Not sure why, but I found myself thinking about Charity Castle this morning.
Lies. I know why. It was this post by the Homewood Museum on IG that sent me down the rabbit hole.
I’m intrigued by a few things that seem particular to Baltimore and Maryland. One is that there is a sense that neither Maryland nor Baltimore are really “the South.” As a Chicagoan, I find this amusing. A border state during the Civil War, the flag is literally a reimagining of the Confederate flag. Border state doesn’t mean liberal or that no slavery existed here. These were states that never seceded and so throughout the war and through the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation which did not apply to border states or areas undergoing Union occupation (like New Orleans) slavery continued. The Mason-Dixon line literally separates so-called free Pennsylvania to the north from slavery (including Maryland) to the south. The question of whether Maryland is the South speaks to whether the criteria of being Southern is being a site of slavery. Or if it means something else, something more.
Two is that there is a sense that, southern or not, slavery or free, Maryland is somehow different because there were so many enslaved people freed from bondage. Baltimore is a special instance of this because labor on the wharf and mills around the town provided opportunities for escaped and freed Black (men) to find work or hide within and among free Black communities. Frederick Bailey, and the research my colleague Larry Jackson is doing on his early years in Baltimore, is a good example of someone who is both an exceptional example of freedom and freedom-seeking, but also was able to make his way about town, in the everyday, with some mobility and autonomy, because he operated within and among free and resistive Black communities that already existed in town. But Freddy D was still enslaved and had to run away across state lines to experience a change in status. Slavery is still slavery, even in a free space.
Another example of this exceptionalism is the free womb law, which gets pulled off the bookshelf whenever a discussion about slavery in Baltimore gets going. Formalized over time, as Jessica Millward relates, the most modern iteration was the 1809 Act to Ascertain and Declare the Condition of Such Issue as may hereafter be born of Negro or Mulatto Female Slaves. The law did not free the children of enslaved mothers outright or at a certain age, as other parallel laws across the Americas did. The 1809 Act declared that slaveowners freeing their bondspeople needed to determine at the time of manumission of the children of the woman freed would also be free (“all her increase shall be free”). If they failed to do so, any children born even after manumission would be declared slaves. A less than rousing endorsement of freedom than we’d like to believe. (Read Millward)
This is a long way of saying cultural institutions and popular memorialists of both Baltimore and Maryland have a way of side-stepping the bad rap given sites of slavery further south like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. This is also a long way of saying I don’t believe it, I don’t trust it.
One of my favorite quotes about slavery comes from James W. C. Pennington. I first encountered it in a collection of essays edited by Walter Johnson, where Johnson uses the key concept of the “chattel principle” across his introduction. It is so important, the chattel principle is the name of the collection itself. Going back to the source of the quote Johnson used, I realized that Pennington is not just speaking about slavery, but he is speaking as a man who escaped slavery in Maryland:
"My feelings are always outraged when I hear them speak of "kind masters,"--"Christian masters,"--"the mildest form of slavery,"--"well fed and clothed slaves," as extenuations of slavery; I am satisfied they either mean to pervert the truth, or they do not know what they say. The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and nakedness, are its inevitable consequences to a greater or less extent, warring with the dispositions of men..."
This state is soooo not an exception.
Circling back to the Homewood post. The long columns. The grassy knoll. The view from the Big House. It is difficult to find a text that names Homewood what it is, but Homewood Museum rests on what was essentially the Homewood Plantation, the home of Charles Carroll, Jr., son of Charles Carroll (signer of the Declaration of Independence). Homewood plantation, a site of slavery with slave quarters (demolished only in 2002) and enslaved laborers who worked the fields around and within the domestic space of the house itself, now the space of the museum. The plantation itself is 130 acres and was co-designed with Izadod Conner, an enslaved man:
“Little is known about the estate’s original landscape. Letters from Carroll, Jr., reveal that large formal gardens designed by him and his slave Izadod Conner extended northward from the mansion 1,000 feet before terminating at a brick privy, still extant. Fruit orchards, also planted by Conner, were arranged in orderly rows, angled northwest from the house. Pine trees were planted at the estate’s entrance. A brick carriage house, today Merrick Barn, was built 350 yards south of the mansion. Other structures built on the property included slave quarters, a smoke house, and a dairy and spring house, none of which stands today. The forested Stone River Valley abutted the estate from the west and south. Homewood House was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.” (TCLF)
This is where Charity Castle lived, for a time, until she attempted to make her escape from the alcoholic and abusive Carroll, Jr. and, with the help of a white abolitionist and her Black husband, appealed for her freedom from bondage.
