By Victor Greto
NEWARK – Erwin Polk believes that freedom is both a right and a gift.
When he found out that a family of his ancestors – Mary Polk and two of her children, Sarah and James – had been freed by their white owner from bondage in 1809 at White Chapel, a small plantation in Somerset County near Allen, Md., and followed the progression of his paternal roots through the ups and downs of American history, he had mixed feelings.
“There are times when I’m at work,” says Erwin Polk, 57, who works at Well Fargo in Chester, Pa., and who lives in a large, stately home in the Baulieu subdivision in Newark with his wife and child, “and I’m thinking, this has got to be the worst situation I’ve ever been in. Then I think about my grandfather picking for another farmer and making a whole 25 cents a basket, out there for hours with a 30-minute lunch break, sunup to sundown.”
It’s a legacy that when Polks from throughout the country gathered in Allen, Md., to reflect on their family’s 200 years of freedom and their struggle for liberty that began more than a half-century before the Civil War and the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment freed all African-Americans.
“The fact that some of my relatives truly sacrificed to get an education, it’s motivation to me to keep doing something,” Polk says. “I may not be the highest educated person in my family, but I have to do this and I have to do get more information, because I like it, but also because it gives meaning to me.”
Ever since he read a self-published book an aunt and cousin wrote in 1976 about his father’s family’s odyssey from slavery to freedom when he was a young man, Polk has been fascinated by the history of his family, including his mother’s family, the Ryner-Langston-Gould-Pierce-Murrays.
“It’s important to know that, prior to the Civil War, it was noted that our family members would receive their freedom, 200 years ago,” says Wanda Polk Peyton, Erwin’s sister. “It’s significant. This is information we have had for many years, and with the highlighting of the history book, we’re thankful to have this information.”
Actually, the first history book, partially the work of Condra Wilfred Williams, Erwin’s distant cousin who is now dead, and Velmar Polk Morris, 74, Erwin’s aunt, understood freedom to have come to the family in 1829, until Erwin discovered another document that pushed freedom back to 1809.
“It was so new to me,” says Velmar, 74, of her family history. “I didn’t realize how it all happened. I did this to find out what my people had to go through.”
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Although Erwin Polk first became fascinated with his family’s history in his early 20s, a first marriage and divorce intervened before he devoted time to research.
In 1995, he decided to devote a few days off each year (including his birthday) to visit archives, including ones in Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Annapolis and Princess Anne, Md., the latter of which was near the old White Chapel plantation.
In 2002, Polk rediscovered the document had found decades before, the 1809 will of Nancy Morris, the plantation owner and widow at White Chapel. Morris wrote the will in January of 1809.
“First my will and desire is that my Negro woman Rachel and my Negro woman Mary and her children Sarah and James be all free at my death…” the beginning of the will reads.
Mary, Sarah and James are direct paternal ancestors of Erwin’s. Mary was married to Frederick Polk, who probably remained a slave at a nearby plantation.
Erwin found the will by accident.
“I had been rummaging through deeds and probate records,” he recalls.
A bored clerk at the desk of the Princess Anne Somerset County Courthouse, office of the register of wills, asked him if he could help. Erwin asked him to look up the Morris will. He found it, and Erwin saw what his aunt and cousin once saw, but then turned the page.
“I saw the registration that said she had died in April of that same year,” Polk says. “That pushed back the freedom of our family by 20 years.”
Velmar and Condra had assumed the plantation owner hadn’t died for another 20 years, because they also had found the freedom papers of James Morris Polk, Mary Polk’s son, in 1829.
“Children didn’t get their freedom papers till they came of age (reached 21),” Erwin Polk says, explaining the existence of the papers. The document was actually a “pass” that allowed the young man to travel freely.
Polk doesn’t know why his ancestors were freed by Nancy Morris in the year that happened to be the year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.
“I’ve heard from a gentleman, Charles Polk, who is white, and he indicated that it may have been part of her husband’s desire to free some of them on her death,” Erwin says. “He had left all of them to Nancy Morris, but not all the slaves got their freedom after their death.”
Despite their liberty, free blacks during the antebellum (pre-Civil War) era were second-class citizens. Some were even kidnapped back into slavery.
By 1810, when Polk’s ancestors were freed, only 4 percent of blacks in the South and 75 percent of blacks in the north were free. But Delaware and Maryland held a much higher percentage of free blacks than the Deep South, up to 75 percent in First State.
