William King returned to Jackson, Louisiana where he found his wife and child well. The three headed up the Mississippi to visit with King’s family in Ohio before returning to Edinburgh. “At Detroit my boy took what the Doctors called intermittent fever. On the third day he appeared to be better and the Doctors said I could go on to Ohio, that he would be well in a few days. So I left Detroit on a Steam boat for Toledo where I took the canal to go to Father’s who lived about thirty miles from Toledo. But before I reached Waterville on the Canal my boy got worse and died on the canal boat. I got out at Waterville to get a coffin for my child, and wait till it was made. There I hired a team to take myself, wife and child out to my Father’s and there I buried him in a grave yard on my Father’s farm where most of my Father’s family have been buried since. This was a severe trial to my wife but she bore the dispensation with Christian fortitude and in a week she was able to go with me to New York where we took a sailing Packet for Liverpool and arrived there in fourteen days and twelve hours.” (55)
Can you imagine???????
I have no question for this passage. I just can’t imagine how Mary King left for New York and what the trip across the Atlantic must have been like for her.
King travelled across the Atlantic as a Second Mate – never having piloted a ship before!
That April, William King planned to return to America for his wife and son but when he arrived in Liverpool he discovered the ship that was to sail that week had a full complement of passengers and could take no more. So he asked the Captain if he had a full complement of ship-hands. Luckily he required a second mate, so King “bought himself a red shirt, and a Sou’Wester and shipped as Second Mate. When we left the harbor I was on the quarter deck doing duty, and every day at noon I took the sun’s altitude with a quadrant that the Captain furnished me with. The rest of the time I was in the Cabin reading until the Pilot came on board at New York , then I was again on the quarter deck doing duty; and when the Manifest was handed in to the proper authorities in New York my name was read out as Second Mate.” (53-54) Not bad, for a student of theology!
You are invited to tell of a time when you, or someone else, found a way through a dilemma with a brilliant solution.
Burke and Hare were notorious criminals in the area where King served.
In January of 1844 the 31 yr. old William King started his studies as one of 300 students drawn from all over the world to the newly-formed College of the Free Church of Scotland. Victor Ullman, in Look to the North Star, says of the relationship between King and the charismatic President of the College, “ For all of his three years in Edinburgh, William was to be in Dr. Chalmer’s thrall, as a student, a protégé, and a friend… he was to pattern his life and beliefs after that man’s rare combination of unswerving faith and administrative practicality. “ (53)
Part of Dr. Chalmer’s focus was “raising the lower classes from that state of moral degradation into which they had fallen” .(48) His plan was to divide the poorest sections of Edinburgh, “appoint a gentleman and Lady who were to visit all the families in their division once a week.” (49) Their mission was to create a relationship which would encourage the parents to send their children to schools administered by the Free Church.
West Port was considered one of the lowest and most degraded slums in Edinburgh. Impoverished Irish immigrants flooded to this area to labour in the harvests. King tells in his autobiography of two men who provided boarding for the immigrants in Burks Close, West Port. As a way of lining their pockets, they took to smothering some of their boarders and selling the bodies to the medical school for dissection. For his part in the crimes, the one man was hung. (The story of Burke and Hare has been made into a movie. It’s worth reading about them on Wikepedia!) Also in Burks Close was an old tannery where a school and church was opened by the divinity students. Children were invited to attend both. “The boys collected from the street when first placed in School were in such a state of filth and rags that their bodies had to be washed and their hair cut, before they could be set on the benches…the boys had their hair cut close by a barber and perfumed, which so pleased the boys that when they saw a few thus dressed by the Barber, willingly came of their own free will to be washed and perfumed. The girls washed their clothes and combed their hair. A seamstress was appointed to assist them in making and mending their own clothes. The cleaning up of the Scholars had an influence on the Parents, who began to come to Church with their clothes clean and tidy. The girls also began to knit and sew for their brothers.
“A night school was opened for the boys that were grown up and could not attend the day school. In School they were up to all manner of mischief and the boys without would disturb those that were within. On a signal given the lights would be put out and the boys would pitch into each other, and for a few minutes all would be in confusion until the gas was again lited and order restored. It became necessary, during the first winter of the night school to have a policeman placed at the door of the schoolroom to keep the boys without from disturbing those that were within. But the second winter all this difficulty disappeared. The boys began to like the school and to study and gave no trouble, and many of those boys that were wild at first became diligent students and soon learned to read and write, attended the Sabbath School and became useful members of Society.” (52)
When have you witnessed people completely turning their lives around?
