William Jefferson Hardin and the Ghost of Slavery

By Lawrence Woods

Early in his life, Hardin knew he was born a free person of color, and by the time he was twenty, he knew he had a more comprehensive education than most of the white men of his age. In the West, he actually looked French or Spanish, but he still was proud that he was of one-eighth African descent.
In 1850 Hardin was twenty, when the Fugitive Slave Law created a terrible threat to a free person of color, as slave-catchers then roamed the northern states, seeking people they could seize, process through the poor enforcement of the law, and resell southward. He soon moved to Canada, as a safer place to live, but “didn’t like” that country, and returned to Wisconsin (a part of the old Northwest Territory, where slavery was illegal). Then in 1857, the Supreme Court said that people of African descent were “inferior,” whether slave or free.
In Colorado in 1863, Hardin was a barber, that favorite occupation of African American men, who associated with the upper classes of white men, and if personable—as Hardin was—made valuable friends. Soon he was speaking to “overflow” crowds, even though he was telling the story of a Haitian slave’s successful revolt against the French. He even got a job with the Denver mint. But although he had never been a slave, the ghost of slavery still lurked behind him, and an editor, writing about the mint job, said that Hardin had an ”ugly black mug.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728344980

Lawrence Woods

Lawrence Woods graduated from the University of Wyoming and received a PhD in History from New York University. He is the author of a number of historical works, and he is also an attorney. Woods Lives in Worland, Wyoming.

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© 2020 Lawrence Woods. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  03/10/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4499-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4497-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4498-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902348

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CONTENTS

An Advocate for Those on His Darker Side

William Jefferson Hardin

The Beginnings

The Trial

Where Should They Go to Live?

The 1830 Census

Send Them Back to Africa

William Jefferson Hardin in 1830

The Shaker Years

Marriage

The California Interval

Canada

The Dred Scott Decision

A Louisiana Story?

Council Bluffs

Colorado Territory

The Octoroon Play

Statehood for Colorado

The London, Ontario Visit

A Newspaper Agent

The Western Territories Tour

Enter Nellie Davison

To Wyoming

Helping the Kansas Refugees

The Love Feast

A Kentucky Reminder

Life Goes on in Ontario, 1881

The Seventh Territorial Legislature

The Porter’s Problem

More Domestic Troubles

The Ontario Family

The Elusive Survivor

A Footnote

The Brutal Ghost of Slavery

Our Beginnings

Appendix

About The AUthor

Bibliography

Endnotes

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AN ADVOCATE FOR THOSE

ON HIS DARKER SIDE

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William Jefferson Hardin had a very light complexion—it was said he looked like an Italian or a Frenchman—and he had a better education than most men in his neighborhood, plus outstanding speaking skills. According to the U. S. government, he was a free person of color, and a casual examination of his life might suggest that such a person was in a transition zone, moving toward full equality in society. When he spoke to white people, he often emphasized that he was seven-eighths white, but he loved his African roots, and he was a strong advocate for the equal rights of all those people.

Parts of the Hardin story have been told by several others—of orations delivered with great skill, and of work as a barber, where he met and made friends with many important men of American society, and of service in the Wyoming territorial legislature. I grew fascinated with the irony that on the one hand, he was near-white, handsome, well-educated and easily charmed crowds. At the same time, he insisted on urging the cause of those on the African side of his heritage, and that insistence placed him in the path of the several variations of racial discrimination, with unhappy results. Indeed, this treatment of Hardin could hardly be skin-color discrimination, but instead, it harks back to the assertion of the innate inferiority of African descendants—an assertion that was also used to justify slavery, with all its abuse of slaves, both male and female. I have called this thinking the ghost of slavery, and this is the story of Hardin’s encounter with that ghost.

Lawrence M. Woods

August, 2019

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WILLIAM JEFFERSON HARDIN

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Early in November, 1879, when he was near the pinnacle of his career as Wyoming’s Black Legislator, after winning election as a member of the Wyoming Territorial House of Representatives, William Jefferson Hardin had a long interview with a Cheyenne newspaper, in which he spoke in detail of his background, details that emphasized his relationship to the white population. However, there is quite another side of his feelings about his roots. While on occasion he said that he was seven-eighths white, in a very emotional piece, he also said that he was an octoroon,—meaning he was one-eighths African American. In stirring public speeches before cheering crowds, he supported those who shared his dark blood. These were people he loved. In what follows, I hope to make those feelings as clear as I can make them, based on the sources that remain.¹

