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afrolumensproject central pennsylvania african american history for everyone ten years on the web 1997 - 2007 |
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New Book on John Brown,
and Events in Albany:
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Recent Letters from Jean Libby and other scholars |
| August 12,
2006 Jean Libby to "John Brown Scholars" list. New Book on John Brown:
Dear friends and
scholars of John and Mary Brown,
John Brown's
Family in California,
the newest
publication by Allies for Freedom will be first presented at the
Niagara Movement Commemoration in Harpers Ferry on August 18 -
20, 2006. The booksigning will take place on August 20, following
the walk to John Brown's Fort at dawn in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du
Bois and the civil rights pioneers and the services and concert
in the Free Will Baptist Church on the Storer College campus.
The book is in 8½ by 11 magazine format, 40
pages, and contains essays by April Halberstadt, director of the
Saratoga (California) Historical
Museum; Eric Ledell Smith, historian at the State Museum of
Pennsylvania; John M. Lawlor history professor at Reading Area
Community College; Louis M. DeCaro, Jr., biographer of John Brown
and editor of a new life and letters to be published in October
(International Publishers).
My own essays and
photos in the book date back to a cross-country train trip in 1976
and photographing direct descendants of John and Mary Brown
(Beatrice Keesey, Alice Keesey, age sixteen, and Jim Keesey, age
twelve) in their California home in December of that same year. The Keesey family's direct forbear was Annie Brown Adams, the same who
spent her sixteenth summer, 1859, at the Kennedy Farm in Maryland.
The resemblance of Annie and Alice at the same age is
breath-taking. Today, Alice Keesey McCoy is an active John Brown
scholar interested in the family relationships and historical
significance.
This new
publication is revised from a course reader that I made for a
California History Center one-unit Travel Class (yes, you do have
to write a report if you want academic credit). It has a driving tour
of sites associated with the family of John Brown, which includes
the entire civic center of the City of Saratoga, California, located
on the orchard owned by Ellen Brown and her husband Tom Fablinger,
adjacent to the one owned by Sarah Brown.
The heart of this
new publication is the search for family and identity, whether
in the archives of the United States or in the genealogy of the
descendants even in the genealogy of some slaveholders when that
provided explanation for African American family's forced
migration. In this case the remarkable providence is that an
original (1999) Allies for Freedom organizer, Judith Grevious Cephas,
in looking for documentation of rupture of the Grevious family from
Virginia to Kentucky, found that the slaveholder was the Taliaferro
family of Gloucester County. William Booth Toliver was put in
charge of the military rule at Charlestown during the imprisonment
and execution of John Brown. He was selected by Governor Wise
because of experience with slave insurrection in 1836, which
resulted in the expulsion of free African Americans from Gloucester
County. This research chain was initiated through a reference
in the work of the late Dr. Herbert Aptheker, in American Negro
Slave Revolts. The enginehouse for research is now on the Internet.
Lori Deal, a
descendant of Lucy Higgins (a progressive woman in Santa Clara,
California, who was a friend of Sarah Brown) began searching for
answers about her family, who had inherited a letter from John
Brown to his wife, Mary, written in 1854. As Lori searched for a location
to donate this letter to best serve the continuation of the ideas
of the abolitionist women of Santa Clara County (voting rights and
equality for all, including the new racial minority in California,
Asians) she decided upon The Bancroft Library at the University
of California, Berkeley.
One reason for her
decision was the online cataloging of their collection on the entire
university library system. Further, she extracted a promise from
the curator that Bancroft would cooperate with smaller local
institutions such as the Saratoga Historical Foundation to provide
information about their collections.
The Bancroft
Library could look at Kansas, where the letters of Mary Brown and
other Brown family members at the Kansas State Historical Society
are online in cooperation with Territorial Kansas, a smaller
historical entity with much expertise. We would like to encourage
a similar process in California.
For some years
several of the authors of John Brown's Family in California have
been working together to create a documents book about John Brown. Some of this begins anew, particularly the carpetbag
documents and analysis by Pennsylvanians Eric Ledell Smith and John
M. Lawlor. Meanwhile, the person who took the carpetbag from the
Kennedy Farm, CLIFTON W. TAYLUERE, a Maryland Confederate, has been
lurking in the margins of earlier histories, sometimes
misidentified [Villard) but mostly ignored, waiting for his proper
credit. It was he who donated "Sambos Mistakes" to the Maryland
Historical Society in Baltimore in 1883, with a long letter
describing the events of October 18. Scott Sherlock, a volunteer at
MHS wanting to publicize its treasures, has made a verbatim
transcription of "Sambos Mistakes" from John Brown's
handwriting. This was no mean feat, because the copy was in
reverse, John Brown having kept a carbon-type copy of the essay
written for the African American newspaper The Ram's Horn in 1848. Scott
did it with a laptop computer and a hand-held mirror from the handbag
of an MHS archivist.
Eric Ledell Smith
has put some preliminary information about Clifton Tayluere in
the carpetbag documents article, but a couple of Yankees can't
do him justice. He is a worthy subject for his own people--Scott Sherlock
and Dennis Frye come to mind--and there is enough in the MHS to
make another Civil War science fiction, Bill Forstchen. Ask Scott
to describe the numbers that Brown has written completely over a
large page. Numerology? Astronomy? Whatever it is, that
is another of the documents that Clifton Tayluere kept as souvenirs
(with permission from Jeb Stuart and Andrew Hunter) of the carpetbag
that he took for his journal, the Baltimore Clipper.
Before rushing off
to find the microfilm of the Clipper for the time of John
Brown's raid, be advised that there isn't one. The archivists
and historians in their wisdom microfilmed the Baltimore Sun
of October, 1859 but not the Clipper. I had the Clipper scanned
personally at the Maryland State Archives in 2001, but it needs
a better budget than that of a retired part-time teacher to be
sure it was done completely, and can be made public. I have made CD
copies of the scans for the State Museum of Pennsylvania and the
Maryland Historical Society, and of course my first resource, the
Western Maryland Room of the Washington County Free Library in
Hagerstown. Eric Ledell Smith has correlated the carpetbag
documents with these newspapers as well as the Dreer Collection at
the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the published records of
the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Mason Committee. John M.
Lawlor has correlated them with the records at the National Archives
and Records Administration, finding a different group of originals,
all taken from Brown at his capture on October 18.
Please enjoy
John Brown's Family in California in the spirit of inquiry and
identity that engendered it. It is available for ordering from
Allies for Freedom on our new (shared) ecommerce site which can
be approached via
www.alliesforfreedom.org or directly at
http://store.atozproductions.com Delivery will begin following
the booksigning in Harpers Ferry on August 20. ISBN
0-9773638-2-1.
My best regards --
see many of you next week!
Jean 1
August 13,
2006 "Hello Friend of the Underground Railroad History Project: Thanks for receiving this email from me. Some time ago you volunteered to receive emails regarding "clean-up days" at the Stephen and Harriet Myers Residence and this is one of those emails! I would like to alert you to two items:
--Paul Stewart" Thank you, Paul. Jean Libby 2 www.alliesforfreedom.org |
| Notes 1. Correspondence, Jean Libby to Afrolumens Project, 12 August 2006. 2. Correspondence, Jean Libby to Afrolumens Project, 13 August 2006. |
Original
material on this page copyright 2006 Afrolumens Project
The url of this page is http://www.afrolumens.org/ugrr/libby03.htm
This page was updated August 17, 2006.