Creative History

On September 19, 1738 a four foot tall man strode into the Burlington, New Jersey Quaker meeting house with a purpose.  The Quaker meeting house in Burlington was the largest building between there and Philadelphia, and on this day when the little man with the big ambition walked in, the meeting house was packed with hundreds of the most influential men and women--a veritable who’s who of Quaker religious and secular leadership, in the colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The diminutive man was a well known local eccentric named Benjamin Lay.  Some people, those of a more religious bent among the Quaker faithful, claimed that Benjamin Lay was a prophet like a modern day eighteenth century John the Baptist.  Others among the Quaker faithful, probably the majority, thought Benjamin Lay was nothing more than a local crackpot who was best to be avoided.  For his part, Benjamin Lay didn’t care what anyone thought--he was on a mission to abolish slavery on this Septe...

“A.P. Andrews of the Civil War Roundtable of Jackson, Mississippi and Dr. Laurin C. Post of San Diego State College, and other historians, say they have confirmed that Sylvester Magee was born in Carpet, N.C in 1841, that later he became a slave to Hugh Magee of the Dry Creek area of Covington County, Mississippi and that he fought in the Civil War for the Northern Army.”  ftrom the Monday May 2, 1966 edition of The Hattiesburg American . In 1966, on his supposed 125th birthday, Governor Paul B. Johnson, Mississippi’s first Governor who wasn’t a staunch segregationist or overt racist, declared May 29, 1966 to be Sylvester Magee day in honor of the Hattiesburg man who claimed to be America’s last living enslaved person, last surviving Civil War Veteran and the oldest living person in the history of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson the then President of the United States, a man known as a Civil Rights reformer in the 1960’s, personally wrote Mr. Magee a note of congratulations ...

  Under a sweltering equatorial sun, shackled around the neck and chained one to another at the ankles, on August 7, 1860 over 900 enslaved Africans were forced aboard the slave ship Erie docked near the mouth of the Congo River in west Africa. The imprisoned human cargo that had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, mostly children and young women, were led onto the ship at gunpoint and under the watchful eye of a thirty-four year old American slave trader originally from Portland, Maine (quite a distance from what would become the Confederate States of America) named Nathaniel Gordon. Writing for Scribner’s Magazine over forty years later in 1900 when mentioning the infamous slave trader Nathaniel Gordon in his scholarly article entitled, “The Slave Trade in America” historian John R. Spears would say of Gordon’s cargo aboard the Erie that, “Only 172 were men and 182 were women…Gordon preferred to carry children because they could not rise up to avenge his cruelties.” And l...