by J. Vincent Lowery

In 1905, Wilmington, North Carolina businessman Hugh MacRae welcomed the first European settlers onto truck farm colonies that he and the Carolina Trucking Development Company developed in the southeastern section of the state. MacRae was a prominent participant in a regional immigration movement that historian Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. contends “crested about 1905 or 1906 … [,] the work of a relatively few articulate and influential individuals who confronted the dual task of attracting immigrants to the South and persuading their fellow southerners to welcome them.” MacRae argued that African Americans were responsible for the region’s low wages and its debilitating system of tenant farming. He proposed that European immigrants would introduce small-scale, diversified, cooperative farming methods and consequently transform the agricultural economy. He predicted, “The South has everything to gain and nothing to lose in this [immigration] movement, because we would replace the lowest type of labor, that is labor obtained originally from the lowest race on earth, by a type of labor which would be so selected as to represent a standard immeasurably higher than the one we have been accustomed to.” The company chose colonists who intended to settle as families and possessed agricultural expertise, a familiarity with the climate, and a desire to become American citizens. Nativists identified southern and eastern Europeans as innately inferior and therefore undesirable, but MacRae defended the company’s settlers, among them Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, and Poles. He devoted considerable effort to the defense of the Italians of the colony of St. Helena, the largest and most prosperous settlement. Clearly responding to concerns that the company pursued undesirable settlers, MacRae explained that “the South has no cause to fear the descendants of the people who were the builders of Rome and Venice, and of Florence and Milan.”¹

Group of Italian Settlers in St. Helena, NC (Pender County Public Library Digital Archive)

Yet immigration restrictions threatened MacRae’s work. Political scientist Aristide R. Zolberg argues that policymakers “designed” the nation by writing laws that permitted the entry of foreigners who possessed cultural, economic, and political value while restricting those perceived “as a threat in relation to what is deemed a fragile status quo.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, policy debates reflected a particular unease with the growing number of southern and eastern Europeans entering the country; nativists believed these so-called “new” immigrants were innately inferior, predisposed to disease, immorality, criminality, and anarchism. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act established the precedent for federal restrictions based on national origins, a model that would be embraced in the 1920s to limit southern and eastern European immigration. In 1921, Congress approved a temporary national origins quota system based on the 1910 census to reduce the number of “new” immigrants passing through the nation’s ports. The act also directed legislators to develop a permanent system; nativists insisted this policy must further curtail immigration.²

Photo of Hugh McRae (Village of St. Helena Website)

MacRae, a member of the Selective Immigration League, confronted restrictionists in 1924, when Representative Albert Johnson introduced a bill to implement a permanent national quota system based on the 1890 census. Johnson’s proposal would “not only reduce the total annual immigration but also choke off all but a trickle from southern and eastern Europe.” MacRae argued, however, that the bill “would … be a great calamity to the South Atlantic States, as it is purely restrictive without taking advantage of the wonderful possibilities at this time for selective immigration, through the simple process of classifying the immigrants according to their desirability.” Conceding that Congress would approve the use of the 1890 census to determine quotas, the League suggested “[t]he establishment of a minimum quota of 10,000 for nationalities that numbered 75,000 in the United States in the census,” thus creating much higher quotas and consequently admitting more immigrants than Johnson intended. MacRae and the League shared restrictionists’ desire to bar undesirable immigrants but countered that the United States should instead establish criteria that also addressed the labor needs of the country. Seeking to place greater emphasis on immigrants’ economic value, the League proposed that the quota system should give preference to farmers while making “[p]rovisions for ‘non-quota’ skilled labor and farmer immigrants when specifically asked for by State authorities; and subject to the approval of the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Agriculture in the case of farm experts; and the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Commerce in the case of skilled labor.” The League also endorsed an earlier proposal by W. W. Husband, commissioner general of immigration, who favored using naturalization records to privilege those nationalities more likely “to become assimilated as American citizens,” thus yielding to nativists’ desires to exclude immigrants who did not fit into American culture and politics. MacRae believed that these “principles … should be embodied in the Immigration Bill in order to get the great advantage of selection.”³

