[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In our last essay, we found Anarcha’s final resting place. She died in about 1870, and was buried in the woods on the former Alto plantation. Fifteen years later, her husband was buried alongside of her. Today, in the last installment of the Anarcha Archive, we’ll look at what can be said about her final years.

The first thing to note is that Anarcha lived until emancipation. It’s unknown where exactly the slave quarters were on the Alto plantation, but it’s very likely that it was somewhere near where she was buried.

And by 1864 she considered herself to be married. However, I don’t think she was ever formally married, even though there were many marriages of formerly enslaved people in the years after the Civil War.

I did a lot of searching for Anarcha and Lorenzo in marriage records and cohabitation records in King George and surrounding counties, and didn’t find anything official. Nevertheless, Lorenzo and Anarcha considered themselves married, and he remained loyal to her, long after she died.

In 1865, right after the war, Lorenzo and five other men entered into a labor agreement with Charles Mason, who in likelihood had been their enslaver. The contract stipulated that Mason would provide the land and all the equipment necessary to work it, and Lorenzo and the others would work the land with a 50/50 split of profits, along with providing the Mason family with milk, firewood, and so on.

It’s a little bit too much to go into here, but I eventually found evidence that the Mason home had burned during the Civil War. It’s very likely that Lorenzo and the others had rebuilt the home the Masons continued to live in.

Later documents show that Lorenzo worked about 100 tillable acres, and controlled 500 acres of woodland. This matches perfectly with the former Alto plantation today.

In 1884, Lorenzo had himself buried alongside Anarcha, right in the middle of those woods. It’s possible that one of Anarcha’s daughters, and an unnamed stillborn child born in 1867, were buried in the same area.

Anarcha’s death record indicates that she died of “asthma.”

This likely isn’t the case, but we know that in Richmond the experiments that were performed on her included the use of chloroform. Chloroform was still very experimental at this time, and the inexpert application of chloroform could leave patients with a bloody cough.

What everyone wants to know is whether Anarcha had any living descendants. By blood, that’s impossible to say.

It’s possible that her son William lived for a time in DC, but it looks like he didn’t have children. Delia doesn’t appear to have had children either, though it seems that at one point she was married to a quite important man.

The truth is, I did manage to find descendants of Lorenzo’s side of the family — so there is, at least, some echo of Anarcha living today.

But as for Anarcha, little can be said with certainty. She wasn’t ever fully cured — we know that for certain. Because she was in New York City, she may have had some idea about how important her story had become for the history of medicine.

She died with a husband beside her who appears to have loved and cherished her, and she had living children with her.

Most important of all, she experienced freedom.

When her name was entered into the books for the 1870 Census, it was the first time she was counted as a person, as a free citizen. She died free.

This grave has now been surveyed by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. It’s been identified, and work is being doing to ensure that it is protected.

And that’s Anarcha’s story — at least as suggested by the documents that prove that she truly lived. Anarcha was thought to be lost to history, but even those who have been lost can be found.

Thank you very much for reading the Anarcha Archive.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In this penultimate essay of our series, we’ll look at how I found Anarcha’s grave — after years of searching — in the middle of a remote forest in Virginia.

As I said in earlier essay, I got stuck in the search for Anarcha at about 1864. I knew that she had been leased to a man named Charles Mason, and a letter from Mason to James T. White offered a few details about what her life was like, but I didn’t know who Charles Mason was.

My search in Virginia had started in Caroline County, but there weren’t any Charles Masons in Caroline County.

I didn’t figure that out until I started asking questions in counties neighboring Caroline County.

That brought me here, to the probate office of King George County, Virginia. It’s not much from the outside, but a lot of the secrets of Anarcha’s life were waiting inside.

Charles Mason, I learned, had a large plantation called Alto somewhere near King George — but where?

Everyone I met in King George told me that the person to ask was a woman named Elizabeth Lee, who was the main force behind King George’s tiny historical society.

But for a while, as I was conducting this part of the search, I was still staying in Bowling Green, which is about twenty miles away. I got a phone number for Elizabeth Lee, and an email address, and I reached out to her. But she never answered me! I’d been told that she was working on a book of her own, and I worried that she wasn’t answering me because she was afraid that we were in competition.

I waited until I ran out of ways to try to find Anarcha. Then I went back to King George. I had to find Elizabeth Lee.

