George Washington Carver

A Life

Christina Vella

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780807160763
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Nearly every American can cite at least one of the accomplishments of George Washington Carver. The many tributes honoring his contributions to scientific advancement and black history include a national monument bearing his name, a U.S.-minted coin featuring his likeness, and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Born into slavery, Carver earned a master's degree at Iowa State Agricultural College and went on to become that university's first black faculty member. A keen painter who chose agricultural studies over art, he focused the majority of his research on peanuts and sweet potatoes. His scientific breakthroughs with the crops—both of which would replenish the cotton-leached soil of the South—helped spare multitudes of sharecroppers from poverty. Despite Carver's lifelong difficulties with systemic racial prejudice, when he died in 1943, millions of Americans mourned the passing of one of the nation's most honored and well-known scientists. Scores of children's books celebrate the contributions of this prolific botanist, but no biographer has fully examined both his personal life and career until now.Christina Vella offers a thorough biography of George Washington Carver, including in-depth details of his relationships with his friends, colleagues, supporters, and those he loved. Despite the exceptional trajectory of his career, Carver was not immune to the racism of the Jim Crow era or the privations and hardships of the Great Depression and two world wars. Yet throughout this tumultuous period, his scientific achievements aligned him with equally extraordinary friends, including Teddy Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi, Henry A. Wallace, and Henry Ford.In pursuit of the man behind the historical figure, Vella discovers an unassuming intellectual with a quirky sense of humor, striking eccentricities, and an unwavering religious faith. She explores Carver's anguished dealings with Booker T. Washington across their nineteen years working together at the Tuskegee Institute—a turbulent partnership often fraught with jealousy. Uneasy in personal relationships, Carver lost one woman he loved to suicide and, years later, directed his devotion toward a white man.A prodigious and generous scholar whose life was shaped by struggle and heartbreak as well as success and fame, George Washington Carver remains a key figure in the history of southern agriculture, botanical advancement, and the struggle for civil rights. Vella's extensively researched biography offers a complex and compelling portrait of one of the most brilliant men of the last century.

1

CARVER’S GEORGE

Though it was the most shattering event of his life, George Carver had no memory of the kidnapping. It happened when he was only a few weeks old, during the Civil War. He could not even remember clearly what he had been told about it later on. He and his mother were kidnapped by raiders who snatched them from their cabin in southwest Missouri and took them to Arkansas, seventy miles south. He was somehow separated from his mother, who mysteriously disappeared. Their master, Moses Carver, sent a neighbor after them, a man named John Bentley who belonged to the local militia of the Union Army. Carver promised Bentley a racehorse worth $300, perhaps some money, and perhaps forty acres of farmland if he could recover the slaves. Bentley found George being watched, if not quite looked after, by some women he described as squaws. He wrapped his coat around the infant, tied him to his saddle, and brought him back, traveling at night and hiding during the day from both the Confederate and Union forces that were prowling the vicinity. Mary, George’s mother, was never seen again. Even after his name was known all over the country, George Washington Carver could never find out whether his mother was dead or alive or what had happened to her during that frightful abduction. Someone said she had been sold in Arkansas. Another thought he had seen her going off with Union troops. Freed slaves were wont to follow the army that had emancipated them in those first bewildering months of freedom, but it is unlikely that Mary voluntarily left the area and abandoned both her children—George, the baby, and his brother Jim, who was still in Missouri. The exact time of the kidnapping, George’s precise age, the terms of the bargain between Moses Carver and Bentley—all these are uncertain. Even the year of George Carver’s birth is undetermined.

On the other hand, enough information has been gathered about Moses Carver to give us a fair idea of how little George lived after he was returned to his owner—we know more about his childhood, in fact, than about many others who grew up in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Moses Carver had come to the settlement then known as Diamond Grove in 1837, some twenty-five years before the kidnapping. That corner of Missouri was “the West” in the minds of the people who migrated there—promising and foreboding. The hills were forested just as in the East, but these hills were infested with bandits. In winter, the wind that battered the Ozark peaks entered the valleys as steady, panting cold. Summer was suffocating and still, except for swarming insects. The land itself, knowing no boundaries in those days except water and mountain, was Arkansas, or Missouri, or Kansas, or Oklahoma Indian Territory, everywhere riddled with streams and thick with woods. The prairies were not the vast, undulating grasslands of the farther West but ragged, green handkerchiefs set down between moist draperies of oak and elm. Four Carver brothers, Moses, George, Solomon and Richard, arrived within a few months of each other, bringing their families. Moses Carver’s patents from the government assured him of four adjoining tracts of public land and several decades of backbreaking labor.

