Gendered Resistance

Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner

Mary E. Frederickson, Delores M. Walters, Mary E. Frederickson, Delores M. Walters

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252095160
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Inspired by the searing story of Margaret Garner, the escaped slave who in 1856 slit her daughter's throat rather than have her forced back into slavery, the essays in this collection focus on historical and contemporary examples of slavery and women's resistance to oppression from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Each chapter uses Garner's example--the real-life narrative behind Toni Morrison's Beloved andthe opera Margaret Garner --as a thematic foundation for an interdisciplinary conversation about gendered resistance in locations including Brazil, Yemen, India, and the United States. Contributors are Nailah Randall Bellinger, Olivia Cousins, Mary E. Frederickson, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Carolyn Mazloomi, Cathy McDaniels-Wilson, Catherine Roma, Huda Seif, S. Pearl Sharp, Raquel Luciana de Souza, Jolene Smith, Veta Tucker, Delores M. Walters, Diana Williams, and Kristine Yohe.

PART I

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON GENDERED RESISTANCE

CHAPTER 1

A MOTHER'S ARITHMETIC

Elizabeth Clark Gaines's Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Mary E. Frederickson

In 1991, after the publication of Beloved, Toni Morrison addressed an audience of a thousand historians at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. After a stirring introduction by Darlene Clark Hine, the crowded conference ballroom grew quiet as Morrison spoke of the importance of remembering those who “brought you over,” those who made it possible “to get to the other side.” She had taken the process of making sense of the past to an entirely new level in Beloved, a novel that pivots on the tension between “keeping the past at bay” and the act of remembering.¹ Leveraging history with the power of fiction, Morrison transformed Margaret Garner, the enslaved Kentucky woman who escaped with her husband and children across the Ohio River from Covington, Kentucky, to Cincinnati, Ohio, on a freezing January night in 1856, into Sethe, who kneads memory like bread dough, turning it over and pushing it back, over and back, again and again.

Elizabeth Clark Gaines, the protagonist of the story told in this chapter, traversed the same “River Jordan” forty years before Margaret Garner's treacherous passage. Crossing the Ohio River from Covington to Cincinnati in 1817, Gaines was a manumitted slave whose history has been hidden in archives, wills, census records, city directories, court documents, newspaper accounts, and notes from an interview conducted with her grandson Peter H. Clark in June 18, 1919.² This history is a story of emancipation, not of a dramatic escape on the Underground Railroad nor of whips, chains, or barking dogs on the chase. In contrast to Garner, there were no trials, no speeches, no editorials, no publicity of any kind. Elizabeth Clark Gaines calculated her way out of slavery, following a route that took decades and led to Gaines's freedom and the manumission of her children. Their emancipation was her proudest legacy. Records of the manumission of slave mothers and their mixed-race children are not rare in American archives, suggesting that Gaines's story, as remarkable as it is, is more common than we think.³

Elizabeth Clark Gaines's story speaks directly to three questions of major concern to historians, anthropologists, and feminist scholars. First, what do the experiences of enslaved women in the United States tell us about sexual servitude? Second, how useful and reliable is oral history in reconstructing a history of gendered resistance? And finally, what do stories about enslaved mothers and their children tell us about resistance and the meaning of freedom? Margaret Garner's life offers one historical template; the life of Elizabeth Clark Gaines provides another. In sharp contrast to Margaret Garner's brilliant flash of resistance that was ultimately unsuccessful, Elizabeth Gaines's calculated, manipulative, and persistent route to freedom unfolded with no public notice. No one has written about her life. Court documents recording her name, including her manumission papers, remained buried in the archives for almost two hundred years, leaving her thoroughly “disremembered.” The interview with her grandson held the key to this reconstruction of Elizabeth Clark Gaines's story. At age ninety, he spoke about his family history in eloquent detail. His account of names, places, relationships, and dates, stretching from eighteenth-century Virginia to nineteenth-century Kentucky and Ohio, began with his once-enslaved, mixed-race grandmother and his white slaveholding grandfather. Her life history, the forms of resistance she employed, and the trajectories of her children's lives bring to life a multifaceted way of negotiating enslavement and emancipation that stretched across a lifetime.⁴

The hero of this story went by three different names: born a slave named Betty in 1783, she took the name Elizabeth Clark at the time of her manumission at age thirty-one in 1814; five years later, in 1819, she changed her name to Elizabeth Clark Gaines when she married a “free man of color” named Isom Gaines. Betty lived as an enslaved woman who, according to her grandson Peter, bore five children fathered by a white slave owner named Clarke. Four of these children lived to adulthood—Peter Clark's father Michael; his sisters, Elisa and Evalina; and his brother, Elliott. One of Betty's five children apparently died in infancy. Elizabeth Clark survived as a “free woman of color” who built an independent life for herself; after age thirty-six, as a legally married woman, Elizabeth Clark Gaines gave birth to three more sons, fathered by Isom Gaines. Her seven children, four of whom were born in slavery, became influential leaders, active church members, significant abolitionists, and accomplished businessmen.⁵ Their children became teachers and homemakers whose children attended public schools, went to college, and trained as physicians and musicians. They inherited a world that first took shape in their great-grandmother's imagination.

