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Article

Bassett, Ebenezer Don Carlos  

Adam W. Green

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2018

was the second of three children born to two freed slaves, Eben Tobias, a farmer, and Susan Gregory, a mixed-race Pequot Indian, in Derby, Connecticut. An education proponent and political activist, Bassett became America's first black diplomat when he served as Resident Minister in Haiti for eight years, helping pave the way for those seeking opportunities in international diplomacy and public service.

Along with his mixed race birth and royal lineage that his family claimed from Africa Bassett whose surname came from a generous white family close to his grandfather s former owners also had elected office in his blood His grandfather Tobiah who won his freedom after fighting in the American Revolution had been elected a Black Governor as had Bassett s father Eben The largely nominal honorific was bestowed upon respected men in various locales via Election Days sometimes by a voice vote these Black Governors ...

Article

Betances, Ramón Emeterio  

Félix Ojeda Reyes

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, on 8 April 1827 to Felipe Betances Ponce, of Dominican origin, and María del Carmen Alacán, of Puerto Rican origin, the well-off owners of a sugar plantation called Hacienda Carmen. On 21 April he was baptized and registered by church officials in the Book of Mulattoes. Shortly after his mother’s death on 10 February 1837, Betances’s father sent him to Grisolles, near Toulouse, in the southwest of France. Under the care of the Prévost-Cavallieri family, Betances, always an excellent student, studied at the Collége Royal in Toulouse. In 1848 the year of the revolutions that toppled absolutist supremacy in Europe he entered the College of Medicine at the University of Paris At that historic moment Betances commenced a lifetime of political engagement and activity by participating in the antimonarchist revolution of 24 February which established the Second French Republic Although his ...

Article

Bruce, Henry Clay  

Diane Mutti Burke

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

author of a slave narrative, was born to slave parents in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The Lemuel Bruce family, including Pettis and Rebecca (Bruce) Perkinson, owned Henry Bruce and his mother and siblings. Bruce's many siblings included his younger brother, Blanche Kelso Bruce, the senator from Mississippi from 1875 to 1881.

Bruce spent most of his early childhood years on plantations and farms in Virginia, Missouri, and—briefly—Mississippi. Pettis Perkinson brought Bruce, his mother, and siblings back to Chariton County, Missouri, where he permanently settled in 1850 From the age of nine Bruce was frequently hired out to other employers in the community and worked at a variety of occupations including brick making tobacco manufacturing and general farm labor Bruce had a self described desire to learn and was taught to read by his young owner and playmate William Perkinson The older Bruce children taught their younger siblings ...

Article

Buchanan, James  

Diane L. Barnes

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Hailing from Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, James Buchanan was the son of the storekeeper James Buchanan and Elizabeth Speer. Following a local school education, Buchanan read law and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1812. Buchanan never married, instead concentrating his energies on his political career. He began in the Pennsylvania state legislature, serving a single term from 1814 to 1816, and was later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served five terms starting in 1821. Buchanan began his political career as a moderate Federalist, but by the early 1830s he was an ardent supporter of the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, and the newly forming Democratic Party. Jackson rewarded his loyalty by appointing him as minister to Russia in 1832. Upon his return to the United States in 1833 Buchanan was appointed by the Pennsylvania legislature to fill the U S Senate seat ...

Article

Calhoun, John C.  

Chad Morgan

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Calhoun did more than anyone else to chart the Slave South's increasingly defiant course from the 1830s onward; the trajectory of his career closely mirrors that of his region. Born into a family of ardent patriots and Revolutionary War veterans, Calhoun's early nationalism steadily gave way to the need to construct ever-moreelaborate defenses of the South's slave society. Ironically, in doing more than perhaps any other individual to set the stage for the Civil War, this “father of secession” and unapologetic slaveholder became a great practical force in the bringing about of Emancipation.

John Caldwell Calhoun was born just outside the town of Abbeville in the South Carolina Upcountry. After studying at Yale and then the Litchfield Law School, Calhoun began his meteoric rise to political prominence with a promising stint in the South Carolina state legislature. In 1811 he married his cousin Floride Bonneau Colhoun [sic a Lowcountry ...

