Chapter IV
CHAPTER IV.
MR. HOPKINS remained but a short time in the office of overseer. Why his career was so short, I do not know, but suppose he lacked the necessary severity to suit Colonel Lloyd. Mr. Hopkins was succeeded by Mr. Austin Gore,†Historical annotation: Austin Gore (1794-1871), also referred to as Orson Gore in the Lloyd family account and cash books, was the overseer of Edward Lloyd V's Davis's Farm plantation where in 1822 a young slave named Bill Demby died. A friend of Gore's later challenged Douglass's assertion that Gore coolly murdered Demby, insisting that he was "a respectable citizen living near St. Michaels, and . . . a worthy member of the Methodist Episcopal Church; . . . all who know him, think him anything but a murderer." Lloyd apparently tolerated Gore's brutal actions because he later promoted him to be overseer of the much larger Wye House plantation. The 1830 U.S. census listed Gore as the head of a household which contained three boys and two girls under 10, his wife, and an elderly woman. Only a child at the time of Demby's death, Douglass must have constructed his narrative of the incident from plantation legends. A. C. C. Thompson, "To the Public—Falsehood Refuted," reprinted in the NASS, 25 November 1845 and in Lib., 12 December 1845; Various account books and cash books, Land Papers—Maintenance of Property, Land Volume 39, reel 10, Lloyd Family Papers, MdHi; 1830 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 14. a man possessing, in an eminent degree, all those traits of character indispensable to what is called a first-rate overseer. Mr. Gore had served Colonel Lloyd, in the capacity of overseer, upon one of the out-farms, and had shown himself worthy of the high station of overseer upon the home or Great House Farm.
Mr. Gore was proud, ambitious, and persevering. He was artful, cruel, and obdurate. He was just the man for such a place, and it was just the place for such a man. It afforded scope for the full exercise of all his powers, and he seemed to be perfectly at home in it. He was one of those who could torture the slightest look, word, or gesture, on the part of the slave, into impudence, and would treat it accordingly. There must be no answering back to him; no explanation was allowed a slave, showing himself to have been wrongfully accused. Mr. Gore acted fully up to the maxim laid down by slaveholders, "It is better that a dozen slaves suffer under the lash, than that the overseer should be convicted, in the presence of the slaves, of having been at fault." No matter how innocent a slave might be it availed him nothing, when accused by Mr Gore of any misdemeanor. To be accused was to be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always following the other with immutable certainty. To escape punish-
ment was to escape accusation; and few slaves had the fortune to do either, under the overseership of Mr. Gore. He was just proud enough to demand the most debasing homage of the slave, and quite servile enough to crouch, himself, at the feet of the master. He was ambitious enough to be contented with nothing short of the highest rank of overseers, and persevering enough to reach the height of his ambition. He was cruel enough to inflict the severest punishment, artful enough to descend to the lowest trickery, and obdurate enough to be insensible to the voice of a reproving conscience. He was, of all the overseers, the most dreaded by the slaves. His presence was painful; his eye flashed confusion; and seldom was his sharp, shrill voice heard, without producing horror and trembling in their ranks.
Mr. Gore was a grave man, and, though a young man, he indulged in no jokes, said no funny words, seldom smiled. His words were in perfect keeping with his looks, and his looks were in perfect keeping with his words. Overseers will sometimes indulge in a witty word, even with the slaves; not so with Mr. Gore. He spoke but to command, and commanded but to be obeyed; he dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with his whip, never using the former where the latter would answer as well. When he whipped, he seemed to do so from a sense of duty, and feared no consequences. He did nothing reluctantly, no matter how disagreeable; always at his post, never inconsistent. He never promised but to fulfil. He was, in a word, a man of the most inflexible firmness and stone-like coolness.
His savage barbarity was equalled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge. Mr. Gore once undertook to whip one of Colonel Lloyd's slaves, by the name of Demby.†Historical annotation: Bill Demby (c. 1802-22) lived with twenty-two other slaves, including his family, on Davis's Farm, one of several Talbot County plantations owned by Edward Lloyd V. Plantation records indicate that Demby, a prime field hand, died sometime during the year 1822. Return Book, 1 January 1822, 1 January 1823, Land Papers—Maintenance of Property, Land Volume 39, reel 10, Lloyd Family Papers, MdHi; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 72-73, 213n 10. He had given Demby but few†Textual note here indicates which edition or impression a text variation occurs. D1 reads "but a few." In the correlative passage in Bondage and Freedom (122), however, Douglass chose the wording of the copy-text (D1: First impression of the second edition, published in Dublin in 1845). stripes, when, to get rid of the scourging, he ran and plunged himself into a creek, and stood there at the depth of his shoulders, refusing to come out. Mr. Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and that, if he did not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood.
