The sergeant, p.10
The Sergeant, page 10
It was January 6, 1860, when Said first stepped foot in New York: a metropolis of 800,000 people, with a skyline of four- and five-story tenements punctuated by church spires, water towers, and factory chimneys. For their three-day visit, the Rochussens booked a suite in one of the city’s finest establishments: the Metropolitan Hotel, advertised as an “immense and magnificent building… furnished throughout in the most costly style, having all the accommodations and conveniences that the most luxurious taste could devise.”
The Metropolitan stood on the fringe of New York’s theater district, and even in midwinter there was enough entertainment to keep tourists happy. In the hotel’s basement, Niblo’s Saloon featured George Christy’s Minstrels, a blackface troupe whose songs included “Work, Darkie, Work” and “Darkie Gal’s Dream of Home.” Five blocks away, Drayton’s Parlor Opera Hall was showing tableaux of Africa, including “scenes by living characters in native costumes, illustrative of savage Kaffir life.” For more dramatic fare, the Winter Garden Theatre was offering one of America’s most popular plays, “The Octoroon,” in which a heroic Louisiana plantation owner fights against a villain’s plot to make him sell his slaves, including a beautiful octoroon (meaning she had the equivalent of one Black great-grandparent and seven who were white). In a British version of the play, the hero and the octoroon fall in love, defeat the villain, and end up happily ever after, but in the American version, the octoroon poisons herself in the final act, heartbroken that she could not legally marry her master, letting producers sidestep the question of whether a white man could have a successful romance with a woman with the slightest trace of African heritage.
There’s no evidence Nicholas Said took in such sights during his brief stay in New York. Instead, his only known outing was to accompany the Rochussens to church, generating a controversy that would reverberate all the way across the Atlantic.
George Cheever, minister at New York’s Church of the Puritans, was one of America’s most vocal abolitionists, much to the consternation of some influential congregants who had business ties to the South. Several deacons recently petitioned for his removal, arguing that his sermons were getting too political, prompting a formal Congregationalist inquiry over whether to strip him of his post. Cheever bristled at the criticism. “The people love to hear God’s word rebuking the iniquity of slavery,” he railed. “It is only crooked politicians and political Christians who cry out against such rebukes and call it ‘political preaching.’ ”
So far Cheever had survived, but so many wealthy New Yorkers quit donating to the church that he turned to abolitionists in England for help. “Doctor Cheever may justly be regarded as the Martin Luther of America. Will British Christians allow him to be overthrown?” read a fundraising pamphlet in London. The British Anti-Slavery Society, which had hosted Rochussen’s visit to England, praised “the noble stand taken by Dr. Cheever against the pro-slavery churches of America.”
Two days after they arrived in New York, the Rochussens and Said, accompanied by a white female nurse Rochussen had temporarily hired, went to services at the Church of the Puritans, a cathedral-like edifice on Union Square. As the Rochussens took their seats, Nicholas and the nurse took the servants’ position directly behind them. They had barely sat down when one of the church’s trustees asked Said to follow him to a different pew.
“Is that seat reserved?” Rochussen asked, since many churches charged congregants money to reserve pews.
“It is not,” said the trustee, who figured that because the stranger was a foreigner, he was unaware of American customs. “In this country, places of worship generally do not allow colored people to intermix with whites.”
“I know that. But I had supposed that Dr. Cheever’s church, in harmony with the views he expresses, would make an exception to that rule. Aren’t colored men allowed here?”
“Our church follows the same rule as others do. Colored people worship here, but they do not mingle promiscuously with the audience.” In fact, the few Black people who attended the church generally sat in the balcony, which church officials defended by saying it allowed them to be a few steps closer to God (and out of sight of white parishioners).
“And this is Dr. Cheever’s church? The church that is soliciting British aid?” By now, Rochussen was speaking loudly enough for other congregants to hear. “Since you are now telling me that Dr. Cheever’s church follows the same rule as churches elsewhere, perhaps I should leave.”
