The movie O Brother Where Art Thou, in my estimation one of the top ten movies of the last twenty years, came to mind in a peculiar way. One over-the-top character in the film, a stereotypical, white demagogue politician and Klan Grand Wizard, ranted and raved about integration, miscegenation, and amalgamation, and about 'Niggers' and the threats he thought they were to the flower of southern womanhood. It was satirical and silly, yet deadly serious, as the bitter fruit of southern racial relations bear witness.
My research into the sale schedule (1860 Census records of slave ownership) indicated that Mr. Jones owned six slaves: a thirty-three-year-old black female; a twenty-six-year-old black female; a thirteen-year-old mulatto female; a nine-year-old black male; a six-year-old mulatto male; a two-year-old black female.
The information I have on other slave owners in Giles and Lincoln County shows that a goodly number of mulattos were prevalent in the tallies of their human chattel tallies.
A starling bit of the record on Mr. Jones slave property states that the thirteen-year-old mulatto girl and six-year-old mulatto boy were 'fugitives from the state.' It seems incredible that a thirteen-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy could escape from slavery nearly four hundred miles from the Ohio River and free soil. They would have had to traverse two slave states. The slave codes were active and the way harsh and often obscure.
For that matter what work could two adult females have done for an owner who did not have a house? Mr. Jones never owned his own residence. Were the adults rented out? Where did they reside? Could they have been concubines? The record listed two black adult women, one black boy, one black toddler, and the two fugitive mulatto children. Is that a reason to suspect sexual impropriety? It surely appeared so to me.
I looked up and out the front window of the pool hall and let my often too vivid imagination wander around the notions of masters and slaves, oppression and sex, opportunity and hunger…and the acceptable and the shunned. Not finding any enlightenment, I went back to a folder containing items for the chronology of Mr. Jones' life that I was working on. I would let the issues of miscegenation and amalgamation simmer.
Along the edge of one page of notes on Mr. Jones' years in the United States Congress as a member of the House of Representatives, 1843-59, I saw my note to self, "King and Havana?" Then I remembered the material I'd read about this errand that was part of Mr. Jones' service in Washington. Mr. Jones was an unusual politician in the antebellum era. Congressional seats as a rule turned over much more often than today. Two or three terms (four to six years) were usual but Jones had served eight terms-sixteen years-and had only faced opposition in his first race and his seventh. He received 60 percent of the vote in the 1842 race against Whig William Long to succeed Democrat Hopkins Turney of Winchester in Congress. Turney did not seek reelection, as he had been elevated to the U.S. Senate. The 1854 opposition candidate, a reactionary Know-Nothing named Sam Gordon, managed just 30 percent of the vote.