Article

Clay, Cassius M.  

John Craig Hammond

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

“I do not set up for being perfect: far from it!” wrote the Kentucky antislavery agitator Cassius Marcellus Clay to the abolitionist John Fee in 1855. “I wish I were,” he continued, but “a good balance sheet of good against evil is all I aspire to!” Judged by his own standards as well as by those of black and white antislavery advocates, Cassius Clay succeeded in fulfilling his ambition, through his battles against the evil of slavery. A former slaveholder and one of the few antislavery leaders to remain in the South after 1830, Clay became something of a hero to northern abolitionists, who appreciated his willingness to challenge slaveholders on their own turf.

Cassius Clay was born in Kentucky s Bluegrass region to the planter Green Clay and his wife Sally in Clermont Clay lived to the age of ninety three and spent much of his life ...

Article

Clay, Henry  

Kate Gigliotti-Gordon

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Henry Clay was born in Hanover County, Virginia. His father, John, a Baptist minister, died in 1781. His mother married Henry Watkins the following year and followed her new husband to Kentucky. Henry Clay remained in Virginia, where he later studied law with George Wythe. Finishing his studies in 1797, Clay followed his family to Kentucky and settled outside of Lexington. There he married Lucretia Hart, the daughter of a prominent Kentucky businessman, on 11 April 1799 and purchased a plantation near Lexington, which he named Ashland. Clay and his wife had eleven children, although only four outlived their father. After a long and illustrious career, Clay died in Washington, D.C. He was buried in Lexington, Kentucky, where a statue to his memory stands.

Clay's national political career began in 1806 when the Kentucky legislature selected him to complete an unexpired term in the U S Senate ...

Article

Davis, Madison  

Steven J. Niven

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

wheelwright, politician, and postmaster, was born a slave in Athens, Georgia, to parents whose names have not been recorded. Little is known about the first three decades of his life, other than that he worked as a wheelwright for his master, a carriage maker. Davis learned to read and write while still a slave, skills that helped propel him to the forefront of black political leadership in Reconstruction-era Athens, alongside the tailor, William Finch.

Davis attended one of Georgia's earliest freedmen's conventions in Augusta in January 1866 and rose to prominence as captain of Athens's first black fire company. His reported “coolness and energy” in dealing with a major fire in Athens in 1866 was probably a factor in his election as one of Clarke County's two black delegates to Georgia's constitutional convention, which sat from 1867 to 1868 In the first elections ...

Article

Dudley, Edward Richard, Jr.  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
29 January 2021

was born in New Bern, North Carolina, the son of Sarah Pasteur and Edward Richard Dudley, a fisherman. The elder Dudley is listed in U.S. Census records as “white,” but his contemporaries recognized him as a light-skinned African-descended member of the Dudley family. “Black” and “white” were rather fluid concepts in nineteenth-century New Bern, with 25 percent of the “black” population free by 1860, and another 12 percent designated as “free people of color.” At the time of her son’s birth Sarah Pasteur was legally enslaved, despite the efforts of her father, Edmund Pasteur, to secure her freedom. Edmund Pasteur had been allowed to hire himself out to earn money to purchase his own freedom in 1815 from John Carruthers Stanly who had himself been born enslaved Stanly may have been the largest slaveholder of African descent in North America Pasteur then saved $750 to purchase his wife ...

Article

Fields, Mary  

Lisa E. Rivo

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

building foreman and caretaker, U.S. mail coach driver, Montana pioneer, also known as Black Mary or Stagecoach Mary, was born a slave in Hickman County, Tennessee. Information about Fields's parentage and early life remain unconfirmed, although James Franks, whose grandparents knew Fields in the late 1800s in Montana, writes that Fields was the daughter of Suzanna and Buck, slaves of the Dunne family, owners of a Hickman County plantation. The Dunnes sold Buck immediately following Mary's birth. According to Franks, the Dunnes allowed Suzanna to keep her daughter with her in quarters behind the kitchen, and Mary enjoyed a relatively privileged childhood, even becoming friends with the Dunne's daughter Dolly, who was about the same age as Mary. This arrangement, Franks writes, lasted until Suzanna's death forced fourteen-year-old Mary to take over her mother's household duties.

