Girl in Black and White

by Jessie Morgan-Owens

  When Christmas morning dawned, twelve hours later, Jesse was still alive. He asked for a pen, ink, and paper and wrote a simple will, drawn up and witnessed by his cousins. Jesse Cornwell was in his prime, but no one could have survived that accident. His injuries got the better of him later that day, and he was buried with his relations in Rockingham.

  A remorseful Jackson had brought Jesse’s team home from North Carolina himself, a trip of three weeks, to deliver the will in person. Jesse had left five horses and seven slaves to his wife Conney. She had been Jesse’s wife since she was just a child herself, barely older than her eldest daughter Caty. Everything she saw had been his.2 It was now hers as long as she stayed single.

  Principally and first of all I give and recommend my Soul into the hand of Almighty God, and my body I recommend to the Earth, to be buried in decent burial at the discretion of my Executors, nothing doubting but at the general Resurrection I shall receive the same again by the power of God. And as touching such worldly Estate as it has pleased God to bless me with in this life, I give, surmise, and dispose of the Same in the following manner and form:

  I give and bequeath Conney, my dearly beloved wife, the whole of my Estate, wholy during the term she may remain my widow—but if she should marry again, then the whole of my Estate to be divided equally among my children after all my just debts is paid, or if she should die whilst my widow, then, the Estate to be equally divided as before mentioned. And lastly, I constitute and ordain my dearly beloved wife Conney and my loving son Augustine Cornwell the sole executors of this my last will and testament.

  —Jesse Cornwell’s will, December 25, 18043

  A look at the Prince William County personal property tax lists shows that the Cornwells and the Calverts were among that county’s prominent families. Starting with the state’s first collections in 1782 and for years thereafter, these two surnames predominate in family size and wealth. Conney’s father, Humphrey Calvert, appears on county lists that date back to the first year recorded after statehood. The Cornwells had lived on the banks of Potomac Creek since at least 1741.

  Cornwell family genealogists have determined that Jesse was the illegitimate son of Lidia Cornwell, daughter of Charles H. Cornwell and an unknown father, perhaps one who shared her last name. In early 1760 Lidia was summoned before a jury on presentment, or suspicion, that she had committed the crime of fornication. Her pregnant body would have presented conclusive evidence against her, so she did not show in person, opting instead to pay a fine, not to the state, but to the church: “The defendant failing to appear, judgment is granted the Churchwardens of Dettingen Parish against her for 50 shillings current money or 500 pounds of tobacco for the use of the poor of the said parish, with a lawyer’s fee.”4

  Jesse Cornwell took his mother’s name. He appears on Prince William County tax lists first in 1783, as a white male over twenty-one with one horse and three cows. In 1788, he acquired his first slave. When Jesse was in his thirties, he and Conney left their rented one hundred acres to become the proprietors of the New Market “ordinary” at Sudley Road and Balls Ford Road, which remains a thriving commercial interchange to this day.5 Jesse applied for an “ordinary license” or the right to serve alcohol at his tavern on May 7, 1796. The tavern opened about fifteen miles south down what is now Route 234 from his tobacco lease. Stagecoaches stopped there to change horses; Jesse kept five in the stables at the ready. He also kept a stud horse at the farm and ran a side business in horse breeding. Locals came by the New Market tavern for news; subscriptions to the Republican Journal and the Dumfries Weekly Advertiser were sold there. The Cornwells’ tavern served as a hub in the community’s public life.6 Travelers stayed for the meals and political commentary.

