This week’s essay, inspired by a current book* but making no claim to be an adequate review of it, concerns two remarkable American teachers born about a century and a half apart into very different social realities, but sisters united in their signal contributions to the education of young people in the town where I live. The subject of the book is Elizabeth (Betsey) Stockton (ca 1798-1865), the apparently mixed-race daughter of an African-American slave and an unknown Anglo father, the newborn being by the law of the day the chattel property of the mother’s owner, who was Robert Stockton, a prominent Princeton citizen and a cousin of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The biographer is Constance Escher, recently retired from a long career as a teacher of history in the Princeton public schools. Connie Escher is personal friend of ours of long standing, and the mother of a close childhood friend of our own youngest child.
Nobody was lucky to be born a slave, but some few born slaves had better luck than others. Betsey Stockton was sent to the household of Ashbel Green, a Presbyterian divine and later President of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University). He and his family recognized the youngster’s remarkable abilities and fostered her secular education and her religious interests, which were pronounced. She became a kind of surrogate daughter and sibling in the family, but her labor could still be commodified and rented out, as it commonly had been also for ostensibly free indentured servants. It was necessary that de facto manumission become de jure for her to undertake her life’s work as a missionary and teacher. Stockton’s long, varied, and fruitful career—better described as a vibrant religious vocation, as the animating force of her life was the love of Christ—is the subject of Escher’s book. The historian has sifted judiciously through a large body of primary materials, some only fragmentary and suggestive, but others of amplitude. Among the latter are substantial contemporary journals kept by Betsey Stockton and her Princeton missionary colleague Charles Stewart. Any contemporary reader of nineteenth-century domestic documents—such as the letters written by ordinary soldiers featured in Ken Burns’s Civil War series--is likely to be amazed by the excellence of the writing. Stockton’s prose is fresh, uncluttered, clear, to the point. Since the same can be said of Constance Escher’s, her book offers as much delight as it does instruction. I encourage you to seek out a copy of it and read it. This essay is not a proper account of it, merely tangential ideas it encouraged.
Female life expectancy in America at the time of Stockton’s birth was perhaps forty-five years. She lived to be about seventy, and crowded into that time half a century of missionary ministry and teaching in Hawaii, Canada, and her hometown of Princeton. Perhaps some readers will be disappointed that the liberation she was most interested in was spiritual liberation. Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Chattel slavery, a grotesque social manifestation of the “body of death,” does not make a prominent appearance in her recorded thought. But she lived and worked among black and white abolitionists and ministered to people of color in disparate parts of the world. The degree of social liberation she had experienced she found in education, and it was that gift she spent her life imparting to others. Yet there are several moments in her story where racial issues are raised. There is one very telling passage in the book that both Joan and I found particularly striking.
Among its other attractions, Stockton’s story can claim a place in the literature of American seafaring, resonating for me especially with Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). In November 1823 Stockton, together with her white spiritual brother and sister Charles and Harriet Tiffany Stewart, sailed from New Haven bound for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) on a grueling five-month voyage involving the “double” crossing of the African cape. Betsey Stockton’s account of the terrifying storm-tossed seas of Cape Horn is reminiscent of that of Camões in the Lusiads. The Portuguese poet objectified his fears in the invented mythological giant Adamastor; Stockton located hers in her own timorous heart, a gloomily Presbyterian “bottomless sink of sin.” But there was plenty to fear in the material world. The harrowing fate of the whaler Essex, which had been sunk by an irate whale in 1820, was still in the news. (This was usually called the “Essex disaster”; but perhaps whales just did not like being shot at with harpoons?) Six or seven weeks out, approaching the west coast of Africa, the missionaries' vessel happened upon and conversed with a Portuguese slaver. Stewart, an ordained Christian minister obligated by the Law of Charity, practically exploded in his Journal: “Surely, if anything on earth calls for the righteous judgment of God, it is the prosecution of the slave trade; and sooner or later, the retribution of a just avenger must fall on those who thus make the heavens to echo the moanings of the bereaved, and the rich earth with the tears and blood of the enslaved.” That was written three years after the Missouri Compromise and thirty-five before John Brown’s prophecy of 1859: "I...am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done." Betsey Stockton died on October 25, 1865, and was buried in Cooperstown NY, next to her beloved spiritual sister Harriet Stewart. One reasonably hopes that she had read in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural eight months earlier the equally prophetic words: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-men’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.”
The constant here, sadly, is the spilling of blood. That is the world’s way. It was not, however, Betsey Stockton’s way. For her and her intimate companions the blood once shed long ago and far away was forever sufficient. Her weapon was literacy. If swords could be beaten into plowshares, why not pen nibs as well? On this day, Ash Wednesday, a day on which we are invited to ponder the deep sinks of our own imperfections as fellow human beings are terrified, injured, and killed in wickedness by other fellow human beings, that is perhaps a thought worth pondering. In any event, it is one brought to my mind by the extraordinary story in Escher’s engaging book.
* Constance K. Escher, She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton: The Illustrated Odyssey of a Princeton Slave (Eugene OR: Resource Publications/Wipf and Stock, 2022), pp. 197.
[ISBN pb 978-1-7252-7544-7; hb 978-1-7252-7545-4]
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