At each stage of her life, Elizabeth Clark Gaines, née Betty, plumbed the resources available to her—family, church, literacy, white allies, and the law—to navigate her way to freedom. In the process, legal battles ensued, first with the man who enslaved her for twenty-four years, and then with his eldest son. Elizabeth Clark Gaines used the law to free herself and her four children. Her success met with hard resistance, both in Kentucky, where signed papers concerning enslavement meant nothing if a slave master refused to honor them, and in Cincinnati, where, as Elizabeth Clark Gaines's grandson Peter later put it, “Nowhere has the prejudice against colored people been more cruelly manifested.”⁶

Betty

Betty was born in 1783, in eastern Virginia's Hanover County. Evidence of her birth appears in a ledger meticulously kept by a young white man named John Clarke. Her mother, Lucy, was said to be a “mulatto;” her father, a “Black.” Her parents had worked as slaves for William Clarke, a wealthy man who ran a thriving import business and inn. When William Clarke died intestate, shortly before Betty's birth, his son “John Clarke” was appointed executor of his father's complicated legal affairs, a process that eventually took twelve years. Betty's brother Edmond was born in 1789; her sister Sarah, in late 1793. Each time, expenses paid “To negro Rachel” for “laying Lucy” were carefully recorded in the Clarke book of expenditures.⁷

Betty's immediate family was able to stay together during the twelve years that John Clarke managed his father's estate, but that changed abruptly in 1793, when he divided his father's slaves among the heirs. Betty's mother, Lucy, and her brother and sister, Edmund and Sarah, went to John Clarke as part of the settlement; “a girl Betty,” then age ten, went to William's daughter, Mildred Clarke Crutchfield; and Betty's father, Peter, was sent to William's daughter, Ellender. The probate of their master's estate sundered Betty's family, forcing them to live on three different Hanover County plantations. Betty, made to live apart from her parents and siblings, was separated from her mother for the first time.⁸ Betty's mother, Lucy, worked in John Clarke's household, who as a son of Hanover County, had followed the dictates of custom and practice for the ruling elite in that part of eighteenth-century Virginia. He had made a proper marriage to Sally Smith, a young woman his own age from the same social class, and during the years that Lucy was pregnant with Betty and her two siblings, John Clarke and his wife also had three children: Elizabeth was born around 1788, Harriet in 1792, and William in 1794. Shortly after William's birth, Sally died, leaving her young husband with three children under the age of seven.⁹ Betty's mother, Lucy, whose children were about the same ages, would have been one of the enslaved women Clarke depended on after his wife's death.

In 1795, when Betty was thirteen, John Clarke bought her from his sister, Mildred Crutchfield. This sale, quite possibly negotiated because of Lucy's influence, reunited Betty with her mother and her siblings Edmond and Sarah. Shortly afterward, John Clarke left Virginia with a number of other white Virginia families heading West. John Clarke took Betty and her mother, sister, and brother with him. Betty's father, Peter, was left behind, although a number of other Clarke slaves were selected to go. The population of Kentucky increased nearly three hundred percent in the 1790s, and Betty became part of this huge migration led by men like John Clarke, the white sons of Virginia's elite, seeking more affordable land that could be planted in tobacco, cotton, and corn and worked by slaves. After traveling over four hundred miles from Hanover County to Kentucky, John Clarke and his entourage settled first in Lexington, Kentucky.¹⁰

The onset of sexual activity for Betty occurred during or soon after the trip west. She conceived a child during this time and gave birth to a son, Michael, in Lexington in 1797. The oral history given by Betty's grandson Peter H. Clark tells us that his father Michael was the first of Betty's children fathered by “him.” Betty was fourteen at the time of Michael's birth; John Clarke was thirty-seven. By the time her son turned two, in 1799, John Clarke had resettled Betty and her family on a two-hundred-acre farm on “Paddy's Run,” outside of Cynthiana, Kentucky, about thirty miles from Lexington. According to Peter Clark's interview, over the next eight years, Betty, who Clarke later referred to as “my negro woman, Betty,” gave birth to four more mixed-race children—three daughters, one of whom died in infancy, and another son—fathered by her white slave owner. The household on Paddy's Run consisted of John Clarke and his three children from his marriage to Sally Smith, who were ages ten, six, and four when Michael was born, and some twenty other enslaved men, women, and children of various ages. For more than two decades, Betty lived as John Clarke's enslaved concubine, as such “wives” were called in Hanover County, Virginia. Widowed at age thirty-five, he never remarried.¹¹

