Chapter Fourteen

Somber Skies and Howling Tempests

We are tossed and driven on the restless sea of time;

Somber skies and howling tempests oft succeed a bright sunshine;

In that land of perfect day, when the mists are rolled away,

We will understand it better by and by.

— Charles A. Tindley, 1905

Samuel and Susannah Russell, both of whom were rapidly approaching their sixtieth year, must have felt snake-bitten, but they persevered. Despite having lost the title to their home, the family remained living among their neighbours and friends in Chatham’s east end. Dr. Russell also continued to maintain his medical practice based in the Charity Building. The presence of the Provincial Freeman and its editor, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, in the same building ensured that life was never boring. Mrs. Shadd Cary was a remarkable woman, described by an admirer as:

[R]ather tall, but of fine physical organization wholly feminine in appearance and demeanour has a well molded head set upon a rather slender neck, which gives her, when erect or speaking animatedly, what white folks would say, a very saucy look.… Miss Shadd’s eyes are small and penetrating, and fairly flash when she is speaking. Her ideas seem to flow so fast that she, at times, hesitates for words; yet she overcomes any apparent imperfection in her speaking by the earnestness of her manner, and the quality of her thoughts. She is a superior woman, and it is useless to deny it.[1]

However, her fiery temper and caustic pen were guaranteed to inspire controversy. After one of her scathing editorials in which she attacked members of the nearby Baptist Church, the trustees (which included her landlord) responded with an acerbic letter of their own: “We believe Mrs. Cary to be the enemy of the Cross of Christ and when she vilifies the names of the tried friends of the slave, we are not surprised. She knows how to applaud the enemies of the Refugees … and to abuse their friends.[2]

We are left to wonder about the relationship that would have existed between the mercurial editor and the doctor. Shadd Cary was deserving of Russell’s admiration as a tireless advocate for their people, an anti-slavery warrior, and, on a more personal level, one of the teachers of the Russell children. However, she was a vocal foe of Hiram Wilson, who had been the family’s guardian in earlier days. She was also a constant opponent to what she referred to as “begging,” or the practice of receiving charity, something of which the Russells had been among the grateful recipients. (It is interesting to note that the Provincial Freeman staff cheerfully acknowledged the financial support of Lucretia Mott, who made a generous donation to help prop up the struggling newspaper.[3] ) Articles of praise for Chatham’s other black physicians appeared in the columns, but Dr. Russell was never mentioned in her newspaper other than in the weekly advertisements for his medical practice that he placed. Perhaps that was a good thing.

William Wells Brown generally had a favourable impression of Chatham as printed in The Black Abolitionist Papers: Volume II: “Those who have ever passed down the valley of the Mississippi, or walked on the banks washed by the Potomac, will have his liveliest recollections of the appearance of the slaves revived by spending an hour in Chatham.” Sadly, his impression of Dr. Samuel Russell’s medical practice was less complimentary.
Image from Autographs for Freedom, 2nd series, page 71, edited by Julia Griffiths on behalf of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Courtesy of Kate Clifford Larson.

Not everyone was impressed with Russell’s medical philosophy. William Wells Brown, himself a former slave, visited Chatham in 1861 as part of a tour of several black areas of settlement in Canada. Brown raved at the medical skill of Dr. Thomas Joiner White who, he stated, was educated at one of the oldest universities in Maine as well as in Paris, France. Similar kudos were bestowed upon Dr. Martin Delany, who was highly regarded for his chosen profession and even more so for his reputation as a newspaper editor and lecturer. He also travelled extensively and spearheaded “the Niger Valley Exploring Expedition,” which was a movement to return blacks to Africa where they could establish their own homeland. Brown described Delany as a man whose firmly held convictions and public speaking ability made him “the ablest man in Chatham, if not in America.” Dr. Amos Array was deemed a bit less praiseworthy, however, grudging respect was granted because he was a reformer in the medical practice, being an “allopathist [treatment that would bring on effect different than the disease], hydropathist [natural healing powers of water], homeopathist [administering small doses of medicine that would bring on symptoms similar to that of the disease], and an eclectic [use of botanical medicine, but also conventional physiological treatments]” and possessed the unwavering faith of his patients. Although Dr. Array employed some of the same methods as Dr. Samuel Russell, Brown felt the latter to be worthy of only a passing, dismissive sneer: “I called at his gate, read his sign, my mouth beginning to feel peppery, I passed on.”[4]

