CHAPTER TWELVE — TWO ANARCHAS?

[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.]

What I want to say in this essay is, “Okay, I know what you’re thinking.”

In our last essay I revealed that I found Anarcha in the case records of Woman’s Hospital in New York City, which was founded by the so-called “father of gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, in 1855.

And I know what you’re saying to yourself: how do you know the Anarcha in New York is the same as the Anarcha from Alabama?

This is a totally fair question. And what can we say from just this image? Well, it’s the same rare given name. The age is exactly right. It’s the same relatively rare condition, obstetric fistula. It’s the same doctor who experiments on her. And this last one, I’ll ask you to trust me for a bit, until a later essay— the Anarcha in Alabama and this Anarcha both worked as nurses.

That’s already a circumstantial slam dunk.

Admittedly circumstantial evidence is not direct evidence, but circumstantial evidence can be very power. If, one night, you go to sleep and your driveway is clear, and you wake the next morning to find it covered with snow, that’s circumstantial evidence that it snowed overnight.

You can be convicted of crimes on circumstantial evidence alone. If this was a trial, just this one document about Anarcha would remove all reasonable doubt.

When I showed just this document to the well-known scholar of slavery, Eric Foner, that was all he needed. He wrote back to me, “It does seem that Anarcha and Anarca are the same person.”

There’s also this. At this point, Sims was already using Anarcha as the central figure in the myth of his career. Is it really possible that he would come across another enslaved woman, also named Anarcha, cure her too, and then not have anything to say about it?

That’s not how this guy went about his business. He seized on every chance for self-promotion.

But okay, I wasn’t satisfied with just that.

After an archivist at the New York Public Library helped me identify William L. Maury as Anarcha’s owner as of 1856 another archivist at the NYPL, Philip Sutton, found something else — a connection from Sims to another Maury, R.B. Maury.

We’re going to detail more about the Maury family in later essays. But this was a very widespread family — William L. Maury was older than R.B. Maury, but they were related, and the family was tightknit. In fact, there’s a society dedicated to the study of the family even today.

And here’s the thing — just like Sims, R.B. Maury was a gynecologist.

And it’s more just a coincidence. Sims and R.B. Maury belonged to some of the same professional associations, and many years later, after Sims died and there was an effort to raise a monument to him in New York City, there were about thirty physicians gathered to sponsor his statue. R.B. Maury was one of them.

There was a direct connection from Sims to the Maury family.

And there was more than one. This is Matthew Fontaine Maury, the “father of oceanography.” He was related to both R.B. Maury and William L. Maury, Anarcha’s owner. Matthew Fontaine Maury was a famous scientist, and both he and William L. Maury were in the United States Navy — though both would resign to join the Confederate Navy at the start of the Civil War.

This is J.F.G. Mittag, who was Sims tutor when he was a teenager. Sims’s autobiography describes Mittag as the first teacher to see potential in him, and the two went on to be lifelong friends. In fact, Mittag was staying with Sims in New York City right around the time that Anarcha was checked into Woman’s Hospital.

This is 1848, a few years earlier. Both Matthew Fontaine Maury and J.F.G. Mittag served on a very small board gathered to consider questions related to railroad construction.

Once again, there’s a direct connection from Sims to the Maury family.

Last, we jump ahead a bit, and future essays will describe this in more detail. Sims left New York in 1861, and he lived in Europe for the duration of the Civil War, mostly in Paris. Without going into detail, at this point, this is an announcement of the wedding of his daughter, and specifically says that members of the Confederate Navy were in attendance. It would be way to include here, but the evidence shows that both Matthew Fontaine Maury and Anarcha’s owner, William L. Maury, were both in Paris at around this time. It’s virtually certain that they would have attended this reception at Sims’s Paris home.

And now there’s a direct connection from Sims to the man who was identified as Anarcha’s owner in 1856.

That’s really all I needed to be convinced. The Anarcha who appeared in New York in 1856 is the same as the Anarcha upon whom J. Marion Sims experimented in Alabama, between 1846 and 1849.

In our next essay, we’ll talk more about how and when Anarcha might have moved from the South to the North, from Alabama to Richmond, and then to New York City. This will provide more evidence still that Anarcha did not remain in Alabama.