Reappraisal

Dr. Loren Schweninger 

 It was an eventful time at the Maryland State Archives these past two weeks. Although I gave my final Queen Anne’s County presentation over a week ago, I can still feel its effects on my daily work. My typical day revolves around researching slave freedom petitions from the Dr. Loren Schweninger Collection—a topic I have talked about at length in this blog—but lately I have been through ongoing communication with the Maryland State Archivist, Dr. Ed Papenfuse. His interest in these presentations on the Eastern Shore bumped up the priority of the Schweninger collection reappraisal.

When Dr. Papenfuse, commonly called “Ed” in the context of archivists and historians in Maryland, learned I was utilizing the Schweninger Collection for meaty historical research during my nine month fellowship he also asked me to examine the collection for gaps. Recap—Dr. Loren Schweninger is a historian and associate of Ed. His eponymous collection, or at least the digital proxy that I’m examining, are digitized scans of microfilm created in the mid-1990s. The microfilm followed a citation list based on research Dr. Schweninger and others performed on-site. They span thirty-five agencies of state and county government from the War of Independence to the eve of Civil War. Although some are scribed on official-looking, uniform sheaths of cloth-like paper, many are loose, irregular, and include affixed newspaper clippings announcing slave or estate sales. Oftentimes these records duplicate content in clerk produced copies like photocopies or e-mail attachments today; I expect these ultra official records were not examined as closely by Schweninger because the manner with which the court tried petitions favored record creation and filing in the unbound papers rather than those materials destined for the big books.

The collection exists in three forms in order of increasing accessibility: As an abstract collective of citations while the records span dozens of shelves, stacks, and up to four floors. As a collection of microfilm. As a digitized collection on MSA servers that can be reached via a simple HTML finding aid written by Ed. He clearly valued the collection because, as I recently learned, he did the coding himself on his own time. The finding aid, which is one of three intellectual access points, is arranged alphabetically by agency and provides links to the opening pages of the digitized film the records inhabit. The remaining two access points are Collection and Microfilm inventories, which provide intellectual access and microfilm navigation respectively. Collection inventory breaks the film down intellectually and groups the content by agency regardless of its film reel, much like Ed’s finding aid, although my early efforts to sort through the collection proved the finding aid’s content was based on the Microfilm inventory.

Following my research work on William McNeir, a special Research Department project, and the bustle of public presentations, I returned to Schweninger. After several e-mails and a meeting with Ed I devised a method to perform my task. I drafted and shared an online spreadsheet tracking my reappraisal of Schweninger to verify its completeness and provide URLs for the start and end points of each case. Each reel begins with target sheets declaring the forthcoming slide contents and individual target cards declaring the catalog number, agency, description, and other metadata particular to that petition or case. Currently the only way to view a particular case is to click a link for the entire film and scroll through perhaps hundreds of images until you reach your desired target card.

Now, halfway through the reels, I can safely say the vast majority of the collection is as it should be. Although rare, the most common annoyance is a missing or errant target card separating each case; the necessary examination of the combined or mislabeled cases is a necessary kink in my workflow because it prevents my slipping into a “scan, ctrl-c, ctrl-v” stupor. Only two cases out of several hundred are missing. A clerical error on the Microfilm inventory in the Special Collections catalog describes a petition that does not exist on the scans and shares an identical classification number with a case that does exist. This error is repeated on the finding aid but not the Collection inventory catalog. Once I complete my survey and retrieve the truant records I can fix this problem and many others.

Alex Champion--Maryland State Archives

Perils of Leadership: The Law Takes Slaves from a Maryland First Family



In school I learned that historians use archives to compile evidence or find illustrative examples of a much longer case they are making. Genealogists, who are historians with a narrower interest, meanwhile consult indexes or other records looking for very particular items (usually names) and then move on. In the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project at the Maryland State Archives we perform a hybrid type of work that, on the ground anyway, resembles genealogical research—only in reverse.