Despite freedom, as Polk writes in his book-in-progress, his ancestors and other free blacks in Maryland and Delaware had to be wary of gangs such as the “Patty Rovers,” a criminal family led by Patty Hanley, based on the border of Maryland and Delaware near Seaford. The gang terrorized African-Americans, killed several and kidnapped many to sell them back into slavery.
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The next record the family has after James Morris Polk’s 1829 coming-of-age papers comes from a special 1832 census, when Mary Polk and her married daughter, Sarah Polk Pinkett, voted against returning to Africa.
“Maryland’s free black society was growing, and they wanted to know from all these free blacks if they wanted to go back to Africa,” Polk says. “They stayed.”
The 1850 census lists Mary, her son James and, finally, Mary’s husband, Frederick, who probably had been freed in the meantime. Only free blacks had their names listed in the U.S. Census from 1790 to 1860.
Condra had earlier discovered that Frederick Polk was born in Guinea, West Africa, during the 18th century. Family members believe he was probably sold on the auction block at Princess Anne, Md., to Judge David Polk. The judge lived from 1721-1778.
The Judge evidently gave his slave his own name. Condra also believed that Frederick may have been a favorite of the judge’s, since the Judge gave him many of his personal belongings, including his walking cane, clothes chest, razor, knife, fork and spoon combination, and sword.
Slavery was abolished in Maryland in 1864, and throughout the United States the following year after the end of the Civil War.
By the 1880 census, Mary and Frederick’s son James Morris Polk had not only been married to Rebecca Caroline Black Polk for many years, they had had 10 children, all of whom eventually married and had children of their own.
Records also show that the oldest daughter, Lucinda, was married and living in Baltimore, and two of the children, Ishmael and Sarah, worked as servants for a white family.
Their eldest son Thomas Elzey Polk, Erwin’s great-grandfather, became a sailor and, from 1882- 1892, served as a Buffalo soldier in the U.S Army 9th Cavalry Regiment in the west.
The 1880 census also shows that James Morris Polk had been living separately from his wife and kids. Erwin guesses that his great-great-grandfather was either separated or divorced from Rebecca because of two letters that the Buffalo soldier Thomas Polk addressed only to his father in 1883 and 1885.
James Morris Polk died in 1890.
Thomas also evidently learned how to write while serving as a Buffalo soldier. When he entered the military, he signed his name with an X. When he left, he had written letters and signed his name on his discharge papers.
In an interesting twist, one of the chaplains stationed at Fort Sill and Fort Robinson, when Thomas was there, was Theophilus Gould Steward, who was an ancestor of Erwin Polk’s mother. The chaplains taught many of the soldiers how to read and write.
Thomas Polk’s life as a Buffalo soldier seems to have been inspiring for many his descendants.
“Members of our family would defend the United States of America in every major war and all during the Cold War Era,” Erwin says.
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Erwin Polk insists that the need for education is one of the greatest lessons his family has learned about its past.
Polk’s father, Elmer Elias Polk, was born in 1920. “To go to high school, it was a 6-10 mile walk each way, ” Erwin says.
So Polk’s grandfather, Ulysses Samuel Arthur Polk (Thomas’ oldest son), a farmer and carpenter who bought a 70-acre farm in Allen, Md., for $625, paid a taxi cab to get his three children to and from school.
To supplement the farm, his grandfather and father made 25 cents a basket picking for other farmers.
As early as 1915, however, a Polk family member attended college, before being drafted and going into World War I two years later.
Erwin himself graduated from Morgan State in Baltimore in 1974, following a trail blazed there by his grandfather’s first cousin, Ishmael Arnett Polk, who graduated from school in 1932.
In his research, Erwin Polk also discovered that a branch of the white Polk family sired the 11th president of the United States, James Knox Polk, the one-term president from 1845-1849, who reigned during the Mexican-American War.
Erwin says he knows of “pockets of black Polks all over the country,” including those in Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Oklahoma, some of whom will be attending the reunion.
Like his life experiences, Polk says that researching and learning about his family’s past has touched him in ways he had never thought it would when he began the search in earnest more than a decade ago.
“If there’s something to get upset about, it’s what happened after slavery,” he says, referring to segregation and the century-long struggle for Civil Rights. “That’s still happening.”
Even so, he says, he understands all sides, from slave owners to the slaves.
“There’s no need to carry hostility around,” he says. “I have the ability to adapt to any situation. After all, nothing short of death is permanent.”