By Farooq A. Kperogi This third installment in the Nicholas Said column series expands on my previous pieces and brings the discussion to ...
By Farooq A. Kperogi
This third installment in the Nicholas Said column series expands on my previous pieces and brings the discussion to a conclusion.
Perhaps the final straw that broke Nicholas Said’s back and drove him to leave combat duties during the Civil War was the imposition of an inexperienced 18-year-old white boy named Lieutenant Robertson James — described as “one of the least qualified officers in the regiment” — as the leader of his platoon.
On the day Said finally received his long-denied back pay of $200, he voluntarily resigned his sergeantship, demoted himself to private, laid down his arms, and requested a secretarial assignment. He later left that role to work at the army hospital.
Dr. Burt Green Wilder, a physician at the hospital, sought an assistant who neither smoked, drank excessively, nor ate pork (and who could write well), criteria that Said, a linguistically gifted ex-Muslim and teacher, met easily. He secured the job as a "hospital assistant."
Soon after, most of his Black comrades in the Civil War were killed or severely wounded in battle. The wounded were brought to the hospital where Said worked. He experienced what Dean Calbreath called his "baptism in blood, which soaked his clothing and clung to his flesh."
Dr. Wilder, impressed by Said’s intellect, described him as “very philosophical in his mind and interested in unusual things, religious problems, etc.”
On May 13, 1865, about a month after Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered and the Civil War ended, Said married in South Carolina. The marriage lasted only two years. There’s no evidence it produced any children.
Dr. Wilder, who later became a leading professor of anatomy at Cornell University, refuted the findings of a racist post-war commission that claimed Black people were innately inferior by singling out Said, a "multilingual intellectual from the very interior of Africa," as a direct contradiction.
Instead of returning to the North from where he enlisted in the U.S. Army or to Borno, Said stayed in South Carolina, devoting himself to teaching Black people to read and write for free while farming on the side.
His work caught the attention of General Robert K. Scott of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, who praised Said as “a thoroughly educated man and a distinguished linguist, who converses fluently in ten languages and who is equally conversant in both the Greek Testament and the Koran.”
Southern newspapers, incredulous at the idea of such an African, mocked the claim.
Despite the racism he faced in the military, Said found warmth and respect from many white individuals, including Southerners, precisely because of his sharp intellect and unusual multilingual aptitude. That’s why he once remarked, according to Calbreath, that “the kindest people with whom he had ever met and domiciled [with] are the Southern whites.”
He also became one of America’s first Black people to devote their time to getting scores of Black people registered to vote. His accomplishments were so noteworthy that the New York Times’ William Swinton, himself a polyglot, profiled him extensively on August 13, 1867, in an article titled “The Negro Pundit.”
“He has certainly made himself a remarkable philologist. Remarkable it would be in even the most cultured of Caucasians, but still more so in one who bears on his black visage the symbols of his savage race [i.e., Said’s Kanuri facial marks],” Swinton wrote. “For he knows, in addition to English and his native tongue, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Hebrew, Greek, German, French, and Italian…. Nor is it merely a parrot-like faculty of imitation, for he has a deep penetration of their genius and affinities and, in some instances, a fair, and in others, a profound acquaintance with their literature” (208).
The New York Times profile was republished in over two dozen newspapers. The Nation, a liberal newspaper, even suggested that Said was “was so talented he might make a good candidate for vice president someday, or at least a cabinet secretary or maybe an ambassador to Russia.”
Two months after the New York Times profile, Said wrote about himself in the Atlantic Monthly, one of America’s most iconic magazines. His article, titled “A Native of Bornoo,” caused his profile to soar in South Carolina and got him a more prestigious teaching job at a private school where he taught English and French.
After actively participating in Charleston’s politics, where many Black officials were elected—triggering violent white backlash—Said left the city. He became a peripatetic teacher in rural South Carolina before moving to Georgia.
To gain acceptance in the South, he concealed his Union Army service, even falsely claiming he arrived in the U.S. post-war. His autobiography completely blacked out his participation in the Civil War.
