Exp. Total:	$17,326.00
SALES
Item		Quantity	$/Price
cotton		331,136 lbs.	$.07/lb.
bacon		13,500 lbs.	$.05/lb.
corn		100 bushels	$.50/lb .
tanning bark		80 cords	$6.00/cord
blacksmith work			$100.00
wool			$125.00
		Total Sales:	$24,610.00
		Expenses:	$17,326.00
		Profit:	$7,284.00

             Col. Williams was a first rate planter. His annual average of cost per slave, to feed, house, clothe and provide with health care was $33.78. Cotton was a very important item to the economy of the United States.  Some U.S. Cotton Export Data (which does not reflect domestic sales) for selected years:

                                    Year                                   Amount / pounds

                                    1780                                           6,766,613

                                    1790                                         31,447,605

                                    1800                                         56,000,000

                                    1850                                       758,000,000

            While tobacco was the "parent” of slavery in the English Colonies of North America, cotton was certainly "king."