Collections

The papers of Anna Maria (Campbell Hickman) Otis Mead Chalmers (1809-1891) and her family offer a deep look into a 19th century American family with a sharp focus on enslaved and formerly enslaved persons. The collection documents the life of a young, widowed woman, Anna Maria Mead Chalmers, who was the granddaughter of General William Hull (1753-1825). She was a mother of four children and became a businesswoman in Richmond, Virginia. She was a writer, an editor of the Southern Churchmen, an educator and founder of Mrs. Mead's School for Young Ladies, and a director of The Southern Churchmen Cot ("Retreat for the Sick"), a hospital for children. Anna Maria's family enslaved people who are represented in the papers including Othello "Tillo" Freeman (1790's-1860's?). It includes a letter from William written in [1875], who was their carriage driver, and letters about Sam the fiddler, who settled on the farm after escaping harsher enslavement in Louisianna, and Jordan who was described as being hired out in a letter dated September 8, 1841 from Thomas R. Blair.

This collection contains a single letter from Colonel Archibald McClean to Pennsylvania Congressman Honorable Francis James, dated February 16, 1842. McClean, a well-connected Virginia lawyer, expresses his support for the anti-slavery efforts of John Quincy Adams. McClean notes his interest in "the debate which has been going on for some time in your House [of Representatives] upon the resolution for censuring Mr. [John Quincy] Adams for presenting a petition which was unpalatable to at least a portion of the members." The Gag Rule of 1840 silenced Adams's opposition to slavery. McClean praised Adams in the letter and voiced his belief that Adams would ultimately prevail against the gag rule. McClean also discusses the Southerners in Congress who opposed Adams and their hypocritical posture toward the enslaved and America's failure to agree with England on a reciprocal right to search each other's vessels to suppress the slave trade, as England had already abolished slavery in 1833. McClean also requests a copy of John Quincy Adams speech on Amistad.

This collection contains the 1798 bill of sale for an eight year old Creole boy named Jean Baptiste from Port-au-Prince on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). It was written by the Bordeaux-born merchant Arnaud André Robertjot Lartigue (1740-1826) to a " Monsieur Grandidier". It is a single sheet of paper consisting of eleven lines of french detailing the transaction of enslavement including the name and age of the boy and the price of sale of a hundred livre.

This collection contains nineteen documents and letters that provide detailed documentation of the ownership of a breeding stallion named Wicked William. The documents include three pedigrees, four stud service tickets, five sales records, and seven stampless letters, which provide a first-hand account of thoroughbred breeding and horse racing in Virginia during the early 19th century. The collection traces the breeding of Wicked William and his pedigree.

Autographed signed letter from Dixon Evans to his brother James Evans in Fayetteville, North Carolina with his acccount of his shooting, and killing an unnamed enslaved person from Marion, South Carolina. The enslaved person was trying to obtain food from the dairy and smokehouse. Dixon Evans was being sued by Nathaniel Evans who was the owner of the enslaved person. Dixon Evans blames the enslaved person for Dixon's own murderous actions.

This collection consists primarly of 26 letters of correspondence between Thomas Garland, his wife Jane Moore Taylor Garland (1810-1861), her father William Day Taylor (1781-1858), and Jane's sisters and sisters(-in-law?) F. A. Taylor (Frances Ann Taylor), Clarissa "Clara" Garland Kean (1816-1845), her husband Dr. Ortho Williams Kean (1813-1865), and Mary Garland from New Kent, British Colonial Virginia (Orange County, Virginia) and other locations including Botetourt County, Goochland, Everettsville, Taylorsville, Boyd's Tavern, and Fredericksburg, Virginia from about 1830-1858. Other family members mentioned in the collection are Angelina "Ange" Fitch Mitchell, William Jacquelin "Jack" Taylor (1815-1854) and Miriam Nones Jacob Taylor. There is a receipt from a D. J. Cauthen and a photograph of Frank Everett Hartmann and family at his graduation from the University of Virginia in 1911.

The George Washington Lewis papers consists chiefly of correspondence to and from George Washington Lewis and between other family members, but also includes a few photographs of the Lewis family and the homes of "Claymont", "Shellfield" and "Marmion"; a plat of "Claymont"; newsclippings; notes on Lewis family history and genealogy; and a few financial and legal documents.

This collection contains an account book of a Virginia dentist, Dr. I.T. Walton, who worked in Appomattox, Prince Edward, Charlotte, Mecklenburg, and Albemarle Counties. The book recorded services for white, enslaved, and free Black patients between 1857 and 1861. The account book documents procedures, tooth conditions, and overall health assessment of patients and includes prices for cleanings, toothache drops, "gold plugs," and various "temporary" and "amalgam" fillings, as well as for "extracting" teeth and "fangs," resetting teeth, and occasionally "killing nerve[s]." Each entry records the name of the patient and, if different, the name of the person paying the bill. Most of the volume proceeds chronologically, though Walton regularly returns to entries to record later work on the same patient. Walton delineates race within his account book, with forty individuals referred to as either "negro" or "negress". Walton notes two Black patients as free, and the rest were evidently enslaved. No mention of the Civil War appears. A few entries note Walton's renting rooms- evidence of an itinerant practice- while others, apparently from Key West, Florida, indicate that he spent some time there in the late 1850s. A few early pages contain dental account entries from 1857 through 1859, and some twenty pages at the end contain brief entries on Walton's personal and dental accounts from 1857 to 1861. A number of poems, some apparently authored by Walton, are interspersed between dental entries.

This collection contains a two-page letter written by John Kendal, a partially freed Black man from Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, to his former enslaver, Thomas Watters. Watters was a British trader from Kendal in Cumbria who worked in the West Indies. Also included is a transcription of the letter provided by the dealer.

This collection contains one photograph of Edmund Parker (1827-1898), formerly enslaved at Mount Vernon, standing guard at George Washington's Tomb circa 1890. In 1841, Parker was brought to Mount Vernon, at the age of fourteen, as one of the enslaved people owned by John Augustine Washington III. He married Susan, an enslaved woman Augustine had purchased in 1852, and the couple went on to have nineteen children, including two sets of twins. Parker fled from Mount Vernon during the Civil War, seeking refuge in Union-occupied Alexandria, Virginia. He later lived as a free man, followed by a stint in Pennsylvania, before settling back in Washington. In 1882, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association hired him to serve as the watchman at Washington's tomb, and he served until shortly before his death in 1898.