Mysteries of the Sandman, 50th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): In January of 1912, Joseph L. Wiley of the Fessenden Academy gave a speech in Tallahassee in celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. The speech was "most excellent" according to the Ocala Observer and was printed in full in the New York Age, taking up four columns in the paper. 

Professor  Wiley focused on the opportunities of African Americans in the South and held out "hope and inspiration to the Negro race." Among the examples of "thrift, enterprise, and success" he cited was the Florida banker Silas Hart, who had been born a slave in 1860 on the Plantation at Cashua Creek in South Carolina. The Professor noted that Silas' net worth was then over $100,000 (about $3.5M today) and deserving of special mention. "He has made good,” the Professor noted. 

Abraham Lincoln was elected President the year Silas was born. That same year, the Pony Express completed its first run and the German chemist Albert Niemann invented cocaine. Charles Dickens published his first installment of Great Expectations and it was only a year earlier that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. A month after Silas' birth, South Carolina seceded from the Union. 

During the ensuing Civil War, Silas lived as a slave for the first five years of his life until the defeat of the Confederacy and emancipation in 1865. His father, Eli, who had lived under slavery for 30 years, moved the family to LaVilla, a neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida as soon after emancipation as he could. He found work as a brick and stone mason, and Silas evidently joined his father in the family business. 

Following the highly contested election of 1877, Democrats agreed to concede the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of all federal troops from the former Confederacy, and Reconstruction fell apart. Exploitative systems of convict leasing and sharecropping soon followed and returned many Black people to a status very similar to slavery. 

The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, ran an article in January 1942 by Samuel Harper titled, Negro Labor in Jacksonville. In the article, Harper states, “Back in 1886, Negro bricklayers labored hard and worked ten hours a day at the rate of twenty-five cents per hour.  They were very skillful at this trade."  The article goes on to note that among the bricklayers, one Silas Hart “rose from the scaffold to a foreman."  

Eventually, Silas rose above even the rank of foreman. With their black-majority populations, Jacksonville neighborhoods like LaVilla proved fertile grounds for minority office holding. According to Florida’s Black Public Officials, 1867-1924 (Canter Brown, Jr., 1998, University of Alabama Press), a minimum of forty-six African Americans served in local governments from at least 1870 to consolidation of the neighborhoods with Jacksonville in 1887.  Silas is listed in Brown’s book as one of the town clerks of LaVilla during the 1880s.

On December 2, 1886, at the age of 26, Silas  married Emma Louise Trowbridge of Augusta, Georgia, the daughter of Anna and Merritt Trowbridge. They had one son, Silas, Jr, born on September 3, 1889.  

Emma appears to have been a substantial woman in her own right.  In the book Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America, Francesca Morgan writes, “Led by Emma Trowbridge Hart of Jacksonville, Florida, black women launched a nationwide effort in early 1899 to fund a $25,000 monument ‘to the memory of the colored heroes’ of the Spanish-American War army, to be erected in some liberal city, ‘not Jacksonville.’”  

On October 6, 1902, Silas founded the Central Trust and Investment Company, becoming Jacksonville’s first Black banker. Silas served as president and cashier of the bank, which opened with only $800 in securities and $406 in cash. The bank was successful and by 1904 it held $20,000 ($695K in 2026 dollars) paid-in capital and had 500 depositors, twenty of whom were White. 

Central Trust had exchange relations with several large banks in New York City, and was the only institution south of Richmond, Virginia that had membership in the American Bankers' Association. The Jacksonville Evening Metropolis reported, “All of Florida knows that Central Trust and Investment Company is owned, manned, and managed wholly by colored men. From the start it has steadily gained the business confidence of the community, and among their long list of heavy depositors are many of the best and largest business men of both races in Jacksonville.”  

Silas and Emma’s affluence was such that they were able to afford a live-in servant, also provide Silas, Jr., their only child, with an elite education. They sent him to the Worcester Academy, a private school in Massachusetts and one of the country's oldest boarding schools, and then to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Both schools had accepted African-American students from as far back as the Civil War.

Capital Trust closed in 1926, three years before the stock market crash of 1929 that triggered the Great Depression, and all of its depositors received their money in full. 

Silas passed away at the age of 73 in 1933. 

Five years of slavery is an unfortunate start to life for any child, but Silas seems to have made the best of it. In the kind of rags-to-riches, Horatio-Alger story we don't often hear in real life, he was born a plantation slave, abandoned by Reconstruction, came of age in the Jim Crow South, and followed in his father’s footsteps in the ranks of the Jacksonville bricklayers. He made his way up through those ranks to foreman, was elected to public office, and created wealth as a trusted banker in the deeply prejudiced and segregated South. He provided a fist-class education for his son, and eventually sanctuary, safety, and comfort to a grandson in his Jacksonville home. 

Silas, in short, made good, as Professor Wiley had put it.