The sergeant, p.29
The Sergeant, page 29
The story had everything Evans could have asked for: exotic settings and a colorful central character, undone by his crookedness. But there is no known evidence Said ever committed a crime or spent a day in prison. Both Alabama and Tennessee, which operated prison mines near Huntsville, kept thorough records of their convicts, but Said does not appear in them, and the courthouses of the counties where he is known to have lived have no evidence he was ever arrested, tried, or convicted of a crime. The only teacher convicted of forgery in the Alabama prison system at the time was Jim Lide, who may have had a perfectly understandable motive for his crime. At the time, teachers’ paychecks required the signatures of two school directors, and sometimes one or both of those directors, who were typically white, stalled on signing the paychecks for Black teachers. So it’s possible that Lide’s crime, as happened with schoolteachers in a few other locations in the South, was forging the name of a school director to obtain what was legally his.
Despite not having a shred of proof to support its claims about Nicholas Said, Evans’s story appeared in the St. Louis Republic on November 8, 1892, and even though it was riddled with errors, it quickly went nationwide, albeit in severely shortened form. During that era, most newspapers ran columns consisting of short squibs of one or two sentences, similar to a Twitter feed today, containing current events, gossip, jokes, and bits of trivia. Three days after the story ran in St. Louis, it was chopped down to three sentences in the New York World and then trimmed into a one-sentence squib transmitted over the news wires: “There is at present a colored prisoner working in the Alabama mines who can speak twelve languages.”
More than a hundred newspapers throughout the country reprinted that squib. Because it was so brief, many newspapers added their own comments to the story. The McCook Tribune, a progressive newspaper in Nebraska, said it showed that “the colored man and brother has a great deal of fluency and takes to the words readily.” The Ironwood News-Record in Michigan said it showed how anyone “who can speak as many languages is apt to get in trouble if he isn’t careful.” The Waycross Weekly Herald in Georgia was more cynical: “There is a colored prisoner in the Alabama mines that speaks twelve different languages. Perhaps that’s what they put him in prison for.”
Because the squib did not say why the prisoner was in jail, some newspapers took it upon themselves to provide the crime. “There is a negro convict in the Alabama coal mines who is well educated and speaks twelve languages, but with all that he couldn’t resist the temptation to persuade his neighbor’s hogs to climb over into his pen, and that’s how he got into the pen himself,” read one version that appeared in several Southern newspapers. The Bainbridge Democrat, in the Georgia town where Nicholas Said’s only known child was born, sermonized that the squib “goes to show that the highest education of the negro is not an unmixed blessing—not even for him—much less for the state. There are thousands of negroes in the penitentiary today for forgery.”
Evans’s story came at a time when Southerners were rolling back funding for Black schools, and it fit into a narrative that suggested education would have unwanted side effects for Black people, by teaching them how to be better criminals. Thanks to Evans, critics of Black schools now had a sterling (if fictional) example of the pernicious effects of education. “The mischief of this little sermon is that it encourages all the ignorant old Bourbons who gloat over it to believe that education can’t do much for a ‘nigger,’ and that there’s no use wasting any money upon him, and this in spite of [Black colleges like] Hampton [and] Tuskegee, and the untiring little army of school teachers, white and black, who are steadily leading the negro up out of the night,” warned Pennsylvania’s progressive Altoona Tribune, in a patronizing but well-intentioned comment on the made-up story that the Alabama convict had been jailed for stealing hogs.
If that were the only thing Evans wrote about Nicholas Said, it would probably not have done much long-term damage to Said’s reputation, since only two newspapers used his name: the St. Louis Republic and New York World. But Evans wasn’t finished. When visiting Alabama four years later, he decided to revive the story for the Chicago Times-Herald, this time painting it with truly purple prose.
“There is soon to be released from the state coal mines of Alabama Nicholas Said, one of the most remarkable negroes that ever felt the sting of a master’s lash,” Evans wrote in February 1897. He expanded his previous tale to describe how Said, the son of a South African chieftain, was purchased by Captain Simpson of the British army. In this version, Simpson and Said were about to return to Africa after a tour of the Americas when Simpson died in New Orleans, prompting Said to begin his career as a teacher. Evans wrote that Said arrived in Choctaw County just before the hanging of Jack Turner (whom Evans erroneously called “Ben”) and helped restore peace between Black and white people in the aftermath of his death, even though in real life Said left Choctaw at least five years before Turner’s death. “Intellectually, he was so vastly superior to the others of his race that they… were his slaves from that time on,” Evans wrote. After such a major buildup, it would have been anticlimactic if Said was undone by a single case of forgery, so instead Evans transformed him into a repeat offender, committing forgery at least half a dozen times and going in and out of prison twice before his final offense, when “he caught a country merchant for a big sum and was sentenced for ten years.” Evans wrote that Said was due to be released from prison in March, warning readers that a devious criminal would soon be in their midst.
This time, Evans’s story was so dramatic nobody tried to boil it down into a one-sentence squib. It ran at full length in at least thirty newspapers, including such major publications as the New York Sun, Baltimore American, Denver Post, Los Angeles Herald, Savannah News, Chattanooga Times, and Omaha World-Herald. A generation that had never read the profiles of Said in the New York Times or The Atlantic now saw him only as a cautionary tale of the effects of a good education gone bad.
