Using my grant from the NEH and the American Antiquarian Society, I was able to read all the newspaper reviews of that novel from November 1854 to January 1855 to see how audiences responded to the original Ida May, before they met Mary as “Little Ida May.” I found so much out about Ida May that I brought out a new edition of the novel with Broadview Press. A selection of these reviews can be found in the appendix of that book. I prefer the American Antiquarian Society for this kind of research, because it holds extensive newspaper holdings and because it extends the access for researchers working online in its Readex databases to the hostel next door. I could spend my nights reading newspapers from 1855 while eating chocolate and popcorn. (Thank you AAS!) During March 1855, many reviews of “Ida May” became about Mary, so this search offered material about both the fictional Ida May and Mary, or “Little Ida May.”
None of this research yielded any information about the family’s time in bondage. For that I turned to a generous community of genealogists and their tools: census records, birth, death, and marriage certificates, wills, land deeds, tax payments, gravesites, and military records. The Cornwell family has a listserv on Rootsweb.com, a community hosted by Ancestry.com, where several researchers, led by Cindy McCatchern and her father Ron Cornwell, posted transcripts of documents they had located about Jesse and Constance Cornwell. I corresponded with Cindy, and she shared with me what they had found so far. Their story stopped with the Virginia Supreme Court finding in John Cornell’s favor. Ron Cornwell wrote of Prue and her children, “We have no record, at this time, of what actually became of them.” (Dear Cindy, enjoy, with my gratitude!) Henry and Elizabeth Williams had no grandchildren, and my subject Mary had no descendants. The widow of Evelina’s grandson, Mrs. Arlette Johnson, corresponded with me to share what she had heard about the painting of Prue made by Edward Mitchell Bannister. I thank the Museum of African American History in Boston for granting me access to this striking painting.
Though the years Caty and Kitty Cornwell spent in court left their family in tatters, their litigiousness brought Prue’s family into the historical record. John’s suit against J. C. Weedon in 1847 brought all of the Cornwells’ earlier cases, wills, and arbitration agreements into the files held by the Fredericksburg Circuit Court. Although it took the better part of a year to read and organize the information in these Xeroxed handwritten documents, the depositions made in those cases offered a remarkably detailed picture of their lives, a fortuitous coincidence given their position in the history of Prince William County as illiterate women without means, their illegitimate mixed-race son, and their female slaves. Late in my research, the website “O Say Can You See,” launched to share Washington, D.C., cases of interest, brought me Jesse Nelson’s suit against John Cornwell, which told the story of his stay at the Yellow House.
While in Singapore, I taught a class on antislavery and archival research that was entirely based on digital archives. I shared my own archive project with the twelve advanced students who took that class and they still offer me sustaining suggestions and their enthusiasm.
I am now the happy dean of several graduating classes of brilliant students at Bard Early College, who have taught me a tremendous amount about identity, justice, beauty, and liberation. My colleagues at BECNO know how many trials were borne in the writing of this book, and I appreciate their patience with me as I learned things the hard way. Thanks also to my colleagues at the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College for their generative practices—not just for teachers! And I wish to thank Donna Uzelac, for reminding me to make this book a reality while holding down a heart-demanding job.
When it came time to find an agent, I took a chance and shot for the stars. Thank you Jay Mandel for catching this project, and Sam Anderson for introducing us. At Norton, my gratitude also goes out to Mary’s champion, Jill Bialosky; my patient teacher, Drew Weitman; my careful copyeditor, Janet Biehl; and the book’s designers.
I wish to name the several groups of readers who shepherded this project into its present form.
Mary was a child of mixed race, whose family ought to have a place in American history, and whose childhood was marked by race in ways that I, as a woman raised white, cannot fully, viscerally understand. For this, I was particularly thankful for opportunities to share research with scholars of color, who gave open-handed feedback on this project. It is crucial to recognize where your knowledge simply cannot extend, and where the only remedy will be found in other people. I wish to thank my team of “beta readers,” especially Lenora Warren, Nikki Greene, Aundrea Gregg, and Denise Frazier, for your generosity in the work of communicating across difference at the beginning and end of the project.
