While at Tuskegee Institute in 1914 Mrs. Emma Castleman Bowles, who has since died, related this account of the origin of Wilberforce. This story does not agree with the account given in Bishop D. A. Payne's African Methodist Episcopal Church (423 ff.). The value of the document lies mainly in the light which it throws upon the relations between wealthy slaveholders and their children of slave women. There must be much truth in the narrative, for Payne's sketch says that in 1859-60 a majority of the 207 students enrolled "are the natural children of Southern and Southwestern planters." The Special Report of the United States Commissioner of Education, published in 1871 (372-373), supports this statement. Mrs. Bowles' story follows:
Mrs. Emma Castleman Bowles said her father was Stephen S. Castleman, a slave holder who lived on the Yazoo River, about 150 miles from Vicksburg. He owned the Ashland plantation. She was born June 3, 1845. Her mother was a half sister of her father's wife. When Castleman married, her mother was sent to wait on her mistress. Castleman lived with both women. Castleman had two children by his wife and five by his concubine. He hired a white woman to teach Emma. This woman was paid $500 a year. Mrs. Bowles said she was not taught anything, not even to read. She spent her time playing with her half-brother and riding a pony which her father had bought for her.
In March 1858, Castleman sent his daughter Emma to Cincinnati by his brother-in-law, her half uncle, O. Leroy Ross. Here, she was emancipated and acknowledged as Castleman's daughter. Ross then brought her to Wilberforce and placed her in school.
Tawawa Springs was a summer resort for Southern slave holders. The Springs were medicinal. The Hotel Tawawa had 350 rooms, extensive grounds, elaborate water works for fountains, etc. There were several cottages on either side of the hotel. Slave holders would bring their families and slaves and live either in the hotel or in the cottages. A law was passed in Ohio forbidding the bringing of slaves into the State. Then white help and free Negro servants were used. The place declined financially and was finally sold for debt. Several planters banded together bought the place and turned it into a school for their illegitimate children by Negro women. Stephen S. Castleman was one of these men. Mrs. Bowles said this was done about 1856 or 1857.[2]
There were about nine teachers, all Yankees. The first principal was Rev. M. P. Gaddis. Richard Rust was the first President. The students, with a few exceptions, were children of slave holders.
Money was deposited in Cincinnati banks for the use of the children. President Rust was given power to draw on banks as the children needed money.
The following were named as among the slave owners who brought their children to the school. A planter named Mosley from Warren, Miss., brought seven children by three different mothers and freed them. Senator Hemphill of Virginia brought two daughters and emancipated them. A planter by the name of Smith brought eight children from Mississippi with their mother about 1859. He had a slave man and woman to wait on them. He was arrested and made to emancipate them. He bought a large tract of land for them. A brick house he built was later owned by Colonel Charles Young. The woman had lived with Smith under compulsion, and as soon as she was emancipated would have nothing more to do with him. Mrs. Bowles said that she went to school with these children and often visited the family. She had seen the mother strip herself to the waist and show how her back had been mutilated to make her submit to her master's wishes. A man named Piper came and brought 10 children and their mother. She was jet black. After the war he married her and settled in Darke County, Ohio.
General T. C. McMackin, a hotel owner of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was appointed by Castleman as his daughter's guardian. She said that she got in a fight with another school girl and was put on bread and water. She wrote her father. He had McMackin come to Wilberforce and adjust the matter. Her father, and she said the fathers generally, lavished money on their children. She had a box that held fifty silver dollars. This her father kept full of silver dollars for her to buy candy with.
Abolition was preached constantly in the school. She came to hate slavery. She had seen great cruelties inflicted on her mother and other slaves. Her mother took up with a slave man. Emma was a child, sleeping in the room. Many a night her father would come and curse the slave and compel him to leave the cabin. Then he would whip him and her mother. Whipping was on bare back from 39 to 300 lashes. Slave stripped naked and hands and feet tied to stakes driven into the ground. Stocks were also used. The lash and the stocks were both used on her mother's slave husband. They were put in the stocks at night and whipped night and morning.
Mrs. Bowles was courted in school by a class-mate, named George W. Harding, whose father was a large slave holder in Tennessee. President Rust tried to break it up. He wrote her father. Castleman wrote his daughter that he did not send her North to waste her time with a nigger. If she did not stop he would come and get her, cow hide her and bring her home and put her in the cotton field. She replied that "if her mother was good enough for him to sleep with, that a nigger was good enough for her to marry." She married Harding March 5, 1862. He had received considerable wealth from his father. When they married he had $55,000,[3] and later inherited $80,000 from his mother.
The war stopped communications with the South. As soon as the war closed, Castleman wrote to find out about his daughter and learned that she was married and the mother of two children. He wrote to her to come home and leave her niggers. If she didn't she would not get any of his property. She wrote him that he had beaten her mother and made her bear five children out of wedlock and that she would not forsake her husband and her lawfully born children.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The school began in 1855.
[3] Harding squandered his property and died a pauper. Mrs. Harding then married another student of Wilberforce, A. J. Bowles.
COMMUNICATIONS
Mr. John W. Cromwell has addressed the Editor the following letter which may interest persons directing their attention to the record of the Negro in West Virginia:
Dear Sir:
While reading your Negro Education in West Virginia I was reminded of my acquaintances in that State, and I thought of the striking contrast between the West Virginia of 1877 and that of 1923.
On invitation of Prof. Brackett, President of Storer College, I attended a Teachers' Institute and Educational Convention, held at Harper's Ferry, in 1877. There I first saw a gathering of young teachers, vigorous and alert, none more chivalric in bearing than the central figure in the person of John R. Clifford, at that time Principal of the Grammar School at Martinsburg. To me it was quite a contrast from dealing with the civil service of the Treasury Department at Washington on the one hand, and my experience with the young men there a few years before as I had beheld them in central Pennsylvania.