  Conney’s son, Augustine, died only a few years after Jesse, in 1807 or 1808, at about twenty years of age. With no white male to be the head of household, Conney and her four daughters became self-governing. Conney, in her early thirties, could have remarried but chose not to. She had paid off Jesse’s debts of ninety-odd pounds that winter he died, by her industry and the sale of three young horses, two of them four-year-old bays.7 As feme sole, or a widow who chose not to remarry, Conney regained the legal rights of property—to buy and sell land, to negotiate contracts, and to manage a household of slaves—that she had formerly lost by the coverture laws that governed married women. Like many “middling women,” or women of moderate means, they worked alongside their enslaved people to scratch out a living in tobacco and horses on the hundred-acre lot. Their annual rent on the farm was a thousand pounds of crop tobacco.8

  In the fall of 1808, Conney’s second daughter, Kitty, fell pregnant by Juba (or Juber), an enslaved man in his fifties, who was the backbone of their tobacco farm. Here is what can be ascertained from the open secret of her pregnancy. By the rights of property, Juba was at Kitty’s beck and call. Fifteen-year-old Kitty—fierce, poor, and isolated—may have ordered him to meet her. Juba may have welcomed the invitation, or initiated it, but sex cannot be truly consensual when one partner enslaves the other. Juba may have forced himself on her, losing himself in a momentary power. By having relations with a white woman in Virginia in 1808, Juba also manifested a death wish.9

  The baby who was born in June 1809 was black like his father, Juba, and a bastard like his grandfather Jesse. 10 The midwife took the baby to the kitchens to be washed and swaddled. When she returned the child to his mother’s breast to latch, Kitty’s eyes fastened on the ceiling. Conney named the boy John Cornwell and handed him over to be raised in the slave quarters.

  Conney couldn’t sell Juba because she needed him for fieldwork. So Juba, Kitty, and baby John remained on the farm, confined together in a tense state of impending crisis. Both Kitty and Juba were now in vulnerable circumstances. If John’s parentage was found out, Juba faced death by hanging and Kitty would be “ruined” at sixteen, unmarriageable in a time when a woman’s marital status determined her livelihood.

  According to the legal doctrine partus sequitur ventrem, or “that which is brought forth follows the womb,” the status of a child followed from that of the mother. The condition of slavery passed from one generation to the next along the matrilineal line. This convention-turned-legal-doctrine was put in place in the British colonies, and later the United States, to protect and enlarge property. Enslaved women with “abroad husbands,” or men outside their plantations, would increase, through their children, the wealth of her master. Men who sexually assaulted their female slaves profited from the children of these unions, who were born into slavery. While partus sequitur ventrem did not guarantee the freedom of children born to free women, in John’s case, it did have that effect. Kitty was a free white woman, so her child John was born free. But like all free black youths in Virginia, he was vulnerable to becoming enslaved. He was evidence of Kitty and Juba’s crime. His grandmother Conney could have sold John off as the son of Juba and a light-skinned slave woman without much pretense and to her daughter’s relief.

  ◆

  About this time, Conney’s father Humphrey Calvert offered her a deal on two slaves, a young woman and her mother. Humphrey’s neighbor had owed him $110 and had put Prudence, or “Prue,” up for security.11 Prudence’s mother, Lettice, or “Letty,” came along with the deal. They had been working for Humphrey at Conney’s brother’s place. What did Conney need with two more women? She had four daughters living at home. Why would she support four female servants, one for each of them? She already kept Betsey, a young girl, and Hannah, the nurse.

  Conney looked over these securities. This would be her first purchase in slaves. She appraised the women carefully, fingering their soft curls. Even with the midday sun streaming in, cutting across their skin, she couldn’t see them as Negroes. Letty’s hands gripped her last remaining daughter’s shoulders. Though Conney was not in any position to take on people, she took the deal. The women could sew and help at the tobacco harvest. She had brought Juba along, as the carriage driver, and two h
undred dollars she had saved. Her sister-in-law Nancy remembered that Conney counted “every cent of the purchase money of Prue . . . in my presence.” Juba drove them home.

  Prudence—who would be Mary’s grandmother—was about eighteen years old when she came with her mother Letty to serve Conney. John was darker than Prue, but he was not a slave. Who would have the harder row? John’s freedom to leave one day would count for so much.