John Clarke and Betty do not appear to have been “notorious in the neighborhood,” as historian Joshua D. Rothman suggests people considered some mixed-race couples living together in the Early Republic society of Virginia.¹² To the contrary, the society of Harrison County, Kentucky, seems to have accepted the household structure at the Clarke farm on Paddy's Run. Clarke bought his land from Richard and Mary Timberlake, former neighbors in Virginia, who had come to Kentucky in 1790. Samuel Broadwell, a founder of the Methodist Episcopal Church on Paddy's Run, was a witness to Clarke's will. At Paddy's Run, Betty, together with her mother, Lucy, and her sister, Sarah, took care of Betty's children—two sons, Michael and Elliott, and two daughters, Elisa and Evalina—and John Clarke's three older children, left motherless when Sallly Smith died. By 1810, John Clarke's oldest children, Harriet and Elizabeth, had married Kentucky men and settled into lives of their own. Harriet wed Augustine C. Respess, who later established a business in Mason County, Kentucky. Elizabeth married James Kelley, a merchant in nearby Paris, Kentucky, who later settled in Cynthiana.¹³ The youngest white child on the farm, William S. Clarke, grew to maturity knowing that he would inherit land and slaves from his father. In sharp contrast, the fate of Betty's children, the mixed-race half-sisters and half-brothers of Harriet, Elizabeth, and William, weighed heavily on their mother's mind.

Betty lived in a world structured to keep her and her children enslaved. As historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed has written in The Hemingses of Monticello about Sally Hemings's mother, Elizabeth, “Slavery, white supremacy, and male dominance—indeed, practically every feature of Virginian society—combined to keep her down [and] law formed the foundation of this system.” Betty's life in central Kentucky, in a society modeled after that of eastern Virginia, was much the same, particularly in legal terms. As in Virginia, the law shaped Betty's oppression and John Clarke's privilege, determined their relationship, and, as Gordon-Reed put it, “set ironclad limits” on Betty's capacity to determine her fate and that of her children.¹⁴

While the power of the legal system to perpetuate the bonds of slavery was essentially the same in Virginia and Kentucky, differences in literacy laws, geography, and evangelicalism meant that life at Paddy's Run was not the same as life in Hanover County. Specifically, Kentucky never enacted the same literacy laws as Virginia, which meant that Betty and her children could legally learn to read and write. The way in which her sons subsequently functioned in Cincinnati as businessmen who used the legal system and wrote their own wills proves that they were literate.¹⁵ Moreover, the farm where Betty lived on Paddy's Run was less than seventy miles from the Ohio state line, which until passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 marked the boundary between slavery and freedom. Traffic along the Paris-Cynthiana Pike passed close to Paddy's Run on the way to Cincinnati, the largest market in the area for agricultural goods and livestock. Slaves from the area around the Paddy's Run farm regularly transported crops and livestock north along this route, putting them in close proximity to the site of early abolitionist activity in the Ohio River valley. But while differences in the legal system and the geographical landscape of antebellum Kentucky opened a wedge in the ironclad slave system that shaped Betty's life, evangelicalism proved to be the strongest cultural force that Betty used to transform her life, both while enslaved and later as a free woman of color.

To say that evangelicalism thrived in rural Kentucky during the years that Betty lived at Paddy's Run is an understatement. Her move to this part of Kentucky in 1799 coincided with a period of unprecedented religious fervor in the region. On the line between Harrison and Bourbon Counties, Paddy's Run sat near the epicenter of what historian John Boles has called the “Great Revival” in the antebellum South, a phenomenon of religious awakening so spectacular that word spread all along the Eastern Seaboard and further revivals “ignited” throughout the region. The revival spirit began in southern Kentucky in 1798, and then spread north to Lexington, Paris, and Cynthiana. In July 1801, a revival at Indian Creek in Harrison County, a couple of miles from the Paddy's Run farm, drew ten thousand people, male and female, free and slave. Methodist ministers like Samuel Broadwell of Paddy's Run joined dozens of other pastors from Presbyterian and Baptist congregations to minister to the crowds.¹⁶

A few weeks later, with much advance publicity, a gathering almo...