Oberlin Heritage Center Blog

by Ron Gorman, Oberlin Heritage Center volunteer docent

It’s no secret that one of the primary goals of Oberlin College in its first decades of existence was to train Americans to become missionaries who would go out into the world and crusade against slavery and other moral ills.  That’s why I find the story of Thomas DeSaille Tucker and Charles Jones so intriguing; it’s an interesting twist on the traditional Oberlin narrative.  Tucker and Jones were native Africans who came to America, attended Oberlin College and devoted their lives to combating slavery right here in the United States, serving as missionaries in the American South in its hour of greatest need.

Thomas DeSaille Tucker
Courtesy State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory

Unfortunately I have no picture to post of Charles Jones, and the information on him is scant, but what we do have comes from reliable sources.  There is quite a bit of information available on Tucker, however, and his legacy continues to this very day (although his middle name is subject to a wide range of spellings, including deSaliere, DeSota, and De Selkirk).

Jones and Tucker were raised in Sherbro, Sierra Leone, Africa.  Jones was the son of a powerful Muslim chief, and Tucker was the grandson of another powerful chief, who also happened to be a slave trader.[1]  Both youths were educated in the Kaw-Mendi (a.k.a. Mende or Mendi) mission that was established on the western coast of Sierra Leone by American philanthropists in the 1840s.  In fact the land for the mission was rented to them by Tucker’s grandfather, and the original purpose of the mission was to repatriate the survivors of the slave ship Amistad.  Oberlin College benefactors Lewis and Arthur Tappan were among the main supporters of the mission, which was basically run by Oberlin students and alumni, about 30 of whom would ultimately serve there.  Certainly Jones and Tucker would have known, and perhaps been influenced by, Sarah Margru Kinson, one of the original Amistad captives, who was educated at Oberlin College after her release, then returned to Sherbro in 1849 to become a missionary and teacher herself.  (For more information on Sarah Margru Kinson, the Amistad, and the Mendi mission, see Sarah Margru Kinson: The Two Worlds of an Amistad Captive, by Marlene D. Merrill, available from the Oberlin Heritage Center gift shop.)

Jones and Tucker were brought to the United States in 1856 by Oberlin College alumnus George Thompson, who returned to Oberlin after relinquishing his post as director of the Mendi mission.  Tucker would have been about 12 years old at the time, Jones was probably about 17.  Interestingly, they arrived in the United States in the summer, and when asked how they liked it, they replied, “We like it very well, but it is too hot for us, we can’t stand it!”[2]

Both of the boys lived with Thompson initially, although Jones eventually took a shoemaker apprenticeship with Oberlin’s Orindatus S. B. Wall and moved in with his family.  Tucker entered the preparatory school at Oberlin College in 1858 at the age of about 14, and entered the collegiate program two years later.  Jones attended the preparatory school in the 1860-1861 school year.  But both had every intention of returning to Africa after receiving their education, just as Sarah Margru Kinson had, to dedicate their lives, as Tucker put it, to “do good in my native land.”[3]

When Tucker was still in Africa as a 10 year old boy, he had written to Lewis Tappan about the “wicked practices” of his country, including warfare that involved attacking towns when “the enemy on the other part are asleep” and killing “their enemies so much even as not to have pity upon some of young babes.”  A relative of Tucker’s, who would eventually become a slave trader himself, had also written Tappan that “slavery and bigamy or polygamy will be the last sins an african [sic] will forsake.”   But now that Thomas Tucker had crossed the ocean, he came to see that the United States had its own sins and wicked practices, as he wrote to a friend back in Africa:

‘The colored men in this country have no voice in the general government; even in some of the States they have no voice in the State government.  It would fairly sicken you to be here on a fourth of July and hear guns firing and “starspangled banner” waving “over the land of the free and the home of the brave” while there are this day 4,000,000 of slaves in their possession.  O what a hypocrisy.  God will not always sleep but will yet come in judgment against this country except they speedily repent.’[4]

Then the American Civil War broke out.  Union forces made slow progress into the slaveholding states of the South, and as they did so they were thronged by slaves who had escaped from their owners.  The Fugitive Slave Law, which remained in force, demanded that slaves be returned to their owners on claim.  Although some Union commanders were all too happy to comply and relieve themselves of the burden of accommodating the freedom seekers, a few saw this as an opportunity to strike a blow against slavery and the Confederacy.  General Benjamin Butler, who had seized the military bases at Fortress Monroe in the Norfolk-Hampton region of coastal Virginia, was among the latter.  Arguing that the Confederates considered the slaves as “property”  which they were using to support the rebellion, he claimed the right to refuse their return.  And thus hundreds of freedom seekers became “contraband” of war.

