Stories for the Semiquincentennial

Matt Darroch 

It's 1976 Rock is the biggest blockbuster of the year. Gerald Ford is on the tail end of his presidency. Elton John and Kiki D are topping the charts.

And Dave Hand begins his bike ride across America.

Dave Hand 

So, from a route standpoint, I flew into Eugene, was bused to Reedsport, Oregon, and then went through 10 states, so Oregon,

Matt Darroch 

Idaho, and Montana,

Dave Hand 

Dipped down to Wyoming through Yellowstone, which was just magnificent on a bike,

Matt Darroch 

Then through Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri,

Dave Hand 

Touched the corner of Illinois through Carbondale into Kentucky, which frankly was really the worst state in my book, and then into Virginia.

Matt Darroch 

This epic journey was part of the Bikecentennial, a trans-American bike trip in celebration of the Bicentennial, or America's 200th anniversary.

Dave Hand 

I just love the thrill of being out on two wheels and controlling my own destiny.

Matt Darroch 

Dave was 18 when he first saw a Bikecentennial ad in Cycling magazine.

Dave Hand 

I said, this sounds like an interesting feat.

Matt Darroch 

At the time, he was going to college, but still living at home, so he asked his parents' permission and scrounged up the money,

Dave Hand 

By that time I got my 10 speed bike back then for what you can buy with the money, that was all I could afford.

Matt Darroch

Around 4000 cyclists took part in the bike centennial and went through some of the most stunning natural environments of America, like Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and the Rocky Mountains, but to Dave, Kansas was his favorite.

Dave Hand

People there were just great. We ended up with, you know, the townspeople were doing ice cream socials, and I don't know whether I can't remember what it's that weekend or whether they just were doing that back in the 70s as a way to kind of get together, you know, square dancing outside, inviting the bicyclists, and it wasn't just my group, and it was just a chance to interact with the locals.

Matt Darroch 

It took him a little over two months to complete the Bikecentennial. Along the way, he dealt with countless flat tires and brake checking jerks in cars, but everything went pretty well, even the steepest climb of the ride in Vesuvius, Virginia was no match for Dave's fresh young legs.

Dave Hand 

I kept a journal every day, and I was actually very faithful in writing my thoughts of the day, as well as how many miles we did that day, and if I spent any money. And I wrote in the journal that says, "Oh, we rode up Vesuvius. I didn't think it was quite that hard. Some of the other older gentlemen on the trip struggled getting up, but all of us got it.

Matt Darroch 

A couple of weeks ago, Dave joined a group of cyclists to ride the Virginia section of the original Bikecentennial to celebrate America's 250th anniversary.

Dave Hand 

The body feels a lot more worn out.

Matt Darroch 

So, when he came up on Vesuvius 50 years later, it was a bit more intimidating.

Dave Hand 

I actually was, frankly, very nervous. I actually didn't think I was going to do it, but lo and behold, I made it up. Now, it wasn't anywhere near as fast as I probably did it in a bikecentennial days 50 years ago, but I made it.

Matt Darroch 

From Virginia Humanities. This is With Good Reason. I'm Matt Darroch. Today on the show, we pedal back in time to the first organized bike tour across America. 

The original Bikecentennial route - that went coast to coast 50 years ago - is still mostly intact today. It's called Bicycle Route 76 and Tom Ewing has written sections of it for the better part of a decade. He's a history professor at Virginia Tech and the project director of the podcast, Bike 76 Virginia. I sat down with him to learn about the spirit of the Bikecentennial, its grassroots nature, and any lessons to be gleaned for America's 250th celebration. 

All right, Tom, when did you first learn about Bicycle Route 76? Doesn't it run straight through your hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia?

Tom Ewing 

Well, I probably learned about it driving back and forth to my home in Blacksburg. The first time I really thought about it as a bicycle route was about 10 years ago when I started riding a road bike through Catawba Valley and Ellet Valley, which are just north of my home, and noticed the signs and realized that the route I was riding on connected to Yorktown in the east and Oregon in the west.

Matt Darroch 

How have I never heard of this before? Is it a popular path among bicyclists that you know maybe the general public just isn't as hip to?

Tom Ewing 

It's not a terribly popular route. It was created in 1976 as part of the bike centennial, and then there were hundreds of 1000s of cyclists on it, but I've, you know, been on the route numerous times, and rarely see someone who was loaded up, you know, for a long distance ride. I do occasionally, but it's not that common. I've been across the 550 miles in Virginia last year, and I would guess there's probably two or 300 signs across the whole route, you know. So, anyone who's driving probably will see them. They do tend to cluster. I mean, obviously, they're at intersections, so there might be, you know, two or three intersections where there might be six or eight signs, and then you won't see one for 20 miles.

Matt Darroch 

Wait, so, so you rode 550 miles in Virginia, is that the whole state of Virginia?

Tom Ewing 

That's the whole route, yeah, across Virginia.

Matt Darroch 

What was it like getting to see, you know, parts of Virginia that I assume you've, you've never been to before from the vantage point of a bike, it must have been beautiful.

