But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis

1. Of Southern Birth

C H A P T E R 1  Of Southern Birth Robert Purvis, destined to become a major figure in the abolition of slavery , was born in Charleston, South Carolina—a state second only to Virginia in its slave population—on August 4, 1810. The Neck, an unincorporated section of Charleston, north of what was known as Boundary Street, was then a place of lawlessness; it was home to many free blacks, and the black mistresses of white slave owners. William Purvis, a white cotton merchant and his mixed-race wife, Harriet Judah, lived here on Elizabeth Street from time to time. The couple had three children; Robert was the second.1 Among the devastating effects of chattel slavery was its destruction not only of family ties, but also of a family’s past. Instead of the family Bibles, the gravestones, the family letters and journals, and other memorabilia with which many American families trace their ancestry, the descendants of slaves were left with legends, some of them colorful, most of them difficult, if not impossible, to trace. Such was the case with Harriet Judah, Purvis’s mother. When he was eighty years old, and had become famous, Robert Purvis told reporters that Harriet was the daughter of a slave, Dido Badaracka, “a fullblooded Moor.” Purvis described her as a woman of “magnificent features and great beauty. She had crisp hair and a stately manner.” By Moor, Purvis apparently meant what was known as a Blackamoor. Dido was not an Arab; she was dark-skinned and had tightly curled, “crisp” hair, which Harriet inherited. Many years later, when a critic falsely accused Robert Purvis of trying to pass for white, she described Harriet as a “tight headed negro lady and a dear good woman.”2 7 According to the legend which Robert Purvis repeated several times, Dido Badaraka was born in Morocco. At the age of twelve, she was captured by a slave trader, along with an Arab girl. Both girls had been lured to go a mile or two out of the city where they lived to see a deer that had been caught. They were seized, bound, placed on the backs of camels, and carried to a slave market on the coast. Here they were loaded onto a slave ship and transported to Charleston, South Carolina in 1766. At the slave market, the Arab girl was freed. (In order to keep peace with the Barbary pirates, in none of the British colonies were Arabs or Moors enslaved .3 ) However, Dido was sold to a white woman, a Miss Harriet Deas, who educated her, treated her as a companion, and left instructions that Dido was to be freed and given an annuity of $60 when Miss Deas died, which she did nine years later.4 Subsequent biographers have accepted this story, but it has proved impossible to verify. The date of 1766 appears to be wrong, for Dido had a child, Mary, Harriet’s half sister, in 1804, when she would have been fifty years of age. It seems far more likely that the date of Dido’s capture was 1776. Among slaves whose sales were recorded in Charleston between 1773 and 1810 there were twelve Didos, but none owned by a person named Deas. A search of manumission records reveals only that a Mrs. Elizabeth Deas left a will asking her descendants to free “old Dido” in 1802. Even if Dido Badaraka had been born in 1754, rather than 1764 as we now think, she would scarcely be described as “old Dido” at the age of forty-eight.5 When Dido was still a young woman, Purvis said, she had attracted the attention of Baron Judah, a member of a prominent Jewish family. There was such a person living in Charleston at the time, who may have been Purvis’s grandfather. Baron or Baruch or Barry Judah (1763–1830) was the third of ten children of Hillel Judah, a German Jew, and his wife Abigail Seixas Judah, a Sephardic Jew, originally from Spain or Portugal. This family moved to Charleston sometime between 1766 and 1783, becoming part of a tiny Jewish community, numbering 188 according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census of 1790. Recently scholars have estimated that the numbers might be higher, possibly as many as 225.6 Jews began arriving in Charleston as early as 1695, although their numbers remained small until 1750. The first Jewish settlers in Charleston , as well as elsewhere in...