The First Volume of the
Town Records of Macedon, New York (1823-1851)
and its Maryland Connections
by
Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse
Maryland State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents
All
meaningful history is local in nature. It is through local
connections and local examples that the fabric of American Society is
best explained and understood as long as they are connected and placed
in the context of the collective history of the nation. Macedon
New York did not exist in isolation. Those who lived and worked there,
and those who passed through, left trails of connectivity to the major
and minor issues of the day. In the period covered by this first
volume of the Macedon Town Records, there are are ties to model
philosophies of local government, general education, and the ultimately
successful efforts to remove the stain of slavery from the nation that
deserve further exploration and accurate story telling.
This
mold-stained, water damaged volume of the first
records of the town of Macedon is a survivor, symbolic of
the resilience of the local body politic to changing times.
Most of it is nearly legible, despite its neglect over the
years.
Salvaged once in the1970s and used to convince a local congressman to
sponsor legislation designed to save it and other precious public
records from further decay, the legislation passed to great
fanfare, only to see this volume relegated to a bottom drawer
in
a file cabinet where it was later inundated by water from a
nearby bathroom. Sally Millick, working with Judy Gravino, the Macedon town clerk,
and
others who realized the importance of the history it contained, were
determined that this time the volume would get proper attention and a
permanent archival home. A conservator cleaned and stabilized
the
contents. Kirtas Technologies, Inc., with support from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day
Saints, scanned the pages for the bound volume reprint
edition of which this introduction is a part. The Maryland State
Archives, scanned the conserved pages for an on-line ebook, and rebound
the original in
protective polyester for the Town of Macedon as a permanent memorial to a
former Macedon Town Attorney, Supervisor, and Wayne County
District Attorney, John
M. Wilson, and his aunt Sara E. Wilson, who, in the 1960s, saved it
from being lost altogether.
The
journey to save this priceless volume documenting the first decades of
town government in Macedon New York began for me in 1962 with the
sudden death of my uncle John M. Wilson who had just been elected
district attorney for Wayne County. He had given Sara E. Wilson the
volume along with a 1904 atlas and an 1877 history of Wayne County for
safekeeping, which she in turn passed on to me to see to their
preservation and use.
In
1973 my career path led to becoming the Assistant State Archivist
for Maryland, after having worked in the offices of Congresswoman
Jessica McCullough Weis and Frank Horton (both of whom represented Macedon in Congress), and at the American Historical
Association (AHA). While at the AHA, I served as liaison and
staff to a committee headed by Charles Lee, Archivist of South
Carolina, that was determined to expand the the role of the National
Historical Publications Commission (NHPC) to include the preservation
of records, particularly state and local records. I
convinced my former employer, Frank Horton, the then ranking minority
member on the Government Operations Committee of the House of
Representatives, to co-sponsor the legislation in the House along with
his chairman. I was able to do so in part by showing him this
volume and suggesting that once I had it properly boxed at my own
expense, he might want to give it back to the town in a special
ceremony at the dedication of the then new canal park on July 3, 1973.
He liked the idea and combined the presentation back to the town
with a press release explaining the importance of the new legislation
placing the 'R' in the NHPC. Unfortunately the recipients, the
Macedon Historical Society, did not have the resources at the time to
care for it properly, and eventually it was relegated to a bottom drawer
of a file cabinet at their headquarters that became rusted shut after a
plumbing accident.
While
not all the pages of
the volume are legible here, the recent advances in technology raise
hopes that even more will be readable in the future once the techniques
of imaging have been refined by Roger Easton, Bill Christens-Barry, Fennella France, and their colleagues.
Fortunately the ink used in the writing of the volume has left a
residue that may be possible to extract in greater detail,
although the process at the moment needs further testing and is
currently very expensive.
The
journey of the town records from Macedon
to Maryland and back, is the story of the quest to preserve permanently
the rich local history of the past and to place it in the context of
the struggle to establish a government responsive to the
needs
and dreams of all its citizens.
The
volume itself is but a bare outline of the concerns and actions of
local town government in Macedon from 1823, when it was part of Ontario
County, until the prosperous pre-civil war years of the 1850s, by which
time it had been incorporated into Wayne County. It records the
outcome of local
elections and provides insight into who was charged with administering
local affairs including the assessment of property and the collection
of taxes. Cattle and sheep marks are recorded to help
recognize who owned wandering animals and to help prevent
theft. It concerns
itself with roads, schools and the outline of who was elected to
conduct the town's business from 1823 to 1851. Clearly the
emphasis in this volume is keeping the roads in good order, resolving
disputes over where roads ran, and meeting the educational requirements
of the State which called for uniform school districts with overseers,
supervisors, standard text books and an accounting of the students
served. Indeed periodically the text books to be found in the
school district libraries were listed in this volume.