 Genealogists often start their research with the names of their extended family in hand and work from there. Although case studies built around runaway ads start with names and locations just as genealogists do, the richest case studies start by examining attractive records themselves like a historian might. Freedom petitions from the Schweninger Collection, United States Colored Troops muster rolls and court cases on slave crimes have a wealth of information about slaves and former slaves; these are not stepping stones but rather the origin of our work. From here we use these names to search the indexes just like genealogists would. But rather than assemble a family tree, we are using state and municipal records to expose a history of an exploited racial class, like a historian would. If the groundwork of LOSIM is genealogy reverse, the collectivities of research that LOSIM compiles are itself the long case that historians make.

William Paca's portrait by Charles Wilson Peale

Coincidentally, the raw Schweninger Collection was compiled in a similar manner as a genealogist looking for the names of ancestors. Since it is a research collection of sources rather than a collection of Dr. Schweninger’s notes or compositions, it is reminiscent of a fishing trawler scooping up any and all information it can about slaves (voluntarily or involuntarily) involved in court cases. From these resources I think I made an original discovery about one of America's founding fathers, Maryland Governor William Paca.

It was with a certain giddy excitement that I read Robert Moody’s freedom petition. [See the post “Moody Moments”; January 13, 2013] The blossoming research geek within me was challenged by the dearth of corroborating materials in the census, court and probate records, but stimulated by the implications of the unspoken subplot unfolding before me.

Robert Moody was a slave of Richard Jones in the early 19th century. In May, 1803 Moody challenged his bondage by Jones and submitted his freedom petition to the Queen Anne's County Court. Following multiple continuances, the case was heard in May, 1812; using transcripts from three successful cases spanning courts across Maryland, Moody and his counsel William Carmichael successfully petitioned for his freedom by proving his descent from a free Indian woman named Mary or Moll. His case is an example of the complex legal environment of slavery and the legal means to escape it.

The State of Maryland officially discouraged activities that created familiarity and racial or class equality between whites and blacks but these laws were not unbending and ultimately aided Moody. A 1681 law governed the relationships between white servants and slaves by carrying a penalty of 10,000 pounds of tobacco for any priest marrying a "ffreeborne Englishe or white woman" and an African slave. This same law however stipulated that "all Children borne of such ffreeborne women, soe manymitted & ffree as aforesaid shall bee ffree as the women soe married"; this legal discrepancy between mulattoes borne of free mothers with slave fathers and mulattoes borne of free fathers and slave mothers essentially transferred freedom through the maternal line no matter how many generations removed and, if proven, invalidated bondage.

Moody vs. Jones

As of 1810 Richard Jones owned approximately sixty-two slaves in his Queen Anne's County property, including Moody. Attempting to abort the petition process, Jones' attorney argued that Moody "ought not to have or maintain his Petition against [Jones] because he saith that the said Robert Moody on the day of proposing the petition...was a slave" and was willing to verify this. Moody's attorney William Carmichael responded that Moody was a "free man and of free condition, and not a slave" and thus not precluded. Perhaps little more than a gesture in the dramaturgical interplay of the court room, Jones' attorney simply reiterated his argument that Moody was in fact a slave. By neglecting this opening gambit he would probably harm his own case.

Carmichael presented records of three cases as evidence that Moody was legally entitled to freedom: Thomas Carver against Samuel Lloyd Chew, Rachel Baker and others against John Paca, and Margaret Creek against William Wilkins.

Carver vs. Chew

The 1794 case of Carver vs. Chew relied on the testimony of Queen Anne's County residents, especially those familiar with Wye Island, but also crossed the Chesapeake into Annapolis and Herring Bay. In retrospect this connection to Annapolis should have made me suspicious that this case was bigger than I anticipated. Over thirty persons, many of whom knew Philemon Pike's plantation on Wye Island for years if not decades, gave testimony regarding an Indian servant named Moll or Mary, whom Carver claimed was his great-grandmother. Many deponents were workers, white servants, or other persons familiar with the plantation; most claimed to have never heard of a woman named "Indian Moll" and lent credence to Samuel Lloyd Chew's claim.

