The incident was, in many ways, a metaphor for this period in southern history. Harry lived on the ground floor of the building, just as other slaves constituted what slavery advocates dubbed the “mudsill” of southern society:
In social systems there must be a class to do the mean duties to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, refinement, and civilization. It constitutes the very mud-sills of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on the mud-sills.
That “other class,” the white students, lived in the two upper floors, just as all whites supposedly lived in the South.
The building, like the nation, was seriously flawed from a design standpoint. It contained combustibles but no fire escapes and only one stairwell—a stark metaphor for the federal constitution, which permitted slavery but provided no peaceful means to bring it to an end. If a fire started in the building, it would almost certainly result in serious bodily injury or death to many of the building’s inhabitants, just as would a national civil war. Like any fi re, all that was necessary for nightmarish destruction was a heat source. And America was getting hotter by the day.
A few years after Howard College was established in 1841, Alabama Baptists had initiated the separation of all Southern Baptists from their northern brethren over the issue of slavery. Schisms were also occurring in other denominations, foreshadowing what would happen to the country. The split of the Baptists preceded the secession crisis in the early 1850s caused by sectional conflict over whether the California Territory acquired in the Mexican War should be admitted to the Union as a “free” state. The South did not secede at that time, but only because of a political compromise that, among other things, strengthened the Federal Fugitive Slave Act and thereby facilitated the recovery of southern slaves who had escaped to the North, many with the help of religiously inspired anti-slavery activists. Nevertheless, sectional tensions continued to increase due to activists repeatedly interfering with the enforcement of the act; and such interference was further encouraged by the publication in 1852 of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous literary indictment of slave owners and slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of whose no forgotten was A Tale of Life Among the Lowly; or Pictures of Slavery In The United States of America.
In the book’s opening chapter, a slave owner who is heavily in debt negotiates payment of his major creditor, a crass slave broker, by offering to exchange his most faithful slave, Uncle Tom. But the slave broker also wants a second slave, a mixed race boy of four or five years of age named Harry, whose mother also belongs to the slave owner. The broker is interested in Harry because he has a buyer who wants to “buy up handsome boys to raise for the market” and sell them “for waiters, and so” to “open door, wait, and tend.” The slave owner is initially reluctant to sell a child away from his mother, claiming to be “a humane man.” But the broker replies that it was not the same “as if it was white folks, that’s brought up in the way of ’spectin’ to keep their children and
wives, and all that. (Racial slur), you know, that’s fetched up properly, ha’n’t no kind of ’spectations of no kind; so all these things comes easier.” Under the pressure of his financial situation, the slave owner ultimately agrees to sell Harry and Uncle Tom, who was married to one of his other slaves. This, in turn, sets in motion a heart-rending chain of events that leads Harry and his mother to escape to Canada and Tom to his death.
One commentator noted the immediate northern popularity and financial success of Stowe’s book and predicted that other similarly themed works of literature would soon emerge, increasing abolition sentiment and thereby accelerating social justice. As a consequence, he predicted, the “Union itself will become again periled by this tremendous revival of anti-slavery sentiment, and the toil and up-hill work that resulted in the Compromise Measures will go for nothing, and the battle of the Union and the Constitution will have to be fought over again.”
Stowe’s portrayal of slave owners as brutal, unfeeling dicta-tors incensed many in Alabama and across the South who preferred to characterize slavery as a heaven-sent, biblically sup-ported institution designed to improve the lot of an inherently inferior race through job training, economic support, and evangelization. Slavery was “as much an institution of Heaven as marriage,” wrote one Alabama Baptist. Several public relations strategies were developed to respond to Stowe. One was to highlight acts of discrimination against free blacks in the North. Alabama newspapers, for example, reported the enactment in several mid-western states of laws prohibiting blacks from moving and residing there. They also gave voice to crackpot “scientific” theories proclaiming the inherent mental inferiority of blacks. These were, wrote a Mobile editor, “one of the natural defences [sic] of slavery” because they undermined the postulate of abolitionists that “all men are created equal.”
Like their southern brethren, Alabama editors also publicized incidents of charitable acts by slave owners toward their slaves. Following the report of one such act, a Virginia newspaper declared:
These are notorious and recorded facts, and can be proved if denied; and there are many such occurrences among our colored people which might be made public to put to shame the exaggerated fictions of Mrs. Stowe and her adherents, if there was any possibility for substituting in the Northern mind fact for fiction, reason for imagination, and charity in the place of sectional prejudice.