And so I came here. I thought it was going to be tough, but this is the South. I met a very nice woman here, and when I said I was looking for Elizabeth Lee, she gave me an address.

This is Elizabeth Lee. She died a few years after she first helped me, in 2017. And the truth is that I never would have found Anarcha without her help.

And I shouldn’t have been worried when she didn’t answer my emails and phone calls. She was eighty years old, even then, and didn’t have much use for voice mail and email.

She answered the door when I knocked, and when I explained why I was there, she got ready and we rode right back up to the historical society.

We sat, down, and I started to tell her the story of Sims in Alabama, the fistula experiments, and the young woman known as Anarcha.

Elizabeth perked up in her chair when I said that name. She got up — it was a bit of an effort — and she pulled a book down from a shelf.

This is the page she turned to. There was an Annacay and Laurenzi Jackson buried on land nearby — on land that had once been the Alto plantation owned by Charles Mason.

What had happened was that a hunter named Jim Pettry had been out in the woods behind his home. A few hundred yards into a quite impenetrable forest, he found a gravestone, all by itself — not part of any graveyard — broken off and lying face down. It was partially covered over with leaves and dirt.

As it happened, Pettry was an amateur genealogist. So he wrote down what was written on the stone, and he brought it to Elizabeth Lee.

When she heard the name Anarcha, she connected it to this entry — Annacay.

If you haven’t read the earlier essays in this series, you might be wondering why the names are so different. It might be a good idea to go back and look at a few earlier essays, where we talked about how Anarcha’s name changed over time. But even now, we see Anarcha’s name in different forms. In 1870, she’s “Anaky,” married to Lorenzo, also in King George.

I didn’t find this until much later, but this Anarcha’s death record. As we noted in an earlier essay, Anarcha was known as Ankey — and here she is, Ankey Jackson, wife of Lorenzo Jackson. It turned out that Elizabeth Lee had transcribed this record for another book, but she’d never connected it to the Annacay in her cemetery book.

It took a while to find all of those things, but that’s the first thing that Elizabeth and I did. After she pulled down her cemetery book, we hopped into my car and drove out to the Alto plantation to find Jim Pettry.

It took a while to find Jim, but eventually it led here. It all looks pretty normal from the outside, but inside — just a few steps away — it all felt very wild and far away. In the coming years, I would visit Anarcha’s grave on five or six occasions, and either going in or coming out, I would get lost every time.

I thought about a lot of things as Pettry and I approached the grave. He was a talker, so he was telling a story about some of his own genealogical work, but I was only half listening. I was thinking about how hard history is — how sometimes it seems like facts intentionally hide, and resist our efforts to uncover them. But when we finally arrived at the grave, I was heartened because I knew that however hard a history seems, however lost someone might appear to be, the truth is still out there, waiting to be discovered.

For a time, at the site of Anarcha’s grave, Jim Pettry and I just stood there in the silent ache of the woods.

Next time, in our final essay, we’ll look at a little more about what can be said about Anarcha’s final years.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

Today, we’re backing up a little bit to look at the people who were Anarcha’s final owners. It turns out there’s a fascinating story there that has been misidentified in history for many years.

This is Lydia Maria Child, a prolific 19th century author. Child was most famous for the lines “Over the river and through the woods to grandfather’s house we go,” but she was also a fervent abolitionist — a tireless advocate for the end of slavery.

In 1859, shortly after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Child wrote a letter to Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, ostensibly to request permission to visit Brown in jail, to tend to his wounds while he awaited execution. Wise wrote back to say of course Child could visit — it was a free country.

But the whole thing was a ruse, intended to attract publicity. Child’s original letter, and Wise’s reply, was printed in the New York Daily Herald.

The letters printed in the newspaper elicited a response from a woman named Mrs. Mason, from Virginia. Mrs. Mason excoriated Lydia Maria Child, and Child wrote back in even more robust fashion. There was very little information about this Mrs. Mason, and for years she was misidentified as the wife of a senator.

In any event, all of the letters from this sequence — Lydia Maria Child’s letters with Governor Wise, a letter from John Brown, and then Mrs. Mason’s letter and Child’s reply, were printed in pamphlet form by the Anti-Slavery Society. 300,000 copies were sent all over the country. There were only 30 million citizens of the United States at the time. That would be the equivalent of 3 million copies of a pamphlet today.

