“We lodged in log huts, and on the bare ground. Wooden floors were an unknown luxury. In a single room were huddled, like cattle, ten or a dozen persons, men, women, and children. All ideas of refinement and decency were, of course, out of the question. We had neither bedsteads, nor furniture of any description. Our beds were collections of straw and old rags, thrown down in the corners and boxed in with boards; a single blanket the only covering. Our favourite way of sleeping, however, was on a plank, our heads raised on an old jacket and our feet toasting before the smouldering fire. The wind whistled and the rain and snow blew in through the cracks, and the damp earth soaked in the moisture till the floor was miry as a pig sty. Such were our houses. In these wretched hovels were we penned at night, and fed by day; here were the children born and the sick neglected.”
– Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson (1849)
La Plata, MD – President Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “So you’re the little lady who started our Great War.” The irony in this story is that the more famous author may have gotten her inspiration from an account written by a former slave from Southern Maryland.
“Josiah Henson was born a slave in Charles County about a mile from where we are right now,” Dr. Julia A. King, associate professor of archaeology and anthropology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, told the Charles County Archaeological Society of Maryland in La Plata Thursday, Feb. 9.
Finding Josiah Henson before he founded a refuge for refugee slaves and became a conductor on the Underground Railroad was no easy task, she pointed out. There are a lot of things about Josiah Henson that were unusual, King said.
He witnessed as a boy the horrible punishment meted out to his father, who had attacked the overseer at Le Grange, because the man had raped the slave’s wife. Henson watched as his father’s ear was severed, as the man was lashed to a bloody pulp by a whip before a jeering crowd.
“Previous to this affair, my father, from all I can learn, had been a good-humoured and light-hearted man,” Henson would later write. “His banjo was the life of the farm. But from this hour he became utterly changed. Sullen, morose, and dogged, nothing could be done with him.”
His father was eventually sold to a plantation in Alabama, which according to King, was akin to a death sentence for Maryland slaves.
At that time, the young boy’s family was owned by Francis Newman who had fled to the New World from scandal in England and owned four properties in Charles County. Dr. Jonah McPherson, who owned Henson’s mother, went and got the other and her children from Newman after the incident with the boy’s father.
As a young man with children of his own, Henson’s owner promised him freedom, but he fled after realizing his master had no intention of fulfilling that promise.
“When it came to escaping from slavery, it was very difficult for one person to escape,” King said. “Virtually everyone went on their own. When Henson escaped, it was with his wife and two children. This was something that was extremely hard to do, yet they ultimately escaped to Canada.”
King detailed a 2016 surface collecting effort by her St. Mary’s College of Maryland students at La Grange in La Plata in an effort to find where the slave cabins mentioned in Henson’s account might be.
By detailing on a gridded map where concentrations of artifacts were recovered, King and her students were able to determine with a fair degree of certainty that they found their man. Or at least where he lived.
Judging by the distribution of artifacts, the farther the team explored from the main house, the more remnants they unearthed that supported her hypothesis. Among the artifacts were four stones, she said, based upon other slave quarter complexes unearthed in neighboring Historic St. Mary’s City, may be foundation stones for the former cabins she believes stood there.
There is a lot more, she conjectures, waiting to be discovered.
“There is so much out there,” King said. “We’ve gotten so much information and the site is preserved,” she said.
Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com