In Georgia, he encountered Lucius Bryan, a virulently racist aristocrat who had written that Africans had “never built a city, never bridged a river, never made the smallest discovery having any tendency to widen the little space that separates him from the gorilla.” But after meeting Said, Bryan softened his stance. He grudgingly acknowledged that Said’s intelligence and learning equaled that of any white man.
So, he encouraged Said to tour Southern states to demonstrate “the possibility of elevating the colored race to a standard of equality with Europeans.”
Said agreed, arguing that Africa “has been, through prejudice and ignorance, so sadly misrepresented that anything like intelligence, industry, etc., is believed not to exist among its natives.”
Beginning his lecture tour in March 1870, he electrified audiences. Though often introverted in one-on-one dialogic engagements, he transformed to a spine-tingling orator on stage. “On the stump, he seemed as one inspired. His sentences were short, clear-cut, and logical. When gesticulating with his arms, the eye could almost see sparks dripping from his fingertips,” Calbreath quoted one observer to have noted.
Attendance at his lectures initially cost 25 cents (about $5 today), later increasing to 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children. Subscribers also paid similar amounts for his forthcoming autobiography.
During a visit to The Atlanta Constitution (the flagship newspaper in Georgia now called the Atlanta-Journal Constitution) on July 22, 1870, the editors described him as “a very intelligent son of Africa… [who] talks intelligently on almost every subject.”
Said let the editors read a rough draft of his autobiography. They wrote that they were “astonished to find it well written…. The contents are novel, and, as far as we read them, very interesting.”
Other Southern newspapers dubbed him the “wandering African celebrity” or the “learned African.” In Florida, a star-struck bank clerk inscribed on Said’s account application: “This is the wonderful Nickolas [sic] Said, doubtless.”
As his fame grew, so did lecture fees, rising to 75 cents. Fame also made him a magnet for girls. A teenage Georgia girl named Annie from a small town called Bainbridge (which now has a little over 14,000 people) threw herself at him. Their short affair led to a pregnancy, which Said wasn’t aware of.
Annie gave birth to a girl whom she named Nancy Said. No one knows whether her descendants are alive. Short of getting DNA samples from Said’s relatives in Kukawa and comparing them to the probable descendants of Nancy Said in Bainbridge, Georgia, we have no way of knowing.
Despite warnings, he moved to Alabama, a perilous state for educated Black men. Yet, he found surprising warmth there, even impressing a former slave owner and Confederate soldier, Mitchell Smith, who recommended him to local politicians in another Alabama town Said moved to, saying, “Nicholas Said…is, by far, the most intelligent and best-educated man of the African race with whom I have ever conversed.”
Settling in Bladon Springs, Alabama, for four years — the longest he had stayed in one place since his forced displacement from Kukawa — he earned “the highest esteem of the white citizens,” as James S. Evans Jr. (whose son would later destroy Said’s reputation) wrote. “He had a dash about him that was fascinating…. He knew something of political economy, had studied the principles of law, possessed a smattering of knowledge of physics, and had read much on religious topics.”
There, he taught, completed his manuscript, and married again on September 24, 1874, to Rachel Thornton, a 24-year-old single mother with a six-year-old son. There is no information that he had a child with the woman.
In 1877, he left Bladon Springs without his wife and resumed his lecture circuits in Mississippi and Tennessee, carrying his autobiography. This time, he began calling himself Mohammed Ali ben Said, though he later reverted to Nicholas after settling in Haywood County, Tennessee.
In Haywood County, Tennessee, Nicholas Said mysteriously vanished from public view. It seems he fell into depression because of a series of injuriously libelous falsehoods written about him by James Evans Jr., a popular but notoriously mendacious, drunken, and unapologetically racist Alabama journalist whose father respected Said a great deal. These fabrications were republished in multiple newspapers.
Evans conjured stories about Said entirely from his imagination, claiming he was a South African criminal, a linguistically gifted forger and thief serving time in prison. There is no record of Said fighting back to reclaim his reputation.
Some believe he died in Haywood County in 1882, but no official record of his death exists in the United States. Or, as Dean Calbreath speculates, did he return to Borno unnoticed? No one knows for sure.
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