>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Ellen Terrell: Thank
you for coming today. The third time seemed
to have been a charm. The two times between
the Pope and the snow, we didn't, we didn't have success. My name is Ellen Terrell, and I'm
a Business Reference Specialist in the Science and Technology
and Business section. And we're sponsoring
this program today. It is my pleasure to
introduce the speaker, today's speaker, Jim Johnston. He grew up in Independence,
Missouri, which is Harry Truman's hometown. And he has a degree in mathematics
from university of Kansas, and a law degree from
University of Michigan. He practices law in D.C., where
he focuses on telecommunications and intellectual property law areas. He began writing for
publications about 25 years ago, and has been published in the New
York Times, The Washington Post, The White House Historical Magazine, The American Historical
Magazine, and The American Lawyer. He has won two journalism awards
and has two books to his credit: The Recollections of Margaret
Cabell Brown Loughborough, and the book today that he's
speaking on which is From Slave Ship to Harvard, which is about Yarrow
Mamout and his descendants. The book is for sale outside in
the tables, if you're interested. So, but when I asked him why
he decided to write this book, he said he had seen James Alexander
Simpsons' portrait of Yarrow that is in the Georgetown Library, and
that the Peale portrait used on the cover, he just wondered
who this man was to have been -- get two portraits at the time. So I just wanted to
welcome him and you here. Just to let you know, the program
is being webcast for inclusion on the Library's website. So when you ask questions, just know
you'll -- the back of your head, at the very least,
will be on the camera. So if you have an issue with that. So I just want to welcome him. [ Applause ] >> James H. Johnston:
Thank you, Ellen. You know, we had the Pope
knock this out last fall, and the snowstorm in January. So I'm glad that we have a chance
to talk at the Library of Congress, and I thank you all for coming. Ellen sort of stole my
thunder because what I'm going to do today is talk, first
of all, why I wrote the book, because I think people
want to know that. And secondly, I'm going
to go through the book. And the book -- I intended the
book as a story of race in America. It's more than just
this man or this family. And as we go through it, you'll see
it's a story of race in America. But it started here, at the Georgetown Library,
which you all may know. And I was in what was then the
Peabody Room before the fire. And I was -- this actually was
a photograph taken at the time. The day I was there and
discovered the portrait. And you look across that room, and you see on the wall this
portrait of a black man. And that's up close of it. And at the bottom right, the
label said, "Yarrow Mamout, James Alexander Simpson, 1823." And, you know, I thought you
don't think of Georgetown as a place for African Americans. That sort of intrigued me. Plus just the portrait
itself intrigued me. So I went home, as we all do
now, and Googled Yarrow Mamout, and saw this portrait by the
great Charles Wilson Peale. And this is obviously a much
more artistic portrait of Yarrow. And a friend of mine is the Director of the Smithsonian
Museum of American Art. And I said, "Do you
know this portrait?" She said, "No, but any portrait
of an African American prior to the Civil War is rare, and
you have two of the same man, so you might do something about it. And it took me eight
years to do something about it and write this book. That's the story I'm
going to tell you now. You have to start. It's race in America, so
you have to start in 1634, and that's when the Ark and
Dove brought the first Europeans to Maryland. And this is the --
these two ships coming. And Lord Baltimore was the
proponent of the Maryland Colony. And he said the colonists, there
were 150 on these two ships, so when you get to America, you have
to remember there's nothing there. Everything you need has
to come from England. Utensils, saws, nails, hammers,
metal, fabric, sugar, wine. Anything you want that's
manufactured or can't be raised
there, you have to import. And therefore, you need
something to pay for that. You have to do something in America that you can pay for
all these imports. And there's a lot of riches there. There are fur, you can raise crops, you can do logs, you
can do pitch, tar. You can do all sorts of things. One thing you shouldn't do though. The one thing you shouldn't do is
what the Virginians have decided to do, and that is to raise tobacco. Because the Virginians at the
Jamestown colony had discovered that a man could work for a year,
and he could make six times more with tobacco than anything
else he did. And so this tobacco
mania took over Virginia. And the Marylanders quickly
learned that yes, indeed, tobacco was the best thing. And that is why they
developed this system of agricultural factories
called plantations where they needed cheap,
unskilled labor to work. They first got it from
convicts and indentured servants from the Great Britain, and
eventually slaves from Africa. And that's how slavery got started:
all because of this one plant. To get tobacco to England -- that's
the trick, to get it to England. So when you grow it, they would
pack it into these what were called "hog's heads" and this
was one technique shown on this is they'd just roll it down. But if you roll it more than
ten miles, it ruins the tobacco. As a result of that, all the
settlements, all the plantations in Maryland and Virginia were within
ten miles of some body of water where they could roll these hogs
heads down, load them on a skiff, and then float them to a port where they could be
transported to England. >> The net effect of that. I'm not sure if this is the
Library of Congress map of 1795. I think it may be in the
Maryland State Archives. But you can look at
this map of Maryland, and you see the bodies of water. And I've marked on there
with those little logos, little labels, the ports. And these were the deep-water ports where a sailing ship
could come into a harbor. And that's -- those
were the tobacco ports. So you had to bring the
tobacco down to those ports where it would be reloaded
onto an ocean-going ship. But the net effect of all of
that was that in the Maryland and Virginia colonies, all the
people, the economies were all based within ten miles of a body of water. So that's what happened
throughout this area. Here on the Potomac, they kept
moving this plantations farther and farther west, north
and west, up the Potomac. Until they came to a spot right
here where you're looking at. I took this photograph. There's a 40-foot deep hole in the
Potomac River, and it's deep enough for a sailing ship to anchor
there and not roll over. And that became the last tobacco
port on the Potomac River. Here's another picture of it. It's the Kennedy Center,
