Girl in Black and White

by Jessie Morgan-Owens

  Meanwhile, his human ‘property’ steadily increases, both in numbers and value; for the lighter the mulatto the more desirable among the fastidious; and rare beauty is often the result of a second intermingling of the same aristocratic blood with the offspring of a former passion. From time to time, friends come to visit this bachelor hall, and in due season the master is repaid for his hospitality to them by a valuable addition to his stock of human chattels.

  A South Carolina woman, Mrs. Douglass, is quoted: “Southern wives know that their husbands come to them * * * from the arms of their tawny mistresses. Father and son seek the same sources of excitement, * * * scarcely blushing when detected, and recklessly defying every command of God and every tie of morality and human affection.”

  —Mrs. Louisa Jane Whiting Barker, “Influence of Slavery upon the White Population” (pamphlet distributed by the American Anti-Slavery Society), New York, 1855.

  This abolitionist propaganda hits its mark, accurately reflecting Prue’s experience on Thomas Nelson’s plantation. Nelson began gratifying himself with Prue when he was in his late thirties and she was the slave of a neighboring farm.

  Given their circumstances, Prue—and likely her daughters, too—suffered these “outrages” during their enslavement at Nelson’s and then Weedon’s plantations. Elizabeth was born on Powell’s Run on January 12, 1822. She would spend two-thirds of her thirty-year enslavement in the service of Thomas Nelson, her father, followed by nine years with J. C. Weedon (her father’s legal wife’s brother).

  In her early twenties, Elizabeth married Seth Botts, a charismatic young black man who served at the tavern at Bellefair Mills in nearby Stafford County. Seth, whose master was also his father, descended from a distinguished line of Virginia politicians and was known for his easy smile.

  Given the upheaval that attended Nelson’s death, we cannot know if Seth Botts or a white man was the father of Elizabeth’s children. We do know that Seth’s father was his white master and that Letty, Prue, and Elizabeth suffered decades of bondage to men who were known to force themselves on their slaves. By the genetic calculus of the time, Elizabeth was an “octoroon,” or seven-eighths white. All who recorded meeting Elizabeth assumed her to be white.

  Seth and Elizabeth’s oldest child together, Oscar, was born the year Nelson died, in 1845. Oscar shared his father, Seth’s, dark complexion. The following year Elizabeth was sent with her mother and siblings to live with J. C. Weedon. Mary Mildred, antislavery’s future poster child, was born two years later, in 1847. Their third child, Adelaide Rebecca, was born in 1849. Elizabeth named this child after Seth’s half-sister, Adelaide Payne, a free woman of color who lived in Washington in the service of a congressional clerk, John William DeKrafft.12 Seth called all three children his. To all who noted their appearance, both daughters were white.

  3

  Jesse and Albert Bell Nelson

  Washington, 1847

  J. C. Weedon waited a little over a year before he began to sell off Prue’s sons. In the January hiring season of 1847, Albert, twenty-six, and Jesse, eighteen, were not hired out to a local as expected but were transported to an Alexandria slave trader for auction.

  When she learned of the sale the following day, Caty Appleby—Conney Cornwell’s eldest daughter, who had lost all claim to Prue’s children—traveled from Dumfries to Weedon’s plantation in Brentsville to confront Weedon in person. The conversation went poorly, as she recalled in an 1854 deposition: “By what authority have you sold Albert and Jesse?”

  To which Weedon callously replied, “Because I wanted the money.”

  Caty persisted, “But you sold property belonging to John Cornwell, and not to you or Nelson.”

  “If it is the property of John Cornwell, then he will have to show it.” Weedon did not expect to see Cornwell, but should he come, Weedon would welcome the opportunity to have him locked up as a returning free black. He told Caty to convey a threat: John Cornwell must claim Albert and Jesse in person, if he wanted his property returned.1

  It was a Saturday, and the sale had been made the day before. Caty knew that Prue’s sons might still be nearby, and if so, she had the rest of the day and Sunday to find them. By Monday morning, these two young men would likely be in a coffle headed south. She could not bear to see her mother’s wealth marched away, the proceeds lining another man’s pockets.

