Thomas Morris Chester

Chester was the first African American war correspondent working for a major daily paper, covering the U.S. Civil War. He also had a troubled relationship with the colonization movement, and spent years striving for equal rights for African Americans

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and Holly Fry. They were going
to talk about a man named Thomas Morris Chester and

(00:21):
he was the first African American war correspondent working for
a major daily newspaper. And that's pretty much how you
will see him talked about in most of the places
where he has talked about. Yeah, if you ever are
looking him up online in a search, that's usually like
the text that appears next to his next to the
primary link or picture. Yeah, it's that's pretty much how

(00:43):
he's discussed often. And he's not really a well known
figure in American history overall. Um. He covered the Civil
War for the Pennsylvania Press, and in the course of
his work he saw the Union Army sees the Confederate
capital of Richmond firsthand. But he had a lot of
aspects to his life besides just this war correspondent work, um,

(01:08):
which are pretty notable. He played a role in pretty
important parts of U. S history before and after the war.
So we're not going to talk just about his war
correspondence work today. We're also going to talk about his
long and kind of troubled relationship with the colonization movement
from before the war. Uh. That movement encouraged freed slaves

(01:32):
to immigrate to Africa. And we're also going to talk
some about the years after the war when he moved
to the Deep South to try to work for civil
rights for African Americans. So we'll start at the beginning
with his birth, which was on May eleventh of eighteen
thirty four in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His mother, Jane Murray, had

(01:53):
escaped from slavery when she was nineteen, making her way
from Baltimore, Maryland, to York, Pennsylvania in eighteen five. His father,
George sold oysters, which we talked about oysters recently as well.
Uh and Thomas had eleven siblings, six of whom actually
lived to adulthood. Apart from the oyster selling, they also
ran a successful restaurant near the courthouse in Harrisburg, and

(02:15):
they were abolitionists, So their restaurant became this hub for
both general socializing in Harrisburg and for the abolition movement.
So abolitionists would meet at the restaurant to plan and
organize and to pick up a copy of The Liberator,
which was William Lloyd Garrison's anti slavery newspaper. And although
there were many free African Americans living in Harrisburg, their

(02:38):
lives weren't particularly easy. Laws restricted basic civil rights, and
racism was prevalent. Since Thomas's parents were running a successful business,
they were living pretty comfortably as a family, especially compared
to many other black Americans at the time. His parents
really worked to make sure all of their children received
an education, and this was not really some thing that

(03:00):
everyone was able to afford or do. No, that's notable
for sure. So when Thomas was sixteen, he started attending
the Allegheny Institute and Mission Church outside of Pittsburgh, and
this was a co educational school for African Americans that
was founded by abolitionist Charles Avery. It was reportedly also
a stop on the underground railroad. He left the institute

(03:21):
two years later, in part because of the changing climate
in Pennsylvania when it came to slavery. Pennsylvania had passed
a gradual emancipation law in seventeen eighty. It was the
first state to do this actually, and the law did
not actually free any slaves when it passed instead, it
gradually free the people born after that point who would

(03:43):
have been slaves by having them be indentured servants until
the age of Yes, this was kind of a it
was a way to gradually free people, but it definitely
did not confer immediate freedom on anyone. Like, No, probably
most of the people living at the time it was
passed would never really it would be their subsequent generations,

(04:04):
very gradual. Yeah. If if a person was born into
slavery the day before the law went into effect, that
person was born a slave, but a person who was
born to slave parents the day after, um would instead
be an indentured servant until they were twenty eight years old.
The Scott revised a little bit over the first few

(04:27):
years after the law was passed so that that person
would gradually become a free person rather than a slave.
It was sort of meant to be a gradual way
to give people their freedom without actually inconveniencing a lot
of slaveholders. Yeah, there was a lot of progress in

(04:47):
this time that was extremely slow and did not really
seem like progress at all at the time. Yeah, I
mean that's that's when, um, you know, theory of government
and politics is that gradual changes better than a media change,
and it's just a mindset that was at play there. Well,
there was also a mindset of wanting to appease people

