'Stolen' Toward Civil War

Review by Bill Doughty

Kidnapped and taken aboard a boat in the Philadelphia Navy Yard nearly 200 years ago, a small boy was about to be taken on a harrowing trip with other free African Americans into the Deep South. They were to be sold as slaves. "They would have to fight like hell to try to escape."

Arch Street ferry, Philadelphia. Drawn, Engraved & Published by W. Birch Springland near Bristol Pennsylvania 1800. (Library Company of Philadelphia)

Richard Bell's "Stolen" (37 INK, Simon & Schuster; 2019) opens with this scene from August 1825:

"Cornelius Sinclair was ten years old and he was trapped. He was stuck in the belly of a small ship bobbing in the middle of the Delaware River, a mile south of Philadelphia. A man had grabbed him from a spot near that city's market an hour ago, shoved a black gag across his mouth, tossed him into a wagon, and hauled him here.It was dark below the waterline, but Cornelius could see enough to know that he was not alone. Four pairs of eyes stared back at him – four other black boys.Yesterday they had all been free. Today they were slaves, prisoners of a gang of child snatchers who planned to sell their lives and labor, most likely to plantation owners in the Deep South. If the boys' abductors got away with this, Cornelius would spend the rest of his life as someone else's property somewhere very far away. He would never see his family again."

"Stolen" is a heart-rending true tale of the ordeal of these young men. And it is also a story of the courage of civil servants, public officials, journalists and ordinary citizens to stand up against evil – and for justice. The story starts in the "sanctuary city" of Philadelphia, birthplace of the nation.

An 1840 painting of ships and boats on the Delaware River including large schooners, naval warships and rowboats as well as a paddle steamer. Twin ship sheds of the old Philadelphia Navy Yard are visible. Oil on canvas painting by Thomas Birch.

We follow the trail the kidnappers took with their "coffle" – chained or guarded caravan – as part of the Reverse Underground Railroad. We meet thieves, torturers, liars and murderers. And we confront the awful truth of how slavery was practiced, condoned and protected, not just in the South. The banal cruelty is almost unimaginable.

Although slavery was dying out in the North by 1825 (fewer than 20,000), just shy of fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, it was still going on in rural parts of New Jersey and New York. Yet it was still sanctioned in the states below the Mason-Dixon Line, including in Maryland and Delaware and especially farther south in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana (1.7 million souls).

Abolitionists and former slaves Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass

Bell recounts that some of the events in this narrative unfold in Dorchester County, Maryland, where slavery still flourished. "More than five thousand enslaved people lived in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1825, and two thousand more labored in fields and workshops just across the sate line in Sussex County, Delaware. Frederick Douglass (b. 1818) and Harriet Tubman (b. 1822) were among the many enslaved people to grow up around here..."

In the Deep South, some cotton farmers and sugarcane growers would gladly buy slaves from the North, few questions asked. As the United States expanded westward, the nation had to confront an expansion of slavery, including thousands who were kidnapped even as free Americans.

The book's subtitle is "Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home." The true story provides irony as slaveholders attempted to justify their inhumane practice. Some fought against the Reverse Underground Railroad from the North in order to protect the institution of "owning" other humans in the South and, they hoped, the West.

Pivotal moments in the destruction of the industry of slavery were of course the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Constitution, blueprints for liberty and equality. Other milestones were reached when President Jefferson and Congress abolished international slave trade in 1808; when Pennsylvania passed a new Personal Liberty Law in 1826; when the Supreme Court struck down in 1842 "states rights" opposition to civil rights; and when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.

"Stolen" unfolds in the middle of this cascading series of events that would soon lead to Civil War in 1861.

Bell makes a convincing case that the boys' ordeal was a spark that "advanced the cause of racial justice in America." He presents the story of the kidnapping and odyssey using court records, letters and newspaper sources. And he acknowledges his use of conjecture where there are blanks, couching his narrative with adverbs such as "likely," "probably," "surely" and "certainly."

Andrew Jackson

This book offers great maps, photos, art and artifacts to illustrate the story. Though not part of the "Stolen" story, Bell includes an engraving of slave owner Andrew Jackson: "A slave owner and speculator [who] traded enslaved adults and children across state lines for decades prior to his presidency, a fact that several of his opponents tried to exploit."