The possibility that these stories might fall on deaf ears did not stop Alabama
editors from continuing to publish this type of evidence throughout the 1850s, but the heat of animosities only increased as a result of unnecessary political overreaching by pro-slavery interests in Congress.
Just months before the fi re at Howard College, Democrats in the United States Congress inflamed sectional tensions even further by adopting bills establishing the Kansas and Nebraska Territories and, in the process, repealing a prior political compromise—the 1820 Missouri Compromise—which had shielded from the spread of slavery all territory in the American West north of the 36° 30’ parallel. As the bills that brought about this fateful change were making their way through Congress, the Alabama press warned that they would restore sectional difficulties and reported intense outrage in the North. A Mobile editor also observed that the repeal of the compromise was actually of little practical benefit to southern slave owners, claiming that “the territory in dispute is totally valueless to the South” and could be used “by no process” by slaveholders. On the other hand, he continued, the repeal would “rearm the north against the south, and, by consequence, excite within the south those suspicions which will be a bar to any subsequent understanding between the two sections. The north will think that the south is always waiting for an opportunity to assail the north; and the latter will think it must be always acting on the offensive against the South."
When the bills were nonetheless adopted with the unanimous support of Alabama’s congressional delegation, then signed into law by Pres. Franklin Pierce in May 1854, that offensive was on. Alabamians read in their newspapers that obstruction of the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act increased, anti-slavery activists mobilized to emigrate to the Kansas Territory, and a new political party, the Republican Party, was formed. A little known forty-five-year-old Illinois lawyer and one-term congressman (1847–1849), Abraham Lincoln, resolved to re-enter politics and seek a seat in the US Senate against an opponent supported by the Illinois Democrat who had sponsored this ill-advised legislation, US Sen. Stephen Arnold Douglas. Lincoln’s goal was to restore the barrier against slavery that had stood for decades. Anti-slavery activists theorized that preventing the extension of slavery would eventually lead to the termination of the institution by slave owners in Alabama and elsewhere once the available land under cultivation was exhausted of nutrients and plantation agriculture was, therefore, no longer profitable.
To attract attention, Lincoln challenged Douglas to de-bates in Illinois over the merits of the legislation. Their first of several celebrated debates occurred in October 1854, the same month as the fire at Howard College. The first was in Springfield, Illinois, on October 4, and the second was in Peoria on the evening of October 16, the day after the fire. In his three-hour address at Peoria, Lincoln took a very conservative approach toward the issue of slavery, the same that would characterize the first year of his later presidency. He did not advocate the abolition of slavery in the South but was adamantly opposed to its spread elsewhere. Nonetheless, he did not mince words over the immorality of slavery. It was, he declared, a “monstrous injustice” and the epitome of despotism, founded as it was in the “selfishness of man’s nature.”
Lincoln’s address was not reported in Alabama, but Alabama slave owners had heard it all before. Slavery was a sin, and they were all sinners. Slaves, however, were valuable property, as demonstrated by an estate sale that occurred that year in Huntsville, where 285 men, women, and children had been sold at auction for $207,195, an average of more than $700 each. According to the enthused editor of the Huntsville Southern Advocate, “a young man and wife having no children, sold for $3,005; many boys and girls, from 11 to 20 years old, brought from $1,500 to $1,700; two twin brothers, 15 years old, sold for $3,700; a brother, 16 years, sold for $1,700, and a sister of the same, 16 years of age, for $1,600.” The local newspaper in Marion similarly reported the sale of two slaves there “on the block for cash at enormous prices.” Thus, because of greed and other factors, resolving this raging controversy by the voluntary emancipation of the slaves was a pipe dream. Southern extremists, such as Montgomery lawyer William Lowndes Yancey, who like Lincoln had been out of politics for some years, returned to the public arena to again advocate secession as the only possible remedy. “Nothing can be truer,” Yancey wrote, than that “a house divided against it-self cannot stand.” This was three years before Lincoln would use the same biblical expression in the same context.
But not even Alabamians were ready for that, at least not yet. The slavery-friendly Democratic Party still controlled the presidency (Pierce would be succeeded by James Buchanan, a Pennsylvania Democrat), the Congress, and, as would be demonstrated in the March 1857 Dred Scott decision, the US Supreme Court. Hence, until secession gained more support, southern slave owners would have to co-exist with northerners and with the vast, growing slave population living among them.
