1857

Most Americans in 1857 lived on farms.

According to Smithsonian magazine, an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 slaves escaped on the Underground Railroad – heading north. Less well known: about one tenth as many headed south, reaching Florida when it was owned by Spain, or escaping across the border with Mexico.

 

Most of the runaways, headed south were men, and usually in their 20s. Women, who had children to raise, couldn’t leave them behind. Some had forged passes. Other stole horses and weapons. One escapee stole 12 gold watches and a diamond breast pin.

 

After crossing the Nueces River, the runaways faced their biggest challenge. The area was sparsely populated, rattlesnake-infested, broiling hot during summer months, and home to Apaches and Comanches, usually unsympathetic to the plight of escaping slaves. Some made it all the way – only to drown crossing the Rio Grande.

 

By this time, Mexico’s congress had decreed that slaves from U.S. territory would become free “by the act of stepping on the national territory.” A slave who made it – who was willing to join the Mexican military – would be granted land and citizenship.

 

As Smithsonian magazine explains,

 

This soon became common knowledge among enslaved people in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and what would later become Oklahoma. They envisioned… what historian Mekala Audain calls a “Mexican Canaan” across the Rio Grande – a promised land where they could be free. They made the…arduous journey through Texas. They stowed away on boats leaving from Galveston and New Orleans for Tampico and Veracruz. In the 1850s a dozen slaves were reaching Matamoros, Mexico, every month. Two-hundred-seventy arrived in Laredo, in Tamaulipas (now called Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas) in a single year. American diplomats kept pressuring their Mexican counterparts to sign extradition treaties, which would return runaway slaves to their owners, but Mexico flatly refused – in 1850, 1851, 1853 and 1857.

 

Like slaves heading north, escapees headed for Mexico found a variety of allies to help them. One was a white man from Alabama, Nathaniel Jackson. A descendent explains:

 

“He married a slave that he freed, Matilda Hicks, and they came out [to Texas] in covered wagons in 1857. She already had three children by another man, and she had seven more with Nathaniel.”

 

Nathaniel bought 5,535 acres of land right here by the river and established the Jackson Ranch…There were Black, white and mixed-race people all living together, raising cattle in a place that was very remote, where they could be left alone. The runaways knew they could get help here – food, clothing and work if they wanted it. Nathaniel was a nice, generous, courageous man, a humanitarian. He would cross them into Mexico in boats.”

 

John Webber was another white man willing to aid runaways. 

“He came to Mexican Texas as a single man and settled near Austin in Webber’s Prairie, which later became Webberville,” says [one historian]. “He fell in love with his neighbor’s slave, Silvia Hector, and had children with her. He emancipated her in 1834, married her, and purchased the freedom of their children.”

 

After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passed, Webber moved his family to the lower Rio Grande Valley, and bought 8,856 acres of land in 1853. “Like the Jackson Ranch, it became a stopping place for runaway slaves going to Mexico,” says Sofia Bravo, a direct descendant of Webber and Hector’s.

 

The couple received a license to build a ferry across the Rio Grande, which helped John in his business as a trader – and also came in handy for ferrying runaways across to freedom. 

By 1857, in the Mexican state of Coahuila, an entire colony of black Seminoles, descended from free black and slave runaways who had allied with the Seminole people in Florida, had been established. Their journey began fifteen years earlier, after the U.S. Army broke Seminole resistance and forced almost that entire people to move west to the Creek reservation in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

 

The Creeks denied the newcomers land and started capturing Black Seminoles and selling them into slavery in Arkansas and Louisiana. By 1849, says [one historian], “the Seminoles and their Black allies had had enough.”

 

The Seminole leader Wild Cat, with the assistance of John Horse, leader of the Black Seminoles, led more than 300 men, women and children, including 84 Black Seminoles, from Indian Territory south to Mexico. In northern Coahuila, the Mexican government granted them a 70,000-acre military colony with work animals, agricultural equipment and financial subsidies. Within months of arriving, Wild Cat went back to Indian Territory and returned with about 40 more Seminole families and most of the remaining Black Seminoles.