The widow Elizabeth Chew, quite possibly the step-mother of the defendant, stated that a slave named Margaret was pregnant when her deceased husband (also named Samuel) acquired her from Wye Island. Crucially for Moody, Elizabeth testified that Tom was Margaret's son and claimed "Margaret was a free woman, free as any body." She verified this with Samuel Chew's sister, one and the same of Samuel Lloyd Chew's aunt, Mary Hepburn of Upper Marlborough. Hepburn told her that "Margaret certainly is a free woman and no slave [because] her mother [Rachel] was the daughter of an Indian woman a native of this country" and brought up in the family of Philemon Lloyd on Wye Island. Chew acquired Margaret through his marriage to Henrietta Maria Lloyd, the only daughter of Philemon Lloyd. Henrietta Maria was probably the birth mother of Samuel Lloyd Chew, the defendant. Since Philemon Pike and Philemon Lloyd occupy the same time and space in this reference case, they are likely the same person or at least blood related.

Baker and others vs. John Paca

Moody's case was first filed in 1803, the year after his mother Betty, the daughter of a "yellow woman called Rachel [Baker]," was freed along with at least fifteen other slaves in a case against John Paca. Since I am new to Maryland, the name “Paca” did not mean too much. I knew it shared the name of a Maryland politician however that meant little. Unlike my native Midwest where families scatter across the landscape, Maryland names remain geographically confined. For example, Baker and Moody shared an attorney, William Carmichael, but research into him would be difficult. The name Carmichael is everywhere in Queen Anne’s County and William is perhaps the most common name during this historical period; furthermore, families tend to name children after a beloved relative. I suspect his son is R. B. Carmichael, a Queen Anne’s County politician and judge. It’s a start but without knowing William’s approximate birth year it is nigh impossible to know whether the records I am looking at pertain to him or someone else.

I made the connection to William Paca through an incredible coincidence; I clicked a link from the Legacy of Slavery’s official Twitter account. @LegacySlaveryMD—“Ratification Day! OTD in 1784, Congress meets in Annapolis to ratify the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/treaty/treaty.html”



A living history portrayal of Paca by Marcos Salaverria:
Photo by Joshua McKerrow - The Capital

The link took me to an MSA Web page where I spotted a link to a biographical page for Governor William Paca. I clicked that link, satisfying my itch, and checked his partial biography. I immediately noticed his wife’s maiden name—Mary Lloyd Chew. Whatever the tendency for Marylanders to share surnames across many generations, Paca’s first wife had two names frequently mentioned throughout Moody's petition. It went on to say that Paca had a son named John and died in 1799 (the year before Baker’s petition was filed) at “Wye Hall” in Queen Anne’s County. This all could still be a coincidence however; "John" was also a common name and the Wye River after which the island was named is fairly extensive and many places would be entitled to its moniker. I clicked the link to Mary’s biography and was hit again with even more names—Philemon Lloyd and Henrietta Maria. Her extended biography stated that Philemon Lloyd Chew died childless in 1770 and Wye Island was split between Paca (by virtue of his wife Mary) and his other sister Margaret Chew Bordley. Unbeknownst to me I had read a complicated tale of genealogy and probate concerning some of Maryland’s most prominent political families.

Wye Island - J. G. Stong's Map of Queen Anne's County, 1866, MSA SC 5080-1

I realized that Moody’s owner Richard Jones probably purchased him from William Paca himself. Since Moody claimed the same lineage as Rachel Baker and her family but was not listed as a co-petitioner in their 1800 filing, his sale probably happened before 1800 when William was still alive; this was corroborated upon a re-reading my notes. The 1802 verdict found Rachel and her co-plaintiffs were descended from a free Indian woman named Mary or Moll and the judge ruled them to be of free condition. They were also awarded $39.48 and one-third cents. Moody's attorney William Carmichael, who also represented Rachel Baker et al., placed a record of this case into evidence.