So who was this Mrs. Mason?

In a previous essay, we established that Anarcha’s last owner — or at least the man who was leasing her — was a man named Charles Mason, of King George, Virginia.

And we know that Mason lived on a plantation called Alto.

That’s the clincher.

In the pamphlet published by the Anti-Slavery Society, the return address of “Mrs. Mason” is listed as Alto, in King George, Virginia.

And here’s where it gets really crazy.

Charles Mason’s wife wasn’t just anybody. And actually she wasn’t even his first wife. Mason’s was first married to a granddaughter of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His second wife, Maria Jefferson Carr Randolph, was a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson.

And she was born here, Tufton, one of several small plantations that Jefferson owned around Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia. Maria was born in 1825, and it was said that she sat on the lap of her great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson, shortly before he died. I learned all this during a month of study I did at the International Center for Jefferson Studies here in Charlottesville. As part of the residency, I actually stayed in this home. Portions of my book, Say Anarcha, were written in the house where her final owner had been born.

Many years later, Maria married Charles Mason and moved to his plantation, Alto, in King George. A few years after that, as the Civil War loomed, John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry, and the episode involving Lydia Maria Child’s letter transpired. It was said that Child’s response to Mrs. Mason, in particular, helped to prepare the North for the war that was to come.

Anarcha arrived a few years later. In our next essay, we’ll go into how I found her actual gravesite, but what we can say right now is that Anarcha’s final years overlapped with the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, and in particular an episode that served as a kind of prologue to the Civil War.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In this essay, we’ll begin to look at the final turn of Anarcha’s life. Where she would be married, where she would have her final children, and where she would become free.

For a long time, as I searched for Anarcha, I was stuck here, at Old Mansion, in town of Bowling Green, in Caroline County, Virginia. Anarcha lived here for about ten years, owned by the Maury family, until she was leased out during the Civil War.

There was really just one additional clue about her fate.

In late 1864, a man named Charles Mason wrote to James T. White, of Bowling Green, about an enslaved woman named Ankey, who had been leased for about a year.

As we saw in previous essays, “Bowling Green” was the name of Old Mansion before the town took the name, and James T. White had married into the Maury family, and became the owner of Old Mansion in 1862. This meant that, for a very brief time, James. T. White was Anarcha’s owner, though it seems that for all practical purposes she was still enslaved by the Maury family.

But probably in 1863, she was leased to Charles Mason — for a year. And after a years’ time, Mason was writing to White to find out what Anarcha’s owners wanted to do with her for the coming year.

Mason described her as sickly, and unable to work. But she had children with her, and a husband who doted on her.

There was one clue in the original letter that wasn’t in the transcription of the letter I found. It was a return address. Charles Mason was from a place called “Alto.”

I remained stuck right about there for quite a while. After 1864, it seemed that Anarcha just dropped off the map. The problem was that I couldn’t find any Charles Mason’s in Caroline County, Virginia.

In Bowling Green, I managed to find the graves of Anarcha’s enslaver, William L. Maury. He was here, with his wife, though they had actually lived most of the rest of their lives in New York, on Long Island. More research into the Maury family revealed a lot more about what Anarcha’s life in Bowling Green must have been like, but after 1864, I just didn’t know what happened to her.

That’s when I started driving around to counties around Caroline County, talking to archivists, talking to volunteers at local historical societies, and looking through records in probate offices.

And that’s when I came here. This is the country offices of King George County, Virginia, in the town of King George. It wasn’t particularly fancy, but there was a lot of history packed in here.

And here was Charles Mason, in census records, in slave schedules, and other documents.

And it turned out that Charles Mason had a plantation called Alto — and Alto, like Old Mansion in Bowling Green, had a horse track on its property.

There’s still actually an Alto Lane in King George, and it wasn’t that hard to find. But I was still a little stuck. What everyone in King George told me was that, for local history, the person to talk to was a woman named Elizabeth Lee.

And for quite a while, Elizabeth Lee wouldn’t answer my calls or return my emails.

But I was certain now. The search for Anarcha had lasted years by now, and I’d been staying in Bowling Green for some time. But it was time to give up those accommodations and come here, to King George, to find Elizabeth Lee.