We come face to face with some of the morally bankrupt misanthropes involved in the kidnapping, torture and sale of thousands of human beings for profit.

But we also meet some heroic people, including lawyer John Henderson, Attorney General of Delaware James Rogers, civil servant Samuel Garrigues, and Mayor of Philadelphia Joseph Watson.

Watson was a man of earnest integrity: "He loathed con men who made their living bearing false witness," and "He had a loathing for liars and charlatans."

Mayor of Philadelphia Joseph Watson. (Unknown artist)

It was men and women like Watson and other abolitionist heroes – including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Highland Garnet – profiled in this book who took a stand and fought to end slavery.

When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 it outraged southern states. It was "so inflammatory that many historians record it as the single most significant cause of the Civil War."

At the end of the story we read about one of the boys who survived the ordeal for a time becoming a seaman for a time, heading out to sea in 1837, just before his 18th birthday. Missing in this book but included in other retellings of the history of the era is the role of the U.S. Navy, part of the Union military, in fighting and overcoming slavery.

While justice was not perfect in this or in many other cases, while reading this book, I kept thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.'s quote: "We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

A Groundbreaking 'Double Victory' – NMAAHC

Review by Bill Doughty

U.S. Navy Capt. Brian O. Walden, right, directs the U.S. Navy Ceremonial Band as they play "Hail to the Chief" during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Smithsonian NMAAHC in Washington, D.C., Feb. 22, 2012. (Photo by Chief Musician's Mate Stephen Hassay)

The U.S. Navy Ceremonial Band played "Hail to the Chief" as President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama arrive on stage for the historic groundbreaking ceremony for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture during Black History Month, Feb. 22, 2012.

Among the museum's exhibitions, collections, photos and other treasures are tributes to – among others – Medal of Honor recipients, the Tuskegee Airmen, Mess Attendant Doris "Dorie" Miller, and the overall "African American Military Experience."

Visitors view an exhibit about the legacy of Mess Attendant Doris “Dorie” Miller at the Smithsonian NMAAHC, Nov. 1, 2016. Adm. Nimitz presented Miller with the Navy Cross for his extraordinary courage during the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (U.S. Navy photo by Arif Patani)

The museum's "Official Guide" (Smithsonian Institution, 2017) shows various galleries and collections – floor-by-floor – and provides context within a history of overcoming slavery and the struggle to achieve civil rights and equality. "The United States was created in this context, forged by slavery as well as a radical new concept, freedom."

The museum represents the triumph of that concept promised in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Constitution – a democratic republic under the rule of law, not under a dictator or monarch. E pluribus unum: out of many, one.

First envisioned in 1915 after World War I, the creation of the museum was a nearly century-long struggle with lots of fits and starts. Congress finally authorized legislation in 2001, signed by President George W. Bush, to create a presidential commission that came back with a strong recommendation backed by Representatives John Lewis and J.C.Watts as well as Senators Sam Brownback and Max Cleland leading to enactment of a public law to bring the museum to life.

The guidebook takes visitors floor by floor to expansive open areas of discovery, art and education.

On the third floor of the museum, "Double Victory: The African American Military Experience" starts with the American Revolution and the War of 1812, into the Civil War and other conflicts, and through both world wars and the Cold War. Wartime military service has proven to be a catalyst for progressive social change throughout U.S. history.

"During the Revolutionary War, thousands of African Americans served as soldiers in the American colonial armies, including Jack Little, whose 1782 pay certificate for his service in the 4th Connecticut is on display here ... The War of 1812, sometimes referred to as the Second War of Independence, opened the ranks of the U.S. Navy to skilled African American seamen ... The Civil War was one of the most pivotal events in American history, and the Union victory that established the possibility of freedom for all depended on the service and sacrifice of tens of thousands of black soldiers, many formerly enslaved."