“There is no necessity for you to leave. You are quite at liberty to remain where you are. It is only that your black footman has to take another seat, which I can show him.”
Hearing his valet de chambre described as a “footman” further raised Rochussen’s ire. He had no intention of letting Said be sent to the balcony. Said, after all, had been to Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches throughout Europe without being subjected to such indignity.
“I am astonished to meet with such practices in the church of such a man as Dr. Cheever,” Rochussen said, rising from his seat. “Which door are colored people allowed to use to go out of this church?”
The trustee presumably pointed to a side door, since Black people were typically discouraged from using the front door of public establishments. Without another word, the Rochussens, Said, and the nurse left the building. They were just reaching the sidewalk when another congregant ran out to invite them back.
“That gentleman had no authority to talk to you that way,” he said. “The feelings he expressed are not those of the congregation.”
“I can feel no sympathy with members of a congregation who appear to be as much polluted as others by the great American sin,” Rochussen responded, giving the man his business card and telling him to hand it to Cheever.
Back at his hotel, Rochussen asked a Black attendant whether any local church allowed Black and white worshippers to sit together. The attendant suggested Shiloh Presbyterian, just a short distance away, led by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave who had graduated the racially integrated Oneida Theological Seminary in upstate New York. Garnet welcomed the Rochussens and their servants with open arms, but Rochussen was still angry. That evening, he dashed off a letter to London’s abolitionist newspaper, the Anti-Slavery Reporter.
“I dare not condemn Dr. Cheever… as I do not know his opinion on the matter…,” Rochussen wrote. “I think, however, that no British friend of the anti-slavery cause ought to give him any assistance before all distinctions of skin are decidedly abolished in his church.”
The confrontation sparked a variety of reactions. The New York Times poked fun at how the Puritans had been perturbed by “the audacity of the negro servant” who had committed the “unpardonable act” of sitting among them. The Independent said Rochussen made a “stupid blunder” by not understanding that American churches had the right to decide who should sit where. Frank Leslie’s Weekly attacked Rochussen as a hypocritical troublemaker: “Lord Rochussen’s mock-turtle-aristocratic-democratic-all-men-born-equalism was outraged by Dr. Cheever’s congregation not allowing him to thrust his nigger servant into the pew behind himself and his wife. Was there ever such impudence? He would not sit in the same pew with his odoriferous flunkey, but places him in the pew behind, and yet expects others to put up with the infliction! So much for Rochussen!” But The Anglo-African, New York’s leading Black-owned newspaper, praised Rochussen as “a noble and distinguished stranger” who discovered at Shiloh that “in black congregations, saints and sinners, black and white, plebeian and uppertendom [the wealthiest 10 percent] are all treated equally.”
Dr. Cheever, who was in his office when the incident occurred, tried to resolve the issue in his next sermon: “The occurrence that took place last Sunday was without the knowledge, consent or approval of this church…. In the name of Christ and of his church, we disavow and condemn such a bias towards persons and we affirm the duty of the churches and the ministry of every denomination to set themselves against the cruel prejudice that is crushing the colored race among us.”
By then, the Rochussens and Said were far away from New York. In fact, little more than twenty-four hours after the church service, they had boarded the steamship Karnak, en route for the Bahamas and points south. But the controversy would stay alive until they returned.
9 Islands of the Fallen
Nicholas Said’s voyage to the Caribbean began “under the most agreeable auspices,” as one of his fellow travelers put it. “From the time we cast off our moorings at Jersey City until we came to anchor [in the Bahamas] we sailed upon a perfectly tranquil sea,” wrote former US president Franklin Pierce. “The transition from severe cold to very warm weather was sudden and rather trying. In forty hours after we left our coast we were sitting under an awning to protect us from the sun’s rays.”