White Alabamians, like other white southerners, had lived for decades in fear that the slaves would someday violently revolt to obtain their freedom and revenge for centuries of exploitation. Th is was especially true in Black Belt counties like Perry County, where whites were greatly outnumbered by slaves. As historian Wayne Flynt has noted, one tool used by southern society to avoid a race war was the selective instruction of the slaves in the principles of Christianity intended to inculcate faithfulness, obedience, and subservience. The Apostle Paul, they reminded them-selves and the slaves, admonished “servants” to “obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eye service, as men-pleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God.” An Alabama editor warned that “[t]o secure the fidelity, docility and contentment of servants, all masters, religious or otherwise, would do well to have [their slaves] well taught in the precepts of the Bible. No fear of personal reward or punishment, no love of approbation or preferment can be half so effectual as a right conscience, a high sense of obligation to God, and the hope of eternal salvation.”
This indoctrination process, wrote a disappointed anti-slavery correspondent to an abolition organ in the North, was too effective. Christianity had made blacks “fit for slavery” by teaching them “patience, contentment, and fidelity” and to await “a salvation that is to take effect after death.” Proving this point, just a few months before Harry’s death, an Alabama newspaper published a letter from a Mobile slave, who was traveling with his owner’s family in New York, in which the slave contrasted his happy lot with that of the overworked and underpaid white and black laborers in the North: “Some people wonder that I should go back to Alabama, and deem it very strange that I do not avail myself of the offer of what they call freedom.” But, he concluded, “I would not exchange conditions with them for all the bribes and charms Abolition-ism could offer me. What has ever been denied you or me that we wanted? Nothing, absolutely nothing, and God knows my masters have ever been my best friends.”
But just in case this appearance of contentment was feigned, slave owners were quick to severely punish any acts of violence by slaves against whites and did so in a very public way to send a message to other slaves that a violation of the scriptures would not be tolerated. Less than sixty days before Harry’s fiery death, a Montgomery County slave was burned at the stake after allegedly killing his owner. This mode of punishment, wrote the Montgomery Journal, was justifiable and necessary as “an example to check the growing and dangerous insubordination of the slave population.”
There may have been any number of motivations behind the manner in which Alabama Baptists responded to the death of the slave, Harry, following the fire at Howard College. Gratitude was certainly a factor. In addition, in his speech at Peoria on the day after the fire, Lincoln declared that “the great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can their sensibility to pain. These sympathies in the bosoms of the southern people, manifest in many ways, their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro.” But the manner in which Harry was remembered suggests that it may have also been designed in part as a message to encourage other slaves to imitate Harry in terms of loyalty to, and protection of, whites, while at the same time attempting to undermine northern criticism and counter the image of slave owners as abusive tyrants. Harry’s funeral service was held at a white Baptist church in Marion named Siloam, a word used in the Bible’s New Testament in connection with a miracle performed by Jesus restoring a blind man’s sight. After spreading mud over the man’s eyes, Jesus instructed him to rinse his eyes in the pool of Siloam at Jerusalem, after which the man could see for the first time. The college students saved by Harry appear to have washed in Siloam’s water. At least temporarily cured of moral blindness, they initiated a fundraising project to erect a monument to Harry, a tribute unprecedented in Alabama history up to that point. When the Alabama Baptist Convention conducted its annual meeting in December 1854—also at Siloam Baptist Church—a collection was taken up for the purpose of “uniting with the students” in this endeavor.
Erecting that monument, however, was not a priority for Baptist leaders. The focus was, instead, on raising the funds necessary to replenish the college’s endowment and to rebuild the building, which had also been the location of the college’s classrooms, as quickly as possible. Otherwise the college might close or move to another town. A boost was given when the Baptist president of the University of Alabama, Rev. Basil Manly Sr., resigned and its board of trustees selected his replacement and a new faculty, none of whom (it was said) were Baptists. The editor of the Baptist newspaper in Tuskegee giddily concluded that “God is causing all things to work together for good to Howard” by removing a “mighty magnet” that had “attracted the sons of Baptists to Tuscaloosa” and pointing “our brethren” to Howard “with an unerring finger.”
The dormitory building at Howard College was finally completed in the fall of 1856, but still no monument to Harry had been erected. Priorities appear to have changed, however, not long after the Livingston Messenger in late 1856 reported the discovery of a widespread conspiracy among several hundred slaves in West Alabama to revolt during the Christmas holidays. This news was followed in early 1857 by that of the murder of a slave owner in East Alabama and the burning at the stake of the alleged slave perpetrator in front of a crowd of 4,000 to 5,000 people, including other slaves. Finally, sufficient funds were amassed to have the monument prepared.
