1846 Letter Demanding Release of Enslaved Person
GUEST: My great-grandfather's uncle was an attorney in Cumberland, Maryland.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: And received this letter from somebody who lived in Brookville who may be a distant relative as well.
APPRAISER: Okay.
GUEST: Um, asking for the release of a person who had been recaptured and re-enslaved 26 years after their original release in 1820.
APPRAISER: And so the addressee is Thomas Harvey, Esquire, an attorney in Cumberland, Maryland, MD. And you can see the postmark from 1846. And what he says is his father freed all of the enslaved people...
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: ...that he "owned" in his will. And the rule was, men freed at 21.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Women at 18, right?
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: But this man has also kept tabs on one particular man-- he says he was sold by his nephew to another man.
GUEST: To a person in Cumberland.
APPRAISER: "I have little doubt but Samuel Thomas sold him as a slave, but that will have no effect on his right to immediate freedom." The year this letter is written is 1846.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And this man should have been freed in 1820.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: He knows his date of birth. June 14, 1799. He knows his name, Richard. He knows he's lost an eye…
GUEST: As-- he's injured himself, so yes.
APPRAISER: By some unfortunate... And he mentions that this should be kept, kind of, on the down low.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: "Should I be obliged to petition for his freedom, it may cost his owner all his wages to this time. Please make some enquiry who his master is without letting Dick know of his right for the present." For the context of what was going on in Maryland at this period, there was the Nat Turner's rebellion in early 1830s in Virginia...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: ...and it made a lot of white, slave-owning people very worried about a slave revolt. As a result, the Maryland legislature had really cracked down very heavily on the movements of enslaved people. People that owned property in Baltimore that were free, were not allowed to send their children to school...
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: ...even though they paid school taxes. Frederick Douglass himself escaped in 1838-- from Baltimore.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And the year this letter was written in 1846, there was a man who had established a bunch of underground railroad stops who died in jail in 1846 just for helping.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: So for this person to put themselves out there and say, "I know that there's this person who's being horribly wronged, "and I want the help of an attorney. I want to do right by this man," is he's really exposing himself to a lot of risk.
GUEST: That's interesting.
APPRAISER: So he had to have really strong beliefs in a time when a lot of people did not stand up for the moral right.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Another interesting point is Black Americans have a lot of trouble doing genealogy because so much of their history has been completely expunged as though it didn't exist. We have a location, we have a first name. We have, uh, the month, the day and the year, 1799, that he was born, and so that might be just the little tidbit of information that a genealogist is looking for or needs...
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: ...to put together somebody's complete genealogy of somebody living now. If I was to assign an auction estimate, I would say $2,000 to $3,000 at auction.
GUEST: Oh, that's fantastic. That's really cool. Thank you for that background, too, that's fascinating.
$2,000 - $3,000 Auction
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1846 Letter Seeks Freedom for Enslaved Person
Read this poignant letter by William Thomas to an attorney in Cumberland, Maryland, pursuing freedom for an enslaved man named Richard in 1846.
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