The Stained Glass Window

1

Setting Up Slavery

St. Simons Island to Roswell

The Roswell Historical Society email arrived not quite two weeks after the Schlesinger presentation: "Dr. Lewis, I am cautiously optimistic that I have made a complete line to Alice King with documentation to back up the findings." Not only had reading Malcolm Bell's admirable biography, Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family, reinforced my suspicions about the Butlers' two King overseers, but Bell's candid February 1968 book talk at the Roswell Historical Society corroborated a genealogical fact: "The practice of miscegenation by the two Kings [Roswell and Barrington] is well documented." Reverend Grogan, author of the remarkably detailed inventory of Cobb County black families, found nothing to say about an Alice King, but, as he confided, "the Kings were noted for miscegenation."
DeNiro's much-anticipated packet arrived with the photographed copy of Barrington King's bill of sale, dated January 3, 1822, which recorded the purchase of "all those negro and mulatto slaves named Nancy March Yorick Hester Elsie Candis and William" for the sum of $3,800. I was an old hand with historical documents: the Archives Nationales de France for the Dreyfus affair; Yale's Beinecke for the Harlem Renaissance; FOIA Justice Department files for the Du Bois biography. But reading an actual bill of sale for seven human beings was a nauseating novelty, or, as I expressed much more diplomatically to archivist DeNiro, an experience causing "a fair amount of astonishment." By his ownership rights in the seven human beings sold by Maxwell and Waters, Savannah's leading slave traffickers, Barrington King, Roswell Sr.'s twenty-four-year-old heir, stood to profit as a matter of course "from the future increase of said female slaves."
What relevance this had to this family quest of mine became clear after construing the bill of sale's companion document. It was a long parchment page dated 1849 and photocopied from Barrington King's slave ledgers for the years 1835-1864. Two of the seven purchased in 1822-the enslaved William, age one, and enslaved Elsie, age two-had produced three daughters and two sons by 1849; their oldest was Clarissa, born in 1835; Thomas, the youngest, was born in 1849. A line slicing through Clarissa's name channeled my eyes to the faded penciled notation in her master's hand: "Sold, September 1852." I realized that this young woman Barrington sold away from Roswell must be the mother of Alice.
Barrington King, I remembered, had left Darien to join his father in Roswell in 1838, taking his human property along. Clarissa's mother, Elsie, must have been a tender thirteen when Clarissa was born. Her future husband, William, was just twelve at the time of Clarissa's conception, a procreative feat I thought Reverend Grogan might find interesting. My check of the U.S. Census for 1850 disclosed that of Barrington's seventy-odd slaves, half were under the age of ten and worked as domestics. Many of them must have been females who, like Clarissa, represented future revenue sources. Clarissa should have been seventeen in 1852. She would have lived all but three of her seventeen years in Roswell, and conceivably had enjoyed the dubious advantage of service as a domestic. Moreover, as I learned many years later, Clarissa's mother, Elsie, served as nurse and servant for Barrington King's first daughter. In any case, Clarissa and another enslaved young woman and her infant ("Kitty and child") had fetched $1,420 for Barrington.
My anxious inquiry as to Clarissa's buyer was answered as unknown. Archivist DeNiro added that she thought the sale was unusual for Barrington and that she found his ledger's silence on the matter of Clarissa's new master even more unusual. Nearly a decade of Clarissa's existence had gone missing. Neither her whereabouts nor her situation could be found in Barrington King's ledgers. After a bit more digging, however, DeNiro discovered either Clarissa or a doppelgänger Clarissa ("Claricey") living in Georgia's Houston County as a servant, single, in the household of a James Wiley Belvin and spouse Eliza Judith after 1860. She is still there, free, in the 1870 census: Clarissa King, still single, but now with her siblings, Adela, Charles, and James.
My just-discovered great-grandmother was an altogether mysterious apparition. Still, I felt I knew enough about her world's racial and sexual etiquette to hazard a historically plausible story of Clarissa's Roswell creation and exit. Moreover, reflecting upon what I seemed to glimpse as the larger implications of her genealogy-the metanarrative of Clarissa King-I found myself exhilarated by its explanatory possibilities. Could I not follow this as-yet-to-be-realized maternal great-grandmother's genealogical and circumstantial lineages, and her life lived in slavery and freedom, as emblematic of a national failure?