My grandmother Pearl Wilson (sister-in-law of Sara E. Wilson) was
the last teacher at Macedon District #4 school house. She
salvaged a couple of the original texts from the trash which she
passed on to me, including a well worn copy of one of arithmetic
primers listed in the earliest accounting of texts (Nathan Daboll's Schoolmaster's Assistant
owned by Orran Green of Macedon), and book no. 67, District No. 4,
which is an 1840 history of Spain and Portugal featuring a glowing
chapter on the period of African rule over Spain.
The
traditions of education and local government found
here are largely New England in origin with the town meeting at the
center of local affairs, the town clerk charged with recording
all
actions of the meeting, and the justices of the peace left to
keep the
peace among neighbors. Yet no matter how bare the outline, the
stories this volume helps tell of family and place, and their
geographical reach is far greater than it first might seem.
Macedon and its residents in the period covered by this volume
were active players in the movement to abolish slavery and
promote citizenry among all Americans regardless of color.
The Erie Canal brought farmers and nurserymen to the town with its
fulfilled promise of affordable transportation of goods and services.
Crops, fruits, and manufactured goods made their
way to Albany and beyond. It was a time of growth
and optimism in which religion played a major role. Macedon
was in what came to be known as the 'burnt over region' for the large
number of proselytizing religious groups that lived there.
Among them were the Quakers who allied themselves with the
increasingly activist and vocal anti-slavery movement.
The Quaker emphasis was on education, improving responsive and
responsible local government, and a political end to slavery.
Their chief supporter in all these efforts in Macedon was Gerrit Smith
who brought his Liberty Party Convention to Macedon in June of 1847,
and Frederick Douglass,
the former slave from Maryland who moved to
Rochester the following December. In Macedon, Gerrit Smith
was allied with Asa Smith and his son William R. Smith, who lived
across from each other on what is now the Victor road . The house has
been identified
as still standing by local historians Charles Lenhart and Marjorie
Perez. It clearly deserves recognition on the National Register of
Historic places, as well as an explanation on the New York web site
devoted to the underground railroad. Sally Millick, Charles
Lenhart, Wayne County historian Peter Evans, former Wayne County
Historian Marjorie Perez and Sue Jane Evans of the Pultneyville
Historical Society in fact deserve enormous credit and praise for their
efforts to rediscover the Abolitionists, Underground Railroad agents and Afro-American
history in Wayne County. Without their aid and careful research
the importance of the connections between Macedon and Maryland would
remain broken and forgotten.
With
backing from
Gerrit Smith and personal visits from Douglass, William R. Smith opened
a
school in his home for runaway slaves and former slaves to aid them on
their way to
freedom in Canada and to prepare some who remained for the Abolitionist
lecture circuit, part of the 7,000 sought by the Liberty Party as
teachers and civil activists. Willliam R. Smith would later be
the
unsuccessful Liberty
Party candidate for governor of New York, and would fall victim to the
stringent Fugitive Slave Law that came in 1850 as a Southern
reaction to the increasing success of the underground railroad movement
in arousing the ire and fear of slave owners with regard to the loss of
their labor force.
Gerrit Smith's allies took a different tact from the abolitionists led
by William Lloyd Garrison (himself a former Marylander whose mother
continued to live in Baltimore until her death). Garrison
believed the Constitution created slavery and ought to be
ignored, instructing his supporters to not participate in the political
process, but to work to overthrow it. Gerrit Smith believed
in working within the system to a degree, mounting a
political party of his own, and ultimately serving a term in Congress
as an independent. As he did not recognize human beings as
property, he conscienced aiding and abetting their escape from slavery,
working at the same time to change the laws that legitimized the
institution in some states, and to mount a campaign of education that
would unlock the minds and promote the citizenry of the
enslaved.
For four days in June, 1847, the town of Macedon was the center of the political universe,
at least for those abolitionists who had formed their own political
movement which they called the Liberty Party. There they
nominated Gerrit Smith for President of the United States. Their
proposed reforms extended to the abolition of the post office monopoly
opening it up to competition, a measure that would not be enacted for
over another century, but their main issue was slavery. "We hold
slavery to be illegal and unconstitutional, and that the Federal
Government is bound to secure its abolition by the guaranty, to every
State in this Union, of a republican form of government. If the
South demurs, let her, peacefully, withdraw from the Union."
