In 1840 or 1841 John Cornwell resurfaced in Georgetown. When the news reached the family, Caty Appleby asked Nelson, “Why has John Cornwell not come to get his slaves?”
Nelson replied, “Oh, he has demanded them of me, but he is not in a situation to receive them at this time.” John could have freed Prue and her family at any point after 1830, when he came into his majority, but he did not. Instead, he asked Nelson to act as his agent and bind Prue’s two elder sons out for work—Albert to learn the trade of blacksmith, and Jesse that of a wheelwright. Nelson agreed.
Sometime afterward Caty asked Nelson about how Albert and Jesse fared in their training. Nelson had not followed through on his agreement with John, and he had never sent them out. “I asked him why he did not bound out these slaves, as requested by John,” Caty later said, “and he said, ‘I have a reason for it.’ So, I asked him, ‘What was your reason?’
“Nelson replied, ‘Because they are my children and if I were to hire them out and they should get bad homes I could not take them away.’ ”
A bond usually was made for the entire calendar year, from January to January, during which time the lessee could treat and train hires according to whim, as his or her own property. Hiring out was like auctioning off, only it happened annually.
In her record of this exchange, Caty did not comment on Nelson’s admission that “they are my children.” She must have already known. She did not seem surprised that Nelson expressed fatherly concern toward the fortunes of these enslaved young men. Instead, she asked Nelson if he had “any persons in view, with whom he intended to put them?”6
Nelson had another option: “he could have them learn a trade without the bonding out, then if they were ill treated he could remove them to another place.” Twelve-year-old Jesse went to work at Chapman’s Mill, to learn to be a millwright, and twenty-year-old Albert apprenticed with W. Chapman, its blacksmith. Chapman’s Mill was a much larger operation than the little mill on Nelson’s property. It had been the preeminent mill of the neighborhood for one hundred years, a technological marvel still standing seven stories over Broad Run, a stone’s throw from the Fauquier County line, along the thoroughfare through the Shenandoah Valley that would become Interstate 66.7
The children’s placements made good sense. Nelson followed the spirit of his agreement with John, while training his sons in profitable careers with the best in the neighborhood. A millwright builds and maintains mills. With this training, Jesse could one day run the mill on his father’s property. Every working farm in Virginia needed a blacksmith, so Albert could likewise be a valuable asset to his father’s plantation. Their training enriched property that they could never inherit. Their skills increased their value as slaves when they became men. Nelson clearly did not plan to give them up.
Nelson did not mention that these boys, and their sisters, had also learned to read and write. The law prohibited empowering slaves with literacy. Prue’s children must have learned in secret alliances: with their half brothers and sisters, with their father, or while out on apprenticeships. Conney, her daughters, and their husbands signed their names with a “mark” rather than a signature. In court documents, a justice of the peace transcribed Caty’s and Kitty’s depositions and signed an affidavit that he had read the documents back to them. The master class was illiterate, but Prue’s children by Nelson could read and write. This skill brought a tactical and strategic advantage: these children could forge their way to freedom and pass into white society.
Thomas Nelson showed great care in keeping his sons safe from harm and close at hand. He did not own Albert and Jesse. They were another man’s inheritance, and John Cornwell wanted them hired out. Nelson could protect his children from the vicissitudes of enslavement only if he kept them physically close. His only claim on their safety was proximity.
Another detail suggests tenderness. Billy King was responsible for the maintenance of the mill on Nelson’s property, and at Nelson’s request, he kept separate accounts: one for the meal that Prue used to feed herself and her family, one for himself, and one for everyone else. Wheat and grain were the primary cash crop of northern Virginia in the early nineteenth century, so King would not have taken exception to Nelson’s demand for careful accounting.
Later in court, an attorney asked King, “Did Nelson tell you to keep an account of the meal that slave Prue used out of the mill?”
“Prue was in the habit of getting meal for her self and children,” King explained. He hastened to add: “I put down what I get out of the mill as well, at Nelson’s request.”
