|
Article Excerpt
After nearly a decade of struggle with local authorities and the surrounding black community, on the afternoon of October 10, 1931, the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated a memorial to Heyward Shepherd, a black man and first victim of John Brown's 1859 raid, in the small town of Harpers Ferry. The ceremony opened with a welcoming address by Henry McDonald, the white president of a local black college. McDonald described the dedication not as a day to "remember discord" of the past, but rather highlighted the monument as a tribute to "fidelity to duty, faithfulness in times of stress, [and] vigorous defense of honor." He encouraged black men and women to see that whites were indeed willing to share their advantages with all those races who were submissive to the will and desires of whites. Matthew Page Andrews, a white historian from nearby Baltimore, was more explicit than McDonald in his efforts to invoke the proper black-white relations in regard to the events of Harpers Ferry and slavery. By contrasting Brown's "vociferous exit" to Shepherd's "quiet passing," he implied that blacks should imitate the faithful and humble freedman rather than the violent, crazy Brown. "Heyward Shepherd may be used to exemplify ... what America has done for transplanted Africa," he argued, insisting that America had served as a civilizing force on the Africans, while Brown had attempted to "uncivilize" the race. (1)
Although some members of the African American community believed that the monument would serve to bridge the sectional gap and increase the "very best feeling between the white and colored races," the black press overwhelmingly expressed displeasure with the monument and its dedication. The Pittsburgh Courier printed an editorial by Jesse Max Barber, president of the John Brown Memorial Association, denouncing a memorial to a man who "didn't do a single thing to merit a monument." Barber challenged the speakers' comments regarding Brown and accused the South of "still hanker ling] for the filthy institution of slavery." Perhaps most significantly, the Afro-American referred to the memorial as the "Uncle Tom Slave Monument" and proclaimed that Brown was not the criminal "rebel daughters" and Andrews had implied. It applauded Brown's use of force as "the only way" in which slavery could be ended and celebrated his violence in opposition to Shepherd's "cowardliness and ignorance." Noting that many of the speeches were not heard because of the laughter of the crowds, the paper concluded that "most of the better thinking people of Harpers Ferry look[ed] upon the whole thing with disgust." According to them, Brown, not Shepherd, remained the hero of the "better" black men and women. (2)
West Virginia, a border state during the Civil War, seemed an unlikely site for a faithful slave monument organized by descendants of Confederate veterans. But, in fact, the site was quite symbolic, representing a literal border between white and black memories of Brown and his raid. The notion that memory was (and still is) contested is not a new idea; historians such as David Blight and Kirk Savage have demonstrated the ways in which Northerners and Southerners, white and black, contested Civil War memory through veterans' reunions, memorial celebrations, and the construction of monuments. But the Heyward Shepherd monument and the controversy that surrounded it serves as a rare instance in which white and black memories overtly confronted one another and one in which white "victory" was not guaranteed. Framed in terms of gender, race, and heroism, the debate reflected much larger ideas about slavery, race relations, and resistance to violence in the early twentieth century. (3)
In the early morning hours of October 17, 1859, John Brown and twenty-two of his followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hope of starting an insurrection that would attract slaves from across the region. After capturing the arsenal and cutting the telegraph wires, Brown could have seized the town and freed the local slaves, but he remained in the armory waiting for hundreds more to join his crusade. Not one slave or insurrectionist came. Instead, the townsmen and local farmers surrounded the armory, keeping him there until the militia from Virginia and Maryland arrived the next day. On October 18, the U.S. Marines, led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, stormed the engine house of the armory and captured a wounded Brown and several of his raiders. By the end of the raid, ten of Brown's men and seven local men, including a free black man and a slave, had been killed. On November 2, a Virginia court found Brown guilty and sentenced him to death. Exactly a month later, Brown was hanged just miles from Harpers Ferry in the county seat, Charles Town, Virginia. (4)