and the port is Georgetown, and that creek was Rock Creek. And Georgetown was the last port
on the Potomac River for tobacco. And I say that in terms
of the history and race -- of race because the reason they put
the capital here was it was just east of Georgetown. So that the fact that we're all in
Washington, D.C., we owe to tobacco. And the fact that we have
African Americans in great numbers in the United States is
all because of tobacco. Now with that, let me start
turning to Yarrow's story. So you sort of have the background
for why we had slavery in America, and why we're here in
Washington, D.C. talking about it. There's a man here called
Christopher Lowndes, L-o-w-n-d-e-s. And he and his three brothers
and his son were involved in this transatlantic slave trade. And that's the big
kind of slave trade. In fact, they were the
second largest slave traders, transatlantic slave traders in
what is now the United States. And this is his house. It's over here, just about three
miles from us in Bladensburg. It's called Bostwick, and
that's where he lived. This house is still there. It was built with money
from the slave trade. Christopher Lowndes, there's a
thing called the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. It's a very, very rich
resource where they went and got all the ships they
could conceive of that were in the slave trade and
compiled them with the owners, the ship names, and et cetera. I went through that
and got this slide. These are the ships the Lowndes'
owned or participated in. Christopher Lowndes, and he
had a brother in Liverpool, which was the English
center of the slave trade. And he had a brother on St. Kitts, which was a switching
point on the slave trade. And they had 9600 slaves
brought to the New World. Second largest slave traders in
America right here in Washington, D.C. His son, Francis, actually
captained these three ships -- and you know, that's -- if you talk
about evil or lack of morality. Actually captaining a slave ship. Sailing it over to Africa,
picking the slaves up and bringing them here is sort of
is the pretty high up in the scale of immorality in my view. So his son Francis actually
captained these three ships. Now again, the reason
that I tell you this is because you're a Washington crowd. If you go over to Georgetown
and look at Tudor Place, that house was built
by Francis Lowndes. The two wings on this
house, the center section, was built by a later owner. So that the fancy Tudor Place
in Georgetown that we all think of as Georgetown is such a
[inaudible] place was a lot of it was built with
the slave trade money. In fact, this man, Benjamin
Stoddert, married Francis -- Christopher Lowndes' daughter,
Francis Lowndes' sister. And the reason Benjamin
Stoddert, I mention him is because he was the first Secretary
of the Navy under John Adams. So the slave trade went very
high up in the government of the United States
with the first Secretary of the Navy being an
in-law of the slave traders that brought Yarrow Mamout over. The kind of ship they
used was this: a snau -- s-n-a-u, but it's pronounced "snow." Two-masted, shallow draft. That has a great advantage to them. I call these "the Federal
Express of the slave trade" because you could sail this
ship up a river of Africa, and people would flag
the ships down and say, "We've got slaves for sale." And the captain would stop, and
he'd buy maybe five slaves here or ten slaves there. And that was the -- this
was an ideal ship for that. And then when he came
across the Atlantic, of course if you were a slave, it wasn't very good,
and it rolled a lot. And you -- I'm going to talk about
what the conditions were like. But when he got to
America, he could go up those same rivers I showed
you, and the Chesapeake Bay, the Potomac River, and go up
to the plantations themselves. If we all here know Mt. Vernon,
and you've looked at Mt. Vernon, you know what Mt. Vernon looks like. These slave ships would sail right
up to the dock at Mt. Vernon and try to sell slaves to Washington
or his overseers. And then in the end, if
they didn't have enough -- if they hadn't sold
their -- quote -- "cargo," they would go to the big
cities like Annapolis or Baltimore and try to sell the
rest of the cargos. But the idea was not to transport
the slaves in wagons or on foot, but to transport them by
ship from Africa directly to the plantations in America. A slave ship captain described
the slave ships this way. Speaking of the slaves: "Their lodging rooms below
the deck are sometimes more than five feet high,
and sometimes less. And this height is divided towards
the middle, for the slaves lie in two rows, one above the
other, on each side of the ship. Close to each other
like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close that
the shelf would not easily contain one more. Cramped for want of room,
they are likewise in irons, for the most part, both hands
and feet, and two together, which makes it difficult for them
to turn or move to attempt either to rise or to lie down without
hurting themselves or each other." And my intent here is not to
make slavery look very good. I mean, this is just
terrible conditions. And this was written
by a slave ship captain at the time Yarrow came over. Roughly at the time, 1750. Yarrow came in 1752. So these are the conditions
on those ships. Now, I've said that this is
the story of race in America, and the reason I also like to
quote this man, this John Newton, he was a captain of a slave ship,
but after three voyages to America, he couldn't stand it anymore. And he became a minister in England. And you may have heard
of John Newton because he wrote the
hymn Amazing Grace. And that's why that hymn is
associated with civil rights, because it was written by a man
who turned from being a captain of a slave ship to a advocate in
England to abolish the slave trade, and they did, under his pressure. Now, I'm going to get to Yarrow. He came -- he was a Fulani Muslim. And the Fulanis started in
Mali, that yellow country. And at the time he came, they were
moving militarily into West Africa, Senegal, and Guinea on
the West African Coast. And the Fulani were educated. They had European weapons. They had discipline. And so when they moved
into these countries, of course there were
indigenous people that didn't like the Fulani coming in,
and so there was warfare. And this period of warfare
lasted quite a while. But the net effect was when the
Fulani won, as they usually did, they would take their
enemy as prisoners of war, and would sell them
to the slave ships. So that's how the slave
ships got cargo. Now of course sometimes the
Fulani lost, and when they did, they got sold to the slave ships. The slave ship captains didn't care. As long as the people were black,
they were buying them as slaves and taking them to America. But that's how we ended up with educated Fulani
Muslims in the slave trade. When John Newton campaigned to
