The Sergeant, page 12
Said’s letter ended up on the desk of Rev. Alfred Constantine, a white missionary who had spent two years in the Bassa nation in Liberia and would have still been there if a bout of tropical fever hadn’t intervened. Now that he had recuperated, he was planning to return in summer with a group of the society’s recruits. Instead of responding to Said directly, however, he forwarded the application to an associate in Detroit, asking him to contact Said, verify his story, investigate his religious beliefs, and write back with the results.
Constantine’s associate, Rev. George Duffield of Detroit’s First Presbyterian Church, was impressed with the application: “a neatly written epistle… [in] very high and well written French.” But as he read further, he was stunned to realize that he had crossed paths with Said before, while sailing from Istanbul on the Egitto in 1853. Eager to discover whether this was the African teenager he had seen working for Russian diplomats, he wasted no time in hurrying to the boarding house where Said and the Rochussens were staying.
Although only five blocks separated the church from the boarding house, they were in two very different neighborhoods. First Presbyterian was in Detroit’s upscale city center, surrounded by office buildings, hotels, and emporiums built of granite, brick, and marble, unlike the wooden tenements of the Third Ward. Duffield, whose mansion on the outskirts of town was staffed by four Canadian and British servants, was immediately struck by the idea that a European nobleman like Rochussen would lodge in a place with such “humble pretensions.”
“The circumstances of his living at a colored boarding house of quite inferior grade leads me to think there is something suspicious about this Mr. Rochussen or that he is in some peculiar straits or difficulties,” he wrote.
The Rochussens were not around when Duffield dropped by, but Said was there. Eight years had passed since their first meeting, and both had changed so much they were hardly recognizable. Duffield was now in his sixties with wrinkles and white hair, and Said was no longer a shy teenager. “He is black as jet, has several scars [tattoos] on his forehead and very small hands and fingers, is 23 years of age, smart, intelligent,” Duffield wrote.
To avoid revealing the purpose of his visit, Duffield introduced himself as a local minister making the rounds of his parish, but Said must have had some suspicions. A white minister had come to a colored boarding house and asked for him by name. Judging from his aristocratic bearing, he didn’t belong in the Third Ward, so why go out of his way to seek out an African immigrant? The visit must have had something to do with his letter to Constantine.
Duffield tried easing into the conversation with small talk, asking whether Said planned to stay in America.
“No. It’s too cold.” Just last month, the temperature had dropped to more than ten degrees below zero, and it still often dipped to freezing.
“So where else do you want to go?”
“My own country.”
“Why go there?”
Every other time Said had described why he wanted to return to Africa, he had put it in secular terms, saying he hoped to teach his countrymen about Western sciences or political systems or military tactics. But now, with a minister who might be linked to the African Civilization Society, he tailored his answer accordingly. “I want to do my countrymen good by preaching to them of Christ and trying to save them.”
This was exactly what Duffield wanted to hear, but he needed more information. Said’s letter mentioned he had been baptized into the Orthodox Church which, as far as Duffield was concerned, was nearly as heretical as Roman Catholicism, so he asked whether Said still considered himself Orthodox.
“No. I found something better.”
“What is that?”
“Protestantism.”
“Where did you become a Protestant?”
“In England.” Said explained that when he was staying at the Waldegrave mansion near London, a couple of maids had “manifested a great interest” in his soul and instructed him in their beliefs. As mentioned before, it’s likely that their assignations were more earthly than heavenly in nature, but the answer pleased Duffield.
“Do you think you would not be afraid but be able to go back to your country and tell your people of Christ?”
“I would not be afraid. He will help me and give me strength.”
That was exactly what Duffield was looking for. Before ending the interview, he asked to see Said’s passport, a leather-covered booklet with his name embossed in gold, bearing visas from such cities as Dresden, Munich, Marseilles, and Rome. After comparing it to his own passport, which carried visas from many of the same cities, Duffield was completely satisfied that Said was the teen from the Egitto. To him, nothing but the hand of God could have brought about such a reunion. “I would not but wonder at the ways of Providence and rejoice in the hope that this young man may be raised up to bear the gospel,” he wrote that evening.
Over the next month, Duffield remained in constant contact with Said, giving him Bibles in English and French and inviting him to church, where he sat so close to the pulpit Duffield could watch him following along in the scriptures. Since Duffield was fluent in French, German, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, the two also connected over their love of languages. Duffield went so far as to give Said a grammar book in ancient Greek, so he could read the New Testament in its original language. Within several months, Said was plowing through the text.
When Rochussen heard that Said was thinking of leaving him, he was livid. If he were ever to rebuild his image as a nobleman, after all, he needed a valet by his side. Knowing that Duffield was a teetotaling temperance man, Rochussen tried to scare him away from Said, warning that he was “so addicted to the habit of drinking that he was harming himself.” Duffield, however, had already decided that Rochussen was a conman, and felt his words were simply “a ruse to prejudice my mind.” On April 5, he told Said he could join the mission to Africa that summer. But those plans were disrupted a week later by a barrage of cannon fire in South Carolina.