(05:08):
and not stoke the fires of anger among people who's uh,
who were using slaves in their labor right, which is
kind of those two things kind of played together. No,
you need to get used to the idea that you're
not going to have this forever, I know, and to
a modern listener that can just be so horrifying that

(05:28):
there was any appeasing of people who owned slaves. But
that's really something that was going on pretty extensively. By
eighteen forty, which is when Thomas was six, there were
only sixty four slaves in Pennsylvania according to the Census.
So by the time the Fugitive Slave Act was passed
in eighteen fifty, nearly all of the African Americans in

(05:49):
Pennsylvania were free, although many of them were working off
this indenture that the gradual Emancipation Law had put into place.
In Harrisburg, in particular, Ler, most of the African Americans
living there even owned their own homes by this point,
but because the Fugitive Slave Act required runaway slaves to

(06:09):
be returned south to their owners, and gave African Americans
virtually no rights to defend themselves if they were accused
of being runaways. Many free people in the North, regardless
of whether they had been slaves, were legitimately afraid that
they would be quote returned south into slavery, and as
one can imagine, this made many consider leaving the country altogether.

(06:31):
This desire to leave was compounded for many by the
feeling that there was really no reason to fight to
stay in a country where they would never have fair treatment.
Slavery had been abolished in Canada along with the rest
of the British Empire seventeen years before, so many free
African Americans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere chose to flee to
Canada to avoid the threat of being taken south. Others,

(06:54):
including Thomas, chose to emigrate to Liberia. UM As a side,
as I was researching this episode, I felt like everything
about his life requires us to explain some context. So
we've just explained the context of the fugitive slave law
and why freed African Americans were at this point fleeing

(07:15):
to Canada. UM Now we're going to talk a little
bit about Liberia, which is the place where Thomas chose
to live a lot of his adult life. Yes, and
that is again a whole other place with a huge history,
so that that we could do whole episodes on the Fugitive
Slave Law and a whole episode on Liberia and the
colonization movement from the nineteenth century. Yeah. So the brief

(07:39):
version is the American Colonization Society founded the Colony of
Liberia in Western Africa in the early eighteen twenties, meaning
it to be a home for freed slaves. The movement
viewed Liberia is a place set aside by God for them,
and if Africans and American returned there, they could rid
the continent of the slave trade, spread cre chanity, and

(08:00):
help improve Africa overall. Colonists began arriving there in eighteen
twenty two, and while they did manage to make it
a republic in eighteen forty eight, they met with extreme
resistance from the native Africans already living there, and too
few people migrated there for it to really thrive in
the sense of its original intent. Thomas became Pennsylvania's most

(08:21):
prominent and recognizable supporter of the colonization movement. He went
to Liberia on the ship Banshee in April of eighteen
fifty three, and he went to the capital, Monrovia and
enrolled in Alexander High School. The curriculum, though, was basically
a repeat of what he had already learned and studied
at the Allegheny Institute, and this was really frustrating for him.

(08:43):
He had wanted the life in Liberia that would be
better than the opportunities that he had in America and
not just a replay of what he had already done. Right.
He had gone there because he really was hoping for
a better life and that it wasn't working out that
he was getting the same opportunities. So in September of
eighteen fifty four, eighteen months after he got to Liberia,
he went back to the United States to attend Thatford

(09:05):
Academy in Vermont. His tuition was paid for by the
New York colonizationists, with his parents contributing what they could afford,
and the idea was that he would further his education
and then go back to Liberia. The colonization movement was
really eager for him to return, since it would be
kind of damaging to the cause or at least damaging

(09:26):
to people's perceptions of what they were trying to do.
For such a prominent advocate, who have gone to Liberia
and then turned around and come back home again. So
he was definitely on the radar of the people who
were organizing and leading this movement, and they were willing
to pay for his education so that he could return. Yes,
so that he could go back to Liberia and and