Museum artifacts include those of the "Buffalo Soldiers," Harlem Hellfighters of WWI, Tuskegee Airmen of WWII, U.S. Marine drill instructor Sgt. Maj. Edgar P. Huff of the Korean War, Air Force General Lloyd "Fig" Newton of the Vietnam War, as well as Vietnam Veteran Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden, a Marine Corps aviator who became an astronaut and the first black administrator of NASA.

Portrait photo of retired U.S. Marine Corps Maj Gen Charles Frank Bolden Jr. hours before his induction into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Ft. Worth, Texas, Oct. 27, 2017. Bolden was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the 12th Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 2009 to advance the missions and goals of the U.S. space program. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Cristian Bestul)

Other modern leaders of note featured in the "Double Victory" displays include Gen. Colin Powell, Gen. Hazel Johnson-Brown, and Adm. Michelle Howard.

The official guide is a good read prior to a visit to the museum, and is an invaluable companion for a self-guided tour. With cutaway floor maps and clear color-coded guides, this book offers behind-the-scenes stories about the exhibitions and collections. Of course there's also a downloadable mobile app for Apple IOS and Android to navigate the museum. Visitors can go to the Rosa Parks display, Martin Luther King Jr. tribute, Michael Jordan section, or George Clinton's actual P-Funk Mothership.

A highlight is the exhibition of artifacts recovered by maritime and archeology teams from the Slave Wrecks Project, including from the wreck of Portugese slave ship São José-Paquete de Africa, which sank in a storm off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa Dec. 27, 1794.

The recovery of artifacts from the wreck and collaboration with international teams features prominently in the biography of the NMAAHC founding director Lonnie Bunch III, "A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump" (Smithsonian Books, 2019).

Bunch describes the trials and tribulations of creating the museum and speaks most poignantly of retrieving artifacts related to the São José project in a visit to Africa:

"Finding relics from the São José was the goal of my journey, but I discovered so much more about Mozambique, about slavery in South Africa, about maritime archeology, and about myself. I knew that relics from the ship such as wood from the hold that we would eventually display was not an inanimate object, but a touchstone to give meaning and humanity to the subject of slavery. It would serve as a totem that would prod Americans to replace the silences that we find so comforting with conversations, though difficult, that could lead to reconciliation and healing."

In his description of the groundbreaking ceremony in 2012, Bunch notes, "The United States Navy Band ... delighted the audience and provided a wonderful musical counterbalance to the array of speakers that included senior Smithsonian colleagues, [former first lady] Laura Bush, then Governor of Kansas Sam Brownback, Reverend Calvin O. Butts III, and Congressman John Lewis."

He has an interesting encounter with President Trump during a tour of the museum which is insightful and worth reading.

Bunch concludes with pride about the museum's relevance globally. Yet, he conveys humility about what the museum can mean for all Americans.

"Museums alone cannot ease the tensions that come from the debates surrounding the fluidity of national identity in the twenty-first century," he writes. 
"... But museums can contribute to understanding by creating spaces where debates are spirited but reasoned. Where contemporary challenges are addressed through contextualization and education. Since its opening, NMAAHC has become a site where rational healing and reconciliation are possible."

Author, historian and educator Bunch became Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, June 16, 2019. According to his published biography he oversees 19 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous research centers, and several education units and centers.

Visitors tour exhibits at the Smithsonian NMAACH focusing on the African American military experience. (U.S. Navy Photo by Arif Patani)

Navy and 'Great Influenza' Changed the World

Review by Bill Doughty

One hundred years ago another wave of an influenza epidemic crashed on America's shores.

(Illustration from Penn Medicine News)

"By February 7, 1920, Influenza had returned with enough ferocity that the Red Cross declared, 'Owing to the rapid spread of influenza, the safety of the country demands, as a patriotic duty, that all available nurses or anyone with experience in nursing ... (offer) their services," according to John M. Barry, author of "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" (Viking/Penguin, 2014).

Courage in the Face of Fear

Fortunately, the epidemic did not hit with the same deadly force throughout 1920 that it had in the previous two years. 

The epidemic of 1918 erupted with such speed and scope that it created worldwide fear and terror. This influenza seemed to target young, otherwise healthy, adults as well as people with vulnerable immune systems.