Next time, before we do just that, we’ll dive a little bit more into who exactly Charles Mason was. It turned out he wasn’t just anybody — he was a Confederate spy, and he was married to a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson. And there was a story to be found there that I had no idea I would uncover.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In previous essays, we looked at Anarcha’s life at Old Mansion in Bowling Green, Virginia. Today, we will continue to look at those years and begin to look at the final steps of her life.

As we saw earlier, Anarcha was living here as of about 1854.

In late 1856, she was sent to New York to become the nursemaid of her master’s second wife, and to be experimented on by J. Marion Sims, once again, at Woman’s Hospital. She returned to Old Mansion in early 1857.

She remained here for about six years, working as a midwife, and likely as the plantation nurse or doctor among the enslaved population.

A couple more things about her time here can be said.

As we know from later documents, Anarcha was later thought to be married to a man named Lorenzo.

When, and how, did she meet Lorenzo?

It’s a lot to go into, believe me, but as we described in an earlier essay, there was a horsetrack in front of the Old Mansion house, and horse-racing was a major preoccuptation in Virginia at this time.

Anarcha would soon be leaving Old Mansion, and where she would go next — and this took me a while to figure out — would be another plantation with a horse-racing venue. It seems very likely that Anarcha met her future husband as a result of a plantation owners traveling to one another’s property for races and festivities.

This document, from Old Mansion, reveals that Anarcha — or Ankey, as we saw in previous essays — gave birth again in 1858. This was her sixth pregnancy. This document reveals births to women owned by William L. Lewis at the time. “S.B.” stands for stillborn. Since there is no later record of this birth, this child appears to have been sold away.

That makes sense with what we know about the Maury family, and the eventual fate of Old Mansion.

The Maurys were a cotton family, and as the Civil War approached, their finances began to suffer. Anarcha’s owner, and his cousin Matthew Fontaine Maury, resigned from the Navy and joined the Confederate Navy, and as the war began all farming production was given over to growing food for soldiers.

When the war erupted, it was quite close — some early battles were only thirty or forty miles away. And then came the Battle of Fredericksburg, just a dozen miles to the north of Bowling Green and Old Mansion.

That’s when the Maurys sold Old Mansion. William L. Maury and his wife, Anne Fontaine Maury, sold everything to a man named James. T. White, their brother-in-law. Old Mansion would remain in the White family for a number of generations to come.

What that means is that, for a very short time, ownership of Anarcha passed from William L. Maury to James T. White. But she wouldn’t remain at Old Mansion for much longer.

Maury family correspondence took note of the moment when the Maury family could no long afford to maintain all of enslaved people they owned. Here, Anarcha’s fate is listed alongside that of Fanny — a horse.

Next time, we’ll look at how I began to piece together the final steps of her life — and verify that the last chapter of Anarcha’s life intersected with the legacy of the family of Thomas Jefferson.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In this essay, once again, for the purpose of shedding light on Anarcha’s experience, we’ll dip into the legacy of the so-called “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims.

When Sims died, in 1883, his legacy was believed to be based on many things. A cure for infant lockjaw. The condition known as vaginismus. Cancer surgery. But as time passed, Sims’s cures or innovations were either debunked or shown to have been first proposed by others.

For example, the so-called “Sims position” came from one of Sims’s professors.

His surgical cure for lockjaw was debunked when it was proved to be a bacterial infection — tetanus.

The claim that he pioneered a new cancer hospital in New York is false — he died before it opened, and was actually kicked out of his own hospital precisely because he was performing cancer experiments.

And not only was his vaginismus surgery debunked, it was soon shown that he wasn’t the first to observe the condition.

For several decades now, all that has remained of Sims’s legacy is the claim that he was the doctor who first cured fistula.

But that’s not true either.

There were a number of doctors in America who cured fistula before Sims did. Mettauer and Hayward are the best examples. There were others in Europe, as well.

Sims defenders have acknowledged this, and have responded by saying that Sims devised an easy cure — and one that went on to inform how fistula is cured surgically today.

But that, too, isn’t true.

When Sims first set out to cure fistula, he conceived of a device called the “clamp suture.” This was a variation on quill sutures that were already in place. In short, the clamp suture worked by imbedding short metal bars into tissue alongside a fistula — a hole — and then squeezing together the bars with suture material. The idea was that the tension of the suture material would be on the bars and not on the delicate tissue.