Tom Ewing 

It is beautiful. There are sections that are really quite stunning. The southwest part of Virginia, coming from Briggs Park down to Mount Rogers, and then the valleys west of the Blue Ridge. There are also parts that are pretty busy. There are places where the interstate is right next to you, you're very aware of the traffic, but yeah, I think seeing the country from a bicycle seat, everything is slower, you're more aware of the environment as you go through, you have time to observe a farmer on a tractor because he's not going much faster than you are, you know, and so I think you really do have a better sense of both the natural environment, but also the built environment. As you go through on a bicycle.

Matt Darroch 

You were mentioning some pretty mountainous areas in Virginia. Is it a pretty tough ride? 

Tom Ewing 

It is. So, this section, I think, was known in 1976 as a challenging section. The very first riders left Jamestown, and so it's pretty flat for the first three days until they get to ride up Afton Mountain up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and then it's up and down a lot all the way through until you get through Eastern Kentucky, and then it flattens out. Going the other direction, the eastbound, you know, they started hearing about this big climb in Virginia from the town of Vesuvius up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was reported to be the steepest climb on the entire Transamerica route. Really, the climbs in the Cascades and the Rockies were higher, you know, much higher elevation and longer, but more gradual, and so the steep climb, the three miles was something that a lot of cyclists were dreading and anticipating, but then you know had a sense of exhilaration when they got to the top. They also knew when they got up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, those were their last major hills, and then it was downhill until they got to Yorktown.

Matt Darroch 

So, talk to me about how Bicycle Route 76 came to be in its connection with the Bikecentennial of 1976

Tom Ewing 

So this really did begin with the vision of four people, Greg and Liz Burden and Jill and Greg Sipple, who were young and adventurous in the early 1970s and actually on something called the Trans Hemispheric Bicycle Trip, which began in Alaska and was supposed to go all the way to Argentina, and at some point along that ride they started thinking, so this was, I think, 1973 they started looking ahead to 1976 and the bicentennial, and thought we should organize a ride across the country to celebrate America's 200th anniversary. Then one of them came up with the name Bikecentennial, and they didn't just give up on the idea, but when they got back from this trip, they started organizing. They did fundraising, and then they started advertising. They had print ads in Bicycling magazine and the whole Earth catalog, and you could fill out a form, and I think it was a $10 check to hold a spot. And then there were two or three pairs who rode across the country in 1975 to map out possible routes, and then they started training group leaders, so the idea was each group would have 10 to 15 riders, two or three leaders who were trained. There are a couple options. You could do a kind of self-supported, where you carried everything, camping gear. You could also pay extra to have lodging arranged for you, which was usually either a dormitory in a college town or a church floor, very occasionally a hostel or a hotel, and then there were some trips where they actually had a support vehicle that carried their things and met them along the way, which is more common now when people do long distance bike trips.

Matt Darroch 

So it sounds like it was largely, you know, a grassroots operation.

Tom Ewing 

It really was, you know, the four visionaries became the four organizers. They recruited others, obviously, as they went through. They got a small grant from the American Bicentennial Commission, which was the federal organization. And then I think there was some donations, you know, that kind of helped them get what they needed. It was very. Much a shoestring operation, and of course it was the 1970s so everything was done by postcard, phone call, or or personal visit, and so the Bike Centennial Group printed maps. There was a guidebook for each of the sections, so maybe six books total, you know, by different areas. The one for this area started in Berea, Kentucky, and went to Christiansburg, and then there was a second that went from Christiansburg to Yorktown, and so those had turn-by-turn maps, and they also had a series of abbreviations for things like, you know, C for camping or F for food, but I think there was a fair amount of faith, you know, that you could actually find those things as you went through.

Matt Darroch

Yeah, the idea of having to use a map to cross, you know, the entire United States is daunting to me. I use Google Maps just to get around, you know, my city that I've been in, Charlottesville, for the last, you know, 10 years.

Tom Ewing 

Well, two or three of the newspaper photographs I've located from 1976 show you know a cluster of writers looking at a map, and I did a talk, actually last year in Lexington, and met someone who had written in 1976 and when I showed this photograph as the part of my presentation, he laughed, and he said we spent a lot of time staring at maps, you know, because the maps, I mean, the maps are accurate, but they don't have necessarily the fine detail that you need, you know, when it, when it actually comes to specific turns, and of course they're printed maps, and so if there's a road closure detour or something else, then yeah, you're kind of on your own

Matt Darroch 

You know, this was the heart of the 70s - were the bike riders the free-spirited hippie type, because you know that's definitely the kind of image I have in my head.

