Dr. Schweninger, I Presume: Maryland Slave Petitions

Dr. Loren Schweninger

This past week I returned to the depths of the Dr. Loren Schweninger Collection. This artificial collection, which I’ve previously talked about, is one of the results of over a decade of research and grant funded support to remove the mask of slave history in government records. The product of this effort at the Maryland State Archives is a scanned microfilm collection of (primarily) court documents concerning free blacks and enslaved Marylanders who challenged enslavement through legal avenues. Although greyscale scans of the microfilm scans are legible, I found that scanning the original documents provided a richer and easier to read picture: All document images in this blog are from these new scans.

At the time the Race and Slavery Petitions Project was launched in 1991, Dr. Loren Schweninger was a member of the Department of History at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The project located, collected, organized, and published all pertinent legislative petitions from the fifteen slave states and the District of Columbia.

Schweninger’s petitions project received multi-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. In 2000 the project received a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a Digital Library on American Slavery. Many counties and Baltimore City are expressly cited in the austere Schweninger HTML finding aid but Queen Anne’s County—the subject county of my first presentation this February—is not. The DLAS allows me to selectively choose cases originating from a specific county without examining every image linked in the finding aid.

Dr. Schweninger found fifteen pertinent instances or references to slave petitions in the COURT OF APPEALS (Judgments, Eastern Shore) S380 series alone. Until the Constitution of 1850 (the official printer of its debates was William McNeir, the subject of my last research project) Maryland divided much of its governance between the Eastern and Western Shores because of an archaic custom dating back to colonial period resentments. Although Annapolis was the seat of state government, offices like the Treasurer and the Court of Appeals had separate jurisdictions for each side of the bay. By using the DLAS I was brought to “George Walls v. Henny Hemsley and her children” in series S380. The preliminary description and citation of the case was intriguing but ultimately misleading. Filed on May 1, 1815, the petition description reads:

“Henny Hemsley and her children state they are unjustly held in slavery by George Walls, who is currently in Maryland, but who is a resident of Kentucky. The petitioners claim they are entitled to their freedom because they are ‘descended on the female line from a free woman named Susan.’”

Upon examining the source I realized the petition was a ghost. The original petition, unfound or perhaps lost, existed with other documents as a transcript in series S380 for the June term 1817. Since the transcript carried full legal weight, any distinction between the original petition and the transcript was moot. Besides, this transcript summarized several documents probably otherwise trapped inside the QUEEN ANNE’S COUNTY COURT (Judgments) or (Judgment Record) series. The DLAS indicated that the petition was “granted; appealed; reversed; affirmed”; I interpreted this to mean the freedom petition was granted, appealed by George Walls, reversed by the Court of Appeals, and then reaffirmed following the slave Hemsley’s own appeal.

The story given in the petition was, to say the least, astounding and horrifying.

Henny Hemsley was a mulatto slave with three children. In 1815 Hemsley's counsel William Carmichael petitioned the Queen Anne's County Court to release her and her family of bondage to George Walls of Kentucky. Hemsley's petition claimed that she and her daughters Susan, Juliana, and Priscilla were "descended on the female line from a free woman named Susan" and, since slave status was passed matrinlineally, entitled to their freedom. The case hinged on the testimony of witnesses Greenberry Griffin and John Denny.

Greenberry Griffin gave testimony of how the elder Susan was illegally enslaved. In the weeks leading to the surrender of British forces at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, Griffin travelled with Captain James Sweat to the James and York rivers in Virginia. Following the surrender, Griffin saw Susan "selling cakes and beer without controul" at the Gosport Shipyard and thereafter repeatedly on the shore of the York River until Captain Sweat left the area. Several men took Susan aboard Sweat's vessel and sold her to him; she was a replacement for another black woman who was released because of her "cries and screams." Captain Sweat informed her that he would make her his wife. She protested the kidnapping and claimed she was a free woman and already married to a white man in Virginia. Although Griffin testified that he did not remember sharing this story with other persons, he admitted hearing others talk about it.