"In 1918 fear moved ahead of the virus like the bow wave before a ship. Fear drove the people, and the government and the press could not control it. They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies. And the more the officials and newspapers reassured, the more they said, 'There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are taken,' ... the more people believed themselves cast adrift, adrift with no one to trust, adrift on an ocean of death."

The misnamed "Spanish Flu" of 1918 (Barry makes a strong case that it originated in Kansas) took more American lives in the first year (675,000) than all the U.S. service members who died fighting in WWI, WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam War combined. In one week in October, 4,597 Philadelphians died of the disease.

Paul Lewis

On the front lines of the war against the killer influenza epidemic – in laboratories and medical facilities – U.S. Navy and other military and civilian researchers searched for the pathogen as well as a vaccine and a cure.

This book is dedicated, in part, to one of those Navy warriors, and opens with a scene about him: "The Great War had brought Paul Lewis into the navy in 1918 as a lieutenant commander ..." Lewis had previously helped prove that a virus caused polio, "a discovery still considered a landmark achievement in the history of virology."

Lewis saw the early signs of disease in sailors in Philadelphia, where the virus was killing five percent of Sailors who showed any symptoms of influenza. 

In Boston, another Navy medical warrior, Lieutenant Commander Milton Rosenau at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, mobilized to fight the epidemic.

(Photo from Bureau of Medicine and Surgery)

"Rosenau too was a scientist who had chosen to leave a Harvard professorship for the navy when the United States entered the war, and his textbook on public health was called 'The Bible' by both army and navy military doctors."

Other military doctors and researchers who raced against the disease included William Henry Welch, Simon Flexner, Victor Vaughn and William Gorgas. Oswald Avery went from Army private to captain; he would eventually make "the most profound discovery of all" in his search for the cause of the disease.

The enemy in 1918 was not only the epidemic of disease, but also a pandemic of fear. "Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follows uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear." Truth matters.

Emergency hospital in Funston, Kansas.

A Maritime Component

Author-historian Barry profiles each of these courageous warriors as well as dozens of other people who faced the crisis. He reveals the strong maritime component to its global spread.

(Photo from Naval History and Heritage Command)

The pandemic of 1918-1920 was fueled by WWI fervor and war mobilization – in crowded barracks and aboard ships, including international steamers and U.S. Navy vessels. Dozens of shipyards were hit and had to close. Naval hospitals were overwhelmed. Navy brig prisoners volunteered as test subjects for Lt. Cmdr. Lewis and other scientists.

Sailors unintentionally brought deadly influenza to Great Lakes Naval Training Center and Newport Naval Base in Rhode Island; to New Orleans and Puget Sound; back-and-forth to Europe; as well as across the Pacific aboard USS Logan to Guam. Adm. Albert Gleaves and his captains dealt with effects of the pandemic, including aboard USS Leviathan.

Navy collier USS Brutus carried a relief expedition to Juneau, Alaska. "They found terrible things. Terrible things," Barry writes. "In Nome, 176 of 300 Eskimos had died. But it would get worse." Other Red Cross relief teams to the Aleutian Islands found devastation caused first by the disease, then by starvation and finally by starving dogs.

Nineteen U.S. Navy nurses died on active duty during the war, more than half from influenza. One of the survivors was the second superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps, Chief Nurse Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee, recipient of the Navy Cross and namesake of the first USS Higbee, commissioned in 1945. The keel was laid for the future USS Lenah H Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG 123) in November 2017.



Changing the World

The epidemic of 1918-1920 occurred at a time when women increased demands for the right to vote, a right won 100 years ago. Women had supported the war effort in Europe, and they served on the front lines in the fight against the epidemic.

The nation and world changed in other ways too in those first decades of the 20th century. 

President Woodrow Wilson's physician, Navy Rear Adm. Cary Grayson (who had served as presidential physician to Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) accompanied Wilson to the peace conference in Paris in 1919. Both Wilson and Grayson, as well as Wilson's wife and others, contracted influenza while in Paris.

President Wilson and Rear Adm. Grayson

Barry contends that the disease caused physical weakness and some mental lapses in the commander-in-chief and may have led to his stroke four months later. But the devastating effects of Wilson's bout with influenza also may have led to his concessions to the allied enemies of Germany in order to save his League of Nations.