end the slave trade in England, this picture was -- this drawing
was sent around a lot to build up public support to
abolish the slave trade. To show how terrible the
conditions were on the ships. And it does do that. It shows you all the
crowding on the ships. But my problem with this as a writer
who's trying to convey a message is that you can't really
see any of those faces, and I wanted to humanize the story. And one way you do that is with
this man, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. He was a Fulani Muslim. He came to Maryland again,
1730 -- 22 years before Yarrow. He was educated, sixteen years
old, roughly -- teenager. When he got here, he
could read and write. When he got here, he'd pray
on the ground as a Muslim, and people would kick dirt in
his face to make fun of him. He was pretty unhappy,
and so he did something that you wouldn't think of. He wrote a letter to his
father in Africa, and said, "Dad, get me out of here." You know, the notion today --
we look back, and you know, we have this history -- our
own conceptions of slavery, the notion of the slave would think
that he could write his father back in Africa and get out of
here is sort of preposterous. Well, he didn't get out that way, but people in England
intercepted his letter. They said, "My gosh, there's
this educated slave in Maryland. Let's bring him to England." And so he was sent to England, and this painting was
done by William Hoare. He was a student of the
great Thomas Gainsborough. And I tell all this story not only
to tell you a little bit about race in America, but also to point out
that of the 9.6 million people who went on those slave ships, there are only two
portraits by major artists. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Yarrow
Mamout by Charles Wilson Peale. And so these -- you know,
as I got into this story, I saw how rare this
story was becoming and how rare that portrait is. We don't know enough about
black history to know that this portrait is precious,
and we're seeing the faces of people who were on slave ships. And I remind people, this
isn't what we thought. You know, this isn't the modern
concept of what slaves looked like. We don't see them as these very
educated men, but many of them were. Yarrow came in here, 1752,
to Annapolis, Maryland. That's the Chesapeake
Bay and the Severn River, and that's the Naval Academy. I once tried to sell this book to
the Naval Institute, saying, "Well, you know, he did come
in to Annapolis," but they didn't see it that way. Anyway, you know, if you have
an imagination enough, and I do. I'm not sure you all do, but if you
look down at that football field at the Naval Academy, or at
the practice fields there, I can see this little
nine-year-old boy. And that nine-year-old boy
there is Charles Wilson Peale. He was living in Annapolis
at the time Yarrow came in. And so he never made the
connection many years later that he probably saw Yarrow
come off that slave ship because there are not that many
slave ships coming into Annapolis. And this is the ad from
the Maryland Gazette, 1752. "Just imported in the
Elijah," -- that was the name, "Captain James Lowndes, directly
from the coast of Africa. Parcel of healthy slaves consisting
of men, women, and children, and will be disposed of onboard
the said vessel in the Sevren River on Tuesday, the fourth day
of June, for sterling money. Bills are exchanged. Gold or paper currency. Benjamin Tasker, Jr." And my friend, Christopher
Lowndes that owned Bladensburg. They were brothers-in-law. Lowndes had married Tasker's sister. Tasker was the governor of Maryland. Again, how high up in the early
government the slave trade went. This is the transatlantic
slave trade, which is, I think, different in concept
from just slave markets. And I got a picture because I
do like you to see pictures. I got a picture of Elizabeth Tasker
Lowndes, Christopher Lowndes' wife, also painted by Charles
Wilson Peale. And I must say that I am
not doing her a favor. She was truly on death's
bed when this was done. Charles Wilson Peale was
going through Bladensburg, and they asked him
to paint a portrait for her grandchildren
before she died. She died a few days after
this portrait was done. But again, I'm showing you portraits
of people, of what it was like then. Now let's go to Yarrow Mamout. He's come in on June 4th, 1752, and
he was purchased by Samuel Bell, who owned Yarrow from 1752 to 1777. Then his son, Brook Bell, and
then finally Upton Bell -- and I have a picture of Upton -- signed Yarrow's freedom
papers in 1796. I'm going to go through
these people. First, Samuel Bell. He was the kind of man that Lord
Baltimore wanted when he was saying, you know, "Do things
industrious in the New World. Do things that export." Samuel Bell's specialty,
he was sort of an engineer, but his specialty was watermills. And that was the only form of
power we had in America other than human and animal muscle. So that was a big step
up for America. This picture is of Peirce
Mill down in Rock Creek. Everybody knows Peirce Mill. Samuel Bell was the man
who first put a mill there, and he put several
mills up in Rock Creek. And these were used to
saw wood or grind grain, but they were also used -- Samuel
Bell was really a very smart guy because in 1764, he moved up
here to Antietam Ironworks, up by Antietam Battlefield,
at the mouth of the Potomac -- Antietam Creek and
the Potomac River. He moved up there because
there was an ironworks, and they used water power
to pound and refine iron, and that was his specialty. So he was a very prominent man. And in fact, he was an early
revolutionary in Maryland. Supported the American
Revolution, believed in it, was a big proponent of
overthrowing England. He had this house which is
still there, the brick house, called Kelly's Purchase,
outside Sharpsburg, Maryland. And he worked at that iron
mill for the rest of his life. And in 1777, he died,
and I got his will. And I know Yarrow is with him
because I got Samuel Bell's will. And in the will there's a
reference "to my negro boy, Jarrow." And you know, how you
spell the word "Yarrow," doesn't make a whole
lot of difference. That's Yarrow Mamout. They have taken Yarrow
from Washington all the way up to Washington County, Sharpsburg. And the word "boy" today, for
a black man, is an insult. But back in those times, it
meant something different. It was your body servant,
and it was a good deal for -- if you were white. Because your body servant
was more than a valet. He was someone who
went with you all day. If you were on the road a
lot like Samuel Bell was, he owned 63 properties
during his lifetime, so he's constantly traveling around. He was sheriff of Frederick County,
so he was constantly on the move. Your body servant was a second gun. He was someone to talk to
when you were on the road. And when you got to where
you're going at night, the inn, you got to go in and have a leg
of mutton and a stein of ale. And your body servant