MacRae spoke in favor of a selective immigration policy when he testified at a senate committee hearing. He argued that a selective policy “will give an opportunity to avoid arbitrary discrimination against those nations of northern Europe which have always been regarded as the sources from which the best class of immigrants have come to the United States.” MacRae discussed his colonies in southeastern North Carolina, but he did not mention the past successes of the Italian colonists at St. Helena. This omission illustrates his awareness of legislators’ intent to greatly curtail the entry of southern Europeans and his desire to avoid antagonizing restrictionists. MacRae instead identified Dutch and Danish farmers as the most desirable immigrants. He predicted “that a few words put into your bill will add $1,000,000,000 annually to our agriculture without any harm to anyone, and it may add $5,000,000,000 a year, because I believe we can double the agricultural products of the South.”⁴

Italian Couple on Front Porch in St. Helena (Courtesy of Pender County Public Library Digital Archive)

MacRae corresponded with several senators in hopes of securing an amendment to the bill being debated in the Senate. Like Johnson, Senator David Reed proposed a national origins system, although the senator’s proposal did not explicitly discriminate against southern and eastern Europeans. North Carolina senator Furnifold Simmons introduced an amendment clearly influenced by MacRae and the League. Simmons’s proposal gave preference to immigrants “skilled in agronomy, forestry, horticulture, or animal husbandry, and to experienced farm laborers who are going to some agricultural district to engage in farming.” The amendment also permitted governors and state legislatures to appeal to the Secretary of Labor for preferential treatment for such immigrants. The amendment encountered some opposition in the Senate, but historian Peter H. Wang explained that the legislature’s eventual approval of the Simmons amendment signified “a fairly important concession to southern farm interests.”⁵

In 1925, MacRae returned to Congress to appeal for another amendment to the Johnson-Reed Act. He praised the law for its “scientific selection of immigrants,” but he complained that it counted farmers “within the quota.” He argued, instead, that skilled agriculturalists and their families should be identified as “nonquota” immigrants. MacRae believed that quota requirements deterred men who could not otherwise bring their families to the United States. These immigrants would end the region’s dependence on African Americans “[b]y the simple process of dilution.” MacRae asserted that African Americans were “better adapted to heavy work, say, in an iron foundry or a rolling mill. Negroes do not have the intelligence back of them to make good at scientific farming. They lower the standard of the whole agricultural situation.” The North Carolina businessman assured the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, “I can take a thousand families of Hollanders and Danes, or equally skilled farmers, and put them in groups throughout the South and revolutionize the agriculture of the South.” He believed this “infiltration of brains” would lead to new farming and marketing methods that he had been seeking for twenty years. Despite this appeal, Congress failed to act upon MacRae’s proposal.⁶

Farmers Working the land inMacon County, Alabama in 1940 (U.S. Department of Agriculture)

MacRae continued to appeal for a favorable immigration policy, but he eventually realized that the immigrants he sought could not be attained. Acknowledging that the South would have to rely on its existing labor force, MacRae argued that southern agricultural reform must account for African Americans. Although the Wilmington businessman continued to blame blacks for the economic hardships of the South, he admitted southern whites’ responsibility for African Americans’ plight since the Civil War. MacRae concluded, “The negro and his problems are our legacy. He is a fixed part of our burden, and to lift ourselves we must lift him.”⁷