  Caty traveled by steamboat to Alexandria and began her search for Jesse and Albert in the “establishment kept by Mr. Bruin” at 1707 Duke Street, in the town’s West End. Joseph Bruin and his partner Henry Hill used this federal-style building (today private offices, across the street from a Whole Foods Market) as a holding facility for slaves awaiting sale to the South. These men were slave traders, and from 1844 to 1861, they did a brisk traffic shipping thousands of enslaved people from Virginia, Maryland, and Washington to the booming auction houses of New Orleans.2 Bruin and Hill used the adjacent lot as an exercise yard for imprisoned slaves (most notably the sisters Mary and Emily Edmundson). The National Park Service has transformed this two acre yard, which now covers underground parking, into a small plaza and monument to the people held there.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin refers to Joseph Bruin and his “large slave warehouse” twenty times, as the setting for scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bruin considered himself a cultured Christian man, whose every interaction with the public was conducted with impeccable manners.3 Bruin, Stowe wrote, was a “man of very different character from many in his trade.” He lived on the premises, with his wife and two young daughters.

  At Bruin and Hill, Caty learned that she had just missed Albert and Jesse. They had been held at Bruin only overnight, then were marched down to the Potomac and into Washington for auction. Caty informed Bruin that the men that he had held the night before were not the property of J. C. Weedon. Bruin was helpful. He told her that if she went to Williams Jail right away, she would find them there.

  Caty followed Jesse and Albert to Washington.

  William H. Williams’s “private” slave jail, known as the Yellow House, was located on the National Mall, with an adjacent yard surrounded by a twelve-foot-high wall. The Yellow House is no longer standing, and its precise location is hard to determine, as federal buildings now cover the area that was once Eighth Street and Independence Avenue. Most researchers place the Yellow House site at 600 Independence Avenue S.W., in what is now the Federal Aviation Administration building.4

  Jesse and Albert Nelson were kept in a damp, moldy basement that admitted no light, in a barred cell with only a low bench for comfort. In that dark place, stories ended. Marriages ended. Identities were changed and lost. Children were held there for weeks after their parents had been sold, to “fatten” before sale.5 As the property of new masters, children and adults alike were renamed when sold. The shackled men, women, and children who emerged from this dark tomb suffered a terrible rebirth.

  In 1841, six years earlier, Solomon Northup had awoken in that dark place, still groggy from the drug slipped to him by his kidnappers. When he regained consciousness, as he remembered in Twelve Years a Slave, he was in total darkness, alone, in chains. Then the door that barred his cell “swung back upon its hinges, admitting a flood of light, and two men entered and stood before me.” One was the prison’s turnkey, Ebenezer Radburn, and the other was James H. Burch, a slave trader whose next act would be to beat Solomon into submission. Northup and his ghostwriter, David Wilson, chose to pause the fearful narrative here, with these men standing in the doorway, to take the opportunity to describe the Yellow House from the perspective of one of its prisoners.

  The pain in my head had subsided in a measure, but I was very faint and weak. I was sitting upon a low bench, made of rough boards, and without coat or hat. I was hand cuffed. Around my ankles also were a pair of heavy fetters. One end of a chain was fastened to a large ring in the floor, the other to the fetter on my ankles. I tried in vain to stand upon my feet. Waking from such
a painful trance, it was some time before I could collect my thoughts. Where was I? What was the meaning of these chains? . . . What had I done to deserve imprisonment in such a dungeon? I could not comprehend . . .

