Fancestor

“…the history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest….” Howard Zinn, A People’s History 1980 “There seems to be something willful, something almost luxurious in your desire to feel ashamed of the past.” -Duncan Campbell Scott, Conversations With a Dead Man by Mark Abley 2013      A hundred years after the fact, on the so-called “civilized” east coast of 1879, the Sullivan/Clinton Expedition was considered a patriotic, ancient military campaign by the time General Tecumseh Sherman took the platform to give his memorial speech; in front of the adoring centennial crowd in upstate New York. After the Civil War, military men and armchair historians enjoyed a sort of heyday, bringing the musket, tomahawk and scalping knife back into parlors and auditoriums of genteel society. Men like Rev. Charles Rockwell, Sam Eager and James Quinlan, joined more scholarly, yet flawed, intellects like William L. Stone and F...

  “Before quitting the scene of his brutal butchery, looking first in at one window, then at the other.”-George J Mastin       Now we stand before the second canvas. Each canvas looks like a different sign painter tackled it. This artist’s hand is more skilled. It is an interior scene, the dying young George, the baby is draped in his sister’s arms. Streams of red paint run down his creamy white bedclothes. His head is gently cradled,(Christ like) by Helen Holmes, standing safely behind the locked raised panel door. Julia and Helen’s eyes implore each other, over John Van Nest’s body propped against the wall. For the moment they are safe. But wait! Bill’s still there, LOOK! Behind the window- again the racist, rolling white, google eyes, and obscene grin, luridly intruding into the room, seeking more victims, phallic spear raised……   Helen Holmes (victim) sworn: “I was at the house of John G. Van Nest the night when he and his wife and chi...

“As I sat myself down by the side of my mother, I began to tell her of the pains and miseries, the hard usages and ill treatments to which I had passed through, until the clock struck the hour of ten, and I retired to rest and fell in the arms of sleep and began to dream of the tortures and torments to which I had passed…..”   -Austin Reed The Life and Confessions of a Haunted Convict       In the late 1840’s a tailor and aspiring showman from Genoa, New York, by the name of George J. Mastin would pick up an old Daily Cayuga Tocsin and be reminded of a crime so horrific it defied comprehension. A perfect family in a tidy house along the lake behind a picket fence in the moonlight, was senselessly butchered by a “insane, negro madman.” Mastin remembered the case well. Suddenly he saw it very clearly—fear could be monetized—murder as entertainment. Where others saw unspeakable tragedy, better left forgotten, Mastin saw profit in reliving the tragedy. Wh...

  “William’s aunt was raving crazy but she never hurt anyone. She got well before she died. Sidney Freeman [Bill’s uncle] got crazy in prison. He never hurt anyone; neither of them ever stole anything when crazy. Sidney was in prison for stealing. It is said he was put in wrongfully.”- Sally Freeman (Bill’s mother)    When a Monticello jury found C.W. Hardenbergh, guilty of murder in 1842, the defense appealed, citing “traditionary insanity,” or one’s “crazy ancestors” as explanation and viable proof of the legal insanity of the accused. It didn’t work with C. W. Hardenbergh; but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work with William Freeman. Seward pointed out that William Freeman’s own mother had admitted under oath that many of her relations had their battles with the mind.        Atty. Gen. Willis Hall had done his homework in Monticello (which ever John Van Buren sat at the defense table) and Seward benefitted. Seward would leave no stone untur...

“Never did the word of God appear more precious to any one than it did to Jacob [Jack Hodges.] In reply to my questions respecting his interest in Scriptures, he said, “Master, if you will believe me, I have come into my cell at night, and setting my supper on my cot, I have taken my Bible and become so much engaged in reading and meditating upon its truths, that I wholly forgot my meal, till I saw it untouched in the morning.”- Rev. Ansel Doane Eddy, Black Jacob 1842     “I asked Freeman if he could read.”   local merchant Ira Curtis told the jury. “He said he could. Rev. Austin a clergyman of this village came into the cell where we were. He took up a testament that was laying there, opened it, and handed it to Freeman and asked him to read it. He undertook to do so, and commenced by repeating the words, “O’ Lord Jesus Christ Almighty, mercy Moses……” and continued in that way, but sometimes using words that I could not understand and which I doubt were to be f...

“Yes Captain, but your enthusiasm has made you forget your glass tower…”- Rev. Charles Rockwell, Sketches of Foreign Travel and Life at Sea 1842     Finally something clicked in Bill’s head. With his right arm out of commission, he gave up, ran towards the stable, stole Mrs. Wyckoff’s horse and disappeared into the moonlit night. The daughter, Julia VanNest, her brother Peter Van Nest, and Helen Holmes all escaped unscathed, due to the bravery of Mrs. Wyckoff. Without her valor the bloody scene would’ve been much worse. As Bill told many, he had “only just begun his work.” The first men to come upon the scene were so shaken they couldn’t speak. County sheriffs, hard, grizzled lawmen and county doctors who’d seen it all, hadn’t witnessed anything like this since the war.      Mrs. Wyckoff’s horse was old and slow, but from years of riding other people’s stock, Bill was an excellent horseman. He put his heels into the horse’s belly and reined him north...