put the horses away. So that's the role
of a body servant. But it also meant, it
wasn't that bad for Yarrow. First of all, slaves were not
permitted to leave the plantation, so they couldn't see the country. Yarrow Mamout was able to travel
around the state of Maryland and see what America was all about
in a way that most slaves couldn't. He was also with Samuel Bell
whenever Samuel Bell would talk to people and Samuel Bell knew
a lot of important people. So Yarrow got to meet
all these people. And ultimately, when Yarrow
got free and in Georgetown, all these people were the big rich
and famous people in Georgetown, and they had met Yarrow many, many
years earlier with Samuel Bell. So they knew that he was a
reliable, decent human being. So it was good for
Yarrow Mamout, too. Upon Bell's death,
Yarrow Mamout went to Brook Bell, Samuel Bell's son. If you go out to Potomac,
Maryland, along River Road, you'll come to this: Bell Mountain
Road, and Bell Spring Road. The Bell's had an estate out there
called Belmont that was 2000 acres, and Yarrow settled there. Now, I think about this time, you're asking me how do
you know all these things? Who wrote this all up? Well, nobody wrote
it up, I wrote it up. But I'm going to start telling you
how I know some of these things. First of all, how do I know
that Yarrow Mamout was there? Because across the road
from that sign is this: it's the ruins of a watermill. Bell had a watermill
on that property. And on that hill, you
see in the background, that was a different plantation. And on that plantation, to a slave
woman, was born Yarrow's son. So I'm pretty sure that Yarrow
Mamout was there nine months before that little boy was
born on that hillside. And obviously, he was working
on Belmont for his owner, probably working on the
watermills and met a woman on the adjoining plantation,
and had a child with her. But it was more than just a
casual affair, because seven years after that boy was born,
his name was Aquilla, seven years after he was born,
Yarrow bought the boy's freedom. So it meant that Yarrow stayed
in contact with the boy, probably stayed in
contact with his mother. Probably his mother
was virtually a wife, and got the boy's freedom
at that point in time. 1790 though, by 1790,
Yarrow is in Georgetown, and this is Brook Bell's
ledger book. MDHS is the Maryland
State Historical Society: they make you put an acetate cover
over it if you take a picture. And there you can see
there is an entry in the accounting book
for Yarrow Mamout. So Brook Bell was handling
Yarrow's money. And by -- you know, selling him
goods and also keeping accounts, other accounts for Yarrow
Mamout in Georgetown. They had moved from
Potomac into Georgetown. And Brook Bell was a merchant there. And then Brook Bell died in 1796. This is the inventory of
his estate, and I don't know if you can see the yellow,
but there is Yarrow's name. And this is another
way I know some things. It said that in 1796,
Yarrow is 60 years old. So you subtract 60 from 1796,
Yarrow was born roughly in 1736. So that gives me a date
of birth of Yarrow. When Yarrow was -- when
Brook Bell died, though, he had cut this deal with Yarrow. He said, "Yarrow, if you make bricks
for the new house, I'll free you." And Yarrow made the bricks for the
new house, but Brook Bell died, and so the widow freed Yarrow. Now Yarrow was recorded
as explaining this story, and before I show you
what Yarrow said, let me point out about his dialect. Yarrow, of course,
was a Fulani Muslim. So his first language was
Fulani, an African language. But I know he could read
and write in Arabic. And as a Muslim, he would have
had some familiarity with Arabic. So there's language two. If he was from Senegal,
that was a French colony, he would have to speak French. A lot of -- everyone from Senegal
today speaks French and English. Or if he was from Guinea, he
spoke English, and in any event, once he got here, he spoke English. So Yarrow in this quote is speaking
in his third or fourth language. And this -- he was so famous
in Georgetown, somebody wrote down his actual words to show
how -- the speech pattern. And Yarrow talking
about how he got free. "Olda massa been tink he got
all de work out of a Yaro bone. He tell a Yaro, go free
Yaro; you been work nuff for me, go work for you now. 'Tanky, massa,' Yaro say. Sure nuff, Yaro go
to work for he now. Yaro work a soon -- a
late -- a hot -- a cold. Sometime he sweat --
sometime he blow a finger." Well, you've got to look
at the poetry in this. First of all, he know
-- and he's working in a third or fourth language. First of all, he knows his
name rhymes with "marrow bone," so he's making a play
on words, saying, "Get all de work out
of a Yaro bone." But then what I really like here
is at the end where he's saying, "sometime he sweat,
sometime he blow a finger." I was thinking, you know,
like a kid playing with a gun. A cowboy. You blow the
smoke out of your pistol. No, he means it's cold,
[puff of air sound] and he's blowing on his finger. So sometimes he sweats. Sometimes he has to [puff
of air sound] blow a finger. And it's sort of one of
my favorite expressions. You know, I get cold in the winter, and I've got to blow a
finger [puff of air sound]. Anyway, so Yarrow gets free in1796. And he eventually buys this house,
and this is the lot in Georgetown. You've got maps. Ellen's got some maps
here of Georgetown. His address was 3324
Debt Place in Georgetown. This is 3324 Debt Place. And he put up a house there. It was a log house,
and it's gone now. And we'll get into that a bit later. But in -- after he bought that
house in 1800, he turned around and resold it to his son,
for reasons I won't get into. But I do have his deed -- at the National Archives is
preserved his deed of sale. And the Recorder of Deeds
then and the Recorder of Deeds today operate
in the same way. They are a point of record. Today, if you sell a house, you take
the deed into the Recorder of Deeds, and he'll put a camera on
it and take a photograph, or as I would say,
make a Xerox copy. In those days, the Recorder of
Deeds was a human Xerox machine. You brought the deed in, and he
would make an exact copy in his big, beautiful handwriting
like you can see here. And you can see what
a good writer he was. Big, great penmanship. Except where it comes to
Yarrow's signature there, below Francis Deakin's. And that obviously is
completely illegible. While I had my suspicions when I was down at the National Archives
the day that I saw that, and so I sent it to an expert, who
showed me the [inaudible] alphabet, Arabic alphabet from Nigeria. And he looks at those words, and
he said, "The word that looks like "Josi" is probably his attempt to
spell Yarrow in English, J-a-r-o. The second word is pretty easy. It's Arabic. It's [inaudible], in
the name of God. So he has signed the deed as
"Yaro, in the name of God." I was giving this talk several
years ago, and before I even got to that point, somebody in the audience said,
