Black Fortunes

The sun was warm, and the air smelled of the salt water on the sandy coast of Nantucket on August 12, 1841. On a dirt road lined with trees and hedges, in a library known as the Nantucket Atheneum, the town’s first abolitionist convention came to order. Five hundred men and women took their seats, most of them local Quakers, the men in plain dark-colored suits with broad hats, the women in gray or brown dresses with bonnets. The Atheneum had once been a church and retained an exterior of white wood and stone with stained-glass windows and two stone columns at its entrance. Inside was a great room filled with benches of carved wood, bookshelves, and oil paintings on the wall. From a platform in the back, William C. Coffin, a local abolitionist, made an announcement: there was a fugitive slave in attendance, and he was going to give a speech.

Heads swiveled as Frederick Douglass stood and made his way toward the stage. He was tall with a muscular frame that showed through his shirt and vest, a square jaw, and a clean-shaven face, his hair coiled dark and parted and pushed across his forehead and down toward his ears. As he moved to the front of the room, members of the audience could see that he was shaking from stage fright.

Douglass, who was twenty-three years old, had escaped from slavery in Maryland three years earlier. He now lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and worked at a brass foundry. He was a preacher at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in his town, but had never spoken to an audience of more than a few dozen, nor had he much experience speaking in front of white people.

Douglass had come to Nantucket for a working vacation, hoping to stay abreast of the goings-on in the abolitionist struggle but more to relax on the island looking out on to the Atlantic Ocean. “Needing a day or two of rest, I attended this convention, never supposing that I should take part in the proceedings,” he recalled. “Until now, I had taken no holiday since my escape from slavery.” When Coffin asked him to come to the stage, he was so overcome with fear that he could barely keep his feet underneath him. As he took the stage, he felt ill. He summoned all his willpower to keep his back straight and his limbs steady, and then he began.

His voice trembled as he spoke of being born and raised on a slave plantation in Maryland. He stuttered as he described enduring backbreaking labor and brutality at the hands of overseers. The audience hung on his every word. One of the attendees recalled, “Flinty hearts were pierced, and cold ones melted by his eloquence. Our best pleaders for the slave held their breath for fear of interrupting him.”

When Douglass finished, the well-known abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, a slim man with thinning hair, leaped onto center stage. He praised Douglass and sermonized on the evils of slavery, whipping the crowd into a fury. “Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or a man?” he demanded, motioning toward Douglass.

“A man!” the audience cried back in unison. “A man!”

“Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?” Garrison demanded.

“No! No!” the audience shouted back, seeming to make the rafters shake. Douglass himself, moved by Garrison, recalled, “For a moment . . . a public meeting is transformed, as it were, into a single individuality—the orator wielding a thousand heads and hearts at once, and by the simple majesty of his all controlling thought, converting his hearers into the express image of his own soul.”

The crowd was at a fever pitch, and Garrison continued, raising his voice, “Shall such a man ever be sent back to bondage from the free soil of old Massachusetts?” He motioned toward Douglass again.

“No! No! No!” the audience jumped to their feet and shouted. The noise poured out of the building and could be heard in the streets.

Afterward, as the convention let out, a crowd of men and women formed around Douglass who were eager to shake his hand, thump him on the back, and compliment him on his speech. When the crowd finally dissipated, a group of Nantucket’s prominent black citizens, led by Edward J. Pompey, a free black whaler, industrialist, and ship commander, approached Douglass, brimming with pride. The group was from Newtown, Nantucket’s black district, where Douglass was lodging. They escorted him out of the church and down a road past a fence that segregated Newtown from the rest of the town.

The walk from the Atheneum to Newtown took fifteen minutes as the group walked south, passing first the rest of town, then a cow pasture, and finally a fence made of wood planks. Above Newtown was a set of large windmills and, to the south, a settlement of displaced Wampanoag Indians who lived in the wilderness on the island’s coast. Newtown was a cluster of houses erected along a grid of eleven streets; prominent among them was Angola Street, an allusion to the residents’ African heritage. The center of the enclave was the African Meeting House, a square building with a gable roof, gray wood siding, and a wood-plank fence surrounding it. The African Meeting House was where Nantucket’s black residents attended church and school, and on occasion it hosted African American visitors such as Douglass.

