Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, in her great book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” lived for some years in Chatham. Several, however, have settled and left kindly memories behind them in the neighborhood of Oshawa. One of these was
OLD JEFF.
About 1865 there came to this locality an intensely black negro. He had been a cotton-picker in Alabama, and had run away from slavery.
How he got away he never would tell, but said he followed the north star. Without permission from anyone he went into the woods, just south of Cedar Dale shop, and in a thicket built himself a hut by inclining poles together like the letter A, covering them with dirt and using one unstopped end as a door. In this hut he dwelt by himself with his big dog for about seven years, when he died. Charitably disposed persons used to give him food and clothes, for he was too old to work. He was very polite and harmless, and indeed became quite a favorite in the neighborhood.
There seemed to be some hidden romance in his history which he never would tell, and during his latter days, although he had been anxious to get away from the South, he pined to go back. In the words of the old song:
“I’ve hoed in fields of cotton,
I’ve worked along the river,
I thought if I got away
I’d ne’er go back any longer;
But times have changed the old man,
And his head is bending low,
For my heart’s turned back to Dixie,
And I must go.”
The late Mrs. F. W. Glen had a water-color drawing of old Jeff’s hut, which was prized highly for its faithful reproduction of the picturesque but rude dwelling. Poor old Jeff! the remains of his hut are still standing in the thicket.
My father, in his earlier years, had a black man as a general servant. He lived so long in Canada that his story may be included in this sketch.
He was born about the year 1814 in one of the counties in Virginia, which was so storm-swept during the great rebellion from 1861 to 1865. His home was in the track which Gen. Sheridan despoiled so effectually that he was able to boast, “Even a crow flying over must carry its own rations.” But during the first forty years of this poor slave’s life it smiled and produced grains and grasses and cattle in abundance. There his home was on the farm, where the system of agriculture is more like ours. The “plantations” proper are farther south, and the negroes employed on them are looked upon by the farmer slaves as belonging to an inferior race. “Only a plantation nigger” is a common saying among those employed on the Virginia farms. Owned by the head of one of the first families of Virginia, he had to thank him, too, for being the author of his existence. There were other sons born to this proud first family of Virginia. As they grew up they became sensitive of their slave half-brother, and induced their father to sell him.
His new master farmed one thousand acres of land, but only about one-half of this was arable, the rest being broken and used mainly for sporting in the scrub. On this one-thousand-acre farm sixty slaves, male and female, were kept, and the new master thought seriously of making his new slave foreman. The old overseer, however, strongly resisted being put under a “nigger,” and his opposition, when putting it in such light in that day, was sufficient to keep the new slave out of the position.