Moses Carver was twenty-five when he began clearing his property, the hardest part of confirming his claim. Every acre of field was wrested from thicket, from tough briars that had to be burned, from trees that clung to life with ancient, stubborn roots. The tangle of brush had no paths except those made by the hooves of his animals and the feet of his family. Working alone, he pried stones out of the earth or buried them under soil that he hauled up from the banks of the stream that vacillated through his land. On the edges of the fields, undergrowth reached out to reclaim the strips as soon as he had cleared them. Yet within a few years, the woods were pushed back. The farm was laid out with crops and fruit orchards, fenced by close-set rows of black walnut trees; the barns and coops were up and filled with livestock; and Carver, the enthusiast of toil, purchased more weeds and woods to clear. By 1853, his farm spread over 240 acres, with apple and cherry orchards, hundreds of Dutch elm and cultivars, sixty-five acres of oats, potatoes, Indian corn, and more. It is no surprise that the youngster raised by Moses Carver thought unremitting overwork was a way of life.

The conventional story of Moses and Susan Carver is that they came with the thousands of German immigrants whose wagons clambered into Missouri between 1830 and 1850. George Washington Carver, with his usual imprecision when he talked about his past, once described Moses as “a German by birth.” Maybe Moses was so taciturn that George never realized he had no foreign accent. It is hard to say how the notion of his German origin arose. Moses was sedulous and opposed to slavery, as were most of the German people who settled in the territory, but he was thoroughly American. The Carver brothers had farmed in Ohio and Illinois before being lured to the free wilderness farther west. In fact, Moses Carver’s father and Abraham Lincoln’s father had owned adjoining farms. Moses and Abe played together as children.

Moses’s brother George was already widowed when he arrived in Diamond Grove with his four children and his mother-in-law. In 1839, two years after all the family was settled and long before the Civil War, this brother George and his ten-year-old daughter both died in the same month, leaving another girl and two boys. These orphans were then raised by Moses and Susan, who were themselves childless. Adoptions of this sort were commonplace, then and later. Rare was the family, whether in the city or the country, that did not shelter some dependent relative, often a motherless child. The three children lived for some fifteen years in the Carvers’ log shanty, a single room of fourteen by fourteen feet. The cabin had a plank door with wooden hinges, a window without glass, a clapboard roof, a wooden floor, and no foundation. The fireplace simply sat on top of the ground. The chimney was built of rocks as far as the mantelpiece and of sticks and clay from there up. It was sufficient to let out some smoke; the rest settled in soot on the walls and furniture. In that house the size of a storage room, the five of them cooked, ate, slept, kept all their clothes and possessions, bathed in winter—at least occasionally—and tried in all seasons not to step on or smell each other. The cabin was considered adequate by frontier standards. The government required only a dwelling twelve by twelve feet square to grant a homestead claim. One claimant wrote his fiancée, “I have built a cabin of 12 by 14 so that you will have enough room to spread out.”

By 1855, the brother’s children had grown up and moved out. The Carvers then did a curious thing. Although they disapproved of owning people and had no other slaves, they purchased a thirteen-year-old, Mary, from an adjoining farm. Possibly the Carvers bought the girl in order to rescue her in some way. They paid a good price for a used person—$700—though she was too young to help with the heavy chores. Like all the children in the family, Mary called the Carvers “Aunt Sue” and “Uncle Mose.” Susan Carver treated her with much affection. But one detail set Mary apart from the Carver nieces: her fecundity. Between her thirteenth and nineteenth year, she may have had as many as four children besides George: a daughter, twin girls, and a boy James, whose father was white. The little girls, it seems, died young, if indeed they ever lived. The 1860 census of Newton County, Missouri, lists the Carvers’ slaves as Mary, age nineteen, and a “yellow” baby of seven months—Jim, as he was called—but no girls. The census also shows that a farmhand was living on the Carver property, a twenty-two-year-old white man named Jim Carroll, who may have been young Jim’s father. Apparently, George was not yet born in 1860. In one of his three autobiographical sketches, George Washington Carver, answering the inevitable query about his earliest years, wrote that he had had three sisters, including a set of twins. He knew them to be dead “only as history tells me, yet I do not doubt it as they are buried in the family burying ground” (1897).