Where was Said during this wave of libelous reportage? Why did he do nothing to stop it? Perhaps he really did die in Haywood County in 1882, or maybe he finally managed to leave the country, fulfilling his long-held desire to return to Africa. Whatever the case, Evans’s articles went unchallenged, causing irreparable damage to his reputation. Even then, Evans would not let his one-sided vendetta rest. In 1903, he wrote a humorous profile of a fictional farmer in Choctaw County who offhandedly mentions that the first chinaberry trees were imported into the county about the same time that “Nicholas Said, the nigger from Africa” arrived—a wholly gratuitous reference that seems to have been inserted for the sole purpose of denigrating Said with the N-word. By then Evans had successfully reduced Said from his previous status as a role model to a mere punchline.
Evans’s one-liner was the last known time that Said’s name was mentioned in print for nearly a century. Copies of Said’s autobiography ended up gathering dust in research libraries, and his story did not begin to resurface until 1984, when Allan D. Austin—a professor of Black Studies at Springfield College in Massachusetts—ran across his memoirs in The Atlantic magazine and incorporated them into his book-length study, African Muslims in Antebellum America. Since then, Said has been mentioned occasionally in books about the Civil War or academic studies of Black history, but it would take decades for a full picture of his life to reemerge from behind the musty cobwebs of the past.
My own encounter with Nicholas Said came about in a roundabout way. I’m a journalist, and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the San Diego Union-Tribune sent me to the Middle East to gauge the opinions of ordinary citizens in Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian territory. At Bethlehem University, I dropped in on an English class and asked the students for their opinions. “What happened in New York was not fair to humanity, not fair to anyone,” one said. “I was at the top of one of the Twin Towers two weeks before it happened, so I could have been one of the people who was killed there.” Then the students began asking me questions: “How many Muslims live in the United States? How well are they treated? When did the first ones arrive? What has their history been like?”
I responded as well as I could, but some questions stumped me, so when I got home I scoured historical records for answers. What I found is that besides the fact that between 15 and 30 percent of American slaves were likely Muslim, small numbers migrated willingly to America, beginning not long after the Mayflower. In the 1630s, Moroccan sailor Antony van Sallee moved to Manhattan, bringing a gilded copy of the Koran. (His descendants include Humphrey Bogart and Jacqueline Kennedy.) By the 1660s, a small number of other Muslims had settled in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. Although the number of individual immigrants was small, perhaps totaling as few as a couple of hundred before Muslim immigration began in earnest in the 1880s, individual Muslims can be found in each epoch of US history. In the American Revolution, for instance, Muslim immigrant Joseph Benenhaley fought against the British in South Carolina, while Hamet Achmet, a drummer in the Connecticut infantry, was befriended by George Washington, who gave him a lock of his hair. Muslims crewed Yankee whaling ships, patrolled the Mexican border for the US Camel Corps, and prospected in California during the Gold Rush. There were likely dozens of Muslims in the Civil War, ranging from Max Hassan, a Black clerk from Egypt who served as a sergeant in a New York regiment in the swamps of Louisiana and Texas, to Abel Mahomet, a Moroccan barber in a regiment from Maine who nearly became the last casualty at the Battle of Appomattox. Confederates had captured him and were about to hang him, mistakenly thinking he was an escaped slave, when trumpets announced a ceasefire, resulting in his release.
In the midst of this research, I ran across Nicholas Said’s memoir in The Atlantic, which led me to search further for his full-length autobiography. As it turned out, Said didn’t fit into my search for Muslim immigrants, since he converted away from Islam eight years before moving to the United States. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by his intellectual prowess, his wide-ranging travels, his Candide-like optimism, and the broad variety of people he came into contact with: slave traders and abolitionists; peasants and kings; Yankees and Rebels; Christians, Muslims, and Jews; and even early disciples of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. The more I learned about him, the more interested I became, not only because of his own story, but because it provides such a window into a crucial era in world history. He witnessed firsthand the impact of jihads in the Muslim world, enslavement in Africa, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, unrest in Tsarist Russia, the golden age of European aristocracy, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.
Although Said was widely known at the time, few historians know of him today, and even those who do can’t explain some of the mysteries of his life: Why did he ask to be demoted from sergeant in the middle of the Civil War? Why did he repeatedly lie to say he hadn’t arrived in the United States until after the war ended? How did a man who had become such a celebrity—featured in stories that ran in hundreds of newspapers—suddenly disappear from the public view?