(09:48):
do more work. Uh, he wanted to go to law school,
but he couldn't afford it, and the colonization movement was
anxious for him to return to Liberia as we were
just speaking of, so they were not willing to pay
his way through law school. So in May of eighteen
fifty five, he offered his services as a teacher, and
he was granted free passage back to Liberia in steerage

(10:08):
if he taught the settlers on board during and after
the journey. He didn't really like the idea of traveling
steerage and thought that based on his prominence in his work,
that he should be able to get an actual cabin,
so he tried to negotiate for terms that would let
him buy a cabin on his owns and that was
going to require some money. What he really wanted to

(10:28):
do was to found and lead a school, and eventually
he was able to make a case that the executive
committee of the a c S, the American Colonization Society
that we referred to earlier, they agreed to this plan.
So he boarded the Mary Caroline Stevens for a Liberria
in November of eighteen fifty five. Unfortunately, uh this plan

(10:50):
was not an overwhelming success. However, in addition to paying
him a lower salary than it had earmarked, the a
c S didn't set aside funds or have plans for
building a new school, so Thomas's classroom was in a
hallway in a place called the Receptacle, which was sort
of an acclamation center for new colonists. He also wound
up in the middle of a power struggle both within

(11:12):
the colony and between the colony and the a c
S back in the States. He was constantly at odds
with the leadership there, which led to a whole lot
of gossip and accusations of wrongdoing and mismanagement on all sides.
And at this point there's not a lot to go
on about who was actually right. We have a whole

(11:32):
lot of documentation of what everyone said, but not a
whole lot of documentation of what actually happened. But eventually
Thomas resigned and went back to America again, racking up
the frequent travel miles that this is one of the
things I understand why a lot of biographical information seems
reluctant to talk about this period in his life, because

(11:56):
number one, the colonization movement was pretty contentious in the
world at that point. There were a lot of people
who didn't agree with the movement, and then obviously there
were also some some internal conflicts going on within the movement.
Um So I think a lot of people they don't
want to sort of tarnish anyone's opinion of either the

(12:16):
movement or of him or anything like this. But having
to go back and forth across the ocean so many
times at this point in history, I think makes it
uh pretty big to omit that whole part. Yeah, that's
a that's a lot of time to spend going back
and forth, and a lot of effort. I mean, it

(12:37):
was not an easy sea boy. You know, It's not
like booking a flight now. You kind of have to
prepare for a long time and prepare to be not
in delightful circumstances the whole time, and upon his return
he was actually viewed with suspicion by the rest of
the movement. He actually became enough of a pariah that
it's somewhat surprising that he and the Athist didn't just

(12:58):
part ways instead, and he tried to stay into the
radar and not get embroiled in the in fighting or
politics that were going on within the movement. He also
started working to support individual people and small groups who
wanted to emigrate, and eventually he started to put together
another plan too were returned to Liberia himself, this time
to start a newspaper. The capital of Liberia, which was

(13:22):
called Monrovia, didn't have a newspaper at the time, and
people generally thought it really needed one at this point.
Though both the American and Pennsylvania Societies for Colonization were
reluctant to deal with Thomas after his previous trip I,
eventually he made a successful case and he was once
again bound for Liberia in exchange for sixty dollars of

(13:42):
his own money in an annual subscription for twenty five
copies of the newspaper to his benefactors. He was also
to teach at the Brewster Receptacle for a few months
so that he could earn enough money to actually launch
the newspaper when he got there, so his way was paid,
but he was going to have to earn his own
money to the newspaper, which he did, although by that

(14:03):
point Liberia's original paper, The Liberrian Harold, had been resurrected,
so there wasn't that gap that he had counted on.
The Harold was a government supported paper and Thomas's was independent,
and it quickly came under fire for publishing things that
were critical of the government. Thomas didn't agree with the
positions of Stephen A. Benson, who was the Liberian president.

