Resistance & Resilience

In commemoration of Black History month, Stratford Mail considers a trio of portraits of Black women and men, two of whom were enslaved at Stratford Hall under Colonel Philip Ludwell Lee. The stories of Sawney, Henrietta Steptoe, and Louisa Thomas, however partial and fragmentary, offer valuable lessons of resistance and resilience in the face of the longest odds. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, their stories help us to enrich and enliven our national narratives about liberty and other founding values, and to see those values as tasks never quite done and forever in need of defense. 

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Transcript

Stratford Mail

2.2: Resistance & Resilience

INTRO

This month we commemorate Black History with a trio of partial portraits of Black women and men whose diverse experiences under the slavery system raise a window on models of resistance and resilience.    

Our first portrait highlights both the potentials and pitfalls of physical archives for writing history. In the case of historically underrecognized communities, the silences of archives are imposing and yet vulnerable to exceptions: in this instance a single undated letter, fragmentary and damaged, in parts unreadable. But for this one letter written in the hand of Colonel Philip Ludwell Lee of Stratford, we would have no inkling of the man Col Phil enslaved, a man named Sawney, who doesn’t otherwise appear in the account books of Stratford or its inventories of the enslaved. From the letter we know that Sawney belonged to the house staff, performing a wide range of tasks related to the daily rhythms of the Great House and the activities of Col Phil.  The letter is addressed to Phil’s sister Hannah Corbin at nearby Peckatone plantation, to which Phil believes Sawney fled to duck the consequences of what Phil terms egregious misbehavior. According to Phil, Sawney “spoke very provokingly” to him after Phil read him the riot act for turning up in dirty and disheveled clothes to wait on the family at supper. Moreover, complained Phil, “when he is waiting, he will behind your back drink the liquor, and eat meat out of the dishes as he carrys [them from the] dairy tho’ he has his regular meals, much as he can eat, and will not do one [thing to] help the rest when out of your sight.” Phil admits to physically punishing Sawney for past grievances, but not “above twice” and then “very gently.” Phil congratulates himself for indulging Sawney’s request not to relocate an enslaved woman named Pat or Patty to an outlying quarter despite her unspecified misconduct.  In Phil’s mixed-up world, Sawney’s favorable treatment (which included better clothing, a 10 pounds sterling allowance annually, and the opportunity to attend dances) had been met with ingratitude. Phil asks Hannah to punish and return Sawney to Stratford. And yet Sawney does not appear in the 1776 probate inventory conducted after Phil’s death in 1775. Did Phil mistake Sawney’s destination? Did he turn up at Peckatone as Phil assumed, perhaps to seek the assertive Hannah’s intercession with Phil on his behalf? Was he returned to Stratford and sold away? Or did he bypass Peckatone for new vistas and better days? Wherever Sawney laid his head at last, he left behind a record of ordinary resistance. His refusals to ‘help’ except under direct supervision, to conform to expectations about what he wore and how he wore it, to restrict what he ate and drank to what was explicitly provided for him, and to police his speech for the comfort of his enslavers–all these refusals  helped Sawney to claw back some sense of autonomy even as they disrupted the smooth operation of the unjust system that aimed to drain him of will. To risk violent punishment with this mix of covert and face-to-face defiance testified to the goodness of freedom, and in those moments Sawney communed with freedom just as surely as the white patriots who contended for their rights against a grasping empire. Even Col Phil detected freedom in Sawney’s defiance, explaining in his letter to Hannah: “he should not be master.” To Sawney’s record of dissent, we should add his redemptive use of his status to mediate between other resistors and Col Phil, of whom even his brother Francis Lightfoot Lee remarked, “I really fear he has lost sight of all good principles.”    