  On September 1, 1810, Conney purchased 54 and a quarter acres on the banks of Powell’s Run for $250, a sum she raised by selling the fine carriage and pair that had killed her husband.12 And now that Conney could afford to lose the help, she sold Juba. Whether she intended to preserve his life or his value as property, she saved Juba by selling him out of town.13

  Today Powell’s Run flows beneath clusters of cul-de-sacs of low-rent townhouses in Woodbridge, a suburb twenty-five miles southwest of Washington, D.C. If it were still standing, Conney’s house would be visible from I-95. She had bought prime land, near Rippon Landing, where tobacco was once shipped via the Potomac to points north and east. When Conney was a child, Dumfries, the county seat just a few miles to the south, had been a busy seaport, situated on Quantico Creek near the Potomac. After the Revolutionary War, the port at Alexandria stole the trade along that waterway. Nonetheless, to be within a few hours’ ride of both town and sea made all the difference to Conney. More important, the location would introduce her daughters to a new society, so that what had happened to Kitty wouldn’t also damn the others.

  On September 10, 1810, not two weeks after she moved her family to Powell’s Run, Conney married her eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Caty, to Eli Petty, a man twenty years her senior. As an advance on Caty’s share of the inheritance from her father, Conney gave Eli a dowry worth $575: one cow and calf, one bed, one horse, and a man named Abram, who had been owned by Jesse since boyhood. Eli sold Abram and bought a $300 tract of land close to Powell’s Run.14 Out of courtesy, he signed a release stating that he had received his wife’s full share of her father’s estate.15

  Eli and Caty had two daughters before Eli died at the age of forty-four on January 2, 1815. Less than five years into her marriage, Caty was a widow with a farm to run and daughters to raise, just like her mother.

  Unlike her mother, Caty owned no enslaved people to increase her property’s worth. Caty and her daughters faced want and dire circumstance. She had no property of her own to offer a second husband, and her first husband had signed off on any future inheritance. In her mother’s files, Caty found the release on Jesse’s property that Eli had signed, and she threw it in the fire.16 Destroying this record would make her eligible for a greater inheritance if Conney’s wealth continued to increase. Betsey, now serving as Conney’s cook, had brought two daughters, Mahala and Jane, into the family. Caty needed whatever help might come her way.

  In 1816, when she was twenty-three, Kitty married William King, a miller and a gambler. Billy saw jail time for disturbing the peace, and so did Kitty. Records show they had one son, “J. W.” King. Time after time Constance supported them, giving them $25 outright one year, loaning them $18 the next. Kitty took back her maiden name. From 1833 to 1837, she lived alone with her younger son and her mother’s enslaved woman Hannah in nearby Centreville, Fairfax County. After 1837, her husband Billy King appears in the Fairfax County tax records only sporadically.17

  In his teenage years, Kitty’s son John Cornwell frequently shows up on the local registries—on the books at the courthouse and the town center in Dumfries, and on the county’s account books—as a young man who did odd jobs. He captured rogue pigeons, scalped ravens, and surveyed roads. He tamed horses and sold them. To society, John was black, and both white and black society treated him accordingly.

  Prue served the family for sixteen years, caring for John as he grew up, as Conney’s children married into farms of their own. Prue married James Bell, a freedman some years older than her. He ran a small restaurant for longshoremen in Washington.18

  When Conney was in her late forties, her health suddenly declined. On September 14, 1825, she wrote a will that she hoped would prevent her four daughters from selling Prue and ensure that they cared for her sixteen-year-old grandson, John. Conney called upon her neighbor Captain Thomas Nelson to serve as her executor. He was the county surveyor, with some legal knowledge from his own extensive holdings in both people and property. Perhaps Nelson had assured Conney that he would make sure everything and everyone would be safe in his hands, as if they were his own.

  They were his own: Nelson had fathered Prudence’s children, Albert, born in 1820, and Elizabeth, born in January 1822.

  Conney intended to do well by both Prue and John. She wanted to provide for John. But she did not want John to profit one day from Prue’s continued service or to be deceived by greed into a dishonorable sale. She did not write her will carelessly, and it was entirely to form, but a proviso would later catch Prue and her children in a legal bind. (Conney had taken to calling Prue “Princy.”)