(14:23):
After The Star published an anonymous letter that was critical
of the government, the Harold fired back with accusations of
sexual impropriety between Thomas and another teacher. This led to
both the Board of Trustees investigating the teacher and a
grand jury and investigation into the Brewster Receptacle. In the
aftermath of all of this, both Thomas and the other

(14:45):
teacher resigned and left Liberia. As with problems during his
previous trip to Liberia. It's unclear at this point exactly
who did what. His accusers often fell back on how
Thomas was tall, muscular, really attractive, and had a reputation
for having away with the ladies, so they kind of
circumstantially judged him based on his just appeal as a

(15:10):
human being. Those either, you know, played a role in
what people perceived he was doing or or maybe played
a role in his actual behavior. It's unclear at this point.
Back in the United States, he spent several months promoting
colonization on behalf of the Pennsylvania Society, and in September
of eighteen sixty he went back to Liberia again. The

(15:30):
Star had stopped publishing after he left, and he wanted
to get it going again. He really wanted people who
didn't agree with the Librarian government to have a voice
in the newspaper. He was hoping to use the newspaper's
influence to sway the course of upcoming elections. But when Benson,
who previously said that he did not agree with, was

(15:51):
re elected, he once again decided to return to the States.
This I feel like I sort of characterize him as
just a strong idealist. He was really committed to his
own beliefs and not willing to play politics to compromise
them in any way. So he wound up butting heads

(16:14):
with a lot of people in the whole context of
this movement. Yeah, I think I'm glad you said that,
because it is easy to start, you know, with these
repeats of I went and tried it, and I got mad,
and it came home that you want to be careful
not to characterize him as just kind of a foot
stomp e like angry. Fine, I'm leaving. You know that

(16:37):
there are ideals behind this behavior. It's not just that
it didn't go his way so he was out of
the are. Yeah, there were strong ideals behind the whole
movement and how it was going to be better for
freed slaves to move to Africa then to stay in America.
And he really felt like sometimes when I got there,
it was not actually better, and he was not willing
to back down on that idea. He was like, no, seriously,

(16:58):
this needs to be better. We are moving to Africa, um,
And he just he really raised a lot of ire
from people. But back in the US in eighteen sixty one,
Thomas kept speaking on behalf of the colonization movement. So
even though he was frustrated with how it was going.
He was still, you know, promoting it in some ways,

(17:19):
but there was heavy resistance at that point to the
idea of colonization. A lot of people who wanted to
immigrate were choosing to go to other places, including Haiti,
but many felt like America was their home, and even
though they weren't treated as full citizens there, it was
the option that they were most interested in. The prevailing
desire of most African Americans to stay in the United

(17:40):
States got stronger and stronger as the government started to
actually encourage colonization. In eighteen sixty two, for example, following
the District of Columbia Emancipation Act, Congress earmarked a hundred
thousand dollars to fund the immigration of freed slaves. Lincoln
and others in the government had supported emigration action plans

(18:00):
as well, which led to really vocal protests. There are
a lot of reasons why people were reluctant to leave
the United States and to move somewhere else, most off
in Africa, but a lot of it boiled down to
people thinking, Okay, why should we give up our home
and property just to appease a bunch of racists, which
I think is a valid question. Um. There's also a

(18:23):
really great long read at the Route about why people
chose to stay. A lot of that is focused on
why why freed slaves chose to stay in the South,
but it's still relevant. A lot of the issues that
it brings up as reasons for people to stay apply
to anyone who was staying at a place where they
were facing just serious discrimination and unfairness at all. Turns, Yeah,

(18:47):
and these why why don't you go away somewhere else?
You'll be happier there, I'm sure of it. There was
a there's a lot of question about what what will
we do once slaves are freed, and a lot of
people in the government proposing as an actual solution in
quotation marks, well, we could just send them back to Africa.