There is no documentary evidence for the birth or death of these sisters and no grave marker, though there are plenty of unmarked graves of children in the Carver cemetery. George’s information no doubt came from the Carvers, and it is unlikely that they could have miscounted his sisters or been mistaken as to whether there had been a set of twins. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine that George later forgot these particulars. Nevertheless, when he wrote other accounts in 1922 and 1927, he mentioned only two sisters. And in an interview he gave a journalist in the 1930s, the girls had become a single sister who died while he was being rescued from the raiders in Arkansas.

What are we to make of George Carver’s garbled accounts of his early years? Generally, he was as careful of the truth as most of us and was not given to exaggeration of any kind. Moreover, the scientist who did not know when he was born was a stickler for dates—he would write the date on every scrap of paper that came under his eyes even before he read it. But Carver was peculiar. Often he did not pay the least attention to matters that other people consider significant. When writers first began asking him to supply details of his background, he did not consider his childhood sufficiently important to warrant exactitude. Verifying facts about what happened far away and long ago could be a time-consuming nuisance. As his career developed and the public became curious about him, more and more writers badgered him for details of his youth. Often he was cryptic or vague and could not recall even basic information. Sometimes in an interview he would throw out a placating anecdote to be obliging, something folksy that a journalist could enrich to fill out his story. It was only after one of the biographical articles made Carver a national figure that he realized the stickiness of his harmless little fictions. After he was well known, every inconsequential fragment was enlarged by journalistic embellishments that then clung to his life as it rolled down the years.

Regarding his birth, it’s a pretty good guess that George Carver came into the dangerous world of southwest Missouri some time between 1861 and 1863. His father was a black slave owned by a Mr. Grant, the same neighbor who had sold Mary to the Carvers. The father was killed before George was born. He was hauling wood with a team of oxen and in some way fell from the load, under the wheels of the wagon. By this time, the Carvers had given their cabin to Mary and her brood and had built another cabin for themselves, a shanty larger than the first one by two meager feet.

Missouri, having few plantations, had few slaves. Small farming of corn and hogs was usual for much of the state, especially around Diamond Grove, where most people owned no slaves or only one or two. But farmers from Arkansas and Tennessee started moving into Missouri in the 1840s and 50s. These settlers were adamantly with the South on the slavery issue, though many were starvelings who themselves owned nothing and no one. In 1860, the population of the state was roughly 1 million whites added to 100,000 slaves who were located mainly on the tobacco and hemp plantations of the river counties, far away from Diamond Grove. The state had too many slaves for its people to stand together against slavery but too few to make them eager to defend the idea either. Missourians were trapped; the Missouri and Mississippi rivers ran through their state. Both the North and the South thought they had to possess these strategic waterways in order to win the war.

The boundary counties where the Carvers lived had been a battleground long before the actual start of the Civil War. Ruffians from Missouri invaded Kansas in the 1850s to drive out northerners who had settled there. In turn, guerilla bands from Kansas—“jayhawkers”—made raids along the border, carrying off slaves, robbing and murdering Missouri farmers, and destroying everything in their wake. Some of the raiders were violent abolitionists, such as the notorious John Brown, Puritan transplants from the East who had been reborn in Kansas. Brown and his party cut off the hands of some Missouri slave owners before murdering them; then they fervently thanked God for His mercy in allowing their mission to succeed. Other raiders were simply lowlife criminals indulging in casual brutality against Missourians, whom they indiscriminately regarded as “pukes”—poor white trash.