Tom Ewing 

If you look at photographs, your first thought is going to be, well, two, yes, these are definitely free spirits, and why aren't they wearing helmets? Those are my first two thoughts. I mean, the most common uniform I would say was a bicentennial T-shirt, you know, a pair of shorts and tennis shoes. This was before the era of cleats, and so there were toe clips, and so some cyclists would have that, but not all of them. Again, looking at it from our perspective, 50 years later, these look much more like people you know, riding their bikes down to the swimming pool rather than riding across the country, except they had, you know, bags on the back, you know, where they were carrying a lot, you know. In reading the accounts of cyclists, I kind of see a spectrum. I think there were certainly some who, you know, did this on a whim, maybe hadn't cycled very much, just bought a bike to do this, or borrowed a bike, even. And then there were much more serious cyclists, but there were others who really wanted, I think, more in the spirit of the bike centennial, wanted to stop and talk to people, look at things as they went along. There was a group of, I think all women, for women who said, you know, what we, we let our group go ahead, they wanted to go too fast, and we wanted to stop and see things, and every day they stopped to swim, even if that meant a detour, and they just weren't worried about how long it was taking them, you know, and they made it across the country.

Matt Darroch

Do you have any sense of how many people ended up riding Bicycle Route 76, 50 years ago?

Tom Ewing 

Yeah, the most common number is 4000 and about half of those did the entire trip, and then half did what they called section rides, so generally those would either start in Astoria in Oregon or at Yorktown in Virginia, and then head inland to a stopping point, or they would start someplace inland and end up on the coast, you know. So, there were, I forget how many, maybe a dozen section rides of different lengths. A common one, or a very popular one, was called the Colonial Section, which went from Radford to Yorktown, so about 350 miles, six or seven days. I would say there was a fair amount of attrition. I think every account I've, I've read talks about people who started and then quit, but I think there are others who, you know, joined as they went through

Matt Darroch 

4000 riders, that sounds like a lot to me. Why do you think it appealed to so many to celebrate America's 200th anniversary, you know, in this way?

Tom Ewing 

Well, this was a booming age for bicycling. Generally, when people talk about the history of cycling in the United States, there's the first era in the 1880s to the 1910s when cyclists are first introduced and are extremely popular, and then they really get displaced by the automobile, and then that sort of the dominant vehicle, and and in the 1950s and 1960s I think bicycles were really seen as something for children, you know, it was a toy, it's what you. Used to get around until you got a driver's license, but then in the 1960s there's a shift in technology, 10 speed bicycles become much more available and popular, and so it's, it's easier to go longer distances and carry more, and then in the early 1970s you have, you know, the growth of an environmental movement, you know, much more attention to the costs of automobiles, and then the oil shock with the OPEC oil embargo in 1973 that pushes up gas prices, and suddenly bicycles are practical as well as something for recreation, and so you know there's a lot of interest in bicycling, you know, and so the bicentennial kind of fit right into that, and the bicentennial really does have a strong kind of grassroots component to it. Communities, organizations are looking for ways to celebrate this 200th anniversary. There are high-profile events like the tall ships that sail into, you know, New York City, and you know, parades and other kinds of ceremonies, but this really fit in with the kind of ethos of, again, like you said earlier, grassroots, do-it-yourself, ground-up celebrations of this holiday, and so I think that there was, there was a lot of kind of willingness to try something new, like this transcontinental bike ride.

Matt Darroch 

So, did you hear of any, like, crazy stories that you could share here about the, you know, the adventures or misadventures on the long trip across the US?

Tom Ewing 

Yeah, I think I mean a common story, which any cyclist now, you know, will recognize are the mechanical mishaps people kept careful track of how many flat tires, how many broken spokes, and also how many dogs chased them along the route, you know. And so I think there was a lot of that, you know, certainly people encountered unusual, you know, moments along the trail. 

They, they were really quite afraid of the coal trucks in Eastern Kentucky, and I think that was someplace they were really glad to be away from, especially those who, you know, then got into Virginia and saw it as safer. So, there were some close calls. There was one rider who was killed, really, out, I think, in Kansas in a vehicle collision, but overwhelmingly the stories that that stood out were the positive ones. 

There was a story about, you know, riding through Western Virginia and hearing fiddler banjo music, and pulling over and joining a jam session, and you know, hearing a concert on a porch, so they really looked for those opportunities to connect with the community, because of the timing. A lot of cyclists were on the road on the fourth of July, so they often joined in to the town parade or the community celebration, even if you know, even if they weren't part of the planning. 

And I think, for me, you know, one story that sticks out actually was something that happened when I was riding a year ago, which was in the town of Davenport. We had stopped for lunch in a little diner, and there were a handful of people there older than me. After I left, was getting ready to on my bicycle, one of the gentlemen came out and looked at me and said, "Where are you headed? And I said, "I'm going back to Virginia. We're heading east. And I said, "Do you see many cyclists here? Because this was, you know, this town was directly on route 76 It ran right through the center. And so I said, "Do you see many cyclists here? And he kind of looked around. He said, "A few, but not like back in 76. Then there were a ton of them, and I said you were here in 76 and he said I've been here forever, and I think for me it really, you know, in some ways kind of summed up this, this not only the experience in 1976 when you know literally there were dozens of cyclists coming through a week, if not in a day, depending on, you know, where the town was located in the timing, but also that, that connection, you know, 50 years in a person's lifetime is not necessarily all that long, you know, you, you, you can have a memory both of the 200 and the 250th but I think, you know, in today's society, which is so fast-paced and urgent, and you know, we're very focused on the present, you know, thinking about someone who has that 50 year memory in the same town does kind of stand out, and for me it was a way to connect, you know, what I was studying as a historian with what you know I was now experiencing both as a historian, but also as a cyclist and a citizen.