Our second portrait opens in D.C.’s historic neighborhood of Georgetown, specifically in Holy Rood Cemetery, Section 19, Lot 172, where a tomb marble commemorates the death of Henrietta Steptoe on June 2nd, 1850. Henrietta was born into slavery at Stratford, where she appears as 3-year-old Henny in a 1782 inventory of enslaved persons belonging to the estate of the late Philip Ludwell Lee. In the division of Col Phil’s estate, Henrietta was allotted to Phil’s youngest daughter, Flora Lee, and likely left Stratford in 1785 when Flora relocated to a new home on the corner of Washington and Oronoco Streets in Alexandria. Flora married her first cousin Ludwell Lee (son of Richard Henry Lee) in 1788, and moved into John Mill’s old manor atop Shuter’s Hill in Alexandria, where Henrietta surely lived and labored for more than a decade. Fairfax County minute books record Ludwell Lee’s manumission of Henrietta and two others (likely her children) in 1801, at which time she likely moved to Georgetown, where the mortality books of coffinmaker William King note that Henrietta buried an unnamed child in December 1805. Happier days followed in June 1807 when Henrietta offered her daughter Mary Ann for baptism at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, her older daughter Rebecca Steptoe Lee standing godmother. An 1839 portrait of Henrietta’s daughter Mary Ann by James Alexander Simpson has recently been promised to the Baltimore Museum of Art. In its announcement of the portrait’s acquisition, the BMA notes that “the portrait embodies complex narratives around race, identity, family, and regional history.” To understand why we turn to Certificate of Freedom No. 1722, recorded in the very year that Mary Ann sits for Simpson and attesting to the free Black status of Henrietta and her now 30-something-year-old daughter Mary Ann Tritt. Archivist Dorothy S. Provine records that “both women are light colored,” and the 1840 census will identify Henrietta as mulatto. Eldest daughter Rebecca is variously identified as mulatto and white in official records. Here then are some of those “complex narratives” to which the BMA refers, and which we hope will be explored when the portrait reaches the exhibition floor. The Georgetown Directory of 1830 registers a Henrietta Steptoe living on “First street, opposite [the] Catholic Church,” where Mary Ann had been baptized. It was a small brick home for which she was assessed $2.75 in tax in 1828, affordable on the income she earned as a midwife. In his 1895 memoir on forty-odd years of medical practice in the District of Columbia, Dr. Samuel Busey bemoaned the initial rarity of “trained obstetric nurse[s],” remarking that “ the nurses on the market belonged to a class of ‘old grannies,’ mostly of the colored race.” The undertow of contempt here is characteristic of attempts made by the white medical establishment to eliminate midwifery in the late 19th century, though midwives or “old grannies” remained a major resource of obstetric care and community cohesion, especially in African American communities, into the mid-20th century. Dr. Busey goes to say that “Aunt Phillis and Henrietta Steptoe had risen to the dignity of Madame Lachapelle, and their vernacular and oracular dispensations were implicitly believed and accepted as the rule of conduct in the lying-in chamber of high life.” To suggest that Henrietta was received on par with Marie-Louise Lachapelle, the mother of modern obstetrics and head obstetrician at public hospital Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, is to say that Henrietta was taken to be a medical professional of the highest quality; while the comparison to the happy, faithful slave character Aunt Phillis from the anti-Tom, pro-slavery novel Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, or Southern Life As It Is (1852) is meant to underline (if you missed it) that Henrietta was black and to imply that her skillset, composed of time-honored West African practices and traditions handed down and refined in the context of plantation slavery, was inferior to Dr. Busey’s training even if the upper crust of Georgetown society preferred to be attended by Henrietta. When Henrietta died aged 71, mourners gathered at her daughter Rebecca’s home to pay their respects. Her tomb marble in Holy Rood cemetery reads:  Peace to thy soul eternal be thine And light celestial now upon thee shine And if thy prayer now be heard above Who blessed thy children with a mother's love.   

