PART TW0- THE TWO HUNDRED YEARS WAR CHAPTER SEVEN- THE BENT OVER SLAVE

      “Female prisoners were housed separately, but not separate enough…..They would catcall to the men and attempt liaisons…..The utmost vulgarity, obscenity and wantonness, characterizes their language their habits, and their manners. Their bestial salacity, in their visual amours, is agonizing to every fiber of delicacy and virtue.” And of the insane inmates the ex-lawyer offered a dismal observation. “Poor creatures. Their histories would fill an octavo.”-  William Coffey, Inside Out; or the interior view of the New York State Prison 1823

    The not so coded language of the time regarding Indians, blacks (both slave and free), as well as women and the mentally ill, belies a predisposition on the part of those doing the writing, to always place themselves on the periphery, in the role of reactionary. If genocide of the Indian, racism, and sexism existed it was merely as a justifiable, direct response to the other’s harmful actions. The offending party’s bothersome existence (like Richard Jennings’) eventually brought pain and punishment onto themselves; through their own activities, and annoying habits. If a woman looked good she was “asking for it.” If a black man or woman sat down after working dawn to dusk in the fields, they were lazy. If the Indians were to be exterminated, their lands seized for development, it was because of their savage nature. Refusal of conversion to Christian agrarianism brought displacement and death for the natives. Get on board, or get out the way. 

      If blacks remained enslaved on Thomas Jefferson’s estate it was “for their own good.” The founder of the Republic did not want to “release members of his own family” into the wilds of this free society (he was helping codify) without sharpening their claws for battle. Thomas Jefferson, (just like Texas newspaper man John Peterson Osterhout) felt the institution of slavery was basically altruistic, protecting charges from that cruel free world. It was the white man’s patriotic, paternal, “Manly,” duty to maintain and protect chattel-slavery—for the good of the defenseless blacks. In other words keep African Americans poor, illiterate and generationally dependent on white patrician authority. I know Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays gave birth to modern America. Maybe chattel-slavery and “Jeffersonian thought” (justifying it) gave birth to Freud, Bernays and by default, oxycontin, the Sacklers and Perdue pharma.

    Conservative economists in 1819 recognized the slaves invaluable, and crucial position, as “property,” within the fragile U.S. economy; not wanting to challenge the status-quo, and risk depression in the upset, if freedom somehow loomed. As always, for women (especially those of color), it was much worse. If men got drunk, raped, abused or even murdered women, it could easily be laid at the pretty feet of the victim. As a GOP Missouri lawmaker Rep. Barry Hovis put it recently, as he moved to deny female rape victims access to abortions, “Most…rapes were not the gentlemen jumping out of the bushes that nobody had ever met….most of them were date rapes or consensual rapes…”  What defense did a poor “gentleman” have, when confronted with the “bestial salacity and visual amours,” of the wicked female? And what exactly is “consensual rape?” Whatever the consequences, the fragile fabric of society had to be protected at all costs, by the guardians at the gate—the white man. This slide into villainy didn’t happen over night. America took centuries to get it just right. 

     

    My great……grandfather Isaac Jennings, son of Gideon and Sophia Carpenter Jennings, moved to Montgomery just after the hangings of the murderers of his uncle Richard. When his  wife Jane Jessup gave birth to their first born Francis Clark and died, Isaac remarried the local Montgomery school teacher Phoebe Lay, having eight more children. Phoebe Lay would head up the faculty of the new red brick Academy Building on Clinton Street—the same building where my both grandparents worked as janitor, and cook, where I went to elementary school and ended up in jail. Francis Clark Jennings married Ruth Ann Houston. Ruth Ann’s family were the lineage my mother’s sister Lillian Suydam would have to follow, in order to be accepted into the racist, right wing, Daughters of the American Revolution. Like me, Aunt Lil couldn’t find any record of the Jennings on the Revolutionary muster rolls in New York. Unlike my late aunt’s maternal kin, we Osterhouts are well documented killers of both Indians and the British. It wouldn’t take much digging to get my secret decoder ring and bloody revolutionary badge. The S.A.R. is another club membership I will pass on pursuing.

    William Henry Seward was twelve years younger than his cousin Isaac Jennings, and doesn’t seem to be the only one looking to leave Goshen. My line of Jennings kin, also put Goshen and Sugar Loaf behind them, moving a few miles northwest to Montgomery; distancing themselves both physically and emotionally from the Sewards—abandoning the Teeds entirely. 

     Isaac Jennings bought property on the edge of the village, down by the Wallkill River, bordering what would become Riverside Cemetery and a small housing development of Browns, Coles, Monroes and Snyders. A short Montgomery back street still bears the Jennings name. I could follow this branch in the Jennings tree, through mercantile businesses, appointments to the bench, the formation of the Montgomery Volunteer Fire Department……only for their descendants to lose the family house to the Locks and most of the money in the depression. They worked hard, had kids, went to war, made money, went broke, and eventually moved away, scattering across the West Virginia, and Virginia foothills. My uncle Lee Lay Jennings once took me to visit Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he lived. It was closed. His one son Lay Jennings was born with severe mental and physical birth defects and (like me) would never have children. Told by the doctors Lay would not live, he’s a year older than me, and still kicking. Another tough Jennings. My uncle Lee Lay and Aunt Katherine’s family are the withered tip of our Jennings branch. No more buds will sprout bearing the Jennings name.  

   To continue the genealogical journey through the alien Jennings would be of no more interest, or importance, than any other white middle class family, spreading out in small town America. We had our good times and bad. The stately, red brick, Jennings house in Montgomery that was loss to debt in the 1920’s, changed hands many times, yet still remains in good shape, just across “Ward’s Bridge.” Rumored to have been a stop on the underground railroad in Isaac Jennings’ time, I’ve found nothing to bolster this theory, other than the family connection to abolitionists William H. and his wife Frances Seward. It’s a history I can take some pride in, but what insight would it provide?

   Instead, I’ve chosen to continue to follow the historical figure cousin William Henry Seward, and three not so well known intra-historical, African American criminals—John “Jack” Hodges, and the soon to be introduced—William Freeman and Austin Reed. These three black individuals hopefully will provide experiences than are not so easily compartmentalized as those in my tree. Black history, convict history, is very different than my alien history. Both sides of my family enjoyed (in the overall scheme of things) an entitled position that I can’t deny, but can leave in its proper context, while exploring elsewhere. Concentrating on the perspective of others, whose family narratives parallel my own, emanating from prisons, the burned-over district of western New York, a ghetto with the name of “New Guinea,” and The House of Refuge juvenile reformatory in New York City, I hope to explore a different perspective. Cultural appropriation? Maybe.