King sailed across the Atlantic on a ship filled with cotton.
And so William King found himself locked into a system of which he deeply disapproved. He was popular with the students and trustees of the college. He had status. He had a good income. His wife was amongst her family and childhood friends. He writes in his autobiography, “The way was dark before me, my oldest boy was nearly three years old and I wished to remove him from the south before he was capable of knowing betwixt right and wrong. But I could not leave without some good excuse.” (44)
The opportunity came when the College proposed a change in governance. King announced that he was returning to Scotland to complete his theological studies. First he needed to establish sponsorship for a poor white student whose tuition he had covered. He also needed to provide for the slaves he owned and those he would inherit, so he purchased a plantation next to his father-in-law’s where the slaves might be self-sufficient.
“In November I had made all my arrangements for leaving, but I concluded to go alone to leave my wife and child with her father and I would return in the spring to take them over to Edinburgh in the summer, when the sea was calm. “ (46) It was a rough passage. The captain of the ship said that he had never seen one rougher. The one consolation was that “a cotton ship will not sink, she is as light as a cork and where she had sea room in mid-Atlantic, there was no danger of her going down. I was sea-sick the whole voyage, and when I arrived in Liverpool I was scarcely able to walk.” (46)
Tell of a time when opportunities opened up for you.
The cotton gin created a 25-fold increase in the amount of cotton that could be processed.
The cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney, greatly increased the efficiency of processing cotton and, ironically, greatly increased the demand for slaves to clear more land, plant, weed, harvest and process the crop.
From William King’s autobiography, “Up to the invention of the cotton gin the seed of the cotton could only be separated from the fibre by hand-picking, and that process was so slow, that it did not remunerate the planter to raise it. But Whitney, who invented the cotton gin, a machine for separating the seed from the fibre, rendered slave labour profitable, quadrupled the price of cotton land and afforded a ready market for the surplus slave raised in the farming states. Cotton became a valuable article of commerce, and found a ready market in Europe. It could be raised in large quantity by slave labour in the US and just as the price of cotton went up the price of slaves went up with it, and a large traffic was thus opened up between the farming and cotton growing states. The surplus slaves raised in Virginia Maryland and Kentucky were collected annually by slave dealers and carried to the cotton and sugar growing states where they were readily disposed of. A traffic was thus carried on between the farming and cotton growing states demoralizing in its nature and evil in practice, it was the means of separating parents and children, brothers and sisters, never to meet again in this world. Marriage was encouraged in the farming states (of the north) for the purpose of raising slaves for the southern market.” (40)
Inventions always have spin-off effects. What are some you’ve noticed?
The passage that was to shape young William’s life.
“What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” Mark 8:36 of The Bible. William King heard these words and the sermon that accompanied them from a minister who was freeing his slaves and returning to New England in the early days of King’s tenure at Matthews Academy. They were to have a profound impact on him. “I have now lived long enough in the country to see the evils of slavery,” he wrote in his autobiography.
“The evils, of the system that were necessarily connected with it bore as heavily on the white families as on the black. The moral evils connected with the system were such that it could not exist with Christianity. It would either destroy Christianity or Christianity would destroy it. They could not exist together. When I lived in the south slavery had reached the zenith of its power and was ripening for destruction.” (39) “I saw the danger to which I would be exposed from the world in the situation I was about to enter upon. There was the prospect of wealth and a gay and fashionable world with all its pleasures spread out before me, including the human heart to settle down in their midst and make this world my portion.” (37)
In 1841 he married Mary Phares, the oldest daughter of a wealthy planter.
When did you come to a point where you realized you were losing your soul? What did you do about it?
Or
What moral evils do you believe should not be tolerated today?
Lanterns – King’s way of controlling the boy’s dormitory.
William King was offered the position of Rector (Headmaster) of a preparatory department of Louisiana College. Before he accepted he asked the Trustees to change the laws that required all boys above 12 years of age to be treated as gentlemen. He wanted the power to correct them because he knew amongst other things that the “boys would leave their rooms at night and visit neighbouring plantations for improper purposes”. (33) “Sometimes they would have company with them in their rooms feasting and drinking and having a good time generally and wholly neglecting their studies.” (32) William King would have none of that. He had the floor of small bedrooms changed into a single dormitory. One unmarried teacher slept at each end and a lamp was kept burning throughout the night so that bed checks could be made.
