# 9: Charles W. Chesnutt, the floating T, and his father’s lucky break - a story of orthographic liberation after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
The writer Charles W. Chesnutt has a heck of a name. It really feuds with autocorrect. I’ve edited a book about Chesnutt, published a peer-reviewed article on Chesnutt, and taught his fiction for years. And still, not only (sigh) do I misspell his name regularly, even when I do spell it correctly, Autocorrect fights back —“CHESTNUT” it scolds, CHESTNUT CHESTNUT CHESNUT
That idiosyncratic spelling isn’t just a persnickity affectation. As his daughter tells it, that spelling was rooted in a story about courage, activism, and orthographic liberation.
As her story goes: a runaway slave was recaptured outside of Oberlin, Ohio in 1856. Chesnutt’s father, Andrew Chesnutt, who was a free Black man living in Ohio at that time, joined a posse of both Black and white abolitionists who came together to enact a rescue. They chased down a wagon, unchained the poor man, and were able to hustle him away to freedom.
Unfortunately, the identities of the posse members were revealed in the melee with the bounty hunters and a local judge shortly thereafter found himself trying a collection of men for their violation of the Fugitive Slave Act, among other offenses. They had clearly broken the law, many laws, in fact and while the judge may have had some sympathy for the anti-slavery cause, he didn’t have a lot of options about enforcing legislation. And the punishments and fines and necessary sentencing were draconian and might well have ruined these men’s lives forever. The judge therefore decided to use technicalities and workarounds in order to let these rescuers off. In the case of Andrew Chesnutt, the judge noticed that the writ of arrest read “Andrew Chestnut” not Chesnutt. He was able to release Andrew because, as he disingenuously argued, the wrong man had been arrested. Not surprisingly, as the daughter told it, the family was always appreciative of and rigorous about emphasizing both the spelling of their own name but also appreciative of a kind of transcriptive flexibility which could allow a nimbleness in life and in prose.
My colleague Bill Hardwig and I wrote up this anecdote in the Introduction to our collection of essays Approaches to Teaching Charles W. Chesnutt (MLA Press 2017), mostly because it highlighted our interest in Chesnutt’s use of language, of dialect, of stenography, and of his writerly identity and how all those things were inevitably entwined with race.
I share it here because it also tells us something about how people chose to remember such events. Did it really occur? It certainly seems plausible. But it also demonstrates how remembering events of sly subterfuge and knowing deception and even amusing ruses, could be just as much a part of the history of liberation as the usually horrifying and sad tales.
CHALLENGE: Can anyone fact check this story in Ohio’s court history?
For Further Reading see Helen Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1952)
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To Cite:
Ashton, Susanna. "Charles W. Chesnutt, the floating T, and his father’s lucky break - a story of orthographic liberation after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850." The Runaway Chronicles. Squarespace. 07/08/2024. https://susannaashton.squarespace.com/config/pages/65c93bd35c81e32bb1a08098/content.
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