 

Runaway slaves started arriving before the colonists had finished clearing fields and building their wood-frame houses. One man named David Thomas had escaped with his daughter and three grandchildren. In 1850, a group of 17 arrived, asking to join the Black Seminoles. By 1851, there were 356 Black people living at the colony, and three-quarters of them were runaway slaves. At a moment’s notice, all the adult males had to be ready to fight against the Comanches or Apaches, arguably the most formidable Native American warriors on the continent.

 

The Black Seminoles, known as Mascogos in Mexico, had a well-earned reputation as superb trackers and fighters. On foot or on horseback, according to the historian Kenneth Porter, who gathered their oral histories in the 1940s, the stronger men would use muskets as clubs. “They beat down buffalo-hide shields, splintered lance shafts, and rammed the iron-shod stocks into their enemies’ astonished faces.” Others used machetes to hack off spear and lance points, and then decapitate their foes. In a battle known in the oral history as “the big fight,” 30 or 40 Black Seminoles defeated a much larger force of Comanches and Apaches, and much of the fighting was hand-to-hand combat.

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February 25: Horace Tabor was a Maine stone cutter, who met Augusta Pierce, his future wife, when he went to work for her father in 1853. He asked her to marry him in 1855, they married in 1857 and then headed for Kansas, to start a new life. (From: William M. Thayer’s Marvels of the New West, p. 246-248.)

 

His wife later described their first taste of frontier life:

 

On the 25th of February we left my home in Augusta, Me., for our new one in Kansas. … At Kansas City we purchased a yoke of oxen, a wagon, a few farming tools, some seed, took my trunks and started westward. My trip was not very pleasant, for the wind blew disagreeably, as it always does in Kansas.

 

We arrived at our destination on the 19th of April at 11 a.m. I shall never forget that morning. To add to the desolation of the place, the wind took a new start. The cabin stood solitary and alone upon an open prairie. It was built of black walnut logs 12 x 16 feet; not a building, a stone, or stick in sight. We had brought two men with us, and how we could all live in that little place was a question I asked myself many times. The only furniture was a No. 7 cookstove, a dilapidated trunk, and a rough bedstead made of poles, on which was an old tick filled with prairie grass. I sat down upon this trunk and cried; I had not been deceived in coming to this place. I knew perfectly well that the country was new, that there were no saw-mills near, and no money in the territory, but I was homesick and could not conceal it from those about me.

 

Mr. Tabor and the two men unloaded the wagon while I tried to clean up the cabin. I found a number of old New York Tribunes in the room, smoothed them out, made a paste of flour, and soon had the black, ugly logs covered, putting the newspapers right side up, that I might read them at my leisure, for I could see that reading matter was likely to be very scarce. Having covered the walls, I unpacked the boxes and made up a decent bed. I took out my table linen and silver, for I had not left home without the usual outfit, and then began to prepare my first meal. I cannot say that it was very inviting, but I did the best I could and we were all blessed with good appetites. The two men took rooms nearby and boarded with us, thus helping us to money to support the table. Mr. Tabor broke the land, put in the seed, and began farming in good earnest, exchanging day’s labor with the neighbors to save hiring help. In this way our pioneer farm was started.

 

No rain fell that summer, so that when harvest came we had nothing to gather. Mr. Tabor went to Fort Riley and worked at his trade, while I remained at home with my babe, and made a little money by raising chickens.

 

Indians and snakes were then numerous in Kansas, and I lived in constant dread of both. I cannot tell which I feared the most. The rattlesnakes crawled into my cabin to get into the shade, and when I sat down it would be upon a three-legged stool with my feet under me.

 

“The winter was warm and pleasant. When spring came we tried farming once more. An abundant crop resulted, but there was no market for it; eggs were three cents per dozen, and shelled corn twenty cents per bushel. I kept boarders and made some butter to sell. (See also, 1859, for the Tabor’s next move, to Colorado.)

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September 9-12: If you are not familiar with the story of the S.S. Central America, my students were always intrigued.

 

The book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea chronicles the story in great and often exciting detail.

 

Loaded with gold minted in San Francisco, the vessel was sailing for New York in 1857 when caught in a violent Atlantic storm. For three days, the vessel struggled to survive, finally going down, and taking three tons (or perhaps fifteen, sources differ) of gold and 425 passengers and crew with her.