Creek vs. Wilkins

Moody and Carmichael also entered into evidence the 1799 Baltimore County case of "Negro Margaret Creek against William Wilkins." Attempting to abort the petition process, Wilkins' attorney argued that Creek "ought not to have or maintain her petition against him because he saith that the said Margaret Creek on the day of proposing [this petition] was a slave" but her attorney Thomas Kell argued otherwise. The jury found Margaret to be free and awarded her an astounding sum of £1,783.

Verdict




Paca House, a home and garden that attracts many Annapolis tourists:
Photo by Joshua McKerrow - The Capital

The jury at Moody's trial was convinced by the evidence from these three petitions and found in favor of Moody against Richard Jones. They awarded him the sum of $105.63 and one-third cents compensation. Jones' attorney argued that Moody did not adequately prove that the Margaret Creek from the Wilkins petition was the same Margaret from the Samuel Lloyd Chew petition; he filed an exception. To challenge this exception, a "mulatto man with wooly head" named Cesar Boose testified that Jones purchased Moody from William Paca fourteen or fifteen years earlier and that John was William's representative. The defense counsel "objected to the admissibility of the witness alleging him to be a negro [and] precluded by the Act of Assembly"; the defense likely cited a law similar to an 18th Century act stating that "no Negro, or Mulatto Slave, Free Negro, or Mulatto born of a White Woman...[or] or any Indian Slave, or Free Indian Natives...be admitted and received as good and valid Evidence in Law, in any Matter or Thing whatsoever...wherein any Christian or White Person is concerned." The court however ruled that it was incumbent upon the defense to prove whether Boose "was a negro slave [or] free negro descended from a slave." Although it is not stated explicitly, it appears that Jones excepted the evidence presented through the three preceding freedom petitions in addition to Cesar Boose's testimony.

Judgments Affirmed

The case was given to the Court of Appeals for the Eastern Shore the following month, June 1812. It was entered into the docket in the low triple digits so a continuance was was issued for the next session. The case appears again on the Court of Appeals Docket in June, 1813, which states the court's decision: The Court of Appeals for the Eastern Shore affirmed the Queen Anne's County Court judgments for all exceptions, however Judge Buchanan broke from his colleagues and dissented on the fourth exception. Jones' exceptions to the Queen Anne's County Court judgments were not numbered but it is likely that exception four concerned Boose's testimony. The dissent was probably recorded in the more detailed Judgment Records, which are lost; since no catalog entry for a book containing Judgment Records for 1813 exists, the record was probably lost before its transfer to the then-named Maryland Hall of Records.

The fate of Robert Moody is unknown however there are other free persons by that surname in the Queen Anne's County certificate of freedom index.

Ygolaeneg or, Genealogy Backwards

Rather than start with the name "William Paca" or "John Paca" like his descendants might, I started with a record that happened to include a court exhibit concerning his son. Although William and John Paca's names are crucial in proving Robert Moody's case, their names are lost in conventional indexes since they are not technically the co-defendants. It took the work of Dr. Loren Schweninger, his fellow researchers, and follow-up from the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland team (you know, me) to make this connection; I’m currently awaiting a book edited by Dr. Schweninger to see if he also made this Paca connection.

The successful petition of Rachel Baker and her extensive family represents a sizable exodus from a Maryland first-family perhaps not seen again until Henrietta Ogle's slaves fled to British ships in the War of 1812. Currently there are two researchers at least partly dedicated to studying just these slaves. One of them, Chuck Weisenberger, used his Comegys Bight Scholarship to fund a summer research trip to the National Archives in London. If memory serves, he examined naval and Canadian provincial records to find as much information as possible about Ogle's slaves. It's an intriguing contrast that Paca's slaves escaped with the law on their side while Ogle's slaves escaped extra judicially.

Woe to be a Maryland first family.

--Alex Champion, Maryland State Archives

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