¹ Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “Strangers and the Southern Eden: The South and Immigration, 1900-1920,” in Ethnic Minorities in Gulf Coast Society, ed. Jerrell H. Shofner and Linda V. Ellsworth (Pensacola, Florida: Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference, 1979), 5; Hugh MacRae, Bringing Immigrants to the South: Address Delivered Before the North Carolina Society of New York, December 7, 1908 (n.p., 1908); “Hugh MacRae’s Letter to Editor Daniels,” Winston-Salem Twin City Daily Sentinel, February 12, 1907, p. 5; George S. Byrne, “Hugh MacRae’s Practical Application of Common Sense,” Manufacturer’s Record, May 30, 1912, 49-53. For more on the economic, racial, and reform dimensions of MacRae’s colonization scheme, see John Faris Corey, “The Colonization and Contributions of Emigrants Brought to Southeastern North Carolina by Hugh MacRae,” (MA Thesis, Appalachian State Teacher’s College, 1957); Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 32, 94, 109, 123, 277-294; Stanley Tebbs Prewitt, “Hugh MacRae’s Agricultural Project: An Example of the Tensions between the Jeffersonian Ideal and the Planners’ Ethic” (Honors Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1974); Marcia G. Synnott, “Replacing ‘Sambo’ Could White Immigrants Solve the Labor Problem in the Carolinas?,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1982) 77-89; W. Frank Ainsley, “‘Own a Home in North Carolina’: Image and Reality in Ethnic European Communities,” Journal of Cultural Geography 5 (1985): 61-69; W. Frank Ainsley, “Pulsating Patterns of Land Occupancy: The Impacts of Farm Colonization Experiments on the Rural South,” Pioneer America Society Transactions 10 (1987): 43-52; Marcia G. Synnott, “Hugh MacRae, Penderlea, and the Model Farm Communities Movement,” Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1988): 53-65; Tycho de Boer, Nature, Business, and Community in North Carolina’s Green Swamp (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 132-139; and Lauren H. Braun, “Italians, the Labor Problem, and the Project in Agricultural Colonization in the New South, 1884-1934” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois-Chicago, 2010), chap. 5; Timothy B. Tyson and David S. Cecelski, “Hugh MacRae at Invershiel,” http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/morton/index.php/essays/hugh-macrae-at-inversheil/ (accessed April 24, 2013); J. Vincent Lowery, “The Transatlantic Dreams of the Port City Prophet: The Rural Reform Campaign of Hugh MacRae,” North Carolina Historical Review 90 (July 2013): 288-324; Thomas Luke Manget, “Hugh MacRae and the Idea of the Farm City: Race, Class, and Conservation in the New South, 1905-1935” (MA thesis, Western Carolina University, 2012), 28-58. Local historian Susan Taylor Block has written a variety of pieces on the Cape Fear region, including a book on the colony of Van Eeden and blog entries on MacRae and his other colonies. For her work, see http://susantaylorblock.com/ (accessed August 6, 2014).  Wilmington journalist Charles W. Riesz, Jr. has also written an insightful account of  MacRae’s Dutch settlers, from whom he is descended.  See Riesz, Tar Heels in Wooden Shoes: Dutchmen, Daffodils, and Dairies in 20th-Century North Carolina (Wilmington, NC: Charles W. Riesz, Jr. and Joanne F. Riesz, 2012).

² John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 99-100, 112-113, 129-130, 202-204, 308-311; Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17-20; Robert F. Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commission, 1900-1927 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), ch. 7-8; Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), ch. 1-2; Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (New York and Cambridge: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2006), 1-23, 224-227, 232-238 (quotation on 17); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998).

³ Higham, Strangers in the Land, 315; Selective Immigration League of America, “Purposes” and “Principles,” and Hugh MacRae to David R. Coker, January 23, 1924, David Coker R. Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina (hereinafter cited as Coker Papers); Selective Immigration League of America, “Purposes” (dated February 6, 1924), and Hugh MacRae to Frank H. Hampton, February 6, 1924, Box 44, Furnifold M. Simmons Papers, 1890-1946, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (hereinafter cited as Simmons Papers); Congressional Record, 68^th Congress, 1^st sess., 1924, vol. 65, pt. 7, 6525.  On the immigration restriction debate and the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, see Higham, Strangers in the Land, 315-324; Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 258-261; Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics, 142-144; Ngai, Impossible Subjects, ch. 1; Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, 47-58.

⁴ Congressional Record, 68^th Congress, 1^st sess., 1924, vol. 65, pt. 7, 6525.

⁵ Hugh MacRae to Furnifold Simmons, December 29, 1923, Box 43; Simmons to MacRae, January 11, 1924; W. W. Husband to Simmons, January 23, 1924; MacRae to Frank H. Hampton, February 2, 1924 and February 6, 1924; MacRae to Simmons, February 6, 1924, all in Box 44; MacRae to Simmons, March 13, 1924; Royal S. Copeland to MacRae, March 24, 1924; Henry Keyes to Simmons, March 28, 1924; LeBaron B. Colt to Simmons, March 28, 1924; all in Box 45; Simmons Papers; Congressional Record, 68^th Congress, 1^st sess., 1924, vol. 65, pt. 7, 6521-6525; Peter H. Wang, “Farmers and the Immigration Act of 1924,” Agricultural History 49 (October 1975): 647-652 (quotation on 651); Synnott, “Replacing ‘Sambo,’ ” 84.

⁶ Hearings Before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, Sixty-Ninth Congress, First Session, December 17 and 18, 1925 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1926), 1-15, 18-19, 24-27 (quotations on 5, 6, 8, and 25).  See Ngai’s Impossible Subjects and Daniels’s Guarding the Golden Door for coverage of the formulation of the national origins system.