This is what Sims was experimenting with for years on Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the others. His hope was that if he could get it to work, the device would have his name: the Sims clamp suture, or something.

But the clamp suture never worked — not until, that is, Sims tried using silver wire instead of silk for suture material. He didn’t know why silver worked better, but it did. It would be some time before the germ theory took old, and people realized that metals have inherent anti-bacterial properties.

But when Sims first published about obstetric fistula, he barely mentioned using silver wire for suture material. Even though it worked only about half the time, he was still trying to “sell” the success of the clamp suture.

This would continue as Sims moved to New York, and opened Woman’s Hospital. Woman’s Hospital was basically launched on his personal marketing campaign about the fake success of the clamp suture.

In earlier essays, we described how Nathan Bozeman became Sims’s assistant in Alabama. He learned Sims’s clamp suture mechanism, and worked alongside Sims for several years before he went to New York.

Bozeman even bought Sims’s office and home.

And as we described earlier, Bozeman did perform additional experiments — and sometimes cured — women that Sims had experimented on and failed to cure, some many times over. It’s tempting to see Bozeman as a kind of hero, but the truth is that he was experimenting on enslaved women, as well, with something called the button suture.

In 1856, Bozeman began to publish. He revealed that Sims’s clamp suture — on which Sims’s entire reputation was based — was heavily flawed, and worked only about half the time.

He proposed instead the button suture, and claimed that it cured many women that Sims had failed to cure.

This set off a massive feud between the two men. The Sims-Bozeman feud would for decades appear in early histories and textbooks about gynecology.

For what it’s worth, Bozeman would be called the “father of gynecology” long before Sims was, but he has largely vanished from history. He would spend much of the rest of his life trying to deconstruct Sims’s legacy.

As you might imagine, Sims was livid about this — and he immediately set about attacking his former assistant.

And what he did was arrange a series of experiments to test the effectiveness of the clamp suture, his device, against the effectiveness of the button suture, Bozeman’s device. More than half a dozen women, in other words, became unwitting victims in a bitter duel between rival surgeons.

And the result? Neither the clamp suture nor the button suture contributed to the success of the operation to cure obstetric fistula.

The reasons the procedure had worked at all was the silver wire.

So, long story short, the device on which Sims had staked his entire reputation, was introduced with his 1852 paper, and by 1856 it was abandoned completely.

And that’s exactly when Anarcha came to New York to be experimented on yet again.

And what did Sims do? Did he acknowledge that the woman who was at the center of his reputation had never been cured? No.

Instead, six months after Anarcha was discharged from Woman’s Hospital, he gave a lecture implying that silver sutures was the greatest invention in modern medical history — second only to anesthesia. And while Sims didn’t first conceive of it, he was more than happy to let the world believe he innovated the use of silver suture material in medicine.

That’s not true, either. But it’s something you still see today — and sometimes in reputable sources.

In our next essay, we’ll return to Anarcha’s story, and find out what happened to her during the Civil War.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

Up to now, we’ve followed Anarcha as she left Alabama, and stayed for a time in Richmond. Around 1854, she came to be owned by a man named William L. Maury. Today, we’ll be looking at where she lived for the next few years of her life.

When I first went to Virginia to search for Anarcha’s later life, I stumbled across several Anarchas, but none of them fit with the Anarcha who appeared in the case register of Woman’s Hospital in New York.

This woman, however, provided an important clue. This was a woman named Anarcha, married to a man named Goodwin, with a daughter Henrietta; And then I found a record for the same woman, husband named Goodwin, daughter, Henrietta — but now she was called Ankey:

In Virginia, Ankey was a shortened form of Anarcha. That would be true of our Anarcha, as well.

In New York, we saw Anarca, belonging to William L. Maury of Caroline County, Virginia. And here we see a reference to “Wm L. Maury’s woman Anky, and three children, came here from Dctr. White’s last night.”

This is actually from the farm book, kind of a farmer’s diary, of William G. Maury of Old Mansion in Bowling Green, Virginia. In an earlier essay, we saw that William L. Maury’s father had purchased Old Mansion in 1842.

And this new reference, to “Ankey” coming to Old Mansion with three children, comes just after Anarcha is discharged from Woman’s Hospital in New York. The discharge happens on January 22, 1857, and the arrival at Old Mansion takes place on March 12, 1857.