This book began as so many do, as a small part of one chapter in a dissertation, and for recognizing that germ of an idea as the center of another book, I wish to thank my nurturing and kind advisors: Nancy Ruttenberg, Virginia Jackson, Bryan Waterman, Liz McHenry, and Ulrich Baer. My close-knit graduate student cohort at NYU produced several social justice activists, writers, artists, and professors, and I am fiercely proud to stand in our circle of cronies. The C19 community, the Newhouse Center at Wellesley College, and the American Antiquarian Society hosted invaluable lunchtime conversations centered on Mary, a child they had never heard of, and that I hope they will never forget.
When I moved back to New Orleans, I took up writing outside academia again, a habit I had left when I left in 2000. I am deeply grateful to my new and old friends who recalled me to my style and broadened my idea of an audience. May every writer be reborn into a writing group like No Name.
Somehow, I won the lifelong friendship (and reading notes) of two extraordinary thinkers, Maeve Adams and Raphaëlle Guidée, who continue to startle me with their insight and empathy. (My thanks, too, for their equally brilliant partners.)
My family will be reading this book for the first time in print. So first of all, I thank you for your patience!
My father Rick Morgan and stepmother Kathy Morgan have been proud and vocal supporters of my return to history. They, too, have been making forays into history, digging through archives in Louisiana and Nova Scotia to learn what they can about our long past in this place. I appreciate their clear-eyed searches.
In reparation for our ancestors’ part in Louisiana’s history of exploitation, known and unknown, I plan to donate 25 percent of the proceeds of this book, and any future earnings from the telling of Mary’s story, to organizations that serve communities of color, and those that work toward liberation in our present moment.
I wish to thank Missy Cotita, my mother, for reminding me over and over again that this was a story about family. (Mom, I hope you find this story as compelling as I have. I wrote much of it in your cabin!) I name my own grandmother Ruth Liuzza as my inspiration for Prue, for her grace under pressure or change. My sister Katie Shipley, my brother Andy Morgan and sister-in-law Quinn St. Amand, and my stepfather Tim Cotita all show their support through curiosity; they empower me with their words, laughter, and good food for the good fight.
None of this work would have been possible without the willingness of my partner in life and art, James Owens, to go further and to keep looking for a better world. Our son was not yet born when the book began, and somehow, he is now almost seven—Mary’s age when she entered the limelight. Please forgive the times when you had to share me with the past, Nathaniel, and know always that my world revolves in love around you.
I hope the publication of this book calls forth new material; if it does, please find me online at www.morgan-owens.com or @marymildredwilliams. I will be posting artifacts and new information as it comes to light.
NOTES
Prologue: Boston, May 29, 1855
1. Charles Sumner, “The Anti-slavery Enterprise: Its Necessity, Practicability, and Dignity, With Glimpses of the Special Duties of the North,” delivered March 29 and 30, 1855, Manuscript Collection, New-York Historical Society. See the digital version at https://www.
nyhistory.org/slaverycollections/collections/sumner/index.html.
2. Boston slave riot, and trial of Anthony Burns . . . (Boston: Fetridge & Co., 1854), at Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/04033077/. For more on Burns, see Virginia Hamilton, Anthony Burns (New York: Knopf, 1988), and Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
3. Sumner to Stone, February 19, 1855, as published in the Boston Telegraph, February 27, 1855.
4. In 1855 the newspapers that reprinted Sumner’s letter could not reproduce Mary’s daguerreotype alongside it, since that technology would not be invented for another thirty years. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which appeared in 1855, offered photorealistic engravings based on photographs. In 1880 the New York Daily Graphic was the first newspaper to print photographs as halftones. By 1897 high-quality halftones had replaced engravings in most papers.
5. Historian Mary Niall Mitchell, who found Mary’s daguerreotype in the MHS archives, underlined this point in her report: “Before I identified Mary’s portrait, it had been in the collections of the MHS since the 1920s, and in the Andrew family’s possession since 1855.” Mary Niall Mitchell, “The Real Ida May: A Fugitive Tale in the Archives,” Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 59.