In the document where King’s deposition is recorded, the attorney for John Cornwell has crossed the next line out: “Nelson would not let Prue have meal from his home, but from the mill.” That is, Prue is not to get her weekly ration of meal from the house, like the other people on the place. Here is evidence of an affair. She is singled out to collect her family’s weekly ration directly from the mill, where she is unlikely to bump into the mistress. Perhaps Nelson wanted to hide his growing number of children with Prue from his wife’s accounting. Prue may have lived apart from the house or from Nelson’s other slaves. Perhaps she and her children lived independently in a quiet cabin, out of the way.
Nor did Prue receive her weekly peck in rationed whole kernels, handed out to the enslaved people on the place on Saturday, for them to grind, laboriously, in a hand mill or between two rocks on Sunday. Rather, her meal arrived stone-ground from the mill. Even though her portions were carefully recorded, she took what she wanted. Her meal was measured and tallied by the miller King, as if she were a white customer patronizing the neighborhood mill.
Entries in a miller’s ledger are scant traces to rely upon, to infer a life from. What evidence remains of tenderness? What evidence remains of cruelty?
Thomas Nelson died intestate in 1845. It was an inexcusable lapse in judgment for a sixty-three-year-old father and landowner to neglect to leave a will, for he died a wealthy man, with a great deal of property and children, both free and enslaved, to protect. Census data from 1840 shows that he held thirty male slaves, eight of whom were field hands, and seven were boys under the age of ten. Jesse and Albert are listed as “1 male slave manufacturer/trade” and “1 male slave learned profession.” He held thirteen females: six women under the age of sixty-five, including Prue (who was fifty-four at the time of Nelson’s death), Elizabeth (twenty-three) and Evelina (nineteen), and five girls under the age of ten.
Nelson’s widow Eliza Jane, inherited $6,000 worth of personal property, as well as the plantation and mill, on 600 acres that were worth another $5,000. One hundred fifty of those acres were under cultivation. That year Eliza Jane’s daughter, the five-year-old Elizabeth Nelson, also died. Eliza Jane’s other five children survived, including the infant Horatio, and they inherited a vast property in slaves.
As a widow with significant wealth, Eliza Jane was free to punish her rival Prue as she saw fit. Eliza Jane’s brother, John Catesby Weedon, was named the executor of Nelson’s estate. Known as J. C., Weedon was also, legally speaking, the administrator de bonis non of Constance Cornwell’s remaining estate. In other words, he was now responsible for goods not administered by the previous executor, Nelson, who had died without finishing the work of administering the Cornwell estate. The Cornwell sisters—Caty, Kitty, Nancy, and Lydia—were cut out completely.
Prue, her children, and her children’s children—Prue’s “increase”—were sent to Brentsville to serve J. C. Weedon, who had made his wealth by selling children and hiring out their parents. He took possession of Prue and her family and put them out to work for him, betting that John Cornwell’s race would bar him from taking Weedon to court. Allegedly, Weedon planned to have Prue and her children “sent off to the south” through a slave trader named John Cooper within the year.
How much money would Weedon’s late brother-in-law’s children, these unclaimed nieces and nephews, bring him? An affidavit attesting to the probable worth of
Prue and her children had been submitted to the court six years earlier, at Kitty’s request. Seymour H. Storke, Captain Nelson’s neighbor, had hired the thirteen-year-old Evelina from time to time and had been responsible for setting the price of Prue and her family for the court.
Are you or are you not acquainted with a Family of Slaves, living with Thomas Nelson in Prince William County, consisting of a woman named Prue and her children; if yea, please state what you know and think, as to their description, health, and value?