"Give us seven thousand men in this great nation who will hold
up by their votes and their teachings, the great fundamental principles
and objects of civil government, as God and nature have established
them, and we are fully persuaded that it will be the most powerful
political party in the nation or the world. It will be a great
teacher of the long neglected but vitally important sciences of civil
government, of political morality, of political economy."
William
R. Smith was inspired by the principles set forth by the Liberty Party,
and would stand as its candidate for Governor, but he was also a man of
action who believed that education was the key to good citizenship.
Throughout this volume there is a constant refrain that there
were no colored students attending Macedon schools, yet they were
taught at William R. Smith's home on the Victor road. Because the
Macedon school for free and runaway Negroes founded by William R.
Smith, and funded by the Presidential candidate of the Liberal Party,
Gerrit Smith, was, in the
eyes of Federal law, illegal when it aided runaway
slaves, little has survived of the actual records of the school.
It is known that in 1848 Smith taught the two recently
freed Edmondson
sisters, seen below in plaid wraps and bonnets, at a Liberal
Party/Abolitionist rally attended by Frederick Douglass.
William R. Smith also welcomed Myrtilla Minor to his home and school as
possibly a teacher or at least to be inspired by her association with
him and his friends. From correspondence on line from the Clements Library
written from Macedon, Minor outlined her future plans as a teacher.
She went on, with support from abolitionist friends, to found the first
school for Free Blacks in the District of Columbia, where she was
joined for a time by Emily Edmon[d]son.
It is also known that William R. Smith had a close working
relationship with Frederick Douglass, and probably played a role with
the Gerrit Smith and Amy Post families in weaning him away from the
radical abolitionist policies of William Lloyd Garrison to the ideals
of Smith and the Liberty Party. It is not known when Frederick
Douglass first met William R. Smith, but by September 11, 1849, he was
writing from Macedon on his way to attend the funeral of Hannah
Sexton, wife of a prominent Quaker Banker who held mortgages on many of
the farms and nurseries in Macedon and Palmyra. At least one letter
survives from William R. Smith to Douglass in the fall of 1851 which
was published in the Frederick Douglass' Paper, when Smith was deeply
immersed in the William Chaplin case. In July 1852, Douglass probably
went to Smith's house in Macedon to "spend a day ...with a view to aid
him in drawing up a statement of the facts in the case [of William
Chaplin's default in raising repayment of the bond for his release from
prison]."
The story of the Macedon Abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, the Edmon[d]son sisters
and Willliam Chaplin are very much a part of the fabric of
the history encompassed by these town minutes. William R. Smith
serves as Inspector of the Common Schools in 1833, 1837, and
1838, and at times an overseer of the roads. William R. Smith's
father, Asa,
appears in the records as one of the first Assessors as well as often
as an overseer of the roads, and as a Commissioner and Inspector of
Common Schools. To obtain a fuller account of Macedon's
participation in the effort to abolish slavery, the record needs to be
expanded to encompass the lives of those that Gerrit and William
R. Smith took
under
their wings, sheltering and seeking to teach them to read, write, and
be well informed citizens. The road to freedom leads back to
Maryland, where the citizens of Macedon came face to face with
the evils of slavery and engaged their enemy. The records they
left behind not only document the road to freedom, they provide an
expanded insight into the operations of the legal system in
Maryland and the charitable giving of Marylanders in a State
where slavery was legal until 1864, and supporters of slavery
controlled most aspects of the political world.
Two good books have been written about the ship Pearl, one by Josephine F. Pacheco and the other by Mary Kay Ricks.
Abolitionists chartered it with the intent of aiding slaves working in
Washington D. C. to escape to freedom. In the Spring of 1848
seventy-six slaves fled on Pearl,
but were caught on the Potomac by a chasing steamship when the wind
failed. On board were the Edmon[d]son sisters, Mary and Emily,
children of a free black Maryland farmer and his slave wife (slavery
descended through the mother). As punishment for attempting to
escape, the sisters were about to be sold into prostitution at New
Orleans, when they were purchased with funds raised by the
Abolitionists who had encouraged them to flee in the first place.
Further fund raising efforts by such as Henry Ward Beecher,
brother to the future author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
to assist in their education, floundered until a benefactor, possibly
General William Chaplin, came to their aid, sending them in 1849 to
attend William R. Smith's school in Macedon. Chaplin in turn
became more aggressive in his efforts to free Washington slaves, aiding
Garland and Allen, the body servants of Congressman Robert Augustus
Toombs and Senator Alexander H. Stephens to escape by coach one night
in the summer of 1850, probably on their way to William R. Smith's
farm. They were caught on the edge of the District of
Columbia, and shots were fired. Ultimately it was determined that
they had passed into Maryland (the penalties were harsher there) and
jurisdiction over the case was transferred to Maryland courts.