"That says [inaudible]." And she was Egyptian, and she
could read it very, quite easily. Even though it's the -- probably a
copy made by the Recorder of Deeds, not the actual signature of Yarrow. In any event, it shows that he
could read and write in Arabic. And then the great Charles
Wilson Peale comes to town. Peale had been not only
a portrait painter, he had been in the military. He crossed the Delaware
with Washington. He didn't paint that portrait. And then he opened a museum after the Revolutionary
War in Philadelphia. And this is his self-portrait,
beckoning you into the museum. It was a lot like the Smithsonian,
except it was for profit. And so you'd go in there,
and you could see there that he had these fossils. He had pictures of birds. And he also had a presidential
gallery where he had portraits
of all the presidents. You know, today we know
what Washington looks like. We know -- we're in
the Madison Building. We know what Madison looks like because there are
copies all over the place. Back then there were
not photographs. The only way you could see what
these guys looked like was to go to a museum and look at a portrait. And Peale was the big
presidential portrait painter. So he's welcomed many people in. And he came to Washington for
a number of reasons in 1818, including to get a
portrait of James Madison -- or James Monroe, who was the new
president, for his portrait gallery. When he wrote in his diary, "I heard
of a negro living in Georgetown. Said to be 140 years old. I propose to make a portrait
of him if I get a chance." Yarrow was not 140. That was fiction, but
Yarrow did own bank stock. He was an entrepreneur, and so
Peale got interested in this. And so Peale painted that portrait. While he did that, he took
information from Yarrow and other people about
Yarrow's life. And that helped me
reconstruct Yarrow's life. For example, the woman who had --
the widow who freed Yarrow said, "He was about 14 or a little bit
older when he came to America." Well, Yarrow would be
16 by my reckoning. "My father-in-law bought
him right off the ship." It all fit. The Elijah was the only ship to come
from Muslim areas of West Africa for many years in that time period,
so Yarrow had to be on that ship. And it all fit with what these
people were saying about him. But look at this portrait. You see here -- there
is no evidence of this. This is all Jim Johnston
speculation. First of all, you see that big,
great leather coat over him. That's Peale's coat. Yarrow couldn't afford that. That's a leather coat
-- he couldn't-- this was done in January,
late January of 1819. And so Yarrow is all bundled up. He's pretty cold, but
Peale's painting him. But Peale had owned
slaves in his life. But by this time, Peale's an
older man now, and more wiser. Peale got this revolutionary
notion that black people and white people were equal. You know, it wasn't just
they had equal rights, he thought they were equal. And he thought the only
difference between black people and white people was the skin color. And that if you gave a black
person equal opportunities, he could be just -- he or she
could be just as prosperous and famous as a white person. And I think that's what
you see in this portrait. You see Charles Wilson Peale
painting a wealthy merchant in Georgetown who just
happens to be black. And I think he was
sending a political message out with this portrait. And in any event, Yarrow died. That's the house in Georgetown
where the widow lived. And I can imagine Peale going
up there and talking to him. But Yarrow died shortly
after the second portrait in 1823, and here's his obituary. This is a black man who
came on a slave ship. And he's got an obituary
in the newspaper. You know, this isn't little,
trivial stuff, you know. This is pretty significant stuff. "Died at Georgetown on
the 19th [inaudible]." That's the prior month,
so 19th of January, 1823. "Negro Yarrow, aged according
to his account, 136 years. He was interred in the
corner of the garden, the spot where he usually
resorted to pray." And it goes on to tell the story. But my favorite part is
the last line that says, "Yarrow was never known to eat a
swine nor drink ardent spirits." You know, that was the
litmus test of a Muslim. He wouldn't drink alcohol,
and he wouldn't eat pig. And you know, I found that
throughout other parts of my research, whenever you come
across a Muslim, that was the thing that white people always noticed. They would offer them a glass
of wine, and they'd say no. Well, that's a Muslim. So this was sort of what
was common knowledge, apparently, among early Americans. That ends my Yarrow story,
and with the rest of my time, I'll go through the rest
of his family quickly. His sister, Hannah, Free
Hannah, or Hanna Peale. I don't have a lot about her, but
it does tell me a little bit more about this story of race in America. His sister supposedly
came on the same ship. I can reconstruct that she was a
waitress here, a slave waitress at Hungerford's Tavern
in Rockville, Maryland. And I looked at the names of
the slaves who worked there. And these are slaves at Hungerford
that had African-sounding names. And so I -- I think there were
34 slaves, and these are the ones that I thought had
possibly African names. Well, there's something
that I haven't told you. Among the Fulani in West Africa,
there's a naming convention. When your child's born, you
go to a holy man and say, "What should I name
this boy or girl?" And if it was a boy, one of the
-- and the mother's fourth child, then one of the names is Yarrow. So "Yarrow" tells us that he
was his mother's fourth child. If he was born on a
Monday, Mohammad, Mamadu, or Mamout is the name. So "Yarrow Mamout" tells us that he was his mother's fourth
child and born on a Monday. But here at Hungerford's Tavern,
you see there's another Yarrow, the last name, so he's Fulani. And then I went through that naming
convention with these others, and I found one, two,
three, four, five -- five slaves at that tavern who
are possibly Fulani Muslim. So it means that there
weren't just one man. It wasn't just an exception. There were a number
of Muslims who were in the Washington area
in Colonial times. And also met. I know that Yarrow stayed
in contact with his sister. It also meant that Yarrow probably
went out to the tavern in Rockville as the body servant to his owner
because his owner was clerk of the court in Rockville
and had business out there. So Yarrow would go with him. And then when his owner went to
do his business, Yarrow could go over to Hungerford's Tavern
and sit down with his sister and other Fulani Muslims. You know, we think
about Germans, Italians, Jews come to America,
they stick together. No reason to believe that
a Fulani wouldn't do that, Muslims wouldn't do that
if they had a chance. I think that happened in this case. Also living out there was
a man named Josiah Henson who wrote an autobiography
of his life that Harriet Beecher Stowe
