Freedom Suits, African American Women, and the Genealogy of Slavery

Freedom Suits, African American Women, and the Genealogy of SlaveryAuthor(s): Loren SchweningerSource: The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (January 2014), pp. 35-62Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and CultureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.71.1.0035 .

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Freedom Suits, African American Women, and the Genealogy of Slavery

Loren Schweninger

AT various times during 1792 and 1793, Anne Brown, a free person of color, gave four sworn depositions before Annapolis alderman and mayor John Bellum concerning a large group of slaves filing

freedom suits in the Maryland General Court of the Western Shore. The daughter of Mary Brown, known as Mulatto Moll, Anne Brown had grown up in the Swamp, located about twenty miles south of the city in Anne Arundel County (Figure I). Her mother was an indentured servant to “old Robert Lockwood,” who owned four slaves and a small farm. As a child she and her mother and her sister Mary Batson lived on the same farm as Lenah, one of Lockwood’s slaves, the only daughter of Maria, who had arrived with her young daughter in Maryland about 1686 on a ship. Anne’s mother had told her many times that Lenah’s mother “was to be free and was a Spanish woman.”1 She never heard any old person in the Swamp say that Lenah’s mother was a slave. Anne’s depositions became part of the evi-dence in sixteen freedom suits filed by members of the Boston family, who traced their roots back to Maria. How and why the slaves took this surname is not clear, but it was almost certainly used by Lenah and her ten children early in the eighteenth century (Figure II). As the suits progressed, twenty-four other witnesses provided testimony, many of them on behalf of the slave-owning defendants, but none of them were deposed more than twice, except for Anne, who was called on to give testimony a total of six times, including two depositions in 1795 and 1797, the last coming at age sixty-six after the suits were appealed to the Maryland High Court of Appeals.2

Loren Schweninger is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He wishes to thank his daughter Emily and wife Patricia for reading the initial draft of this article and the twenty-two graduate students at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who commented on the second draft at a special seminar in May 2013. Four anonymous readers for the William and Mary Quarterly provided detailed, rigorous, constructive critiques for which the author is especially grateful.

1 Deposition, Anne Brown, sworn before John Bullen, Alderman of Annapolis, ca. 1792, found in John Boston v. John Francis Mercer, transcript of Records of the General Court of the Western Shore, Md., 1791–95, Court of Appeals (Judgments), November 1797, micro-film reel (M) 11015, case #15, Schweninger Collection (SC), Maryland State Archives (MSA).

2 Depositions, Anne Brown, ca. 1792 (twice), 1793 (twice), Oct. 17, 1795, June 3, 1797, found in Records of the General Court of the Western Shore, Md., Nov. 1, 1791,

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 71, no. 1, January 2014DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.71.1.0035



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SC, MSA. Other cases found in the Records of the General Court of the Western Shore, Md., Nov. 1, 1791, include Philip Boston v. Richard Sprigg (case #12), Maria Boston v. Richard Sprigg (case #13), Benjamin Boston v. Richard Sprigg (case #14), John Boston v. John Francis Mercer (case #15), Fanny Boston v. John Francis Mercer (case #16), Henny Boston v. John Francis Mercer (case #17), Anne Boston v. John Francis Mercer (case #18), and Jenny Boston v. John Francis Mercer (case #19), in M 11015, SC, MSA. Documents pertaining to these cases in the Records of the General Court of the Western Shore, Md., Nov. 1, 1791, include depositions by Anne Harwood (July 20, 1789), Elizabeth Rawlings (July 20, 1789), Richard Watkins (Mar. 10, 1790), Richard Richardson (Mar. 10, 1790), Plummer Iiams (Aug. 4, 1790), Mary Batson (Aug. 7, 1790), John Welsh (Feb. 3, 24, 1791), Robert John Smith (ca. 1791), Ann Watkins (June 4, 1791), John Tydings (Oct. 25, 1791), Thomas Gibbs (Nov. 3, 1791), Mary Cruchly (Nov. 4, 1791), Benjamin Atwell (May 21, 1792), Alice Taylor (June 23, 1792), John Norris (Oct. 8, 13, 1792), Margaret Gassaway Watkins (May 21, [1793]), Richard Hopkins (May 21, 1793), Dinah Watkins (May 21, 1793), Mary Farro (May 21, 1793), Joseph Cowman (May 25, 1793), Bacon Boston (June 15, 1793), and William Harwood (May 25, 1795); Testimony of Benjamin Carr (Oct. 16, 1792); Certificate, or affidavit, William Ford [Foard] (Aug. 10, 1747); Court Record, 1791–93; Court Record, 1793–95; and Order and Appeals, 1795. The records of the Court of Appeals, June Term 1797, include the following cases, which are listed on the side of two pages within case #12 (Philip Boston v. Richard Sprigg): Bacon Boston v. Gassaway Watkins, Peter Boston v. Stephen Steward, Richard Boston v. Joshua Warfield, George Boston v. James Murray, Guy Boston v. Richard Richardson, Peter Boston v. Richard Richardson, John Boston v. Richard Richardson, and Deborah Boston v. Richard Richardson. The record from the General Court of the West-ern Shore, including the depositions of Anne Brown and others, was forwarded to the Court of Appeals. Anne’s 1797 deposition and a deposition from one of the previously freed Boston slaves, Bacon Boston, were included at the end of the other depositions in the case of Philip Boston v. Richard Sprigg. Other cases mentioned in Anne’s deposi-tions included Nelly Boston v. Richard Sprigg, Anthony Boston v. Gassaway Rawlings, George Boston v. James Murray, Tamar Boston v. Benjamin Ogle, Thomas Boston v. Ben-jamin Ogle, and an unidentified family member v. Edward Dorsey, M 11015, SC, MSA, granted, appealed, affirmed (hereafter GAA). Abstracts of some of the cases cited in this essay can be found in the Digital Library on American Slavery, created by the Race and Slavery Petitions Project and the Electronic Resources and Information Technology Department of University Libraries at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, 2009, http://library.uncg.edu/slavery/; the original documents can be accessed through

figure i

Genealogy of Mary Brown (“Mulatto Moll”), indentured servant to Robert Lockwood. For “free Moll,” see deposition of Benjamin Atwell, May 21, 1792; deposition of Alice Taylor, June 23, 1792.


http://library.uncg.edu/slavery/


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Freedom suits provide a unique window into the complex history of race and slavery in the United States. In the North the suits filed in Massachusetts by Bett, or Elizabeth, Freeman in 1781 and Quock Walker in 1783 led to the end of slavery in that state, while suits in Pennsylvania and New York played an important role in the gradual abolition of the institu-tion. In parts of the Upper South, freedom suits also had the potential to unravel the institution during the early national era. Yet, with the exception of those in Massachusetts, these early suits have not been examined in any depth by scholars, despite offering many insights into the social, cultural, family, racial, legal, and even political history of the period. Freedom suits reveal cultural interactions among slaves, free blacks, and whites; the power that court actions could give to those held in bondage; and the role of African American women in maintaining family histories and sustaining oral traditions. They tell us about the impact of the American Revolution’s ideals on society and how, at least for a brief period, suits relying on family oral traditions dating back many generations could result in freedom.

Beyond the legal aspects of the cases—the plaintiffs, defendants, depo-nents, lawyers, and judges (the General Court of the Western Shore served primarily as an appeals court but also took individual freedom cases; thus there was no jury)—the struggle for freedom among the Boston family of slaves affords an exceptional rendering of the voices of people who are rarely heard and in this way fuses social and legal history. The voices tell us how over several generations a community established itself and how hearsay and gossip among both whites and blacks functioned to create and re-create social roles, expanding our understanding of the cultural, social, genealogical, and economic relationships that shaped various communities. The various groups were separate and yet attached to each other, and they show the differences in the ways that kinship ties were preserved among whites and African Americans. Indeed the identities of African Americans who descended or claimed descent from a free woman remained strong from one generation to the next and would continue to do so in subsequent generations as the opportunities to bring their heritage to the fore became increasingly rare during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.3

Freedom suits continued during the nineteenth century as hundreds of slaves and their lawyers filed legal complaints, as they were called, mainly in

ProQuest’s “Slavery and the Law Digital Archive.” For family relationships among the Boston slaves, see Genealogy of the Boston Slave Family, ca. 1686–1798, http://oieahc .wm.edu /wmq/Jan14/Schweninger.pdf.

3 Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York, 2009), 7–9; Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York, 2010), chap. 5; David G. Smith, On the Edge of Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Issue in South Central Pennsylvania, 1820–1870 (New York, 2013), 90.

freedom suiTs and The genealogy of slavery


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the Upper South and Louisiana.4 Few of them relied on evidence stretching back to the early colonial era, since the laws were becoming more restric-tive and court decisions prohibited the testimony of African Americans and hearsay testimony. But many of them revealed the histories of black families, their interaction with concerned whites, and the importance of free blacks in seeking to emancipate members of their families and others. During the decades prior to the Civil War, African Americans filed suits claiming they had been freed in a will or deed but not released; were chil-dren of a free woman of color, a white woman, or Indian forebears; resided in a free territory or state where slavery was prohibited; or were imported into certain states contrary to law. Like those from the late eighteenth cen-tury, many of these later cases contain testimony about culture, society, race relations, and the importance of African American women in preserv-ing the genealogy of slavery.5


4 The Upper South consisted of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and, later, Kentucky, Tennessee, the District of Columbia, and Missouri.