"Historians with virtual unanimity agree that the harshness toward Germany of the Paris peace treaty helped create the economic hardship, nationalistic reaction, and political chaos that fostered the rise of Adolf Hitler," Barry writes. Feelings of persecution and resentment in Nazi Germany led to another world war.

Other ways the epidemic changed the world but for the better: Science, as represented by medical centers and researchers, triumphed over superstition. Corrupt local authoritarian governments in Philadelphia (the Vare political machine) and New York (Tammany Hall) were exposed and impeached in the court of public opinion. Truth and ethics were shown to be supremely important in the face of fear and terror.

"The media and public officials helped create that terror – not by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure.Terror rises in the dark of the mind, in the unknown beast tracking us in the jungle. The fear of the dark is an almost physical manifestation of that. Horror movies build upon the fear of the unknown, the uncertain threat that we cannot see and do not know and can find no safe haven from. But in every horror movie, once the monster appears, terror condenses into the concrete and diminishes. Fear remains. But the edge of panic created by the unknown dissipates. The power of the imagination dissipates."

Cmdr. Richard Shope

Meanwhile, researcher Paul Lewis had remained perpetually restless both during and after the epidemic. The microscope was his periscope searching for an enemy lurking in his laboratory – "the mysteries he embraced. He settled into them like a man casting off into an impenetrable ocean fog, a fog that made one feel both alone in and part of the world.

"Among the warriors against fear was Paul Lewis's protege and assistant, Richard Shope. 

Shope investigated swine flu in the 1920s and by 1931 published his papers showing his discoveries. He included Lewis's name as an author on one of his papers.

Shope's research was successful. "He had found the cause of influenza, at least in swine," Barry writes. "We now know that the virus he found in swine descended directly from the 1918 virus, the virus that made all the world a killing zone."

In 1928, in England, Alexander Fleming serendipitously discovered penicillin while researching influenza. Oswald Avery's work on influenza led directly to the discovery of DNA, further changing the world.

Applied Science: Coronaviruses

Barry provides more than a history of the epidemic. He also explains coronaviruses, Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, and the science of the influenza virus at the cellular level, including the difference between a slower mutating DNA virus and a faster mutating RNA virus.

"Influenza is an RNA virus. So is HIV and the coronavirus. And of all the RNA viruses, influenza and HIV are among those that mutate the fastest," Barry writes.

"[O]ne cannot leave this subject without speaking to other questions: the likelihood and potential danger of another influenza pandemic, what we can learn from the one of 1918-1919, and how we can apply those lessons to the emergence of a new pathogen, whether that pathogen is a weapon of terror or a new natural menace – such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, the disease which spread from animals to man in the spring of 2003 and threatened to become a major pandemic.The answer to the first question – the likelihood and potential danger of another influenza pandemic – is not very reassuring. Every expert on influenza agrees that the ability of the influenza virus to reassort genes means that another pandemic not only can happen. It almost certainly will happen."

Barry offers a special discussion of the coronavirus SARS – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – that appeared in China in 2003 and spread quickly across borders bringing with it susceptibility to ARDS. The Navy forward deployed to the western Pacific was concerned about the possibility of SARS outbreaks in 2004. The Navy maintains a preventive medicine SARS webpage as part of Ready Navy. 

The Navy (Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center), DoD and Centers for Disease Control are leaning forward to provide information and prevention tips regarding the newly emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that reportedly originated in Wuhan, China.

Today, unlike 100-plus years ago, scientists throughout the world are able to communicate and collaborate within seconds. They can, if allowed, share information and assistance across borders. An informed public can make rational decisions and not succumb to fear. Medical scientists have more tools and information to fight against pandemics.

Read this book to see the fate of Paul Lewis after the war. 

Right up there with McCullough's sweeping history books, Barry's "The Great Influenza" is a masterpiece. This is a great Navy read.

Camp Lemonnier’s medical team gives influenza vaccinations to service members, Oct. 28-30, 2019. (U.S. Navy photo by MC2 Marquis Whitehead)