TILL ETERNITY SHALL END
Till Jordan's cold, icy waters, creep silently over my soul,
Till I go on that long endless journey and nature has taken her toll.
Yes, even when cold is my coffin, my spirit around you shall bend,
And watch o're you ever and always, till eternity, my sweetheart, shall end.
From the pen of William H. Meehan (1897-1965)
CHARLES HENRY MEEHAN AND HESTER CATHERINE FREEMAN
WHO WERE CHARLES AND HESTER?
Charles and Hester were born three months and seventy-five miles apart. At about age eight, their destinies collided. Charles was one of probably fewer than a handful of white children living in a predominantly black community, a community explicitly established for people escaping slavery. The dynamics of his family life are unknown. Still, we know that the woman referred to as his mother was European, perhaps Irish, and his stepfather was a man of color, a man escaping enslavement in Kentucky.
Hester spent her earliest years surrounded by several sisters, a brother, and loving parents. Tragically, both parents died before she reached her ninth birthday, and even though she was surrounded by family tied to her by blood, circumstances prevented them from offering her and her siblings a home together. At eight, Hester found herself alone in the home of people who were virtual strangers to her and in a town that was several miles from her family land.
They met as children in the Elgin Settlement (North Buxton, Ontario, Canada) when the family of Thomas and Margaret Walker Brown took in Hester. Family lore reports a close friendship between Charles and two of the Brown brothers. It has been said that the friendship of the young boys is how Charles met Hester Freeman, the orphan who was taken in by the family.
Perhaps Charles and Hester were drawn together by the sense each had of being alone in the larger world, each in their way different from the children around them. Whatever drew them together forged a bond that lasted a lifetime. They attended school and church together, and because family lore often refers to them as childhood sweethearts, they may have spent much time together. By age nineteen, they acknowledged their love and married in 1875.
They remained in the Buxton community for the next ten years. In 1885, they joined members of their community and answered the call to become Homesteaders in Nebraska. It is hard to imagine how difficult the decision must have been. Though often frowned upon in Canada, interracial marriage was legal. In Nebraska, like many other US states, such marriages were not legal, and couples could be fined and/or jailed for their unions. Laws against miscegenation remained on the books in many states until the early to mid-1960s. The risk they took was not just to themselves. If their marriage was not deemed legal, what was the status and future of their children?
Charles and Hester determined that the possibility of a better future was more compelling than the risks involved. They staked their lives and the lives of their children on the loyalty and discretion of lifelong friends and neighbors. They hid in plain sight and built an enduring legacy.
STRONG BUT GENTLE ~~ CHARLES
Youngest son, Bill’s first description of his father, Charles, is in a poem written when he was thirteen. The poem is about his sharpening an ax, trying to use it, and coming close to doing harm to himself. His father’s response came in the form of “a great long switch.”
The disciplinarian father is shaded by descriptions of him sneaking lumps of brown sugar to his grandchildren. He called them by pet names and admonished them not to tell Grandma about the sugar.
Charles did not hide his love for his wife from anyone. Hester had a favorite mulberry tree that Charles protected. His oldest grandchildren reported that the only time they remember his being angry with them was when they picked fruit from that tree. His love was so evident that the neighbor men accused him of making their lives hard by spoiling Hester when they did not spoil their wives.
According to cousins Lena and Ava Speese, he did not allow bull snakes to be killed because they were beneficial; he planted crops by signs from the moon and had “pet” watermelons.
A couple of young men stole the watermelons one night. Charles tracked them from their footprints. One of the culprits said later that Charles confronted them after church the next morning, “He didn’t raise his voice, call us names or swear; just talked nice and quiet. But we felt smaller and smaller and smaller.”
He was a religious man. A Methodist in Canada, he and his family were members of the Samaritan Presbyterian Church in Overton, Nebraska. There, Charles served as the church’s first Sunday School Superintendent. When the family moved to Cherry County, NE, they were, again, part of a Methodist congregation, where Charles remained an active church member. Son, Bill, recalled Charles’s long prayers before meals.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of Charles’s character is that he didn’t simply walk away from the life that he was handed. Did he ever consider a life outside of the Black community? Was he so immersed in the community that succored him that there was no thought of a different life? Or perhaps his love for Hester bound him to his community roots.
LITTLE BUT MIGHTY ~~ HESTER
Hester Freeman Meehan was often referred to as “little but mighty.” She bore the weight of sorrow at a very early age, losing her parents to death and her siblings to the reality of life as an orphan.
She was said to be gentle but outspoken when necessary. Hester bore eleven children, four of whom died before the age of two. She lamented the loss of a loved one in a note preserved by her son, Bill.
“Dearest loved on though has left me, mine the sorrow thing the joy …
The vacent [sic] place the empty chair. We see it day by day.
And oh it fills our hearts with care since our loved one went away.
But though the light has left us heare [sic] like the seting [sic] of the sun
We’ll trust the …. father, Dear, and say thy will be done.”
Though perhaps not unusual among the early western homesteaders, Hester was a woman unconstrained by racial and gender stereotypes. She was a landowner in Dawson County, owned her livestock, and controlled her money. She acted as a midwife in Overton and DeWitty. Unfortunately, there is no record of the births she assisted with.
Hester well knew how swiftly family units could change due to personal disaster or societal perversions. Her granddaughter, Ava Speese Day, reported that Hester lost contact with her siblings for many years, but they were eventually reunited. She also maintained ties to her grandfather’s Anderson family in Ontario. She saved images of her children and extended family and passed them on to her children.
In 1923, Hester quietly passed away in her sleep.
