CHAPTER NINE — ANOTHER CLUE

[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 the last essay in this series, I presented the evidence I found that suggested that at about halfway through the experiments that J. Marion Sims performed on Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and approximately seven other young women, ownership of most or all of them passed to Dr. Nathan Harris, who was the original enslaver of Betsey.

Anarcha’s name appears regularly in later Harris plantation documents. Documents like this are tricky. The ages of enslaved people are often just guesses, and even inside the Harris plantation materials, you can see that lists of names are simply being copied from one document to the next.

These kinds of lists were used for tax purposes, so it wasn’t really in the plantation owners’ interest to make sure the documents were accurate in every detail. In particular, when it came to enslaved people, it’s pretty clear that corners were being cut frequently.

One document in the Harris plantation materials is remarkable. The colors are off, because of how I took the pictures, but this is the same piece of paper, front and back. Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy Ann all appear on the same list of 27 enslaved people. The Harris materials are only time that all three of the names of the women who were known to have been among Sims’s earliest experimental subjects appear together.

Last time, we looked at the document in which ownership of Anarcha passed to Harris’s fiancé, Margaret Duncan. The later Harris plantation documents you’ve just seen in this essay come from several years later. And recall that Sims’s experiments ended with Anarcha’s so-called “cure” in 1849. After that, all of the women who were part of the initial experiments disappeared.

But there’s another clue in Harris’s bequeath to his wife. Deep inside the document, it suggests that all of the enslaved people listed in it are in the possession and under the control of John Duncan, of Autauga County, to the north of Montgomery.

This John Duncan is important. He’s really John Duncan, Sr. He has three children. John Duncan, Jr., is Nathan Harris’s law partner. His daughter, Margaret Duncan, is now Nathan Harris’s wife. And a second daughter, Catherine Duncan, is going to be central to Anarcha’s story very soon.

Incidentally, as we noted in an earlier essay, Anarcha’s owner at this time was Margaret Duncan, who became Margaret Harris. As it happens, a hospital in Montgomery was called St. Margaret’s, after Margaret Harris. It stood downtown for many years.

The Harris plantation materials appear to solve the mystery. After 1849, it would seem that Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and perhaps others were sent to the plantation of John Duncan, Nathan Harris’s father-in-law, in Autauga County. That would explain why Nathan Bozeman never saw any of them.

There are couple of reasons why this would have benefitted Sims.

First, he’d been experiment on Anarcha and the others for years. He need fresh experimental subjects to continue his work, and after he claimed to “cure” in Anarcha in 1849 he needed to conduct additional experiments before publishing his results. Having Anarcha and the others sent away would have been perfect for him.

Second, Sims was already lying about how often his fistula cure worked. He said that it worked every time, but Nathan Bozeman would soon say it worked only about half the time, and even then only when conditions were perfect.

In other words, having Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey sent to Autauga would have suited Sims’s needs perfectly. No one could contradict his claims about them, and as we saw in an earlier essay, that’s exactly what happened.

In our next essay, we’ll back up a little bit, and shed some light on what, exactly, Anarcha was doing during the time of the experiments.