6. Sumner, “The Anti-slavery Enterprise.”
7. “Redeemed Slaves in the House,” Worcester Daily Spy, March 12, 1855.
1. Constance Cornwell, Prince William County, Virginia, 1805
1. Kitty Cornwell v. Thomas Nelson, 1844, deposition of John Webster.
2. Material about the Cornwell family can be located at the Ruth E. Lloyd Information Center (hereafter RELIC) at the Prince William County Library. A local historian, Ron Turner, transcribed many of these documents and published them at http://www.pwcvirginia.com/pwcvabookspublishedworks.htm. Cornwell family genealogists, foremost Cindy McCatchern, have transcribed and posted material on the Cornwell family message board and listserv, CORNWELL-L, hosted by RootsWeb.com and Ancestry.com.
3. Jesse Cornwell, Last Will and Testament, December 25, 1804, admitted to the Court of Chancery of Prince William County, Virginia, August 1813.
4. Grand Jury v. Lidia Cornwell, February 26, 1760, Prince William County Order Book 1759–61, p. 45. Thanks to Ron Cornwell for this source.
5. From Balls Ford, Sudley Road crosses under I-66 and enters the Manassas National Battlefield Park.
6. Advertisement in Republican Journal at RELIC; ordinary license found by Cindy McCatchern and Ron Cornwell.
7. Her sister-in-law noted, “Constance Cornwell, with the aid of her children and slaves, paid the debts of Jesse Cornwell.” Cornwell v. Nelson, 1844, deposition of Jesse Brockley.
8. It was due annually to the landlords Robert and Mary Hedges, Deed dated April 13, 1789, RELIC. These hundred acres of tobacco farmland were located along the Felkins Branch of Cedar Run, near what would become Brentsville. For more information on the rights of widowed women and feme sole, see Julie Richter, “Women in Colonial Virginia,” in Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2013).
9. Antimiscegenation laws, on the books until Loving v. Virginia in 1967, enforced racial segregation by making relationships between races a felony. In the context of white supremacy, a lynch mob often enforced this offense extralegally. For more context on such relationships, see Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
10. Children of all interracial unions were considered illegitimate in Virginia until 1885.
11. This neighbor, Samuel Jackson, may have been Prudence’s father.
12. The deed for this property shows John and Sarah Lynn as the prior owners.
13. Ten years later Juba might have been freed. Cornwell family genealogist Elaine Crockett contends that Juba (also listed as Juber) was sold to the overseer Jonathan Leathers, who worked for a prosperous landowner, Francis Taylor. Taylor or Leathers subsequently sold Juba to Benjamin Berry, Taylor’s elderly relative. Juba was with Berry when Berry died at ninety-six in Henderson County, Kentucky, in 1820. According to the 1820 Henderson County deed book, the heirs of Benjamin Berry, in the division of their father’s property, “agreed among ourselves that Negroe Juber as he had been a faithful servant . . . be free.” See “[CORNWELL] Slave Jubar, Father of John Cornwell, Mulatto,” posted August 10, 2010, http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.cornwell/3026/mb.ashx.
14. Eli also purchased this land from the Lynn family. Eli, who had served as a witness to the deed for Conney’s purchase of her place at Powell’s Run, may have brokered both deals.
15. Cornwell v. Nelson, 1844, deposition of Dumfries constable John Tansill.
16. Cornwell v. Nelson, 1844, deposition of William King. William King was not on Caty’s side in the ongoing property suits between Caty and her sisters, so this information may not be reliable. Eli Petty’s release does not appear in archived documents.
17. Personal property taxes, 1830–39. William King is not listed with his family after 1833, i.e., “Kitty Cornwell and son J.W. King; 2 wm + 6 + 2h.”
18. Evelina Bell Johnson, oral history, in Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class, 1750–1950 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), pp. 221–24. I have not found any other records of James Bell.
