CHAPTER TWENTY — HOW ANARCHA MET LORENZO
[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 previous essays, we looked at Anarcha’s life at Old Mansion in Bowling Green, Virginia. Today, we will continue to look at those years and begin to look at the final steps of her life.
As we saw earlier, Anarcha was living here as of about 1854.
In late 1856, she was sent to New York to become the nursemaid of her master’s second wife, and to be experimented on by J. Marion Sims, once again, at Woman’s Hospital. She returned to Old Mansion in early 1857.
She remained here for about six years, working as a midwife, and likely as the plantation nurse or doctor among the enslaved population.
A couple more things about her time here can be said.
As we know from later documents, Anarcha was later thought to be married to a man named Lorenzo.
When, and how, did she meet Lorenzo?
It’s a lot to go into, believe me, but as we described in an earlier essay, there was a horsetrack in front of the Old Mansion house, and horse-racing was a major preoccuptation in Virginia at this time.
Anarcha would soon be leaving Old Mansion, and where she would go next — and this took me a while to figure out — would be another plantation with a horse-racing venue. It seems very likely that Anarcha met her future husband as a result of a plantation owners traveling to one another’s property for races and festivities.
This document, from Old Mansion, reveals that Anarcha — or Ankey, as we saw in previous essays — gave birth again in 1858. This was her sixth pregnancy. This document reveals births to women owned by William L. Lewis at the time. “S.B.” stands for stillborn. Since there is no later record of this birth, this child appears to have been sold away.
That makes sense with what we know about the Maury family, and the eventual fate of Old Mansion.
The Maurys were a cotton family, and as the Civil War approached, their finances began to suffer. Anarcha’s owner, and his cousin Matthew Fontaine Maury, resigned from the Navy and joined the Confederate Navy, and as the war began all farming production was given over to growing food for soldiers.
When the war erupted, it was quite close — some early battles were only thirty or forty miles away. And then came the Battle of Fredericksburg, just a dozen miles to the north of Bowling Green and Old Mansion.
That’s when the Maurys sold Old Mansion. William L. Maury and his wife, Anne Fontaine Maury, sold everything to a man named James. T. White, their brother-in-law. Old Mansion would remain in the White family for a number of generations to come.
What that means is that, for a very short time, ownership of Anarcha passed from William L. Maury to James T. White. But she wouldn’t remain at Old Mansion for much longer.
Maury family correspondence took note of the moment when the Maury family could no long afford to maintain all of enslaved people they owned. Here, Anarcha’s fate is listed alongside that of Fanny — a horse.
Next time, we’ll look at how I began to piece together the final steps of her life — and verify that the last chapter of Anarcha’s life intersected with the legacy of the family of Thomas Jefferson.