For many visitors to present-day Harpers Ferry, the quaint town continues to evoke images of Brown's failed raid or subsequent struggles by the Union and Confederate armies to control the federal arsenal during the Civil War. Few recall the most ironic aspect of the town's history: that the first blood shed during Brown's raid belonged to a free African American railroad porter named Heyward Shepherd. When the Baltimore and Ohio mail train arrived from Wheelersburg around midnight, one of Brown's men seized the night watchmen. According to John D. Starry, a Harpers Ferry physician who later testified during the trial, Shepherd had been out on the railroad bridge looking for the missing watchmen when he was ordered to halt by one of Brown's men. Instead of stopping, he turned to go back to the office and was shot in the back, "one of the balls taking effect in his back, going through his body and coming out at the nipple of his left breast." Shepherd returned to the office, where he died between twelve and one o'clock on the following day? At the time of the raid, little or no attention was given to Shepherd's death. Instead, Brown became a Christ-like martyr for many white Northerners and African Americans. But calls for a monument to Shepherd emerged as early as 1867 and continued well into the twentieth century. Seven decades after Brown's raid, Southern white women led the way, dedicating a memorial to Heyward Shepherd, the "faithful slave," generating a swift backlash from the African American community. (6)
The United Daughters of the Confederacy had first considered commemorating faithful slaves in 1904, when they pressed for the erection of a national faithful slave monument. An article in the Confederate Veteran argued that "erecting this monument would influence for good the present and coming generations, and prove that the people of the South who owned slaves valued and respected their good qualities as no one else ever did or will do." Not all white Southerners agreed, as evident in a fiery letter written by UDC member Mrs. W. Carleton Adams. She protested that "this is not the time for erecting monuments to the old slave--if there ever will be a time." Invoking the image of the black rapist, she asked why such a monument should be erected "when there is not a state in the South not mourning for some beautiful woman whose life has been strangled out by some black fiend." She concluded that only "when the southern home is as safe with the black man as with the white man" should whites consider a monument to blacks. Apparently, a majority of Daughters attending the 1907 convention in Norfolk agreed with Adams, and consideration of the proposal was thus postponed. (7)
Despite the Daughters' initial hesitation, the comic and contented slave had become one of the most popular figures in American culture by the late nineteenth century. Images of loyal ex-slaves allowed whites of all classes, regardless of their genealogy, to remember the best part of their collective past: sentimentalized plantation life rather than battlefield defeat. (8) Central to this fiction was the Lost Cause's selective remembering/forgetting of the Confederacy and slavery. Rather than remembering slavery in the image of the anonymous field hand, Southerners told stories of the happy slave, the "Mammy" or "Uncle Tom" who "was supposedly part of the family." (9) Slavery was rewritten under the rubric of love and family in which blacks were "so often imagined as willingly reentering the relation of servitude to their former masters." By encouraging blacks of the New South to behave as loyal servants who understood their subservient status, the fictitious ex-slave bridged the chasm between the Old South and the New South. (10) Blacks of the New South could either conform to white images of the submissive "old-time negro" or be subject to white violence.
One of the most conspicuous images of blacks created by whites in the Jim Crow South were monuments to these "loyal" slaves. The first such monument, erected by Captain S. E. White in 1896 at Fort Mill, South Carolina, featured a marble shaft "dedicated to the faithful slaves who loyal to sacred trust ... guarded our defenseless homes, women, and children." Prior to this memorial, the white South had directed their energies exclusively to memorializing Confederate soldiers in an urgent need to disassociate the Southern cause from slavery. According to Kirk Savage, however, after a purified image of "white rule freed from the brutal footing of slavery" had been accepted by the North, there was room for Confederate commemoration to return to the issue of slavery and its role in their consciousness. (11)
For nearly three decades, then, the UDC chapters and UCV camps across the region encouraged communities and even Congress to provide a national memorial to the black men and women of the antebellum period--whites' imagined loyal slave. The generation of white Southerners coming of age after the war, those who missed their opportunity to rule as absolute master over the black man, longed for the "old negro." One contributor to the Confederate Veteran, reminiscing about faithful antebellum slaves, hoped that "the present and...
|