Pennington, when he is describing the chattel principle, also known as describing the ONTOLOGY OF SLAVERY, isn’t being gender neutral. He goes on to describe, in particular, the abuse of enslaved women under slavery. Almost as though, the definition of bondage, the outer limit of what it means to be an alienated and degraded subject, is represented not in truncated Black manhood but in violated Black womanhood.
“It is under the mildest form of slavery, as it exists in Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky, that the finest specimens of coloured females are reared. There are no mothers who rear, and educate in the natural graces, finer daughters than the Ethiopian women, who have the least chance to give scope to their maternal affections. But what is generally the fate of such female slaves? When they are not raised for the express purpose of supplying the market of a class of economical Louisian and Mississippi gentlemen, who do not wish to incur the expense of rearing legitimate families, they are, nevertheless, on account of their attractions, exposed to the most shameful degradation, by the young masters in the families where it is claimed they are so well off.”
So Pennington is talking his shit right, getting right to the heart of the matter. And right there, up the road, about forty years earlier, is Charity Castle, proving his points.
So who is she, this Black girl who would have looked through the columns at Homewood (Plantation) and been nauseated at anything less than condemnation of that site?
Charles Carroll, Jr., Little Chuck, we’ll call him, is married to a woman named Harriet Chew. Little Chuck is abusive to his slaves, his free Black and white servants, and, of course, because this kind of abuse only ripples out from the source, he is abusive to his wife. Harriet, eventually, leaves him, but before that she writes to her brother, Benjamin Chew, for help. She wants assistance with a situation that she has been confronted with regarding her enslaved property, a girl named Charity Castle.
Benjamin Chew writes:
“…my Sister by my desire decided on Monday last to send the Woman back to Baltimore that nothing should appear deficient on her part and to such Effect intimated her determination to the Woman [Charity Castle] when a distressful occurrence took place discovering not only a reluctance but an absolute repugnance in the Woman against returning to Homewood, stating with great agitation and many excuses for her declaration that was willing even to be sold or sent to any remote Distance rather than be placed where she had been brought forth a Tale which has so shocked my poor Sister that for Tuesday she was chiefly in her Chamber and has suffered a Conflict not easy to be described to you, leaving her in doubt what part to adopt, even the mentioning it to me.”
Benjamin Chew believed it would be "improper" to send Charity back because "from the woman’s account it would be improper to place her at Homewood where attempts have been essayed that Delicacy forbids me to particularise."
For stepping in this way, Benjamin Chew might have been described by his enslaved property as a kind master. Or he may have been pragmatic. But he was not an abolitionist. And the heart of slavery remained the chattel principle. Benjamin Chew did not ask for Charity's emancipation, although he could have. This is 1814, not long after the 1809 Free Womb Law and well after the 1790 Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act. There is definitely energy in the air for abolition so Chew wasn’t even a “man of his time” type of man. He made a choice to advocate for Charity AND to continue his support for slavery and wealth in enslaved property. Benjamin asked Big Chuck (Little Chuck’s Declaration of Independence signing daddy) for an exchange. Another enslaved woman should take the place of Charity, allowing the PROPERTY that his sister coveted to remain with her. And he specifically asked for a woman: "some one of the Women you may have on one of your Farms so as to place the Woman now here called Charity in the Stead of the one that may be sent to Homewood."
A letter war begins as Benjamin Chew begins writing back and forth to Big Chuck’s legal advisors about what to do about Charity. Meanwhile, Charity Castle is in Philadelphia with Harriet Chew. This is an important plot point, because, the 1780 Philadelphia law means freedom is a real option for Charity. An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, this law means that if an enslaved person remained in Pennsylvania over 6 months, they would be freed. We saw this law at work in the life of Ona Judge, written about by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Never caught, Ona Judge, ran away from the General George Washington and was pursued across state and national lines for most of her life by him. And it just so happens that Charity ends up having an accident, falling from a stack of firewood. The fall is devastating enough to render her unconscious. Per medical practice, Charity was bled to try to save her life, but she was eventually declared unfit to travel by horseback back to Baltimore in time to beat the six month deadline. Big Chuck’s affiliates split the difference—they sent her to Wilmington, NC, where she could avoid the travel back and the abolition timeline at the same time.
Do you see the cartwheels slaveowners would make around just one Black girl?
Was Charity aware of the law and its possibilities? Had to be. Was she desperate enough to hurt herself? Maybe. How can we know from this side of history? And knowing, how can we judge?
We know her husband lived in Philadelphia and was upset enough about the situation to go speak to Harriet Chew on her behalf. We know that either she or he hires a white abolitionist lawyer, William Lewis, and that he is also one of the lawyers who worked on the gradual abolition law:
"I have no doubt of her having been well treated, if the Case may appear to be a hard one on the part of Mr Carroll, I cannot but consider hers abundantly more so, from her State of Slavery. & as is probably the case, accident made her a Slave, accident has made her free, and it seems right that she should avail herself of it."
