CHAPTER EIGHT — THE HARRIS BEQUEST

[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 described how after 1849 Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey simply disappeared. None of the doctors who observed Sims’s earliest experiments ever wrote of meeting Anarcha or any of the women, and not even Sims’s assistant, Nathan Bozeman, who came along right at the moment Anarcha was supposed to have been “cured,” ever met her. So what happened to them?

Up to now, we’ve been looking at materials that I was able to find during my first trip to Alabama, in 2015. I soon came to know a little more than that, about Anarcha’s later life, and I’ll talk about later in later essays, but for now I want to want reveal what immediately came next in the lives of the young women who were Sims’s earliest experimental subjects.

It wasn’t until I returned to Alabama, in 2017, that I started to piece it all together. There were only a couple of clues, at that point.

Sims had said that Betsey was owned by a Dr. Harris, from Lowndes County, to the south of Montgomery, and Lucy was owned by Tom Zimmerman of Macon County, near where Sims had lived for a time a few years earlier.

I never found much about Tom Zimmerman, just a deed of land that looks to have originally been purchased from the Creeks, and it seemed like he left Alabama just a short time later.

The key to everything, to the entire remainder of Anarcha’s life, turned out to be this Dr. Harris from Lowndes County.

Harris was a man named Dr. Nathan Harris, and it turned out that he was more a lawyer than a doctor — though he specialized in medical jurisprudence.

This comes from pretty early in the history of medicine, and at this time, particularly along the frontier — and Alabama was the frontier at this point in history — anybody who gave medicine to their family or to the people they owned — their slaves — could call themselves a doctor. This probably explains why a “doctor” was bringing Betsey to another doctor for his advice.

This document is a list of docket numbers and fees, and though it appears that the cases this document refers to have been lost — and believe me, I tried hard to find them — it’s clear that Harris had once represented James Marion Sims in some kind of legal matter.

Sims was actually involved in a number of legal disputes in Montgomery.

But these weren’t the documents that really began to solve the mystery. What really cracked it open was the Harris plantation materials held at the Montgomery County Archives.

This document is from 1847, after Sims’s experiments on Anarcha and the others had begun. It’s kind of a reverse dowry — Nathan Harris is granting property to the young woman (he was much older) who was about to become his wife. Her name was Margaret Duncan.

In an earlier essay, we talked about what happened when men at this time died intestate, without a will. Often, they were so in debt that their wives were left destitute.

At the time, women weren’t allowed to own property. But right around this time a law was passed that permitted women to own property as long as it was held in trust by a man.

That’s what’s happening here — Nathan Harris is giving property to finace, Margaret Duncan, to be held in trust by a man named Samuel Goldthwaite.

This property included a long list of enslaved people — and that list included Anarcha. It appeared that Anarcha now had a new owner or owners. Margaret Duncan or Samuel Goldthwaite.

The Harris and Duncan families are going to loom large in Anarcha’s life, and we’ll document that in detail in future essays. But here’s what seems to have happened.

Sims had said that he would cure all of his enslaved subjects in six months’ time.

But that didn’t happen. It took much longer. And what appears to be the case is that during the period of the experiments, ownership of Anarcha, and Lucy as well — and perhaps all of the women Sims was experimenting on — was transferred to Nathan Harris.

Harris was very wealthy. He owned many properties in Montgomery, and a plantation in Autauga County as well, to the north.

In addition, he owned plantations on the boundary between Montgomery and Lowndes Counties. He could easily be described as “Dr. Harris from Lowndes County.” Incidentally, this map indicates I65, the New Selma Highway, which means that Martin Luther King marched right through land that it’s very likely Betsey came from.

In our next essay, we’ll look at more Harris documents, including a single piece of paper that has all the names on it: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey.