A GREAT AMERICAN HORSEMAN

This story begins with the Civil War---its causes and its aftermath. In 1877, after serving two terms as president, Ulysses S. Grant and his family embarked on a diplomatic tour of the world, meeting the leaders of many nations. On one stop, he visted the “Iron Chancellor” of Germany, Otto von Bismarck. “You are so happily placed in America that you need fear no wars,” opined the mousta-chioed Bismarck when the two men sat down together---for in Bismarck’s view, Germany was a country beset on all sides by rivals. “What seems so sad to me about your last great war was that you were fighting your own people.”

“But it had to be done,” Grant replied.

“Yes,” said Bismarck. “You had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.”

“Not only save the Union,” said Grant, “but destroy slavery.”

The German was incredulous. “I had supposed, sir, that the Union was the real sentiment---the dominant sentiment,” said Bismarck.

“No,” replied Grant. “I felt---we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves---that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain on the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle. …. The existence of slavery would always mean the germs of new rebellion. We had to destroy it. We were fighting an enemy with whom we could not make peace. No convention, no treaty, was possible---only destruction.”

MISSOURI ROOTS

Tom Bass was born an enslaved person on the Hayden Plantation in Boone County, Missouri, in the heart of a region that still styles itself “little Dixie.” Slaveholders from Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia were its settlers; they who grew hemp and tobacco. In 1860, when Tom Bass was 1-year-old, enslaved people made up no less than a quarter of the county’s population. Although during the Civil War, Missouri was officially a border state and never joined the Confederacy, Boone County was strongly pro-Confederate and pro-slavery.

The birth of a baby among the enslaved population on a Missouri plantation was in no way remarkable. Thanks to the close oversight by white owners, parentage was rarely in doubt, and babies were commonly named not by their parents but by their owner, who would then add the child to their inventory of possessions.

Tom Bass’s mother, Cornelia Gray, was Black and enslaved. His father was white: William Bass, the son of plantation founder Eli Bass. Soon after Cornelia gave birth to his son, William Bass married a white woman. When emancipation came four years later, the Bass slaves were given the choice to either stay or leave; Cornelia took the opportunity to find work in St. Louis. Little Tom was raised at Hayden by her parents, Presley and Eliza Gray. A quiet boy with wide-set, intelligent eyes, Tom never slept in his father’s house, but lived with his grandparents and their 14 other children in the one-room cabin where he had been born. As was common in that time and culture, William Bass never denied that Tom was his son, but he never accorded him special privileges either.

LIMITS OF FREEDOM

Before and during the Civil War, slaves frequently ran away, at least 100,000 of them via the network of secret routes and safe houses set up by abolitionists and sympathizers known as the “underground railroad.” In addition, during colonial times, slaves sometimes gained freedom through manumission (whereby an owner freed his slaves), which resulted, even in the antebellum South, in the growth of scattered communities of free former slaves.

Nonetheless, Missouri historian Rose Nolen notes that “The few free Black men and women throughout the state fared little better in the matter of personal freedom under Missouri law than those that were held in slavery. A series of repressive laws