These snippets describe Captain Sweat's motives for the kidnapping and Susan's protests

A second witness named John Denny lived in the immediate neighborhood of Captain Sweat and, since Captain Sweat and his brother Bartus were deceased, testified to what the community knew of Susan. He recalled hearing Susan telling his mother that she was "free in Virginia and to have been stolen from thence by Captain Sweat." Upon being asked if Susan's kidnapping was common knowledge, Denny claimed it was the "reputations of the neighbourhood that...Susan was a free woman."



"Judg.t Reversed on 1.st Exception and aff.d on 2.nd June Term 1817"

The jurors ruled in Hemsley's favor. Walls' counsel made two exceptions and appealed the decision on the grounds that the judge 1) allowed John Denny to use neighborhood gossip regarding Susan in his testimony and 2) did not allow declarations by Susan's deceased owner John Gibson to be admitted as evidence. The Court of Appeals for the Eastern Shore affirmed the Queen Anne's County Court's decision regarding the former owner Gibson but reversed the decision regarding Captain Sweat's neighbor, Denny. It ordered a "new trial...in the same manner as if no trial had taken place or any appeal had been prosecuted." After checking the recto of the judgment transcript I immediately realized that the “…reversed; affirmed” description provided by the Digital Library on American Slavery referred to these two exceptions and not the ultimate verdict. That meant Hemsley and her daughters may well have been freed!

Unfortunately I did not find information confirming nor denying that the Hemsleys were freed. I found no census information of other corroborating sources for them, Captain Sweat, George Walls, or Susan’s former owner John Gibson nor an account of this new trial in the Queen Anne’s County Court series. Since an index for the court does not exist, I scanned individual court dockets for every term from October 1817 to October 1819; I found nothing. I chose a new tack and looked for manumission records instead. I found nothing in the land records where manumissions were often recorded. Fortunately I remembered that Queen Anne’s is one of four counties that have a freedom records index. The freedom records indices span several record types covering manumissions written in state records, wills, land records, and Certificates of Freedom; the Certificates of Freedom were applied for by free colored persons who wanted proof that they were not slaves; such a document would have prevented or ended Susan’s captivity by Captain Sweat. Index 39 had certificate citations for Henny and her daughters Juliana and Priscilla. Henny successfully applied for one on April 30, 1836 and her daughters followed up on May 13.

From these certificates I learned that Henny was not even five feet tall and, despite being described as a “mulatto” (their emphasis) in the Court of Appeals transcript, she was nevertheless called “dark.” Her daughters were similarly short but described as “light.” Priscilla had a scar on her forehead and another on her right ankle “occasioned by a burn.” Given their ages at application time I learned that Henny was probably born in 1791, Juliana in 1814, and Priscilla (called “Priscy” in her record) in 1815—the same year Henny petitioned for freedom. I found no such certificate for her daughter Susan but, since her name seems to always precede her siblings’, I suspect she was the eldest.

There were a number of gaps in the narrative that I am sorry I cannot fill. Given the record keeping practices of the time or twists of fate, I know nothing of Captain Sweat and Henny’s mother Susan beyond the Court of Appeals transcript. The Certificates of Freedom state the Hemsleys were freed on May 1, 1818—the first term of the Queen Anne’s County Court—but I found no record that the retrial ever took place. With a specific date in hand I checked the May 1818 docket a third time but still found nothing.

Census information for the Hemsleys was difficult to find because, as women, their identities were obfuscated by the socio-sexual conventions of the 19^th century. Until 1850, censuses only recorded the head of the household’s name and the number of other persons by age, sex, and caste (i.e. slave or free). The only ways I could quickly locate Henny and her daughters were if I knew the name of any husbands they had or they never married at all. There was never a reference to Henny’s paternity. Given Captain Sweat’s intention to make Susan his wife I could have ruled him in or out if he died after or before Henny’s birth year. The paternity of Henny’s daughters is almost certainly white.

Perhaps to ameliorate my disgust for the chain of events that brought Henny to the Court of Appeals I imagine she had a consensual arrangement with her owner but, upon his death or insolvency, petitioned for her and her children’s freedom so they would not leave their home state. I cannot prove this of course but it is a more pleasant scenario.

Alex Champion--Maryland State Archives