turned into Uncle Tom's Cabin. The little black man there
being [inaudible] looks a lot like the real Josiah Henson. And Harriet Beecher
Stowe said she did use that autobiography to base her book. Anyways, so Josiah Henson's
autobiography also happens to talk about what life was like in
Montgomery County at the same time that Yarrow was going
to the tavern out there. And especially the tavern
sort of interested me. And you know, it's funny, when
you talk about race, black people and white people sometimes
view things differently, and they did then. For example, the white people, here's what they thought
about those taverns. "In some of the taverns,
slaves sleep on the floor of the dining room,
which the master, for obvious reasons,
ought to forbid. They, [the slaves] have an uncommon
desire for spirituous liquors." You know, you see the
racism in that, you know. Black people drank too much. Okay, now we're going to look
though at what black people thought about white people, and we're going to see what Josiah
Henson said -- same place. This is the same place. "My master's habits were such as were common enough
among the dissipated planters of the neighborhood, and one
of their frequent practices was to assemble on Saturday or
Sunday which were their holidays, and gamble, run horses or fight
gamecocks, discuss politics, and drink whiskey and brandy
and water all day long. Perfectly aware that they would not
be able to find their own way home at night, each one ordered
his body servant to come after him and help him home. Quarrels and brawls of the most
violent description were frequent consequences of these meetings. And whenever they became especially
dangerous and glasses were thrown, dirks drawn, and pistols fired, it
was the duty of the slaves to rush in and each one drag his master
from the fight and carry him home." So you can see what the
black people thought about the white people's
drinking habits. You know, when we go through
history, you can get bigotry on both sides, although
this sounds pretty accurate. Next is Hannah's daughter,
Nancy Hillman. Hannah had worked at a tavern
where lawyers frequented because it was close
to the courthouse, and I think that's why Nancy
is -- a detail in the book, knew a lot about the law. But Nancy eventually moved --
Yarrow's niece, moved to Frederick, Maryland, and married a
man who was the servant or slave of Judge Richard Potts. So it all makes sense, you know. She worked in a tavern, she knew
lawyers, so she would marry a man who would be her social equal. A man who was familiar with the
law, and that all made sense. And the Hillman family was a
pretty prominent black family in Frederick, Maryland. And today, Frederick's a
small town, but in those days, it was sort of the legal capital of
the country because all the judges and justices were coming
out of Frederick, Maryland, including Chief Justice Roger Brook
Taney was a man from Frederick. And he knew Nancy Hillman,
and that's important. The Chief Justice of the United
States would have known the Hillman family and would have
known Nancy Hillman. And she was a pretty savvy woman. But Chief Justice Roger
Taney was also the man who wrote the decision
in Dred Scott. And as a story in race in America,
let's look at what this man, who knew Nancy Hillman,
said about black people. "They, [African Americans]
had for more than a century, before the Constitution,
been regarded as being of an inferior order, and
altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in
social or political relations. And so far inferior
that they had no rights which the white man
was bound to respect. And the negro might justly
and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit." This was the most racist
decision ever to come out of the Supreme Court. So racist that in the
north, there were calls to abolish the Supreme Court. The view being if we have a Supreme
Court Chief Justice saying this kind of stuff, we don't
need a Supreme Court. Now, why do I tell you this? Because it's a story
of race in America. It's a man who would have
known the Yarrow family. He knew Nancy Hillman, and he
was saying this kind of garbage. But in my research, I went
up to Frederick, Maryland, because I knew Nancy
Hillman died and was buried, and this is St. Paul, St.
John's Catholic Church in Frederick, Maryland. The cemetery, this tombstone
says "Hillman, Nanny Hillman." It's not Nancy, but it's
the Hillman section. The sexton of the cemetery told
me this is the black section, Catholic Church's cemetery. And so I'm sure that Nancy
Hillman, Yarrow's daughter -- Yarrow's niece is buried here. But if you look past
that obelisk there, all the way over to the
other side of the seminary, and go there like I did,
you come to the grave Of Chief Justice Roger Taney. He's buried in an integrated
cemetery. So, you know, you may be
a racist in your life, but you can never control what
might happen to you in eternity. You just should remember that. Alright, so we're going on. I'm going to skip over
Aquilla Yarrow, Yarrow's son. A little bit, he died in 1832. But I wanted to focus on his
wife, Mary Turner or Polly Yarrow. First of all, Samuel Bell was in
business with a man named Turner. And in fact, they lived -- had adjacent plantations
in Montgomery County. And so I think Yarrow's son,
Aquilla, married Mary Turner, a slave of Samuel Turner. Samuel Turner died in 1809. He was register of Wills, worked out
of the same courthouse as Bell did. This is, excuse me, his signing
as the Register of Wills here, and the next will is his
because he has died in 1809. So -- and he had a slave named Mary. I next see them up in
Washington County, up in 1832, and you see on the bottom right,
Mary Turner and Aquilla Yarrow. This is in a schedule
of free persons of color in Washington County, and
they're living together, actually as husband and wife. So you know, that's the connection, that Polly Yarrow is Yarrow
Mamout's daughter-in-law. And then Aquilla died
right after this was done. He died in 1832. So I went and I got his inventory
of his estate and looked through it, and here is some of the things he
owned, including a lot of yarn. And you see in the margin, "Polly,"
meaning she owned that, not him. So I know that Polly and Aquilla
were living together as husband and wife in the same house. But one of the remarkable things about this inventory
is the last line here, that you see a lot of books. There's a black man living in
the middle of nowhere in 1832, on a tiny little farm,
and he's got books. Why would he have books? Because he can read. Yarrow Mamout had arranged
for him to learn to read. Otherwise there would have been
no reason for a black man, anyone, to have books if you can't read. So I think that Yarrow made
sure that his son got educated. But I was telling Ellen
this before my talk, and I said that at some point,
you know, I do like libraries. And I do like archives. It's a little tedious