I do know that family of Slaves. I have been some years living within about a mile of Captain Nelson’s Plantation and Mill. I know them severally except the youngest, a girl called Catherine about 4 years old. The children of Prue are more nearly approaching to white than any Slaves I ever saw. At a few paces they would be taken for white persons, both as to Colour and appearance, except Evelina and Ludwell, who are a degree whiter than a bright and fair mulatto and I’m told that the youngest is a shade darker than Elizabeth, or the others of white complexion. From what I’ve understood, Prue is a delicate woman, she is a mulatto. Elizabeth would be taken to be a white woman and is so to all appearance—She is very delicate and sickly from all that I learn and know of her. Albert is only tolerably well grown, hearty and serviceable, he is not quite as white as Elizabeth. I suppose from exposure to the sun. Evelina is tolerably well grown, a hearty, fine woman, she lived with me. Jesse seems to be a hearty good looking boy, very fair, I should take to be a white boy. Ludwell is a bright and fair mulatto, very delicate and badly grown, though sprightly. Catherine I have seen, but don’t recollect, I’m told she is a very bright mulatto, near about as fair as Elizabeth. She is healthy and as well grown as usual, I believe. I would not buy any of them, at anything approaching the usual prices of Slaves at the same ages, excepting Evelina, owing to their being so fair Complexioned, nor do I believe that any of them, except Evelina and Ludwell, would sell at near the usual prices in the Slave market, for the same reason. To Elizabeth and Ludwell apply the additional objection of delicate health. Prue might make another exception, but she is rather old and delicate to appearance. For myself, if I had means to buy slaves, I would not purchase any such as they are, except Evelina, and She would be objectionable as to Colour in a family of slaves.
The following are the names and to the best of my knowledge and belief, respective ages, market value of said Slaves, viz.
1. Prue—about 42 years old—value say, $150.00
2. Elizabeth, 20, very white and infirm, $100.
3. Albert, 15, very white, $400.
4. Evelina, 13, not so white, $600.
5. Jesse, 9, very white, $200.
6. Ludwell, 6, mulatto, small, $150.
7. Catherine, 4, very white, $120.
Total= $1720
I think the said slaves would be considerably indebted after offsetting the hires or annual value of those who are serviceable. I consider Evelina and Albert, as the only ones of them of annual value, Albert say for 5 years worth about $75.00, and Evelina, for say 3 years, about $30, together about $105.00. I think they have been chargeable since 1826 say 13 years, at the rate including incidental expenses (Doctors and Midwife’s fees) of say $50.00 per annum. I think Elizabeth has a charge from what I have known and heard of her health.
— Seymour H. Storke, October 11, 18398
Storke had most of the ages wrong. Holding the common opinion that white slaves were weak workers, he thought only Albert and Evelina worth hiring out. He used the euphemism “delicate” to refer to Prue’s family, thereby communicating what he saw as their unfitness for work, their womanly refinement, and his own polygenetic belief that the mixing of races resulted in ill health. They were “chargeable” at fifty dollars per year, by which he meant that it cost Nelson that much to keep Prue and her children in health and home.
Storke would not buy any of them, not even his favored Evelina, because he believed the other slaves on his plantation would reject her because she was white, or because he would find it objectionable. Regardless, he set her purchase price hundreds of dollars higher than her sisters and brothers. Why?
Historian Walter Johnson, who has extensively studied the domestic slave trade, explains that “according to the ideology of slaveholders’ racial economy, which associated blackness and physical bulk with vitality,” enslaved women who were “light-skinned and slender” embodied the opposite: “their whiteness unfitted them for labor.” They represented a different economy: “for slave-buyers, near-white enslaved women symbolized the luxury of being able to pay for service, often sexual, that had no material utility—they were ‘fancies,’ projections of the slaveholders’ own imagined identities as white men and slave masters.” Edward Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told reminds us that the word “fancy” has two relevant meanings: as decoration and desire.9 Storke carefully noted the children’s color—“very white,” “not so white,” “mulatto”—because it affected their value in complex ways. Elizabeth was “sickly” and “infirm,” but her younger sister “Evelina [was] tolerably well grown, a hearty, fine woman, she lived with me.” Evelina suited his prurient desire: she was not too white, not too dark. Though he called her a “fine woman,” Evelina was then only thirteen years old.