  The light admitted through the open door enabled me to observe the room in which I was confined. It was about twelve feet square—the walls of solid masonry. The floor was of heavy plank. There was one small window, crossed with great iron bars, with an outside shutter, securely fastened. An iron bound door led into an adjoining cell, or vault, wholly destitute of windows, or any means of admitting light. The furniture of the room in which I was, consisted of the wooden bench on which I sat, an old-fashioned, dirty box stove, and besides these, in either cell, there was neither bed, nor blanket, nor any other thing whatever. The door, through which Burch and Radburn entered, led through a small passage, up a flight of steps into a yard, surrounded by a brick wall of ten or twelve feet high, immediately in rear of a building of the same width as itself. The yard extended rearward from the house about thirty feet. In one part of the wall there was a strongly ironed door, opening into a narrow covered passage, leading along one side of the house into the street. The doom of the colored man, upon whom the door leading out of that narrow passage closed, was sealed. The top of the wall supported one end of a roof, which ascended inwards, forming a kind of open shed. Underneath the roof there was a crazy loft all around, where slaves, if so disposed, might sleep at night, or in inclement weather seek shelter from the storm. It was like a farmer’s barnyard in most respects, save it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle that were herded there.

  —Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave6

  This place of terror and woe, Northup reminds the reader, was “within plain sight” of the U.S. Capitol. “The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!”

  Seen from the outside, the Yellow House would have appeared like a private residence on a major thoroughfare. Not all passersby knew of the people chained inside. On auction days, prisoners would be brought from their fettered dungeons to the yard for sale. Sunday was not an auction day. Caty would have to return to the Yellow House the following morning.

  Jesse and Albert spent two nights locked in the dungeon. When the turnkey led them into the light admitted by the prison door, up the stairs to the yard and through the covered passage to the iron gate, they found a middle-aged woman from their hometown, the eldest daughter of their mother’s former mistress. Caty Appleby had come to redeem them. When she saw Jesse and Albert, she later recalled, she clasped their hands in her own. She spoke to them. She offered them hope.

  Returning to the offices arranged for business, Caty gave the same story she had told Joseph Bruin to William H. Williams. Williams made it clear that he would not release them without paperwork to support her story, and even if her story proved true, he would not release the men without a promise of reimbursement from Weedon. Williams would proceed with the auctioning of this property unless their rightful owner came to claim them. Caty ran against time and propriety, but this once, she proved strong in that run.

  ◆

  John Cornwell had lived and worked at a hardware store in Georgetown since 1840. He was in the employ of Otho Z. Muncaster, who ran Muncaster & Dodge Hardware on the south side of Bridge Street at number 123, between Congress and High streets. Georgetown streets were renamed at the end of the nineteenth century (Bridge Street is now M Street, and the hardware store was between 31st Street and Wisconsin Avenue), but the stately row of brick shop fronts remains unchanged to this day. John Cornwell had a family, and he had found steady work. By all accounts given to the courts, he was established in Georgetown “permanently.”7 Caty and Kitty both met with him in 1840 or 1841.8

  John went to work on Jesse and Albert’s behalf immediately, since they could be taken beyond reach in a matter of hours, on any given day. Williams owned two ships, the Tribune and the Uncas, both outfitted for the express purpose of transporting slaves to New Orleans. Williams boasted that he had six agents working the countryside around Washington, bringing in hundreds of people from the homes and fields of Virginia and Maryland to be transported to Louisiana’s auction houses.

  John’s first step was to secure a replevin bond in the amount of $2,000, which was raised by his friends John Davidson and Henry B. Walter. These men were likely abolitionists—that is to say, political operatives who could leverage the slave market in a slave’s favor. This initial legal step took six months. A replevin bond, worth twice the appraisal price for Albert and Jesse, should have redeemed Albert and Jesse before the courts had decided the outcome in John’s suit. Albert and Jesse were appraised by “four good and lawful men of my bailiwick, duly summoned and sworn for that purpose.” These four men found the value of the property in question to be $1,050, for “one negro man named Albert—$550.00” and “one mulatto boy named Jesse $500.00.”

  Williams of the Yellow House was summoned, on June 12, but did not appear. Albert and Jesse remained imprisoned.

