The sight of fragile little Eliza with her tearstained face, eyes swollen from crying, being wrenched from her arms and hoisted atop the platform, caused a pain unlike any Clara had known. When Paulina died, Clara grieved. But delivering her dead baby girl into the arms of the Lord—Clara was a woman of great faith—was far different than delivering her sobbing, living daughter into the arms of an unknown enslaver. She knew there was a good chance they would never meet again outside of heaven. It was a grief she shared with many thousands of mothers whose babies were taken and who never again had the chance to kiss the tops of their heads, to remark on how much they were growing, or to marvel in pride at who they were becoming.
“SOLD!” the auctioneer yelled, pointing at the man who had just purchased her flesh and blood. Eliza was carted away, nestled in the back of a wagon among sacks of feed and bolts of fabric. Clara watched her disappear, praying that Eliza would not be afraid, that she would find the strength to be a good girl, and that she would always know that she was loved.[8]
She vowed to find her again someday, even if it took the rest of her life.
When it was Clara’s turn to step on the auction block, she was sober, her eyes fixed on the horizon. She couldn’t allow herself to look into the faces of the people who stared her up and down. She didn’t allow herself to cry for Eliza, or for her husband, or her two older children, all sold to different enslavers. She held her head high, turning on command so the auction attendees could see her from all angles, silent in her rage and despair.
Clara was sturdy. Experienced enough to take to most jobs quickly, but young enough to still have many decades of work left in her. Her buyer was a man named George Brown. He motioned to a spot for Clara to sit in his wagon. The auction block, and Clara’s life as she knew it, slowly disappeared from view as she rolled toward a new, unknown life.
George Brown was a merchant—a hatter—and instead of working outdoors, Clara now had a job inside the Brown home. Over the years, as she helped raise the Browns’ three daughters, she thought endlessly of her own three girls. Her Margaret, was she happy? Did she marry? Her Eliza, did she grow out of the crying spells? How tall was she now? Her Paulina, was she watching from above? Could she hear how often Clara talked to her as she folded laundry and stirred the supper bubbling on the stove? She hoped her son and husband remembered her, as she did them.
Clara spent the next twenty years cooking, cleaning, and washing for the Browns.[9] She couldn’t read or write, but with their help, she tried to keep track of what happened to her children and husband.
Margaret, she heard, had died of a respiratory condition. Clara’s husband, Richard, sold down the river to one of the deadly plantations in the Deep South, was also gone. Her son, Richard Jr., was presumed dead, because the Browns had not been able to find a trace of him for many years. Eliza had initially been sold to an enslaver in Kentucky, but by 1852, she was twenty-six years old, and the only thing Clara had been able to turn up was a rumor that Eliza had headed west.[10]
When George Brown died and his relatives freed Clara, as stipulated in his will, Kentucky law gave her one year to leave the state. Stay any longer, and she risked re-enslavement. The Brown daughters found a job for her in St. Louis, working with a family as a housekeeper and cook.
For the first time in her life, at age fifty-six, Clara was working for pay. Her new employers, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Brunner, were German immigrants, and they taught Clara how to make the foods they enjoyed, which were quite different from what Clara had learned to cook back in Kentucky.[11]
Out of curiosity, I became interested in what German immigrants to the Ozarks were eating in the 1850s. We know from the records that Clara learned to cook a variety of German dishes, and that her newfound skills would later come in handy. I found a historian at Deutschheim, a German heritage site in the Ozarks, who described the great lengths that German immigrants went to to have variety in their diets—it was not part of their food culture to eat the same five things in rotation, as was common in frontier communities.[12] German immigrants at the time believed strongly in the concept of kitchen gardens and orchards, and a German seed catalog from the 1850s boasted hundreds of kinds of apples, pears, and stone fruit seeds. German produce favorites were soon adapted to the warmer Ozark climate.
Dr. Erin McCawley Renn says that German immigrants scoffed at the typically American cash crop system of planting their fields with nothing but tobacco or corn to sell, believing that it ruined the soil fertility and made it difficult to feed your family. The rule of thumb was to grow a hundred heads of cabbage per person, and that should be enough, if they were stored in your underground cellar properly, to last the year.[13] (And before you gasp at a root cellar holding five hundred heads of cabbage, it was mostly stored as sauerkraut.) One German immigrant from the 1840s described the fifty-six types of vegetables he grew in his kitchen garden, ranging from eggplant to radishes to six different kinds of peas, all surrounded by a picket fence to keep the pigs and chickens out.
When November came and hogs across the state were butchered, Germans introduced many varieties of sausages that Anglo-Americans had never tried: mettwurst, sommerwurst, bratwurst, and more. All of these were likely new to Clara. German immigrants were also big on soup, often eating it for at least one meal a day. Soup was something you put on the stove in the morning, and when anyone was hungry, you just helped yourself, sopping up the broth with a hunk of rye bread. Clara learned not just how to keep her employers fed and happy but how to make efficient use of her time in the kitchen and how to store food for the cold winter months, making pickles and vinegars and other fermented foods that helped keep people healthy when fresh produce wasn’t available.
While living in St. Louis, Clara asked every Black person she met if they had heard of her daughter Eliza. No, came the answer, over and over.
“Sorry, auntie,” children said.
“No, ma’am, I don’t know her,” said the men at the train station.[14]
The Brunners wanted to move to Kansas, and Clara accepted their invitation to accompany them there.[15] She had exhausted her search for Eliza in St. Louis, and the change of scenery would give her access to new people who might have encountered her now grown baby girl.
Clara would have no way of knowing what kind of world she was headed to as she made her way to what would come to be called Bleeding Kansas.
Two
Bleeding Kansas1850s
Many, many bad things in America lead back to my least favorite president: Andrew Jackson. Chief among the bad things is the notorious Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, which is widely, and I do mean WIDELY, regarded as the most idiotic thing the high court has ever committed to paper.
