The Man with the Branded Hand

The fact of the matter is, he was a favorite on a circuit of sorts, a circuit of American abolitionist audiences looking for more and more information about and inspiration for the cause. Abolitionists were not without a mission. The crusade they'd created when they signed on had a clear and righteous purpose--they advocated an end to slavery in these United States, and, many of them at least, meant the abolition of slavery to happen not next year or next month, but now.

Oh, my, were they hated. Southerners understood that what was at stake was their wherewithal. Loss of slaves meant loss of property, loss of economy, and loss of power, loss of a culture, loss of a way of life. In the early years of the 19th century, the battles over slavery were but a foretaste of what was to come after Fort Sumter.

But the righteous anger of the abolitionists could not be underestimated. Sometimes, slave-holders saw those dirty, rotten abolitionists wherever they looked, bound and determined to destroy their might and right. So they made laws that made them criminals, thieves when they clandestinely went after the property of slave-holders. 

Which only served to turn up the heat.  

Thus, a circuit of rostrums was created up north, where advocates for freedom would gather to hear people speak of the mission they shared so passionately. And that circuit included this particular man, Jonathan Walker, who became a favorite, not because of his oratorical skills--he was sadly wanting on that score--but because just a few minutes into his SRO presentations, he'd step off the podium and walk through the crowd, his hand open, because there on his palm stood, almost proudly, the scars from his branding--"SS" for slave stealer. 

The man with the branded hand had been a sailor since he was a kid in Massachusetts. In fact, he'd crafted his own ship, which explains why people called him "Captain Jonathan Walker," and, yes he did, he picked up slaves and brought them to freedom, sometime from Pensacola, Florida, where he and his family lived in the 1840s. It was quite simple: he'd be contacted by bondsmen, arrange a time to meet under the cover of darkness, and, this time at least, take passage to the Bahamas, where the good men and women he'd helped shook off the shackles that bound them, the whole bunch more than willing to risk their lives to escape the oppression of slavery. Walker picked them up and brought them to the Bahamas.

When he returned to Florida, he was badly infirm, a victim of sun stroke--it was not a big ship, more of a sloop than a ship. Since a number of slaves had been missing, he was accused of the theft, jailed, beat up, and then, of all things, branded by authorities--with the help of slave-owners--branded on the hand, the branding iron left in place for what seemed forever.

When finally Jonathan Walker recovered, his acclaim as a speaker rose like high seas on the abolitionist circuit, not because his rhetoric soared. By all reports, he wasn't much of a lecturer. What people remembered was those horrible scars on the man's hand, his branding, the "SS."

WELCOME home again, brave seaman! with thy thoughtful brow and gray,
And the old heroic spirit of our earlier, better day;
With that front of calm endurance, on whose steady nerve in vain
Pressed the iron of the prison, smote the fiery shafts of pain!

Or so wrote the Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, in a dedicatory poem to Jonathan Walker and his righteousness.

Is the tyrant's brand upon thee? Did the brutal cravens aim
To make God's truth thy falsehood, His holiest work thy shame?
When, all blood-quenched, from the torture the iron was withdrawn,
How laughed their evil angel the baffled fools to scorn!

Make no mistake, that branded hand was God's own to the abolitionists. Jonathan Walker had taken up the Lord's mission, after all. When Walker looked in the face of a slave, Whittier says he was looking into the face of Jesus, that very face, Whittier says, many "in blindness" miss entirely, even as they kneel "to a far-off Saviour." 

While the multitude in blindness to a far-off Saviour knelt
And spurned, the while, the temple where a present Saviour dwelt;
Thou beheld'st Him in the task-field, in the prison shadows dim,
And thy mercy to the bondman, it was mercy unto Him!

Upper-case H.

John Greenleaf Whittier's salutary poem "The Branded Hand" does the kind of work I'm sure he believed was the calling of the poet/prophet, immortalizing those sacred scars, making them sing forever.

Then lift that manly right-hand, bold ploughman of the wave!
Its branded palm shall prophesy, "Salvation to the Slave!"
Hold up its fire-wrought language, that whoso reads may feel
His heart swell strong within him, his sinews change to steel.

It had to have been an amazing time, religious people, Bibles in hand, going to war--literally and figuratively. Walker's time was even more divisive than ours. Just 16 years after the branding in Pensacola, there were Yankees and there were Rebs and there was blood all over the South, a death toll of 628,000, more than the combined deaths in every other war this nation has ever fought.

Just as so many others did, Jonathan Walker took his family west to Wisconsin for the Civil War years, then crossed the lake and ran a fruit orchard. He is buried in Muskegon, Michigan. 

For the rest of his life, he claimed the branded letters, "SS," meant "saved slaves." His body rests in a Quaker cemetery in Muskegon, Michigan. It is proudly marked.