5 For many of these nineteenth-century cases, see the Digital Library on American Slavery, http://library.uncg.edu/slavery/, and Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 5 vols. (1926–37; repr., New York, 1968). There is no study of freedom suits in the South during the 1780s and 1790s, but a number of scholars have examined particular locations or states and various related subjects. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); William E. Foley, “Slave Freedom Suits before Dred Scott: The Case of Marie Jean Scypion’s Descendants,” Missouri Historical Review 79, no. 1 (October 1984): 1–23; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986); Suzanna Sherry, “The Early Virginia Tradition of Extratextual Interpretation,” in Toward a Usable Past: Liberty under State Constitutions, ed. Paul Finkelman and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Athens, Ga., 1991), 157–87, esp. 171–78, 184–85; Judith Kelleher Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge, La., 1994); Peter Wallenstein, “Indian Foremothers: Race, Sex, Slavery, and Freedom in Early Virginia,” in The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, ed. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (New York, 1997), 57–73; Christopher Doyle, “Judge St. George Tucker and the Case of Tom v. Roberts: Blunting the Revolution’s Radicalism from Virginia’s District Courts,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 106, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 419–42; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Michael L. Nicholls, “‘The squint of freedom’: African-American Freedom Suits in Post-Revolutionary Virginia,” Slavery and Abolition 20, no. 2 (August 1999): 47–62; Walter Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (June 2000): 13–38; Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862 (Baton Rouge, La., 2003); Jason A. Gillmer, “Suing for Freedom: Interracial Sex, Slave Law, and Racial Identity in the Post-Revolutionary and Antebellum South,” North Carolina Law Review 82, no. 2 (January 2004): 535–619; Eric Gardner, “‘You have no business to whip me’: The Freedom Suits of Polly Walsh and Lucy Ann Delaney,” African American Review 41, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 33–50; Brenda E. Stevenson, “The Question of the Slave Female Community and Culture in the American South: Methodological and Ideological Approaches,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 74–95; C. S. Everett, “‘They shalbe


http://library.uncg.edu/slavery/



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There are several reasons for the significance of black women’s role as the protectors of the family heritage. Unlike English common law, where the condition of the child “dooth follow the state & condition of the father,” state statutes and legal traditions in the United States mir-rored Roman civil law: “quia partus sequitur ventrem” (“offspring follows the womb”).6 As a result, free women gave birth to free children, and it was through female ancestry that slaves could test their freedom in the courts. In addition, while most slave owners, including those of the Boston slaves, might be familiar with the work habits of their black charges, they took only a passing interest in their genealogies. When they did, it was often to locate an absentee slave who might be visiting a loved one. As the suits of the Boston slaves reveal, most owners and members of white families were unsure how slaves were related to one another, especially in past generations.

The american revoluTion and iTs afTermaTh produced momentous changes in the United States—economic, political, social, cultural, intel-lectual, and legal—as the country struggled to come to grips with its status as a new nation. Perhaps no institution changed more than the institution of slavery as it gradually came to an end in New England and some mid-Atlantic states while remaining firmly entrenched in the lower states of the South. As a number of historians have shown, Maryland stood at the cross-roads between slavery and freedom, and for a brief period during the 1780s and 1790s, when the ideals of freedom were in the ascendancy, slave own-ers manumitted thousands of blacks. The manumissions were due in part to the state’s economy, which included a northern tier of counties where wheat and grain farmers did not rely heavily on slave labor and urban cen-

slaves for their lives’: Indian Slavery in Colonial Virginia,” in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Alan Gallay (Lincoln, Neb., 2009), 67–108; Kelly Marie Kennington, “River of Injustice: St. Louis’s Freedom Suits and the Changing Nature of Legal Slavery in Antebellum America” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2009); Gregory Ablavsky, “Making Indians ‘White’: The Judicial Abolitions of Native Slavery in Revolutionary Virginia and Its Racial Legacy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 159, no. 5 (April 2011): 1457–531; Marlin Christopher Barber, “Citizens under the Law: African Americans Confront the Justice System in Kentucky, Missouri, and Texas, 1790–1877” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 2011); Andrew Fede, Roadblocks to Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the United States South (New Orleans, 2011).

6 Henry Swinburne, A Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Last Willes. . . . (London, 1590 [1591]), 44, quoted in Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 43 (“dooth follow”); Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (Cambridge, 2010), 457 (“offspring”). The first law to state that “all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother” was passed in Virginia in 1662. This became the guiding principle in subsequent years. See William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia. . . . (Richmond, Va., 1810), 2: 170, quoted in Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 43–48 (quotation, 43).



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ters such as Baltimore where slaves could bargain for their freedom. In the midst of the manumissions, there were also large numbers of freedom suits, and beginning in the mid-1780s Maryland courts not only allowed hearsay evidence but also permitted free blacks and former slaves to testify.7

With a few exceptions, historians have failed to delve deeply into these suits, the families that brought them, the proceedings in the common-law or chancery courts, or the deeper meanings with regard to family histories among those held in bondage. They have also generally omitted discus-sions of the testimony presented at trial; the backgrounds of the lawyers, witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants; and the role of African American women in presenting detailed genealogies of slave families.8 The struggle of the Boston slaves to obtain free status during this period of transforma-tion symbolizes the high point in the ideals espoused in the fight against Great Britain. It also reveals a legal system that was more egalitarian at that moment than it would be for generations to come.9

7 For the permitting of hearsay evidence, see T. Stephen Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775–1865 (Baltimore, 2007), 80–83. For testimony in freedom suits, see Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860 (Urbana, Ill., 1997), 35–36.

8 Eric Robert Papenfuse, “From Recompense to Revolution: Mahoney v. Ashton and the Transfiguration of Maryland Culture, 1791–1802,” Slavery and Abolition 15, no. 3 (December 1994): 38–62; Kathleen Fawver, “The Black Family in the Chesapeake: New Evidence, New Perspectives,” in Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives, ed. Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault (Lanham, Md., 2006), 51–80; Thomas F. Brown and Leah C. Sims, “‘To Swear Him Free’: Ethnic Memory as Social Capital in Eighteenth-Century Freedom Petitions,” ibid., 81–105; Sue Peabody, “‘Free upon higher ground’: Saint-Domingue Slaves’ Suits for Freedom in U.S. Courts, 1792–1830,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Bloomington, Ind., 2009), 261–83; Sean Condon, “The Significance of Group Manumissions in Post-Revolutionary Rural Maryland,” Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 1 (March 2011): 75–89; Jessica Millward, “‘That All Her Increase Shall Be Free’: Enslaved Women’s Bodies and the Maryland 1809 Law of Manumission,” Women’s History Review 21, no. 3 (July 2012): 363–78.

9 For the secondary literature on Maryland, see Jeffrey R. Brackett, The Negro in Maryland: A Study of the Institution of Slavery (1889; repr., New York, 1969), 152–53; Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 33; Lorena S. Walsh, “Rural African Americans in the Constitutional Era in Maryland, 1776–1810,” Maryland Historical Magazine 84, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 327–41; T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington, Ky., 1997), 63–67; William L. Calderhead, “Slavery in Maryland in the Age of Revolution, 1775–1790,” Maryland Historical Magazine 98, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 303–24, esp. 306–7, 314–18; Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 16–19; Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge, La., 2006), 74; Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009); Max Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790–1860 (Urbana, Ill., 2011), 38–39, 45.