Like Said, Pierce was sailing south on the Karnak. Since leaving office in 1857, he had spent much of his time trying to find an agreeable climate for his wife, Jane, who suffered from tuberculosis and chronic depression. After spending two years on the Riviera, they had scarcely returned home to New Hampshire before booking tickets for Nassau, capital of the Bahamas. “The climate is admirable and [Nassau is] salubrious throughout the year,” Pierce wrote, adding that Jane could “enjoy the winter & spring months here and perhaps gain in health and vigor.”
The voyage also offered Pierce an escape from the mounting pressure from Southerners to run for president again. Although Pierce was a New Hampshire Yankee, his greatest support came from Southerners who shared his conviction that the United States was a “federal republic of free white men.” To Pierce, Black people were a “subject race” who deserved no “extravagant social change” from their status quo, which for the vast majority meant slavery. He felt abolitionists had treasonously “surrendered themselves to a fanatical devotion to the supposed interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States as to totally abandon and disregard the interests of the 25 million [white] Americans.”
Pierce, a war hero from the Mexican-American War, was reputed to be one of the handsomest men ever to occupy the White House. At fifty-five, he looked at least a decade younger than his age, with long curls of hair cascading rakishly across his forehead. As a president, however, he had been an unmitigated disaster. His clumsy attempt to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state had touched off a bloody civil war there, pitting slave staters against free staters, with murderous terrorists on both sides. He outraged Northerners by using federal troops to capture escaped slaves far above the Mason-Dixon line. And he drew fire from both home and abroad when it was revealed that some of his aides, fearing Cuba might soon free its slaves, were plotting to seize it from Spain and annex it as a US slave state. He became so unpopular that in 1856 the Democrats refused to nominate him for a second term, instead picking the similarly slavery-friendly James Buchanan, deemed by historians to be one of the worst presidents in US history, with Pierce following not far behind.
Many Southerners, however, still valued Pierce as a defender of slavery. When Buchanan’s plummeting popularity led him to announce he would not seek reelection, they begged Pierce to run again. Pierce steadfastly refused, and as he prepared for his trip to Nassau, he met with two of his strongest supporters to point them in a different direction, a “dear friend” who had served as his secretary of war: Jefferson Davis. Two days before boarding the Karnak, Pierce wrote to the future president of the Confederacy, asking him to run for the presidency of the entire country.
“Our people are looking for ‘the Coming Man,’ one who is raised by all the elements of his character above the atmosphere ordinarily breathed by politicians; a man really fitted for this emergency by his ability, courage, broad statesmanship and patriotism,” Pierce wrote. Without such a leader, he warned, the abolitionists’ “fanatical passion” against slavery would drive the country into civil war.
There’s no proof that Nicholas Said ever met Pierce, but during a five-day voyage in close quarters, it seems likely. With a former president and a Dutch nobleman on board, the Karnak’s captain would have insisted that they share his table at meals, perhaps tended to by their valets. Rochussen, never bashful about speaking his mind, would have seized the chance to persuade Pierce of the evils of slavery, citing his multilingual “gentleman’s gentleman” as a living example of what Africans could accomplish if they were freed from bondage. But with Pierce’s deeply held prejudices, it’s doubtful anything could have changed his mind.
Ironically, the place Pierce chose to escape from the “fanatical passion” of abolitionists was an island chain where nearly three out of four people were either former slaves or freemen descended from slaves. England had abolished slavery in 1833, and the freed slaves in its colony in the Bahamas were later joined by Africans brought in by the British navy, which prowled the Atlantic looking for illegal slave ships. Rather than taking the captives back to Africa, the navy took them to British colonies instead, to live as freemen while providing low-cost labor.
Despite the overwhelming Black majority in the Bahamas, white people still retained dominant power, although there were cracks in the system. By 1860, for instance, two mixed-race politicians held seats in the colonial parliament. Black people could attend integrated schools and churches (although most public schools were poorly funded), vote in elections (as long as they were homeowners), serve as soldiers or policemen (under white officers), and run lucrative businesses, such as repairing ships, salvaging wrecks, harvesting salt, or processing sea sponges. “The great mass of the present population are an indolent, rollicking, singing, good-natured people, who let the morrow take care of itself…,” a New York journalist wrote. “It must be confessed that to make a free man out of a slave is a giant success.”