That night Douglass stayed up talking with the island’s black residents, who also included the wealthy black whaling captain Absalom Boston and the leading black families of the island.

When morning came, Douglass left Newtown to attend the second day of the convention at the Atheneum. Excitement about his speech seemed to have grown overnight, and when he entered the hall, people crowded around him, thumped his back, and showered him with adulation. The next day, he returned to mainland Massachusetts, where William Lloyd Garrison offered him a job as a traveling speaker for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. “I doubt anyone would want to hear me speak,” Douglass told Garrison. Nonetheless, he accepted the offer and began traveling the country telling his story as he had in Nantucket. In the following months, Douglass rose to fame as an abolitionist and orator. His time on the island catapulted him to prominence and also galvanized the African American community there. Among them was a young woman who would become one of America’s most powerful black entrepreneurs: Mary Ellen Pleasant.

IN 1814, IN AN APARTMENT IN A THREE-STORY BRICK BUILDING ON a stone street near Philadelphia’s docks, Mary Ellen Williams entered the world. She was born free and black. Her parents christened her Mary Ellen Williams, taking her mother’s first name and her father’s last name. “My parents were a strange mixture. My father was a native Kanaka and my mother a full-blooded Louisiana negress,” she recalled. Pleasant had her mother’s brown skin and wavy hair and her father’s tall stature and Polynesian features. Her father, a silk merchant named Louis Alexander Williams, was larger than life in her memory: “He was a man of great intelligence. He was like most of his race, a giant.” Her mother did not leave a lasting impression on her. “I was named after my mother, but I really recall little else about her,” Pleasant said.

Pleasant’s time with her parents in their apartment was brief. They sent her to live on the island of Nantucket when she was seven years old to attend school. Like many free states, Pennsylvania was both antislavery and anti-integration. Black children, like Pleasant, were not welcome in Philadelphia’s schools. In most free states during the antebellum era, there were no schooling options for African American children. In Nantucket and Cincinnati, private “colored schools” had been established where parents and sponsors could buy education for black children. In 1826, Williams took Pleasant on a steamship to live with associates of his, an island family called the Husseys, while she attended school on the Massachusetts island.

The Husseys were one of Nantucket’s best-known and most powerful families. Members of their clan had controlling interests in most of the town’s institutions, including the Religious Society of Friends (the formal name for the Quaker church) and local government and industry. They owned several houses and businesses spread across the island. Williams, a traveling fabric merchant, likely knew them as business associates. If he had known the Husseys more intimately, he perhaps would have known that they had a reputation for being dishonest. An old Nantucket verse described the Husseys: “The Rays and Russells coopers are / The knowing Folgers lazy / A lying Coleman very rare / And scarce an honest Hussey.”

When Pleasant arrived on Nantucket, she was put into the care of Mary Hussey, an elderly Quaker woman who dressed in bonnets and long skirts. “Call me Grandma Hussey,” she told Pleasant. Grandma Hussey ran a store in a wood building located beneath a grassy hill by the town’s pier, a stone’s throw away from the Atheneum. From the window, one could see sailors and merchants working away on ships and moving about drums of whale oil. After Williams left Pleasant in the Husseys’ care, Grandma Hussey decided not to send Pleasant to school and instead made her work in her store. “My father, as I afterward learned, sent money every year for my education, but as I was an unusually smart girl and quick at everything, they kept me at work in the store.”

Pleasant resented being kept out of school, but it was an early lesson about power dynamics in the antebellum era. “I envy children who can write a good hand and spell correctly, and blame the Husseys for not giving me an education,” she later said. The Husseys were rich and white, and although Pleasant was privileged to have been born free, the color of her skin and her gender still allowed her to be taken advantage of. Thus she came to better understand the world she lived in. Either she could fight against those who had power, or she could work with them and accept the limitations that race and gender imposed upon her. She decided to do both.