But the record suggests that Anarcha came to Old Mansion sometime earlier than that.

The Maurys are probably one of the best documented families in the country. There are huge troves of letters between family members in archives across Virginia, and in other locations as well.

Prior to Anarcha’s time in New York City, the Maury farm book shows when a cabin was being constructed for Ankey.

There are other references to her in the letters as well — usually, there’s a description of her house being “out” and away from other houses, probably even apart from the other slave cabins on the Old Mansion property.

Old Mansion is very well recorded as well. It was originally a very large plantation, and a stopping point for George Washington, as he journeyed from Richmond to D.C. A very famous racehorse was bred here, and the horsetrack in front of the house is one of the birthplaces of modern thoroughbred racing.

The property was smaller by the time Anarcha lived here, but there were still approximately twenty enslaved people living on the Old Mansion grounds in the late 1850s. The locations of the original quarters have been identified, and there is another site on the property where a cabin likely stood, but it’s impossible to pinpoint the exactly location with certainty.

The problem is that Old Mansion is still held in private hands. The current owners aren’t particularly interested in the history of the home.

Still other letters indicate that Anarcha — Ankey — was working as a midwife at this time.

The whole picture is a bit much to go into in these essays, but, building off of documents we showed in previous essays, what seems most likely is that William L. Maury — Lewis — purchased Anarcha when he believed he was going to be re-marrying.

Anarcha, and her daughter, Delia, were sent first to Old Mansion, and then, when Lewis did get married — in New York — he sent for the woman he had purchased to be his wife’s nurse. And in New York, Anarcha was sent again to Woman’s Hospital.

After, Anarcha returned to Old Mansion, and this is where Lewis’s wife would eventually come, particularly as Lewis resigned from the Navy, and the Civil War began to approach.

But there’s still that mystery of the farm book.

Ankey and three children. Well, Lewis had two daughters by his first wife, who died in childbirth. If Anarcha was traveling back to Old Mansion, it makes perfect sense that she would be escorting Lewis’s daughters.

Anarcha’s own daughter, Delia, would have been the third.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In this essay, we’re going to dive into the question of Anarcha’s children.

Let’s start with an acknowledgement. Whenever you work in history or biography, you work with materials — evidence — that come in a variety of kinds and qualities.

There’s direct evidence, and circumstantial evidence — and there are primary and secondary source materials.

So when a historian or biographer says that something is “true,” it means that it has passed a certain threshold of possibility — but there are degrees of certainty even beyond that threshold.

This is particularly true when it’s the history of slavery and enslaved persons — and when it comes to what can be said of Anarcha’s pregnancies and children it has to be allowed that we are talking about various levels of possibility.

We’ll start here. This is significantly later, and for now I’ll ask you to just trust me that this is Anarcha — those connections will be established in later essays. But what we can see here, for now, is that in 1870 Anarcha had four children, William and Oliver, who were young boys, and Delia who was 19, and Elizabeth, who is listed as 10. A later record indicates that this girl was slightly younger than this, probably around 7.

So what we can say with a high degree of certainty is that Anarcha had a daughter named Delia who was born around 1851 — which is the time period we’ve been looking at in the previous few essays. The two boys and the girl, William and Oliver and Elizabeth, were born much later.

In an earlier essay, we looked at Anarcha’s case record from New York City. By December 1856, she had given birth five times. We know that her first birth took place in mid-1845. There were four others between 1845 and 1856.

Beyond Delia, from 1851, there were three others that we hear nothing more about. What seems most likely is that these babies either did not survive, or were sold away. In my book, Say Anarcha, I make suggestions as to what might have happened with these children, but it has to be acknowledged that these are informed assertions — not fiction, but logical inferences.

There’s also a suggestion that Anarcha gave birth again, around 1858, but once again it appears that this child did not remain with her.

Delia, however, remains with Anarcha — and is with her in 1870, which turns out to be right around the time Anarcha dies.

So Delia stayed with Anarcha as she was taken away from Alabama, and as she was experimented on further in Richmond, as we described in the last couple of essays.

All told, we can tally up from solid primary sources that Anarcha had ten total pregnancies that came to term. Three of them, and probably a couple more, lived beyond infancy. And one daughter, Delia, remained with Anarcha from 1851 until the end of her life.

