Freedom's Mirage: Virgil Bennehan's Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile (Critical Indigeneities)

Throughout the 19th century, America dealt with the self-inflicted curse of slavery and its legacy in different ways, both before and after Emancipation.

One was through voluntary repatriation of freed Blacks to West Africa through the American Colonization Society (ACS), championed by pesidents from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln.

For the most part, colonization provided a fig leaf for racist whites who also opposed slavery, in much the same way that, in the 1960s “urban renewal” meant “urban removal” for the descendants of enslaved people.

Sydney Nathans, emeritus professor of history at Duke University, tells this misbegotten story in smoothly written, tragic miniature in Freedom’s Mirage: Virgil Bennehan’s Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile.

Throughout, he asks the larger question: “What did Virgil’s story reveal about the African American experience in slavery and freedom?”

Virgil Bennehan’s North Carolina enslaver, Thomas Bennehan, who may have been his father, singled Virgil out as a teenager, training him to read and write. The young man, born in 1808, rose through the plantation hierarchy as an accountant, a medical assistant, and the trusted keeper of the storehouse from which meat was distributed.

In Thomas’ will, Virgil and his immediate family were manumitted—freed—and left a substantial inheritance in gold. Skilled, with capital, his future seemed bright.

But freed from enslavement, most men and women like Virgil were, by law and practice, exiled forever from their southern homes and extended families. In the free northern states they found themselves shunned, facing racism, discrimination, and worse. Into this milieu, the American Colonization Society arose with the goal of developing the West African territory they called Liberia, taken by force and deception from its indigenous occupants.

For the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, Nathans writes, “all colonizationists played into the hands of those who wanted every free Black expelled from the North and all but a handful of the enslaved kept captive in the South.”

In fact, the Liberia project was doomed, often with fatal effect for those ensnared in the scheme.

Virgil Bennehan, having left North Carolina with his family, and settled in Baltimore, seemed to be a perfect candidate for emigration, at least in the eyes of the white leaders of the ACS.

When he agreed to take his family with him on a scouting tour of Liberia, the trip was a revelation—and a disaster. Bennehan reported that the colony was characterized by corruption, poverty, and deadly fevers. When the ACS ship returned, he and his family sailed back to Baltimore, where Virgil announced to his family that they would not be returning to Liberia. Instead, he told them he intended to follow the 1849 gold rush to California and to make his fortune there and send for them. Yet all he found was poverty and death, in 1850.

Freedom’s Mirage is a welcome addition to the shelf of books dealing with the antebellum lives of enslaved African Americans who were manumitted in the 19th century until the Civil War.

Nathans became a historian, he explains in the Prologue, “when the winds of the profession were shifting from political history and great leaders to social history and ordinary people.”

However, the challenge of writing history from the perspective of ordinary people is often the absence of extensive documentation. Thus, Nathans explains, historians need to resort to speculation, although informed speculation. “I realized that this was a story replete with conjecture, and even with conjuration,” compelling him to rely on “the detective in me.”

At Duke, where Nathans taught for decades, he acknowledges he was fortunate to be in a pioneering cohort that included William Chafe (Civilities and Civil Rights), Larry Goodwyn (Democratic Promise), and Peter Wood (Black Majority). Elsewhere, other young lions of the discipline like Ted Rosengarten (All God’s Dangers) and Nell Irvin Painter (The Narrative of Hosea Hudson) were carving out a subset in what became known as “oral history.”

Nathans’ slender volume builds on two of his earlier works, both rooted in Durham, N.C., plantations, Staggville and Fairntosh: A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland, about enslaved people who were transported to Alabama; and To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker, about an enslaved woman who fled from the white North Carolina family while on a visit to Philadelphia.

In Freedom’s Mirage Nathans comes to a bleak conclusion: “Virgil Bennehan rose to unusual heights and attainment, only to learn the fragility of privilege . . . [His]odyssey illustrates extremes of what was possible and finally not possible for an enslaved and then freed man of color in the antebellum South—and for decades.”

Bennehan “died a pauper in San Francisco,” Nathans writes. “What an unwelcome end for a man who had traveled from bondage to manumission, from America to Africa and back, and finally from Baltimore to San Francisco.”