Our final partial portrait dates to November 1888, and it requires us to remember one of the most sadistic features of the slavery system: the separation of families. Families were devastated as spouses, siblings, parents, and children were sold apart from one another across the slave-holding states. Laws and norms encouraging and enforcing widespread illiteracy meant that the enslaved and newly freed often lacked a basic means of communicating with those from whom they had been separated. As the anti-slavery newspaper Signal of Liberty put it: The interchange of soul by writing, is among the blessings denied the poor bondman. If literacy thrummed with the power of the taboo before emancipation, it resonated with practicality afterward, especially as a means for folks to rebuild broken families.  On November 1, 1888, Mrs. Louisa Thomas of Chattanooga wrote a Dear Editor letter for the “Lost Friends” Column in the New Orleans paper the Southern Christian Advocate. Louisa likely paid the non-subscriber fee of 50 cents to publish her letter. The “Lost Friends” column was a community-driven measure to repair broken families in the absence of a government will to do so (despite the creation of the under-resourced Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865). The column’s header urged pastors to “please read the requests published below from the pulpits,” and thus use the social networks of their parishioners to reconnect ‘lost friends.’ The prerogative of enslavers to name and rename people, and the small pool of commonplace names in circulation, made reconnection especially difficult. Details were essential, and Louisa Thomas packs a dense biography into her letter. 

“Dear Editor, I wish to inquire for my father and two sisters, Dilsey and Fanny Robinson. My father is Henry Ford Brown. When I last heard from my father he was in St. Leuis, Mo., and the last time I heard from my sisters they were in New Orleans, La. During the war I was between 16 and 17 years of age. I went from St. Louis to Washington, D.C., with Richard Bland Lee … When I first went to Washington I lived on C street and then moved to No. 477 Seventh street. I was sold from Washington in 1863 to Bob Davis, a Negro trader and taken to Richmond, Virginia, I left Richmond … when Bob Davis sold me to Will Brooks, who took twenty-five of us in a drove. My first husband was George Brown. The first time I heard from my father Chattanooga was surrounded by water, and I could not send a dispatch, but I have been writing ever since and have never received any answer. and the letters have never come back. I think somebody gets them. Direct letters to Mrs. Louisa Thomas, 410 McCalie avenue, Chattanooga, Tenn.”

Louisa was enslaved to Richard Bland Lee, Jr., first cousin to Stratford-born Robert E. Lee, whom Richard Jr. followed from the United States Army into the confederate Army of the Potomac. Lousia likely spent significant time in St. Louis (where she places her father) before 1859 when Richard Jr. brought her east to DC. There she lived and labored at 470 7th Street before she was sold to a Richmond-based slave trader in 1863 and then sold south. She does not say where. November 1888 finds her living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in her early forties, on her second marriage, and thinking about her father Henry and sisters Dilsey and Fanny from whom she had been separated. Lousia last heard from her father when water surrounded Chattanooga disabling telegraph lines and preventing outgoing mail. She refers here to the March 1867 flood, the largest in Chattanooga’s history, when the Tennessee river crested 28 feet above flood stage. At the time of her “Lost Friends” post Louisa hadn’t heard from her father in 20 years despite writing ever since. There is indeed a power and agency in literacy, but not necessarily the power of ‘happy endings.’ We do not know whether Louisa found her family again, and we know nothing else of Louisa’s life adventures in the era of Reconstruction and beyond. 

If you have information that might help to enrich and elevate the stories of Sawney, Henrietta Steptoe and her children, or Louisa Thomas, please send your mail to arthurlee at stratfordhall dot org. 

OUTRO 

Samuel Clagett Busey, Personal Reminiscences and Recollections of Forty-six Years’ Membership in the Medical Society of the District of Columbia, and Residence in this City (Washington, D.C.: 1895, 343-44).

Dorothy S. Provine, District of Columbia Free Negro Registers, 1821-1861, volume 3, 165.

Thanks to Carlton Fletcher for his excellent sleuthing about Henrietta Steptoe and her family at Glover Park History. 

Sound effects courtesy of Pixabay
Music is William Ross Chernoff's "In Shadows"
AI voices courtesy of Play.ht (except Dr. Steffey)

© Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, 2024