Matt Darroch 

Tell me about June Curry, who actually lived close to Bicycle Route 76 in the Blue Ridge Mountains here in Virginia.

Tom Ewing

Yeah, so she's become, I think, probably the best known figure from the Bikecentennial, and there's a, there's an origin story for her. There's a woman named Peggy Vale from Rappahannock, who was in one of the early groups to leave Jamestown, and Peggy is most distinctive because she had a dog, very small poodle named Pooh, yeah, I know, who was riding in the, in the front basket, and they made it all the way to Oregon, but that's a different story. But she was riding up the climb up Afton Mountain, and was struggling. I think she had, she had been sick, and, like I said, it was the first big hill of the ride, and she saw a woman out in her garden watering her flowers with a garden hose, and she stopped and said, you know, could I please have some of that water? I'm not sure I can make it up the mountain. And June said, well, I can do better than that. And brought out a, you know, a glass of ice water for her and a bowl for poo to drink out of. And June said, Where are you going? I've been seeing these bicycles. Where are you going, and she had no idea she was on the bike centennial route, and from then on, for the rest of the summer, you know, she would offer water for cyclists as they, as they came up, and then she started baking cookies, and she became known as the Cookie Lady of Afton Mountain, and all she asked is, you know, send me a postcard when you get done that summer, and then over the years her house was filled with postcards because she kept doing it even after 1976 She took Polaroid photos of the cyclists, so she would display those also. She didn't travel much herself and just found this a tremendously rewarding way to connect with people. Her house is now in an interesting location, because it's the eastern parking lot for the Blue Ridge Tunnel, so there are a lot of cars that pull in there to park, so you can walk through the tunnel. June died, I want to say about 12 years ago, but her house has a museum and a marker, you know, recognizing her, her commitment. The Adventure Cycling Association recognized her several years ago for her, you know, this lifetime commitment to cyclists and the Trans America Bicycle Route.

Matt Darroch

So America's 250th is happening next month, what's planned? Is there going to be another kind of bike centennial-esque celebration?

Tom Ewing 

Yes, in a couple of ways. The Adventure Cycling Association is planning a, I guess they've already, they're in the process now, sorry, of a national ride to recognize the 50th anniversary and the end of the ride in Wyoming and Montana and Oregon and parts of Colorado are going to use the historic route 76 the original Bikecentennial route, but they're not using this section in Virginia, for I think good reasons, but also in some ways unfortunate reasons. The route they chose is to start in Washington, DC, and then go up the CNL Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage, which are rails to trails routes, so they're dedicated bicycle routes, and then follow rails to trails across Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and then Kansas, and then into Colorado, and so cycling infrastructure is much better now than it was 50 years ago, you know. 50 years ago, there were almost no bike trails, and so the only way you could ride was on roads, and so you're dealing with traffic, and cars, and trucks, and other vehicles. And so the idea now that you can do at least a third of the route on, you know, dedicated bike routes, which are flatter but much safer. I think is really wonderful. I do think it's unfortunate because it's losing that historic connection to this route in Virginia, but also in Eastern Kentucky and other places. I know of two trips that are recreating the Bikecentennial in Virginia. One has already been completed by a group of Williamsburg area cyclists, and then another one is planned at the end of June by a Roanoke cycling company. You know, so those are ways that they're commemorating this 50th anniversary, and both trips are very attentive to the historic sites along the route. They're stopping at museums, they're looking at notable locations along the route, and so, in that sense, I think they are also recreating the original purpose of the Bicentennial, which is to, you know, think about history along the route. 

Matt Darroch 

It seems to me the thing that made the Bikecentennial so special 50 years ago was the grassroots nature of it. Do you see anything similar happening now to celebrate America's 250th

Tom Ewing 

I do. You know, the most obvious example of this are the museums and historic societies, town governments, and I'm most aware of the ones here in the New River Valley, but I know this is happening across Virginia at least. East, you know, which are doing their own celebrations, they're recognizing connections to the Revolutionary War era, they are thinking about, you know, the long-term implications of the Revolutionary ideals, what was written in the Declaration of Independence, and they're really thinking about a more complicated history of the United States, certainly, than was true 50 years ago. They're looking for stories, you know, that were really not part of that narrative in 1976 thinking about indigenous peoples, thinking about enslaved persons, you know, and also thinking about ways in which the revolutionary promises were not achieved or fulfilled, you know, and the struggles that were needed to make those possible, and so I do see that effort at the local level, and so I think in that sense that spirit of the bike centennial is still there. I think what's missing now is the reinforcement and the connection to the to the federal effort, which is not focusing on those stories now, then I think has really more or less abandoned, you know, people in communities to do this on their own, you know, they're not getting that support that they were getting in 1976 from the very bipartisan and very nonpolitical American Bicentennial Commission.

