Vermont - Day 25

Country Village Campground (again)
Monday, 25 June 2018

I went back south again because I wanted to go to a specific museum that keeps odd hours.  It's just north of Vergennes (pronounced ver-JENS), not far from last night's campground, and I'd intended to start heading north and east after that.  But I got rerouted.  First the museum.

the Rokeby house

The Rokeby Museum is billed as being an important part of the Underground Railroad, which is why I wanted to go there.  Turns out that's what they used to think but not any more.

It was a farm right on what's now Rt. 7 (that I'm getting to be such good friends with) and many of the buildings are still there.  It was the home of a family of Robinsons for 4 generations; one of those was Rowland Evans Robinson, who wrote Out of Bondage in 1897.  His father was the first to bring merino sheep to Vermont from Spain and other farmers quickly followed suit.  By 1850, more than 80% of Vermont had been deforested to make grazing land for the sheep.  (Hard to believe now.)  The family were Quakers, prominent in their community, and strongly abolitionist.

Apparently the family's reputation for being part of the Underground Railroad comes from the escaped slaves who weren't hidden but instead lived and worked openly on the family farm.  The slaves who made it to Vermont were relatively safe because southern slave owners found it too difficult to send someone all the way up and then transport the escapee all the way back through the northern states.  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 changed all that.  More on that in a minute.

The Robinsons were, as most northerners were, racists but had a deep religious conviction that slavery was a sin.  Therefore, they opposed a gradual emancipation of slavery on the grounds that there is no Biblical authority for a gradual relinquishment of sin.

At the new visitors center on the property is an exhibit with more information about US slavery.  According to the exhibit, the original US Constitution prohibited interference with the African slave trade for 20 years.  As soon as it could - January 1808 - Congress banned slave importation from Africa.  The result was that southern states started getting slaves from northern states.  Between 1790 and 1860, more than 1,000,000 slaves were relocated.

Most Americans were initially against abolitionism because they were afraid it would tear the US apart.  Oddly, even as far back as the 1840s some abolitionists were talking secession, not wanting to live in a country that countenanced slavery.

Then in 1850 came the Fugitive Slave Act.  Its intent was to calm the hostility between north and south by providing the southerners a way of retrieving their "property" but, as legislation often does, it had the opposite effect.  The Act didn't just allow slave owners to legally recapture slaves, but it also compelled ordinary citizens, under penalty of law, to aid in the recapture.  It made them complicit in the slave trade and they didn't like that; it turned their apathy into action.  In addition, the Act paid a bounty to people who turned in escaped slaves, at which point Vermont stopped being a safe haven.

Then the 1857 US Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that blacks were never intended under the Constitution to be US citizens and "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

By 1860, slaves were worth almost $4 billion - that's a B, in 1860 dollars - can you imagine? It was more than manufacturing, railroads, livestock, banking, farm equipment and the cotton crop combined.  What had happened was that when tobacco exhausted the soil, farmers turned to planting wheat.  But workers were needed only seasonally for wheat so northern farmers didn't need a year-round work force.  They sold their slaves to the southern cotton farmers.  Almost the entire country ended being complicit, one way or another.

So I didn't get what I thought I was going to get from this museum but it was interesting all the same.

locust tree

There were quite a few of these locust trees around the house and the tour guide said early settlers often planted locust trees to protect against lightning.  The idea was that rain would collect in all those nooks and crannies in the trunk and lightning would aim for the water, rather than the house.  Wonder if it's true.

When I got back to the RV I discovered I needed to rethink my itinerary.  Roscoe's been producing liquid stools for some days now.  I kept hoping he'd snap out of it, but that hasn't happened, as he demonstrated yet again.  I liked that vet I took Dexter to for his Lyme vaccine so called to see if they could work Roscoe in.  They gave us an appointment for tomorrow afternoon and said I could lump in annual shots for him and Jasper and Gracie.  Those shots aren't due until next month but I figured since I was going to be at a vet's office anyway, and it's almost next month anyway, I might as well get it done.

As a result, I came back south again so as to have less of a drive tomorrow to the vet's office in Rutland.  This is a good campground.