A Child of Misfortunes - Part One

By TRB

In 1790 Rebecca Rogers was a happy young girl living on St Croix. Her father, John Rogers owned the largest sugar house in the city of New York which was always full of sugar (and rum both precious and expensive commodities in those times) from the cane plantations he owned on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. It was there his daughter Rebecca met her future husband, James Codwise, the black sheep of a prominent New York City family who had been marooned on St . Croix months earlier by a merchant captain who insisted he leave the vessel because of large gambling debts he had among crew members. James got work as an overseer (basically a slave driver) on one of St. Croix's sugar plantations owned by the high society Beekman family of New York City. Rebecca Codwise met the young man. She was only 15 when they married and not sophisticated in the ways of America's cities. She was very charmed that this man, James Codwise, who was born and raised in a wealthy and distinguished New York City family, would want her as his wife. But she knew very little about the real James Codwise, his character and his behavior. Like many young women of her time she just had to hope that he would be a good man and take care of her and their family. Women had very few rights in the early 19th century and even fewer rights under Danish Law which was the law of St, Croix. When Rebecca Rogers married James Codwise, literally everything she owned became his property to do with whatever he pleased. He had already proved that he could not be trusted, but she had no knowledge of that, and, more importantly, under the circumstances, neither did her father. John Rogers, thinking that he had successfully carried out his duties as a father to see that his daughter married a gentlemen from a good family, now turned over to that gentleman the ownership rights to Mount Victory, one of the island's more successful sugar plantations. The portrait above was painted in New York City in 1820 by famed portrait artist Henry Inman of Agnes Marie Codwise, Rebecca's oldest daughter.

Codwise was still a plantation overseer when he married the young and wealthy Rebecca Rogers of St Croix and changed her life forever. And not in a good way. The extent to which James Codwise would leave Rebecca's life in ruins is expressed in the letters of Rebecca spanning an 18-year period to her son, Dr. George W. Codwise in New York City. They are heartfelt letters and she does not hold back. Her world on St. Croix is falling apart and she wants to take her family to the United States.

The letters begin in 1827 during the administration of John Quincy Adams, when Rebecca (as seen on the left of this page in a button-sized portrait), was 44 years old, and end in 1845, five years before her death at the age of sixty-eight.They provide a first-hand glimpse of a lost culture, documenting the day-to-day events of life in the colonial-period West Indies as seen through the eyes of a sugar cane plantation owner's wife. But Rebecca is not the average plantation owner's wife. She fights against unfairness where she sees it and is not afraid to call her husband a thief to his face.

They also portray in intimate detail her marriage to James Codwise and her relationships with members of her immediate and extended family, particularly her children and in-laws who, because of hard financial times, made even worse by the expensive habits of James, lived in America. The letters reveal an intelligent and caring woman trying to cope with a seemingly endless series of family tragedies and financial difficulties over which she has little or no control. Because of these troubles, she often refers to herself as a "child of misfortunes”.

Rebecca (Rogers) Codwise was born on the island of St. Croix in the West Indies in 1782, nine months following the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Her father, John Rogers was a prosperous merchant and land owner and was also born on the island. His family were sugar merchants, owners of the largest "sugar house" in New York City, and owners of numerous cane plantations on St. Croix. Family tradition holds that John Rogers moved to New York City when he was a young man and worked there (1774-79?) for his father and uncle, in their wholesale sugar business. Like many of New York City's wealthier citizens, young John Rogers was a loyalist, siding with the British crown in its dispute with the colonies.He returned to St. Croix toward the end of the American Revolution and was married there in 1780. Practically nothing is known of his wife except that her name was Agnes and she was of Danish ancestry.

She did, however, bring a substantial dowry into the marriage. Among the properties included in her dowry was the ownership of Mount Victory, a large sugar cane plantation. In 1797, several months following her fifteenth birthday, John and Agnes's daughter, Rebecca Rogers married James Codwise. He was 25, and had been working as an overseer at a plantation nearby.James Codwise had also come from a wealthy and well-connected New York City family. His ancestors had arrived in New Amsterdam (NYC) from Germany in the early 17th century. His father George was a prominent attorney.