 

For the next 125 years no one gave much thought to finding the wreck. A man named Tommy G. Thompson, who had studied engineering and robotics at Ohio State University, began studying old records. Eventually, he and a company he founded (with support from 160 investors) discovered the wreck in 7,000 feet of water (some sources say 8,000).

 

A great deal of detective work and searching of possible wreck sites had already been involved; one summer was spent on a site of another vessel, sunk around the same time, which seemed to fit the profile of the Central America.

 

Eventually robot cameras located the proper wreck. Thompson and others first looked at a series of pictures snapped by the robot. Thompson described what they saw now: 

 

“It was just…it was just…covered with gold! I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it! That was the most thrilling….We had hit right on a pile, nice low pictures, nice and clear. I mean everything was perfect, man. It was incredible! But I looked at it, and I looked up, and, Naaaah, this can’t be. I thought, That’s gotta be a bunch of brass laying there. So I looked again! Holy! And I just started looking at the other shots, and I…mean…it…was…PILES! I’m not kidding you, it is awesome! It is absolutely awesome! Stacks of coins and bars of gold of every size and shape just sitting there!” (Ship of Gold, p. 450)

 

Some of the coins were still in neat sacks, the bags in which they had been contained having long since rotted away.

 

In another scene from the book a robot camera is filming the ocean bottom. The submersible approached a beam sticking up. Nearby, a hundred gold coins, washed by some current glinted in the searchlight. Other hints of bars and coins showed under a layer of sediment. An operator above pointed the forward thruster downward and shot out a gentle wash of water to blow away the covering.

 

The sediment was thin, but when the wake of the thruster hit, it exploded upward, swirling into clouds, blotting out the rotted timbers, turning the monitors white. For several minutes the techs could see nothing but the roiling sediment. Then the clouds began to drift with the light current; the picture on the monitors began to clear and slowly revealed a scene few people could imagine.

 

“The bottom was carpeted with gold,” Tommy said. “Gold everywhere, like a garden. The more you looked, the more you saw gold growing out of everything, embedded in all the wood and beams. It was amazing, clear back in the far distance bars stacked on the bottom like brownies, bars stacked like loaves of bread, bars that appear to have slid into the corner of the room. Some of the bars formed a bridge, all gold bars spanning one area of treasure over here and another over here, water underneath, and the decks collapsed through on both sides. Then there was a beam with coins stacked on it, just covered, couldn’t see the top of the beam it had so many coins on it.” (452)

 

Author Gary Kinder describes what the recovery team saw that day:

 

So many bricks lay tumbled upon one another at myriad angles that the thirty-foot pile appeared to be the remnants of an old building just demolished. Except these were bricks of gold: bricks flat, bricks stacked, bricks upright, bricks cocked on top of other bricks. And coins single, coins stacked, coins once in stacks now collapsed into spreading piles, some coins mottled in the ferrous oxide orange and brown from the rusting engines, others with their original mint luster. Besides a tiny squat lobster carefully picking its way across piles of coins, the scene lay perfectly still.

 

One team member laughed, “Look at those damn fire bricks.” A pink-orange anemone drifted softly through the scene. “Sticking up out of another area was a coin tower,” Kinder writes, “eight stacks of gold coins, twenty-five coins to a stack, all of the stacks abutting one another like poker chips still in the rack, the whole thing frozen together and angled upward at sixty degrees.” The camera on the underwater vehicle could swivel; and now they saw “a mound of gold dust frozen ten inches high, dotted with nuggets, and capped by two small gold bars.” (453)

 

The camera swung again, briefly passing a coin standing straight up. Tommy had caught the date. The camera was swung back.

 

Everyone laughed as Moore tapped the camera back again. There stood a coin upright, face front, just as pure and lustrous as the day it left the San Francisco Mint. It was emblazoned with the bust of Lady Liberty, lovely in profile, her hair crossed with a tiara and cascading in ringlets down her neck, thirteen stars surrounding her, and her ringlets stopping just short of the date “1857.” In a pocket thirty feet across, the ocean floor lay covered with these coins.