Matt Darroch 

Well, what do you think is lost when the federal government is controlling, you know, most of the celebrations when it comes to America's 250th and not funding some of the smaller, more local celebrations,

Tom Ewing 

I think it's a very exclusive celebration, you know, people don't feel part of it if they don't share the, in this case, the administration or the federal government says, you know, are the important things in American history, and so if you take a contrary view to those, you may feel like you don't, you know, are not part of that, and it's certainly discouraging the variety of stories that you know people really need to understand about American history and about these 250 years, and so I think it's really become a missed opportunity, you know, rather than something that could be unifying and building bridges and identifying, you know, common stories and shared experiences. It's become polarizing, and it's reinforced that sense that if you're not accepting a very particular and narrow story, that somehow you're not, you can't be part of this celebration, and so I think for me, you know, just kind of watching fellow cyclists, you know, observe these places and the natural environment and the and the human environment, you know, I felt like, yeah, this is this is a very appropriate way to celebrate this 250th anniversary,

Matt Darroch 

Well, Tom, this has been fun. Thanks for sharing your insight on With Good Reason.

Tom Ewing 

Happy to do so.

Matt Darroch 27:48

Tom Ewing is a history professor at Virginia Tech and the project director of the podcast Bike 76 Virginia. 

This is With Good Reason. We'll be right back. 

Welcome back to With Good Reason from Virginia Humanities. 

In 1776 at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, 87 enslaved people on the Willoughby Plantation in Norfolk, Virginia, escaped under the cover of night. Ervin Jordan is a research archivist and associate professor at the University of Virginia. He traces their remarkable journey from Norfolk to New York to Nova Scotia, and then to Sierra Leone in Africa. 

Ervin, our story starts in 1775 when Lord Dunmore puts out the Dunmore Proclamation. Who was Lord Dunmore, and what did the proclamation declare?

Ervin Jordan 

Lord Dunmore was the last royal governor of Virginia. His proclamation, in view of some of the activities of the patriots at that time, was to demand that people maintain their loyalty to the crown. To back up his threats, he stated that he would be open to receiving free blacks, slaves, and indentured and white indentured servants into his forces, and they were to be employed against the patriots, and he thought that this would accomplish the task, but, of course, as we know, it did not,

Matt Darroch 

And so was this a purely altruistic move by Lord Dunmore, or was he, you know, mainly trying to sow unrest in the colonial Virginia, Norfolk area?

Ervin Jordan 

He was basically trying to sow unrest, because Dunmore himself was not a fan of African Americans. He owned slaves, he'd had trouble with his own slaves in the years prior to all this, so he was trying to make the patriots, compel them to maintain their loyalty to the crown, but at that point it was pretty much too late.

Matt Darroch 

And so, how many people were enslaved on the Willoughby Plantation, and what kind of labor were they mostly doing?

Ervin Jordan 

Based on the numbers who escaped, and based on subsequent documents, was 87 approximately 15 children, 20 some odd women, and 16 men. The typical plantation in this area at this time period probably ran from anywhere between five and 100 slaves. Their occupations vary from domestic labor to agricultural labor, and some of them had skilled labor. There was people who were carpenters, shoe makers, and that sort of thing among them.

Matt Darroch 

Tell me about the kind of planning, or I don't know, logistics that would have gone into an escape of this magnitude. 

Ervin Jordan 

The amount of logistical planning would have had to have been tremendous. This would have involved, I believe, British naval officers. It would have involved some neighbors of Willoughby, who probably had a political or personal grudge against him. So, this is a temporary covert alliance. A lot of times, these large-scale covert alliances don't end well, but this one, this one did. The logistics of getting the slaves from the plantation through the through the forest and to Willoughby Bay and out to the Atlantic Ocean, and that sort of, that would have been tremendous, and it all apparently went off without, from what I can tell, without much of a hitch, but it's an enigma, because we don't really know how this was planned, it had to have planning, because to do a mass escape like this, you need to allocate resources, you need to make sure that everyone's clear about when to meet, you have to agree upon a set day that the weather conditions have to be right, and all this fell into place for them, but we'll never know in detail how this was planned. 

One of the things I did in my research on this escape was I checked the logs of the British ships under Dunwood that were operating as part of the naval blockade by the British Navy off the Virginia coast, and I've looked at the records of some of these ships. There's absolutely no mention of the planning for this. Not only is there no mention of planning of this escape before it happened, there's no comment on it after it happened.

Matt Darroch 

Obviously, the decision to escape was something that carried a ton of risk, you know. They were putting their lives on the line just for the chance of freedom.