A thrill of horror flashed through every soul upon the plantation, excepting Mr. Gore. He alone seemed cool and collected. He was asked by
Colonel Lloyd and my old master, why he resorted to this extraordinary expedient. His reply was, (as well as I can remember,) that Demby had become unmanageable. He was setting a dangerous example to the other slaves, one which, if suffered to pass without some such demonstration on his part, would finally lead to the total subversion of all rule and order upon the plantation. He argued that if one slave refused to be corrected, and escaped with his life, the other slaves would soon copy the example; the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites. Mr. Gore's defence was satisfactory. He was continued in his station as overseer upon the home plantation. His fame as an overseer went abroad. His horrid crime was not even submitted to judicial investigation. It was committed in the presence of slaves, and they of course could neither institute a suit, nor testify against him; and thus the guilty perpetrator of one of the bloodiest and most foul murders goes unwhipped of justice, and uncensured by the community in which he lives. Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael's, Talbot county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is still alive, he very probably lives there now; and if so, he is now, as he was then, as highly esteemed and as much respected as though his guilty soul had not been stained with his brother's blood.
I speak advisedly when I say this, that killing a slave, or any colored person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community. Mr. Thomas Lanman,†Historical annotation: Thomas H. W. Lambdin (c. 1807-?) had labored at a number of trades by 1850: ship carpenter, schoolteacher, town bailiff for St. Michaels (1848), and miller (1850). In 1850 he was married and had five young children. He owned real estate valued at $1,000.00 in that year. In a rebuttal to Douglass's negative characterization, a Maryland friend described Lambdin as "too good-natured and harmless to injure any person but himself." A. C. C. Thompson, "To the Public—Falsehood Refuted," reprinted in NASS, 25 November 1845 and in Lib., 12 December 1845; Tilghman, Talbot County, 2 : 395. of St. Michael's, killed two slaves, one of whom he killed with a hatchet, by knocking his brains out. He used to boast of the commission of the awful and bloody deed. I have heard him do so laughingly, saying, among other things, that he was the only benefactor of his country in the company, and that when others would do as much as he had done, we should be relieved of "the d-----d niggers."
The wife of Mr. Giles Hicks,†Historical annotation: A Giles Hicks resided in Caroline County, Maryland in 1820. 1820 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 92.Textual note here indicates which edition or impression a text variation occurs. B's "Hick," undoubtedly the result of a compositorial error, is rendered as "Hicks" in all subsequent editions and impressions. B's compositor twice rendered the name correctly on this page (Hicks'). On the ground that the name intended by Douglass is "Hicks" rather than "Hick" (see previous note), it follows that B's possessive form "Hick's" involves a compositorially misplaced apostrophe. The error was corrected in D1 and D2 but recurred in E1, E2, and L (B: Copy text, first published in Boston in 1845; D1: First impression of the second edition, published in Dublin in 1845; D2: Second impression of the Dublin edition, published in 1846; E1: First impression of the third edition, published in Wortley near Leeds, England, in 1846; E2: Second impression of the third edition, published in London in 1847; L: Only impression of the fourth edition, published in London in 1852). living but a short distance from where I used to live, murdered my wife's†Historical annotation: Anna Murray Douglass (c. 1813-82), Frederick Douglass's first wife, was born free in Denton, Caroline County, Maryland. She was the eighth child of Bambarra Murray and his wife Mary, slaves who had been manumitted shortly before Anna's birth. At seventeen she moved to Baltimore, where she worked as a domestic. She met Douglass at meetings of the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, helped finance his escape, and, according to plan, joined him in New York City, where they were married on 15 September 1838. During Douglass's tour of the British Isles in 1845-47 she remained in Lynn, Massachusetts, where she supported herself by binding shoes. There she gained a reputation for frugality and skillful household management—qualities that would contribute greatly to her family's financial prosperity over the years. A member of the Lynn Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society and a regular participant in the annual antislavery bazaars in Boston, she continued her antislavery activities after moving to Rochester in 1847. Unlettered, reserved, and, according