Now came the tremendous logistical problem of sheltering them, feeding them, and providing them the education that most had been denied all their lives.  Mary Peake, a local free black school teacher, and Peter Herbert, a local fugitive from slavery, got permission to establish schools on property seized by the Union forces.  Herbert in fact established his school in the abandoned summer home of slaveholding ex-President John Tyler, who had left the area and thrown his support to the Confederacy.  Both Peake and Herbert soon had dozens of students in their classes.

Northern abolitionists, both black and white, from the American Missionary Association (the same group that ran the Mendi mission) also came down to help.  Reverend Lewis C. Lockwood directed relief operations in person and helped establish more schools, while George Whipple (one of Oberlin’s “Lane Rebels”) and Simeon S. Jocelyn petitioned the Lincoln Administration for support.  On December 3, 1862, the Oberlin Evangelist reported:

“Since the meeting of the Am. Missionary Association in this place, Oct. 15, five students from Oberlin College and Seminary have left us for service under the Association in labors among the freemen at or near Fortress Monroe, or in South Carolina, namely: Wm O. King and Palmer Litts, of the Junior Theological Class; Edwin S. Williams of the Middle Theological Class and his wife; and Thomas De Selkirk Tucker of the Junior Class, a native of Sherbro, Africa, brought thence by Rev. Geo. Thompson and in a course of education in Oberlin College.  They are all teachers of considerable experience, with the exception of the last named, and all give promise of efficiency and usefulness in their work.  They left us with many requests for prayer – their case and work awakening profound sympathy among their Christian friends.  Not having completed their course of study, they all expect to return for that purpose after a service perhaps of six months.”

Upon his arrival in Hampton, Virginia, Thomas Tucker immediately began teaching classes in the Tyler house.  It was difficult work.  The teachers were faced with overcrowded classrooms, they endured the hostility and prejudices of many of the Union troops as well as the local populace, and their varying backgrounds and skill levels sometimes created tensions among themselves.  But the missionaries drew their inspiration from their students, finding “their love of freedom strong.  Their desire for learning and the aptitude of children and adults to learn… remarkable.”[5]

Tucker returned to Oberlin in mid-1863.  The time he spent in Virginia and the substandard pay he received while there set his Oberlin education back one year, but with cooperation of the school administration he was able to secure good winter employment and continue his education.[6]

In 1864, Tucker expressed disappointment that his Mendi friend, Charles Jones, had joined the Union armed forces.  Tucker took this as a sign (quite correctly, it turned out) that Jones would not be returning to Africa.  That Jones enlisted is not surprising, given that his Oberlin mentor, O.S.B. Wall, became a tireless recruiter of black Ohio soldiers when the Lincoln Administration finally allowed African Americans to enlist in 1863.  (Wall himself earned a Captain’s commission, perhaps the first African American to do so.)  Wall recruited for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteer and the 5th United States Colored Troops (USCT) infantry regiments in 1863, and the 27th USCT infantry regiment in early 1864.  Only one Charles Jones appears on the roster of these regiments, as a private in Company D of the 27th USCT, which recruited several African American men from Oberlin.  If this was our Charles Jones, he would have seen some of the hardest fighting of the entire war in Virginia in the Spring and Summer of 1864.[7]

Tucker himself was still intent on returning to Africa after completing his Oberlin education, saying:

“Whenever I reflect, so far as youth can, on all the Providences connected with my coming to, and residence in this country, thus far, I cannot resist the conviction that he intends me for some work in life.  To be sure all men know that they were not made to be drones; yet there are times when we are, as it were, divinely impressed with a sense of the path marked out for us in life.  I feel that my only highest goodness and happiness will consist in spending my life for benighted dear Africa…  At all events, unless I can see plainer indications of Providence allotting me a sphere of duty in this country, to Africa I will return.”[8]

However he also began to foresee difficulties if he returned to his powerful family in Sherbro, writing:

“Far from any desire to forget and foresake Africa; I still yet, as I have in the past, cherished the deepest sympathy for my native land… My family influences in the Sherbro, as you well know, are very extensive.  Returning there I would be subjected to trials and temptations which you perhaps can not well conceive of in this country.  As your Sherbro mission is the only one you have in Africa, and as I could not return and labor there without great disadvantages, I preferred to be where I could be most efficient.  I could willingly go to such a place as Shengay, Sierra Leone — anywhere where I can be farthest from my relatives.”[9]

But when Tucker received his A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) degree from Oberlin in 1865, there were no teaching opportunities for him in Africa outside of the Sherbro mission.  He thus resolved himself to be “governed by a sense of duty, and not by selfish inclinations” and to “teach in any capacity — for the elevation of the freedmen.”[10]

