Washington College Magazine
Chesapeake Journey participants pause in front of Historic St. Mary's City's Maryland Dove, a full-scale replica of the cargo ship used in the 1634 British settlement of Maryland.
Washington College junior Jasper Colt and Kent County teacher Karen Frison talk with a Colonial Williamsburg interpreter about listening to the stories everyday artifacts and places can reveal about people of the past.
Members of the vocal trio Sombarkin'—Lester Barrett, Karen Somerville and Jerome McKinney—perform slave spirituals on the site of the Wye House slave quarters outside Easton, MD.
At Point Comfort, VA, C.V. Starr Center director Adam Goodheart explains the geography of the harbor that met the first enslaved Africans imported into British North America.
Historian and folklorist Rex Ellis, Colonial Williamsburg's Vice President of the Historic Area, brings African rhythms to life in a workshop on music's power to help enslaved people endure and resist the dehumanization of slavery.
Participants decode the racial messages embodied in Washington, D.C.'s 1876 Freedmen's Memorial, conceived and funded by African Americans but designed by white elites.
Mount Vernon descendant Judge Rohulamin Quander, whose ancestor Nancy Quander received her freedom in the terms of George Washington's will, leads the group through the estate's slaves' burial ground.
Anchored near the mouth of the Potomac River, C.V. Starr Center associate director Jill Ogline recounts the dramatic story of the ill-fated schooner Pearl, which carried escaping slaves over these very waters in April 1848.
Chesapeake Journey
Last summer, in a quest to embrace the Chesapeake region as the ideal classroom for teaching American history, a group of teachers and students embarked on a journey exploring the past. By Jill Ogline
Seeking relief from the blazing July sun, 20 overheated travelers crowded into a windowless cabin, built of rough logs and chinked with horsehair and mud. But our gratitude for the respite quickly faded as the guide closed the door, plunging the room into stifling gloom. Crammed elbow to elbow, we struggled vainly to avoid touching our sweaty neighbors, and I closed my eyes to focus all my energy on simply enduring the moment: not thinking, not moving, just standing. Then the guide, a young African-American man named Jason, began to speak, and I jerked back to consciousness.
We stood in a slave quarter at Colonial Williamsburg's Great Hopes Plantation, on the third day of a journey through time and place. A group of Washington College students, K-12 teachers from schools across the Eastern Shore, and staff members of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, we came to Williamsburg on a Starr Center-sponsored journey into the rich history of slavery and resistance lying just beneath the surface of the 21st century Chesapeake. Traveling by bus, boat and foot over the course of seven days, we moved from slave cabins to plantation homes, forts, city streets and tobacco fields, joined at every step of the way by guides who brought the story to life—musicians, historians and even a descendant of a slave emancipated by George Washington.
The Chesapeake Bay region—simultaneously the mainland colonies' first plantation economy and a breeding ground for revolutionary sentiment—is an unparalleled classroom for studying the history of American slavery, abolition and emancipation. Delaware State University history professor Alexa Cawley helped C.V. Starr Center director Adam Goodheart and former program manager Kees de Mooy '01 delve deeply into the area's past to conceive, design and administer an intensive seminar rooted in studying history through exploring the places in which it took shape. Funded entirely by a prestigious Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education, "A Chesapeake Journey: From Slavery to Freedom" attracted significant interest from teachers across the Eastern Shore. The eight ultimately chosen to participate, selected through a competitive application process, became informal mentors and "voices of experience" for the group's four student members.
There in that Williamsburg slave quarter, if only for an instant, we felt the echo of a physically demanding and materially uncomfortable existence in a world largely devoid of privacy. As Cecil County teacher Erick Brown later described the moment, "slavery, fundamentally, is the inability to open the door and walk out a free man." But that cabin also represented a place of life—a space for the relationships, stories and songs through which enslaved people asserted their humanity, perpetuated their native cultures and made meaning out of their daily experiences. Moments such as these—flashes of connection with the people and places of the past—filled the week, transforming an extended field trip into something of a pilgrimage and blurring the boundaries between past and present in emotionally and intellectually resonant ways. The following vignettes are only a few glimpses into a profoundly moving experience, but they offer the flavor of the journey.
Moments such as these . . . [transformed] an extended field trip into something of a pilgrimage and blurred the boundaries between past and present in emotionally and intellectually resonant ways.
Day 1 - Sunday, July 8
A slight breeze ruffled the leaves of an enormous oak tree on the ancestral Lloyd estate as the group relaxed in its shade. Immaculately preserved by the 11th generation of the family who settled it in the 1660s, the estate still bears a striking resemblance to the landscape the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass knew from his childhood on the property. There in sight of the mansion and just a few feet from the probable site of the slave quarters, members of the vocal trio Sombarkin' brought to life the haunting spirituals described in Douglass's autobiographies, singing powerfully of a persistent hope for better days: "No more auction block for me, no more, no more..." It would be trite to say that a moment under a tree enabled a group of relatively privileged 21st century observers to truly understand the experiences of the people who produced that music, but something of their anguish, hope and determination seemed palpable as the melodies hung in the still summer air.
