Jim Matthews: From Childhood Torture to Asylum in Hallowell
In December of 1837, South Carolinian John Fogle bought an ad in the Charleston Courier seeking information regarding the whereabouts of a “fugitive slave” named Jim. Fogle claimed to have purchased Jim a few weeks earlier from Mr. David D. Cohen of Charleston, and he suspected the youth might be “lurking in the neighborhood” of Four Hole Swamp, where he’d been raised.
“Fifty dollars will be paid for information of his being harbored by any white person, or $25 for his apprehension and delivery to the master of the Work House,” the ad announced. But the trail soon went cold, and no one ever collected the reward for Jim’s capture.
On Aug. 2, 1838, Advocate of Freedom, a Hallowell-based newspaper that served as the official voice of the Maine Anti-Slavery Society, published the first installment of a series based on the account of an anonymous 20-year-old man that detailed the torture and abuse he’d suffered at the hands of Cohen, Fogle and others. Titled, “Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave,” the shocking memoir soon spread beyond Maine’s borders and into the pages of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Emancipator newspaper in New York City.
Most white readers were skeptical of slave narratives, and pro-slavery writers picked them apart for inconsistencies and errors in an attempt to discredit these accounts. What made this story exceptional was its source’s attention to details. He provided real names and places where the events occurred.
The young man had dictated his story to a writer identified as “J,” who transcribed it and handed it off to “A,” described as “a source of the highest respectability” by Advocate of Freedom. “A” assured readers the anonymous author was “a gentleman of indisputable integrity and fairness.” The manuscript was repeatedly read to the young man to ensure accuracy, and he “was cautioned in every instance to state only the simple facts,” “A” wrote.
Advocate editor William Smyth added that the “scarred back of the victim” attested to the truthfulness of his story. “Some of the scars are the size of a man’s thumb, and appear as if pieces of flesh had been gouged out, and some are ridges or elevations of the flesh and skin. They could easily be felt through his clothing,” Smyth wrote.
Until recently, the name of the story’s source was lost to history. But thanks to research by Clemson University professor Susanna Ashton and her student assistants, we now know he was likely James Matthews, a Black laborer who escaped slavery and spent the rest of his life living in Hallowell.
Matthews was born near the Four Hole Swamp, a vast forest of virgin cypress and tupelo trees 25 miles from Charleston. The National Park Service has officially recognized Four Hole as part of the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Many asylum-seekers sought refuge there, and some settled in so-called Maroon communities deep in the swamp.
Matthews’ mother died when he was a baby, and he had only vague memories of his father, who passed away when Jim was very young. Matthews was legally owned by a widow he called Mistress Smith.
As soon as enslaved children could walk, they were put to work, his memoir recounted. From as early as Matthews could remember, he’d toiled with 20 other boys and girls on the farm, picking cotton and potatoes, pulling weeds, clearing brush, and even operating the cotton gin on occasion.
Mistress Smith was extremely strict, and if the children didn’t do exactly as they were told, they’d be whipped by an old man named Cleeton. A schoolmaster who boarded with the widow used to bring home hickory sapling branches and put them by the chimney to dry; he called them “nice switches to whip the little niggers with.”
“A good many of us were entirely naked and the rest had nothing on but shirts,” Matthews told the interviewer. “I never wore any clothes till I was big enough to plough. When they whipped us, they often cut through our skin. They did not call it skin, but ‘hide.’ They say ‘a nigger hasn’t got any skin.’”
Mistress Smith had a young daughter whom she would send to the cotton house to spy on the Black children. If the girl saw them laughing or playing, she would say, “Ah, I see you idle, I shall go and tell ma.” They would beg the girl not to tell the mistress, Matthews recalled, but she enjoyed seeing the other kids beaten.
The enslaved children were fed two meals a day: one in the morning and another at noon. Sometimes their mothers would save a bit of corn meal ash cake so their children could eat something before sleep. Even when Matthews was hired out to masters who treated him better, he never got more than two meals a day. At great risk, children would occasionally steal vegetables from the garden to ease their hunger pangs.
When he got older, Matthews was sent to the cotton fields to work with other children his age under another slave driver. Even when their labor wasn’t needed in the fields, the children scrambled to look busy, because the overseer would whip them if they were caught not working.
Mistress Smith hired Matthews out for two years to work for Col. Billy Mallard on Dean Swamp. Mallard’s overseer, Tom Galloway, was a brutal man and quick with his whip. One day, the overseer accused an enslaved woman of wasting turnip seed by scattering it the wrong way on the rugged ground. Matthews remembered that Galloway knocked her down and kicked her. Then the overseer and another white man took turns whipping the woman until she stopped screaming.
Another of the enslaved workers on Col. Mallard’s farm had been kidnapped from Guinea and couldn’t understand English, so he didn’t understand that when being whipped, he was expected to say, “Please, massa” and “Do, massa.”
“Master said he would teach ‘the nigger to beg,’” Matthews recalled. “Then they told him what to say, but he did not understand. He was tied up by his wrists, and they kept beating him till they were tired. They then went into the house to drink and left him hanging there.”
A woman named Sarah tried to help the West African man understand what he needed to say to stop the beating. But when the bosses returned from their refreshment, they tried a new torture technique. Mallard and Galloway untied the worker and lashed him to a log. The master and slave driver then whipped him so viciously that the man’s side was gashed open and needed to be sewn shut.
The tortured man never did get the words right. “All the sound they could get out of him was a kind of grunt, ‘ugh, ugh,’” Matthews said. “The next day he went into the woods and staid five weeks before he was caught.”
The enslaved children were terrified of Galloway and would tremble when they saw him coming. If their work wasn’t perfect, he would beat all the kids regardless of who was at fault.
One day, a seven-year-old girl named Margaret didn’t work to Galloway’s standards, so he savagely whipped her with his cow-hide. As soon the overseer left, the beaten and bloody little girl ran off to find her mother, who was digging ditches and filling in ruts left by wagons on a nearby road. To reach her mother, Margaret had to cross a creek in the middle of the swamp. It had rained for several weeks and the creek was at least 15 feet wide and deep enough for horses to swim it, Matthews recalled.
By nightfall, the girl had not returned, and her mother hadn’t seen her. According to Matthews, Mallard was unconcerned, because Margaret “was only a child and not worth a great deal.”
The slave master would not let Margaret’s mother search for her during the day, so after they finished work, she and the other enslaved parents and children scoured the swamp with pine torches. They searched all night for a week, then another week. The grief-stricken mother hid her anguish from the overseer, who’d whip her if she showed emotion.
Two weeks after Margaret’s disappearance, the creek began to dry and a white man showed up at the farm to announce, “‘somebody’s little nigger was dead down in the brook,’” said Matthews.
“We thought it must be Margaret, and afterwards went down and found her,” Matthews continued. “She had fallen from the log-bridge into the water. Something had eat all her flesh off, and the only way we knew her was by her dress. She was lying on the sand-bed, and her hair was all buried in the sand. Her mother cried when we found her, but in a little while got over it.”
We’ll continue Jim Matthews’ story next month. Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
