CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO — THE MYSTERY OF MRS. MASON

[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.]

Today, we’re backing up a little bit to look at the people who were Anarcha’s final owners. It turns out there’s a fascinating story there that has been misidentified in history for many years.

This is Lydia Maria Child, a prolific 19th century author. Child was most famous for the lines “Over the river and through the woods to grandfather’s house we go,” but she was also a fervent abolitionist — a tireless advocate for the end of slavery.

In 1859, shortly after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Child wrote a letter to Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, ostensibly to request permission to visit Brown in jail, to tend to his wounds while he awaited execution. Wise wrote back to say of course Child could visit — it was a free country.

But the whole thing was a ruse, intended to attract publicity. Child’s original letter, and Wise’s reply, was printed in the New York Daily Herald.

The letters printed in the newspaper elicited a response from a woman named Mrs. Mason, from Virginia. Mrs. Mason excoriated Lydia Maria Child, and Child wrote back in even more robust fashion. There was very little information about this Mrs. Mason, and for years she was misidentified as the wife of a senator.

In any event, all of the letters from this sequence — Lydia Maria Child’s letters with Governor Wise, a letter from John Brown, and then Mrs. Mason’s letter and Child’s reply, were printed in pamphlet form by the Anti-Slavery Society. 300,000 copies were sent all over the country. There were only 30 million citizens of the United States at the time. That would be the equivalent of 3 million copies of a pamphlet today.

So who was this Mrs. Mason?

In a previous essay, we established that Anarcha’s last owner — or at least the man who was leasing her — was a man named Charles Mason, of King George, Virginia.

And we know that Mason lived on a plantation called Alto.

That’s the clincher.

In the pamphlet published by the Anti-Slavery Society, the return address of “Mrs. Mason” is listed as Alto, in King George, Virginia.

And here’s where it gets really crazy.

Charles Mason’s wife wasn’t just anybody. And actually she wasn’t even his first wife. Mason’s was first married to a granddaughter of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His second wife, Maria Jefferson Carr Randolph, was a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson.

And she was born here, Tufton, one of several small plantations that Jefferson owned around Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia. Maria was born in 1825, and it was said that she sat on the lap of her great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson, shortly before he died. I learned all this during a month of study I did at the International Center for Jefferson Studies here in Charlottesville. As part of the residency, I actually stayed in this home. Portions of my book, Say Anarcha, were written in the house where her final owner had been born.

Many years later, Maria married Charles Mason and moved to his plantation, Alto, in King George. A few years after that, as the Civil War loomed, John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry, and the episode involving Lydia Maria Child’s letter transpired. It was said that Child’s response to Mrs. Mason, in particular, helped to prepare the North for the war that was to come.

Anarcha arrived a few years later. In our next essay, we’ll go into how I found her actual gravesite, but what we can say right now is that Anarcha’s final years overlapped with the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, and in particular an episode that served as a kind of prologue to the Civil War.