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During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of African Americans in Maryland filed suits similar to those brought by the Boston slaves. The most famous among them were the descendants of Eleanor Butler, or “Irish Nell,” who claimed their freedom because Eleanor was a white woman who in 1681 had married a slave. At the time of the marriage, a 1664 law remanding the wife of such a union to perpetual slav-ery was in effect (though it was soon to be repealed). Although one case in 1770 by a descendant was unsuccessful—the appeals court noting that the 1664 law provided justification—in 1783 the great-granddaughter of Irish Nell, Mary Butler, filed suit on the same grounds and eventually won her freedom as the descendant of a white woman.10 Other families also offered complicated genealogical information about their ancestors stretching back many generations. Successful suits were brought by members of the Shorter, Thomas, Queen, and Toogood families. In each case testimony involved family relationships going back to the seventeenth century and witnesses who recalled what they had heard or had been told or what was common knowledge in the neighborhood concerning the plaintiffs’ distant ancestors. In 1794 Basil Shorter was adjudged free because he was the great-grandson of Elizabeth Shorter, a white woman who married a black man named Little Robin in 1681 “according to the then law.”11 Once this status was established with the testimony of witnesses and court records, other members of the family recovered their freedom. In one case an African American man in the family was deposed concerning his knowledge of the family’s history. In 1808 the great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Shorter was set free even after the Charles County court ruled against her: the tes-timony of one white woman included such phrases as she “did not know

10 Petition of Mary Butler to the General Court of the Western Shore, Maryland, October 1783, in Mary Butler v. Adam Craig, M 11015, case #3, SC, MSA. Related documents that were part of Mary Butler’s case include Transcript of Court Records, 1767–70, ca. 1784–89; depositions of Ann Hedskin (May 27, 1786), John Hooper Broom and Joseph Thompson (May 29, 1786), Jane Howard (Sept. 21, 1767), Ann Whitehorn, Samuel Abell Jr., Nathaniel Suit, William McPherson, Edward Edelen, Benjamin Jameson, Thomas Bowling, William Simpson, Joseph Jameson, and Mary Crosen (all on May 27, 1767), Elizabeth Warren (Sept. 17, 1765), Samuel Love Sr. (Sept. 18, 1765), John Barneson (Sept. 10, 1765); Court Record, Oct. 16, 1770; Court of Appeals Record, October Term 1787, GAA in 1791. See also “Irish Nell Butler,” MSA SC 5496-000534, Archives of Maryland, Biographical Series, July 27, 2011, http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile /msa/speccol/sc5400/sc5496/000500/000534/html/00534bio.html. More information can be obtained by going to the Maryland State Archives website, http://msa.maryland .gov/, and searching for “Irish Nell.”

11 “Basil Shorter against Henry Rozier,” October 1794, in Thomas Harris Jr. and John M’Henry, [comps.], Maryland Reports, Being a Series of the Most Important Law Cases Argued and Determined in the General Court and Court of Appeals of the State of Maryland, from October, 1790, to May, 1797 (New York, 1813), 3: 238–40 (quotation, 3: 239), GAA; “Robert Thomas against the Reverend Henry Pile,” October 1794, ibid., 3: 241, GAA.


http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5400/sc5496/000500/000534/html/00534bio.html

http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc5400/sc5496/000500/000534/html/00534bio.html

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it of her own knowledge” but she “always understood” and heard it said.12 The appeals court reversed the lower court’s verdict and ruled that hearsay evidence was admissible.13

Even unsuccessful plaintiffs called on kin and other African Americans to offer family history testimony on their behalf. Nathaniel Allen, aged about twenty-two, claimed he was “descended from a free Woman.” The petitioner’s mother, aged forty, testified in a deposition that she had Nathaniel by a “Negro Man” and that she was the daughter of Hannah Allen, a mulatto, who was generally considered in the community to be the daughter of a “White Scotch Woman” and a black slave. The petitioner’s grandmother was also deposed and asserted that she always understood “from general Report and believes a White Woman born in Scotland” was her mother, who died before she could remember.14 In this case the defen-dant produced laws passed in 1715 and 1728 making mixed-race descendants of white women who had children by slaves subject to the same punish-ments as white women who gave birth to “mulatto bastards.”15 They were to be sold as servants for seven years and their children were to be bound in servitude until they reached the age of thirty-one. Nathaniel came under these colonial laws and would have to wait until he became thirty-one to achieve free status. The evidence in this case and many others was derived from wit-nesses who related what they had heard others say or what was rumored or reported in the community, evidence dependent on the credibility of some-one other than the person testifying. In some instances witnesses offered double hearsay testimony, a hearsay statement within a hearsay statement. During this period in Maryland, such testimony was often accepted as the only means to sort out the complex genealogies of slavery and freedom.16


12 “Shorter vs. Boswell,” December 1808, in Thomas Harris and Reverdy Johnson, comps., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Appeals of Maryland, in 1806, 1807, 1808, and 1809 (Annapolis, Md., 1826), 2: 359–62 (“did not know,” 2: 360, “always understood,” 2: 359–60). The county court judgment against Shorter was appealed and reversed.

13 Ibid.14 Petition of Nathaniel Allen, Anne Arundel County, Md., to the General

Court of the Western Shore, September 1794, in Nathaniel Allen v. Richard Higgins, M 11015, case #28, SC, MSA (“descended”); deposition of Jane Allen, Sept. 18, 1794, ibid. (“Negro Man”); deposition of Hannah Allen, Sept. 18, 1794, ibid. (“from general Report”); deposition of Nace Allen, Sept. 18, 1794, ibid.; Related Documents: Court Record, September 1794–Nov. 1, 1796, ibid. The white Scottish woman was also named Hannah Allen.

15 Clement Dorsey, The General Public Statutory Law and Public Local Law of the State of Maryland, from the Year 1692 to 1839 Inclusive. . . . (Baltimore, 1840), 1: 29. See also Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,” Journal of Negro History 3, no. 4 (October 1918): 335–53, esp. 342.

16 Petition of Nathaniel Allen, Anne Arundel County, Md., to the General Court of the Western Shore, September 1794, in Nathaniel Allen v. Richard Higgins, M 11015, case #28, SC, MSA; Court Record, September 1794–Nov. 1, 1796, ibid.; depositions




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of Jane Allen, Hannah Allen, and Nace Allen, Sept. 18, 1794, ibid.; “Richard Higgins against Nathaniel Allen,” October 1796, in Harris and M’Henry, Maryland Reports, 3: 504–10; Appellate Court Ruling, June Term 1798, ibid. County court judgment for freedom reversed, appealed, affirmed. See Woodson, Journal of Negro History 3: 342; James M. Wright, The Free Negro in Maryland, 1634–1860 (1921; repr., New York, 1971), 27–28; Catterall, Judicial Cases, 4: 55; William Hand Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland: Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland, April, 1715–August, 1716 (Balti-more, 1910), 30: 289–92.

17 For descriptions of Lenah, see deposition of John Tydings, Oct. 25, 1791, M 11015, cases #12–19, SC, MSA (“yellow”); deposition of Mary Batson, Aug. 7, 1790, ibid. (“bright yellow”); deposition of Richard Watkins, Mar. 10, 1790, ibid. (“brown”); depo-sition of Anne Harwood, July 20, 1789, ibid.; deposition of Elizabeth Rawlings, July 20, 1789, ibid.; deposition of John Welsh, Feb. 3, 1791, ibid.

18 For the land patent, see MPL 4/288–289, 4/519–520, MSA; “Richard Gott” (ca. 1617–ca. 1661), ID I950, Jan. 3, 2009, available through Shakin’ the Family Tree (blog), family tree hosted at RootsWeb, http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm .cgi?db=sharpchick, accessed Mar. 30, 2012.

The narraTive of The BosTon slaves stretched back more than a cen-tury to about 1686, when Maria and her young daughter, Lenah, arrived in Maryland on a slave ship. Although they were of either Spanish or Portuguese descent and freeborn, they were sold as slaves to Robert Lockwood, a farmer in the Swamp. There is no extant description of Maria, but her daughter, as a young woman, was described as “yellow,” “bright yellow,” and “brown,” with long, straight black hair.17 While not definitive, it is likely that Maria too was a person of color, especially considering that she was sold as a slave.

This section of Anne Arundel County was described in an original patent from Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, as six hundred acres of land located on the west side of the Chesapeake Bay, about twenty miles south of Anne Arundel Town, later named Annapolis, and beyond the South River. The patent began “at a marked oak by a Cedar point near the mouth of a Creek running North East and by East by the Herry Creek bay . . . through the swamp.”18 In the following years, this land grant and its surrounding area, with its brackish waters, cedar and cypress trees, and inter-mittent salt- and freshwater marshes and bogs, became known simply as the Swamp. Isolated in a remote area, it drew settlers slowly, but gradually some farmers and stock tenders settled on the more habitable and elevated sections.

A few among them also brought or acquired slaves, some imported from Africa or the West Indies, others purchased from their neighbors in Virginia. The slaves who worked in the Swamp during those early years labored mostly on small farms, clearing the land in areas where the marsh had not intruded, planting corn and vegetables, raising cattle and swine, and cutting cedar and cypress trees. They and their owners sometimes went to nearby islands to cut oak and pine for lumber. Among these slave arrivals were Maria and Lenah, who were acquired by Lockwood. Ironically, much