After nearly fighting its own civil war between Unionists and southern sympathizers, Missouri briefly landed in the Confederacy as an ambivalent slave state on the border of free Kansas. With the official start of hostilities in 1861, the Kansas-Missouri margin became the scene of some of the Civil War’s most vicious battles. Certain farms were invaded time and again by one or the other army, Union or Confederate. When those regulars moved off to another area, bushwhackers—small gangs that belonged to no particular army and recognized no authority—would sweep in and out, plundering and destroying. Jesse James began his truculent career leading a gang of secessionist brigands on the Missouri border. The southern guerillas commonly wore Union uniforms while ravaging. Inspired by the example, the regular federal troops bent on depredation likewise stole uniforms and pretended to be Confederates. Whoever the raiders were, when they came crashing through the fields, they first seized the arms on a place. Next they gathered up slaves, if any, either to free them if the attackers were Unionists or to resell them if the pillagers were secessionists or looters from either side simply on a spree. They took the horses, drove off or killed the livestock, murdered the men, assaulted the women, burned crops, carted off food stores and everything else of value, and concluded their exertions by drinking to unconsciousness. There was no government in the region where victims could seek redress, even when the area was supposed to be under occupation. Early in the war, all the structures of justice and administration broke down completely.

Moses Carver’s farm in Diamond Grove was in the dead center of the agitation, but it was attacked only twice. In one raid, bandits hung Carver up and built a fire under his feet to make him reveal where he had buried his money. Since banks had closed because of the anarchy, along with schools and stores, people were keeping their scant reserves of money in their own possession. Carver was probably one of the few who did have an enviable hoard of specie, as he was raising racehorses (which he also kept hidden from marauders.) According to Moses Carver, his tormenters left without getting his cache, but the raiders came back, and this time they did not go away empty-handed. Moses later told George Washington Carver that he heard a group of night riders thundering out of the darkness onto his land. He ran into Mary’s cabin and scooped up little Jim. “He tried to get me but he couldn’t,” wrote George. Mary and the baby George were spirited away to Arkansas by the bandits.

Moses immediately sent Bentley to overtake the kidnappers and try to ransom Mary and George. Tracking down the marauders may not have been as difficult as it sounds, since the attackers were frequently wild youths well known in the area who took the absence of authority as an opportunity to mistreat neighbors they disliked. Carver gave Bentley $300 for ransom money and promised to reward him with a racehorse if he brought back the slaves. In another version of the story, Bentley took the racehorse with him on the chase and gave it to the kidnappers in exchange for George.

In a memoir written in 1897, George Carver wrote that he and his mother had been “Ku Kluxed” during the Civil War, that is, snatched up by the Klan and brought across the Arkansas border to be sold. Writing about the incident again in 1927, he was more vague about the culprits, remarking only that the Ku Klux Klan was active in the area at that time. But in fact, the Klan was not founded until 1866, in Tennessee, several years after the kidnapping. There was enough lawlessness without it.

The infant that Bentley finally handed over to Susan Carver appeared to be dying from whooping cough, dehydration, and exposure. Whooping cough, like any other disease in the days before antibiotics, was a dire illness even for older children, with spasms of uncontrollable, violent coughing and choking. The spasms might well up thirty times a day and recur for months before recovery—or pneumonia—set in. Susan Carver, already caring for little Jim, was determined to save the fragile baby. Whatever she did, her care was effective: George lived, against all odds, although the relentless cough permanently damaged his vocal cords. As a child, he spoke in a raspy whisper. When he finally reached puberty, the resonance improved, although his voice remained abnormal throughout his life—high and anile, like the speaking voice of an ageing coloratura. And he remained sickly and puny for years.

Burdened once more with orphans, Moses and Susan, now in their fifties, took George and Jim to live with them in the “big” house and gave the children the only real home they would ever know. The Carvers were excellent people—one would almost say excellent parents, except that the word does not quite suit them. The two boys seemed to occupy a special position, somewhere between sons and slaves. “Like most youngsters, we were expected to be indoors at night,” said George Carver, dutifully creating a readable childhood.

My brother and I would sometimes steal out to the persimmon tree. And when we went into the house, there was Mrs. Carver waiting for us beside a jar of willow switches. But when she started toward me, I used to open my mouth and yell. And she would walk away rather than hear that awful yelling. When she turned her back, I would sob and stuff into my mouth a persimmon . . . And those persimmons did taste awful good.

George loved persimmons, but nobody had to sneak them on the Carver farm—the trees were all over the place.

