Dear Young Master and Friend: How One Letter Turned into a Biography
The following is a guest post from Sydney Nathans, author of Freedom’s Mirage: Virgil Bennehan’s Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile, which traces the exceptional life of Virgil Bennehan, born in bondage in 1808 in Piedmont North Carolina, who rose to become an enslaved doctor on one of the South’s largest plantations and to view himself as a friend to Black and white people alike.
When I was debating whether to venture writing a biography of Virgil Bennehan, I confronted two challenges. Could the story of an enslaved man whose life was ever-more exceptional reveal something significant and compelling about African Americans in slavery and freedom? Could I compose a biography based on a single letter my subject wrote?
From the outside, I knew a great deal about the world Virgil Bennehan dwelt in, having done four decades of research in the archive of 30000 letters of the white family that owned Virgil and over a thousand enslaved persons in Piedmont North Carolina. I could build on my research and the extraordinary work of other historians who had scoured those letters and even extracted insights from annual inventories of enslaved workers, listed by name, age, and often by family groups. I could draw on the oral history done in the 1970s by an intrepid Duke graduate student, and on my own two books about persons whose lives began in bondage but took unusual turns. I probed both stories without preconceptions of where the evidence would lead me, hoping that I would come to fathom the larger significance—and even find a transcendent representativeness—of each. In time and with luck, understanding came. Reluctant runaway Mary Walker was not alone in yearning for and seeking To Free a Family she left behind when forced to flee bondage in 1848. Former bondsman Paul Hargis and his descendants were among the many—the majority I realized—who after 1865 had A Mind to Stay in the south rather than join migrations to the north and west.
Enslaved yet elevated to the role of physician, freed but immediately exiled to Liberia, one of the richest and best-connected manumitted men ever sent to Liberia who nonetheless sailed back to America in six months, he came home to North Carolina and purportedly asked to return to bondage.
The meaning was harder to imagine with the exceptional story of Virgil Bennehan. Enslaved yet elevated to the role of physician, freed but immediately exiled to Liberia, one of the richest and best-connected manumitted men ever sent to Liberia who nonetheless sailed back to America in six months, he came home to North Carolina and purportedly asked to return to bondage. When refused, he declared his intention to seek gold in California. I could only hope that if I stayed long enough with his improbable odyssey, transcendent significance would emerge.
The other challenge was that I had to rely on only one letter written by my subject. In graduate school, I had a teacher who declared flatly that one piece of evidence was all he needed to write a book. He had a full professorship at 33 to back his bravado, first at Michigan and then at Johns Hopkins. Though lacking his gumption, out of necessity I kept coming back to that one letter, trying each time to extract more meaning, to fill in gaps with speculation, and all the while hoping that in time more evidence would turn up, as it wondrously had for my previous two books.
The one letter, written in Liberia, was from Virgil P.M. Bennehan and composed on May 29, 1848. The recipient was the thirty-nine-year-old white slaveowner on the Piedmont plantation where both men had been born in 1808, two miles, three months, and seemingly a world apart. The opening of the letter, six short words, always brought me up short. “My Dear young Master & friend.” Master and friend? How could such a friendship be, or come to be? In the body of the letter, there were more declarations of friendship, starting with the old Master, the owner’s two daughters, the young master’s wife and children, then greetings by name to five “neighbors” who in fact were overseers of the plantation. Next came how-do’s to Virgil’s brothers and aged aunt, followed by remembrances by name to fifteen enslaved friends who constituted the owner’s designated hierarchy of skilled workers and domestics. “I could call 100 more names but tell them all how day for me.” Owners, overseers, enslaved—Virgil P.M. Bennehan saw himself as a friend to all while in bondage and still attached to all after his emancipation. Was he living in a world of delusion? Or did I have unexpected complexity to account for?
In trying to explain how Virgil became a physician while in bondage, I found myself tracing the steady expansion of the plantation by purchase of adjacent lowlands, whose clearance and cultivation created a toxic terrain, a malarial environment that sickened ever-rising numbers of workers. The ill in turn needed such medical care as was understood (and misunderstood) in their day. When the owner himself was felled by illness and escaped to restore his health, Virgil was trained to step in and ultimately became a full-fledged caregiver. When his owner died, Virgil received freedom conjoined with exile—without the option to decline both and stay put. If he was so valued, why not let him stay, or leave the choice to him? Sent with wealth and solid medical credentials to Liberia, he met with the Black republic’s secretary of state, the author of its Declaration of Independence, the physician-brother of its president, and received a royal welcome from all. Yet he turned his back on them and the newly independent country and returned not just to the United States but to North Carolina. What propelled him back? Was there any truth to the tale, meant to demonstrate the benignity of bondage, that he begged to be re-enslaved?
The opening of the letter, six short words, always brought me up short. “My Dear young Master & friend.” Master and friend? How could such a friendship be, or come to be?
I might have stayed stumped by these questions had I not found an attic trunk of sorts. Answers were embedded in the correspondence of leaders of the American Colonization Society. Scattered in dozens of microfilmed reels of thousands of letters were clues that connected the dots of where and why Virgil was sent to Liberia, what happened to him and his shipmates in the first six months there, why he returned, the mission that impelled him to go back to North Carolina—and finally the answer to whether he made it to gold rush California.
In this story of Virgil Bennehan—an exception in bondage, an exile in freedom, and a trans-Atlantic and perhaps trans-continental seeker thereafter—did I find transcendent significance? By my lights, Virgil Bennehan’s story revealed the complexity and fragility of human relationships within bondage. When liberated, his experience dramatized the fleeting promise and pervasive limits of Black freedom in the era of slavery. Did his fate foreshadow the future for generations that followed? I invite you, the reader, to judge.
Sydney Nathans is emeritus professor of history at Duke University.