And that he did.  After graduating, Tucker returned to the South, this time to educate freedmen in Georgetown, Kentucky and later New Orleans, Louisiana.  His friend, Charles Jones, having survived the war, also heard the calling to head south and became a preacher in Mississippi.  (He was believed to be in Friars Point, Mississippi until about 1883, and then sometime thereafter might possibly have relocated to North Carolina, still preaching.)[11]  Tucker edited a series of newspapers while in New Orleans and studied law at Straight University, a school established by the American Missionary Association to train black missionaries and to provide legal training to students to help support civil rights in the South.  (Straight University eventually merged into present-day Dillard University.)  Tucker earned his law degree in 1883, then moved to Pensacola, Florida, where he had a successful law practice for four years.

In 1887, Tucker co-founded a college in Tallahassee, Florida called the State Normal School for Colored Students.  His co-founder was another Oberlin College black alumnus and one-time Florida state legislator, Thomas Van Renssalaer Gibbs.  When the State Board of Education selected Tucker to be the school’s first president, the editor of a local newspaper wrote:

“The State Board of Education certainly deserves much credit for the appointments recently made for this school. … We have known Professor Tucker for about 18 years and we have never met a more genial, broadminded and sterling gentleman. He possesses first-class qualities as a friend, gentleman and scholar, and commands the respect of all who know him. He is a strong man, morally and intellectually, and the new Normal has a security of success under his charge.”[12]

Tucker would serve as president for 14 years, but would eventually be forced to resign over policy differences with state authorities.  Influenced by his own Oberlin College education, Tucker wanted the school to offer a strong liberal arts education to its students to complement its vocational training.  State authorities believed the school should focus on vocational training only, and accused Tucker of providing instruction that was “void of the results of the kind for which the money was furnished” and of hiring instructors who were “not in sympathy… with Southern institutions.”  Interestingly enough though, Tucker was replaced by yet another African American Oberlin College graduate, Nathan B. Young.[13]

According to his contemporary Florida historian, Rowland H. Rerick, Tucker was “an able and intelligent man, of excellent character and notable executive ability and an admirable influence upon the students.’’[14]   But now he returned to his law practice and died just two years later in 1903.  If he were with us today, however, he would undoubtedly be proud of the college he co-founded.   No longer known as the State Normal School for Colored Students, it is now called the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (“Florida A&M”), and provides a wide range of studies and programs, from baccalaureate to doctoral, to students of all races and ethnicities, though predominantly African American.  And yes, it provides liberal arts instruction too.

SOURCES CONSULTED:

Clara Merritt De Boer, The Role of Afro-Americans in the Origin and Work of the American Missionary Association: 1839-1877, Vols 1 & 2

Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890

Leedell W. Neyland, “State-Supported Higher Education Among Negroes in the State of Florida”, The Florida historical quarterly, Volume 43 Issue 02. October 1964, pp. 108-110

George Thompson, The Palm Land; Or, West Africa, Illustrated

“Teachers for the Freedmen”, Oberlin Evangelist, Dec 3, 1862, p.7

Joseph Yannielli, “George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition”, Journal of American History, vol 96, issue 4, March 2010, p. 998

General catalogue of Oberlin college, 1833 [-] 1908, Oberlin College Archives

Robert Samuel Fletcher, A history of Oberlin College: from its foundation through the Civil War, Volume 1

Clifton H. Johnson, “Tucker, Thomas DeSaliere”, Dictionary of African Christian Biography

Oberlin College Archives, RG 28/1, Alumni and Development Records, Former Student File, Series B, Box 313, Folder “Jones, Charles 1860-1861”

1860 United States Census, Lorain County, Russia Township

National Park Service, “Soldiers and Sailors Database”

Ira Berlin, Joseph Patrick Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, The Black Military Experience

William E. Bigglestone, They Stopped in Oberlin

Mark St. John Erickson, “An uneasy alliance of white missionaries and refugee slaves leads to freedom in Civil War Hampton”, HR History

Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890

Adam Fairclough, “Being in the Field of Education and also Being a Negro…Seems…Tragic: Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South”, The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 1. (Jun., 2000), pp. 65-91

Emma J. Lapsanky-Werner, Margaret Hope Bacon (editors), Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America, 1848-1880

Marlene D. Merrill,  Sarah Margru Kinson: The Two Worlds of an Amistad Captive

Abdul Karim Bangura, “The Life and Times of the Amistad Returnees to Sierra Leone and Their Impact: A Pluridisciplinary Exploration”, Africa Update Newsletter, Vol. XIX, Issue 2 (Spring 2012)