 

Doering [another member of the recovery team] figured he had now seen more gold coins in one place at one time than any other treasure hunter in history, and that included Cortes and Pizarro. He was ready to pluck some of that gold from the ocean floor, drop it into the artifact drawer, and bring it to the surface, so he could feel it right there in the palm of his hand. (455)

 

New technologies had to be developed to bring the coins up, unmarred, making them many times more valuable. (It was soon decided to lower a long, wide hose down to the site, coat the coins in silicon, pick them up and drop them in a drawer on the robot vehicle, then pull them out at the surface, unharmed.)

 

There were gold bars fifteen times larger than anything then known to exist. The estimated value of the haul was $400 million; but there were multiple court challenges ahead – including one from an insurance company that had paid off the losses back in 1857.

 

In the end, Thompson prevailed. The treasure belonged to his company. But he later ran off and left investors with the same amount of gold they started with, which would be none.

 

Thompson sold his share of the gold, including 532 gold bars and a trove of coins, for $50 million. A lengthy manhunt ended with his arrest in 2015; but when last I checked he was still in jail and still refused to reveal what had become of all the treasure.

 

At least some of it had probably gone into a trust fund for his children.

 

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An article in American Heritage titled “1857” by Oliver Jensen, notes that if you were to go back in time you would notice “the tremendous quiet,” no radios blaring, no power mowers, no loud vacuum cleaners, or airplanes overhead. “Everybody in 1857 is wearing the hoop.”

 

One issue for women: “When a breeze springs up, as it never does in Currier & Ives prints, the hoops are a little frisky.”

 

The economic possibilities seem endless. One financier tells a British traveler that if only he had taken up a certain speculation he would not have doubled or tripled his money, he would have “fourbled or fivebled” it. Harriet Martineau, an English woman visiting Washington, notices a problem with servants. None in America will wear livery.

 

James Mursell Phillippe predicts that by the end of the century the U.S. will have 100 million people. In another fifty years, “she will be almost indubitably the most powerful government on earth.”

 

It is a different world from what we will ever know. The U.S. government does not issue paper money; but 1,400 state banks do. The Sovereign of the Seas has just crossed from N.Y.C. to Liverpool in 13 days, 22 hours. The heyday of whalers operating out of New Bedford and Nantucket, bringing sperm oil to light the lamps of the young nation, is about to end with the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania. Half the workers in the Boston area are Irishmen and Irish women. Fifteen out of every hundred Americans live in cities (vs. 5 out of 100 in 1790). Thomas Howe manages to make pins of one piece of metal and sell them in papers. Previously, they had been expensive, and heads often fell off. Medicine is still backward. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarks, “if the whole materia medica as now used could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”

 

Lincoln tells a gathering in June, in Springfield, that the slave’s condition is worsening:

 

All the powers of the earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house…One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key—the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places, and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of the mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more difficult than it is.

 

In New York City, Fifth Avenue is cut through north of Twenty-Third Street, “but it still resembles a country road.”

 

There are plans afoot to create a great central park, two and one-half miles long and a half-mile wide. Many other areas of the city are overrun with crime. Policemen walk in pairs for protection in many areas, on streets with names like Cow Bay and Murderer’s Alley. Prostitutes as young as 12 roam the streets. Gangs like the Dead Rabbits, Plug Uglies, and Bowery Boys dominate entire neighborhoods. Police estimate there are 621 houses of prostitution, 99 houses of assignation and 75 “concert halls of ill repute.”

 

There are only 8,500 miles or railroads in 1850; that number triples to nearly 24,000 by 1857; this year the Baltimore & Ohio reaches St. Louis, Missouri. The trip takes four days.

 

Steam power has been spreading. One orator cries that “the march of civilization” is driven “by the power of steam!” Another: “The world has not seen a greater achievement!”

 

No one yet has dreamed of time zones or synchronized times; and fundamentalist preachers are warning that God knows but one time for Heaven and for earth.

 

Buchanan is in the White House; on slavery he says, I “hope that the long agitation on this subject is approaching its end.”

 

U.S. troops are preparing to march against the Mormons in Utah. Brigham Young describes federal power as “a stench in our nostrils.”

 

Robert Gould Shaw – who will die in 1864, at the head of the 54^th Massachusetts, and all-Negro regiment, save for its officers, is a student at Harvard.

 

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Jane Grey Swisshelm divorces – partly because her husband kept a mountain lion in the woodshed. She was forced to fight a legal battle to keep her personal property, which under the laws of that time became the property of her husband once they married.