Over the past few years, I have patched many of the gaps in Said’s story with the help of contemporary news stories, letters, diaries, military records, and other documents. My research included visits to archives, libraries, and courthouses in Michigan, Massachusetts, Alabama, and Washington, DC; correspondence with archivists in Russia, England, and the Netherlands; and exhaustive searches through internet databases such as Ancestry.com, GenealogyBank.com, and NewspaperArchives.com. Among the people who helped me were Paul Lovejoy, founding director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University in Toronto, who provided constant feedback and encouragement; Ann Harwell Gay of the Choctaw County Historical Society in Alabama, who helped me pore through old courthouse documents; Daniel Waterman, editor in chief, University of Alabama Press, who aided my research in that state; Russian entrepreneur Ellin Tolstov, who acted as a go-between with the Russian Naval Archives to help me gain access to the diary of Prince Alexander Menshikov; translator Elena Borowski, who helped me decipher the nineteenth-century Russian handwriting on Said’s birth certificate; Mohammed Bashir Salau, history professor at the University of Mississippi, who researched Said’s travels in the South; and Mohammed Fakih, a Lebanese-born translator in Southern California, who translated an Arabic folk tale from Borno about Barca Gana.
Despite the research, not all the gaps in Said’s life story have been concretely filled. His ultimate fate in particular is still a mystery. Nevertheless, his story opens a unique window on a crucial era of history, resonating with issues of race and religion, war and peace, and crime and punishment that continue to reverberate today.
“It is not without a feeling of hesitation and timid apprehension, that I commit these ill-written pages to the great reading public…,” Said wrote in the preface to his memoirs. “But I can truly say that my motive in this publication has been not so much to attract attention to myself as the hope of accomplishing some good by its means.”
Which seems as good a way to end a book as any other.
This is the only known photograph of Nicholas Said, taken in Boston in July 1863, just before he and his regiment were sent to the Carolinas. Wolcott Family Papers carte de visite album (Photo. 70.93), Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston.
This is likely how Nicholas Said’s father, Barca Gana, dressed for battle. “Body Guard of the Sultan of Borno,” in Dixon Denham, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa (London: John Murray, 1826), I, facing 211.
A public square along the Great Dendal in Kukawa. “The Dendal in Kukawa,” in Henry Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1849–1855 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1857), I, 590.
Sheikh Umar, depicted here, ruled Borno from 1837-80, covering much of Nicholas Said’s lifetime. “Presenting gifts from King Wilhelm [of Germany] to Sheikh Omar of Bornu,” in Gustav Nachtigal, Reisen in der Sahara und im Sudan (Leipzig: F.U. Brodhaus, 1877), facing 154.
Tuareg slave raiders. “Tuaricks and Tibboos,” in John George Wood, The Natural History of Man: Africa (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1868), 708.
Fuad Pasha, foreign minister of the Ottoman Empire, 1852–53. L’Illustration, Paris, July 10, 1858, from a photograph by Gustave Le Gray. (Found in a bound volume of L’Illustration XXXII, Juillet-Decembre, 1858, 17).
An African chiboukji. “The Pipe Bearer,” John Frederick Lewis, 1856. Birmingham Museums Trust, England.
Alexander Sergeyevich Menshikov. Portrait by Franz Kruger, 1851. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. From Wikimedia Commons.
Peter the Great and an African page boy thought to be Abram Petrov Gannibal. (The painting was done around 1720, when Gannibal was in his twenties, but it may commemorate a battle that occurred in 1706.) Portrait by Gustav von Mardefeld, c. 1720, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. From Wikimedia Commons.
Dutch prime minister Jan Jacob Rochussen (here) likely bore a resemblance to his cousin’s son Isaac Jacob Rochussen, described in Nicholas Said’s memoirs as “a well-dressed, genteel looking gentleman, with long, flowing, sandy whiskers.” Portrait by Nicolaas Pieneman, 1845. Museum Bronbeek, Arnhem, Netherlands. From Wikimedia Commons.
Katharine Drake. Photograph used with permission from the Newton family, held by South West Heritage Trust, England, reference no. SHC DD/NE/25A.
Rev. George Duffield. George Norcross, ed., The Centennial Memorial of the Presbytery of Carlisle II (Harrisburg, PA: Meyers Printing and Publishing, 1889), facing 149.
Fannie Richards, Nicholas Said’s fellow teacher in Detroit. From the Detroit Public Library.
Recruitment posters promised Black enlistees that they would be paid $13 per month, the same as white soldiers. From the Massachusetts Historical Society.
As the Fifty-Fifth prepared to leave for the South, New York was torn apart by one of the country’s largest race riots. “The riots in New York: The mob lynching a Negro in Clarkson Street,” Illustrated London News, August 8, 1863.
Training the troops. From the Library of Congress.
The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts attacks Fort Wagner. From the Library of Congress.
The Swamp Angel. “Marsh Battery or ‘Swamp Angel,’ ” in Quincy Adams Gillmore, Engineer and Artillery Operations Against the Defences of Charleston Harbor in 1863 (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1863), facing 52.
Black troops attack a Rebel position. “Charge of the Phalanx,” in Joseph Thomas Wilson, The Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States (Hartford, CT: American Pub. Co., 1890), facing 270.
Charles B. Fox, who rose from major to colonel in the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts, was one of Nicholas Said’s key mentors in the Civil War. From the Burt Green Wilder Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Thomas Ellsworth’s fight with former slave Wallace Baker led to one of the Fifty-Fifth’s greatest crises. From the Library of Congress.