Slaves had no surnames, but my new great-grandmother appears to have been the rare exception. She would insist on claiming the King patronymic until she could bear it legally after the Civil War. Roswell had been her crucible. Not all the decades elsewhere altered her superior certitude of being a King. No physical description of Clarissa existed. Her name, undoubtedly bestowed by Barrington King, evokes Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Georgian England’s sprawling bestseller about unconquered virtue. She was surely not fathered by Elsie’s William, and given the sexual liberties of Roswell King’s male line or, indeed, the plantation South’s general interracial profligacy evidenced by “all the mulatto children in everybody’s household,” as sniffed candid Mary Boykin Chesnut, Elsie’s paternity was evident. Since I began this family history, recent revelations by two writers about racially mixed members among the Washington and Madison families have further complicated the founders’ bloodlines.
That Clarissa was sold when she reached the nubile age of seventeen raises unanswerable questions that her great-grandson needed, nonetheless, to ask. I wondered if she had become a distraction, à la Thomas Jefferson's "dashing Sally," to one of the King scions? James Roswell King, twenty-five, married comely Fanny Hillhouse Prince in Roswell that same year. Thomas Edward King, twenty-three years old, departed bachelorhood two years later. To be sure, I could not draw conclusions from intriguing coincidences. Still, I thought the timing of my great-grandmother's exile by sale from the sole place she had ever known beckoned more research. Whether Clarissa was a King "born," in the parlance of her time, "on the wrong side of the blanket" or merely one by virtue of her culture and psychology, her complicated lineage aroused my deepest professional and personal fascination.
As much as Clarissa's fate was determined by her King slave masters, the Kings' own dynastic ascension after the Federalist Era (1789-1801) had come by way of two generations of subservient labor on behalf of American Founding Father and slave master sans pareille, Pierce Butler (1744-1822), and his grandson Pierce Mease Butler (1810-1867). The Founding Father whom Roswell King Sr. served just shy of twenty years as plantation overseer set foot on colonial American soil as a British officer in 1767. Like thousands of Anglo-Irishmen of his class, primogeniture dictated Major Pierce Butler's chosen career. The third son of Irish baronet Sir Richard and Lady Henrietta Percy of Garryhundon, he had served valiantly in the king's army as a teenager against the French in Canada. Twenty-two years later, a veteran Major Butler and fellow officers of George III's Twenty-ninth Regiment of Foot disembarked in Philadelphia from Nova Scotia. From the outset, as it was plain to see, Pierce Butler was on the hunt for a rich woman and had heard enough about the well-dowered belles of South Carolina to make an expedition to the colony that year. In Charleston, Butler cut a swaggeringly appealing presence at the theater and among the St. Patrick's Hibernians, affected a proper solemnity at St. Michael's Church, and boasted military accomplishments to impress the aristocratic Laurenses, Izards, and Pinckneys. A string of dalliances over a couple of years eventually succeeded in winning the fabulously rich Mary Middleton's hand in 1771, along with several huge properties and hundreds of slaves from her grandmother Mary Bull's estate.
The major's loyalty to his sovereign was still to be tested. The previous year, it seems he may well have watched from a distance what his superiors called the "incident on King Street." The record is silent, however, as to what if any long-term significance Butler accorded the Boston Massacre at the time. Yet the detonations ignited throughout the colonies by the "odious" Stamp Act-Boston Tea Party, Townsend Acts, First Continental Congress-inclined a pragmatic Pierce Butler to begin reassessing his professional options. He busied himself mastering the art and science of governing thousands of enslaved Africans toiling in rice fields or beside indigo vats along the Newport and Medway rivers of the Georgia Low Country. His wife's Middleton kin, along with new associates like future Revolutionary War patriots Henry Laurens and Miles Brewton, had gained their great wealth in the triangle slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean and North America, then across to Great Britain. Their example and advice finally were more than enough to induce the major to sell his officer's commission in the fall of 1773 for a tidy sum, matched by family monies, and purchase with six thousand pounds a 1,700-acre plantation on Georgia's St. Simons Island between the Altamaha River and the Atlantic Ocean.
His regiment sailed without him that year. From Hampton Point, his St. Simons Island manor house, he commenced life as a Georgia and Carolina planter and master of bonded men and women. Two years later, Butler took service in the American cause and served as justice of the peace in South Carolina. "No man on earth," he wrote to a Middleton relative, "has the Cause more at heart or wishes more ardently to serve it than I do." He proffered military advice to the Continental Congress about defense of the southern theater. Albeit he managed not to expose himself to the possibility of capture and hanging by his former redcoat brethren. He found it advisable to seek refuge in North Carolina when the Royal Navy occupied Charleston in 1780, during which period his properties were burned and more than two hundred of his slaves took refuge with the British. With military victory the following year at Yorktown, decisively enabled by the French fleet and infantry contingents, came the sausage making in peacetime after the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Admired for his service as South Carolina's wartime adjutant general, an outspoken advocate of reconciliation of defeated loyalists and winning patriots, a model man of wealth and defender of the interests of the Lower South, Butler was honored as one of South Carolina's three delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