We know Little Chuck stays mostly out of the extant correspondence except in one letter rejoinder where he writes:
"I care not what becomes of the unhappy Wretch [Charity]— I will give Myself no further pain about Her,—Yet reserving to Myself the right of ever—claiming Her as My Slave, for the presumption of which, I have the learned opinions of Mr Chew & Mr Rawle."
We know that only two years later, Harriet Chew and her family agree that a separation from Little Chuck is best for all around. In 1816, Harriet effectively leaves him, living the rest of her life in Philadelphia. Does Charity go with her?
We don’t know, because we don’t really know what happens to Charity. The story of Charity Castle I retell here is drawn from documents collected by Phillip R. Seitz and published with editorial explanation and comment in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography as “Notes and Documents: Tales from the Chew Family Papers: The Charity Castle Story.” Perhaps more industrious researchers than I have an update on where Charity Castle and her husband end up after this entire affair. The Homewood Museum featured an “Enslaved at Homewood” exhibit, magnificently curated by Julie Rose, but did not or could not offer a conclusion to her story. The archive stops at those letters. We do know something more about other enslaved individuals and families at Homewood Plantation. There are the Rosses, who join Harriet in Philadelphia when she leaves Homewood. There are the sixteen other enslaved people at Homewood inventoried when Little Chuck passes away. Chuck Tre (Charles Carroll III) inherits Homewood after his father’s death and it appears there were at least fourteen in another petition made by him, requesting he be made administrator of the estate. Charity isn’t listed.
The museum continues to return to the stories of those enslaved at Homewood plantation. Recently, Inheritance Baltimore Postdoctoral Fellow Jasmine Blanks has organized at least two Rituals of Remembrance, reclaiming the Homewood Big House and grounds in remembrance of those enslaved there including:
Charity Castle; Ben; Sue; Christopher Castle; John; Sam Dorsey; Tom Foulkes; William Ross, Christopher; Izadod Conner; Cis Conner; Lott; Sam; Anna; Mary Conner; Joseph Conner; Isidore Conner; Mary Ann Castle; Caesar Conner; Beck Conner; Richard Ross; Rebecca Ross; John; Jule Conner; Mary Ross; Kesia; Anna; Sally and three children; Sarah; James; Nick; Wist; Zack; Daniel; Hilary Stewart; Anny Stewart; Westley Stewart; Sally Stewart; Ann Buckmore and her child; Lindy Buckmore and her child; Catherine Buckmore; Hezekiah Wallace; James Dorsey; Sarah Comas; Sarah Branson; Samuel Castle; John Castle; Bernard Castle; Patience Cook; Matlida.
For me, there is no real end to this story either, no closure. I live here. I work here. I pass the museum every day as I head to my office. I am a Black woman who was a Black girl, raising at least one Black girl in the tradition of audacity and defiance. I am not from Baltimore, but my children were born here. Charity Castle is part of their legacy now. Which means I intend to make her part of mine as well.
So a museum like Homewood is more than just columns and green grass. It is also a site of slavery. And remembering Charity means seeming past the pretty and recognizing it as such.
Much of this is a narrative revision of a talk I gave at an event hosted by Hopkins Retrospective, the video is below.
Reading List / Sources
B. Chew et al., “Tales from the Chew Family Papers: The Charity Castle Story,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 132, no. 1 (2008): 65–86.
Homewood House | The Cultural Landscape Foundation - https://www.tclf.org/homewood-house
Black History Month at Homewood: Honoring Enslaved People at Homewood Museum – The Sheridan Libraries & University Museums Blog https://blogs.library.jhu.edu/2021/02/honoring-enslaved-people-at-homewood-museum/
Farmhouse & Slave Quarters Historical Marker https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=166980
Homewood Museum https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MD-01-510-0035
List of Slaves in Petition 20983205 - Race and Slavery Petitions Project http://library.uncg.edu/slavery/petitions/listPeople.aspx?id=17205&p=s
Petition Details http://library.uncg.edu/slavery/petitions/details.aspx?pid=17205
Homewood House Museum (Johns Hopkins University) – Digital Collections – Maryland Center for History and Culture https://www.mdhistory.org/digital-resource/relatednames/homewood-house-museum-johns-hopkins-university/
Catch up on December 2021's JHU "Conversations on Slavery, Racism, and the University." https://hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com/p/catch-up-on-december-2021s-jhu-conversations
A Ritual of Remembrance on the JHU Homewood Campus https://hardhistoriesjhu.substack.com/p/a-ritual-of-remembrance-on-the-jhu
Thank you for writing this... I am re reading it for my work on sites of liberation and sites in rebellion so this is incredibly necessary reading for me