reappeared soon after with drinks. Patterson said he wanted nothing to drink, that he and Skiffington had to get back. He stood and in a moment Henry appeared with his horse and Skiffington’s horse.
“I promise peace and thas what I’ll deliver,” Patterson said. “Good day to one and all, gentlemen.” He stepped out to the horse and Henry handed him the reins. Skiffington was already on his horse.
The men on the verandah and the landowner now alone in the yard said, “Good day.”
Patterson hung on as sheriff for two more years, until 1843, when Robbins said Patterson was doing nothing as property just up and walked away. Tom Anderson, a forty-six-year-old slave, disappeared in 1842, but it was never clear if he had indeed run away. His master, a sometime preacher with the same name, owed $350 to a man in Albemarle County and had promised Tom the slave in payment. Rather than pay the debt, some said, Tom the preacher probably sold Tom the slave and pocketed the $450 the world knew Tom the slave was worth. Tom the preacher always claimed “my Tom” had run away, even blamed the abolitionists, and he forever pleaded poor to the Albemarle man he owed the debt to. Since Tom the preacher had nothing more the Albemarle man cared about, the debt was all but forgotten, although in his will—revised for the last time in 1871 when slavery wasn’t that kind of issue anymore—the Albemarle man listed “Tom Anderson, 46 Year Old SLAVE, red Hair,” as one of his assets. In early 1843, after four other slaves had ostensibly run away, a very self-confident fourteen-year-old slave girl, Ophelia, disappeared, also without an explanation that satisfied everyone. Some white people attributed that disappearance to her jealous and possibly murderous mistress, who had been educated in Paris, Venice and Poughkeepsie, New York, and who returned home to Virginia with a tomcat of an Italian husband who had never seen black people before coming to America. But slaves in Manchester County said Ophelia had met Jesus’ mother one late afternoon on the main road people took to get to Louisa County and that Mary, hearing Ophelia sing, had decided right then that she didn’t want heaven if it came without Ophelia. Mary asked Ophelia about coming with her and eating peaches and cream in the sunlight until Judgment Day and Ophelia shrugged her shoulders and said, “That sounds fine. I ain’t got nothin better to do right at the moment. Ain’t got nothin to do till evenin time anyway.”
In the history of Manchester County, the end of Sheriff Patterson’s long tenure when he was only thirty- eight would be a small thing—way down on the list of historical events, after the death in 1820 of the virgin Mistress Taylor in her hundred-and-second year and the snowstorm that brought ten inches in late May 1829 and the slave boy Baker and the two white Otis boys who burst spontaneously into flames in front of the dry goods store in 1849. Patterson stayed on but he was crippled and he never got over having been summoned by Robbins like a child out to his plantation, and a nigger child at that. The last straw for all of them, from Robbins to Colfax to white men who could not even afford slaves, was that Rita thing, which grew into something larger than it actually was, thanks to Robbins. Rita, the woman who became a second mother to the boy Henry Townsend. After the Rita thing, everyone agreed that a change would do the whole county good and would put a stop to what Robbins had begun to call “a hemorrhaging of slaves.” So Patterson resigned, took himself back to that English town near the Scottish border where his people had lived for centuries. He spent all the rest of his years as a sheep farmer and became known as a good shepherd, “a man born to it.” His health improved tremendously from what it had been in America, but the health of his wife, a Scot from Gretna Green who was hard of hearing, never returned to what it had been in her early, happy years in the United States. Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.
