Delia Webster and the Underground Railroad by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813184128
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ten years her senior, Craig expressed his affection for Webster as a father’s fond embrace. She is “my dear child.” He is her “true friend.” Perhaps nothing in this letter might have offended Lucy Craig. Nor in the one he wrote a fortnight later, on July 6, addressed “To His Dear Children, New York.” The letter makes clear that Delia is one of the children, the other being his twelve-year-old son Dillard. Presumably Charles at age three was too young to leave home, and the letter speaks of Mary and Florida as being home with their parents. In Henrietta Galey’s manuscript, her father, Dillard Craig, is fourteen instead of twelve—because she sets the scene in 1852, apparently forgetting that Benajah Webster had died the year before—and Benajah and Dillard have a fine time roaming the fields of the Webster family’s Vermont farm.41

The July 6 letter begins with instructions that reveal that by this time Newton Craig had placed total trust in Delia Webster’s probity and discretion, entrusting her with penitentiary business that blended the institution’s finances with his own. “Be sure to do as I have directed, and be ready to explain the whole matter. Mark the manner in which the bills are to be made out. It is important. Make the Penitentiary the purchaser and received payment of me for the whole amount, then pay the bill, five per cent less.”42

He speaks of his intention to come to Vermont to accompany her on the return to Kentucky.43 “I will leave home on the 22nd, and will be at your father’s on the Saturday following. So soon as I learn the true state of the case, I will write you to Ferrisburg. But be that as it may, be sure you start home on the 29th, for of course I will start home that day.”

Then he catches her up on news from home. “This leaves us all well. Florida and Mary Morris are learning very little but mischief. Miss Randall writes from Madison that she wants to come back. I look for her. Mayor Stapp, of Madison, allowed the Holtzclaws bail, and the people are very much out with him; but he did what was his duty under the law.” Milton Stapp became mayor in 1850. The Holtzclaws to whom he allowed bail were a father and three sons involved in a famous Madison murder case. When constable Joseph Howard attempted to arrest one of the sons for having made a disturbance, “he got into a personal difficulty with the father and the sons,” according to Madison historian William Woollen. When Howard tried to collar the son he had come for and drag him out into the street another son shot and killed the constable. “The Holtzclaws were arrested and admitted to bail, and then fled the country.”44 Hence Craig’s comment that Madisonians were angry at Stapp for having granted them bail.

Returning to his plans to accompany her on the return from Vermont, Craig wrote, “Be sure you are at

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