William R. Smith wrote a spirited defense
of his erstwhile friend Chaplin, attacking the Maryland court system
and complaining that excessive bail was used as an unconstitutional
deterrent. When Chaplin refused to raise funds to help pay back
the bond that set him free (nearly $2,000 in a day when a normal bond
for allegedly attempting to steal property would not have exceeded
$250), Smith and Frederick Douglass pondered what they should do next.
It was to no avail. In the meantime, Congress had passed the
fugitive slave law which meant that those aiding and abetting escaped
slaves faced harsh punishment and the effective use of the courts to
suppress those who aided escaping slaves. It is perhaps no
coincidence that when William R. Smith's daughter ran off with a farm
hand, and he forcibly brought her back, that he was charged with
kidnapping and pursued vigorously in the courts to the point where he
was forced to leave Macedon. He ultimately ended up in
California, after first relocating to Delaware and the Midwest.
The farm hand certainly did not have the resources to pursue the
kidnapping charge. Funding may well have come from pro-slavery
elements intent on suppressing the educational efforts of Smith and his
friends.
The
tradition of protecting and advancing the rights of others continued in
Macedon, long after William R. Smith found it necessary to leave. As migrant labor from the
South became increasingly important to the planting and harvesting of
crops throughout Wayne County in the 20th century, relations between
migrants and farmers at time became strained. John M. Wilson ,
Macedon Town Attorney and Supervisor before he was elected Wayne
County District Attorney, was assigned the defense of a migrant worker
accused of murdering his employer. My earliest memories of
the court house in Lyons are attending the trial in which
my uncle defended Moses Tunstill. He lost the case at trial, but
believed so strongly that justice had not been served that he appealed
as Moses's pro-bono lawyer. He won the appeal, Moses was
freed, and the case today stands as a precedent in
N.Y. for the administration of justice to the accused.
All
meaningful history is local in nature, but to ensure that meaning
is extracted, local records must be preserved and accessible for
persistent consultation, review, and extrapolation. This volume
is a survivor, but with its restoration to the Town, comes a lesson
hopefully learned. We need to better preserve and care for the
fragmentary evidence of the past, if we are to chart a better course
for the future. Both the original of this volume and its images
need to be placed in a safe and secure environment in which its pages
can be transcribed, edited, and annotated in a manner that engages as
many interested parties as possible and saves the results in a
permanent, update-able, readily accessible, and search-able format.
As
a tribute to the Maryland connections, I have placed the electronic
images in an ebook that can be edited, annotated, and improved over
time as part of the permanent electronic archives of the State of
Maryland
at: http://mdhistory.net/macedon_ny/macedon_ny_town_records/html/index.html.
When better images become available, they will be added, and as
pages are transcribed and edited they will be accessible through the
universally available search engines of Google, Bing, and their
successors.
NOTE: First posted June 13, 2010;
corrections August 18, 2010, and November 27, 2010, with particular
appreciation to Charles Lenhart without whose detailed notes and erudite
observations this essay introduction to the first Volume of Macedon
Town Records would not have been possible. Much of the research on the
W.R. Smith site and Smith is documented and derived from Judith
Wellman and Marjory Allen Perez, with Charles Lenhart and others, Survey
of Sites Relating to the Underground Railroad, Abolitionism, and
African American Life in Wayne County, New York, 1820-1880 (Lyons,
New York: Wayne County Historian's Office, 2009), which is excerpted
here with permission of the authors. JudithWellman also recommends
Stanley Harrold's Subversives: The Anti-Slavery Community in
Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (2003) on the Edmonson sisters. The
records were returned to the Town of Macedon in a special ceremony
before the town board on September 23, 2010. My comments included a
charge to the Board reported in the Wayne
Post:
“These volumes don’t just simply represent the essence of democracy
here, the way in which you all attempt to give the services to the
people of this town that they deserve. They also are very much
connected with the fabric of the whole of American history. I charge you
with the responsibility of seeing to their permanent and long term
care and preservation and of making them accessible, but also to help
use them in such a way that they teach each generation the importance
of local government.”.
Contents
There are 369 images of pages and fragments in the on-line ebook which are ready for editing and annotation.
First image
Last Image
A version of this essay is also available on the blog http://marylandarchivist.blogspot.com.
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