A month later, in rebuttal, the neighborhood slave trader was called in to comment on Prue and her children’s worth on the slave market. The court document notes that the “servants” were “all present” for John Cooper’s appraisal.
I have directly and indirectly been engaged in buying and selling Slaves for 17 years and still buy and sell. I minutely viewed Prue and her children and am at a great loss to say as to the value. They are all so white as to put it out of the question of taking to any foreign Market for they would not sell on account of colour for some of them has not a vestige in appearance of negro blood, not even a hair that inclines to Curl. Some others appear to bear a slight shade of mulatto with straight hair, another objection still stronger in some of them is the visible appearance of disease, viz. Elizabeth and Evelina, the latter is [missing word] with a sunken breast and totally unfit for any kind of labour. Taking probable charges I would say Prue is worth One Hundred Dollars, Elizabeth One hundred Dollars, Albert Two hundred and fifty dollars, Evelina One Hundred, Jesse Two hundred, Ludwell One hundred and Twenty five dollars, and Catherine Seventy five Dollars.
—John Cooper, November 183910
Applying his seventeen years of experience as a slave trader, “and making a minute calculation,” Cooper stated that Prue and her children would sell for $950. It would be out of the question to take them to a foreign market to sell—by which he meant outside the county—because they were white enough to arouse suspicions of kidnapping. Cooper, for the defense, did not value Evelina as highly as Storke: for Prue, Elizabeth, and Evelina, he set the price at $100 each. If they were kept in Brentsville and hired out to neighboring farms, Cooper believed that after four years, the income brought by their labor would break even against the expenses of keeping them by only $64.
A second neighborhood slave trader, William Carter, was brought in to corroborate Cooper’s assessment. Carter nudged their purchase price up to $1,000, stating that he would offer $50 higher for Albert, but it was “doubtful whether Evelina was worth anything or not.”
Prue was appraised—in this “minute” and derogatory fashion—at least seven times in twenty years: when Conney first bought her, when Conney died, and for the courts by Seymour Storke, John Cooper, William Carter, and John Tansill. Tansill appraised her twice, once in 1825 for Conney’s crying sale and again in 1844. He gave Prue and her children a high value in spite of their color, in 1844: “I consider them (as they are of very light complexion) to be worth about Eighteen hundred Dollars, but were they black negros and mine, I would not take less than Twenty-five Hundred Dollars.”11
Caty’s husband, John Appleby, who had been asked to set the value of Prue and her children in 1850, made the seventh and final assessment of Prue’s v
alue on the slave market. By this time, he had known Prue for thirty years, and his estimate was by far the highest, perhaps due to their personal connection. Caty had known Prue from childhood, and John Appleby added, “I have seen some of them within the last two weeks.” John and Caty valued Prue and her family at $5,250, or double the highest price yet given.
While the Virginia courts debated Elizabeth’s and Evelina’s poor health as a function of color, the Northern popular imagination would have cast them as heroines. Prue’s older daughter, Elizabeth, was of lighter complexion than her mother or sister, and though she was beautiful, she was of “delicate” health. Archival sources construe her as the quintessential nineteenth-century “tragic mulatta,” living most of her life subject to the caprices of a master who was also her father, and destined for an early grave. Elizabeth could have walked out of any number of antislavery novels.
In the 1840s and 1850s, stories of enslaved women who to all appearances presented as white were tremendously popular. The women whom Southern speculators denounced as unfit to work, Northern audiences regarded as paragons of mysterious beauty. Prurient fascination followed near-white enslaved women, and the lighter they appeared, the more sexualized their past was perceived to be. Abolitionists accused young gentlemen in the Southern states of running brothels, not farms.
The highest social life is often the most vile in its secret history. A young man at the age of twenty-one takes possession of the paternal estate, erects a house upon it, where he retires and establishes a household for himself. He secures what means of gratification his taste can select, and thus lives, sometimes ten or fifteen years, if no heiress or beauty cross his path of sufficient attractions to induce him to add her as an ornamental appendage to his establishment.
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