She ingratiated herself with the Husseys, making herself indispensable in their store. As a girl, she foraged the woods around the store for pokeberries, which she would mash and strain to make a dark purple ink for Grandma Hussey to sell. She learned to keep the books, sweep and clean the store, and sell to customers. “I was always on the watch, and few people could get out of the store without buying something from me.” She learned to read and write in her spare time and used her work in the store to learn about business and human behavior. “I have let books alone and studied men and women a great deal,” she said. “You can’t learn all the book knowledge and all the human nature studied in a lifetime. You must slight one or the other.” So she slighted books and studied capital both human and financial.

During her years with the Husseys on Nantucket, Pleasant nursed a resentment of racism and slavery. When she wasn’t working, she would venture south of Grandma Hussey’s shop through town, past the Newtown fence, to enter Nantucket’s free black community.

The inhabitants of Newtown were made up of black whalers, escaped slaves, and domestic servants. They were led by the town’s most prominent citizen, Absalom Boston. Absalom was a well-muscled man with a beard that stretched from his ears down his entire jaw with no mustache. He wore gold hoop earrings, and his hair was coarse and pushed back into a pompadour. Absalom was black royalty in Nantucket. He was a descendant of the island’s Indian natives and black slaves. His family was credited with having ended slavery on the island after his uncle Prince Boston had challenged the legality of slavery in Nantucket, sued for his freedom, and won.

Absalom inherited money from his parents, who died when he was young, and used it to build one of the first structures in Newtown, a small shop in a clapboard house, where he sold fishing equipment and groceries. In 1822, he bought and captained his own whaling ship called Industry, becoming the first black man in New England to own and lead a whaling outfit. Subsequently, he used his earnings to develop Newtown by underwriting mortgages for the houses of free blacks. Along with Boston and other prominent black Nantucketers, Pleasant attended church and learned about abolition before venturing back to her employer on the white side of the fence.

WHILE SHE WAS LEARNING ABOUT BLACK CULTURE AND THE LIBERATION struggle in Newtown, Pleasant bore witness to an economic transformation from the Husseys’ shop by the harbor. From the shop, she could see oil refineries being built and whaling ships carrying whale carcasses and barrels of blubber. The Nantucket whaling boom was just getting under way when she arrived as a girl.

In the early nineteenth century, whale oil, used as lighting and heating oil, was rapidly becoming the United States’ most prized commodity, second only to cotton, making whaling a highly profitable business. Nantucket, with its location in the Atlantic Ocean and its tradition of deep ocean fishing, was well positioned to hunt whales. As the demand for the oil increased, Nantucket’s deep ocean fishing boats were refitted as whaling ships, and the town emerged as the largest producer of whale oil in the United States.

Before whale oil became readily available, most of the Western world lived in darkness once the sun went down. Candles and lamps fueled by cow and sheep fat were hard to produce, burned dimly, and gave off a foul odor. Whale oil, by contrast, burned brightly and was odorless. As it became broadly available in the United States and England, whaling exploded into an $11-million-a-year ($309 million) industry, becoming the third-largest economic sector in the United States after cotton and manufacturing. The boom made Nantucket one of the richest and busiest towns in the world during the years Pleasant was reared there.

Whaling was also a catalyst for social change. With the onset of whaling in Nantucket, men abandoned work in town for high-wage jobs working on docks and in open waters in whaling crews. In their absence, women became entrepreneurs and laborers, running the restaurants, stores, and hotels in town.

The whaling boom also created a black middle and upper class in Nantucket. Benefiting from racial stereotypes about their unnatural strength, black men were recruited to the island to hunt whales. Whaling offered a much better life than slave labor or tenement farming; in addition, men who worked on whaling crews were often shareholders, not employees, and were entitled to a percentage of the profits from the whales they helped bring in. As a result, black men in Nantucket could achieve moderate to high incomes that were unheard-of by blacks in the slave era. As the whaling industry grew, so did the black middle class on the island. Pleasant watched as Newtown grew from a poor village into an enclave of black middle-class families.