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19 “Inventory of Robert Lockwood Late of Ann Arundell County decd,” June 13, 1709, in Maryland Prerogative Court (Inventories and Accounts), 1674–1773, vol. 29, roll 68-4, CD no. 1, 1708–9, pp. 270–73 (CD pp. 147–49), MSA, available at http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/prerogative.htm, accessed Mar. 27, 2012 (“Mallatto,” “Negroe”). Apparently Mulatto Moll, whose mother was white and whose father was a black slave, was indentured to Lockwood until she reached age twenty-one. This would have been an unusually long indenture, but perhaps her mother wished to provide some sort of protection for her young children. For early settlers in the Swamp, see Virginia White Fitz, Spirit of Shady Side: Peninsula Life, 1664–1984 (Shady Side, Md., 1984), 2, 5, 40, 49. For the farming and stock raising in the Swamp, see Karen Mauer Green, The Maryland Gazette, 1727–1761: Genealogical and Historical Abstracts (Galveston, Tex., 1989), 114; Chancery Court Record, Mar. 11, 1767, October 1769, Chancery Records, pp. 280–81, MSA; Maryland State Papers (Red Book) 20, item 86 (82); Maryland State Papers (series A) box 11, item 36C, MSA. For descriptions of the Swamp, see Will of Sele Tucker, Jan. 21, 1782, Anne Arundel County Wills TG #1, pp. 117–18, repr. at “Tucker Family of Anne Arundel County, Maryland,” http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry .com/~evekinn/Tucker_1.html, accessed Mar. 30, 2012. The area is still known as the Swamp; see “The Swamp,” http://www.anyplaceamerica.com/topographic_maps/maryland /anne_arundel_county/the_swamp/266-4738/, accessed Apr. 2, 2012. At this time, the use of the Portuguese word Negroe was probably synonymous with slave. See John K. Thornton and Linda M. Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Founda-tion of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007), 244–45.

less is known about Lockwood than about his slaves and his single white indentured servant. In 1683 he served as a witness when a will was probated in Anne Arundel County and in 1709 his estate was inventoried following his death. At that time he possessed “1 Mallatto wo[man] that has 15 yrs. to serve—15 pounds” and “2 Negroe women wth Children at their breasts—60 pounds.” By then, Maria had died and was buried on Lockwood’s farm. The mulatto woman was Mulatto Moll, or Mary Brown, mother of Anne Brown and Mary Batson. One of the “2 Negroe women” was almost cer-tainly Lenah, who, despite her straight hair and “yellow” complexion, was Lockwood’s slave and thus designated in the inventory as “Negroe.”19

Following Lockwood’s death, Lenah became the property first of his widow and then of another family member, upon whose death she passed to a widow named Ann Jones and then to Jones’s son Gassaway Watkins. The fact that she and her children and other kin lived in an isolated part of Maryland during a period when most of the sales and transfers of slaves occurred among slaveholders within Anne Arundel County created a rela-tively stable environment. When the Boston slaves changed hands, they usu-ally became the property of their owners’ family members or other residents of the Swamp. Despite what might be considered an unhealthy environ-ment, the stability meant, as one historian has pointed out, that the native-born populations in the area—both slave and free—lived longer, healthier lives than people elsewhere in Maryland and gave birth to many offspring who survived. The thirteen children of Mulatto Moll and the ten children


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of Lenah were certainly more than the norm but nonetheless reflected the geography and demography of the area of the state in which they lived.20

Of course no one who testified in court during the 1790s had ever seen or met Maria and only a few among them could testify firsthand about her daughter, Lenah, but some witnesses offered information about what they had heard from their parents or other family members. By all accounts Maria was an attractive and dignified presence: she wore good clothing, a gold cross attached to a necklace, gold “bobs” on her ears, and gold rings on her fingers.21 There was general agreement that Maria was of either Spanish or Portuguese heritage. The gold cross suggested that she may have been Catholic. Mulatto Moll’s daughter Mary Batson, a free person of color, recalled that her mother was born on the Eastern Shore, brought to Anne Arundel County when quite young, and raised in the Swamp by Lockwood. Mary often heard her mother say that she knew Maria, who cared for her when she was young, and that she believed Maria should be free. Moreover, the African American women who lived on the Lockwood farm and a few slaveholders who lived in the Swamp said the same: Maria should not have been held in captivity. She died at almost the same time as her owner and was buried on the Lockwood farm with her gold cross on her chest.22

Maria’s daughter, Lenah, remained in bondage throughout her life. She had straight black hair “like the hair of an Indian,” one witness said, and did not have “the looks of a negro or mulatto.”23 Although there was disagreement about her origins, it was clear that she, like her mother, was of Portuguese or Spanish descent; according to a deposition of the son of one of Lenah’s owners as well as a 1747 “certificate,” or affidavit, of slave owner William Foard, she and Maria arrived from Madagascar. A few slave-holding farmers in the Swamp said that she and her mother were likely free at the time of their arrival and later enslaved. Unfortunately, in all of the sworn testimony there was no reference to the type of work Lenah did on the farms of her owners. In fact, the only reference to an occupation of any member of the Boston or Brown families was a description of Mulatto Moll as an excellent seamstress who worked on Foard’s farm, making clothing for his numerous slaves. There was general consensus, however, that Lenah gave birth to ten living children. As she grew older, Lenah stood out in the memories of those who came in contact with her before her death around 1739, including Dinah Watkins, the daughter-in-law of her final owner,

20 Russell R. Menard, “The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730: A Demo-graphic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 32, no. 1 (January 1975): 29–54, esp. 48.

21 Deposition of Anne Brown, ca. 1792, M 11015, SC, MSA.22 Depositions of Mary Batson, Aug. 7, 1790, and Richard Richardson, Mar. 10,

1790, ibid.; Certificate, William Ford [Foard], Aug. 10, 1747, ibid. Mary Batson noted that Maria was buried wearing her necklace with a gold cross.

23 Deposition of John Tydings, Oct. 25, 1791, M 11015, SC, MSA.



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who remembered Lenah vividly from her childhood: Lenah had a unique color and small stature and had great difficulty walking. The white children, Dinah said, made fun of her because of her infirmities.24 Like her mother, Lenah asserted she and her children by all rights ought to be free. On one occasion a young boy overheard the son of her final owner curse “old Lenah, and tell her that she wanted to be free but that she never would.”25

Over the years, Lenah’s children maintained close ties with Mulatto Moll’s children, even after the Boston slaves were dispersed following the death of an owner, or following their transfer to a younger member of a white family. They communicated with each other often, in part because of their relatively close proximity to one another. Nearly all of the Boston slaves and members of the Brown family knew the story of Ned, Lenah’s son, who attempted to gain his freedom by running away. It seems likely that Ned’s belief that he should be free because of his heritage came from his mother, even though the incident occurred several years after her death. Ned was a “yellow fellow a bright mulatto,” one observer said, who had “long hair like a mulatto’s Hair, and as long as he ever saw mulatto’s hair.”26 He was also determined to claim his heritage. In the mid-1740s he demanded that his owner, Thomas Ratcliff, release him, and when his demand was rejected he set out on his own along a road leading to Annapolis. He was captured in London Town, however, and severely whipped. Ned did have an indenture indicating a date when he was to be freed, but after the incident his owner burned the indenture and subjected him to many punishments.27 The incident resulted in the “certificate” signed in 1747 by William Foard, a longtime resident of the Swamp. Asked about Ned’s background, Foard correctly named Ned’s grandmother as

24 For descriptions of Lenah in her later years, see deposition of Richard Richardson, Mar. 10, 1790, ibid.; deposition of Anne Brown, ca. 1792, ibid.; Certificate, William Ford [Foard], Aug. 10, 1747, ibid.; deposition of Dinah Watkins, May 21, 1793, ibid.; deposition of Thomas Gibbs, Nov. 3, 1791, ibid.; deposition of Margaret Gassaway Watkins, May 21, [1793], ibid.

25 Deposition of John Welsh, Feb. 3, 1791, ibid. (quotation); deposition of John Welsh, Feb. 24, 1791, ibid.; John Welch [Welsh], United States Manuscript Population Census (USMSPC), Anne Arundel County, Md., 1790, image 24, http://www.ancestry .com, accessed Mar. 28, 2012; “Will of John Welsh, of the County of Anne Arundell, in the Province of Maryland,” Jan. 6, 1783, Anne Arundel County, Md., Land Office of Maryland, Will #55, MSA, found at “The Welsh Family of Anne Arundel County, Maryland,” http://www.mosesrawlings.freeservers.com/welshfamilyhistory.html, accessed Mar. 28, 2012. For marriage and early family history, see “Welsh Family to Beaver Co. PA. 1796,” posted by Laurel Powell, June 27, 2002, in Welsh Family Genealogy Forum, http://genforum.genealogy.com/welsh/messages/1127.html, accessed Mar. 28, 2012.

26 Deposition of Richard Hopkins, May 21, 1793, M 11015, case #15, SC, MSA (quo-tations).

27 Deposition of Mary Batson, Aug. 7, 1790, M 11015, SC, MSA; deposition of John Norris, Oct. 13, 1792, ibid.


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Maria (the only white witness to do so) and his mother as “Lenna,” but he said that both women had always been slaves.28

Another Boston slave who felt the same way as Ned was Lenah’s grand-son Bacon Boston (the son of her daughter Violet), who labored on the farm owned by Gassaway Rawlings (see Figure II). Like the other owners of Boston slaves, Rawlings would eventually become a large land- and slave-holder during the late eighteenth century, possessing a 450-acre plantation called Larkins Hills and owning twenty-seven blacks. But in 1766, the year Bacon Boston ran away, he was just beginning his economic ascent.29 In May of that year, Rawlings told readers of the Maryland Gazette,

Ran away from the Subscriber, living near Mr. Jonathan Rawling’s, about the Middle of last Month, a Negro Man named Bacon, he is about 6 Feet high; had on and carried away with him, a Fearnought [a heavy wool coat] and two Cotton Jackets, several Shirts, and other Cloaths; and is a bold impertinent Fellow.