Susan Blue Carver seems to have dedicated her life to doing grueling farm work and rearing other people’s children. She prized the spinning wheel that had been Mary’s; however, George could never get much information out of Aunt Sue regarding the spirit who haunted the little implement. If he questioned her about Mary, Aunt Sue would start to cry, so that he was never able to put together a distinct picture of his living, breeding mother. Susan did not go to church, nor did she attend the few community gatherings that took place in the “cultural center”—the one-room shelter about a quarter of a mile from the farm—that served as church, school, and recreation hall for Diamond Grove. No visitors came to the little cabin stuck away on the big farm, out of sight of the road, and there would have been no room for them to sit down if they had come. Aunt Sue was “quiet and old-fashioned,” according to people who knew her, for people then as now had their notions of modernity and fashion, even in the sticks.

She was probably lonely while George was growing up, like farm wives all over the empty hills, and George was good company, that bright, lively boy. He watched, fascinated, as she boiled pokeberries and barks. She used the resulting dyes on the family’s food and clothes, to touch their workaday lives with color. She taught him things that only a loving mother or grandmother would bother imparting to a little child: spinning, knitting, fine needlework—the minor arts that were the major art of country homes. George Carver’s handiwork—his lace samplers which still exist—are as marvelous and intricate as spider webs. “I never saw anybody do anything with his hands that I couldn’t do with mine.”

Some people are adept at whatever they try. They are just good at the tasks of life. Even as a small child, George was one of those persons. The Carvers’ grandnephew described him as “the smartest boy I ever saw in my life. He could sew, crochet, and cook as good as any woman, and there wasn’t a musical instrument he couldn’t play.” Susan was not sufficiently confident with a pen to attempt her name on documents, but she seems to have taught George to read a little from an old Webster’s blue-backed speller, which was her only book. Most importantly, Susan made him a gentleman. Everyone who met George Carver commented on his unfailing courtesy, his air of gentility—the good manners and consideration for others that a person either acquires as a cub or never learns at all. Perhaps it was Susan who first encouraged his drawing. One of his very early pictures survives—a precocious sketch of the family’s cabin, probably done when he was six or seven. Who saved that little drawing, if not Aunt Sue?

As for Moses Carver, there is little doubt that George’s well-known quirks and much of his kind nature can be traced directly to this foster father, an ambitious man of independent mind and surprising good humor. Moses Carver was self-reliant, even-tempered, and slightly cracked, but possessed of the dignity that sometimes characterizes rural eccentrics. He was born the ninth and probably not the last child in a family that did not expect to provide for children beyond adolescence, if the parents or children lived that long. He continually expanded and improved his farm—even though he could never make it turn much of a profit after the war, and even though he was already making good money from his horses—simply because he liked raising things. He could be giving toward others, but with himself and his own, he was the stingiest of men. Nothing was regularly purchased except oil, coffee, and sugar. Everything else was acquired by bartering agricultural products. On Sundays the Carvers had the usual farm dinner of chicken; whatever remained of it was brought out again for Monday breakfast and again for Monday lunch and supper. Mose hunted wild turkeys and geese to supplement their diet. Once he killed a bear that lasted the family a long time—probably too long.

Years after he could afford a frame house, a stove, separate rooms, and comfort, Moses and his wife lived in a primitive shack with a fireplace and a single candle lamp. Spaces between its logs were stuffed with mud, a stopgap that did not keep such houses from being frigid in winter and stifling in every month that was not winter. The one-room cabin was no doubt bursting with rummage—gun parts, bits of tallow, locks—for Uncle Mose did not believe in discarding anything. Odds and ends had to be saved until a use was found f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Carver’s George
• 2. Drifting Toward Life
• 3. A Real Human Being
• 4. Booker
• 5. Dominion of Poverty
• 6. “Stand Up for the Stupid and Crazy”
• 7. Love and Lynch Mobs
• 8. Wrestling with Devils
• 9. Bad Days and Worse
• 10. The Curtain Lifts
• 11. Trying to Be Serious
• 12. A Real Chemist?
• 13. Passion Pure and Simple
• 14. Suffering Humanity
• 15. Fame and Its Discontents
• 16. Miles to Go
• 17. A Million Thanks
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Notes
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index
• Photographs