Charles Henry Langston

Charles Henry Langston (1817–1892), an American abolitionist and political activist born free in Louisa County, Virginia, was one of two men tried after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, a cause célèbre in 1858 Ohio that helped gain impetus for abolition. In 1835 he was one of the first blacks admitted to Oberlin College. By 1858 Langston helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society and with his brother John Mercer Langston as president, led it as executive secretary. He continued work for 30 years for equal rights, suffrage and education in Ohio and Kansas, where he first went at the end of the American Civil War as general superintendent of refugees and freedmen for the Freedmen's Bureau. In 1872 he was an early principal of the Quindaro Freedman's School (later Western University), the first black college west of the Mississippi River.

He was the grandfather of renowned poet Langston Hughes, and an older brother of John Mercer Langston, an accomplished attorney and activist, who had numerous appointed posts and in 1888 was the first black elected to the United States Congress from Virginia (and the last for nearly a century).

Early life and education

Langston was born free in 1817 in Louisa County, Virginia, the second of three sons and a daughter born to Lucy Jane Langston, a freedwoman of mixed African American and Native American descent, and Ralph Quarles, a wealthy white plantation owner of English descent.^{[fn 1]} Quarles freed Lucy and their daughter Maria in 1806, in the course of what was a relationship of more than 25 years. He also made provisions for his "natural" (illegitimate) children to inherit his substantial fortune after his death.^[2]

Lucy also had three other children with another partner before she moved into the Great House and deepened her relationship with Quarles. Their three sons were born after that. Of the half-siblings, William Langston was the one most involved with the Quarles' sons.^[2]

After their parents both died in 1834, Langston and his brothers, including their older half-brother William, traveled with friends to Chillicothe, Ohio to seek a more favorable environment in the North. Their father had left his natural sons substantial inheritances that allowed them to gain education and as adults work for political reform. The oldest brother, Gideon Quarles, looked so much like his father that he took his name at 21.^[2] Arrangements had been made to place the youngest son John Mercer Langston, only four years old, with William Gooch and his family, close friends of their father's.

In 1835 the older brothers Gideon and Charles started at the preparatory school at Oberlin College, where they were the first black students to be admitted. Charles Langston graduated from Oberlin College after later completing his degree.^[3]

Career

Ohio

Langston quickly became involved in black political affairs in Ohio, where Oberlin was the center of a strong abolitionist movement and a station on the Underground Railroad. He started working for suffrage and equal rights for blacks. Not only was he active, but Langston introduced his younger brother John Mercer Langston to his political circles, and helped him gain entrance to a state convention in 1850, when the younger man was only 20. It was the start of an illustrious career in which his younger brother would overshadow Charles.

In 1858 the older Langston was one of a group of men who freed runaway slave John Price from a US Marshal and his assistants in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. The Underground Railroad hid Price in Oberlin, then helped transport him to Canada and freedom. The daring rescue captured national attention. President demanded that the rescuers be prosecuted. In reaction the state arrested the US Marshal and his party.

A grand jury indicted 37 men (among them 12 free blacks). In response, the state arrested the US Marshal and his team. As a result of negotiations between state and federal officials, only Charles Langston and Simon M. Bushnell, a white man, were tried for their part in subverting the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The state released the arresting party and the federal government released 35 men.^[4] Both Bushnell and Langston were tried and convicted by the same all-Democrat white jury, an injustice Langston addressed in his speech to the court.

His speech a rousing statement of the case for abolition and for justice for "colored men", Langston closed with these words:

But I stand up here to say, that if for doing what I did on that day at Wellington, I am to go to jail six months, and pay a fine of a thousand dollars, according to the Fugitive Slave Law, and such is the protection the laws of this country afford me, I must take upon my self the responsibility of self-protection; and when I come to be claimed by some perjured wretch as his slave, I shall never be taken into slavery. And as in that trying hour I would have others do to me, as I would call upon my friends to help me; as I would call upon you, your Honor, to help me; as I would call upon you [to the District-Attorney], to help me; and upon you [to Judge Bliss], and upon you [to his counsel], so help me GOD! I stand here to say that I will do all I can, for any man thus seized and help, though the inevitable penalty of six months imprisonment and one thousand dollars fine for each offense hangs over me! We have a common humanity. You would do so; your manhood would require it; and no matter what the laws might me, you would honor yourself for doing it; your friends would honor you for doing it; your children to all generations would honor you for doing it; and every good and honest man would say, you had done right! [Great and prolonged applause, in spite of the efforts of the Court and the Marshal.]

^[5]

The judge gave the men light sentences. Langston and Bushnell sued for a writ of habeas corpus in 1859 in the Ohio Supreme Court, but it ruled against them, with the judge saying he had no choice but to uphold the federal law.

Kansas

Early in the Civil War in 1862, Langston moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he organized a school for contrabands who had fled to Union lines from Missouri. He taught the children for about three years. Langston also returned to Ohio in 1863 and, like his brother John Mercer, helped recruit African Americans for the United States Colored Troops when Ohio raised its first regiment.