Dred Scott was an enslaved man in Missouri, a slave state, whose enslavers brought him to Illinois and Wisconsin territory, which were considered free soil. When they returned to Missouri, Dred Scott claimed that he should be free, because crossing into free soil made him a free man.
No surprise, his enslavers disagreed. Dred Scott sued. And the final outcome of the case, decided on by the Supreme Court, was that Dred Scott didn’t have any standing to bring a lawsuit. Why? Because, the court said, all African Americans, no matter if they were enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States. The court, led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, said that “they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.”[1]
Taney (which is pronounced Tawney), was a close adviser to and served in the cabinet of Andrew Jackson. And it was Jackson, an enslaver himself, who appointed Taney to the Supreme Court.
Roger Taney was slim, with noteworthy jowls. He had a wavy, chin-length bob, much like what you see young celebrity women of the twenty-first century sporting every spring. Taney was from Maryland, a Catholic who married the sister of Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Roger and Anne Taney supposedly had an agreement to raise any of their sons Catholic, like him, and any daughters Episcopalian, like Anne. As the fates would conspire, the couple had six daughters.
In recent years, a school in Maryland changed its name from Taney to Thurgood Marshall, after a champion of civil rights who was also from Maryland. Statues of Taney have been removed from various Maryland locations, and in February 2023, a Roger Taney statue was taken down inside the United States Capitol building—a movement led by several members of Congress.
The Dred Scott case was happening right around the same time that Clara was emancipated and went to St. Louis. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Clara, who for the first time in her life was free from bondage, was now formally regarded as “not a citizen” by her own government. There isn’t a record of what Clara might have thought and felt about Dred Scott, but she likely didn’t need the likes of Roger Taney to tell her what she had already experienced: that many people considered her less than based solely on the color of her skin.
Y’all already know that the United States was wrenched in two because of slavery—and only barely knitted back together. If anyone tries to tell you the Civil War was a war for “state’s rights,” calmly look them in the eye, and ask, politely and inquisitively, what exactly the states wanted the “right” to do?
You can follow up with, “Make their own rules about what?”
The answer is, of course, that they wanted to make their own rules about whether they had the right to enslave people. All the “way of life” and “self-determination” and “economic conditions” roads lead right back to slavery. You can also spare me the arguments of “other places in the world enslaved people,” “the United States was one of the first countries to end slavery,” and “Africans sold other Africans into enslavement.”
First, there was no one in the world engaged in chattel slavery like the United States, where people were kidnapped and held permanently, with no hope of escaping the condition. That was not the cultural norm in other parts of the world. Nor was the idea that all subsequent generations of children “followed the mother,” being born into permanent enslavement. The United States saw enslaved women as sources of value because of the enslaved workers they could in turn produce.
Secondly, the American South was one of the LAST places in the world to end enslavement. One of the last. Not the first.
And finally, it’s absolutely true that Africans helped enslave other Africans. But why? Because of the economic incentive created by Europeans to kidnap and sell people. Without an economic incentive, what would be the point of ripping human beings away from their families, imprisoning them in the most squalid and horrifying conditions, and selling them to slave traders to be shipped across the Middle Passage, where hundreds of thousands of them, possibly even millions, would perish before ever reaching the New World?
Enslavement in the United States was widely accepted. While only a small percentage of the country as a whole actively enslaved people, the entire country’s economy, not just the economy of the South, rested on the backs of enslaved Africans. Did you take sugar in your tea? It was probably grown on a plantation that used enslaved labor. Did you wear cotton clothes? Ditto. Did you produce cheap shoes in New England with no right or left foot? You sold them to enslavers to put on enslaved people’s feet.
Northern merchants relied on taxes from the slave trade to make improvements to their cities. For example, Newport, Rhode Island, used the money brought in from taxation on the enslaved to pave its streets.[2] Northern shipbuilders, carpenters, rope makers, blacksmiths, bankers, auctioneers, insurers, sailors, textile mill owners and workers, and more all relied on contracts from companies engaged in the slave trade.
Denim was first created from the indigo dyeing and cultivating knowledge that came from enslaved Africans in South Carolina. Denim was originally classified under the umbrella of what was referred to in the United States as “negro cloth,” and there are dozens of examples of “escaped slave” advertisements that said the people who fled to freedom were wearing jeans.
Eliza Pinckney, who is widely credited as being the botanist behind the establishment of indigo as a cash crop, relied on enslaved labor and the knowledge from enslaved Africans to help her extract the blue dye from the green plant, which is not a simple or straightforward process.[3]
Levi Strauss, founder of the famed denim brand, was hardly the inventor of denim. What he did was take an idea from a collaborator and add rivets to the pants, which made them more durable. And then he marketed the heck out of them. He was in San Francisco at exactly the right moment, the 1850s, when the California gold rush hit. And while he was there, he made sure to advertise that he did not hire Chinese or Black workers—that his denim blue jeans were made only by white people, even though the cotton and indigo were grown by enslaved labor.[4]
In 2022, one of the oldest pair of Levi’s still in existence was sold at auction. They are believed to be from the 1880s, and were discovered in an abandoned mineshaft, incredibly well preserved. Printed inside on a pocket is the phrase “The only kind made by white labor,” a slogan Levi’s adopted later in the nineteenth century. The jeans sold for $76,000.[5]
This is but the merest taste of how the nation as a whole, not just the South, benefited from and approved of the practice of enslaving other human beings. Were some individuals morally opposed to it? Sure, I’ll grant you that. Some people were actively working for abolition. Some people refused to buy goods that had been made by enslaved labor. But most did not. Most looked the other way, reaping the benefits of an economy built on the backs of the enslaved.