During the Revolution he owned several privateers and lived on fashionable Franklin Square where James was born. His mother, Anne Marie (Van Raust) Codwise, was a grand daughter of merchant and banker Gerardus Beekman, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America at that time. His older brother David Codwise was a prominent New York City attorney and landlord, married to Martha ("Patty") Livingston, daughter of the Chancellor of the City of New York. His uncle Christopher was a well-known hero of the Revolution, an original member of the Order of the Cincinnati and a successful New York City merchant. At the time of his marriage to Rebecca Rogers, James had been working on a plantation owned by his mother's cousin, a Beekman. He had arrived on St. Croix in 1795, already burdened with gambling debts acquired during an unsuccessful stint as a merchant marine.

He was also deeply in debt to various members of his family In New York City. It is doubtful, however, that Rebecca's father knew any of this. In fact, James Codwise probably seemed like a good choice for his daughter. Rogers knew other members of the Codwise family through his own family and business relations in New York, and was no doubt impressed with the family's reputation.That would help to explain why he included Mt. Victory in his daughter's dowry, effectively turning over legal ownership of the plantation to James Codwise. Of course Rogers himself had attained ownership of Mount Victory in the same manner - through marriage.

In any case, Rogers was anxious to get back to New York to take over his ailing father's import business. So Rebecca's marriage to James was an immediate relief to him in at least two ways: it freed him from his duties on the plantation in St. Croix, and from his paternal responsibilities to his daughter, Rebecca. John Rogers, however, had misjudged his son-in-law's character and his prospects. James was never good with money. Simply put, he spent more than he made. Following several decades of terrible financial decisions and over-spending, James lost the plantation. His wife, Rebecca, and their children became the victims of his inability to manage the family’s finances. And during all this time, the political and social environment on St. Croix was changing.

Economically, the Triangle Trade and its slavery component had produced wealth for John Rogers and thousands like him. But it had also supported and shaped a culture of obvious moral conflicts. In some of her letters, Rebecca writes of the "wickedness" in St. Croix, and leaves little doubt that she is describing, at least in part, the moral corruption of slavery. Following a destructive hurricane, she writes to her son "the distress is very great in the island at present, but it is not to be wondered at, for the community is so depraved and such wickedness carried on. Would to Heavens that me and mine was out of it." In another letter she writes, "I shall die if I remain here much longer, as I am perfectly disgusted with the place and its inhabitants ... for there is nothing but trouble going on, and very justly I fear." The “troubles” Rebecca is referring to are the numerous slave rebellions that occurred during that period.There are, in fact, reasons to believe that Rebecca, a slave-owner's daughter, a slaveowner's wife was, at the time of her marriage to James, an abolitionist.

She was intensely religious, as were many abolitionists, and counted among her closest friends a number of abolitionist clergymen. One, a "Mr. Warren," who had been a guest in her house, wrote an anti-slavery poem and dedicated it to her. It is unlikely he would have done this without knowing that she shared in his sentiments

Unfortunately, little is known of the early years of Rebecca's marriage to James, except that she produced many children - ten, in fact, in twenty years. Of these, remarkably, considering the prevalence of disease on the island and the lack of proper medical care, only one died in infancy.Their first child, Agnes Marie Codwise, was born in 1798, a year after their wedding

.As mentioned briefly above, family tradition, among other evidence, holds that James Codwise was an unrepentant gambler and a dreamer, whose often ridiculous financial schemes quickly decimated his wife's large dowry. There is a considerable amount of documented evidence that James was simply in over his head, or not up to the task of running a large sugar plantation.The result of the combination of these two failings was already evident when Rebecca wrote to her second son, Dr. George Washington Codwise in 1827.

She and James had been married for 30 years, and were in serious trouble with creditors and in danger of losing Mount Victory. At this point, son George, 26, was a surgeon serving with the U.S. Navy in Brooklyn. Another son James, 27, was living forty miles away from his mother on the Island of St. Thomas working as a plantation overseer. Her two youngest sons, David, 13, and John, 10, were staying with family friends in New York City. Lack of money had forced her to send them away to be cared for by people she didn't really trust. Living with Rebecca at Mt. Victory were Agnes Marie, 29, a widow after only two years of marriage to David Burlock and their 8-year-old daughter Mary. Also with Rebecca were her daughters Caroline, 22, Cornelia, 20, Anna "the second", 8, and Rebecca, the youngest at four.