⁷ Hugh MacRae, A Constructive Program for Land Settlement and Agricultural Development in the South Atlantic States (Wilmington, NC: Wilmington Stamp and Printing Company, n.d.), Coker Papers; Lowery, “Transatlantic Dreams,” 320-321. For more on MacRae’s subsequent immigration work, see Braun, “Italians,” 197-198.

Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America is a wonderful addition to Asian American history, not only because it complicates previous arguments on the origin of South Asian immigration but also it emphasizes the fluidity of migration in the early twentieth century.  One group that Bald profiles are South Asian sailors, the majority of whom had dangerous and labor intensive jobs on British and, at times, American and other European ships.  The jobs that these men secured were not those celebrated in fiction and other writings about the age of sail, but were highly industrialized and tied to the rise of steam power.  Many of these men—when opportunities arose—left sailing and found other jobs in the United States. Among these, a few men settled and started families; others returned to sailing and eventually went home.¹

South Asian sailors are especially important in understanding Asian immigration in the American South.² Racist labor and immigration policies limited where these men could travel to and their experiences in port.  From the 1890s to 1939, British authorities forbade South Asians from working above the 38^th parallel during winter months and required that they disembark at Norfolk or Newport News, Virginia when working in the North Atlantic along the U.S. Coast.  Officials justified this policy by arguing that South Asians could not cope with cold weather.  Both Norfolk and Newport News—major centers of trade in the American South—saw ships and sailors from all over the world at this time.  Local newspapers also reported on such visitors, including South Asians who were temporarily staying in the area.  For example, two 1899 articles from the Virginian-Pilot recommended that locals go down to the pier to watch South Asian sailors load grain on the Samoa,an all-iron British freighter that usually ran between Liverpool and Calcutta.³ Several early-twentieth century articles mention the disembarking of South Asian sailors in Newport News, some of whom were housed on a pier owned by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Company.⁴

C & O Station and Pier (1917) from Souvenir of Newport News, VA

Newport News Harbor (1901) from the Historic Postcards of Newport News, VA

With the passage of the Emergency Quota Act (1921) followed by what is commonly called the National Origins Quota Act (1924), South Asian sailors came under further scrutiny.  At first, the Immigration Bureau required that a bond for $500 be submitted with each landed South Asian sailor; however, that policy was soon overturned.  By the late 1930s, shipping companies quartered South Asian sailors under guard in Titustown, a primarily African American neighborhood in present-day Norfolk, and then were either picked up by their ships in Norfolk or sent to New York City where they were able to meet their ships.⁵ In government correspondence, immigration officials noted that no South Asian sailors had escaped from the Titustown location; two had runaway in 1923 and four in 1924 when boarding at another site.  Local authorities quickly caught all six men.⁵

Besides the experiences of South Asian sailors, what needs further exploration are the ways in which American immigration policies negatively affected other Asian sailors.  Immigration records that focus on Norfolk and Newport News at the National Archives might provide further insight.

¹ For more information on the history of South Asian sailors, also called “lascars” by the British, see chapter 3 in Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost histories of South Asian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).  See also G. Balachandran’s article, “South Asian Seafarers and Their Worlds: c. 1870-1930s,” in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridental, Karen Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 186-204.

² Sailors were not the only South Asians traversing the American South.  Bald also demonstrates the presence of South Asian peddlers and merchants who lived in New Orleans and other southern cities. Vivek Bald, “Selling the East in the American South:  Bengali Muslim Peddlers in New Orleans and Beyond, 1880-1920,” in Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 33-53.

³ “Biggest Freighter that Floats,” Virginian-Pilot 4 Aug. 1899; http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86071779/1899-08-04/ed-1/seq-2/ (access 4 Feb. 2014); “Ocean Leviathan,” Virginian-Pilot 5 Aug. 1899; http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86071779/1899-08-05/ed-1/seq-3/ (accessed 4 Feb. 2014). 