By 1865 about 2,455 blacks, nearly one-fifth of those in Kansas, lived in Leavenworth, close to Missouri. In 1865 Langston was appointed general superintendent for refugees and freedmen for the Freedmen's Bureau in Kansas. There were more than 12,000 blacks in Kansas by then.^[3][6]

From 1863 to 1870 Langston worked for suffrage for blacks in Kansas and for their right to sit on juries. In 1863 he helped lead a state convention which petitioned the state legislature for suffrage. Despite the efforts of many men, it was not until national passage in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment that blacks in Kansas finally received the right to vote.^[7]

In 1868 Langston moved near Lawrence, Kansas, where he purchased a farm. In 1872 Langston was appointed president of Quindaro Freedman's School (later Western University) near Kansas City, Kansas. The Quindaro Townsite is part of present-day Kansas City.

Chartered in 1865, Quindaro Freedman's School was the earliest college for blacks established west of the Mississippi. In 1872 the legislature provided for expansion to a four-year normal department, which Langston headed. Enrollment increased and teachers were trained. The next year, however, the state and school ran into severe financial difficulties and had to reduce programs when the state suffered agricultural losses. Later in the century the college's programs were revived and expanded, including a theological course. By the early 1900s, the university was promoted as a model of musical and industrial education.^[8] The college closed later in the 20th century, and no buildings remain.

As the black population increased rapidly in Kansas in the decades after the Civil War, Langston worked to aid the "exodusters" and other early migrants. From 17,108 blacks in Kansas in 1870, the numbers increased to 43,107 in 1880 and 52,003 in 1900. In 1880 Langston was president of a statewide Convention of Colored Men that called on the Refugee Relief Board to use monies and goods donated for the new migrants and settle them on school properties to help them get established.^[3]

In Lawrence Langston also served as associate editor of the Historic Times, a local paper that promoted the cause of equal rights and justice for blacks.^[3]

Marriage and family

His second wife was the widow Mary Patterson Leary, whom he married in Oberlin in 1869. She had survived Lewis Sheridan Leary, another mixed-race political activist from Oberlin. He had joined John Brown's Raid in 1859 on Harper's Ferry and died of wounds eight days after the attack. Mary brought their daughter Louise to the marriage with Langston.

The Langstons remained in Lawrence, Kansas for the rest of their lives, moving in 1888 into town, where he had a part-interest in a grocery store. Their children were Nathaniel Turner Langston, named after the man who led a slave rebellion in Virginia; and Caroline Mercer Langston, who would become the mother of the renowned poet Langston Hughes. The Langstons also had a foster son, named Dessalines Langston after a major leader of the Haitian Revolution.^[9]

Community involvement

In addition to his political activities, Langston was president of the Colored Benevolent Society, first Worshipful Master of St. Mark's Lodge No. 7 in Columbus, Ohio. He also served as Grand Master of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Kansas, and a founder of the Inter-state Library Association. He also was active in an African Methodist Episcopal Church.^[3]

Legacy and honors

• In 1872 the Kansas Republican Party honored Langston by nominating him as one of four electors to cast the state's votes for President Ulysses S. Grant.

• Historian Richard B. Sheridan:

  Charles Langston used his time and talents to improve the lives of his fellow African Americans through his leadership in the underground railroad, slave emancipation, education, welfare, politics, fraternal orders, journalism, and other activities. For nearly three decades he had been a leader of the campaigns in Kansas for black suffrage and for blacks’ rights to serve on juries and in the state militia. Moreover, he was a leader in seeking improved social and economic conditions for black citizens.

  ^[3]

Footnotes

1. ^ Quarles was the descendant of the 17th-century English poet Francis Quarles.^[1]

Citations

1. ^ Wagner (1973), p. 386
2. ^ ^{a b c} Cheek, William Francis and Aimee Lee. John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp.11-12
3. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Richard B. Sheridan, "Charles Henry Langston and the African American Struggle in Kansas", Kansas State History, Winter 1999, accessed 15 Dec 2008
4. ^ Leon F. Litwack and August Meier, eds., "John Mercer Langston: Principle and Politics", in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, University of Illinois Press, 1991, pp. 106-111 (Available through GoogleBookSearch)
5. ^ "Charles Langston's Speech in the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, May 1859", Oberlin College, accessed 15 Dec 2008
6. ^ Frederick J. Blue, No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Anti-Slavery Politics, Louisiana State University Press, 2005, p. 88.
7. ^ Bill Lohse, "Charles Henry Langston", The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed, 2007-2008, accessed 17 Dec 2008
8. ^ Helen Walker-Hill, "Western University at Quindaro, Kansas and its legacy of pioneering musical women", Black Music Research Journal, Spring 2006, accessed 17 Dec 2008
9. ^ Richard B. Sheridan, "Charles Henry Langston and the African American Struggle in Kansas", Kansas State History, Winter 1999, accessed 17 Dec 2008

Bibliography

• Eugene H. Berwanger, "Hardin and Langston: Western Black Spokesmen of the Reconstruction Era", Journal of Negro History 64 (Spring 1979).
• Jean Wagner, Black poets of the United States: from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, University of Illinois Press, 1973, ISBN 0252003411
• John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol, Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1894; reprint, Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968

External links

• "An Account of the Trials of Simeon Bushnell and Charles Langston", by the Oberlin-Wellington Rescuers, 1859, Oberlin College
• "Charles Langston's Speech in the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, May 1859", Oberlin College

Persondata
Name	Langston, Charles Henry
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1817
Place of birth
Date of death	1892
Place of death