As the Karnak pulled into the dock at Nassau, Nicholas Said, who had spent the past seven years surrounded by Europeans, was “perfectly beside myself with joy on finding a great many liberated Africans.” Later that week, he accompanied the Rochussens to the colonial parliament’s annual opening ceremony, where Gov. Charles Bayley, a pale, balding man with puffs of red hair sprouting above his ears, was escorted by a troop of Black soldiers in Zouave uniforms, preceded by a Black military band. Said was impressed by the soldiers’ “remarkable precision,” adding that the band was “very much admired by all.”
Former president Pierce also attended the ceremony, but he didn’t mention it in his writings from Nassau. Instead, he complained “this city and its suburbs contain about ten thousand souls—three quarters of whom are colored, lazy and thriftless.” And he remained obsessed with the topic of slavery: “We must overthrow abolition cant, abolition folly, and abolition treason at the ballot box, or we must go down together in a common gulf of anarchy & destruction.”
Although Pierce and his wife remained in the Bahamas for the rest of the winter, the Rochussens stayed only a few weeks before sailing to the destination Nicholas Said was most looking forward to: Haiti. “Nothing can excel it in picturesque beauty,’ ” Said later wrote. “It is very mountainous, and viewing it from the sea, it has a grand and magnificent appearance.” For Said, though, the island’s allure extended far beyond its natural beauty. “I was exceedingly delighted at finding myself in the country where the heroes of Haitian independence contended with the armies of Napoleon the Great. I had always admired the exploits of L’Ouverture, Dessalines, Christophe and other negro leaders, whose heroism and military talent are an honor to the African race.”
Said had first learned of Haiti during his travels in France, where historian Joseph Saint-Rémy had recently published several books on Toussaint L’Ouverture and his revolution. Although L’Ouverture had been born a slave, he had worked his way to freedom by 1776, eventually acquiring a coffee plantation staffed by a dozen slaves. Swept up by the ideals of the French Revolution, in 1791 he not only freed his slaves but joined a fight to liberate the colony’s remaining 465,000 slaves. “I was born a slave, but nature has given me the soul of a free man,” he declared. He soon headed an army of liberated slaves and freemen of color, mostly mixed-race individuals who had been born free but faced discrimination under the colonial regime. For three years, he fought the French, until the Revolutionary government in Paris abolished slavery in 1794. He then joined the French to ward off invasions from Spain and England, which were trying to seize Haiti for themselves.
For L’Ouverture, the story did not end well. After Napoleon Bonaparte seized power, he reinstituted slavery and sent 30,000 troops to take Haiti from the rebels. Using guerrilla tactics, the Haitians fought back until Gen. Charles Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, lured L’Ouverture into peace talks, only to arrest him and send him in chains to France, where he died in prison in 1803. But the revolution continued without him, so that only eight months after his death, Haiti proclaimed independence. As L’Ouverture had predicted, “in overthrowing me you have cut down in Haiti only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep.”
Nicholas Said was enthralled with the story. He looked forward to seeing the sites of the revolution, especially the Môle Saint-Nicolas, a fortified port where Henri Christophe and his troops withstood three years of bombardment from the French, and the earthen stronghold at Crête-à-Pierrot, where insurgents under Jean-Jacques Dessalines beat off waves of attacks while singing Revolutionary anthems about liberté and égalité.
From the moment he arrived, however, Said began having second thoughts about Haiti. He was struck by the dilapidated condition of Cap-Haïtien, which had been devastated by an earthquake in 1842 and was still in disrepair nearly two decades later. Riding through the countryside, he and the Rochussens passed fields that had once been lush with sugar cane, cotton, wheat, corn, and rice, but now lay fallow, producing barely enough food to support the peasants who lived there. Poverty was everywhere. “Notwithstanding all the natural advantages which this country possesses, no sign of industry is to be seen in it,” he marveled.
