Book delves into county's history with slavery

Slavery in the United States was a time of cruelty, conflict and, on occasion, a sort of kindness.

That was true throughout the region where slavery was allowed and, according to a new book, true in Cape Girardeau County as well.

Retired Southeast Missouri State University history professor Bob White1 has written a 110-page book detailing the buying, selling and use of human chattel in Cape Girardeau County, an effort that attempts to present the conditions of individual slaves while compiling statistics showing the extent of slaveholding.

"Invisible Chains -- Slavery in Cape Girardeau County," stems from a research project White took on for a PBS production of Mark Twain's "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson," the story of a light-skinned slave child switched in the cradle with the child of his master. Published by the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center, the $20 price for the book is split between the archive center and a scholarship for students pursuing historic preservaation degrees at the university.

White used Census books, court records and property records for his research, as well as delving into the pages of two newspapers, the Cape Girardeau Eagle and Western Eagle, for material. "It is nowhere near the complete story," White said. "It says in the beginning that it is not intended to be commplete, but it gives you some chronicles about slavery. It is kind of representative of what slavery was like anywhere in Missouri."

For example, the 1840 Census records that Cape Girardeau had a population of 12,137; of that number, 1,456 were slaves. There were 21 free blacks living in the county at the time.

Slaves and free blacks amounted to 12 percent of the county's population at the time; the 2000 Census puts the current black population of Cape Girardeau County at 5.3 percent.

In addition to detailing how many slaves were held in bondage in Cape Girardeau, White's book also lists where they lived by township and which residents held the largest numbers of slaves. Jane Jackson, director of the archive center, traces her family tree back to the Randols, one of those slaveholding families.

The book, which drew heavily on the resources of the archive center, is a way to begin understanding family histories that have been obscured by the lack of records -- slaves generally did not have last names and they weren't recorded in Census rolls by name until after emancipation -- or by a lack of knowlegdge.

"From the black perspective, if today's young black people want to know their history, this is a place to start," Jackson said. "It is a huge part of history, and it is tragic."

Some people may choose to forget their family once held slaves, but that is glossing over an important facet of the past, she said. "People living today have no control over what their ancestors did."

Beyond the numbers

In addition to culling facts from the records, White has compiled the stories of the people behind the numbers, highlighting acts of cruelty toward child slaves, the legal dilemnas faced by free blacks without supporting documentation and the peculiar form of kindness that led a widow to implore friends and family members to purchase her slaves during a probate auction in an attempt to keep families together.

Two stories from the book stand out for White as symbolic of the era. One tells of three slave children -- Elizabeth, Maria and Tom -- sold by slave trader Malakiah Bradford to John F. Schaffer in October 1858. The children were 2, 7 and 7 years old, respectively, and Bradford put a requirement into the transfer document that the girls were to be freed at 18, the boy was to gain his freedom at age 21, and the sale price of $3,310 for the three held in escrow and divided among them upon their release from bondage.

"The evidence suggests that Tom, Maria and Elizabeth were Bradford's children born of a slave woman, who was sold for $1,000 to Shaffer at the same time the children were transferred," White writes.

An unsigned letter to Bradford, written in 1866, describes the conditions the children endured: "I found" the two girls "in Cape in a most wretched condition, Shaffer had them both hired out to a man, Shaffer had on the farm Elizabeth to nurse their baby and Maria to work the kitchen. Maria had to go all the way down to the spring through the snow with neither shoes nor stocking on, and they made her go early in the morning through that pasture to fetch the cows in the same condition," the letter states.

In addition to slave trading, Bradford was a partner in the Johnson House Hotel, which stood at the northwest corner of Water Street and Broadway during the Civil War. Over 16 years, White was able to document 92 slaves purchased by Bradford from New Orleans, St. Louis and Louisville, Ky.

The other story cited by White as especially revealing involves a man named George Craig, accused in 1845 of being a runaway slave named Edmund who had left Jefferson County, Ark., in 1836. Craig was imprisoned in the county jail, and his case dragged on until 1847.

His identity was not conclusively established, but the prosecutor in the case, Charles A. Davis, put up $500 to buy the rights to Craig. The prosecutor then hired Craig out, with any amounts above his board and 10 percent interest on the $500 being used to buy Davis's property rights, with Craig to gain his freedom when the full amount was paid. If, in the meantime it was proven that he was truly a free man, White writes, Davis was to be freed immediately and any money he had paid toward his freedom would be returned.

The book can be a starting point for descendants of slaves to use the index to find a little more about their history or for whites to see the slaveholding habits of their ancestors, White said. It isn't intended to be a political statement of any kind, he added, but a chronicle giving facts and flavors of the time.

"I had no agenda when I started that research," he said.

rkeller@semissourian.com

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