JACK'S LAST STAND

“Even the gloomy prison seemed a cheerful and happy place. I have great reason to bless this institution, and every stone in it.” -Jack Hodges, Black Jacob

      Two years after his release Jack Hodges would be within Rev. Ansel Eddy’s parish of Canandaigua, living in a rich white woman’s house, by the name of Harriet Martin. Archival letters of Frances Miller Seward indicate that the Sewards knew Mrs. Harriet Martin and probably Eddy. But I can find no mention in Frances’ correspondence of the black ex-convict now living in the Martin household.     

    You couldn’t ask for a better spokesperson for the efficacy of prison walls, silence, solitary and Sunday cells integral to the Auburn System. But remember, it’s not Jack speaking here, it’s Ansel Eddy. Published a year after Jack’s death, BLACK JACOB, a Monument of Grace, The Life of Jacob Hodges, An American Negro, is Rev. Ansel D. Eddy’s final word, a ventriloquism, stuck in the mouth of a corpse. Jack never did learn to write and it’s questionable that he ever knew how to read. The Reverend promised Jack he wouldn’t publish Black Jacob until after Hodges’ death. Who knows if Jack would have approved of the final edit.

     The chaplains Stanford, Dwight, Curtis, Fisk, Cadle, Cummings, Eddy, et al. never seem to have doubted Jack’s sincerity, or the positive results of their efforts at curative justice. Two Frenchmen, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, who took the grand tour of U.S. prisons in 1831, were not so easily convinced. Publishing their findings, they wondered, “…if chaplains could be deceived by inmate claims about reformation.” As Jennifer Graber puts it, “They argued that the political system could not have individual redemption as it’s primary goal.” But for the prison chaplaincy, operating alongside periodically despotic administrations, this remained not only the goal of clerics, but individuals like Jack Hodges were sterling examples of the success of their mission.      

    According to Rev. Eddy, Jack committed to memory the 51^st psalm, “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, thou God of salvation.” He would repeat this passage over and over, with the bible Rev. Jared Curtis had given him, open in his lap. He told everyone that this was proof positive of his reading ability. If we are to believe Rev. Ansel Eddy, Jack would rather, “read and meditate upon the truths” of the bible, than eat. Then, as now, a great emphasis was placed on the inmate admitting to, and taking full responsibility for his crimes. Jack Hodges had no problem admitting to the shooting of Richard Jennings and, even if he demurred from placing that pie shaped hole in Dick’s skull, he freely accepted  his complicity in the murder.  He was a “profane swearer,” and a murderer. 

    Jack Hodges became, once again another town’s “mascot,” involved in another, much larger conspiracy. This was what the state and the clergy wanted you to think the Auburn system produced—compliant harmlessness—like “Black Jacob.” 

       More than decade after his release from Auburn Prison, on Feb. 16, 1842, when asked on his deathbed if there was anything he needed or wanted, according to Eddy, Jack Hodges answered, “O, I want more grace in my heart.” Jack Hodges, humble to the end, wouldn’t live long enough to either refute, or confirm, Eddy’s quotes of pleas for “more grace,” or the broad characterizations of his conversion to literate Christianity— assuming Jack could actually read his own biography. At the time of BLACK JACOB’S publication, David Conklin had been dead for two years. This closes the book on all the Jennings murder conspirators. They were all dead….I think……

    Jack had served ten years in two prisons for the murder of Richard Jennings, not the twenty-one he had been sentenced to. In Auburn and Canandaigua he had resided at a seminary, then with a rich white woman, dying in the house of the County Sheriff. He would have been almost eighty years old at the time of his death. Little is written of the widow Mrs. Harriet Martin, but she was obviously well known within the growing religious temperance, tract society and abolitionist movements of the day. When her grand house was sold in 1841 to Ontario County Sheriff Myron Holley Clark, Jack Hodges remained with the Martin property. 

    Upon Jack Hodges’ death it would be Myron Clark’s daughter Charolette who paid for the plaque on Jack’s gravestone. Sheriff Clark would also go on to be elected governor of New York State in 1855. This makes four New York State governors, a U.S. President, uncounted clergy and a couple of Congressmen whom John Hodges either knew, or had intimately impacted his life—Dewitt Clinton, Martin Van Buren, William H. Seward, Myron H. Clark, Elam Lyndes, Gershom Powers, et al. Jack was obviously connected among white people right to the end.      

     The medical “dissection” ordered by Judge William W. Van Ness in 1819, also followed Jack Hodges into the grave. And just like his partner in crime, David Dunning, Jack’s body would be dug up a week after he was interred; just to prove he was in one piece and really dead. It was common practice at Auburn, and other prisons, to sell the unclaimed bodies of recently deceased inmates to medical societies and Jack’s black friends were wary of his final “white” resting place. Unbeknownst to Rev. Ansel Eddy, the small African American communities of New Guinea, Canandaigua, Cayuga and Ontario Counties, all knew Jack Hodges and were suspicious of his burial at the hands of Rev. Eddy’s white congregation. The black members of his extended family demanded that the body be dug up to prove he had not been sold for “dissection” by the church or the prison. A week later, Rev. Eddy’s hired grave diggers exhumed Jack Hodges’ corpse. Jack was found, just like Dunning, right where they had planted him, rotting peacefully..…in tact. 

        Even though Eddy writes that Jack, “never associated with the people of his own color, not because he was too proud, but because their ordinary habits of feeling and life did not at all correspond with his devotional desires and the current of his everyday habits and pursuits.” it’s a racist and false claim. Just like in Goshen, Jack Hodges kept his black and white communities separate. The whites were unaware of Jack’s black friends; while the blacks were more than conscious of Jack’s high powered white society connections. We’ll never know the identity of Jack’s “negro wench,” or her baby or the context of that relationship. There’s no record of any African Americans testifying on Jack’s behalf during the Goshen trials, or befriending him in prison. All Jack’s known connections are white and many are in positions of power. In Auburn and Canandaigua it seems the same—until Jack Hodges dies. Then his two communities come forward, separately, claim, memorialize and make sure Jack Hodges is in one piece for his travels to the beyond. 

Charolette Clark’s impressive bronze plaque attached to the obelisk reads: 

JACK HODGES- An African Negro, Born in Poverty and Ignorance, Early Tempted to Sin By Designing and Wicked Men, Once Condemned as a Felon, Converted by the Grace of God in Prison, Lived Many Years, A Converted and Useful Christian. Died Feb. 1842, In the Faith of the Gospel, About 80 years of Age.

   If we were to compare cemetery monuments in this alien history, the one planted over Jack Hodges in the Pioneer Cemetery, Canandaigua, New York rivals William H. Seward’s in Auburn and that of any other Osterhout or Jennings gravesite I can find. R.I.P. Jack.