John Skiffington had come to love and respect Patterson, but it took him less than a day to consider the suggestion from Robbins and Colfax that he become the new sheriff, that he, as Robbins put it, “take up the mantle.” Indeed, Skiffington believed he could be a better peacekeeper, given Patterson’s growing irascibility. Though his marriage was two years old, he and Winifred still considered themselves newlyweds; two years wasn’t even a full blink of God’s eye. Skiffington wanted a good life for his bride and he thought a sheriff’s life, and not that of someone’s deputy, would bring that. He felt he might make a reputation that he could carry to a greater job elsewhere, even to something in Philadelphia, where Winifred often said she wanted to return. A man he knew in Halifax County had gone from deputy to state delegate in less than a generation, less time than it took for a boy to grow into a man. Skiffington loved the South, but as a man with a woman from the North, he gradually became comfortable thinking he could live happy in Philadelphia or in any other part of the country and consider himself just another American who had become what he was because of what the South had given and taught him. Whenever he and Winifred visited his in-laws in Philadelphia, Skiffington never returned to the South without paying his respects to the place where Benjamin Franklin had died. He considered Franklin the second greatest American, after George Washington, and before Thomas Jefferson.
Though Manchester County had money for it, Skiffington did not at that time take on a deputy, having always thought that Patterson had taken him on as a favor to his father. He could do alone what needed to be done. But Skiffington, mindful of the Caesars who controlled all that did not belong to God, took a hint from Colfax and Robbins and assembled a team of twelve patrollers to serve as “nocturnal aides,” slave patrollers. He split Manchester County into three parts and appointed a nightly team of three men for each section. Except for one man who was Cherokee, they were all poor whites, the patrollers, and among them there were only two who had slaves to their names. One was Barnum Kinsey, then considered by everyone to be the poorest white man in the county, “saved,” as one neighbor said, “from bein a nigger only by the color of his skin.” Barnum’s only slave, Jeff, was fifty-seven when his master became a patroller; the slave had been part of his second wife’s dowry, along with five square yards of green silk that had wonderful golden lines running through it, silk so fabulous people said a person could get on it and ride away into the sun. Jeff died at sixty-two, after being unable to work for almost a year and after being cared for all that time by Barnum and his wife. Wherever he went after death, Jeff may have been grateful that in his last months, Barnum would read to him from Franklin’s
Despite vowing never to own a slave, Skiffington had no trouble doing his job to keep the institution of slavery going, an institution even God himself had sanctioned throughout the Bible. Skiffington had learned from his father how much solace there was in separating God’s law from Caesar’s law. “Render your body unto them,” his father had taught, “but know your soul belongs to God.” As long as Skiffington and Winifred lived within the light that came from God’s law, from the Bible, nothing on earth, not even his duty as a sheriff to the Caesars, could deny them the kingdom of God. “We will not own slaves,” Skiffington promised God, and he promised each morning he went to his knees to pray. Though everyone in the county saw Minerva the wedding present as their property, the Skiffingtons did not feel that they owned her, not in the way whites and a few blacks owned slaves. Minerva was not free, but only in the way a child in a family is not free. In fact, in Philadelphia years later, as she paid for all those posters with Minerva’s picture on them, Winifred Skiffington was to think only one thing—“I must get my daughter back. I must get my daughter back.”
In his day, the sheriff’s office sat next to the general store on Manchester’s main street; it was moved to a larger facility across the street and next to the hardware store after the War between the States. Skiffington kept a Bible in the jail, on the northwest corner of his desk, and he kept one in his saddlebags. He found it a comfort knowing that wherever he might be, God’s word could be picked up and read. He turned twenty-nine the month he became sheriff. The town and the county went into a period of years and years of what University of Virginia historian Roberta Murphy in a 1948 book would call “peace and prosperity.” For the people who depended upon slaves, this meant, among other things, that not one slave escaped, not until after Henry Townsend died. The historian—whose book was rejected by the University of Virginia Press and finally published by the University of North Carolina Press—would also call Skiffington “a godsend” for the county. This historian was especially drawn to the quirks of the county. In 1851, she noted, for example, a man of two slaves at the eastern end of Manchester had five chickens born on the same day with two heads. Two of the chickens were even said to do a kind of dance when the harmonica was played. People came from as far away as Tennessee and South Carolina to see the five chickens for a charge of one penny. In the history of the county, the chickens, all of which managed to live until 1856, were a momentous event ten places below the tenure of John Skiffington as sheriff, according to this one historian, who became a full professor at Washington and Lee University three years after her book was
