LIVING OUT OF THEIR TIMES

Historical Precedents for Unconventional Behavior in The Randolph Legacy

by

Eileen Charbonneau

It's said that no writer can write of any but her own time--that even historical writers and novelists will see the past through the prism of the present. Perhaps that's why, in THE RANDOLPH LEGACY I'm drawn to characters who think and act out of keeping with the conventions and precedents of their own times. This book provided many challenges in that regard!

Fortunately, Judith Mercer belonging to the Society of Friends eased my way into her path of being out of her time. Quakers were pioneers and often endured harsh punishments for supporting religious freedom, universal education, women's rights, the abolition of slavery, improvement of hospitals and prisons, and relief work during and after wars. The woman Judith and her father have been visiting in England at the beginning of The Randolph Legacy, Elizabeth Fry, was a powerful force in prison reform. So it was natural for Judith, under her influence, to take on Ethan's cause as a discharged prisoner of the H.M.F. Standard.

Judith's Quaker upbringing also hindered her recognition of the nature of either Captain Willis's obsession, or the vendetta against her family's survival. Although Quakers believed themselves "children of the Light" (divine possession), they were not believers in demoniac possession. Though she was an expert in seeking and "lighting" the good in others, from the cynical Maupin to the disagreeable Winthrop Randolph, she was less able to recognize the festering despair of the Standard's captain, or the rage of the Loyalist family her father had supplanted.

The story of Judith's girlhood rescue of her father from the Loyalists I drew from an account of a family tradition of events dramatized by E.P. Roe in his nineteenth century story "A Brave Little Quakeress."

Ethan Randolph's out-of-his-time actions proved more problematical. How could I explain a slaveholder's son who will not even consider owning slaves himself? One whose conscience is so troubled by his family's traditions that he will exile himself from his beloved Virginia to ease it?

My research told me that Southern families of the period often allowed their children to be brought up side by side with the slave members of their households, working and playing together, looked after by the same women. Some slaveholders' children were "color-blind" until their more formal schooling included differentiating themselves from the black children who had heretofore been playmates. This could be especially true for younger members of a plantation family that already had its heir (oldest son) and "spare" (second eldest, often a churchman, in a tradition that goes back to English feudal times). So I made sure Ethan was born a third son (by tradition, often the adventurer or military man).

Taking leave of his family for his adventure came early for Ethan, who decides to join the crew of his father's merchant marine ship the Ida Lee as a midshipman of twelve--before what the Randolph slave Aaron says, the "hammering in" of black/white, slave/master differences was completed in him. But just in time to suffer at the hands of the British at war with Napoleon.

When Ethan is impressed into the British Navy, then punished for refusing to fight with a brutal flogging and long service aboard the Standard, he gets a taste of what it's like to be owned by another. Now his birthright as a plantation owner's son will never take hold. But I had another problem. How does a crippled boy who's what Maupin calls "more of a shade of the underworld" than flesh and blood, survive those ten years below decks? Besides giving him his Frenchman protector, I took for Ethan's precedent the spirit of an anonymous craftsman I found in the Maritime Museum in Newport News, Virginia. One of his miniature ships is on display there. It's a vessel created without plans or guidance, out of old soup bones, scraps of clothing, and the leavings of the occasional woman passenger's hairbrushes. It has a compelling, rough beauty. Its creator was a captive during the Napoleonic Wars, one of many unfortunates who were held on board British ships for as long as ten years. As I looked at the miniature ship a thought birthed itself: this is what this man did to stay sane. Another thought followed on hits heels: I wanted Ethan's story to incorporate his. So, in novelist's fashion, I "what if'd" until Ethan grew into his manhood--intelligent and sane, perserverant, brave, and with enough charm to get Quaker Judith Mercer to donate her hair to raise his sails.

Once Judith gets Ethan back on land and into the arms of his imperfect family, I was faced with another problem. Yes, Ethan is in love with Judith and in agreement with the Quaker stance that no one is or should be a slave to another. But he's a Virginian, with deep ties to his family and homeland. For precedent I drew on an extraordinary correspondence related in Dumas Malone's wonderful biography THE SAGE OF MONTICELLO. The letters Malone cites are between a young Virginian named Edward Coles and the retired seventy-one year old Thomas Jefferson. Coles, like my fictional Ethan is disturbed by the slavery issue -- what Jefferson called having "the wolf by the ears." Although the slave trade from Africa was outlawed while Jefferson was president, Coles in 1814 asks the elder statesman to take up the cause to emancipate the slaves of their beloved Virginia.

Many of Jefferson's generation believed slavery would eventually die of its own accord. But in the Deep South, the invention of the cotton gin began reinvigorating a dying and profitless institution. Jefferson maintains that the emancipation of slaves is not his fight, but that of the next American generation--Ethan Randolph's and Edward Coles'.

Virginia's manumission laws of the time declared that any freed slave who did not leave the state within a year of being freed, would be sold back into slavery. To avoid his own inherited servants from suffering this fate, Edward Coles choose to follow his conscience and lead them out of Virginia to a free state (Illinois), thus becoming an exile himself. I have my Ethan Randolph follow this example.

Ethan goes beyond the law, though. He aids an abets, first his eight fingered cellmate Atlas, then a whole family of runaway slaves heading north by sea. I thought I might be testing the conventions of the time with this until I read of a Virginia planter's son who did exactly that, much to the dismay of his family and friends. This man pursued his lawbreaking using his southern accent and gentleman's ways to deceive slaveholders and catchers alike, and helped numberless slaves to escape into the free North and Canada. He disappeared abruptly. It's said he died in an unsuccessful attempt to transport runaways north. His family had long since disowned him by then.

I like to think Ethan's survival makes the world right again for this man who dared to live out of his time but in keeping with his conscience.

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