⁴ “Lands Lascars Here,” Daily Press (Newport News, VA), 28 Nov. 1908; http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045830/1908-11-28/ed-1/seq-3/ (accessed 4 Feb. 2014); “Lascars Taken Away,” Daily Press (Newport News, VA), 29 Nov. 1906; http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045830/1906-11-29/ed-1/seq-2/ (accessed 4 Feb. 2014); “Steamer Comes Here to Land Lascar Crew,” Daily Press (Newport News, VA), 26 Jan. 1910; http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045830/1910-01-26/ed-1/seq-3/ (accessed 4 Feb. 2014)

⁵ 55-854-370C, Entry 9, Subject Correspondence, 1906-32, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Department of Labor, Record Group 85; National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Researching the American South can often lead to unusual discoveries that complicate our understanding of American immigration history.  One such experience occurred while reading Gay Montague Moore’s Seaport in Virginia: George Washington’s Alexandria, a local history written in honor of the city’s bicentennial in 1949.  The last chapter profiled Melissa Ann (Hussey) Wood and the house that her father, Captain Samuel B. Hussey, gave her and her bridegroom, Robert Lewis Wood, in 1857 as a wedding present.  Among the items that Melissa Wood brought to her new home was a collection of objects from her family’s travels.  These included “cages of cockatoos, parakeets, parrots” and “a chimpanzee, and a small Chinese slave boy, bought by her father from one of the innumerable sampans in the harbor of Canton.”¹

The last phrase startled me.  Was this story true? Was there a Chinese child enslaved in Alexandria before the Civil War?  What was his actual legal status? And how does this boy’s experiences relate to antebellum debates surrounding “coolie” labor?

To answer these questions, I first looked for more information on Captain Samuel B. Hussey, who had purchased the child.  Born in Vasselboro, Maine around 1811, Hussey was the fourth son of Nathaniel (Huzzey) Hussey and Hannah Lovejoy.  Nathaniel and Hannah must have been passionate about English and American politics—their sons were named Francis Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, George Granville, and Samuel Bancroft.² Hussey was most likely named after one of two Captain Samuel Bancrofts, both of whom led prominent military and political careers in Massachusetts during the eighteenth century.³

Little is known of Hussey’s early life.  By 1835, he married Sybil Hawkes of Durham, Maine and set up household near his family.  By the 1850 U.S. Census, the Husseys, including their two children, Melissa and Francis, were living in Durham.  His occupation was listed as a “mariner.”⁴

Excerpt from the 1850 U.S. Census

Hussey, however, was more than the average sailor.  By the early 1850s, he was captaining some of the largest and fastest clipper ships ever constructed in New England.⁵ These ships were mostly used to bring goods and people from New England and New York to the Pacific and back again. On at least one occasion, it was reported in the press that Hussey transported Chinese indentured laborers, popularly known as “coolies,” from China to San Francisco on an extreme clipper ship known as the Westward Ho.  A few months later, the Westward Ho arrived in Alexandria, Virginia, probably with the Hussey family and their “Chinese slave boy” aboard.⁶

Source: Wikipedia Commons

During the 1850s, European Americans debated the pros and cons of introducing Chinese indentured servitude to the United States.  Many white planters saw this system—which was growing in popularity in the Caribbean—as a way of fulfilling the South’s labor needs, especially in states such as Louisiana which needed workers for its growing sugar industry.  Northern white critics, however, saw the “coolie trade” as another form of slavery and were critical of shipping companies that participated in the transportation of Chinese indentured workers to the U.S. and the Caribbean.  Ironically, Hussey would die aboard the Stag Hound, another extreme clipper ship, in August 1860 while transporting such laborers to Havana, Cuba.  His son, Francis, who was his second mate on the Stag Hound, had also died a couple months earlier during a mutiny.⁸ Two years later, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a ban on American participation in the trafficking of Chinese indentured laborers.⁹

Source: Moore’s Seaport in Virginia

If Moore had only mentioned the “Chinese slave boy” in passing, it would be possible that the above information would be all that was available.  Luckily, she wrote almost half a paragraph on “Chinese Tom” also known as Tom Jefferson.  Moore went on:

“Chinese Tom” was reared and educated by Melissa Wood and after the War Between the States she gave him his freedom.  For years he was the only Chinaman in Alexandria.  Mrs. Wood’s granddaughter remembers the visits of this man to her grandmother.  He would station himself at the entrance to her door and a long conversation would go on between the guttural-voiced Oriental and the gentle little “Missey” whom he adored.¹⁰

Both the 1860 and 1870 U.S. Censuses included a Tom Jefferson from China living in the Hussey/Wood household.  In 1860, he was only eleven years old and, indeed, was attending school.¹¹ His legal status was also clear.  The 1860 Census included him between the family and two free black servants with his race left blank.  Neither the Husseys nor the Woods were listed on the 1860 Slave Schedule, which (if he had been enslaved) would have included his age, sex, and race (NOTE: the names of slaves were rarely given on Slave Schedules).  To date, I have never seen a Chinese indentured servant listed on Slave Schedules.  If the Husseys had purchased Jefferson and viewed him as a slave, the local census taker did not recognize his status.