Samuel Russell may have learned a devastating lesson that perhaps the judgment of the naysayers concerning the practice of botanic medicine was well-founded. An epidemic of scarlet fever ravaged Chatham in 1860. The first symptom of infection was a sore throat, followed a day or two later by a rash that made the skin rough like sandpaper. High fever, sudden chills, nausea, and vomiting compounded the pain of swollen glands around the jaw and neck. Swollen tonsils and tongue, sometime coated white or dotted with yellow pustules, made swallowing extremely difficult. Flaking skin, mental confusion, and delirium accompanied severe cases.

If Dr. Russell attended a patient suffering from those debilitating symptoms, he would have held to the Thomsonian botanical treatment, and recommended a gargle of “Thomson’s Pepper Sauce” composed of cayenne pepper, salt, and vinegar for the early stage. More advanced cases called for ingesting a powdered mixture of the root of the goldenseal plant, poplar bark, nervine (herbs), and cayenne pepper diluted in warm water every two or three hours. A hot onion plaster, roasted in ashes, could be applied externally to “calm the nerves of the patient.” A colleague of Russell advised that if there “were any signs of saburral embarrassment, injections of a decoction of slippery elm, or any other mucilaginous substance” was to be given. (Apparently not having a mirror, the author of this prescription ridiculed others for using extravagant wording as “unprincipled pretender, who wants to dazzle the multitude with his pedantic airs.” In simpler language he accused them of being “the very root of quackery” and anyone who followed them were conceited simpletons.) These treatments, some in combination with Dr. Thomson’s secret recipes, would act by relaxing the fibres of the heart and arteries and “raise a greater abundance of the essence of life.”[5]

The bacteria that caused the illness easily spread to others who came into close contact. Children were especially susceptible. One newspaper named the disease the “red demon of the nursery” and commented: “We hope that it may soon depart from our midst, and leave the young buds of our affection, that are just blooming into life, to blossom and gladden our lives when we are old.”[6] Susannah and Samuel were robbed of some of those buds of their affection, and, when the census taker arrived at their home in early 1861, they tearfully reported that their nineteen-year-old daughter was among those that scarlet fever had claimed within the past year. Two other children of their household also died of the disease that year — a thirteen-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy. Unfortunately, the census taker did not record the names of the deceased children nor identify their parents. Susannah, who would turn sixty before the year was out, was well past the normal child-bearing years so it is doubtful that she would have been the mother of the two youngest children. The Russell’s eldest daughters, thirty-five-year-old Lucinda and twenty-five-year-old Catharine, both married, had returned to live in their parents’ home, and, given her age, those children may have belonged to Lucinda. At any rate, grief permeated every cranny of the one-storey frame home in the way that only the death of a child can do.

At that time, the Russell family was easing apart in a variety of ways. Neither Lucinda nor Catharine’s husbands were with their wives in the household and neither of them appeared in the Chatham census. Two of their siblings, sixteen-year-old William and fifteen-year-old Nancy, were still living at home — William was attending school and Nancy had found a job as a milliner, specializing in hats for women. Older brother Leonard had, like his two brothers-in-law, disappeared from the local records. Jacob, who would soon be twenty, along with his fourteen-year-old “spinster” sister Rebecca, had moved into a one-storey log cabin in nearby Harwich Township, where they cared for three young children with the surname Berry who were presumably their nieces and nephew, children of Catharine —Mary, nine; Margaret, three; and infant William.[7] This tangled living arrangement suggests that scarlet fever had forced the extended family to step in and help each other survive the best way that they could, as they always had.