Ludlowville plaque to honor Wheeler’s unique story

Sometime this fall, the town of Lansing will erect a plaque in Ludlowville Park honoring Peter Wheeler, one of the village’s early settlers.

Like many who came to Lansing around 1800, Wheeler’s journey to Lansing came westward through Pennsylvania. When he arrived, he helped build a log cabin and a barn and farmed and hewed wood just like his neighbors.

Except that, as free people, they did that for themselves, while enslaved Peter Wheeler did it at the command of his master and owner, Gideon Morehouse.

Lansing Town Councilperson Joe Wetmore introduced the resolution to erect the plaque.

“I hope the plaque gets more people to read Peter Wheeler’s story,” Wetmore said. “It gives us a really different view of our community in the early 1800s. Ludlowville looks a little different after getting a glimpse of what life was like more than 200 years ago.”

Wheeler’s remarkable biography was preserved by abolitionist author Charles Edward Lester in 1839; Lester invited Wheeler to tell his story and he captured it verbatim in the book “Chains and Freedom.”

Wheeler was born enslaved on the first day of 1789 in Little Egg Harbour, New Jersey. His mother’s owner freed her and her family in his will. Nonetheless, the 11-year-old Wheeler was put up for auction with the rest of the farm in 1800.
Gideon Morehouse bought Wheeler for $110 and, two weeks later, Morehouse, his family and Wheeler set out for Ludlowville in two covered wagons.

Morehouse beat Wheeler the first morning he owned him, then in the wood shop and then repeatedly along the trail.

As depicted in “Chains and Freedom,” Wheeler said that “the wheels would go down in the mud up to the hubs, then up on a log; and he’d make me lift the wheels as hard as I any way could; and he wouldn’t lift a pound, and stood over me with his whip, and sung out, ‘lift, you black devil, lift.’ And I did lift, till I could fairly see stars, and go back and forth from one wagon to t’other, he to whip, and I to lift.”

That was a turning point for Wheeler.

“I resolved that I would run away, but…not run till I could clear the coop for good,” he said. “Well, we finally got to the end of our journey, and put up at Henry Ludlow’s.”

There, master and slave built a log house, then a barn and then a framed house.

“I was a hewin’ one of the plates,” Wheeler said. “And as ‘twas very long, I got one on ‘em a leetle windin’ and master see it, and he comes along and hits me a lick with the sharp edge of a square right atwixt my eyes, and cut a considerable piece of a skin so it lopped down on my nose, and on a hewin’ I had to go when the blood was a runnin’ down my face in streams.”

A young Tom Ludlow approached Wheeler after Henry was gone.

“Says he, ‘Peter, why in the name of God don’t you show Morehouse the bottoms of your feet? I’d be hung afore I’d stand it,’” Wheeler said. “‘Well, Tom,’ says I, ‘I wants to wait till I knows a little more of the world, and then I’ll show him the bottoms of my feet with a greasein’. Well, Tom laughed a good deal, and says he, ‘that’s right Pete.’”

Tom and Wheeler became friends, and Tom, his brother and his sister all tried to get Wheeler to run away on different occasions.

“[Morehouse] got to be sheriff, and then he drinked worse than ever; and when he come home, he used to ‘buse his wife and family, and beat the fust one he’d come to; and I’d generally be on the move, if my eyes was open, when he got home, for he’d thrash me for nothin’,” Wheeler said. “Sometimes, when I knew he would thrash somebody, he was so savage, I’d stay in doors, and let his rage bile over on me, rather than on the gals; for I couldn’t bear to have them beat so.”

Wheeler was sent to the mill and was away all night with nothing to eat. When he returned, he broke into the cupboard and ate and ate, no longer caring about the consequences.

In the morning, Morehouse built a fire and hardened walnut strips in the ashes. Then, he called Wheeler to the barn, made him strip naked and tied Wheeler’s wrists to a barn beam and his ankles to a ring in the floor. Morehouse left him hanging in the winter’s wind.

“But back he comes, and…he hits me four or five cuts with one and it broke; and he catches up another, and he cut all ways, cross and back, and one way and then another, and he whipped me till the blood run down my legs, and froze in long blood isicles on the balls of my heels, as big as your thumb!” Wheeler said.

Wheeler was cut down and returned to his chores, his shirt sticking to his bloody back. In the morning, Morehouse’s brother-in-law, Abers, came to the house and demanded that Morehouse stop beating Wheeler.
Morehouse refused, and Aber beat him and then took Wheeler to his house where Aber’s wife used warm oil to work Wheeler’s shirt from his back.

Wheeler returned to Morehouse two weeks later, and, almost immediately, Morehouse assaulted him with a pitchfork and then a rifle. Wheeler fought back each time, nearly killing Morehouse.

Morehouse sued Abers for assault. Abers paid the fine and then prosecuted Morehouse for abusing Wheeler.

“I was brought forward, and had my shirt took off, to show the scars in my meat; and the judge says, ‘Peter, how long did he whip you in the barn?’ And I up and told him the story as straight as I could,” Wheeler said. “Then the lawyers made their pleas on both sides, and the case was submitted to the jury, and out they went, and stayed half an hour, and brought in a verdict of abuse, even unto murder intent.”

Morehouse grudgingly paid a fine of $500.

“Well, all went home, and arter that master behaved himself pretty decent towards me,” Wheeler said.
Sometime after June 16, 1806, 17-year-old Wheeler made his decision to run. He had $21 earned on the side and kept by Morehouse’s daughters and the new suit that they had made for him.

At midnight, Wheeler crept to the barn and harnessed the horses. They drove 10 miles into the night to a gate where Wheeler kissed the girls goodbye and jumped down.

“I now begun to feel somethin’ like a man, and the dignity of a human bein’ begun to creep over me, and I enjoyed my liberty when I got it, I can tell you…I couldn’t help standin’ up straight,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler walked to Skaneateles and then to Oneida, dodging thieves and roughnecks on the road. In Utica, a riverboat captain offered him a working passage to Albany. There, Morehouse and a sheriff came close to re-capturing him, and so he took a job on a schooner traveling the Hudson to New York City.

The schooner’s captain was offered an ocean-going command and Wheeler went with him. He sailed to the Caribbean, Gibraltar, the Mediterranean Sea and England. And it was in the Atlantic Ocean where he came across a dreadful reminder of from where he’d come.

“One day a man aloft cries out ‘ship ahoy.’ The captain looks through his big glass and says, ‘bear down on her helmsman,’” Wheeler said. “So he bears down and lays too, and I, ‘mong the rest, went aboard.”

The captain treated Wheeler very well, Wheeler said, but when the captain opened the hatch, Wheeler looked down to see the cabin “crowded with slaves.”

“The first thing I see was a colored female, as naked as she was born into the world, and she looked up at me with a pitiful look; and an iron band went round her leg, and then she was locked to an iron bolt that went from one end of the ship to the other,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler said there were 500 slaves down there, of all ages and genders, with no clothes.

“Not a bit of daylight entered, only that hatch-way, and then only when they opened it to throw out the dead ones, or else feed ‘em,” Wheeler said. “I felt worse, I ‘spose, and it was entirely more heart-rendin’ to me, because they was my own species; they warn’t only human bein’s but Africans…it seemed to me a thousand times worse than it ever did afore, when I was a slave myself.”