Whoever will bring the said Negro to the Subscriber, or secure him in any Jail so as he may be had again, shall receive a Reward of Twenty Shillings Current Money.30

Like other runaways, Bacon was young (in his mid-teens), was considered troublesome, and was quickly caught and returned. At the time, Rawlings owned another Boston slave, Anthony, who was also a son of Violet, and word of Bacon’s bold attempt at freedom spread among family members (Figure III). There is little doubt that such information about lineage and kinship was passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next, oral testi-mony that the Boston slaves were entitled to their liberty as a birthright.

28 Certificate, William Ford [Foard], Aug. 10, 1747.29 For Gassaway Rawlings’s landholdings, see Patented Certificate no. 1297,

Gassaway Rawlings, Dec. 6, 1770, S1189-3366, MSA, http://guide.mdsa.net/series.cfm ?action=viewDetails&ID=S1189-1366, accessed Apr. 30, 2012; Gassaway Rawlings, Larkins Hills, 450 acres, Anne Arundel, Road River Hundred, p. 5, MSA S1161-1-12 1/4/5/44, Maryland Indexes (Assessment of 1783, Index), 1783, MSA S1437. For slavehold-ings, see Gassaway Rawlings, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1800, image 25, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Apr. 30, 2012; Rawlings, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1810, image 14, accessed May 1, 2012. For the list of mortgaged slaves, see Jonathan Waters et al. v. Gassaway Rawlings et al., Aug. 6, 1803, Chancery Court (Chancery Papers), 5593, S512-5705, MSA. See also Edward C. Papenfuse et al., A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789, vol. 1, Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 426 (Baltimore, 1979), 230–31, 346, available on http://aomol.net, accessed Apr. 30, 2012.

30 [Annapolis] Maryland Gazette, May 1, 1766, Supplement, repr. in Lathan A. Windley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790, vol. 2, Maryland (Westport, Conn., 1983), 64 (quotation).


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figure III

Descendants of Lenah’s daughter Violet, including Bacon and Anthony. Names in bold and marked with an asterisk are those who obtained their freedom. Names of owners are listed underneath names of slaves. For a more extensive chart of the Boston slaves’ genealogy, see Genealogy of the Boston Slave Family, ca. 1686–1798, http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Jan14/Schweninger.pdf.





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The Trial Began on novemBer 1, 1791, when eight enslaved plaintiffs and their lawyer filed suit in the General Court of the Western Shore in Annapolis. An equal number of suits were added as the trial proceeded, making a total of sixteen Boston slaves seeking their freedom. At the outset the plaintiffs’ lawyer was George Jenings and the defendants’ was William Cooke. The complaint was simple, only a few lines indicating that the Boston slaves were descendants of Lenah, a free “yellow” woman of Portuguese descent. As would be the case in future freedom suits across the Upper South and in Louisiana, the court then ordered the defendants not to punish the slaves for bringing their suits and to feed and clothe them well, keep them within the state, allow them to consult with their lawyer, and permit them to appear in court as necessary. Chief Judge Samuel Chase, who had signed the Declaration of Independence and would later become an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court, ordered the defendants and their lawyer to appear at the next session. If they failed to do so, he said, it would be “at their own peril.”31 A short time later, two other lawyers joined Jenings to represent the plaintiffs: Gabriel Duvall, who later also became an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court, and William Pinkney, who would soon be appointed by President George Washington as a commissioner to London under the Jay Treaty.32

Among the most telling aspects of the trial, at least with regard to the interconnections of the Boston slaves, was the fact that one to two years before the trial began five members of the owners’ families—Anne Harwood, Elizabeth Rawlings, Richard Watkins, Richard Richardson, and Plummer Iiams—gave depositions. They declared in unison, using virtually the same phraseology, that they had never heard any members of their families who had owned Lenah say that she deserved to be free. She had always been con-sidered a slave for life. Harwood, the daughter of the last owner, echoed these sentiments. She explained that Lenah had died as part of the estate of her father, Gassaway Watkins, and prior to that she was owned by her grand-mother; she had never heard her father or anyone say that Lenah, who was brought to this country “in a Guinea Ship amongst other Slaves and sold as such,” should be free.33 Several of the witnesses added that they did not know any of Lenah’s children or descendants who claimed free status.34

31 Each of the eight initial Boston cases included these words.32 Petitions of John Boston et al. to the General Court of the Western Shore, Md.,

Nov. 1, 1791, M 11015, cases #12–19, SC, MSA; Related Documents: Court Record, 1791–93, ibid. The name Lenah was spelled “Lenar” and “Lener” in two of the petitions.

33 Deposition of Anne Harwood, July 20, 1789, M 11015, SC, MSA.34 Deposition of Elizabeth Rawlings, July 20, 1789, ibid.; deposition of Richard

Watkins, Mar. 10, 1790, ibid.; deposition of Richard Richardson, Mar. 10, 1790, ibid.; deposition of Plummer Iiams, Aug. 4, 1790, ibid. Only one of their ages was specified (Iiams was seventy-two), but judging from their recollections they were all in their six-ties and seventies.



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To counteract these claims, the future plaintiffs also called five wit-nesses. Ann Watkins, a member of a family who owned several Boston slaves, offered testimony that confirmed the complainants’ version of events. In one instance, when Thomas Sprigg came to her mother-in-law’s home, Ann recalled that Thomas asked her if she had heard anything about members of the Boston family seeking their freedom. Her mother-in-law, Margaret Watkins, who died about 1775, told him she had and that “they ought to be free, and that it was their right.”35 Thomas told her to remain silent as he was among the owners. Ann added that her mother-in-law had always maintained that Lenah should never have been enslaved.

The most important early witness on behalf of the plaintiffs, however, was Mary Batson, Mulatto Moll’s daughter and Anne Brown’s older sister, who gave her age as between sixty and seventy, although she was actually about seventy-five. Growing up in the Swamp on the same farm as Lenah and her ten children, she knew them all, naming each of them (see Figure II). She also knew many of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mary said she had often heard her mother say that Lenah was very young when she was brought to this country and that Lenah and her mother were entitled to their freedom. Mary was about fourteen when Lenah died, and Mary’s mother told her that Lenah’s mother was buried on the Lockwood farm. She knew many Boston family members and recounted their struggles for freedom, including those of Daniel, who was eventually set free, and Ned, who attempted to escape but failed and was afterward “used very ill.”36

These pretrial depositions reveal a great deal about the interconnec-tedness among the Boston slaves and the children of Mulatto Moll, how they kept in touch with one another, and how they kept the distant past in their lives, as if they were in some measure living in the past. Certainly, the slaves who filed suits, despite having different owners and living in dif-ferent sections of the Swamp and even beyond, knew about the possibility of freedom. It also seems likely that they knew about other suits by African Americans as well as recent court actions permitting people of color to tes-tify in court against whites. The stories about their heritage and genealogy circulated among those in bondage over many years. It was probably Mary Batson who contacted the first lawyer to prosecute their cause. As a free person of color, she could move about and enter Annapolis unhindered; she had also maintained a lifelong, intimate relationship with the Boston slaves. The timing suggests that the first counsel then contacted the two additional lawyers to take depositions and prepare arguments. The restrictions of bondage failed to inhibit communications among the slaves and Mulatto Moll’s two daughters about their heritage. Together they created a culture

35 Deposition of Ann Watkins, June 4, 1791, ibid.36 Deposition of Mary Batson, Aug. 7, 1790, ibid.




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that made them highly conscious of their past. Thus, the pretrial depositions show a long history of their underlying grievances and a new possibility for a better future, no doubt something many of them had considered for a long period before the filing of their suits. They viewed their status in this man-ner in large measure because they could deploy a knowledge of their geneal-ogy, preserved and perpetuated in oral history by African American women.