Versalle F. Washington, Eagles on their Buttons

Daniel J. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University

Anne W. Chapman, “Fight for Home Saves Plantation”, Daily Press

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Yannielli, p. 998
[2] Yannielli, p. 998; De Boer pp. 121-122; 1860 U.S. Census; Thompson, pp. 441-442
[3] Sharfstein, p. 94; 1860 U.S. Census;  General Catalogue; Lapsanky-Werner, p. 152
[4] De Boer, pp. 119-121, 123
[5] Engs, p. 36, 48
[6] De Boer, pp. 258-259
[7] De Boer, p. 261; Washington, p. 13; Berlin, p. 93; Bigglestone, pp. 237-240; “Soldiers and Sailors Database”
[8] De Boer, p. 259
[9] ibid, p. 261
[10] ibid, pp. 260, 262
[11] Yannielli, p. 998; Oberlin College Archives, RG 28/1
[12] Neyland, p. 108; General Catalogue; Johnson, “Dictionary”
[13] Neyland, pp. 109-110; Yannielli, p. 998; General Catalogue
[14] Neyland, p. 110

by Ron Gorman, Oberlin Heritage Center volunteer docent

“Oberlin commenst this war.  Oberlin wuz the prime cause uv all the trubble.”  Thus spoke the Reverend Petroleum V. Nasby, one of the most well-known American cartoon characters of the Civil War era.  Nasby’s uncouth, semi-illiterate letters enjoyed nationwide newspaper circulation (in the North, at least) and appeared in several books, and were read with great amusement by President Abraham Lincoln.  And since Nasby enjoyed ranting about Oberlin, I thought it would be fun to do a blog about him and his creator, the journalist and political satirist David R. Locke.

David Ross Locke

At the time Locke started writing the Nasby letters in 1862, he was 29 years old and the editor of the Jeffersonian, a Republican newspaper in Findlay, Ohio.  At that time, newspapers often had political affiliations, and Locke, a staunch anti-slavery Republican, had been editing Republican newspapers since the founding of the party several years earlier.  Locke was also an outspoken advocate of racial equality, which was extremely unusual at that time, even among opponents of slavery.  In 1854 he wrote an editorial lashing out at the Ohio Senate for refusing to allow an African American journalist, William Howard Day (an 1847 graduate of Oberlin College), to report on their proceedings.  He called Day “a young man of striking ability” and the action of the Ohio Senate “one of the most contemptible actions on record.”

Locke also had close ties to the leadership of the Republican Party.  In 1855 he entered a brief newspaper partnership with Roeliff Brinkerhoff, a major Ohio Republican Party operative and a future legal consultant to the Oberlin-Wellington rescuers.  Locke was an enthusiastic supporter of Abraham Lincoln, who he first met during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois in 1858.  When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Locke volunteered for enlistment, was commissioned a Second Lieutenant, and raised a company of 100 men.  But when he got to Columbus, Ohio’s Republican Governor, William Dennison, convinced him that his unique journalistic skills would do more good for the Union cause than military service.  So Locke relinquished his command and took ownership of the Jeffersonian.

Ironically, the Jeffersonian was distributed in Hancock County, a strongly Democratic county in mostly Republican Ohio.  Locke was incensed at some of the extremely racist and pro-Confederate attitudes he encountered in Hancock County among a group of men known as “Copperheads” – anti-war, pro-slavery Democrats led by Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham.  One Hancock County man in particular had been circulating a petition throughout the county to expel African Americans from Ohio.  But Locke, who said “I can kill more error by exaggerating vice than by abusing it”, had a ready-made answer for this.  For years his journalistic writings had been dabbling in satire, letters from fictitious characters, and a form of writing that was popular in that era that included wild misspellings and malapropisms.  He would now combine the three to create a parody of the man distributing the petition, and use it to lampoon the Copperheads and the Democratic Party (often called “the Democracy” in that era).

Thus on April 25, 1862, Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby was born – an unscrupulous, ignorant, uncouth, blatantly racist, Copperhead Democrat.  On that day a letter appeared in the Jeffersonian, signed by Nasby, under the heading “Letter from a Straight Democrat”.  (When Locke later published a book of his Nasby letters, this letter would appear as the third entry, under the title “Negro Emancipation”.)  In this letter he railed against the growing black population in the region: “I am bekomin alarmed, for, ef they inkreese at this rate, in suthin over sixty years they’ll hev a majority in the town, and may, ef they git mean enuff, tyrannize over us, even ez we air tyrannizin over them.  The danger is imminent!… Fellow-whites arouse!  The enemy is onto us!  Our harths is in danger!… Ameriky for white men!”

Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby (illustrated by cartoonist Thomas Nast)

The letter got nationwide distribution through a journalistic process of the time called the “exchange”, and became an instant hit.   President Lincoln was so amused by it that he committed passages  to memory and would frequently recite them.  But Locke was only getting started.  Nasby would pump out letters for the next 20 years.

Two months after his first letter, Locke used Nasby to focus on the issue of abolitionism.  It was a common sentiment among the Copperhead Democrats that the abolitionists were the cause of the Civil War.   Lincoln’s predecessor in the Presidency, Democrat James Buchanan, voiced this sentiment in his last annual message to Congress, when he denounced abolitionist “agitation”:

…This agitation has ever since been continued by the public press, by the proceedings of State and county conventions and by abolition sermons and lectures. The time of Congress has been occupied in violent speeches on this never-ending subject, and appeals, in pamphlet and other forms, indorsed by distinguished names, have been sent forth from this central point and spread broadcast over the Union.

How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country! They, and they alone, can do it. All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way…

And so, in June, 1862, Locke lampooned the philosophy of former President Buchanan, who he had previously called “the most odious dough face in the north”.  He did this by having Nasby harangue the abolitionists, in a letter that would later be published in his book under the title  “Annihilates an Oberlinite”.  In this letter, Nasby writes about his encounter with a fellow traveler on a passenger train.  When he finds out the man is from Oberlin, Nasby erupts:

[Warning – the  following passages contain blatantly racist language and sentiments.  They are exaggerations of attitudes that were prevalent among a large portion of the population at the time, and are presented here uncensored for their historical value]

“Oberlin!” shreekt I.  “Oberlin! wher Ablishnism runs rampant – wher a nigger is 100 per cent better nor a white man – wher a mulatto is a objik uv pity on account uv hevin white blood!  Oberlin! that stonest the Dimekratik prophets, and woodent be gathered under Vallandygum’s wings as a hen-hawk gathereth chickens, at no price!  Oberlin, that gives all the profits uv her college to the support uv the underground railroad —“

“But—” sez he.

“Oberlin,” continyood I, “that reskoos niggers, and sets at defiance the benificent laws for takin on em back to their kind and hevenly-minded masters!  Oberlin! —“

“My jentle frend,” sez he, “Oberlin don’t do nuthin uv the kind.  Yoo’ve bin misinformd.  Oberlin respex the laws, and hez now a body uv her gallant sons in the feeld a fightin to maintane the Constooshn.”

“A fightin to maintane the Constooshn,” retortid I.  “My frend” (and I spoke impressivly), “no Oberlin man is a doin any such thing.  Oberlin commenst this war.  Oberlin wuz the prime cause uv all the trubble.  What wuz the beginning uv it?  Our Suthrin brethrin wantid the territories – Oberlin objectid.  They wantid Kansas for ther blessid instooshn – Oberlin agin objecks.  They sent colonies with muskits and sich, to hold the territory – Oberlin sent two thousand armed with Bibles and Sharp’s rifles – two instooshns Dimokrasy cood never stand afore – and druv em out.  They wantid Breckenridge fer President.  Oberlin refused, and elektid Linkin.  Then they seceded; and why is it that they still hold out?”

He made no anser.

“Becoz,” continyood I, transfixin him with my penetratin gaze, “Oberlin won’t submit.  We might to-day hev peese ef Oberlin wood say to Linkin, ‘Resine!’ and to Geff Davis, ‘Come up higher!’  When I say Oberlin, understand it ez figgerative for the entire Ablishn party, wich Oberlin is the fountinhead.  There’s wher the trouble is.  Our Suthrin brethren wuz reasonable.  So long as the Dimokrasy controlled things, and they got all they wanted, they wuz peeceable.  Oberlin ariz – the Dimokrasy wuz beet down, and they riz up agin it.”

(This letter became the inspiration for the title of journalist Nat Brandt’s outstanding book about antebellum Oberlin, The Town that Started the Civil War, available at the Oberlin Heritage Center.)

In Washington, President Lincoln “read every letter as it appeared”, and enjoyed them so much that he kept a folder of them on his desk, and would frequently read passages from them to visitors “with infinite zest, while his melancholy features grew bright.”  He even read them at cabinet meetings, much to the exasperation of the ever serious-minded Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.  On multiple occasions the President expressed the sentiment that “for the genius to write such things” he would gladly “swap places” with Locke.  At the end of the war, Lincoln sent Locke a letter thanking him for his services.