As a result of the emergence of the whaling industry, Pleasant was raised in a boomtown. She watched as people flocked to Nantucket to work on whaling ships, to open oil refineries or hotels and saloons to cater to the growing population. Some people made fortunes in Nantucket; others lost them. The lessons she learned from witnessing the boom would one day prove themselves useful.

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE ABOLITIONIST CONVENTION AND Frederick Douglass’s debut in 1841, Pleasant planned to make a move of her own. Not long after Douglass went back to Springfield, Massachusetts, she boarded a steamship for mainland Massachusetts at the Nantucket pier. “I went to Boston to better my condition,” she later said.

Pleasant arrived in Boston around the year 1842, when she was twenty-six years old and got a job as an apprentice to a cobbler in a shop in Boston’s South End. The South End was home to the city’s monied class, men who wore broadcloth suits with gold watch chains hanging from their waistcoat pockets. Its streets were made of gravel and cobblestones and lined with baroque Victorian homes and mansions. At the shop, Pleasant learned to make boots and sew vests.

Pleasant hadn’t left Nantucket to escape the Husseys or to find a better job or trade. On the contrary, she remained close with the Husseys and couldn’t have hoped to provide a future for herself in shoemaking or any other trade she could learn. To secure a good life, a woman was expected to get married. To better her position, she needed to find a husband, and Boston’s tony South End was as good a place as any to find a well-heeled one.

Pleasant was a striking woman. She was tall and slender with skin the color of clay, a long straight nose, high cheekbones, intense dark eyes, and long hair that was black and oiled straight. Perhaps her best feature was her charm and her way with words. “I have always noticed that when I have something to say people listen,” she remarked. “They never go to sleep on me.”

One day, James W. Smith, a well-dressed middle-aged businessman, entered the shop where she worked to do some shopping. He caught Pleasant’s eye as she was doing her work. “I made sure to strike up a conversation with him before he left,” she remembered. Smith didn’t say much about himself, but he did say he was Cuban. Identifying as Hispanic awarded him a racial ambiguity that allowed him to better navigate the United States’ racial caste system. The proportions of Spanish, Taino Indian, and African blood he possessed were simply left to the imagination, allowing him to avoid being classified as colored even under the strictest interpretation of the “one-drop rule.” Pleasant did discover a bit of information about Smith: she learned that he was an abolitionist.

Pleasant had her sights locked on Smith after that day she met him in the shop. He was well off, and he shared her passion for racial justice. Pleasant, however, didn’t make her interest in him obvious right away. She learned that he was a member of the Catholic church near her workplace, St. Mary’s Church. Pleasant had grown up attending an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Nantucket but became Catholic to join Smith’s congregation. “One church was the same as another to me,” she later said. After joining St. Mary’s, she became a member of the choir. The choir was positioned in the front of the church in full view of the congregation during service.

One night inside a steepled building made of rough stone on the north side of Boston, Smith finally took notice of the young woman he met in the store and at church. After Mass was over, Smith asked the priest, Father Trainor, to introduce him to Pleasant. Pleasant was brought to him, and he offered to walk her home.

As he walked her home that night under the moonlight, to Smith, it seemed they had been brought together by providence. He strolled with her unaware that Pleasant had set the forces that would bring them together into motion weeks before. A few days later, thoroughly charmed by Pleasant, he asked for her hand in marriage. “We were married inside of a month,” she bragged.

AS NEWLYWEDS, MR. JAMES W. SMITH AND MRS. MARY ELLEN SMITH split time between his home in Boston and Smith’s plantation in Charles Town, West Virginia. In Boston, Mary Ellen and James Smith entertained abolitionists together like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Geo Green, and Louis Hayden.