The defendanTs in suiTs brought by the Boston slaves included some of the largest slave owners and best-known planters and political leaders in Maryland. Virginia-born John Francis Mercer, who owned five Boston slaves, later served as governor of Maryland. He possessed a large planta-tion and eighty-three slaves. Even before the American Revolution, Richard Sprigg Sr., who owned three members of the family, was described as a gentleman planter, and after the war he possessed a two-thousand-acre estate called the West River Farm in Anne Arundel County, as well as land and farms in three nearby counties and a total of eighty-two slaves. The Mercer and Sprigg families maintained close family ties through marriage, business arrangements, and the ownership of Boston slaves.37 Benjamin

37 Frank F. White Jr., The Governors of Maryland: 1777–1970 (Annapolis, Md., 1970), 47–49; “John Francis Mercer (1759–1821),” MSA SC 3520-904, Archives of Maryland, Biographical Series, Jan. 11, 2005, http://www.msa.md.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500 /sc3520/000900/000904/html/904bio.html (more information can be obtained by going to http://msa.maryland.gov and searching for Mercer’s name); “John Francis Mercer, Maryland,” in “The Founding Fathers: Maryland,” America’s Founding Fathers: Delegates to the Constitutional Convention, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution _founding_fathers_maryland.html, accessed Mar. 27, 2012; John F. Mercer, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1800, image 21, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Mar. 30, 2012; Mercer, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1810, image 19, http://www .ancestry.com, accessed Mar. 30, 2012; Mercer, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1820, image 10, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Mar. 30, 2012. For the Sprigg fam-ily, see Provincial Court (Land Records), 1763–65, vol. 703 of Archives of Maryland Online (2005), 586, MSA, http://aomol.net; Richard Sprigg, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1790, image 25, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Apr. 29, 2012; copy of the last will and testament of Richard Sprigg Sr., 1797, MSS1M5345a108-109, Mercer Family Papers, Virginia Historical Society (VHS), Richmond; Receipt, Richard Sprigg Sr., Executor of Elizabeth Sprigg, Aug. 3, 1791, MSS1M545a89-95, ibid.; Request, Elizabeth Sprigg to Richard Sprigg Sr., Jan. 20, 1796, MSS1M5345a112, ibid.; disposition of slaves, in part for “Mrs. Mercer and Miss Sprigg,” n.d., MSS1M5345a17, ibid.; see also the descrip-tion of the Mercer Family Papers in the VHS’s “Guide to African American Manuscripts,” http://www.vahistorical.org/collections-and-resources/how-we-can-help-your-research /researcher-resources/guides-researchers-2, accessed Mar. 28, 2012. One instance of the close ties between the Mercer and Sprigg families came when Richard Sprigg Sr. gave a copy of his will to John Francis Mercer, providing his friend with instructions about how to emancipate a few loyal slaves, including members of the Boston family. Last will and testament of Richard Sprigg Sr., 1797, MSS1M5345a108-109, Mercer Fam-ily Papers, VHS; “Sprigg, Richard, Jr., (ca. 1769–1806),” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–Present, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay .pl?index=S000752, accessed May 25, 2012; Richard Sprigg, USMSPC, Prince Georges


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Ogle, the son of a colonial proprietary governor who inherited the Belair Estate in Prince Georges County, lived in Annapolis, and he too eventu-ally became governor of Maryland. At one time he owned Tamar Boston and her son Thomas Boston (Figure IV). In 1790 he owned thirty slaves, including house servants in Annapolis and field hands in Prince Georges County. Richard Richardson, the defendant in four cases, was born in Anne Arundel County and listed in the 1776 Maryland colonial census as heading a household in Saint James Parish with his wife and seven chil-dren along with seventeen slaves. By 1790, as a plantation owner, he had increased his slaveholdings to forty-three. The other defendants, while not as wealthy or well-known, nonetheless could be described as prosperous white Marylanders whose slaveholdings and land acquisitions placed them in the upper economic sphere.38

Whatever their backgrounds and property holdings, most of the defen-dants claimed to have no inkling that they had purchased or acquired slaves who might be able to claim their freedom. As revealed in the various depo-sitions, most of them had little knowledge of the family history of their bondservants. It was therefore a shock to be called before the General Court of the Western Shore to respond to questions posed by lawyers represent-ing their human chattel. It was also time-consuming and costly. Most of the defendants could easily afford to lose a few slaves, but there were costs associated with hiring lawyers, deposing witnesses, copying court records,

County, Md., 1790, image 15, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Mar. 31, 2012; Sprigg, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, 1790, image 25, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Apr. 29, 2012; Sprigg, USMSPC, Prince Georges County, Md., 1800, image 17, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Apr. 15, 2012.

38 For Benjamin Ogle, see White, Governors of Maryland, 43–44, also available as “Benjamin Ogle (1749–1809),” MSA SC 3520-946, Archives of Maryland, Biographical Series, Mar. 31, 2009, http://www.msa.md.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520 /000900/000946/html/946bio2.html; “Maryland Governor Benjamin Ogle,” National Governors Association: The Collective Voice of the Nation’s Governors (2011), http://www.nga.org/cms/home/governors/past-governors-bios/page_maryland/col2-content /main-content-list/title_ogle_benjamin.html, accessed Apr. 29, 2012. For a country estate with twenty-six slaves belonging to Ogle, see Ogle, USMSPC, Prince Georges County, Md., 1790, image 20, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Apr. 27, 2012; for a residence with four slaves, see Ogle, USMSPC, Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1790, image 45, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Apr. 29, 2012; for a residence and possession of eleven slaves, see Ogle, USMSPC, Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1800, image 6, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Apr. 27, 2012. For Richard Richardson, see Maryland, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1772–1890, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Mar. 29, 2012; “Leitner Kogl Prideaux and Threlkel Families,” last revised May 10, 2011, hosted at Rootsweb, http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry .com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=AHN&db=marykl&id=I170655, accessed Mar. 29, 2012; Richardson, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1790 and 1800, images 15 and 25, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Mar. 29, 2012.





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figure IV

Descendants of Lenah’s daughter Maria, including Tamar Boston and Thomas Boston. Names in bold and marked with an asterisk are those who obtained their freedom. The name of Tamar’s son who won his freedom from Edward Dorsey was illegible. The four Boston slaves freed by their owners included Jenny’s children Bet and Daniel and her grandchild Charles, who were freed in 1798 by Richard Sprigg Sr.’s will. Names of owners are listed underneath names of slaves. Copy of the last will and testament of Richard Sprigg Sr., 1797, MSS1M5345a108-109, Mercer Family Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond (“yellow”). For a more comprehensive chart of the Boston slaves’ genealogy, see Genealogy of the Boston Slave Family, ca. 1686–1798, http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Jan14/Schweninger.pdf.





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and traveling to Annapolis.39 Fines and court costs could run to hundreds of dollars and sometimes even several thousands. In fact, some owners complained that slaves were instituting suits of dubious merit because they knew it was less costly for their owners to free them than to pay the costs associated with a defense. Edward Dorsey, an ironmaster who owned a son of Tamar (a great-great-grandson of Maria), complained about the cost of defending himself against two non-Boston slaves. Their suits were “uncon[s]titutional and oppre[ss]ive,” he asserted; thus far he had expended more than £250 sterling, or $600, an amount that exceeded the value of the slaves on the open market.40 He went forward with the defense despite the costs because he believed the suits were frivolous. At the same time, defendants were forced to appear in court and sometimes appear with their lawyers when depositions were taken. Some of the depositions were taken before counsel for both parties or simply before a justice of the peace, but others were given in the presence of the defendant.41

Several of the defendants’ witnesses, elderly members of slavehold-ing families, offered confused and contradictory recollections. Richard Watkins, for example, recalled that some fifty years earlier he knew about a slave woman named “Leaner” who belonged to his grandmother Ann Jones until her death, after which she belonged to his father, Gassaway Watkins. She had a dark brown complexion and as far as he knew she never claimed her freedom. When he knew her, she was about sixty years old and very gray. He heard that she had originally arrived “from beyond Sea” on a slave ship, but he never heard that she wore a necklace with a gold cross. He said his father’s heirs did not object to enslaving Leaner’s children for fear that they might claim their freedom. Thus Richard Watkins called Lenah by the name Leaner and conflated her with her mother, Maria, who wore a gold cross.42 Another defense witness, Quaker Richard Richardson (not to be confused with the defendant Richard Richardson), in his seven-ties, provided similarly puzzling testimony. He said Leaner was imported on a “Negro Ship and was sold as a slave and up to the time of her death the said Leaner was always held as a slave.”43 She was owned by Samuel Lockwood and Ann Jones and she never claimed her freedom. Richardson knew five of Leaner’s children, including three owned by his grandfather,


39 Unfortunately, only the court costs for the appeal to the High Court of Appeals were included in the court transcript, and these are undecipherable. The lawyers for the plaintiffs worked pro bono.

40 For Edward Dorsey’s complaint, see Laws of Maryland, Made and Passed at a Ses-sion of Assembly, Begun and Held at the City of Annapolis . . . in . . . One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-Three [Session Laws, 1793] (Annapolis, [1793]), vol. 645 of Archives of Maryland Online (2003), chap. 36 (pp. 24–26), http://aomol.net/ (quotation, p. 24).

41 Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake, 55; Session Laws, 1793, vol. 645, chap. 36 (pp. 24–26), http://aomol.net; deposition of Alice Taylor, June 23, 1792, M 11015, SC, MSA.

42 Deposition of Richard Watkins, Mar. 10, 1790, M 11015, SC, MSA.43 Deposition of Richard Richardson, Mar. 10, 1790, ibid.


