"SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY"

 “SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY”

Recently Caroline and I were up in Virginia, where Caroline was part of a commission honoring our friend the Reverend Mary Jane Winter on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Mary Jane’s ordination as a minister in the PCUSA.  Caroline had been a part of the original Commission of Norfolk Presbytery which had ordained Mary Jane to the ministry as pastor of Franklin Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Virginia in 1976.  Mary Jane was the first woman to be ordained as a minister in that Presbytery, although Caroline had preceded her in the Presbytery when we came to be co-pastors at St. Columba Presbyterian Church in Norfolk.  Caroline had already been ordained as a minister by Atlanta Presbytery in 1973.

We rented an Airbnb in Richmond for the long weekend, and our daughter Susan joined us there for a small vacay.  We drove out to Franklin on Sunday for the celebration, and of course we were cutting it close to be on time.  We passed through Courtland, Virginia, which is the county seat of Southampton County.  As we drove by the county courthouse there, Susan noticed a sign that commemorated Dred Scott being born there.  We didn’t have time to stop, but we made a commitment to stop on the way back.  We all remarked that we knew that Nat Turner was from Southampton County, but we had no idea that Dred Scott was from there.

On the way back, we did stop to note the recent memorials to Nat Turner and to Dred Scott, both of whom had been born into slavery in Southampton County.  Turner learned to read, and he wanted to read the Bible.  In the Bible he found a message of liberation, in the Exodus story and especially from Galatians 5:1: “Freedom is what we have – Christ has set us free.  Stand then as free people, and do not allow yourselves to become slaves again.”  Turner developed a plan to lead an insurrection of enslaved people to overthrow slavery, and he developed his plan with a small group of enslaved people.  He had hoped (and expected) that a large number of enslaved people would join in the revolt.  In August, 1831, he began with the killing of white people, hoping to ignite the rebellion.  His small band of revolutionaries headed towards the armory at Jerusalem (which became Courtland in 1888), but the rebellion lost steam, as few Black people joined, and as white resistance turned fierce and deadly. After hiding out for a couple of months, he was finally caught, tried and executed in 1832.  His revolution struck fear deeply into the white heart, and Virginia and other states passed laws forbidding the teaching of enslaved people to read, as well as their right to assemble and worship on their own.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ was simply too incendiary to allow Black people to have access to it.

Dred Scott became a famous name in the 1850’s, when he and his wife Harriet sued to gain their freedom from slavery in Missouri.  Scott had been enslaved in Southampton County and then forced to go to Alabama with his enslaver to work a farm there.  The farm failed, and he and Harriet were sold to a surgeon in Missouri – Dred Scott ran away for a while but was recaptured and enslaved again.  The surgeon took the Scott family to Illinois for several years, and that state had a law that freed enslaved people who lived there for an extended period of time.  The Scotts sued for their freedom, initially winning in court, but eventually beginning to lose in appeals courts.  The case finally made its way to SCOTUS, which ruled in 1857 by a 7-2 vote that not only were the Scotts still “slaves,” but even worst, they were not human beings worthy of being citizens of the USA, an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney from Kentucky.  This decision caused an uproar all over the country, especially in the abolitionist states.  Freedom for the Scotts was finally won later in 1857, when abolitionists bought them and set them free.  Dred Scott died in 1858, and Harriet died in 1876.  The Dred and Harriet Scott case was one of five major events in the 1850’s that led to the Civil War.  Can you name the other four?  

We were astonished and humbled to find that all this history had come from Black people in Southampton County, Virginia.  But, lest we get too hopeful with this history, as a light rain began to fall that day, we discovered a tall monument about 50 yards behind the Turner/Scott markers.  On the top was a Confederate soldier, and in front of it was a recently installed historical marker extolling the virtues of the Confederates who had fought to preserve their homeland from the invading forces.  These two streams of liberation and oppression still flow in us and through us.  The Trump administration’s desire to obliterate the teaching of the Turner/Scott stories and to re-establish the legitimacy of the Confederacy remind us that this struggle seems eternal in the American heart.  Each of us and each generation will have to decide which side we are on.  The fight is always on – as the old union labor organizing song put it – “there ain’t no neutral there.”