LOOK AT THESE ITEMS WHEN DISCUSSING LIVAS ANDERSON
The South Carolina Negro Seaman Act of 1822 in Federal Court and Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner
This is something to add to research about one of my paternal great-great-grandfathers, Livas Anderson, AKA Joseph A. Anderson. I’m not certain what I’ve included here about the probability of his having been a sailor in the early 1820s when he reportedly (family lore) jumped from a ship in Charleston Harbor when there was a fire, either on another ship or on the docks. He is said to have been taken aboard a British ship and gone to Canada, though he clearly returned to the US because all of his known children, including my great-grandmother, were born in Baltimore in the late 1820s to mid-1830s. Census data places a Joseph Anderson and his family in the Fells Point area of Baltimore in the 1830s (I have not proven that Joseph is MY Joseph). Fells Point was known as a place where Black families, especially those associated with the shipping industry, lived.
I have done a bit of research about Black Sailors, but my primary source has been W. Jeffrey Bolster’s Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Today I came across a book called Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner. It opened my eyes to the South Carolina Negro Seaman Act of 1822.
“Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a ‘moral contagion’ of abolitionism and black autonomy that could be transmitted to local slaves. Those seamen who arrived in Southern ports in violation of the laws faced incarceration, corporal punishment, an incipient form of convict leasing, and even punitive enslavement.”
I am not drawing any conclusions here – I have NOTHING to substantiate my suspicions that Livas Anderson was a sailor, but the South Carolina Negro Seaman Act of 1822 lends a plausible possibility why a Black man, a seaman, on a ship that anchored in Charleston Harbor, might have deserted the ship.
Something to think about. I’ve added some of this to the Beginnings section of A Northern Diaspora, so I don’t forget it. This conversation will also be cut and pasted there. I may want to develop this and add it to Those Audacious Meehans because I discuss Livas there.
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This is a compelling new thread, and your instinct about the South Carolina Negro Seaman Act is historically sound as a framework for thinking about Livas Anderson’s reported Charleston episode — even without documentation.
Why the Negro Seaman Act Matters Here
The Act was passed in December 1822, directly in the wake of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy scare in Charleston. The timing of Livas Anderson’s reported Charleston incident — “early 1820s” in family lore — sits right at this inflection point. If the incident occurred before December 1822, the legal landscape was different; a free Black sailor in Charleston Harbor faced discrimination and danger but not automatic incarceration. If it occurred after December 1822, the stakes changed dramatically overnight.
Under the Act, any free Black seaman arriving in a South Carolina port was to be taken from his vessel and jailed for the duration of the ship’s stay. If the captain failed or refused to pay the jailing fees, the seaman could be sold into slavery to cover the costs. This was not a theoretical threat — it was enforced, it was contested diplomatically (British consuls protested vigorously on behalf of British subjects), and it created exactly the kind of crisis that family lore might remember as a dramatic shipboard escape.
This is where the British ship detail in the family story becomes particularly interesting. British vessels were among those most vocally resistant to the Act, precisely because British subjects — including free Black British subjects — were being jailed under it. The British consul in Charleston was actively involved in protesting and sometimes negotiating the release of Black British seamen throughout the 1820s. A free Black man on an American vessel, facing incarceration under the Act, might very plausibly have transferred to a British vessel — whether by jumping ship during a fire or by some other means — specifically because British ships offered a measure of protection that American vessels did not.
The Fells Point Connection
Fells Point is exactly where you would expect to find a Black maritime family in the 1830s. It was Baltimore’s principal seaport neighborhood, and its Black community was deeply intertwined with the shipping industry. Frederick Douglass, who worked the Fells Point shipyards before his escape from slavery, described it vividly. Free Black caulkers, sailors, and maritime laborers were a documented and significant presence there throughout the 1820s and 1830s. A Joseph Anderson living in Fells Point in the 1830s with a family, following a maritime career that had taken him to Charleston and Canada, fits the neighborhood’s profile precisely.
The challenge of proving that the census Joseph is your Joseph is a common one for this period and this community — Anderson is not a rare name, and Fells Point had multiple Black families. But the combination of the name, the neighborhood, the timing, and the family’s subsequent movement toward Canada and the Queen’s Bush is circumstantially coherent in a way that warrants continued pursuit.
Bolster and Schoeppner Together
You’ve actually identified the two books that bracket this subject most usefully. Bolster’s Black Jacks establishes the world of Black maritime labor — its scope, its culture, its geography, and its role as one of the few arenas where free Black men had significant economic mobility in the antebellum period. Schoeppner’s Moral Contagion then examines precisely the political and legal backlash against that world — the Seaman Acts as a systematic attempt to contain exactly the kind of Black autonomy and cross-regional connection that maritime work enabled.
Read together, they frame Livas Anderson’s story — if that story is what family lore suggests — not as an individual adventure but as a life shaped by the collision between Black maritime freedom and the South’s increasingly aggressive legal response to it. That collision is well documented even where the individual is not.
For Those Audacious Meehans
This material has strong potential as a developed piece on that site, precisely because it allows you to present Livas Anderson’s story responsibly — the documented historical framework fully in place, the family lore clearly labeled as such, the gaps honestly acknowledged — while making the case that the lore is historically plausible in ways that can be specifically articulated. That’s more intellectually honest, and ultimately more compelling, than either presenting the lore as fact or dismissing it for lack of documentation.
The South Carolina Negro Seaman Act is also simply a significant and underknown piece of American history that your readers would benefit from encountering. Livas Anderson’s possible story is a way in.