CHAPTER TEN — ANARCHA AT MONTGOMERY HALL

[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 consider an episode in Anarcha’s life that speaks to something I said in an earlier essay about Anarcha meeting the diabolical surgeon, J. Marion Sims, when she was a young girl. She took care of Sims in 1836, when he almost died of malaria.

In 1848 — right in the middle of Sims’s experiments on Anarcha and the others — a Connecticut doctor named George Jarvis traveled to New Orleans. He got sick — it was probably typhus, also known as “ship fever.” He managed to travel to Montgomery, where he wound up in the care of J. Marion Sims.

As I said in an earlier essay, Sims was performing all kinds of experiments at this time. Infant lockjaw. Cancers of the face. In addition, he was keeping up a full medical practice, and this included caring for George Jarvis when he came to town. Sims and Jarvis went on to be lifelong friends, and after Sims moved to the North, he frequently visited Jarvis in Connecticut.

When he was sick with ship fever, Jarvis stayed here. Montgomery Hall. It was brand new at the time, the largest hotel in Montgomery. It was also right around the corner from where Sims was conducting his infamous experiments — if you were to walk around the right side of the hotel, as seen in this image, you would come to Sims’s home and office in just about 100 yards.

During the period of Jarvis’s convalescence, Sims wrote letters to his family back in Connecticut. He described Jarvis’s condition, and he explained that Jarvis was particularly fond of a young servant who attended him, a woman that Jarvis described as the “kindest and best nurse.”

Jarvis recovered and left Montgomery, and Sims wrote to his new friend as he traveled home.

As it happened, Montgomery was suffering from a meningitis outbreak at this time. Even many of the doctors in Montgomery were coming down with the disease.

And that’s when we get Sims making a direct reference to Anarcha — the only time we ever see her name in his handwriting. He’s describing the meningitis outbreak to Jarvis, who is on his way home. He makes reference to several of his colleagues in Montgomery. Ames. Baldwin. Boling. And then he says “Mr. King (at the Hall)” — Montgomery Hall — “has been very sick and Anarca, ­­our Anarca, is nursing him, so you may feel easy about his recovery.”

The underlining there, “our Anarca,” is Sims’s. It’s clear that Anarca is the “kindest and best nurse” that took care of Jarvis, and when Sims says “our Anarca,” it suggests, I believe, that Sims too knows what it’s like to be cared for by this same woman. Anarcha was the girl who cared for him, years earlier, when he almost died.

There’s a couple of other curious things here. In earlier essay, we showed that, for a time, Anarcha was owned by the wife of Nathan Harris, Margaret Duncan. But the law required that this property be held in trust by a man, George Goldthwaite.

Incidentally, George Goldthwaite would go on to become, briefly, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, and later served a single term as a U.S. Senator. His granddaughter, Anne Goldthwaite, was a sculptor, and her work “Head of a Negress — Rachel,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

There aren’t any surviving records from Montgomery Hall in 1848, but what we can find from a few years later is that Samuel Goldthwaite was routinely leasing enslaved people to work as servants at the hotel.

And he, technically, was Anarcha’s owner at this time. It’s pretty clear that during the period of Sims’s experiments Anarcha was also being leased to work as a nurse at Montgomery Hall.

Also, who is this “Mr. King”? Why is he called “Mr.” when all the people in this paragraph are referred to by their last names alone? And why should Jarvis be particularly concerned about whether he will recover.

When I showed this letter to James Fuller, who was then head of the Montgomery County Historical Society — Mr. Fuller has since passed away — he didn’t hesitate. “Mr. King” must be a reference to William Rufus King.

At this time, William Rufus King was a U.S. Senator. He was also known to be the romantic partner of future president, James Buchanan. The two men shared living quarters in Washington DC for twelve years, and their letters make their relationship clear.

William Rufus King went on to be elected vice president of the United States as well — but he served in that role, under President James Polk, for only about a month before he died. He’d been sick at that time, and was actually in Cuba, for his health when he won his office. King is the president or vice to have ever taken the oath of office on foreign soil.

Why did he die of? Well, it’s known that King contracted tuberculosis on a diplomatic mission in France.

He got sick in 1848, right around the time “Mr. King” wound up in the care of Anarcha, who was described as the “kindest and best nurse.”

It’s central to the story of J. Marion Sims that Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the others were eventually compelled to work as Sims’s nurses and assistants. No one who has looked at the closely doubts this. But what these new sources confirm is that Anarcha has been trained and had worked as a nurse long before the Alabama fistula experiments, and was leased to work as a nurse at the largest hotel in Montgomery during the experiments. During her time there, she cared not only for doctors, but for a man who would in a few years’ time become vice president of the United States.

Next time, we’re going to skip a little bit ahead in Anarcha’s story. We’ll find her in New York City. What this will show is that the woman whose cure is at the center of the birth story of modern women’s health was never actually cured at all.