"No slave state delegate had more to do with fitting those held in bondage into the United States Constitution than he did," judges Malcolm Bell, Butler's superb biographer. The pettifogging Charles Cotesworth Pinckney probably outshone Butler in parliamentary defense of their "peculiar institution" at the Philadelphia proceedings. Pinckney would boast in Charleston's lower house after the Constitutional Convention adjourned that the battle had been won "against restricting the importation of negroes . . . [and] that without them South Carolina would soon be a desert waste." Butler, described as "of noble birth and inordinately vain of it," had spoken less. But when he did so, alarmed Quaker delegates linked forensic arms with humanitarian allies in order to buffer this lordly South Carolinian's fulminations around the "slavery question." To be sure, all had not gone his way in Philadelphia: Butler conceded the prohibition on the importation of African slaves after twenty years. He and his colleagues also failed to have their slaves counted as full persons for the purposes of representation, but he clung successfully to retaining the fatal three-fifths compromise of the Articles of Confederation.
Butler's real contribution, however, was to embed a fugitive slave clause at the center of the framers' equivocal new document. The fourth article of the obsolescent Articles of Confederation had imposed the duty of reciprocity on all states to deliver all fugitive persons "charged with treason, felony, or other crime" to the states where the crime was committed. But after an adamant Pierce Butler had found "no good reason for confining it to those crimes," the republic's new Constitution incorporated his crucially amended article decreeing that states had the right to repossess a fugitive from justice, "let his crime be what it may." Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 therefore reads: "No Person held to Service or Labour in one State . . . , escaping into another, shall . . . be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered . . . to whom such Service or Labour may be due." The reclamation of absconded slaves was a capital cause for Major Butler, more than two hundred of his bondspersons, along with twenty-five thousand others, having sailed from Charleston Harbor with the British fleet near the end of the Revolutionary War. Sixty-one years later, Kentucky's Henry Clay, "the Great Compromiser," would prescribe an ultimately calamitous refinement of the major's original solution to what had continued to be the unsolvable political problem for the nation of slave labor.
When Roswell King Sr. hired on as Butler’s overseer for seven hundred dollars per annum plus a house in 1802, he assumed his new role as American history stood at a fateful crossroads-at a moment when the direction taken was not inevitable. True enough, New England’s active involvement in the Atlantic triangle had persisted until the revolution, forming, as African American scholar and Lewis family acquaintance Lorenzo Greene revealed years ago, the very basis of its economic life. “About it revolved, and on it, depended, most of her industries,” Greene established. “The vast sugar, molasses and rum trade, shipbuilding, distilleries, a great many of the fisheries, the employment of artisans and seamen . . .” From such profits great New England mercantile families had risen: Browns of Providence; Cabots and Faneuils of Boston; Crowninshields of Salem; Champlins of Newport. Even so, Enlightenment ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the high-mindedness of Quakers, and those egalitarian values annealed in war had inspired and embarrassed revolutionary elites to deplore slavery’s domestic continuity and, perhaps honestly, predict its extinction as inevitable.

After all, the stinging reproach of England's Dr. Samuel Johnson was hard to ignore: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Yelps from slave masters at least were excluded from the new territories of the Northwest Ordinance. Calculating New England businessmen had already begun transferring their capital from sea to land to make spermaceti candles and pig iron. The Browns swerved into banking and insurance. A similar swerve occurred in the Upper South, where declining tobacco revenues and soil depletion induced Virginia and Maryland to cap further importation of domestic slaves and side with advocates at the Constitutional Convention to end Atlantic importation of slaves by 1808. Historian Leon Litwack's North of Slavery encouraged faith in a bending arc of justice. He counted several thousand slaves remaining in 1800, "but almost every northern state had either abolished slavery outright or had provided for its gradual extinction."