Next time, we’ll look at what happened when Anarcha left Richmond, to live at Old Mansion, in Bowling Green Virginia.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

In this essay, we’re going to back up just a little bit, and talk about a frequently overlooked part of the story of Anarcha and the diabolical surgeon, J. Marion Sims.

To be clear, this essay series is about Anarcha, the most consequential of the experimental subjects of the so-called “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims. In 2015, I found the first evidence of Anarcha’s life that did not come from Sims’s own writings, and a couple of years later I set out on a quest to discover what kind of life she lived.

This series is about her, and it reveals part of the story I tell in a book called Say Anarcha. Chances are, the book has already appeared by the time you’re reading this.

But another part of the story is about Sims, and sometimes understanding Sims is a way of understanding what happened to Anarcha, and why it happened.

That’s what we’re talking about today.

The jury is not really out about J. Marion Sims. He was a jerk. Believe it or not, that’s not an exaggeration.

Sims’s biographer, who was definitely a Sims supporter, admitted that he was peevish and puerile.

And another champion openly admitted that he was an “unadulterated jerk.”

But how did he get that way? And does it have anything to do with what happened to Anarcha?

Well, Sims would seem to have been born a jerk, but some experiences around the time we’ve been looking at in recent essays do shed light on what happened to Anarcha — or at least how he went about using her after he claimed to have “cured” cure.

Other writers have noticed that Sims claimed to have been good friends with P.T. Barnum…

Barnum was a promoter of sideshow acts, and an inveterate showman. In fact, he’s considered the model of all showmen. Everyone, including Sims, who later gets called a “showman,” gets compared to P.T. Barnum.

And Sims actually knew him.

It’s worth dwelling for a moment on how P.T. Barnum became a showman.

Originally, Barnum made a living owning grocery stores, and later dabbling in running lotteries. When the state of Connecticut outlawed lotteries, Barnum had to start looking for a new hustle.

And he found a woman named Joice Heth, a very old enslaved woman. She was so old, in fact, that the man who owned her was claiming to anyone who would listen that she was 161 years old, and that she had acted as a nurse to George Washington when he was a boy.

Joice Heth is how Barnum got his start as a promoter of the weird and unbelievable. He believed he could do better with Heth than the man who originally owned her, so he bought her, and showed her all across the country. He quickly made a fortune.

He knew Joice Heth was not 161 years old — and he knew to turn it into a spectacle when doctors in New York started to publicly claim she couldn’t be more than 80.

When Joice Heth died, as Barnum surely knew she would, he turned her death into a spectacle, first charging fees for people to attend her autopsy, and then denying she was dead at all.

All of this happened in the 1830s, well before Sims would meet Anarcha and begin the Alabama fistula experiments.

But you see the parallel, right? Both Barnum and Sims would establish their reputations on the story they created around the body of an enslaved woman.

Okay, now recall that Sims cured Anarcha in 1849…

…and he published his first account of the fistula experiments — first began telling the story of Anarcha — in 1852.

Sims first met P.T. Barnum right in that time — right in between his so-called “cure” of Anarcha, and when he staked his entire career on her story.

Here’s what happened.

In 1850, Barnum arranged to manage the American tour of a famous Swedish singer, Jenny Lind. They started in New York, traveled down the east coast, played Cuba, and then sailed for New Orleans.

And that’s where Sims was waiting.

Sims claimed that his wife insisted that they attend the Jenny Lind concert in New Orleans. In fact, Sims wound up staying at the same hotel when Barnum and Lind were staying.

I don’t think that’s an accident.

To make it a little clearer — Sims was already traveling to New York, at this time. Frequently, in fact. And the New York world was very well acquainted with the story of P.T. Barnum and Joice Heth. Now, a few years later, Sims is about to stake his entire career on a fanciful, and, in fact, false story about the body of an enslaved woman. And he just ­happens to meet Barnum in a hotel in New Orleans.

Sims knew what he was doing. The same kinds of biographers who celebrated him even when they knew he was a “jerk” noted that he was a mover and a shaker, an upward climber. And that’s exactly what he was doing here.

And this begins to explain what happened to Anarcha. Not only was she never cured, Sims was using her — following the lead of P.T. Barnum — to climb the social ladder, and establish himself in New York.

That’s why he could never have it discovered that she was never truly cured.