He also prohibited (and confiscated) the weapons that the boys brought to school: pistols and bowie knives in the hands of the French and English boys and stillettoes or Spanish daggers in the hands of the Spaniards.
In his time at the Academy King loved his nightly horse ride through the 100 acres of the college. “On these excursions I would sometimes meet students going out to the country for a spree. Sometimes I would meet the Patrol visiting the negro quarters to see that they were all in their right place and if any negro was found off the plantation to which he belonged without a written permit from his master he was whipped and sent home.” (36) On these evenings he loved the “the fragrance of the magnolia, honeysuckle and cape jasmine and the song of the mocking bird and the nightingale”. (36)
Given the “disturbed state” of the south, William King, “did not wish to be entangled with a business that would confine (him) to the country”. So he began teaching the seven children of three related, Irish-Spanish, Planter families inland from Bayou Sara. The schoolhouse was surrounded by “crepe myrtle roses, cape jasmine and several beautiful magnolias”. Within two months a long-standing disagreement between two of the pupils who were cousins resulted in one hitting the other on the head with a porter bottle, almost breaking his skull. The young William told the father of the assailant that he would not tolerate such contact at school and should the boy be found guilty, King himself would thrash him and make him obey. The father “felt annoyed that (King) was going to treat his boy as he was in the habit of treating his slaves when they offended him, so he took his children away.” This left King with two pupils.
But word got around the district of King’s actions and he was approached by a wealthy planter who was also a Senator in the Louisiana Legislature. The man had two sons who had beaten two of their teachers. He wanted King to instruct them.
“The first day the boys came to me I kept them in at night and talked kindly to them. I told them they could review their character by good behavior and applying themselves to their books. I would teach them if they would only apply themselves. They promised amendment and kept their word. They were with me two years and I had not two better boys in the school, they were diligent and obedient. They applied themselves to their books and made good progress. Before I opened the school for all who would choose to come, I had only two scholars; by the end of the year I had forty.”
What stories do you have about “standing your ground” (or not!)?
The spring of 1834 William King was reunited with his family on the 634 acres of newly purchased bush 12 miles from the Maumee River in Ohio. For the next 1 ½ years he labored clearing the land of the stands of massive oak, sycamore and walnut trees. He reports in his autobiography, “At the end of two months I could work all day without feeling tired, and could cut down a tree, and take cut about with my companion in cutting up the body of the tree.”(20) This skill was to serve him well years later when clearing for the settlement at Buxton, Canada West. But he wanted to move on. In his words: “I was determined to teach a few years before I would study theology, to be no longer a burden to the family but to support myself and paddle my own canoe.” (21)He had been told he could get a job in southern USA, so he headed down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The further south he went, the more he could see that the country was in a “disturbed state.” (27)
Bands of outlaws were making their way through the slave states, often posing as land speculators. Accompanied by a “body servant” they had stolen from another plantation they would wine and dine at their new host’s expense and, if possible, “sell” their servant who was instructed to steal a horse in the night and meet up with the outlaw some miles down the road. “In this way the master would travel selling his “body servant” perhaps two or three times and then the master, in travelling through a long stretch of forest would shoot the servant and cast him into some pool where he would never be found and never tell tales on his master, who had already received two thousand dollars by the sales that he had made.” (23)
This is a long post and I can’t think of a good question. Feel free to post one!
The young William King departed for Philadelphia, USA with his brother’s entire potato crop days after his graduation from college. The crop that year had been exceptional in Ireland, but dismal in America and King was to sell it to help finance his family’s migration to Canada. The remainder of his family followed in the fall of 1833, but “unfavourable accounts of Canada as a place for farming…(where) people went six months of the year clothed in Buffalo and Bear skins to keep warm”(10), caused them to decide to go to Ohio following spring. To pass the winter, King taught, without remuneration, “the large and advanced scholars” (10) in a primitive log school near Cleveland. The building had “a large fire place at the north and (was) capable of taking in four foot wood.”(10).
The Emma Field Novels 