Day 2 - Monday, July 9
A naval transport sailing from the U.S. Army base at Fort Monroe slipped out into the summer haze lying over the waters of Hampton Roads as we gazed from the fort's ramparts. Once the furthest outpost of the Jamestown settlement, the land surrounding Fort Monroe in 1619 served as a reception point for the first enslaved Africans to enter the Virginia Colony, a group of "20. and Odd Negroes" probably captured in a Portuguese campaign against the Ndongo people. Two and a half centuries later, in the early days of the American Civil War, three slaves—Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory and James Townsend—deserted a local Confederate officer to slip across siege lines into the fort, setting in motion the chain of events that eventually transformed a "war for the Union" into a struggle for liberation. There beneath our feet on this narrow spit of land lay the roots of both American slavery and American freedom.
Day 3 - Tuesday, July 10
African cadences rocked Colonial Williamsburg's education space at the former Bruton Heights School as historian and folklorist Rex Ellis, Vice President of the Historic Area, coached us in the creation of an addictive rhythm. Heads nodded and feet moved in rhythm as four volunteers spiritedly layered the cowbell, the log drum, the tam drum and the shakere (a handheld percussion instrument made from a hollowed out gourd and covered with beads or seeds), struggling to play four separate yet intimately linked parts. "You just have to hit it with authority, sweetheart," Ellis told Washington College senior Samantha Blau, stressing a point that goes beyond music itself. Looking through his eyes, we began to see sustaining an individual rhythm in the midst of group performance as an assertion of independence, a statement of personhood in the face of a system determined to deny it. Moving our bodies in time, we entered into the music, looking for patterns in the rhythm that would provide glimpses into the world of the original performers.
Day 4 - Wednesday, July 11
The sun beat down on a small boat rocking in the waters of Cornfield Harbor as passengers played in their minds' eye a dramatic escape scene: a small schooner furtively slipping down the Potomac in the wee hours of the morning with a contraband cargo of 76 slaves. Setting sail from Washington, DC, in April 1848, the schooner Pearl, blocked from entrance to the Chesapeake Bay by unfavorable winds, laid over in Cornfield Harbor until time ran out. Pursuers arrived on the scene and apprehended the ship, setting in motion a chain of events that ultimately condemned the majority of the Pearl escapees to the very fate they had hoped to avoid through flight: sale south to the slave markets of Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee. Pausing on the spot, we found it chillingly easy to imagine ourselves onboard the Pearl, trapped, encircled and bound for a fearful fate.
There beneath our feet on this narrow spit of land lay the roots of both American slavery and American freedom.
Day 5 - Thursday, July 12
The shady, spacious lawn at Sotterley Plantation in southern Maryland slopes gently down to the banks of the Patuxent River. The view quieted even our talkative group, providing a much-appreciated moment of stillness that laid the groundwork for us to gather later that evening to begin articulating the "essential understandings" we hope to foster among our students. Members of the group spoke slowly, thoughtfully, out of a range of experiences unknown only a few days earlier, vowing to teach respect for the strength and longevity of African cultural heritages, awareness of the ever-shifting nature of slavery, and understanding of the diversity of the tools of resistance employed by slaves.
Day 6 - Friday, July 13
Standing in Mount Vernon's wooded slaves' burial ground, Judge Rohulamin Quander shared stories of ancestors buried beneath our feet. He is a descendant of Nancy Quander, one of the 123 slaves freed in George Washington's will. He also counts among his ancestors Washington's personal secretary Tobias Lear and possibly Bushrod Washington, the President's nephew and heir. With their lineage, Judge Quander and his family have played a central role in recovering and publicizing the estate's rich African-American history. Touring Mount Vernon with Judge Quander brought 18th-century relationships into the present in the most immediate way. For all the antebellum claims of innate differences between white and black, few slaveowners lacked relatives in the quarters. Families such as the Quanders, possessed as they are of ancestors on both sides of a plantation's color line, are uniquely well positioned to remind us that for all of its economic rigidity, slavery was also rooted in complicated, contradictory human relationships.
Day 7 - Saturday, July 14
Joggers breezed through Washington, DC's Lincoln Park, tossing a few curious glances toward us as we peered up at an enormous bronze model of Abraham Lincoln stretching his hand in blessing over a kneeling slave. Emotions ran high as we read aloud excerpts from Frederick Douglass's famously ambivalent characterization of Lincoln's antislavery credentials, delivered on the site in 1876. Some backed away in disgust, offended by the seeming passivity and servility of the black figure. A few saw a potentially positive image—a black man rising to stand as an equal of the President of the United States— but in the end, the Freedmen's Memorial is indisputably a deeply flawed representation of emancipation.
The monument in Lincoln Park is provocative, contradictory and unsettling— perhaps a supremely fitting place to end a journey into awkward, messy history and the minds of the imperfect people who made it. Sanford Levinson has mused that "there is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments," that they exert powerful impact upon our assumptions and preconceptions precisely because their influence goes largely unrecognized. If this is true, then we need look no further than the Freedmen's Memorial to recall why it matters so much what we teach our children about slavery and resistance.
Jill Ogline is associate director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
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