11 The Select School
On April 13, 1861, Detroit’s newspapers screamed with news that had been clattering over the telegraph wires for the past day: “The Blow at Last Fallen. War! War! War! The Confederate Batteries Open on Sumter.” Although it was Saturday, the Detroit bar association held an emergency session, resolving to “stand by the government to the last.” On Sunday, preachers throughout Michigan focused their sermons on the coming war. On Monday, Detroit’s leading businessmen pledged the equivalent of $663,000 to finance a Union infantry regiment—a sum that would top $2.3 million in the next three months.
For Nicholas Said, the attack on Fort Sumter would become one of the key turning points of his life. He had spent much of the past decade floating through life, with his course determined by fate and happenstance, and with no goal except a vague notion of someday returning home. More recently, however, perhaps as a reaction to the prejudice he was encountering in the Americas, he had “prayed earnestly to be enabled to do some good to my race,” adding that “I would willingly sacrifice my life, if need be, in realizing my dreams.” Now it seemed his prayers were being answered. Now he had a chance to fight an enemy that, in the words of Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, was “the first [nation] in the history of the world based upon [the] great physical, philosophical, and moral truth… that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” To fight that enemy, Said would join the US Army. Or so he thought.
Within days after the war began, Said apparently tried to enlist, only to find—much to his surprise—that nobody with an African heritage could bear arms in the US Army, not even the lightest-complexioned “mulatto.” (“Soldiers would not tolerate the mixed breed as comrades,” said a handbook for army medical examiners, which recommended checking the penises of suspected mulattos, since “the skin covering these organs is much darker in persons having a trace of negro blood.”)
Said must have been stunned. He knew that Black troops served in the armies of England and France and that Black generals had once commanded white soldiers under Napoleon and the Tsars. He had been among Ottoman troops so thoroughly integrated that he concluded there was “no prejudice among the Turks on account of complexion.” But in the United States, facing a rebellion over the issue of Black enslavement, no Black man could serve as a soldier.
That hadn’t always been the case. A number of Black freemen fought valiantly in the American Revolution, ranging from soldiers like Salem Poor, who killed the British commander at the Battle of Bunker Hill, to the troops of the First Rhode Island Regiment, a mostly Black unit that repelled three Hessian charges in one major battle. A decade after the war ended, however, Black men were banned from soldiering, due to Southern fears that armed Black veterans might someday try to free their slaves. Since then, myths had arisen to justify the ban. Black men were said to be too lazy to fight, too ignorant to follow orders, too cowardly to face gunfire, and too savage to be restrained on the battlefield. Of course, the charges of savagery didn’t quite jibe with laziness and fear, but consistency has never been a hallmark of prejudice.
The army didn’t ban Black people from all positions. They could perform some jobs, but only as civilians handling the gritty kind of manual labor that white troops liked to avoid, such as cleaning latrines or shoveling out stables. Anxious to play a role in the war effort, no matter how small, Nicholas Said took a job as kitchen scullion at Fort Wayne, a military training center three miles south of downtown Detroit, protected by a dry moat and cedar-covered earthen ramparts. Barred from bearing arms, Said peeled potatoes, shucked corn, plucked chicken feathers, and scrubbed pots and pans in the smoky kitchens of the fort’s limestone barracks.
For the son of one of Africa’s greatest warriors, it must have been humiliating to labor in the kitchens as white troops trained in the field outside before sauntering off to war. And he surely resented the scorn he and other Black workers received from some of the soldiers. “ ‘The nigger’ is not liked in the army…,” read the Detroit Free Press, the openly racist voice of the city’s substantial minority of Southern sympathizers. “Beside the ineradicable antipathy of race, the average soldier has a lurking suspicion that the negro is the cause of the war.”
Growingly depressed, Said turned to alcohol. As previously mentioned, there’s no evidence that Said was a chronic alcoholic, but there’s no question that he sometimes drank to excess, particularly during times of stress. Not long after Said started working as a scullion, Reverend Duffield started to hear “sad stories” about him, culminating in an incident in which he drunkenly stumbled into a woman’s cellar and left his coat there, with his passport in one of its pockets. Duffield obtained the coat and passport, and when Said came to retrieve them, he “acknowledged with some shame his offense.”
That incident led Duffield—a strict teetotaler—to drop his support for sending Said on a mission to Africa, since “he had no clear and well-defined ideas of the Christian faith, and was susceptible at intervals to the temptations of the ‘flowing bowl.’ ” Even so, Duffield felt that “with his intellectual gifts he is capable of becoming an honor and a friend to his race… attaining a position that would command the respect and admiration of all.” Using his contacts in the African American community, Duffield found Said a job that would put his talents to better use than a mere kitchen scullion: teaching French at a private school for “colored” children.
Education was a top priority for the Black community in Detroit. In fact, it was a major reason many families moved there. Over the past thirty years, the city had drawn a steady migration of freeborn Black people from Virginia, which had a small population of freemen since its founding. Like some Northern states, including Michigan, Virginia barred freemen from voting, holding office, sitting on juries, using the courts, or marrying white people. Nevertheless, many were able to carve out successful careers as craftsmen, artisans, and merchants. For decades, they taught their children with tutors or in privately run schools. But that changed dramatically after Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831, which killed more than fifty white people before being bloodily put down.