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William Richardson. Since Maria had only one child and Lenah had ten, he was speaking of a person whose life experiences more closely matched Lenah’s. But in response to another question he mentioned the slave Lenah: when asked whether he ever knew Lenah’s mother, Richardson responded that Lenah did not have a mother in this country. Like Watkins, he knew Lenah fifty years before, as a very old woman, when she lived with Ann Jones. With the exception of Lenah’s son Ned, he said, none of these slaves ever claimed free status.44

Of course, it might be expected that witnesses deposed so many years after events might contradict one another, garble their facts, and be confused about names. But their testimonies also contained a number of other inac-curacies, especially when whites were trying to remember information about Boston slaves who were owned by friends, neighbors, or distant relatives. Often the deposers recalled conversations of their parents or other fami-ly members when they were children. What they remembered from when they were eight-, ten-, or twelve-year-olds was sometimes vague and often distorted by the passage of time. Even when members of slaveholding fami-lies provided information about their own kin who owned Boston slaves, they were sometimes unsure about how the slaves might be related to one another. Two defense witnesses, the oldest to testify at ages seventy-seven and eighty-seven, recalled many people—black and white—who lived in the Swamp during the early years of the eighteenth century, including Mulatto Moll and her children, but they had never heard anyone speak of a woman named Lenah, much less her descendants’ right to freedom.45

afTer The Trial Began, the plaintiffs called five more witnesses—both white and black—to rebut the arguments offered by the defendants’ coun-sel. Several were called to offer character references, defending whites who spoke on behalf of the plaintiffs. Joseph Cowman, a Quaker, defended his neighbor Ann Watkins against the accusation that she did great harm to her neighborhood by allowing slaves to gather at her home at night, “in numbers,” to hear black preachers.46 Of significant importance as the trial

44 Ibid.45 For vague recollections, see deposition of Dinah Watkins, May 21, 1793, M 11015,

SC, MSA; deposition of Thomas Gibbs, Nov. 3, 1791, ibid.; deposition of Margaret Gassaway Watkins, May 21, [1793], ibid.; deposition of Richard Hopkins, May 21, 1793, ibid. For the two defense witnesses who had never heard of Lenah, see deposition of Alice Taylor, June 23, 1792, and deposition of Benjamin Atwell, May 21, 1792, M 11015, SC, MSA. Atwell was listed in the 1776 Maryland census as living in St. James Parish; in 1778 he took the Oath of Fidelity, and in 1790 he was cited in the census with no slaves and five whites in the household. He was illiterate. See references to Benjamin Atwell in Maryland, Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1772–1890, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Mar. 29, 2012; Benjamin Atwell, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1790, image 11, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Mar. 29, 2012.

46 For criticism of Ann Watkins, see deposition of Thomas Gibbs, Nov. 3, 1791, M 11015, SC, MSA (quotation); for Joseph Cowman’s defense of her, see deposition of






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Cowman, May 25, 1793, ibid. According to the 1790 census, Cowman, despite being a Quaker, was listed as possessing eleven slaves; even before the American Revolution, he lived very close to Watkins, who possessed four slaves. Joseph Cowman, USMSPC, Anne Arundel County, Md., 1790, image 14, http://www.ancestry.com, accessed Apr. 23, 2012.

47 For testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, see testimony of Benjamin Carr, Oct. 16, 1792, M 11015, SC, MSA; deposition of William Harwood, May 25, 1795, ibid.

48 Deposition of Mary Farro, May 21, 1793, ibid.49 Deposition of Bacon Boston, June 15, 1793, found in Philip Boston v. Richard

Sprigg, M 11015, case #12, SC, MSA.


progressed was the testimony of sixty-two-year-old Benjamin Carr, who had known Mary Batson for many decades, including ten years she spent living on his plantation. Everyone who knew her, Carr explained, said she was a woman of honesty, integrity, and veracity. The other whites who offered their views in favor of freedom were sometimes as vague as witnesses for the defense. One old lady in the Swamp had told a witness many years before that she had heard rumors that some people of color in the area were entitled to their freedom.47 Mary Farro, whose mother was a Ratcliff and lived in the Swamp near Ann Jones, said that her mother, who passed away in 1790, told her that Lenah was “as free as she was.”48

The third African American to testify, Bacon Boston, was deposed in 1793 when he was about forty. Like Anne Brown and Mary Batson, Bacon explained the genealogy of various family members. He was the son of Violet, or Vi, who was, “as this deponent has always understood,” the daughter of Lenah (see Figure III). The affiant (as those who gave deposi-tions were called) added that his nephew Richard Boston, who petitioned against Joshua Warfield, was the son of his sister Dorcas, or Darkey. He mentioned several other nephews as well as more distant relatives who should be freed. Though he did not remember that his mother had a sister named Maria, after her grandmother, Bacon’s testimony added many perti-nent facts to the Boston slaves’ family tree.49

By far the most compelling, factual, and accurate testimony was sup-plied by Anne Brown, who not only filled in the gaps in others’ testimony and argued against the witnesses who presented depositions on behalf of the slaveholding families but also cited a number of Boston slaves who had pre-viously won their freedom. More than any other witness, she spoke directly from her own knowledge and experience and made every effort to avoid hearsay evidence, although she described the first Maria from information supplied to her by Lenah and a few whites of her childhood. Anne provided detailed kinship evidence about mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, great-uncles, great-aunts, and second cousins. She talked about Violet and Daniel, children of Lenah, as well as Violet’s daughter Nanny and Nanny’s daughter Betty Boston, Lenah’s great-grandchild (see Figure III). She also mentioned John and Philip Boston, children of Nelly, who was the daughter of the second Maria, Lenah’s daughter (see Figure IV); Anne said that she was born on the same plantation as Nelly and knew





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50 Depositions of Anne Brown, ca. 1792 (twice), 1793 (twice), Oct. 17, 1795, June 3, 1797, M 11015, SC, MSA.

51 Harris and M’Henry, Maryland Reports, 3: 139–40 (quotations, 3: 139); Catterall, Judicial Cases, 4: 3, 51.

52 Records of the General Court of the Western Shore, Md., Court Record, 1791–95, M 11015, cases #12–19, SC, MSA. Each case concerning the Boston slaves concluded with these same words.

53 Twenty-three Boston slaves obtained their freedom through the suits, though Guy Boston, one of the plaintiffs, died before the High Court’s decision. In addition, Lenah’s son Daniel was set free by Samuel Watkins, and Richard Sprigg Sr., who died in 1798, bequeathed three Boston slaves their freedom at the request of his wife: Bet Boston; Bet’s son, Charles; and her brother Daniel. The total of Boston slaves freed over the years, therefore, was twenty-six. See last will and testament of Richard Sprigg Sr., 1797, MSS1M5345a108-109, Mercer Family Papers, VHS. For Daniel Boston, see deposi-tion of Plummer Iiams, Aug. 4, 1790, who testified in open court that a member of his family married a member of the Watkins family and that he learned from that member about Daniel’s obtaining his freedom from Samuel Watkins.

her very well, from the time Anne was a little girl until Nelly’s death some-time between 1777 and 1781. Indeed, Anne’s remarkable memory and life-long relationships with the Boston slaves provided an extraordinary picture of five generations of family members.50

To permit both sides time to submit their evidence, the trial dragged on for four years. During this period Chief Judge Samuel Chase and the two associate judges of the General Court accepted the testimony of free blacks and allowed hearsay evidence. In the midst of the trial, in 1793, Anthony Boston won his freedom in the General Court. Anthony was “a descendant of Violet, the daughter of Linah, the daughter of Maria,” a Spanish woman, the judges said. Maria “was not a slave, but free; there-fore, it is considered by the court, that the said Anthony Boston be free and discharged from all further servitude.”51 Anthony’s suit, filed in 1790 in the Anne Arundel County Court, could well have been a test case for the other Boston slaves. On October 13, 1795, the General Court issued its decree in the sixteen cases under consideration: the arguments by both sides had been carefully and fully heard, the court said, and after “mature deliberation” it decided that the plaintiffs were entitled to their freedom, “being descended from a free yellow woman.”52 A week later, the attorney for John Francis Mercer and Richard Sprigg Sr. appealed to the Maryland High Court of Appeals, forwarding copies of the depositions and other evidence for its consideration. In 1797 the High Court affirmed the lower court’s decision without issuing a formal opinion. With this decision, as well as four manu-missions by owners and a few other court cases, a total of twenty-six Boston slaves acquired their freedom (Figure V; see Figures II–IV).53

slaves in maryland conTinued To sue slave oWners for their freedom in subsequent years, but even as the Boston slaves’ trial drew to a close, the Maryland Assembly passed a law in 1796 stipulating that such suits could



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54 Robert M. Ireland, The Legal Career of William Pinkney, 1764–1822 (New York, 1986), 3. Three Supreme Court justices—Samuel Chase, Gabriel Duvall, and Thomas Johnson—had been judges on the General Court of the Western Shore. See “Duvall, Gabriel, (1752–1844),” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide .congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=D000578, accessed Mar. 21, 2013; “Chase, Samuel, (1741–1811),” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide .congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=c000334, accessed Mar. 21, 2013; “Johnson, Thomas, (1732–1819),” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide .congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=J000175, accessed Mar. 21, 2013.


not originate in the General Court of the Western Shore, considered by many observers as “the most prestigious judicial body in the state.”54 In the future the contests would be adjudicated in the county of the plaintiff’s residency. In addition, both plaintiffs and defendants could request a jury trial, appeals could be made only “as to matters of law,” and if a freedom suit was dismissed and brought again by the same party, the court could

figure V

Descendants of Lenah’s daughter Sarah. Names in bold and marked with an asterisk are those who obtained their freedom, though Guy Boston died during the appeals process. There were four suits against Richard Richardson. In all, not including Guy Boston, twenty-six Boston slaves obtained their freedom, whether through the courts or through manumission by their owners. For a more detailed chart of the Boston slaves’ genealogy, see Genealogy of the Boston Slave Family, ca. 1686–1798, http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Jan14/Schweninger.pdf.