Excerpt from the 1860 U.S. Census

Ten years later, Jefferson was a machinist, probably working for the Orange, Alexandria, and Manassas Railroad.¹² Interestingly, the census taker initially listed his race as “C” for Chinese; however, he crossed it out and put “W” for white.  The reasons for this decision are unknown; one can speculate that the census taker was operating under the racial categories that were prevalent in Virginia at the time.

Excerpt from 1870 U.S. Census

Little else is known of Jefferson other than what information can be culled from his two obituaries.  Although he was a railroad worker, the Alexandria Gazette wrote two articles on his life and death.   No doubt, his nation of origin combined with his connections to the Husseys/Woods made him a local celebrity.  In one of Jefferson’s obituaries, it is clear that some viewed him as quintessentially American.  An anonymous writer described Jefferson as “in every respect an Alexandrian, knowing no language but English.  He was good-natured and played when a boy with the children of his adopted city as though native and to the manner born.”¹³ This comment contradicts Moore’s description of Jefferson as a “guttural-voiced Oriental,” a phrase that reinforced his supposed foreignness and inferiority.  Instead, this author embraced the belief seen in the writings of Christian missionaries during the nineteenth century that Chinese children could become Westernized (and Christian) if they were introduced to Western cultural practices and social mores at an early age.¹⁴

The two articles, however, conflict in describing his occupation.  The first obituary noted that he “was employed in the house [of the late Captain Hussey] until he reached early manhood when he was apprenticed in the machine shop of the Southern Railway Company and later was a fireman on that road.”  After leaving Alexandria, Jefferson had supposedly become a drifter.   In a brief article that was published the following day, the author noted that Jefferson had left Alexandria to work as an engineer for the Southern Railway Company in Newport News, Virginia although he frequently visited his friends in Alexandria.¹⁵ This latter livelihood was a more respectable one–although still working class–for someone connected to the Woods/Husseys.

Tom Jefferson died on November 14, 1899 at the Alexandria Infirmary from complications related to a stroke.  He was buried in an unmarked grave at Bethel Cemetery, a non-denominational cemetery in Alexandria.  He had no wife or family.¹⁶

¹ Gay Montague Moore, Seaport in Virginia: George Washington’s Alexandria (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1949), 262. ² Clarence E. Lovejoy, The Lovejoy Genealogy with Biographies and History, 1460-1930 (New York: C. E. Lovejoy, 1930), 92; Everett Schermerhorn Stackpole, History of Durham, Maine (Lewiston, ME: Pressof Lewiston Journal Company, 1899), 199. ³ Genealogical and Family History of the State of Vermont: A Record, ed. Hiram Carleton, vol. 1 (New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1903), 700. ⁴ 1840 U.S. Census, Waterville, Kennebec County, Maine, 4; 1850 U.S. Census, Durham, Cumberland County, Maine, 238; www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013). ⁵ Helen LaGrange, Clipper Ships of America and Great Britain, 1833-1869 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1936), 185; Richard C. McKay, Donald McKay and His Famous Sailing Ships (New York: Dover Publications, 2011), 207. ⁶ “Alexandria Correspondence,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) 18 September 1856, 3; “The Slave Trade,” Daily Dispatch (Richmond, VA) 24 April 1856, 1. ⁷ Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 11-38. ⁸ “Death of Captain Hussey,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) 24 August 1860, 3; “Law Reports: United States District Court,” New York Times 20 April 1861, 2. ⁹ Jung 36. ¹⁰ Moore 262. ¹¹ 1860 U.S. Census, Alexandria, Virginia, 129; www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013). ¹² 1870 U.S. Census, Alexandria, Virginia, 84; www.ancestry.com (accessed August 11, 2013). ¹³ “Death of ‘Chinese Tom’,” Alexandria Gazette 14 November 1899, 2. ¹⁴ Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Music and Popular Culture, 1850s-1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005),18-19. ¹⁵ “Death of ‘Chinese Tom’,” Alexandria Gazette 14 November 1899, 2; “Funeral,” Alexandria Gazette  15 November 1899, 2. ¹⁶ Wesley E. Pippenger, Tombstone Inscriptions of Alexandria, Virginia, vol. 4 (Arlington, VA: Heritage Books), 127.