In our next essay, we’ll begin to dive into the stories of Anarcha’s pregnancies, and begin to wonder about whether she had any children who lived.

[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]

This essay builds directly off our last, describing how Anarcha — the most consequential of the experimental subjects of diabolical surgeon, J. Marion Sims — wound up enduring additional experiments at the Egyptian Building in Richmond, Virginia. If you haven’t read that essay, you might want to return that one, and then come back here.

As we’ve already seen, Anarcha by this point — sometime around 1853 or 1854 — was owned by a man named William L. Maury. The Maury family was large and spread all around the country, New York, Tennessee, Alabama, and several places in Virginia: Fredericksburg, Bowling Green, and Richmond.

A man named Richard H. Maury lived at what is now the Virginia Commonwealth University alumni house. It was common for Maurys to visit one another, stay in one another’s homes, and so on.

Anarcha’s owner, William L. Maury — who was known in the family by his middle name, Lewis — was the son of William G. Maury. In 1842, William G. Maury, bought this home, in Bowling Green, Virginia.

This is Old Mansion. Originally, the home was called Bowling Green, but when the town of Bowling Green took that name — because of the home — the house itself became known as Old Mansion.

This is Old Mansion today. It still exists — it’s one of the oldest homes in the country, in fact. It’s going to be figuring very heavily in Anarcha’s life, and we’ll be coming back here in later essays.

So who exactly was Anarcha’s owner at this time: William L. — Lewis — Maury?

This is Lewis Maury, as a young man, and from a few years later, after he resigned from the U.S. Navy to join the Confederate Navy. Lewis would become captain of one of the “privateers” — essentially pirate ships — that the Confederacy tried to use during the war to disrupt Lincoln’s naval blockade of the South.

Before then, however, Lewis sailed with an expeditionary mission to explore the Pacific, and later sailed with Commodore Perry on the mission to Japan in the early 1850s.

There’s an island named for Lewis — Maury Island in Washington State, between Seattle and Tacoma.

The hints of why Lewis’s life connects to Anarcha go back to his first marriage.

Lewis’s first wife gave birth to two children, and then, while he was on the Perry expedition to Japan, she died as a result of complications of childbirth.

A few years later, Lewis was back home, and he had begun to court the woman who would become his second wife — his cousin, Anne Fontaine.

But how does that connect to Anarcha?

A couple essays back, we learned that Lewis’s cousin, Matthew Fontaine Maury, was the “father of oceanography.” He was also a Navy man. He was from Fredericksburg, but he frequently visited Old Mansion in Bowling Green, and his cousin, Richard H. Maury, at his home in Richmond — just a couple of blocks away from the Egyptian Building, where Anarcha was now being experimented on.

And it’s even more direct than that. Around this time, Matthew Fontaine Maury had begun to experiment with undersea mines — called torpedoes, at the time. He was performing these experiments on the third floor of Richard Maury’s Richmond home.

And in addition, in support of his work, Matthew Fontaine Maury was given access to supplies and resources that were stored in the basement of the Egyptian Building.

Now bear in mind, the Woman’s Hospital case record, which we looked at in an earlier essay, showed that Lewis Maury owned Anarcha. The only question was how he came to possess her.

What this shows is that his cousin, also a Navy man, was doing work in the exact building where Anarcha was being experimented on at the time. In all likelihood, Anarcha was probably living in the Egyptian Building.

And recall that Matthew Fontaine Maury, just a few years earlier, had served on a committee with a man who was J. Marion Sims’s teacher and lifelong friend.

And there’s this too. Anarcha was already becoming somewhat famous. People in New York had already heard about Sims’s “cure.” A couple years earlier, Lewis Maury had lost his first wife to childbirth, and now he was courting the woman who would become his second wife.

Wouldn’t he see the advantage of purchasing an enslaved woman who was a nurse, and who was already famous for what she knew about the dangers of childbirth?

There is no smoking gun that shows that Lewis Maury purchased Anarcha from Nathan Harris, or Harris’s wife, Margaret Duncan. But the transaction did take place.

This sequence of events, Matthew Fontaine Maury finding Anarcha in the Egyptian Building, and being instructed to purchase her for his cousin, makes complete sense.

And as we’ll be seeing in future essays, what Anarcha did next was go to Lewis Maury’s childhood home, Old Mansion, in Bowling Green, Virginia. She would remain there for a number of years.