In Charles Town, they spent time at Smith’s mansion. The town was made up of Victorian homes and plantations built into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, looking down onto the Shenandoah River. It was picturesque, canopied by maple, cherry, pine, sycamore, and fruit trees and surrounded by green hills. Its estates spanned hundreds of acres with two- and three-story homes made of stone, barns and servants’ quarters, tanneries, orchards, and acres of crop fields. Smith’s land was managed by a young African American man named John James Pleasants.^*

There weren’t many slaves in Charles Town, only a few hundred domestic servants and enslaved black miners. Salt mining drove West Virginia’s economy, rather than slave-dependent crops such as cotton. Charles Town did, however, have frequent slave auctions. The spectacles took place on the steps of the Jefferson County Courthouse in the town square and were well attended by slave traders from Virginia, which was just over the state line. The courthouse was two stories high and topped with a gable roof and clock tower. Out front, it had a portico, white pillars, and stone steps. Men and women in chains and metal collars were marched out in front and sold to the highest bidder. Smith frequently attended slave auctions, rubbing shoulders with flesh traders in hats and long coats smoking hand-rolled cigarettes as they bid on men, women, and children. Smith endured the slave markets to purchase people and set them free. “My husband frequently demonstrated his feeling for the colored race by purchasing slaves and giving them their liberty,” Pleasant recalled.

Pleasant’s marriage to Smith was short-lived. Smith took ill less than two years after they were married in 1844. On his deathbed, he summoned his bride to his side. “Promise me,” he said to his wife. “Promise me you will devote a portion of the money I leave you to the cause of freeing the slaves,” he begged. “I promise with a full heart,” she told him. Smith died shortly after, leaving his entire estate to Pleasant.

Smith’s death left Pleasant in a familiar place; she was on her own again. In her grief, she grew closer to her late husband’s land manager, John James Pleasants, or, as she called him, JJ, and the Husseys back in Nantucket. Pleasant returned to Nantucket after her husband’s funeral. There, Captain Edward Gardner, a friend of the Husseys who had known her as a girl in Nantucket, helped her manage her husband’s estate, selling off his various properties and assets and dealing with paperwork.

In 1846, as Pleasant was still mourning James, the island of Nantucket was struck by tragedy. The Great Fire of 1846, as it would later be called, almost burned down the entire town. The blaze started in a hat shop near Grandma Hussey’s shop and spread to the docks, where barrels of whale oil were stored. The oil fed the blaze as it spread over the homes and businesses on the island. The fire melted the barrels of oil on the docks, spilling their flaming contents out into the ocean. The ocean seemed to turn to fire and made the night sky glow. When the blaze was extinguished seven hours later, it was nearly dawn. As the sun rose, people walked the streets in disbelief. More than one-third of the town’s homes and businesses had been burned down, leaving more than eight hundred people homeless and even more without a way to make a living. The Nantucket Atheneum, where Frederick Douglass had spoken and risen to fame a few years earlier, was burned and nearly destroyed in the disaster.

After the fire, Nantucket declined as the center of the whaling industry, and jobs, citizens, and capital fled Massachusetts, leaving those who remained to figure out how to rebuild. Shortly after the fire, Captain Edward Gardner finished settling Pleasant’s estate and gave her the proceeds, which amounted to $45,000 ($1.2 million). In 1848, Pleasant married JJ in a small ceremony in West Virginia.

Late in 1848, gold was discovered in California. Men from all over the country and the world left wives, jobs, and families behind to try to become rich in the California gold rush. President James K. Polk evangelized for men to set out for San Francisco in his State of the Union address in December 1848, which was reprinted in Nantucket and Boston papers. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory [California] are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation,” he said in his national address. He added that “Labor commands a most exorbitant price and all other pursuits, but that of searching for the precious metals are abandoned. Nearly the whole of the male population of the country have gone to the gold districts.”^*

After Polk’s address men began to leave Nantucket for California; whaling schooners were converted into transport ships to take them there. By 1849, more than five hundred men from Nantucket had left the island for California. Among them were Pleasant’s new husband, JJ, and several members of the Hussey clan.

Deserted on Nantucket by JJ and much of her surrogate family, Pleasant made up her mind that she would go to California, too. She had connections there and now possessed a small fortune as a result of her inheritance from her first husband. She had a chance at thriving there just as the male “’49ers” were doing. Besides, she felt she needed to keep an eye on JJ.

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Abolitionism and Capitalism