     I’m ironed in the wagon, right hand is of no use, jolting down that bumpy road back through Syracuse. To the lake we travel to the waiting crowd, they say I killed a little boy but I just don’t see how. Sat at the widow’s table, ate a piece of cake washed it down with good strong tea, we all can make mistakes. Why don’t we just start over? Wipe another slate, clean the blood off all the knives, lick the gravy plate. Now that I’ve been paid, it’s time to celebrate!   “I recollect finding the horse. I lived at the foot of Owasco Lake at the time. I came down towards Auburn and found Mrs. Wyckoff’s horse near New Guinea. He was just getting up. I looked at him and then came to Auburn and I went back and took him home. There was blood on the halter. There was mud on the horse. Horse was old and seemed to be tired. I think he fell near the sluice way, from the appearance of the ground.”- Harrison Mastin The Report of the Trial of William Freeman O...

    They put me in their iron boot, wedged shakes between my knees, hammered down with both their canes on either side of me. I took their jolly recklessness to mean that I’d been caught, in between the sinking ship and the ticking clock. My horse was dead, I mean to say, I didn’t think to ask, he always said he’d ride again as soon as three days passed. “The prisoner traces a divided lineage.” explained Henry Seward, addressing the court in the William Freeman trial.   “On the paternal side his ancestry is lost among the tiger hunters on the Gold Coast of Africa, while his mother constitutes a portion of the small remnant of the Narragansett tribe. Hence it is held that the prisoner’s intellect is to be compared with the depreciating standard of the African, and his passions with the violent and ferocious character erroneously imputed to the Aborigines”   “The tiger hunters of Africa” and the “ferocious Aborigines,” followed the “delicate state,” a...

“I didn’t say I love you because you’re black, or I love you because you’re white or I love you because……….you’re from Japan….”- Donald Trump, campaign speech Phoenix, Az., Aug. 22, 2015 “….Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came….” @realDonaldTrump tweet July 14, 2019 “Send her back! Send her back!”- crowd chant, North Carolina Trump Rally July 17, 2019 “I disagree with [the chant] it. But again I didn’t say that.” -Donald Trump July 18, 2019 Dr. Thomas Spencer sworn By John Van Buren Atty. Gen: Q.   Do you think there is an expression in the mouth? A. I should think a negro’s mouth and lips were as expressive as his eyes. But as a general rule the eye is most expressive. Q. Speaking metaphorically, as you have, does the mind have a nose? A. I have not studied bumpology sufficiently to answer that question. Q. Has the mind any mouth? A. I do not know as it has. Q. Was Parad...

   “I’m the darnedest fool of a great big family. Mixed all up like a plate of hash. Listen for a minute with your kind attention. I’ll tell you all about it, I will by gosh.”- Maude S. Miller, (my grandmother) unpublished diary 1913     So here I go to battle with a head upon my stick, a squinty little scowling face holding up his dick. A hammer made of good cast steel and real fine work at that, you couldn’t find a better tool for cracking a white man’s back. Old Lady was the first to fall and then I paused to pray, over by the picket fence, just sawing on my way.    Now, the anonymous family unit comes front and center—suspended in time and space—waiting for history to wash over them. My grandmother’s little ditty reveals a mindset I heard repeatedly as I was growing up. “We’re mutts.” my mother would say, if I asked “what are we?” The dismissive response wasn’t even close to the truth.The tangle of blood lines, though long and twisted, we...

   “After he [Freeman] was whipped the second time, he came into my office where I was,— crying; said he had been flogged severely; that a hole had been cut between his ribs, so that he could lay the end of his fingers in it. He did not appear to be deaf at the time. He said the flogging pained him so in the night that he could not sleep. His capacity was very limited.”- William P. Smith (foreman) The Report of the Trial of William Freeman      When Bill Freeman wasn’t ploughing fields, sawing wood, driving cows, toting laundry or attending the Wyatt trial, he was obsessing over getting paid for the five years he’d unjustly spent in prison. That “monomaniacal” thought process that Seward, and his expert witnesses would refer to in the Wyatt trial, was but a solitary symptom, in a myriad of conditions used to describe the “insane” individual in the 1840’s. Mad, lunatic, crazy, brute, imbecile, ignorant, feeble, and fool were a few of the others. T...

    “Unlike most negro convicts, he [William Freeman] never became in any degree reconciled to his condition. He repeatedly asserted his innocence to the constables, justice, and jailer, before, and to the keepers of the prison after his conviction, and vainly urged his release.”- Dr. Bigelow The Report of the Trial of William Freeman WH Seward addressed the court: “The prisoner [Henry Wyatt] is accused of murder. The law says, keep away, hold out no fear or hope. You have heard that for seeking his liberty he was scourged 15, 30, 60, 90; more stripes than a fellow convict had the feeling to count. He has been treated as he ought for his crime; but it is too great a power, that the instruments of the law should pursue and persecute…….The expression here was calculated to produce fear.”       William Freeman didn’t go to the courthouse that last day for the closing arguments in the Wyatt trial. He’d given up trying to hear what was being s...