The Saga of Henry Van Meter: War Veteran, Privateer & Asylum Seeker; Part 1
During the decades preceding the Civil War, known as the Antebellum Period, there were several African Americans living in rural Maine communities after escaping from slavery in the South. These men and women generally kept a low profile, but one exception was a Black farmer from Orono named Henry Van Meter.
Van Meter was kind of a local celebrity. He had famously met George Washington in Virginia during the American Revolution, served aboard a privateer vessel inthe War of 1812, and was captured and held as a prisoner of war by the British. In his later years, Van Meter was often seen walking the streets of Bangor with a witch-hazel divining rod, a tool he used to search for buried treasure. It was said that for a few pennies he’d tell you your fortune in a “most affable manner.”
Van Meter’s birth date is unknown, but he was likely born sometime between 1765 and 1772, according to the census and various newspaper accounts. His parents had been kidnapped from West Africa, and Henry was enslaved by Virginia planter Thomas Nelson Jr., a Revolutionary War general and Founding Father.
In 1860, speaking with historian Benson John Lossing, Van Meter said he met Washington several times, and claimed he once steadied the general’s horse while Washington fixed his harness during his first Revolutionary War battle.
After Nelson died in 1789, Henry was among the enslaver’s possessions sold off to pay debts. He was bought by a plantation owner beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, on the “extreme frontier,” in present-day West Virginia.
Henry was distraught to be separated from his family, but later described his second enslaver as “kind.” Nevertheless, according to Lossing’s interview with him, this “kind” master wanted him to marry an enslaved woman in order to breed child slaves for the plantation. Van Meter told Lossing he “didn’t like the gals” he had to choose from, and didn’t want to “wait for dead men’s shoes,” so the planter sold him to a slave trader from Lexington, Kentucky, named Matthew Lightfoot.
As an old man at the turn of the 20th century, Van Meter’s son, Oliver, was known for regaling locals on Deer Isle with tales of his father. In 1898, the Lewiston Journal recorded Oliver’s version of this story, which, notably, he’d told to a group of children on the island, so some details may have been omitted. Oliver said the “good master” had promised his father, then 14, that he’d set him free when he turned 18, but the master died a few months later and his heirs sold Henry to Lightfoot.
“The new master was very cruel,” Oliver said of Lightfoot, “he was a young new-married upstart of a man, and used to whip the boys just to show his authority.” Young Henry grew desperate to escape, and when he learned Lightfoot intended to sell him for $900, he made a plan.
In Oliver’s version of the story, his father rescued a young lawyer from drowning in a stream after his boat tipped over. “It was some time before the young man came to, and when he did, he found the colored man looking after him,” Oliver said, according to the Lewiston Journal. “Nothing was ever said about the accident, and it was some time before they met again. One day father was sent on an errand to a place where he would be obliged to pass the office where the young man was studying law. He took a liking to father and called him into the office, nobody around.”
The lawyer wanted to repay Henry for saving his life, so he offered to forge papers with the name of a free Black man who’d died. Henry could use the documents to get across the Kentucky River should the man posted at the ferry house demand them — an encounter the lawyer called “the secret test.”
“‘Henry, take these papers, don’t lose them,’” the lawyer said, in Oliver’s account, “place them carefully in your breast. Let no man know of your plan, not even your brother, but watch by day and by night till a good opportunity presents itself. Then you go — follow the north star — travel by night and hide yourself by day. At night go as fast as you can; in the day sleep in the woods. Don’t even show the papers till you are out to the secrets test, for on that test my life as well as your own depends.”
The lawyer told Henry to put his trust in God and to destroy the papers if he was overtaken by a slave-catcher’s bloodhounds. As he took the documents, tears streamed down Henry’s cheeks and he fell to his knees praying for God’s assistance, his son said. He bid his white friend farewell and returned to work on the plantation.
“Three long weeks passed slowly by,” said Oliver. “Every night from the chamber window, poor father looked out with hope at the guide that God had given, and often thought of the young lawyer’s words, ‘Two lives to save one slave. Follow the north star by night. God will take you through.’ The papers were kept close to his bosom. Oh, how careful he was of them!”
Henry’s chance to escape arrived when Lightfoot and his wife took off for three days on a social visit with their servants in tow, leaving the 18-year-old alone to tend the cattle and horses. “Now, father thought, was the time for escape,” said Oliver. “He picked out his favorite horse, one that could almost talk and seemed to know his very thought, acting as if in sympathy with him. The saddle was buckled on tight; every foot was looked to for shoeing, his legs were well rubbed down for the race and in the saddle bag he placed a small lunch.”
Unfortunately, the night was cloudy; Henry couldn’t see the north star, but he kept riding until it appeared. When daylight came, the horse was exhausted and foam covered its mouth. Henry climbed over a fence and foraged some field corn to feed it. Using the saddle for a pillow, he slept on the ground and hid with the horse in the thick woods until dusk.
That evening he awoke to see the north star shining. He rode by night and hid in the forest by day until four nights had passed. Worried he’d be seen if he continued riding the horse in less dense cover, he emancipated it. “Taking the saddle from its back and the bridle from its mouth, he buried them into the bushes,” said Oliver, “then taking the horse by the mane said, ‘Well done, old Nell. You have served me well. No chains, no fetters bind thee. You are free. Go where you will.’ Then he kissed that poor old horse and cried, for he knew not what was yet ahead of him.”
Henry was famished — the last meal he’d eaten was the small lunch he packed the first day. He came upon a little cottage and approached its resident, a Black man, but got nervous when the man started asking a lot of questions, so Henry quickly made his exit. He walked the rest of the day exhausted and suffering sharp hunger pangs. Awakening the next evening, he tried to ignore his suffering stomach as he set out north toward Ohio. Eventually he caught sight of the Kentucky River and a little ferry house beside it, just as the lawyer had described it.
“Here was the place for the test,” said Oliver. “Could he get across without showing his papers? If he showed them and was captured, what would become of him and the young man that made them? These things were in his mind when he approached the door. He rapped. A big, ugly-looking man came out, whose face made poor father tremble with fear; but he did speak.”
Henry nervously asked for some food and drink and for passage across the river. “The stern-looking man paused, then looking at the colored man before him, eyed him from foot to head,” reads Oliver’s account. “Then looking him fair in the face he said: ‘Why, don’t you know that it’s against the law to set a bondman across this river?’
“Then father spoke up. ‘But I call myself a free man, say.’
“‘A free man,’ the man repeated. “Have you got anything to show me that you are a free man?’”
“‘Yes, I believe so,’” Henry replied.
“‘Well, I’d like to see it.’”
Henry hesitated, then told the ferryman he’d hand him his papers on the condition he give them back. “Why, my man, I don’t dare to do otherwise,” he replied. “I’m a sworn man at this post. I won’t destroy your papers, young fellow. I only want to see.”
Henry reached into his waistcoat and produced a forged document. The ferryman looked it over, and “then looked at the man before him who was nearly starved and in the height of fear.” After a tense silence, he slowly folded the paper, passed it back to Henry and looked him in the eye.
“Yes,” he finally said. “I will set you across the river, too. Come inside.” He gave the teen something to eat and didn’t say another word until the boat reached the opposite shore.
“Young man, it is lucky that it was I who was here,” said the ferryman. “The paper is defected but I knew the old man” — the free Black man who’d died and had his name forged to make Henry Van Meter a free man.
Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