The artisan who produced it is unknown, as is the author of its inscriptions. At the time the local newspaper, the Marion American, described it as a “perpendicular marble shaft ten feet high, of quadrilateral figure. The brief, simple, and touching epitaph, a part on each side of the shaft, tells the simple narrative of a devotion as noble and as grand as any in the great annals of history.” It was erected with much fanfare in a ceremony conducted in conjunction with the 1857 Baptist State Convention. That ceremony took place in the Marion public cemetery on Sunday, April 10, 1857, a day selected, according to the Marion American, “for the convenience of the negroes who wished to witness the ceremony.” The weather was unusually cold, an extremely rare snow-storm having commenced that morning and continued into the afternoon. Snow is a biblical metaphor for cleansing from sin, but whether anyone saw this as a sign from God is unknown. The snow that fell at Marion, however, did not stick.
What the “negroes” in attendance were told during the ceremony is lost to history, but it was likely of the same tenor as the Marion newspaper’s tribute:
Harry was a boy who waited on the students, and by his faithful and courageous devotion, sacrificed himself to a horrible death. But for his efforts a large number of the students would have been burned to death. One of the first to discover the fire he ran from room to room waking up the sleeping students. Even then he would not leave, and thoughtless of himself, and reckless of danger, though the flames leaped all around him, and the walls were falling in, he would not leave while there was a life to save for others. He remained too long, and was himself enveloped in the flames, and burned to death. He exhibited a high humanity and courage which does honor, not only to his humble race, but to human nature itself, and his self-sacrificing devotion, and fidelity mark in letters of living light the reciprocal affections between the master and the servant.
The inscriptions on each side of the shaft emphasize these same themes. Rather than referring to Harry as a slave, he is called a “Servant of H[enry] Talbird, D.D., President of Howard College, who lost his life from injuries received while rousing the students, at the burning of the college buildings, on the night of October 15th, 1854, aged 23 years.” Consistent with Harry’s indoctrination regarding the biblical obligations of a slave, a second inscription states that he was “A consistent member of the Baptist Church [and] illustrated the character of a Christian servant ‘faithful unto death.’” Stressing that slaves should ignore the sirens’ song of abolitionists appealing to them to escape, a third inscription recalls that “when alarmed by the flames at midnight, and warned to escape for his life, replied: ‘I must wake the boys first,’ and thus saved their lives at the cost of his own.” The final inscription portrayed the monument as a “grateful tribute to his fidelity and to commemorate a noble act.”
Following the ceremony, the editor of the Alabama Baptist newspaper assured its readers that God would certainly remember Harry: “In a grave more truly honored than Napoleon or Caesar fills, the faithful HARRY sleeps, awaiting that summons which shall raise him to the dignity of a King and priest unto God forever!” The editor of the Marion newspaper published an account of the event—cited all over the country—and concluded with his own seemingly heartfelt tribute: “We have made several visits to the grave of this humble martyr, in the cause of humanity. We cannot look upon it without the involuntary tribute of a tear, to his memory.”
But northern abolitionists were skeptical. Th e Washington, DC, National Era, which had serialized Uncle Tom’s Cabin before it was published as a book, pointed out that Harry, “had he escaped [the fire] with his life,” would not have been accorded “the proprietorship of himself” by the young men who had paid for his monument. Similarly, a Pennsylvania editor observed that despite the ceremony in Harry’s honor, Harry was “one of that class” who the US Supreme Court had recently ruled in the Dred Scott case had no rights “a white man is bound to respect.” In other words, in their opinion the monument to Harry was a hollow gesture, actually a tribute to a misleading picture of the institution of slavery. In any event, that institution would be dead in less than a decade, in part due to the efforts of Abraham Lincoln.
Howard College is no longer in Marion, but the monument erected there in memory of Harry still stands. And that memory has long been a source of pride for white citizens of Marion, who were among the first to establish schools for the freed slaves after the Civil War. Th e same can perhaps be said for the students at Howard’s successor institution in Birmingham, Alabama, Samford University, which named a coffee shop at the college “Harry’s Place.” Although he certainly had no reason to anticipate this on that terrible night in 1854, Harry has become an unforgettable part of Alabama’s heritage as well as a role model for us all.