(19:09):
I don't recall learning a ton about that in my
school about it was more and then we've freed slaves
and everything was great. Wait, no, that's not true at all.
Heavy simplification, that is not accurate. Uh. Throughout all this,
Thomas had been thinking about returning to Liberia again, but

(19:29):
after Lincoln issued the Emancipatient Proclamation in eighteen sixty three,
it became clear that there wasn't going to be a
mass immigration, and so Thomas decided not to go. He
started working on a way to get to Britain to
continue his education, but in the meantime he turned his
attention to the Civil War. Following a call for black
soldiers to fight for the Union, he became a recruiter

(19:51):
and he recruited African American soldiers into the fifty fifth
Massachusetts Regiments. And he didn't stay entirely on the sidelines.
When Harrisburg was threatened with Confederate attack, he actually briefly
became a captain in the Pennsylvania State Militia. So what
Thomas is most known for is his war correspondents, and
we have finally gotten to the Civil War. In August

(20:14):
eighteen sixty four, an editor named John Russell Young, who
had himself been a war correspondent, offered Thomas a job
at the Philadelphia Press to report from the front lines
and focus on the work of black troops. And the
job of a reporter was not entirely respected in America
before the war. Often reporters were reviewed as nosy people

(20:35):
airing other people's business, but that changed when they became
the primary way for news from the front to reach
the rest of the people. Hiring Thomas and giving him
such an assignment was really a huge risk on the
part of the paper, both politically and financially. There was
you know, there was a risk of everything from people
attacking the offices of the paper to just not buying

(20:55):
the paper anymore. But white papers weren't really reporting on
the African American soldiers, and at the time there were
only two black weeklies covering things from a black perspective.
And at this point, the Union Army was only about
a month into a congressional effort under Lincoln's direction to
try to work out massive inequalities between black and white soldiers.

(21:18):
Black soldiers were unfortunately basically cannon fodder, given inferior everything,
and we're sometimes beaten and abused by their white commanding officers.
Thomas was in part working to draw attention to these issues.
Right even if a unit, if a fighting unit was
entirely made up of African American enlisted men, almost always

(21:41):
the commanding officers were white, and that led to all
kinds of issues within the Union Army in terms of
fairness and how people were treated and all of that
sort of stuff um and taking this job. As we
alluded to earlier, Thomas became the first African Americans to
be a war correspondent for a major ailing newspaper. In

(22:01):
addition to the risk of being hurt or killed in
the front, he also really was at genuine risk for
being sold into slavery if he were captured by the Confederates.
He wrote often with empathy and sometimes even with humor.
His very first dispatch was about an explosion at the
headquarters outside Petersburg. Here's what he wrote about it. For

(22:22):
several hundred yards the ground was thickly strewn with debris.
The million of property destroyed was but little thought of
in the midst of the immense loss of life. Fragments
of humanity were scattered around in the immediate vicinity of
the tragedy and frightful profusion. Sorrow was depicted in every
countenance that gazed on the ruins, but those loudest in

(22:44):
their grief for the contrabands who mourned their relatives and comrades.
Being employed in great numbers where the accident occurred, more
of them were killed and wounded than any other class
of individuals. And not much later he wrote this passage.
This is of the funny ones. YEA, the enterprising managers

(23:04):
of the firm of Grant and Lee take pleasure in
announcing to the public in and around Petersburg that they
are now prepared, and will continue until further notice, to
give every evening a grand exhibition of fireworks for the
benefit of their respective employees. The past experience of the
firm has enabled it to acquire a success in this direction,
which it feels satisfied a liberal minded public will concede.

(23:26):
The managers will not, in any case hold themselves responsible
for any accidents which may occur to those who may
be attracted from curiosity or otherwise to witness their exhibition.
That makes me chuckle, it does. It's really charming. Most
of the action he witnessed was near Petersburg and Richmond.
He spent almost all of his time reporting from Virginia,

(23:47):
although he did accompany the Union army to Fort Fisher,
North Carolina in December of eighteen sixty four. The Union
had planned to take out the fort at the mouth
of the Cape Beer River using a barge of explosives,
which was and to cut off the south supply route,
but the plan failed because the walls of the fort
were too strong for this barge of explosives to blow up,

(24:10):
they had to call off the attack. Like other Union writers,
part of Thomas's job was to make it seem as
though the war was going well, so he could not,
you know, feed into the perception that this was a horrible,
catastrophic error on the part of any particular person. This
is what he had to say. There will probably be
much speculation in reference to the failure of this expedition,

(24:34):
attributing it to the want of military foresight on the
part of General General Whitzel and not providing the expedition
with the necessary implements for a siege to Other causes are, however,
responsible for the result, the first being the publicity which
naval officers in Norfolk previous to sailing gave their impressions
as to the destination of the fleet, and secondly, the

(24:57):
delay caused after the arrival of the fleet off Masonboro Inlet.
We experienced previous to the storm four days of splendid weather.
There could not have been better weather for the attack.
So he was trying to diffuse the blame and not
make it seem as though any particular person should take

(25:19):
the fall for this unsuccessful attempt. Multiple factors will play here, people,
it's kind of his approach. On April three of eighteen
sixty five, he saw the fall of Richmond, the first
troops to enter the city, where the fifth Massachusetts Cavalry
and the Army Corps, both of which were black units.
Blacks within the city welcomed them as heroes, and he

(25:40):
wrote on Sunday evening strange to say, the jails in
this place were thrown open, and all runaway negroes, those
for sale and those for safekeeping, were told to hop
out and enjoy their freedom. You may rely upon it
that they did not need a second invitation. Many of
these persons will have no difficulty in convincing themselves that
they were always on the side of the Union and

(26:01):
the freedom of the slave. Great events have a wonderful
influence on the minds of guilty trembling wretches. So upon
entering Richmond, he went to the Virginia Statehouse, which had
been home to the Confederate Congress, and rode his first
dispatch after the fall of the city. While sitting at
the desk belonging to the speaker of the Confederate House.
A Boston correspondent named Charles Carrollton Coffin wrote this tale

(26:25):
about the event, which is just ranking up there with
the recent story we told about how Hypatia the touring
a suitor with favorite historical antidotes. And so here is
what Charles Coulson Coffin said. Visiting the capital. He entered
the Senate chamber and sat down at the Speaker's chair
to write a letter. A paroled rebel officer entered the room.

(26:47):
Come out of there, you black cuss, shouted the officer,
clenching his fist. Mr Chester raised his eyes, calmly, surveyed
the intruder, and went on with his writing. Get out
of here, or I'll knock your brains out. The officer, bellow,
pouring out a torrent of oaths, and rushing up the
steps to execute his threat, found himself tumbling over the
chairs and benches, knocked down by one well planted blow

(27:10):
between the eyes. Mr Chester sat down as if nothing
had happened. The rebel sprang to his feet and called
upon Captain Hutchins of General Devons's staff for a sword.
I'll cut that fellow's heart out, said he. Oh, I
guess not. I can't let you have my sword for
any such purpose. If you want to fight, I will

(27:31):
clear a space there and see that you have fair play.
But let me tell you that you will get a
tremendous thrashing, said Captain Hutchins. The officer left the hall
in disgust. Once again. There are so many levels of
things that I love about the story, starting with him
running a dispatch in the speaker chair and including punching

(27:53):
a guy between the eyes calmly, calmly, and then getting
back to his work. After the fall of Richmond, Thomas
stayed in the city to report on rebuilding efforts. The
city was war torn, it was partly destroyed, and it
was full of impoverished displaced people. After the war, he
also traveled to Washington to advocate for civil rights before

(28:13):
Andrew Johnson. From there, he returned to his hometown of
Harrisburg and until he left for England to study law.
That fall, he worked as an advocate for equal rights
and joined the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League. He actually
became its solicitor in literary critic and its corresponding secretary.
He earned his law degree in England at the age
of thirty six. While he was overseas, he also toured

(28:35):
Europe and Russia on behalf of the League. He was
invited to meet and have a meal with the Czar
as well. Then he spent two years in Europe serving
as a diplomatic representative of Liberia, having been appointed as
an aide to camp of James Spriggs Payne, who was
President of Liberia. Sometime in eighteen sixty eight, he left
that post after an election again brought a brought an

(28:58):
administration into power which he didn't entirely support. And while
he continued to think about returning to Liberia and he
actually referred to Liberia as home for most of his
adult life, he was reluctant to do so based on
all of his experiences there Before he came to the
United States again, where he moved to the Deep South,
becoming the first African American to practice law in the

(29:21):
state of Louisiana, with his goal really working on the
reconstruction effort. And this was obviously not a welcoming situation.
Racism and violence against African Americans were rampant, and the
local political environment was full of corruption. At one point,
he was actually shot in the head during an altercation
related to a possibly fraudulent election. He survived and went

(29:44):
on to work for equal rights and an end to
racism in segregation for the rest of his career. He
also became a brigadier general in the Louisiana State Militia
in the aftermath of a different election, that of William
Pitt Kellogg to the office of governor, which was disputed
by the Democrats and led to a violent rebellion. As
if he had not had enough careers at this point,

(30:05):
he became a politician, and he served in a number
of offices, including the superintendent of public education in more
than one Louisiana division. He continued to be active in
the Republican government until eighteen seventy seven, when the Democrats
took control. From there, he became U S Commissioner for
New Orleans, which was a federal appointment, and he held
that post until eighteen eighty three. The Republican government had

(30:29):
been much more supportive of African Americans than the Democrats
were at the time, so the change in leadership left
Thomas feeling pretty frustrated and disillusioned. Like we said before,
he was really an idealist, and he did not want
to back down on anything, but he started to spend
more time in Harrisburg. He eventually married a teacher named
Florence Johnson, and the couple split their time between Pennsylvania

(30:53):
and Louisiana, uh and she was teaching during this time
and he was practicing law. In another turn late in
his life, he became president of the Wilmington's Rights, Fell
and Onslow Railroad, an African American owned company in North Carolina,
in eighty four. This might have been a financial move,
since his law clients were often extremely poor, which made

(31:13):
it hard for him to make an actual living from
his law work. Unfortunately, though, the railroad company eventually failed
and finally on September thirty eight, two Thomas died at
the age of fifty eight. His name is really not
very well known in most of the United States, but
he became really prominently known in his hometown of Harrisburg,

(31:35):
where a school was named after him in two thousand four,
and the book Thomas Morris Chester Black Civil War Correspondent,
which was edited by R. J. M. Blackett, includes quite
a lengthy biography on him, and it also includes all
of his dispatches as a correspondent I ordered a copy
of that book before before doing research on this podcast,

(31:57):
and I did not comprehend how cool what was to
be arriving in the in the mail was. Like I
knew it was his dispatches from the front, I didn't
quite realize that it was a very detailed biography of
his whole life, followed by every dispatch that he wrote.
So if you were interested in this at all, this
is a highly worthwhile. Yeah, it's much more. It's much

(32:20):
more comprehensive than you might think. It gets into a
lot of detail about all the various like he said,
he said, she said, going on while he was working
uh in Liberia. It gets a lot into a lot
more detail about that particular movement. Um. As we said,
there are many many things in this episode that could
have been episodes on their own. We keep finding them. Yeah,

(32:43):
this why I feel like this had more of that
than in any episode that I've researched in a while.
I felt like every time I turned a page there
was something else that was going to need context explained
because it has not maybe been talked about very much
in your typical school room. Well, and it's dates. He
was busy, he was he said a lot of very

(33:03):
different interesting things. He broke a lot of ground in
terms of color barriers. He just I see where eight
podcasts could come off at this one. Yeah. Well, and
it makes me really sad that he I think the
general perception is that by the time he died he
was very frustrated with the state of race relations in America.
He was not very optimistic that things were going to

(33:26):
get better, and that is very sad. It makes me
very sad that, having accomplished so much, that seems to
have been his state of mind at the end of
his life. Yeah. I empathize with it. I cannot say
I identify with it because I am not an African
American person and that would be a just terribly pretentious

(33:48):
thing to say. But it does make me sad that
that I think of at the end of his life
he was in a place of frustration. Yeah. I mean,
you don't want anybody to feel that way at the
end of their lives, but a particularly with as much
as he had gone through and as much work and
effort as he had put into the race relations movement. Uh,
you hate to think that he felt like it was
for not right and so much of his writing and

(34:10):
his actions make it clear that that his motivation always
was a sense of wanting things to be better for people,
and that is another reason why it was so deeply
frustrating so often, because things were not getting better very
quickly at all. I think I also have some listener mail. Fantastic.
This is actually two pieces of mail about the same
thing from our Facebook, from people who have raised very

(34:34):
interesting questions about our Plan and Aisle Lighthouse disappearance episode.
The first is from Ashley, and she says, Hi, Tracy
and Holly, I listen to your podcast while I'm working,
so I may have missed some information in your most
recent podcast concerning the mystery surrounding the Plan and Aisle Lighthouse.
At any rate, I am curious to know why thieves, bandits,
and or pirates were not considered as possible culprits in

(34:57):
the disappearance of three men. There may not have been
anything of worth in the lighthouse, but seems to me
a more likely option than some of the other suggestions.
Thanks for the research to keep it up. I would
say definitely, uh, piracy is more likely than aliens. Yeah,
and it it has been theorized by various historians and
that was that could have been the cause. But it

(35:19):
was such a remote location, like the the island itself
was uninhabited by anyone else, like there was no other
human presence on the island besides the lighthouse. Um, it
would have required some serious work for thieves or abandons
to make their way out there. Yeah, and to make
their way. We talked a little bit about how it
was it was difficult to um doc at the landing

(35:44):
stage there they had as it was there uh, And
how that one man had had to jump from his boat,
he had to back in the small boat into the
slip and jump, and how it was a little bit dangerous,
so that could have potentially been a deterrent as well. Uh.
We also got a note on Facebook from Jim, and
Jim said, did you consider that the source of a

(36:05):
rogue wave that might have killed the three lighthouse keepers
might have been an undersea earthquake? After all, Iceland and
the mid Atlantic Ridge aren't that far away. However, a
large tsunami probably would have been reported by others along
the west coast of Scotland if one happened. This had
a very similar answer of basically what Jim said, which
is that where the flann and Aisles are located between

(36:29):
Iceland and bigger, more inhabited islands. If there had been
something as large as a tsunami, that almost certainly would
have been reported by other people, and that would have
led the investigation to be like they must have been
wiped out by the tsunami and not I wonder what happened. Yeah,
and I think we might have referenced it briefly in

(36:49):
the episode. But I know there is at least one
author that has written a book that he thinks it
was potentially a seaquake, but he there wasn't enough supporting
evidence for me to include that one in the list.
Just you know, eventually you have to edit out some
things for time. I think like a frequent roague wave
situation is probably a little more likely than seaquake because

(37:12):
that would have made a much larger wave. Probably. Yeah,
it's um, you know, such an isolated incident. And even
though these are kind of out on their own, they're
not the only thing they are. We know there were
people nearby, for example, the gamekeeper that was um keeping
an eye on things. He surely would have seen there

(37:34):
had been a So yeah, those are the answers to
those questions really not really answers other than do you
have Some people think that might be the thing, right, So,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other episode, you can at History Podcast at
Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot

(37:54):
com slash history class stuff, and on Twitter at Misston History.
Our tumbler is that mist and his Right dot tumbler
dot com, and we're on Pinterest too, or we can
penned a whole bunch of pictures of that lighthouse. If
you would like to learn more about what we've talked
about today, you can come to our website and put
the word Newspapers in the search bar. You will find
how Newspapers Work, which is freshly updated for this century.

(38:18):
Yeah yeah, you can have changes in that industry so many.
You can learn about all that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is how stuff Works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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(38:45):
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