CHAPTER FIFTEEN — ENSLAVED BY THE MAURY FAMILY

[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.