But the end of the war and the assassination of President Lincoln didn’t stop Locke – or Nasby.  The issue of Reconstruction became a new cause.  Locke was initially a solid supporter of President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor.  Although Locke was firmly in favor of equal rights for blacks, he appreciated President Johnson’s conservative and reconciliatory approach to Reconstruction, as opposed to the harsher policies of the Radical Republicans in Congress.  But as Johnson and the Radical Republicans battled it out and the rift between them grew wider, Locke began to feel that Johnson moved too far towards the Copperhead Democrats.  Then in April 1866, Johnson issued a proclamation declaring the insurrection “at an end” in ten of the seceded states, thereby effectively ending Johnson’s Reconstruction plan and returning control of their affairs entirely to their state governments.  Locke felt that this was a premature “breach of faith” and that “absolute equality in everything pertaining to person and property should be placed above the caprices of the State Legislatures.”   He now saw Johnson as a Copperhead himself and vented his full satirical fury against him (which is to say that Nasby now came out in favor of him).  In one letter, Nasby announces that President Johnson has personally assigned him the task of touring the country and removing all the Radical Republican postmasters (at that time, the Post Office was a major department of the federal government).  One of the towns he visited in the process was – you guessed it – Oberlin:

It wuz a crooel necessity, after all, wich druv me into the servis uv His Eggslency A. Johnson.  Crooel, I say; for whenever he hez a partikelerly mean piece uv work to perform, suthin so inexpressibly sneakin that Seward nor Randall won’t undertake it, they alluz send for me…

The biznis required uv me wuz statid by Seward in his usual loocid style.  It wuz merely to cirkelate incognito (wich is Latin for sneakin) among the recently appinted offis-holders, and assertain ther views upon general politikle topics, but more espeshally ther feelins toward the President and Sekretary uv State…

In Ohio, the first place I stopt at wuz Oberlin, the place where the nigger college is located at.  I regret to say that the Postmaster at that pint is a rantin Ablishnist; and in the two hours I wuz ther, I coodent find a Conservative Republikin who wood take it…  I don’t investigate ez fully ez I might, for ther ain’t a drop uv likker sold ther; and ez my flask give out, I felt that doo considerashen for my health woodent permit my stayin another hour.  I recommend the abolishen uv the office, or the establishment uv a grosery, with a bar in the back room, ez a nukleus around wich the Dimocrisy kin rally…

Locke would eventually advocate  the impeachment of President Johnson and would support the Radical Republicans in Congress when they overrode the President and implemented their own Reconstruction plan under new and harsher terms.  He even advocated the appointment of African American abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Oberlin’s John Mercer Langston to cabinet level posts.  (Locke himself would decline the offer of an ambassadorship during U.S. Grant’s Presidency.)

Locke went on to enjoy great success in the years following the war.  His Nasby letters continued to bring him fame and fortune, but he also wrote plays, novels, short stories, poems and hymns, and became a successful lecturer and entrepreneuer, and a real estate mogul in Toledo, Ohio.  He became a close friend of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain).  He never lost his interest in politics or social activism, and became an outspoken supporter of women’s suffrage and temperance (the latter somewhat ironically, as Locke himself was a heavy drinker for most of his life).  But in the public mind he was always Nasby, which eventually led him to express regret that he had ever created the character.

Locke died in 1888 of tuberculosis, at the age of only 54 years.  One of his many Ohio Republican friends, ex-President Rutherford B. Hayes (a former Civil War general and Underground Railroad conductor), wrote in eulogy:

With his pen Mr. Locke gained for himself a conspicuous and honorable place among those who fought the good fight in the critical years of the anti-slavery conflict before the war.  During the war and after it, he was surpassed by no writer in the extent and value of his influence in the march of events until its great results were substantially secured.  He had the satisfaction of receiving from Mr. Lincoln himself the first meed of praise for his matchless service in the hour of this country’s trial.

Sources consulted:

David Ross Locke, The Struggles (Social, Financial and Political) of Petroleum V. Nasby

John M. Harrison, The Man Who Made Nasby, David Ross Locke

President James Buchanan, “Fourth Annual Message” (December 3, 1860)

Nat Brandt, The Town that Started the Civil War

Carl Sandburg,   Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years & the War Years

Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century

Oberlin College Archives, “RG 5/4/3 – Minority Student Records“

Henry Whipple Chester was born on December 25, 1840 in Bainbridge, Ohio. His father was a farmer, innkeeper, and a postmaster, and an ardent abolitionist. Henry assumed many of his father’s traits and was himself a multi-tasking abolitionist. He entered the Preparatory Department of Oberlin College in 1858 and had just completed his course when the Civil War broke out. Like many boys in attendance at the college, he enlisted as a volunteer to fight at the age of twenty-one in the fall of 1861 in the 2^nd Ohio Cavalry as a private. For the next four years, Chester fought in thirty-eight battles and skirmishes and travelled over 22,000 miles through thirteen states and territories. Eventually, he rose to captaincy of Company K in the 2^nd Ohio. Making it safely through the war, afterward he lived in Kansas doing odd jobs, like selling sewing machines and working at a bank, married, and then moved to Chicago and formed a lumber company.  In the early 1900’s, he wrote a very detailed recollection of the war; it was published a few years before his death in 1918. His recollections display a lively and humorous personality and a war-experience that was at times harrowing, humorous, lively, and bitter-sweet. Below are some stories from his experiences as a soldier.

The 2^nd Ohio spent much of the year of 1863 in the state of Kansas. While in Iola, Kansas, Chester recounts observing Native Americans playing “a ball game…called LaCross, I believe.” One of the chiefs would act as Umpire.

In the summer of 1863, Henry and the rest of the 2^nd Ohio were charged with the task of helping to chase down the Confederate John Morgan and his close to 2,000 men who were raiding through the southern part of Ohio until the Battle of Buffington Island, in which the Confederate forces were defeated and many of them imprisoned. Chester received a furlough for his services and headed home to Oberlin. Dusty, weary, and not in uniform, Henry rode into town at sunset in July of 1863. The Lorain CountyNews, Oberlin’s local paper published an article on his arrival:

“On Wednesday of last week, just as the shadows of the evening were beginning to make objects obscure, a Cavalryman, armed and equipped a la regulation, and mounted on a beast which looked as if he had been either one of Morgan’s raiders or of the chase after Morgan, came into the town from the south. There was something in the lone horsemen’s style which excited suspicion, and as he rode directly through the village without pausing or conferring with anybody, it was surmised that he might be one of Morgan’s spies. Accordingly, there was a “mounting in hot haste” and hot pursuit. But the scare soon ended by the discovery that the worn and dusty dragoon was no other than our young townsman, Henry W. Chester.”

Chester was afterward warmly greeted by his parents and the rest of the town. He was also rewarded with his first bath in over a month.

In November of 1864, Chester was almost captured by Confederates in a skirmish in Virginia, which he described in a letter to his mother, “I found myself surrounded and a revolver on each side of my bared, hatless head.” Chester was asked to run alongside his Confederate captor’s horse; however, thanks to a charge by some of the rest of the 2^nd Ohio, amid action Chester was able to grab a rock “the size of a coconut” and throw it at his captor’s side and escape. Stumbling along the road without a horse or weapons, he then ran into a Confederate in a similar situation.

“I stepped right in front him with my empty holster in my right hand and stuck it in his face so near that he could not see that it was not a revolver…it certainly looked like a gun. I ordered the man to surrender and give me his carbines. He did so at once. I then stepped back and began to laugh at him and showed him that I had no gun until I had secured his.”

He then proceeded to take the Confederate soldier prisoner and make his way back to camp. Luman Harris Tenney, another Oberlinian in the 2^nd Ohio, wrote to The Lorain County News about the whole event and said of Chester, “Chester thinks it ‘better to be born lucky, than rich.’”

Five months later, Chester and the rest of the 2^nd Ohio were at Appomattox Courthouse when the Confederate Lee surrendered to Grant—he wrote to his aunt a few days later in 1865: “My Dear Aunt: PEACE ON EARTH: GOOD WILL TO (NEARLY) ALL MEN! WHAT GLORIOUS NEWS! THE GREAT REBELLION CRUSHED!! SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY PLAYED OUT!!!”

Comments? Questions?

Email Karyn Norwood, AmeriCorps CW150 Leadership Corps volunteer at [email protected].

Sources consulted:

Chester, H.W. Recollections of the War of the Rebellion: A Story of the 2nd Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, 1861-1865. Wheaton, IL.: Wheaton History Center, 1996; Tenney, Luman Harris. War Diary of Luman Harris Tenney, 1861-1865. Cleveland, OH: Evangelical Publishing House, 1914. Image from Chester’s Recollections of the War of the Rebellion.

On March 4, 1861, one-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated President of the United States of America. Only a few weeks before in Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated provisionally as President of the Confederate States. With already seven states having seceded from the Union, Lincoln began his presidency of a fragile United States. Fittingly, his speech was entirely devoted to the “secession flurry.” The country was at a breaking point, he admitted—but it was unnecessarily and wrongly so.  “May his views of prerogative penetrate the nation,” Oberlin’s local paper, The Lorain County News states approvingly, “[but] whether the mild measures which Mr. Lincoln proposes will not excite civil war remains to be seen.”