Whether or not Franks s account is accurate it is ...

Article

Fields, Mary  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Mary Fields was born a slave in Tennessee, but little else is known of her early life. Some historical accounts have placed her on the Mississippi River in the early 1870s, and at least one researcher claims that she was a passenger on the Robert E. Lee when it raced the steamer Natchez in June 1870. By 1884 Fields was living in Toledo, Ohio, where she worked as a handywoman for an order of Ursuline nuns. She became attached to the mother superior of the convent, Mother Amadeus, who is variously reported as a close friend or as the master in a master-servant relationship. Shortly after Fields arrived at the convent, Mother Amadeus left for Montana to open a school for Blackfeet Native American girls. When Mother Amadeus fell ill in Helena, Fields came to her aid and decided to stay in Montana.

Fields assisted the Catholic mission ...

Article

Fields, Stagecoach Mary  

Kelli Cardenas Walsh

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The story of Mary Fields is one of race, gender, and age. She was the antithesis of the nineteenth-century Victorian image of womanhood. In an age of domesticity, Fields lived a frontier life dependent upon no one and uninhibited by Jim Crow.

A former slave, in freedom Fields became an independent, gunslinging, liquor-drinking woman in the untamed frontier of Montana. She stood six feet tall and was stout. Details about the early life of Mary Fields are sparse, other than that she was born into slavery in 1832. Judge Dunn in Hickman County, Tennessee, owned Fields and presumably owned her family. She was befriended by her master’s daughter, Dolly, and remained with the family after Emancipation.

Once she left the Dunn family Fields spent an unspecified time in Ohio and along the Mississippi River During this time Dolly joined a convent of Ursuline nuns taking the name of ...

Article

Fisk, Clinton Bowen  

Lois Kerschen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Clinton Bowen Fisk, the sixth son of Benjamin and Lydia Fisk, was born in Livingston County, New York. His father had been a captain in the army, and his grandfather served as a major general under George Washington. The Fisk family moved to a settlement they called Clinton in Lenawee County, Michigan, while Clinton Bowen was still an infant. Benjamin Fisk died when Clinton was six, however, and Lydia was not able to hold onto the property. At age nine, Clinton Fisk apprenticed himself to a local farmer, but one year later he had to return home because his younger brother died. When Fisk was thirteen, his mother married William Smith, a successful farmer from Spring Arbor, who sent Fisk to Albion Seminary, a Methodist school in Michigan.

Fisk later went into business as a clerk for L. D. Crippen of Coldwater Michigan and married Crippen s ...

Article

Giddings, Joshua R.  

Cathy Rodabaugh

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Insisting that the Constitution made no provisions for slavery, Giddings consistently demanded that the government disentangle itself from any involvement with the institution. He believed that the “slave power,” wielding undue influence in Washington, withheld important rights from both northerners and bondpeople.

Joshua Reed Giddings was born in Pennsylvania to parents gradually migrating westward from Connecticut. His father, a failed farmer, moved the family again to New York's Burned-Over District, a region aflame with religious excitement, then finally settled amid other transplanted New Englanders in an area known as the Western Reserve, in Ashtabula County, Ohio. Largely self-educated and a diligent student, Giddings began law studies under Elisha Whittlesey, passing the bar exam in 1821 He married a schoolteacher from the area Laura Waters who later became a charter member of one the region s earliest antislavery societies One of their five children Laura Maria became a Garrisonian abolitionist ...

Article

Grimké, Archibald Henry  

Johnie D. Smith

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
21 January 1999
Published online:
01 December 2006

Grimké, Archibald Henry (17 August 1849–25 February 1930), lawyer, diplomat, and protest leader, was born a slave on “Caneacres” plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, the son of Henry Grimké, a lawyer and planter, and Nancy Weston, the family’s slave nurse. His parents probably never married, but his mother assumed the Grimké name. Grimké had an extremely difficult early life. After years of virtual freedom—he had attended Charleston schools for free African Americans though technically a slave—he and his brother Francis James Grimké were returned to slavery in 1860 to serve his half-brother, E. Montague Grimké, as house servants. Archibald escaped in 1863 (Francis was sold to a Confederate officer) and spent the last two years of the Civil War in hiding, surfacing only after the fall of Charleston.