19. Cornwell v. Nelson, 1844, deposition of Catherine Appleby.
20. The estate sale was called by auctioneer Francis Wood. The coffin was made by Benjamin Cole.
21. The appraisers were the constable John Tansill, the auctioneer Francis Wood, and a neighbor, James Arnold.
22. Henry Bibb, Life and Adventures (New York: Published by the Author, 1850), pp. 101–2.
23. In August 1848, the clerk of court John Williams was called upon to certify that this catalog was a true transcript of the original held in the records of the County Court of Prince William. While in possession of this document, perhaps it was John Williams who transcribed its contents, then inscribed a hash-mark at Prudence’s entry, to highlight her as different from the other listed items. He may have intended to distinguish the property in question in the lawsuit, Weedon v. Cornwell, brought by John Cornwell twenty years later. Someone has studied these documents for mention of Prue before me. This person entered the archive of the Circuit Court of Fredericksburg, Virginia, with a pencil. Roguishly, he or she drew a wavering line alongside a handful of court documents that all happen to account for Prue. There were other enslaved men and women on the place, left unnoticed. It is always the same sort of line; if annotations can have “handwriting,” they would be in the same hand. This person left no words or other marginalia by which I compare it. Maybe it was Clerk John Williams in 1848, but otherwise I have no idea who this mysterious researcher might have been.
24. Cornwell v. Nelson, 1844, deposition of Jesse Brockley (Nancy’s son).
25. Once cleared of furniture and Constance Cornwell’s personal effects, the farm was rented for $20 for two years to a local farmer, Thomas Gooding. Then Caty rented Powell’s Run for three years, from 1831 to 1833, paying Nelson $30 for the right to work her mother’s land. She purchased the land outright on June 1, 1833, for $100, which Nelson carefully recorded for the estate. In 1810 the purchase price for Powell’s Run was $250—the value of a carriage and pair—and now, twenty years later, it was worth 60 percent less, adjusted for inflation. The house at Powell’s Run fell off her property tax lists in 1837, either sold or absorbed into Caty’s farm. By 1840 the little town of Dumfries, where they lived, had fallen into decay. Many of its people had moved when Brentsville became the county seat in 1822. Quantico Creek had silted in, due to extensive tobacco farming, and Dumfries, without a navigable port, became difficult to get to.
26. Cornwell v. Nelson, 1844, deposition of John Webster.
27. Cornwell v. Nelson 1844, deposition of John Tansill.
28. Cornwell v. Nelson,
1844, deposition of John Tansill.
29. Much of this story of Conney and her daughters can be found in the 180 pages of handwritten depositions and documents held in the Circuit Court of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
30. Kitty Cornwell v. John Appleby and Caty Petty, May 17, 1825.
31. Kitty Cornwell v. John Appleby and Caty Petty, May 17, 1825, bill of sale for Betsey.
32. Cornwell v. Nelson, June 7, 1844.
33. Cornwell v. Nelson, June 7, 1844.
34. Cornwell v. Nelson, June 7, 1844, deposition of Isaac Davis, Brentsville resident. Davis stated, “I told her I understand that Frank had gone with a gang of Negros of Major [word illegible] and Mr. Grimsby, by way of Grahams in Prince William.” Kitty was not forthcoming. And according to multiple accounts, she never did disclose what happened to Frank. The depositions around his sudden departure are inconclusive. Davis told the court that “this was the substance of the conversation we had about Frank, tho’ more words were used by her, but I’ve stated the Substance of all that was spoken about him and the conversation was turned by her talking about a slave called Bet of the same estate.”
2. Prudence Nelson Bell, Nelson’s Plantation and Mill, 1826
1. During this time Betsey and her daughters became the property in question in a lawsuit between Kitty and Caty, so they were also required by law to live with the administrator of the estate, Thomas Nelson, until the suit was settled. This legal maneuver brought Mahala back to her mother, Betsey, after years of separation—she had been working at Kitty’s house—though that peace would be short-lived. The constable, John Tansill, brought Captain Nelson under indictment “for suffering Betsey to run at large,” that is, to live independently with her family. Nelson was compelled to “hire” them back to Caty to quash the indictment. The fact that Betsey lived alone could indicate Prue’s living arrangements as well. Cornwell v. Nelson, 1844, deposition of John Tansill.
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