  ◆

  Albert and Jesse’s predicament catalyzed John. On June 21, 1847, he instituted a suit in the Circuit Court of Prince William County against Weedon, to recover Prue and her children, twenty-one and a half years after he had inherited them. Though he did not know it, John Cornwell’s suit would one day allow him to free Mary, who was a newborn baby when Cornwell v. Weedon began.

  In the two decades that had passed since his inheritance, John had not avoided responsibility. As his counsel, Judge Christopher Neale, told the court, John had “often requested” these people from Captain Thomas Nelson, who “sometimes pretended one thing, at another time another thing, down to the time of his death.”9 For reasons that he did not disclose (but that we can well guess), Nelson did not want Prue and the family to leave with John. But John Cornwell had not sued Nelson for Prue, perhaps because John thought Prue was better off at Nelson’s plantation, given his own poor circumstances. Or perhaps John, in his community of free people, did not wish to bring down upon his family the ignominy of slave ownership. Prue’s preference can only be speculated upon. The will had simply dictated that John could not sell Prue as he had sold the horse. The interpersonal relationships between the properties in question, the estate’s executors, and the heir cannot be read in the neat resolution of Nelson’s ledger.

  In 1847, the possibility that his grandmother’s legacy could be sold without his permission or gain incensed John to action. If he did not claim Prue and her children now, he would soon find them sold and separated, a terrible but common fate. John had limited choices, limited mobility, and a family to support. Other sources imply that he might have been in poor health and his handwriting was all wavers, tremors, and blots. Prue’s children were grown and well trained workers. John returned to the idea that he could hire them out, now without Captain Nelson’s interference. He could pass along the expense of their board, and no one in his community would need to know the source of the profits. Albert, an experienced blacksmith, was worth at least $75 a year. Prue’s youngest son, Ludwell, brought $50 to $70 a year to Weedon’s coffers. John could collect between $400 and $500 a year from their combined labor, whereas his own income was likely less than $100 a year.

  John Cornwell submitted to the court that Constance Cornwell’s will stated that Prue and her children were to be delivered to him when he attained his majority in 1830. That they had not been, he laid at Nelson’s feet: Nelson had taken possession of Prue and failed to deliver her and her family to him, their rightful owner. Nelson had died without doing so. John could not prove that Nelson had ever intended to convey them to him.

  John did not know whether all the slaves belonging to him—Prue’s children and grandchildren—were still in Weedon’s possession. He demanded an account of their whereabouts, names, and ages. He asked that Prue and her children be de
livered to him immediately. He wanted to know his property’s market value, from 1830 to the present, and in damages, he demanded restitution of any profits that had been made from hiring them out.

  In October 1847, acting under court mandate, William H. Williams of the Yellow House allowed Albert and Jesse to leave with John Cornwell. They had spent ten months imprisoned at the Yellow House. Weedon had had to refund the purchase money to Williams, and the replevin bond was dissolved.

  John hired both men out to Washington merchants in the next hiring season.

  A year later, on October 18, 1848, Weedon responded to John Cornwell’s suit with an eight-page demurrer, or objection.10 The court turned him down, and the suit went forward. Predictably, one of the key claims in Weedon’s objection was John’s race: Weedon’s attorney, Daniel Jaspar, argued that John Cornwell had “no right to maintain any action at law or in equity for the purpose of recovering or otherwise acquiring permanent ownership of any slave, in any of the courts of the State of Virginia.” This referenced a March 1832 act that prohibited free blacks from acquiring ownership of slaves in the state of Virginia. Christopher Neale, John’s counsel, countered that Constance Cornwell’s will from 1825 predated this prohibition. Furthermore, since John was a free black resident of Georgetown, Weedon’s team claimed that abolitionists had likely aided him—a damning claim in Virginia’s courts.

  Weedon’s team pleaded a statute of limitations; the plaintiff, John Cornwell, had slept upon his rights for more than twenty years, and many of the witnesses to his claim were now dead. They called for proof that these slaves had ever been Conney Cornwell’s to give away. Weedon, allegedly, had never heard of any claim on these slaves until January 1847, when Caty had turned up at the Yellow House to claim Jesse and Albert.