to spend all day in a -- but sometimes you've
just got to get out. And that happens even
in my research. So I thought, "You know,
I've just got to get out." My story was sort of coming to a
dead end, and so I thought, "Well, I'm going to go up to Antietam
and see what's up there." And when I did -- now
this is actually true. I'm not making this up. When I decided to go up to Antietam
to actually look at the ground, I was looking at a map, and
I saw this: Yarrowsburg Road. I had no idea there
was a Yarrowsburg Road, nor did I have any idea as to
why there was a Yarrowsburg Road. I would not have found
this in a library or book except by looking at a map. So I went in there, and this
is downtown Yarrowsburg, there's nothing there. But there were two men talking
over to the side of the road, so I went up to them, and I said, "Can you tell me why this
place is named Yarrowsburg?" And the one man, Bill
[inaudible] said, "Yes! My grandfather told me it was named
after a woman named Polly Yarrow." And you know, that
Polly in the margin of that was just sticking
in my head. But I'm a lawyer, and so
you don't lead witnesses. And you don't get good research if
you give them the answers you want. So I just waited him
out because I knew that he wanted to say
something else. And I just waited him out. And finally, after about 15 seconds,
he said, "She was black, you know." And that's what I wanted him to say. And he said, "She was
the midwife here. Delivered all the babies,
black and white. My grandfather told me that's
why this is Yarrowsburg." And so that added this whole
new dimension to this story. That hill in the background
is called Elk Ridge. The locals call it "the mountain." But if you go over that, as I did,
on foot -- there used to be a road, but if you go over it on foot, on
the other side, you come down here to the Kennedy Farm, and many people
don't know what the Kennedy Farm is. But you will because that's
where John Brown and 22 men holed up before the raid
on Harper's Ferry. They were there for three months. So I think that Polly Yarrow
probably knew that John Brown -- knew that there was something
going on there at the Kennedy Farm because it was only a
mile from her house. And she was the midwife, and midwives did more
than deliver babies. They were sort of first-echelon
nurses. And so they may have called on her. We move from Polly -- I'm
going to come back to Polly, but to her nephew, Simon Turner. He was born here in a springhouse
or slave cabin on the Crampton Farm, near Crampton's Gap,
near Yarrowsburg. And then the story starts getting
better because I get better records because in 1864, Simon
Turner joined the Union army. And his wife later applied for a
pension and said this about it: "My husband Simon Turner
and I were both slaves at the time we were married. My husband belonged to Eli Crampton,
and I belonged to Mr. John Gray. Both our masters in
slavery are dead. They were coming around
drafting men, and he [Simon] said he wanted not
to be drafted, and so he enlisted. I did not see my husband from the
time he enlisted in March 1864 until he came home
in August of 1865." There's only one picture
of the unit he joined, The 39th Regiment U.S. Color Troop. This is that picture. Naturally the white
officers are in the front, but there are troopers in the back. When I showed the Turner family this
photograph, they looked at the tall, skinny black man in the
background, and they said, "That looks like Uncle Mark." He does. I saw a picture of
Uncle Mark, but I can't be sure. Anyhow, I may have a
picture of Simon Turner. After the war, he settled here
in Pleasant Valley, Maryland. And up at the top of this
picture, it's hard for you to see, but there's marked,
"Mrs. Yarrow's house." She was famous enough for her
house to be marked on an 1877 map. And Simon Turner was living with
his father-in-law, Arthur Sands, who's marked on the map, and it's
only about a half a mile apart. So they knew each other. And then Polly died. "An old colored woman
named Polly Yarrow, whose exact age was not
known, but was over 100 years, died on last Saturday in the little
village called Yarrowsburg near Crampton's Gap and Pleasant
Valley in this county." Second black person in this family to have an obituary
in a white newspaper. These people, this was
in a period of slavery. These people were so talented
that they are being recognized, albeit at their death, with
obituaries in white newspapers. And nearing the end, we have
Simon's daughter, Emma Turner. I don't deal with all the family, only Emma because she
was a very bright girl, and she grew up in Pleasant
Valley and then went to college over here in Harper's Ferry. That's Harper's Ferry,
where John Brown was. And [inaudible] College, and
she got a degree in education. The first one in her family to get a
college degree, at least in America. And she married a man from
Howard named Robert Ford, who was a divinity student. And they moved around
a lot, but ultimately, they settled in Baltimore. And here's Emma. She dies in 1956, so
I've got a picture. This woman, by the
way, knew Polly Yarrow. She knew Yarrow Mamout's
daughter-in-law because she was ten years old when
Polly died, and she was living in that -- a half-mile away. Anyway, they had a son, and one
of their sons, Robert Turner Ford. And in 1923, Robert Turner
Ford, her son, went to Harvard. You know, it was a different
Harvard then than it was today. There wasn't Affirmative Action. Blacks had to be ten
times more talented than white people to
get into Harvard. And in 1984, this man
went back to Harvard and described what it was like then. There were only seven other
blacks that -- six other blacks. "In the black segment of
the segregated society in which I was born and
bred, there was an almost -- almost [inaudible] faith
in education as a means of attaining social worth
and economic freedom. College graduates were
rare in that society." His grandfather and three of
his uncles had been slaves. And he's saying college
graduates are rare. And they were illiterate. "College graduates were rare,
and the possession of a diploma of any kind identified one as being
a member of an elite group entitled in leadership and respect. A graduate of Harvard
with all of its traditions and history was viewed
as the epitome of academic and social merit." This is by a man, again, whose -- came out of slavery
and went to Harvard. Graduated in 1927. My research took me to Yarrowsburg. This is Mt. Moriah
Baptist Church there, and in the cemetery is
the grave of Simon Turner. It says, "He died to
save the Union." And so I've led you
through the family, and this is the chronology
I've talked through. It switches from Yarrow's
family to in-laws, but the Turners were in-laws. And this is them when I was
interviewing them for the book. The woman on the left in the red
sweater is Alice Turner Truitt who is Robert Turner's daughter,
Robert Turner Ford's daughter. These other women are her cousins. And then last summer over at