The bearing of the men was more than matched by the excellence of the women. Outstanding at the time was a young woman whom I could not at first determine whether I should rate her as a young pupil in one of the classes or one of the faculty. I soon found that she was a student teacher, also an elocutionist of grace, skill and power. So impressed was I that Storer College thenceforth was a regular place of visit during commencement season, and I soon found myself on its trustee board.
During one of these commencements, Frederick Douglass was booked to speak on John Brown; but Andrew Hunter, the prosecuting attorney who convicted John Brown, came to Harper's Ferry, and declared that Frederick Douglass should not speak in Jefferson county, where Brown was convicted and hung. He also said: "If Douglass dares to come here, I'll meet him, denounce him, and crush him!" Douglass came; so did Hunter. At the proper time, Douglass was escorted to the rostrum, and without invitation Hunter followed and took a seat close to Douglass, the master of American orators, who spoke as I never heard him before; and when through started to his seat. Hunter interrupted him, arose, and advanced toward Douglass with outstretched hand and exclaimed: "Let us shake hands," and while so doing, said: "Were Robert E. Lee here, he would shake the other," and pausing a few seconds, with all the power of his nature he said: "Let us go on!" to which Douglass replied: "In union together!" And everybody on the campus shouted—making the occasion one of dramatic as well as historic interest.
As editor of The People's Advocate, of Washington, D. C, the incident was sketched in bold and striking outlines for the country, and was read eagerly. It also forms an incident of one of the chapters of The "Life and Times" of Frederick Douglass.
In 1882, the Knights of Wise Men, with headquarters at Nashville, Tennessee, held their convention at Atlanta, Georgia. Thither went such representatives of the day as William J. Simmons, of Kentucky; Frances L. Cardozo, of Washington, D. C.; Bishop Henry M. Turner, of Georgia; Richard Gleaves, of South Carolina; John R. Lynch, of Mississippi; Robert Peel Brooks, of Virginia; Prof. J. C. Corbin, of Arkansas, and many other distinguished men interested in the order.
John R. Clifford, of Martinsburg, West Virginia, was one of the party and a most distinguished orator was he, whose masterly oration delivered in the State Capital of Georgia, with Governor Colquitt, and other state officials, was a fitting setting for the presentation of a beautiful gold-headed cane, with the convention's and his initials carved on it. Robert Peel Brooks was chosen by the delegates to present the gift.
The career of Mr. Clifford for twenty years' work as a teacher, brought him to the forefront, and he was appointed by three different W. Va. State Superintendents to hold and conduct Teachers' Institutes. Mr. Clifford holds a life-time teacher's certificate in honor of this distinguished service. He was the first colored man in West Virginia to be admitted to the bar in the early eighties. He became editor of the Pioneer Press in 1882 at Martinsburg, and ran it regularly for thirty-six years, being honored with the deanship of Negro journalism a short time before the Pioneer Press ceased to exist.
Mr. Clifford, single-handed and alone, filed charges against Prof. N. C. Brackett, head of Storer College, killed and wiped out Brackett's drawn color line, that barred colored people from going there as had been their privilege. He was the only colored editor in West Virginia who was a member of the State Editorial Association for twenty years, and was chosen the last year as its historian.
While defending a client sometime ago, a United States Commissioner and Mr. Clifford got into a controversy over some witnesses he wanted summoned, and it was kept up until the Commissioner demanded that he stop and go on, or he would put Clifford in jail. Undaunted he continued and gave the Commissioner to understand that just as long as he refused to summon the witnesses, he would contend for it; whereupon the Commissioner had him put in jail, where he remained for an hour and twenty-two minutes. Getting out he asked for his client, who had been tried and jailed. He was brought back. Clifford went his bond, sent him home, preferred charges against T. T. Lemen, United States Commissioner, and W. D. Brown, United States Marshal. Clifford went to the Department of Justice in Washington, D. C. proved his charges and had both put out of office and his client was set free.
He was appointed, by Senator B. K. Bruce and Frederick Douglass, Commissioner for the state of West Virginia to the New Orleans Exposition. He was elected three times President of the National Independent Political League, was chosen Principal of the Manassas Industrial School, where he and Frederick Douglass spoke on the occasion of his inauguration. He resigned because of his contention for better water.
He was the first man to impanel a colored jury in the state of West Virginia, and for so doing, was knocked down in the court room three times with deadly weights, causing the blood to run down into his shoes. When knocked down the third time, U. S. G. Pitzer, a Republican (?) prosecuting attorney, sprang on him, but with apparent superhuman skill and force, Clifford turned him at a time when there was not a soul in the court room (everybody having run out) but Pitzer & Clifford, with the latter on top, and had not Stephen Elam rushed in and pulled Clifford off of Pitzer and carried him out, death might have been the result,—Elam is still living. Later Pitzer was nominated for the Legislature, and Clifford canvassed Berkeley County on his bicycle exhibiting his bloody shirt (which he still has) and the day before the election Clifford spoke in the band-stand in the Public Square for an hour and thirty minutes, waving his bloody shirt and the following day Pitzer was defeated by 1336 votes.
He is a 33° Mason and a Past Grand Master of W. Va.; member of the American Negro Academy, and helped to shoot off the shackles from four million slaves and cement this Union on the bloody battle fields during the war of the sixties and holds an honorable discharge in proof of it.
He gives credit to the late Hon. John J. Healy of Chicago, Ill., for his early education thru the public schools of Chicago. He attended and graduated from Storer College 1875, and holds an honorary diploma from Shaw University.
John W. Cromwell.