After the rebellion, Virginia imposed strict new restrictions on freemen, including a ban on education. Any Black people found reading or teaching others to read could face up to twenty lashes; any white people who helped them could be fined the equivalent of $2,400 and thrown into jail for two months. Despite the penalties, some brave souls broke the law. In Fredericksburg, for instance, an Englishwoman named Mrs. Beecham held classes for Black children in her living room. To guard against prying eyes, she taught class while reclining on a sofa, with her students lying on the floor around her. In case someone came to the door, the students were equipped with wooden sticks, phosphorus, sulfur, and flint, so it would appear they were learning how to make matches. Those restrictions eventually drove many freemen out of Virginia, and one place they settled was Detroit, which despite its limitations on civil rights, allowed the freedoms of speech, assembly, and education that had been stripped away in Virginia.
As more Black people moved in, Detroit launched a publicly funded Black school in 1841, but for its first two decades, it was run by churches: first, the African Methodist Episcopal Church off Beaubien Street, then the Colored Episcopal Church a few blocks away. In 1860, Reverend Duffield’s son, Divie Bethune Duffield, a longtime member of the Detroit Board of Education, spearheaded the creation of a secular school: a two-story wooden building that could fit nearly 130 students. Duffield proposed hiring two Black teachers: twenty-nine-year-old Kentuckian John Green to serve as principal and teach the upper grades while middle-aged widow Sarah Slaughter handled the primary grades, which was seen as women’s work. But while the board agreed to fund the school, it balked at the idea of paying Black teachers. Instead, it hired John Whitbeck, a thirty-six-year-old white teacher from Livingston County, and Margaret Scott, a nineteen-year-old newcomer from Pennsylvania.
Although Colored School No. 1 was bigger than the previous church-based schools, it still reached only a fraction of the children in Detroit’s growing Black community, so William Lee—a freeborn carpenter from Virginia—organized a Select (meaning “private”) Colored School at 59 Lafayette Street, one of the Third Ward’s main thoroughfares. For principal, Lee hired John Green, and to teach the primary grades, he apparently picked twenty-two-year-old Fannie Richards, who had started her education on the floor of Mrs. Beecham’s living room in Fredericksburg and had recently returned from Toronto after graduating from college there. And then there was Nicholas Said.
Thanks to his travels, Said was well versed in many topics—history, geography, current events—but many Black parents wanted their children to learn French, a key acquisition for anyone who wanted to mingle in polite society, especially for those who wanted to cross the Detroit River into Canada and travel or do business in Montreal or Quebec. Said did not like French, with its “disagreeable” nasal tones, but he took the job anyway. Fortunately, his students were probably less interested in learning a new language than in hearing his stories of growing up in Africa and making his way through Europe to America. As he told his tales, he became a celebrity with not only his students, but their parents as well. “Said became quite distinguished, especially among the colored people, for his erudition, his large experience of the world, and his promising talents,” a journalist later wrote.
Of course, teaching French to schoolchildren when the rest of the country was embroiled in a fight over slavery was not how Nicholas Said envisioned his destiny. But to his fellow teachers, the Select School was nothing short of revolutionary. Fannie Richards—a stout, bespectacled woman with a broad and welcoming smile—would later marvel that “no race has advanced more rapidly than ours, and it has not shown all it can do yet.” In 1867, she would become Detroit’s first Black teacher of an integrated classroom, after local parents successfully sued to desegregate schools, eighty-seven years before Brown vs. Board of Education, and she would later launch one of the nation’s first kindergartens, inspired by their success in Germany. She would continue teaching until 1915, with a devoted following among her white and Black alumni.
In the meantime, as losses from the Civil War mounted, the army began rethinking its ban on Black soldiers. By mid-1862, Union commanders in the South were using newly liberated slaves to fill their battered ranks. Initially, they were hired to build fortifications, haul supplies, and perform menial labor, so white troops could concentrate on the actual fighting. The army paid them rock-bottom wages of just $7 per month (plus food and shelter), much less than most unskilled civilian laborers, but some officers started arming them and putting them through military drills, hoping to deploy them in battle.
On New Year’s Day 1863, as Nicholas Said began his third winter in Detroit, Abraham Lincoln enacted the Emancipation Proclamation, officially freeing all slaves in the Confederacy. Five days later, more than five hundred African Americans jubilantly braved Detroit’s wintry chill to jam into the Second Baptist Church for a community-wide celebration. The church was festooned with posters of Lincoln and abolitionist martyr John Brown; a brass band played patriotic tunes; orators delivered rousing speeches; and a choir of escaped slaves sang how “Abraham Lincoln is the man for all; he can whip Jeff Davis and Old Stonewall.”
Nicholas Said was not a regular churchgoer, but he likely attended this service, organized by Fannie Richards’s brother John, one of the Black community’s leading voices. Speaking to the crowd that night, John Richards seized on a clause in Lincoln’s proclamation that said that freed slaves could work for the army. “Negroes can fight!” Richards exclaimed. To highlight that point, an armed platoon of Black men wearing makeshift uniforms marched down the aisles.
