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1. The Making of a “Colored Gentleman”
- University of Virginia Press
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CHAPTER ONE The Making of a “Colored Gentleman” As a child John Mitchell worked as a servant in the home of James Lyons, a white attorney who had owned his parents before the Civil War. During the 1870s Lyons lived in one of Richmond’s finest houses, a Greek Revival mansion on Grace Street about three blocks west of Capitol Square. One morning Mitchell answered the doorbell and discovered a black man standing before him. The man asked to speak to Lyons, so Mitchell ran to fetch his employer. When he told Lyons that a “colored gentleman” was waiting to see him, Lyons grew agitated. There was no such thing as a “colored gentleman,” he told the boy. The title of gentleman was reserved for white men only. Years later when he was editor of the Richmond Planet, Mitchell remembered the rebuke and recalled why he had identified the visitor as a “colored gentleman.” His mother had taught him that he himself would grow up to be a gentleman, he said. She had “different ideas from . . . the ‘blue blood’ on that score.” He described this encounter with Lyons as a pivotal event of his childhood, one of those moments when obscure matters became clear.1 Mitchell’s image of himself as a boy and his assumptions about what sort of adult he would become were molded by the circumstances of his childhood. He was born on July 11, 1863, at Laburnum, the suburban estate of James Lyons in Henrico County on the northern outskirts of Richmond. His parents were house servants. His father, John Mitchell Sr., was Lyons’s coachman, while his mother, Rebecca Mitchell, worked as a seamstress. Little is known of their background, save that Rebecca had once belonged to the Pollards, a family living in nearby Hanover County, but was purchased by Lyons sometime before the Civil War. Lyons thought she was born in 1836 and her husband John in 1841, but they assumed themselves closer to the same age, both born about 1835. Probably neither was certain of a birthday. Rebecca Mitchell gave birth to seven children, but only two survived infancy. The first to live was named for his father and called Johnny. A second son, Thomas William Mitchell, or Tom, was born on March 9, 1868.2 As an adult John Mitchell Jr. liked to remind white Richmonders that he had been “born at Laburnum.” It was a way of connecting himself to the Old South and to images of wealth and power. The big house at Laburnum might easily have served as the setting for an antebellum novel. It had a broad veranda, tall white columns, and a wide expanse of lawn. Shade trees surrounded the house, and beyond the lawn were gardens, orchards, stables, and outbuildings. John S. Wise, the son of Governor Henry A. Wise, visited Laburnum often as a child, and he remembered the estate as richly appointed, with furniture imported from Europe, massive silver, shelves lined with books, elaborate carriages, thoroughbred horses, and legions of servants. Varina Davis, the wife of Jefferson Davis, attended parties at Laburnum during the Civil War, and she thought “a finer example of a high-bred Virginia household could not have been found.” The 160-acre estate was about a mile and a half beyond the Richmond city limits, just off the Brook Turnpike, the main road leading north toward Washington, D.C.3 James Lyons, the master of Laburnum, was himself the epitome of the Virginia gentleman. Born in Hanover County in 1801, he was the son of a physician and the grandson of a superior court judge. After attending the College of William and Mary, he set up a law practice in Richmond and entered politics , winning election to the General Assembly in 1840 as a Whig, but he was best known as a friend and host to politicians. Among his guests during the antebellum years were Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and various members of the French and English nobility. Descriptions of Lyons are so effusive as to border on caricature. According to contemporaries he was “the handsomest man of his day.” He had flawless manners and carried himself with the “conscious air of a superior and a leader.” He was much in demand as a public speaker and had “great presence and marked personal beauty.”4 Lyons was also habitually in debt, a matter of no small importance to slaves who feared the breakup of families that could result from...