The Saga of Henry Van Meter: War Veteran, Privateer & Asylum Seeker; Pt. 2
In the late 19th century, Henry Van Meter was a local celebrity in Orono, Maine. During his over 100 years on earth, he had lived through the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. As we chronicled in last month’s column, Van Meter was enslaved from birth in Virginia and made a harrowing escape across the Kentucky River to freedom with the help of a young lawyer who’d forged his papers after Van Meter saved his life. This month, we pick up his story where we left off, as told through interviews with Van Meter and a talk his son Oliver gave to a group of children on a rainy fall evening on Deer Isle in 1898.
It was the early 1790s when Van Meter escaped to the North. According to one source, he left a wife who was still enslaved and never saw her again. He ditched his slave name for Van Meter, the name of a former master in the Shenandoah Valley who’d been kind to him. Some friendly white men helped him make his way to Ohio, which was then just a scattering of houses around Fort Washington, a fortified stockade built in what is now downtown Cincinnati. The fort was a staging ground for colonial wars against the indigenous people defending their ancestral lands. Henry got his first job in the North as a servant in Gen. Arthur St. Clair’s army.
St. Clair’s army suffered staggering defeats against tribes of the Northwestern Confederacy (from the present-day Midwest and Upper Midwestern U.S.), including a November 1791 surprise attack from which only 24 of nearly 900 white soldiers escaped unharmed. It’s not clear whether Van Meter was there, but in 1793 he got a job as a messenger for Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne in Cincinnati, whose forces defeated the Confederacy and signed a treaty in 1795 that pushed the defeated Indians into a small section of northwestern Ohio.
Van Meter subsequently traveled with some English traders to Philadelphia, where, like many free African Americans in those days, he became a sailor. He followed the sea for many years, and with the help of some local Quakers, he learned to read and write at a Society of Friends’ school.
In 1814, Van Meter shipped out of Baltimore as a common sailor on the Lawrence, an 18-gun privateer frigate with over 111 men. During the War of 1812, the Lawrence captured 13 British vessels, took 106 prisoners and over 3,000 tons of cargo. Van Meter was on board when the ship was captured by the British off Lisbon, Portugal. He became one of 1,000 African Americans among 6,500 U.S. sailors sent to the notorious Dartmoor prison in England. The inmate population also included some 8,000 French prisoners captured during the Napoleonic Wars.
Conditions at the prison were utterly miserable. There was severe overcrowding and understaffing, leaky roofs, and poor food and sanitation. Many men died from diseases that found a fertile environment there. Prisoners established their own legal system to mete out punishments, and there was a market, a theater and a gambling room.
The POWs greeted the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, with jubilation. But it would take several more months of diplomatic squabbles and snafus before they would be released. Surviving solely on moldy hard tack, the sailors were fed up. A riot ensued and Van Meter witnessed the guards shoot and kill seven prisoners and wound 31 — an incident that became known as the Dartmoor Massacre and sparked outrage in America. After some Dartmoor POWs returned home to York, Maine, they issued a resolution on Aug. 31, 1815, resolving “that every impression that we formerly entertained in favor of the British nation, as magnanimous, pious, liberal, honorable or brave, is utterly extinguished…”
Van Meter returned to America, and to life on the sea. He met a fellow Black sailor named Peter Russell who’s also escaped a Southern plantation. Some time before Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820, the two men were working together in Yarmouth. It was there that Van Meter met and married a free Black woman named Maria Avery and moved to Orono. He cleared 100 acres of land near the Stillwater River that he bought from the government. The Van Meters had half a dozen children. The area became known as “New Guinea,” a commonly used name for Black settlements. Van Meter was well respected in town and known for giving captivating lectures about his experiences at Darmoor.
Then tragedy struck. In 1833, newspapers reported that Van Meter had gotten swindled out of his farm, leaving his large family homeless. According to Oliver, a group of white men approached his father in his field one day with an offer. They told him “there was not many colored people here” and the Van Meters would be better off living among people of their own race. Oliver continued:
“They told him the best place for him would be to go to Liberia, Africa. ‘That’s the place for a good colored man,’ they said, ‘where you can raise your sons and daughters in wealth and splendor.’ After a while they said so much that he was induced to sell the little farm and cottage for the small sum of $310. [About $10,800 in today’s money.] After procuring the money he took the whole family and started on the journey, not knowing where he was going. He got as far as Boston and when he told the colored people there that he was going to Liberia they told him that he had better bury all the children before he started for they would all die with the heat. At New Bedford they told him the same thing, and decided to go back to Bangor.
“After he got there he called upon the men to whom he had sold his little place. He was told that the price of real estate was very changeable; that the price one day would be less than at other days; that the little farm had changed in price and if he could raise $1,500 he could again hold the land and title. Father’s money was all gone, and when he told mother what he had heard, she said: ‘Well, father, pretty tough, but we have got to stand it.’ Then they roamed around the streets of Bangor, children and all, for three or four days with not a home of any kind, and many times a very scanty share of food for the children. At last they found a place up at Baskerville where old Johnny Baker sold them a piece of land and gave them plenty of time to pay for it.”
Orono townspeople collected money to help the war veteran and his family. Van Meter even traveled to Boston to speak about his family’s plight at the office of abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. To William Lloyd Garrison, Van Meter’s story was the perfect example of how the political push to “recolonize” African Americans to Liberia, led by prominent white slaveowners and Northern moderates, could be used by predatory racists to scam free Blacks out of everything they’d earned. Deadly tropical diseases awaited the settlers in Liberia. It’s been estimated that between 1820 and 1843, just 40 percent of them survived.
Van Meter and his family never fully recovered from the loss of their property. In 1867, a local paper noted that Van Meter “has not been fortunate in the acquisition of wealth. The only treasures of which he can boast are his wife and children. He is now bedridden, but his intellect is as clear as ever.” He died in 1871, at the approximate age of 110. He was remembered as a hard-working man and a great storyteller. He was a devout Evangelical Christian, a temperance advocate and a fervent abolitionist who “devoted his energies to the advancement of his race,” a local paper wrote. A loyal Republican, Van Meter proudly cast his final vote for Maine governor in 1868, re-electing Civil War hero Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
A large congregation gathered for Van Meter’s funeral at the Free Church on Columbia Street in Bangor before his funeral carriage brought his remains to be buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. In a eulogy to the old veteran, the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier wrote, “He lived through nearly four generations. Though among the lowly of earth; yet, may we not hope that amid all his disadvantages he accomplished life’s great end, and that today his soul is still ‘happy in the Lord’ among the redeemed, glorified in Heaven.”
As his son Oliver told anyone who would listen, “This man, my father, Henry Van Meter, who was so awfully abused, died at the age of 110 years, and is buried at Mt. Hope in Bangor with no slab to mark his grave. He is the very colored boy who held the horse for George Washington while he fixed his harness on the field at the first battle he was ever engaged in.”
In the 1890s, an old anecdote from the 1830s about Van Meter testifying at a court trial over some stolen sheep began circulating in newspapers across the country in the form of a humor piece. Van Meter, who always known as an intelligent and decent person, was resurrected as a bumbling, racist caricature of himself with a minstrel accent.
Life didn’t improve much for the Van Meter children. Most of them died fairly young. A couple of his sons moved to Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, where they worked very low-wage, menial jobs. His son Oliver moved to Deer Isle and married Abigail Russell, the daughter of his father’s fellow fugitive-slave friend, Peter Russell, where he eked out a meager living from the sea. Frederick Douglass Van Meter died in 1831 in Rhode Island, the last of Henry Van Meter’s children to pass on. He had worked as a janitor and laborer and never married.