Rebecca's husband James was at home, but their relationship wasn't going well. Among other complaints, she was convinced that over the past three decades, he and other unnamed members of his family had "robbed" her of her estate. As a result of her husband's mismanaged financial affairs, the estate was now heavily mortgaged to several local lenders and banks, which were demanding their money under threat of foreclosure. Astonishingly, James had also borrowed money against the value of his property from the king of Denmark. Further, he had borrowed considerable funds from both the Codwise and Rogers families in the States - money he had failed to pay back.

Now they were ignoring his and Rebecca’s pleas for assistance. His self-pride and stubbornness wasn't helping matters. In 1828, in a letter to his wealthy brother David in New York, James asked for five hundred dollars to relieve his family's "desperate conditions." He promised that he would soon begin to pay back the several thousand dollars he had borrowed from David in the past. David didn't answer the letter. Instead, he wrote to his brother's son George in Brooklyn agreeing to lend James the $500 if George would agree to repay the loan with reasonable interest within a year. In a more than generous gesture, David also offered to credit the repayment against his brother's past loans, in effect giving James the $500 with no strings attached.

James wouldn't hear of it. He wrote to his son George that he would "... sooner sell some of my servants (James owned more than 70 slaves), than accept such a loan as my brother has procured." In the same letter he blamed the "fickle designs of Providence" for his troubles.

"It is a long time since I have written you, owing to the manifold misfortunes of myself and family," he wrote. "With the almost daily multiplied embarrassments I meet with, having nothing for the last twenty years but tales of woe to harrow up my Soul - to write that I had almost made up my mind to cease the knell of lamentation forever . . ."

While James was clamoring for still more personal loans and seemed engulfed in self-pity, his wife Rebecca, who was also writing regularly to son George, had a decidedly different view of the family's problems and how to solve them. In a letter to son George dated September 6, 1827, she wrote of her husband, "I am very anxious for him to do something for the support of the family whilst he has health and strength. I wish whenever you write to him you would urge it, and tell him the necessity of his trying to exert himself."

Ideally, Rebecca would have liked to move to America, reuniting the family. She wrote to George in a letter dated Feb. 5, 1828, “I wish you would try to persuade your father when you write him to seek some employment in America. I know you have great Influence over him..."

Obviously Rebecca had little influence over her husband, and couldn't really talk to him, at least not about the things he didn't want to hear. She was trapped on St. Croix, reduced to pathetic attempts to influence her husband through letters to her son more than a thousand miles away.

As a woman of the early nineteenth century, she had virtually no rights to speak of. Her family's wealth was not available to her; all of her property belonged to her husband who could do whatever he wished with it - with or without her permission. His inability or reluctance to work was of little importance in a system where women were without legal rights. She could not separate herself from him without losing everything. So she remained a "loyal" wife, even referring to James as "your Dear Father" in letters to her children. And she single-handedly kept the family and the household intact. She complained, she cried, she imagined serious illnesses, but, unlike her husband, she got out of bed every morning and worked the whole day.

She made soap, rum, molasses, pickles and various jellies, which she sent to her sons in America. She also sold some of these goods to regular customers in St. Croix and New York. She made clothes for all of her children. She supervised the activities of four servants and entertained house guests, many of them boarders - ship captains and other visitors to the island - who paid a weekly rate.She was a talented illustrator, who filled notebooks with detailed pencil drawings of island scenery. She also loved books and could recite from memory from the works of many famous poets of that period.

At times her life seemed centered around the schedule of ships to and from America. Mt. Victory was located on the western shore of the 80-square-mile island (approximately 20 miles long and four to five miles wide) on a hill overlooking the harbor in the commercial port of Frederiksted. She could probably see the docks from her window. She knew most of the ship captains personally, and was surprisingly knowledgeable about the condition and performance of the vessels that regularly journeyed from New York City to St. Croix and back. These ships were her only link to the outside world. She called their departures "opportunities," as in, "I will send it to you by the next opportunity." Every day she dispatched a servant to the docks to see if she had received a letter or a package from her loved ones. She sulked when they returned empty-handed and immediately sent off letters chastising her relations for their lack of correspondence.

(Author's Note: This concludes the first part of the life of Rebecca Codwise. Her letters to her son in Brooklyn have been transcribed and will be included in future parts of this series along with her other writings.)

A Child of Misfortunes