Ervin Jordan 

Very much so. And given the time, this is this is true for people right up until the latter part of the 19th century in Virginia. Most Virginians, black or white, barely traveled 10 miles beyond where they were living, especially those who are in these rural areas. So, these slaves, they, they obviously, many of them knew the area, so that wasn't the issue. But most of them had probably never been off that plantation, so they would have had to been carefully instructed how to proceed, because this escape took place at night. 

Fortunately, there's a web app that you can call up what the sky was like in a given area for the time period. So, I looked up the conditions of Norfolk County, April 14, 1776 and saw that there was a waning, crescent moon. So, we're giving them enough light to proceed, but not enough light to have them be detected while they were on the escape route.

Matt Darroch

How do you think they were able to keep it a secret? Did they have space on the plantation to meet privately?

Ervin Jordan

That's one of the things about slavery that many Americans don't understand, was that, I mean, the slaves were owned and controlled by their owners, but their owners could not keep their eye on every slave all the time, so there were many opportunities for slaves to have private conversations, especially at night, after they were supposedly in their cabin relaxing from the day's labor. Of course, we know about the grapevine, everybody heard about the grapevine, where word could be passed along in that way, and so, given that these people were on this plantation. I suspect that many of them were parts made up several families, family groups, because that's another reason why all of them escaped, and none of them stayed behind. The real problem was not them getting word among themselves, but could they really trust these white people to enable them to gain their freedom, because these were people who would have been strangers to them.

Matt Darroch

So, did they all make it to the British side safe and sound?

Ervin Jordan

Yes, the British ship got them to Hampton. Later, when Dunmore evacuated the area, he moved all of these, these, and other slaves that he had, that had come to his side. He moved them to an island called Gwen's Island in Gloucester County. 

This is where a curious and unusual thing begins to happen. While they were on Gwen's Island, a lot of these Willoughby slaves disappear. There were.. I found a document online that had a roster listing of the slaves that were on this island were done more, and it was a wonderful doctor, because many of these cases were enlisted as slaves that would list their last name as Willoughby, so that helped me to the track thing, but over time these people started disappearing, and they were dying off because of diseases like typhoid, dysentery, small pot. Box. 

Now, some of them may have decided to leave the island on their own. That's also another reason why their numbers went down. There was a battle on Gwen's Island. The British lost, basically a bombardment of the island by Patriot forces. And so, Dunmore decided to evacuate to New York City, and by the time he was doing that, according to the records that I found in New York and elsewhere, only about 20 of these Willoughby slaves were still around.

Matt Darroch

Wow

Ervin Jordan

Now he transported several 100 slaves, but the Willoughby numbers had just dramatically dropped, and would continue to do so for the rest of this story.

Matt Darroch

So, one of the enslaved people who escaped was a woman named Mary Perth. What do we know about her?

Ervin Jordan

At this point in time, she is the most well-known and documented Willoughby slave of the period, because she has been mentioned in passing in several books, and there was been one or two articles done on her. There's a museum in Philadelphia that actually has an artist rendering of her. 

She was born around 1740 and about the time that she was 20 some years old, Colonel Willoughby purchased her as a domestic servant, and by that time she had had a few children. She became a secret evangelist for slaves. The story is that at night she would strap her youngest child on her back and go out to the dismal swamp and preach to other slaves, but she made sure that she always got back to the plantation, as she said before master and mistress woke up, and we know this because when she eventually made it to Sierra Leone, one of the chaplain of the colony there apparently interviewed her, and she told part of her story. Didn't go into a lot of detail, but she did tell part of her story. But she knew how to read and write. We know that she wore eyeglasses, and eventually she adopted two boys. 

So she, she headed a family of seven by the time this escape was, take was to take place. But I consider her a remarkable woman, because we have to consider something. According to my estimates, Mary Perth traveled 11,000 miles during the course of her seven decades of life. This is from Virginia to New York City, from New York to Nova Scotia, from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone Africa, and then from Sierra Leone to England. She stayed in England for about two years to find, get medical help for one of her daughters. So she traveled, this woman traveled across three continents and 11,000 miles.

Matt Darroch

That's amazing.

Ervin Jordan

It is amazing. My jaw dropped after I did the calculation.

Matt Darroch

You know, you were raised in Norfolk, where the Willoughby slave escape took place. Did you learn about it growing up in the area?

Ervin Jordan

I grew up in the area of segregation, so black history was not a subject in school. Anytime we were told anything about black people in Virginia, it was basically as slaves, and that they were happy slaves, that they were always loyal, never gave their white owners any trouble. The ones who did make trouble were insane, and that sort of thing. 

I would have to say five years ago I had never even heard of Mary Perth, just learned about her, because as a historian, and being on the Black Advisory Committee to the Virginia Committee on the 25th anniversary, I decided that I wanted to, in order to be able to give them advice, I decided I need to explore as a personal quest information about the black experience in Virginia during the Revolutionary War, and this name, Mary Perth, came up, and I noticed that other authors have mentioned her - sometimes only like one or two sentences in the book would mention her in passing, but I kept saying, "Why am I seeing this woman's name? Must mean something, and so that's why I started pursuing this research, so you can imagine my astonishment when I found out that she was one of these 87 people who had escaped thanks to the aid of Lord Dunmore.