After the war Grimké briefly attended the Freedmen s Bureau s newly created Morris Street School before enrolling at ...

Article

Haralson, Jeremiah  

Alston Fitts and Loren Schweninger

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

politician, was born a slave on a plantation near Columbus in Muscogee County, Georgia. Sold twice before becoming the property of Jonathan Haralson of Selma, Alabama, a lawyer and the head of the Confederate Niter Works, the self-taught Haralson remained in Dallas County as a freedman following the Civil War. There he married Ellen Norwood in 1870, and their son Henry (who later attended Tuskegee Institute) was born.

Unsure about the future of the Republican Party, Haralson entered politics in 1867 as a Democrat. A gifted orator who combined humor and wit with a discussion of serious issues, he campaigned in 1868 for Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour, who, he said, “represented the true principles of philanthropy and national government” (Selma Times, 4 Nov. 1868). When Democrats failed to attract support from newly enfranchised blacks, Haralson switched his party allegiance in 1869 He and ...

Article

Hyman, John Adams  

Debi Hamlin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

North Carolina senator and U.S. congressman, was born a slave near Warrenton, Warren County, North Carolina. Nothing is known about his parents or his childhood. In 1861 Hyman worked as a janitor for a jeweler who with his wife taught Hyman to read and write. When that was discovered, the jeweler and his wife were driven from Warrenton, and Hyman was sold and sent to Alabama. Following the Civil War and his emancipation, having been at least eight times “bought and sold as a brute,” as he described it, Hyman in 1865 returned to Warren County, where he was a farmer and store manager. Sometime between 1865 and 1867 he became a trustee of one of the first public schools in Warren County.

Hyman's formal political career began in September 1866 when at the age of twenty six he was a delegate to the Freedmen s Convention of ...

Article

Hyman, John Adams  

Debi Hamlin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
21 January 1999
Published online:
01 December 2006

Hyman, John Adams (23 July 1840–14 September 1891), North Carolina senator and U.S. congressman, was born a slave near Warrenton, Warren County, North Carolina. Nothing is known about his parents. In 1861 Hyman worked as a janitor for a jeweler who with his wife taught Hyman to read and write. When that was discovered, the jeweler and his wife were driven from Warrenton, and Hyman was sold and sent to Alabama. Having been at least eight times “bought and sold as a brute,” as he described it, Hyman in 1865 returned to Warren County, where he was a farmer and store manager. Sometime between 1865 and 1867 he became a trustee of one of the first public schools in Warren County.

Hyman s formal political career began in September 1866 when at the age of twenty six he was a delegate to the Freedmen s Convention of ...

Article

Lincoln, Abraham  

Paul Finkelman and Vickey Kalambakal

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Abraham Lincoln, self-made and self-educated, remains one of America's best-loved presidents. He rose from obscurity and poverty through his own efforts to become president. His election in 1860 as the first president dedicated to ending the spread of slavery to new states led to the secession of seven slave states. His refusal to allow the Union to fall apart led to civil war and to the secession of four more states. During the war Lincoln presided over a revolution in American race relations that ended slavery; allowed for black political and military participation in the affairs of the nation; and, after his assassination, resulted in blacks' gaining full rights as American citizens.

Article

Lincoln, Mary Todd  

Vickey Kalambakal

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Mary Ann Todd was born to a slave-owning family in Lexingto3n, Kentucky. Although she was raised in privileged circumstances among the wealthy and well connected, Mary suffered personal losses throughout her life that eventually affected her sanity and health. When she was three, a baby brother died; at age six, she lost her mother. Alienated by a new stepmother, Mary experienced a desolate and unhappy childhood. Family memoirs indicate that she would have witnessed brutal punishments inflicted on slaves in her own family; she also would have seen the slave markets in Lexington and the hangings of rebellious slaves. She was aware that her favorite caretaker, the bond servant Aunt Sally, aided runaway slaves.

Mary Todd moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1839 to join two sisters and various cousins and uncles Several relatives were politically active in the state Mary s cousin was a mentor to and law ...