CHAPTER TWO — ANARCHA IN 1841

[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 first essay in this series we looked at the 1828 plantation inventory of David Westcott, Anarcha’s first owner, who died without a will after moving to Alabama from South Carolina in 1820.

Westcott left behind a young wife, Eliza, and four children. When she died, decades later, a stained-glass window was cast in her honor, as one of the founders of the First Methodist Church in Montgomery. The window honoring Anarcha’s second owner is still in place today.

There are checks, receipts from clothing and furniture stores, pages from ledgers, and so on. The Westcott plantation was a large concern, but it doesn’t appear to have been a huge, entirely self-sufficient plantation. They were buying in town many of the items that were made on some plantations.

Some of the furniture of the Westcott plantation is on display in the First White House of the Confederacy, but very little from the plantation has survived.

Descendants have preserved a small doll of an enslaved woman and a small child’s chair that is said to have come from the plantation’s nursery, which descendants claim was used for both white and black children.

There’s a chance that Anarcha held this doll, or sat in this chair — admittedly, it’s pretty remote, but there’s a chance.

When David Westcott died, his sons, Samuel and William, were about ten and eight. Eliza ran the plantation on her own until her sons came of age. In 1841, the family finally got around to distributing David’s property between his wife and children.

This time, there wasn’t anything about furniture and cattle. It was the distribution of persons — enslaved people. Eliza and her four children received an equal distribution of what was now about eighty enslaved persons. And there was something notable about this: many of the enslaved people on the Westcott plantation in 1841 were quite young — had been born, in fact, since 1828. There is really no other conclusion to come to: the Westcott plantation was breeding slaves.

Anarcha was given to William R. Westcott, the family’s second-oldest son. He became her third owner. In one document she is listed with a value of her own now, $500. She will soon be able to produce more slaves. On another page of the same document, her name is given as Anarcky, and her age is listed as 13. It’s 1841. In four years’ time, J. Marion Sims will report meeting a 17 year-old girl named Anarcha on the Westcott plantation.

After 1841, the Westcott plantation would quickly begin to grow. But now, the master was not Eliza Westcott, but two men, approximately 22 and 20 years of age. To be clear, it was common for enslaved women to bear the children of their masters, and at this time there were approximately twenty enslaved women on the Westcott plantation who were old enough to bear children.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll take a look at who might have fathered Anarcha’s first child.