Matt Darroch

You know, in light of America's 250th anniversary next month, why is it important to keep stories like the Willoughby slave escape alive?

Ervin Jordan

It's important because we have so many gaps in history in America, and not just for black kids, we have so many gaps in history, and we historians are trying to fill those gaps. Sometimes we are fortunate, such as in my case, that we come across someone who is a really had a fascinating life, and that fascination is eventually shared by people who are not historians, because we write about them. 

That's one reason why it's important, and history, I believe, is much too important just to be left to historians. My experience has been that people, when I share stories like this with people who are not historians, that they appreciate it, that they're intrigued by it, and I think that's that's 90% of getting the job done at that point, because that's why we write. There are some historians who write only for themselves. Other historians, I don't, and the majority of them don't. We write to share to serve people who are not necessarily historians, because these stories help us, I think, understand our past. I think it provides some clues on how we can deal with the future as well.

Matt Darroch

Well, Ervin, what an incredible story. Thanks for sharing it on With Good Reason.

Ervin Jordan

Thank you very much for having me.

Matt Darroch

Ervin Jordan is a research archivist and associate professor at the University of Virginia. He also serves on the African American Advisory Council of the Virginia American Revolution 250 commission.

The Revolutionary War is often framed as a glorious cause, a righteous fight for liberty and representative government against the tyrannical rule of the British. But my next guest says those same ideals didn't always make their way into our state constitutions. Mark Boonshoft is a history professor at Virginia Military Institute and the author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Origins of Constitutional Democracy in Revolutionary New York.

Mark Boonshoft

I think the best way to think about the American Revolution, or the war in particular, is that it's a civil war, and so the result of that is that there is a whole lot of violence and coercion on both sides, and so patriots, if you want to call them patriots, you want to call them revolutionaries, are faced with a real challenge, which is that a large portion of the population doesn't agree with them, and yet they are trying to create revolution, and then eventually governments in the name of quote the people, but when half or two thirds of the people don't really agree with them, that requires all sorts of messy, not exactly idealistic ways of getting allegiance. In other words, coercion is important to getting people to abide by the revolution to accept it,

Matt Darroch

And what about political violence? How did it factor into the messy civil war tearing the colonies apart?

Mark Boonshoft

I mean, it begins even before the war starts, as colonial governments get sort of overturned, are unable to govern anymore, because there's a critical mass of revolutionaries who don't want to listen to them, you start to get violence between loyalists and revolutionaries, and then as the revolutionaries, in particular, start trying to set up their own institutions, and there's all these committees, committees of safety, committees of inspection, committees for detecting and defeating conspiracies, is my favorite one, that's one in New York that's pretty on the nose. 

These committees are all sort of designed to enforce allegiance to the revolution. So really early examples, in 1774 the Continental Congress passed this was known as the Articles of Association, which is this essentially national before there's a nation, a national boycott on importation and consumption of British goods. These committees of inspection are basically people spying on their neighbors to make sure they're not violating them, right. And then they go to these committees, or to these provisional governments that are being created to basically rat people out, and those committees, which have no basis of authority, I mean, they're just a group of people who said we're now in charge of this county or this town are then punishing people for violating the association or just not being good patriots or for siding with the British, so they're doing all sorts of things that again sounds kind of antithetical to the values we associate with the American Revolution. They are confiscating property, they are disarming people, they are banishing people. 

Matt Darroch

As this chaos was coursing through the colonies, state constitutions were actually being brainstormed and written. You look specifically at the New York constitution. Why that one? 

Mark Boonshoft

There's the practical reason. I'm from New York, and so I can go do research and stay with my mom, but the bigger reason is New York takes a long time comparatively to write its constitution. Most of the states do so in 1776 after the Continental Congress, which is another ad hoc body that really has questionable basis and authority, it's just created out of nothing, suggests or tells the states to write new constitutions. This is in May of 1776. Most states do it relatively quickly, but at that point the war has arrived in New York. It is the seat of the Civil War. It takes New York almost a year to actually write a constitution, and part of the reason for that is the quasi legislature that's writing this constitution is constantly running from the British Army, sort of being chased up the Hudson, as the army is being chased up the Hudson, and the result of that is you can really see how the Constitution is written, not just in with war as a backdrop, but shaped by the war.

Matt Darroch

Yeah, you argue that the ratification of the New York Constitution was profoundly impacted by the war and political violence raging through the colonies. How so?

Mark Boonshoft

In 1776 as those sort of wars arriving in New York, and as New Yorkers who are in favor of the revolution are trying to again ensure coerce allegiance out of the population. They're having to make really tough decisions about how to deal with the people who are kind of internal enemies, and that can be enslaved people, that could be loyalists, that could be Native American groups on the frontier, the Haudenosaunee in particular, and so they're making very clear compromises with the values of the revolution that they're claiming.