Yarrow's property in Georgetown, I got the city of Washington
to dig, archeology there. And here's the work -- the
woman sitting in the lawn chair over these is Alice
Turner and her daughter, and these are the archaeologists
working. And when they did this,
this is the panorama. The red soil you can see all around, that is soil from Yarrow's
time period. So far, they have nothing
-- they found nothing. They bagged it all up
and looked through it. As of the last time I've talked
to them, they've found nothing that they can write to him,
but they do have things, a lot of things from
his time period. It took me about an hour
to get through this. It took them 175 years to go
from slave ship to Harvard. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Ellen Terrell: If anybody has any
questions, we have a few minutes. I don't know if the
books are still for sale, but he will be signing
anybody who has them. >> James H. Johnston: Any questions? Yes, sir? >> Was Yarrow Mamout
sold into slavery because the Fulani lost a battle? How did he end up a slave? >> James H. Johnston:
I don't know exactly. I do know Ayuba Suleiman
Diallo, who was another Fulani, he made the mistake of
sleeping in the wrong hut. And the Mandingo came by, and
they were the enemy of Fulani, captured him, and sold
his to slave ships. So I think that Yarrow and his sister probably got
captured somehow the same. But it's an assumption. Yes? >> [Inaudible]. And I wondered if there
was a good reason for that. >> James H. Johnston: There's
not a reason to skip over it. It's just that it doesn't -- it
doesn't flow with the lecture. He's dealt with in the
book a lot, but it just -- you know, it didn't flow
with what I was saying. Other questions? Yes, ma'am. >> Just a respectful request, and
I mean that absolutely sincerely. When you speak of Yarrow and
other Fulani who could read and write Arabic as
"educated," isn't it fair to say that there were many others
who were pulled into slavery who were educated and
sometimes very deeply in [inaudible] of their society? They just didn't read
and write because reading and writing weren't
part of their cultures. But that doesn't mean that
they weren't educated. Wouldn't it perhaps be better to
speak of "literate" as opposed to "educated" when you talk -- >> James H. Johnston: Well, but
the Fulani had formal education. They would have had schools which the non-Muslim Africans
did not have a school system. >> Well, that's not entirely true. They did have ways of educating
people when they came of age at various stages of their life. They would have intensive
education in their traditions. They just didn't -- they
didn't have a written culture. But I don't want to say if you couldn't write,
you weren't educated. That's the only point I'm making. >> James H. Johnston: No, I agree. I agree with you. But -- and I try to
make that distinction. Except for the fact that the
Fulani could read and write. And therefore, when
they came to America, they were treated quite a bit
differently probably because 95% of white Americans could
not read and write. So suddenly to see a black man who
actually knew more than, you know, seemed more educated than you
were was really quite disquieting for white Americans. And a matter of respect
for them, too. Yes, sir? >> I mean, the title
"From Slave Ship to Harvard" is certainly
interesting, in the sense that I'm sure you must
have read the book from [inaudible] which he shows how, you know, a lot of the elite universities
were fundamentally funded, created largely by, you know, by
the slave trade and stuff like that. So to go back to the
grandson or something like that who went to Harvard -- >> James H. Johnston:
It's five generations. >> But you should want to say
be saying about, you know, about education being [inaudible]. Did he ever in his
writings talk about -- he must have encountered incredible
racism while he was at Harvard, and obviously [inaudible]. So did he write about that? Did he talk about that? Did that cause him to consider
any aspects of his education that he had gotten there? And talk [inaudible]
and stuff like that? >> James H. Johnston: The
question is did Robert Turner Ford, who went to Harvard, write or
talk about the racism at Harvard? And the answer's no. It was the old black
culture, I think in America. He thought he was lucky
to get there. And he did not reflect
on his adversity, although in his reunion speech --
of course he was talking to Harvard. The only thing I have from him
is that writing, and he's talking to his Harvard classmates,
so he clearly, I think, did not want to complain. I know from the family that he
obviously experienced racism, and felt very strongly about racial
justice, and the family does. But he did not express it
in that speech at Harvard. Yes, sir. [ Inaudible ] >> James H. Johnston:
You lived in Debt Place? Where did you live on Debt Place? >> I don't -- I forget the -- >> James H. Johnston: Okay. >> But I lived on Debt Place. >> James H. Johnston: Yeah, I mean
that was not the best part of town. John Kennedy lived across the
street when he was first married. He and Jacqueline Kennedy
lived across the street from Yarrow's old property, but they
never apparently realized it was such historic property. Any other -- one more
question, and then -- >> In looking at the way that
you -- I'm a genealogist, okay, so I'm fascinated by
your whole process. And the way that you were able to track the family
over time and in place. In terms of the records that you
were finding, was that family -- did they stick out in the records? In terms of African Americans,
or was there a larger community? In other words, were
they the prominent family that you were finding
in the records? >> James H. Johnston: the question
is was this family prominent in the records, and
the answer's yes. When I -- throughout
all my research, it was clear that this
family, whether it was Yarrow or his in-laws were
very exceptional people. I could find records on them. Arthur Sands, who was one of
the ancestors, got himself -- bought his own freedom in 1856. And then when Maryland passed
a law after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Maryland
passed a law to really, absolutely prohibit freedom
for blacks because, you know, John Brown had used
some free blacks. And so Maryland said, "That's it! We're never going to
let blacks free." Arthur Sands, before that law
took effect, he took $600, and bought the freedom of
his wife and his children. So he was a unique individual. He founded the Mt. Moriah Baptist
Church, the photo that I showed you. He founded the black school in
Pleasant Valley after the Civil War. So throughout the time these
people were very, very exceptional. And that's the story I wanted
to tell with this book. But with that, I want to
thank you all for coming. I will sign books outside,
or you can buy books. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.