I begin with the Sun interview, because it contained so many details that seldom appear elsewhere. Hardin was a native of Kentucky, born about 1829 in Russellville, in Logan County, and someone (who was not identified) sent him to live for eleven years with the Shakers, in their colony in the same county, who educated him and taught him other skills. Although he was born in a slave state, he was never a slave—which means that his mother was not a slave when he was born. Edward A. Slack, editor of the Cheyenne Sun, said that Hardin had no resemblance in his features to the African race, and instead looked more like an Italian or a Frenchman than a colored man.²

The Shaker colony in Logan County lay just east of Hardin’s birthplace in Russellville, and there, he received much of his education. The Shakers must surely have recognized his many native assets, and they gave him a fine education—better than many white boys of the area—plus other skills the Shakers were noted for. Early on, he would have learned about the Shaker opposition to slavery, and something of what it meant to be a free person of color.

In the 1879 interview, Hardin left out many details of his life after leaving the Shakers, some of which are found in other sources. He said that he left the Shakers to go to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where for one or two years, he taught a school for free children of color. From Bowling Green, he went to California for four years—he said it was to search for gold—before returning to Kentucky. When he returned to slave-owning Kentucky, he thought it was a a repugnant place, and he never lived there again. Then, it was to Canada, which he did not like, either. A sojourn in Janesville, Wisconsin, followed by a short stop in Council Bluffs, completed his itinerary before coming to Denver in 1863.³

All of these details were true, but Hardin left out many other details. Information about marriage and children was missing from the Sun account—he eventually had two of each—and those omissions will be supplied later. But perhaps the largest omission in that interview was any mention of the effect on his life of the fears created for African Americans by the events leading up to and during the very bloody Civil War. We know what some of those fears may have been, but we cannot presume to really know what his feelings were about them.

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THE BEGINNINGS

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In the year 1829, Hardin was born near Russellville, the county seat of Logan County, Kentucky, not far above of the Tennessee border. He was born a free person of color, a special category listed in the United States censuses, until the Civil War eliminated the reason for it. His father was a white man, whose name we do not know, and his mother was a free colored quadroon—one quarter black. His mother’s name was one of only two possibilities among a group of slaves in Logan County, either a woman known as Kitty, or a woman known as Little Mary. Both women were set free in 1821 by the Circuit Court of Logan County, so that when William Hardin was born, he was never a slave. If the surname he later selected was intended to refer to his family tree, it could have been a white man named Hardin. The boy’s grandfather was also a white man, whose name we also do not know, but his great grandfather, who died at the beginning of 1820, was a white slaveowner named William Harding, who was the grandfather of both Kitty and Little Mary.⁴

William Harding was born in Frederick County, Md., in 1752, and he and Mary Belle Lackland had three children before Mary Belle died in 1783. The oldest daughter later died (in 1790), and William’s household shrunk further in 1799, when Ellen, the younger daughter, married her cousin, Elias K. Harding (thus entangling two branches of the family), leaving her father William alone with his son, John Lackland Harding. The household also included more than a dozen slaves (there were thirteen in the 1790 census of Frederick County, Md.).

At some point after his wife died, William’s relationship with his son, John L. Harding, deteriorated badly and John, who also had political aspirations, wanted his father to leave Maryland. One possible reason was that William drank a lot before he left Maryland, leading to drinking bouts and dancing frolics that troubled him for the rest of his life. Also, the fact that William was creating a new, partially black family with Polly, one of his slave women, may well have been particularly disturbing to his son (as well as to other people he associated with). Two (and possibly three) of the mulatto slave children who later came to Kentucky with William and Polly were his progeny, and another generation of quadroon descendants followed in Kentucky.

During the 1820-21 equity trial in Logan County, Harding was quoted on the subject of slavery.

In his deposition, James Crewdson, who prepared Harding’s will, said that Harding was uniformly opposed to slavery, and "doubted whether any man could be a Christian and hold slaves.⁵

When William did leave Maryland, owing a large sum of money, John paid the debt for him. The father’s relationship with his son continued to be so bad that when William executed his will in 1816, he didn’t know that John had a third son (a six-year-old boy ironically named William, after his grandfather). Harding family tradition gives 1810 as the year when the families of William Harding and his cousin Elias Harding (married to William’s daughter) left Maryland for Logan County, Ky. William brought most of his slaves with him (he left two behind in Maryland with his son John).⁶

In Logan County, on the banks of Little Whippoorwill Creek, the two Harding families built a log cabin for shelter until the slaves made the bricks for a permanent home. William Harding lived