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order a stay until the court costs of the first case had been paid. Lastly, free blacks could no longer testify against whites.55

The legal technique that both the Boston slaves and the defendants relied on was the use of hearsay evidence. A few years after the suc-cesses of the Boston slaves and other families, Maryland attorney general Luther Martin expressed his outrage that courts accepted such testimony. “Our courts have determined that general reputation, that such persons are descended from white women, or that they have exercised the right of freedom, is evidence to the jury,” he asserted. “It is giving the power to ignorant persons to judge of rights.” He then mentioned the Butler, Toogood, and Queen families, noting that members of the Queen family argued ancestral connections with native Indians of South America. “In all these,” he observed, “and in many other similar cases, hundreds of negroes have been let loose upon [the] community by the hearsay testimony of an obscure illiterate individual.”56 For Martin and other proslavery advocates, freedom suits posed a grave risk to slave owners and their right to possess human property. Although he did not mention the Boston slaves, the last rebuke appeared to be aimed directly at Anne Brown.

More than a decade after the attorney general’s remarks, in 1813, the United States Supreme Court ruled on a suit brought by an enslaved woman named Mima Queen and her daughter, taken on appeal from the District of Columbia Circuit Court. Queen and her lawyer, Francis Scott Key, told the court that her ancestor, Mary Queen, was brought to America many decades before as a free woman but was sold into servitude for seven years. She, like Maria Boston, wore fine clothes. At trial one witness confirmed the truth of this story, which his mother had told him she had heard from her father; two others said that they heard reports from a number of people in the neighborhood corroborating the claim but could not identify who gave these reports. The defense objected to this testimony and the court sustained the objections. When the court ruled in favor of the defendant, the plaintiffs filed a writ error. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the majority opinion. He admitted there were certain exceptions to the hearsay rule, including evidence about reputation in the neighborhood that could reveal pedigree (ancestral relationships), but such evidence could not extend to an individu-al’s status as an enslaved or free person. The testimony that Mima Queen was free was intrinsically weak and failed to verify the underlying facts. It was thus “totally inadmissible.” He affirmed the lower court’s ruling.57

55 “An Act relating to negroes, and to repeal the acts of assembly therein men-tioned,” in Laws of Maryland, Made and Passed at a Session of Assembly, Begun and Held at the City of Annapolis . . . in . . . One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-Six (Annapolis, Md., [1797]), chap. 67, esp. clause 23 (quotation).

56 Mahoney v. Ashton, Md., 4 Har. and McH. 63, October 1797; ibid. 295, June 1802, in Catterall, Judicial Cases, 4: 53–55 (quotations, 4: 54), 4; Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake, 82.

57 Mima Queen and Child, Petitioners for Freedom, v. Hepburn, 1813, in B. R. Cur-tis, [comp.], Reports of Decisions in the Supreme Court of the United States: With Notes, and a Digest, 5th ed. (Boston, 1870), 2: 535–39 (quotation, 2: 537).



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One of the lawyers for the Boston slaves, Gabriel Duvall, who had become an associate justice on the Supreme Court, had fought for many years against what some authors have called the counterrevolution follow-ing the American Revolution, as white Marylanders sought to solidify the “peculiar institution” in the Upper South. In his dissent from Marshall’s opinion, Duvall wrote that in Maryland many claims for freedom could only be proved with hearsay evidence because no living evidence existed. This type of testimony was affirmed by the unanimous opinion of the High Court of Appeals after full and fair argument by the ablest counsel at the bar. “If the ancestor neglected to claim her right, the issue could not be bound by length of time, it [freedom] being a natural inherent right,” Duvall believed. The reason for admitting hearsay evidence was much stronger in freedom suits than in cases concerning pedigree (lineage) or land boundaries. “It will be universally admitted,” he noted, “that the right to freedom is more important than the right of property.”58

WiTh regard To african americans, many white southerners would have taken exception to this final contention. Even so, for a brief period the courts of Maryland not only permitted hearsay evidence but also allowed free blacks and former slaves to testify. There is little doubt that the legal system played an important role, as did the judges who permitted hearsay evidence to be introduced and ruled in the slaves’ favor. But the struggles of the Boston family tell historians more about race, slavery, the law, and the genealogies of slavery and freedom than would be apparent simply by studying legal issues. Freed blacks and slaves were instrumental in bringing their plight to light, and their efforts show how events were both shaped and reshaped by ordinary people. It goes without saying that Anne Brown was a remarkable woman with an extraordinary memory. But her depo-sitions and those of her sister Mary Batson and the former slave Bacon Boston reveal a great deal about the society in which they lived. In fact, it appears that their knowledge of slave-owning families was about as great as their knowledge of the relationships between members of their own families. At the same time, slaveholders’ knowledge of their own human property or of the slaves of their neighbors and friends was limited. This is probably to be expected, since most owners viewed their slaves as property, but what is surprising is how African American women built a culture and society around the issues of family heritage and freedom, communicated with various family members, and kept hope alive among many of the

58 For the full text of this case, see “Mima Queen v. Hepburn—11 U.S. 290 (1813),” Feb. 5, 1813, U.S. Supreme Court Center, http://supreme.justia.com/us/11/290/case.html, accessed Mar. 27, 2013 (quotations); see also “Mima Queen and Child, Petitioners for Freedom, v. Hepburn,” Feb. 5, 1813, Legal Information Institute, http://www.law.cornell .edu/supremecourt/text/11/290. For a synopsis, see Mima Queen and child v. Hepburn, D.C., 7 Cranch 290, February 1813, in Catterall, Judicial Cases, 4: 4, 165–66.


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descendants. The final decision of their fate occurred more than a century after the progenitors of the Boston slaves arrived in Maryland, yet the fact that so many suits were filed from different settings against different owners exposes the power and strength of that culture. It was not a black culture but rather a family culture; it was not a separate culture but an inclusive one that extended to slaves, free people of color, and southern whites who sympathized with their plight. In this culture African American women played a pivotal role as keepers of an ancestral history, unwilling to let it die even under the severest conditions. Oral history bound the Boston and the Brown families together over an entire century, giving them a great deal of strength in the knowledge of their past.59

59 Of course, not all the descendants of Maria and Lenah became free; in the early nineteenth century, many family members remained in bondage. Indeed, some members of the Boston family probably remained in slavery until the Civil War, as sug-gested by an 1862 letter from runaway slave John Boston to his wife, Elizabeth Boston, who lived in Owensville, Md., very near the Swamp. Fleeing from slavery, John Boston found refuge with a New York regiment in Upton Hill, Virginia, where he wrote this letter to his wife in Owensville:

My Dear Wife it is with grate joy I take this time to let you know Whare I am i am now in Safety . . . this Day i can Adress you thank god as a free man I had a little truble in giting away But as the lord led the Children of Isrel to the land of Canon So he led me to a land Whare fredom Will rain in spite Of earth and hell Dear you must make your Self content i am free from al the Slavers Lash . . . I am With a very nice man and have All that hart Can Wish But My Dear I Cant express my grate desire that i Have to See you i trust the time Will Come When We Shal meet again And if We dont met on earth We Will Meet in heven Whare Jesas ranes.

John Boston to his wife, Jan. 12, 1862, National Archives, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780’s–1917, available at “Free at Last: John Boston—An Escape from Slavery, 1862,” Eyewitness: American Originals from the National Archives, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/eyewitness/html.php?section=9, accessed Apr. 8, 2012. According to the National Archives website, “There is no evidence that Elizabeth Boston ever received this letter. It was intercepted and eventually forwarded to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.” The probability is great that John Boston was a member of the Boston kinship group: the surname was very unusual if not unique, he lived near the Swamp, and his given name, though common, was also in the Boston family tree. For the struggles of other probable members of the kinship group during the 1850s, see Petition of Daniel Boston to the Orphans Court of Anne Arundel County, Md., August 1853, in Register of Wills, 1851–1874 (Petitions and Orders), Daniel Boston v. Henry Owens and Robert Gale, microfilm CR 63,128, pp. 39–40, MSA. In February 1859 the Baltimore City Criminal Court ordered Maria Boston, a woman of color, to be sold as a slave for a term of four years. A few weeks following her sale for thirty-one dollars, Maria ran away, but she was soon captured and received an extension of her term of ser-vitude. See William E. Beale to the Orphans Court of Baltimore City, Maryland, Mar. 21, 1859, M 11026, case #4239-14-294, SC, MSA.


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