Day 1 / Sunday, July 8
Chesapeake Journey Co-Director Adam Goodheart introduces the program at the Custom House in Chestertown and tells the story of Thomas Ringgold, a revolutionary patriot who also ran his slave-trading business. from the Custom House.
Our journey began on a hot summer day much like those Frederick Douglass, Edward Lloyd, Thomas Ringgold, and the others in whose shoes we are walking would have known on the Eastern Shore. Coming together for the first time in the Custom House, we introduced ourselves, immediately plunging into the complicated waters of the topic we’ve set out to pursue. As we shared, the common ground between us quickly expanded. None of us are experts. But we have some inkling of what we don’t know. We’re all searching for better words, better frameworks, better ways to teach a highly sensitive, emotionally charged subject. If slavery were simply a subject for the history books, it would be far easier to teach. But slavery is essentially a question of race and class; and it’s difficult to imagine any two issues with greater, and more problematic, presence in modern America than these two topics. If slavery is America’s tragic flaw, its greatest national sin, it is also the paradox that gave new definition to the concept of freedom. The conversations we have about our racialized history – whether in our classrooms, our living rooms, our museums, or our polling places – must also explore this organic, expanding definition of living life as free people. Slavery gives us much to lament and more than enough to regret, but the struggle to destroy it – in grand gestures and small acts alike – also gives us much to admire. If history is at root a record of choices and actions, our week’s journey will introduce us to many whose choices challenge us to think more about the significance of our own.
The little known site of Frederick Douglass's birth place along Tuckahoe Creek in Caroline County. In the woods at right is the ravine known as Kentucky, along which Douglass's grandmother's cabin stood.
Our first stop was Frederick Douglass’s birthplace on the banks of the Tuckahoe River, a landscape still uncannily similar to the terrain he sketched in his autobiographies. As Adam read from Douglass’s accounts, we absorbed the place, wondering at how the world must have appeared to a young slave child destined for a life dramatically different from that of his ancestors. The site is unmarked, but even unacknowledged history has a power of its own. Its very isolation has offered it some protection from expanding suburbanization, preserving a landscape that Douglass would have recognized, but at the price of ensuring that few will ever see it or understand its significance. Climbing back on the bus, we followed the road the six year old walked with his grandmother on another summer’s day, in August 1824. It took us to Wye, the seat of Lloyd family power, and Douglass’s first real encounter with the meaning of slavery.
Wye House, home to 13 generations of the Lloyd Family in Talbot County, where Frederick Douglass lived as a boy between 1824 and 1826.
After a brief picnic in the shade of a tremendous oak overlooking the small “Captain’s House” that was Douglass’s home while here on one side and the Chesapeake Bay that embodied the freedom for which he yearned on the other, Adam led us in a discussion of Douglass’s autobiographies. Afterwards we began our tour of the estate by walking down to see the “Red House” that once housed the Lloyds’ overseer, Mr. Sevier, and then trekking over to the Great House. The cordial Mrs. Mary Tilghman greeted us kindly at her front door and quickly began to tell us the tales of the many significant historic artifacts her family has collected over the centuries. Every item in sight was capable of eliciting a story from our gracious host, who was more than willing to share them. Stepping through the front doors of this opulent manor house was akin to leaping back into the 17th or 18th century. The library, though not quite so elegantly furnished, was the real treasure trove for a history nerd like myself and the last stop on our tour of the house. Our next stop was the Orangerie, a greenhouse-like building built for the express purpose of growing, you guessed it, oranges (and lemons). It is a very rare example of this type of building and boasted, of all things, a central heating system. We ended our tour of the estate in the family cemetery, the final resting place of thirteen generations of Lloyds.
The a cappella group Sombarkin (L–R: Lester Barrett Jr., Karen Sommerville, Jerome McKinney) perform slave spirituals at the site of the Wye Slave Quarters.
Once again under the shade of that gigantic oak (could it have been here since Douglass’s time?), we were blessed to hear the beautifully chilling sounds of the vocal trio Sombarkin. Their voices carried the Negro spirituals across the very land where Frederick Douglass came to live as a young boy, and learned the harsh truth of his circumstance. I cannot possibly adequately express how this amazing experience shook me to my core.
The group on steps of the Easton courthouse where Frederick Douglass gave his famous speech in 1878.
A mere thirteen miles from the Wye House, we soon stood on the Talbot County Courthouse green. It was here that, after his escape plans were discovered, Frederick Douglass was jailed. And it was here that he returned, many years later, to speak of abolition to a crowd of both blacks and whites alike. Today we are met by leaders of The Frederick Douglass Memorial Action Coalition (aka “Fred’s Army”) to discuss a proposed memorial for Douglass that has met with opposition. The memorial would lie not fifty feet from one erected to commemorate the “Talbot Boys,” confederate soldiers from Talbot county who fought in the Civil War. Apparently, there is some concern that the Douglass memorial would overshadow that of the “Talbot Boys” in size and stature. Still, the Coalition is unflinching in its determination to honor this great man who has been recognized so little.
Dr. Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and leading authority on the history of slavery in America delivers the keynote address to the group in Easton.
After a classic Eastern Shore dinner at Easton’s Tidewater Inn, we leaned back in our chairs to listen to a man who has made his life’s work the recovering of stories of those who carved out their own interpretations of freedom under slavery’s shadow. Professor Ira Berlin, one of the nation’s greatest historians of slavery, and his wife Martha graciously drove down from College Park to spend the evening with us. Professor Berlin eloquently reminded us that “history is not about the past; it’s about arguments we have about the past.” These arguments help us better understand our own age, and chart a way toward a future that draws from the best of the past and honestly confronts the worst. We’ve traveled far today in time. Tomorrow we strike out across the bay.
—JASPER COLT & JILL OGLINE
Click here for a gallery of more photos from Day 1.
A Chesapeake Journey: From Slavery to Freedom