  In the name of God, Amen. I Constance Cornwell of the county of Prince William and state of Virginia, being sick and weak of body but of sound mind and memory and being sensible of the uncertainty of human life do make and ordain this to be and contain my last will and testament, that is to say, it is my will and desire to be decently buried at the discretion of my executor hereafter mentioned and as to what worldly estate it hath pleased God to bless me with, I give and bequeath the same in the following manner, viz.

  It is my will and desire that all my just debt be first paid and for that purpose all debts that due me I wish collected and applied so far as it will go and should that prove insufficient it’s my desire that so much of my stock should be sold as will be sufficient to pay the balance.

  Item. I give and bequeath to my Grandson John Cornwell the oldest son of my daughter Catherine [Kitty] the following slaves, viz, Letty, Princy, and her two children, Elizabeth and Albert them and the increase of the females forever, also my horse. It’s my will and desire that my Grandson Jn. Cornwell shall not sell any of the slaves nor their future increase and should he attempt so to do they shall be free.

  Item. Should any money be left after paying my just debts out of the sale of my stock, it’s my will and desire that it should remain in the hands of my executor hereafter named and by him applied to the use of my slaves until my Grandson comes to the age of twenty one years at which time they are to be given up by my executor.

  Item. I give and bequeath to my four daughters all my household and kitchen furniture and all other of my estate both real and personal to be sold by my executor and equally divided amongst them. But should any of my four daughters claim any thing of my estate for what I may have sold and used of my deceased husband’s property they forfeit all interest in my estate. And lastly I do hereby constitute and appoint Thomas Nelson Executor of this my last will and testament hereby revoking all other or former will or wills and testaments by me before made. It is my desire that my executor before named shall not be required to give any security in testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand on this 14th day of September 1825.

  Constance Cornwell (her mark)

  —Last Will and Testament, September 1825

  When sixteen-year-old John inherited thirty-four-year-old Prue and her two young children Elizabeth and Albert, he also inherited “the increase of the females forever,” which would one day include Prue’s four additional children as well as her future grandchildren, Mary, Oscar, and Adelaide. Conney knew that Prue and her family might be too expensive for John to keep, so she instructed Captain Nelson to sell off her stock certificates to pay her debts and to support them until John’s twenty-first birthday. On that day in June 1830, Nelson was to deliver the family to John and divide the remainder of Conney’s estate among her four daughters and two sons-in-law.

  Conney knew firsthand the power of wills to write the future. The limitation preventing John from selling Prue and her children wo
uld protect them from the dangers of the open market should John’s moral compass falter. If he was allowed to sell Prue and her family, they would be sold as concubines. The slave economy traded in light-skinned “fancies,” or children whose value on the auction block rose with their sexual desirability to the white planter class. But Conney did not choose Prue over John by giving her liberty outright. If she freed Prue, Conney knew, Prue would leave that very day, leaving John with nothing.

  These women and children were the only wealth Conney had. Her sister-in-law had heard Conney say, at different times, that “Prue was her own property and that she would do with her what she pleased.” Kitty (left destitute and hardened by her marriage to Billy) and Caty (recently remarried but still penniless) would take whatever they could get their hands on from Jesse’s estate. Jesse’s hurriedly composed will, drawn up that gory Christmas Eve twenty years earlier, had set the course for the rest of Conney’s life, as Jesse no doubt intended it would.

  That will had bound Conney to solitude, as she would now bind Prue to service.

  On the day Conney died in December 1825, her property was increased. Prue was in labor with her third child, another daughter, born on the day of her mistress’s death. This child was named Evelina.

  Days after Conney’s body left its wake in the parlor for its place in the ground, her neighbors rushed to get as much property off of her land and onto theirs as they could. Caty, thinking back to that time twenty years later, remembered it as a “scramble” to take things from Powell’s Run.19 On December 12, 1825, everything went in a “crying sale.” Captain Nelson carefully tallied the accounts as Conney’s possessions went out the door.