So when they are overthrowing the colonial powers. They're saying these are governments that are invading our rights, right? They're taking away rights to property, they're taking away rights to self-government. And so the result of that is they make these decisions over time that actually run counter to their own arguments against the British, which is to say that to enforce allegiance to the American cause, they also have to limit rights. 

So, there's a point in 1776 Just use one example when a committee in Brookhaven, which is in Long Island, basically writes a letter to the New York's provisional government and basically says, what do we do about all these people who are not in favor of the revolution, and Congress writes that the immutable laws of self-defense and preservation justify any reasonable measure taken by the revolutionaries, and so that they go on to say their tender regard for things like freedom of speech, rights of conscience, personal liberty extend only as far as may be consistent with our general security right. So you're in the middle of a war and you're and you're basically trying to create a revolution in favor of liberty and rights, and then you're saying, but we really can only guarantee those as far as is safe, and you know they're the ones defining what safety means.

Matt Darroch

So, if, if I have this right, you know, the New York constitution, and presumably other state constitutions, weren't necessarily a product of rational debate, you know, closed off from the war and political violence sweeping across the colonies. These constitutions were actually born out of violence. 

Mark Boonshoft

Yeah, right. And popular pressure. We kind of have this image of the revolutionaries as good, the war as this kind of glorious cause was the way they referred to it, and then we've got these statesmen writing constitutions, or particularly the US Constitution, sort of like almost in like another scene, and that they're thinking rationally, but they're working quickly, they're working under pressure, and doing what they think they need to do, even if it goes against some of the ideas about how republics should work that some of these more elite guys who are writing these documents subscribe to.

Matt Darroch

When was the New York constitution ratified, and what were the biggest, I guess, undemocratic pain points in the document?

Mark Boonshoft

New York's constitution is finished in April of 1777. Some of the undemocratic points, there's this council of revision, which reviews all laws passed in the state, which means that even if a critical mass of voters can get their people into the legislature to pass the kinds of price control laws and things that you're seeing in other states, it might get shot down by this this council of revision. 

There's that, and the other point to make about the New York constitution is that people don't really have a decision of whether it becomes the law of the land. We've been using the word ratification, but ratification takes on a particular meaning during the revolution, that is, that is a constitution is written and submitted to the people for a vote, right? Do you accept this as the fundamental law? New York doesn't do that. Most of the states early on don't do that. So, you have to kind of think about, you know, the US Constitution says we the people, right, which is kind of a fiction, but the way they kind of make it seem like the people are the sovereigns in that is that there is this moment of popular ratification where, where voters in every state get to decide whether they want this thing or not, that doesn't happen in New York, and so it doesn't happen in most of the states, doesn't happen in Virginia, and so all of a sudden, in, you know, April of 1777 in New York, or June of 1776 in Virginia, you might just be a farmer who finds out you have a new constitution governing you, you had no hand necessarily in approving it, and you're supposed to abide by it, and so there's a feeling that these could be kind of arbitrary, right? They're not necessarily what the people wanted, and yet they are public and governments, which are governed by the people.

Matt Darroch

As we draw closer to America's 250th anniversary next month, how are we still dealing with the repercussions from these undemocratic, anti-democratic constitutions, you know, written hundreds of years ago.

Mark Boonshoft

There's a great book, it just won the Pulitzer Prize by Jill Lepore, that makes the point that the US Constitution is really, really hard to amend, and I think when we think about why that is the case, one of the answers is that the US Constitution is sort of born in this revolutionary moment. There are fears of popular power being too great, and we are now still living in a political system where it is really hard to get things done. I think in 250 years removed from the revolution, a lot of the biggest issues in. American life are decided by the Supreme Court instead of through democratic deliberation in legislatures, and so to my mind the promise of the US Constitution is that it reflects the will of the people and that it can be changed, but the reality is it's very hard to do, and part of the reason I think it is hard to do, and part of the reason is politically hard to change things is structures in place in the Constitution, but also our own veneration and our own narratives that we tell about where it came from and how it came to be, and again, if we think about it as a sort of like beautifully rational outcome of the best minds of a generation, well, who are we to question that? But if we think about the Constitution as a product of 10 to 12 years of complete civil war upheaval, continued violence, and think of it as responding to that and solving a set of problems, then I think we can think a little bit more creatively about our own democratic challenges, and not be as hamstrung by the past as sometimes it feels like we are.

Matt Darroch

Well, Mark, this was a fascinating conversation. Thanks for sharing your insight on With Good Reason.

Mark Boonshoft

Thanks for having me.

Matt Darroch

Mark Boonshoft is a history professor at Virginia Military Institute, and the author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Origins of Constitutional Democracy in Revolutionary New York. 

With Good Reason, is produced by Virginia Humanities, which acknowledges the Monacan Nation, the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Our production team is Sarah McConnell, Allison Quantz, and Lauren Francis. Special thanks to Jennie Taylor for booking assistance. For the podcast, go to With Good Reason radio.org I'm Matt Darroch. Thanks for listening.