to her husband, never completely at ease in white company, she seldom appeared at public functions with Douglass. She was nevertheless affectionately remembered by her husband's associates as a "warm" and "hospitable" hostess at their home. On 9 July 1882, Anna Douglass suffered an attack of paralysis in Washington, D.C. She died there on 4 August. In January 1884 Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white woman. Lib., 18 November, 2 December 1853; Philadelphia Christian Recorder, 20 July 1882; Washington Post, 5 August 1882; Rosetta Douglass Sprague, Anna Murray Douglass: My Mother as I Recall Her (1900; Washington, D.C., 1923); Jane Marsh Parker, "Reminiscences of Frederick Douglass," Outlook 51 : 552-53 (6 April 1895); Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 149, 151, 154, 159; Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 9-10, 100-01, 106, 109-10, 297-98. cousin, a young girl between fifteen and sixteen years of age, mangling her person in the most horrible manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that the poor girl expired in a few hours afterward. She was immediately buried, but had not been in her untimely grave but a few hours before she was taken up and examined by the coroner, who decided that she had come to her death by severe beating. The offence for which this girl was thus murdered was this: She had been set that night to mind Mrs. Hicks' baby, and during the night she fell asleep, and the baby cried. She, having lost her rest for several nights previous, did not hear the crying. They were both in the room with Mrs. Hicks. Mrs. Hicks, finding the girl slow to move, jumped from her bed,
seized an oak stick of wood by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl's nose and breastbone, and thus ended her life. I will not say that this most horrid murder produced no sensation in the community. It did produce sensation, but not enough to bring the murderess to punishment. There was a warrant issued for her arrest, but it was never served. Thus she escaped not only punishment, but even the pain of being arraigned before a court for her horrid crime.
Whilst I am detailing bloody deeds which took place during my stay on Colonel Lloyd's plantation, I will briefly narrate another, which occurred about the same time as the murder of Demby by Mr. Gore.
Colonel Lloyd's slaves were in the habit of spending a part of their nights and Sundays in fishing for oysters, and in this way made up the deficiency of their scanty allowance. An old man belonging to Colonel Lloyd, while thus engaged, happened to get beyond the limits of Colonel Lloyd's, and on the premises of Mr. Beal Bondly.†Historical annotation: John Beale Bordley (1800-82) was the son of Matthias Bordley (1757-1828) and the grandson of John Beale Bordley (1727-1804), a noted agriculturalist and Revolutionary War era patriot from Maryland. Often called simply Beale Bordley, John Beale Bordley was born on his father's Wye Island estate, across the river from the Lloyd plantation, and remained there until his mid-twenties when he moved to Philadelphia to study law with Pennsylvania Chief Justice John Bannister Gibson. Quickly tiring of the law, Bordley came to develop a very successful career as a portrait painter of prominent figures in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. A number of his paintings are held by the Maryland Historical Society. Francis Sims McGrath, "A Letter to Eileen," MdHM, 24 : 306 (December 1929); Eugenia Calvert Holland and Louisa MacGill Gray, comps., "Miniatures in the Collection of the Maryland Historical Society," MdHM, 51 : 342, 346, 353 (December 1956); Anna Wells Rutledge, "Portraits Painted Before 1900 in the Collection of the Maryland Historical Society . . . ," MdHM, 41 : 35, 36, 43 (March 1946); Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, 14 March 1882; Francis Sims McGrath, Pillars of Maryland (Richmond, 1950), 393. Textual note here indicates which edition or impression a text variation occurs. D1's deletion of "Mr." is almost certainly a compositor's oversight. Douglass and Webb would have acted with extreme inconsistency to have deleted one "Mr." among many. When initially referring to a white person, Douglass's habit was to use "Mr." or "Mrs." and first (if he knew it) and last name. Several examples occur in the immediate context of this alteration (D1: First impression of the second edition, published in Dublin in 1845). At this trespass, Mr. Bondly took offence, and with his musket came down to the shore, and blew its deadly contents into the poor old man.
Mr. Bondly came over to see Colonel Lloyd the next day, whether to pay him for his property, or to justify himself in what he had done, I know not. At any rate, this whole fiendish transaction was soon hushed up. There was very little said about it at all, and nothing done. It was a common saying, even among little white boys, that it was worth a half-cent to kill a "nigger," and a half-cent to bury one.