While the federal government was in strife, small town life in Oberlin was not—“Oberlin Knows no Crisis,” the local paper comments. Yes, the country was in a tough spot, and certainly, Oberlinians were aware of it. Daily life in the village, though, very much like today, was ongoing. So, what was going in Oberlin 150 years ago? A perusal of the local paper finds out: a lot!

The weather in Wellington and Oberlin was mild these first two weeks in 1861, more like “May, instead of March.” Temperatures were recorded as being upwards of sixty.

The college’s student population was threatening to reach an all time high—700 enrolled, and perhaps, could reach 1000! This, despite the “crisis,” the editor of the paper notes. Oberlin College students had just participated in the “Day of Annual Fasting and Prayer for Colleges,” which entailed, as the title speaks of, fasting and prayer for Christian students and the colleges that endeavored to educate them.

Complaints were pouring in about the condition of some of the sidewalks in Oberlin: “One fourth of the walks in our otherwise moral and orthodox village are indecently dangerous! [They are] in a state hardly navigable for cats.” (To modern Oberlinians and readers elsewhere just coming ourselves out of a long and snowy winter: I think we can relate!)

A classified in the local paper reads similar to one we might find today for a car, “For Sale-A valuable Horse, and a first rate new Lumber Wagon, (single or double) cheap for cash. Call on R.J. Shipherd.”

An elderly woman wrote in to the paper and commented on Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “What a critter Mrs. Stowe is to write!” This was just after she had just finished another chapter of the book.

On impure drinking water, the local paper advises: “Set a pitcher of iced water in a room inhabited, and in a few hours it will have absorbed from the room nearly all the respired and perspired gases of the room, the air of which will have become purer, but the water utterly filthy. Hence water…should be often renewed.”

In retrospect, in the first days of March 2011,

Karyn Norwood

Questions? Comments?

Email: [email protected]

Source Consulted:

The Lorain County News, 6 March 1861, p. 2,3; The Lorain County News, 13 March 1861, p. 2.

The opening month of 1861 was one of growing tension and conjecture throughout the country and, certainly, in Oberlin. As five states (Mississippi on the 9^th; Florida on the 10^th; Alabama on the 11^th; Georgia on the 19^th; and Louisiana on the 26^th) joined South Carolina in seceding from the Union, both the North and South speculated on the fragility of a perhaps irreconcilably broken America and, not so much if, but when, the country would descend into civil war.

In its first weekly installment of the year, The Lorain County News, Oberlin and Wellington’s local paper at the time, hesitantly asked, “Should not the North Arm Itself?” in response to news of Southern efforts to drill soldiers. By the middle of the month, the News was already soberly writing of “The War Begun”:

“However much we may regret that the fair fabric, which our noble fathers erected, is to be divided against itself, the fact that civil war has begun, and the permanent division has begun to be, cannot be overlooked.” (The Lorain County News, 16 Jan. 1861, p.2, c. 1.)

Oberlin residents were saddened by the likelihood of an American civil war, but they also believed that the “domineering spirit of slavery” was one that could not ever be reconciled, and that war was, in fact, the best and only opportunity for a solution to the “irrepressible conflict” of interests in the country.

On January 12, Oberlin’s own James Monroe (a Ohio State Senator from 1860 to 1862) in his address to the Ohio Senate opened with this remark in regard to the state of the Union: “A fine old author says, ‘Agree with your friends when you can; differ from them when you must.'”

And so war seemed unavoidable, even necessary; but as Monroe later in that same speech passionately spoke of, the notion of an impending Civil War was utterly heartbreaking to most Americans:

“We may be Democrats or Republicans, Conservatives or Radicals, but we are all Americans…Is there a heart in these bosoms that does not thrill at the words, home, country, native land? Which of you desires to see a single star blotted from the dear old flag? Or to see that flag trailing in the dust, soiled and dishonored? Whose blood does not run at the thought of such a calamity? …Not one, sir. These hearts are American hearts.” (The Lorain County News, 30 Jan.   1861, p. 1, c. 3, 4.)

And yet, the inevitability of civil war was encroaching on all the hearts and minds of Americans this month, 150 years ago.

Questions? Comments?

Please email Karyn at [email protected]

Sources Consulted:

Hansen, Henry. The Civil War: A History. New York: Signet Classics, 2010; The Lorain County News. 2  Jan. 1861, p. 2, c. 1.; The Lorain County News. 16 Jan. 1861, p. 2, c. 1.; The Lorain County News. 30 Jan. 1861, p. 1, c. 3, 4.