There they were: the names that link Phyllis Hammond to America?s shameful past.
Written out neatly in a script that?s still legible some 140 years later, property records show that Carroll County slaves, like those in the deepest South, were no more notable than the rest of their owners? possessions. One wagon, one horse, one Negro.
For Hammond, it was all too much. She wept.
“I went to tears to think we were put into the same category as material items,” the 50-year-old Westminster activist and former president of the Carroll branch of the NAACP said. “It was devastating.”
And all too real, thanks in part to an anonymous donor, who in December dropped off 19 documents containing Carroll County slave records to the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.
Although any newfound slave registry ? history aside ? is bound to cause an unsettling ripple for some in the community, the Carroll County Human Relations Commission will hold a public presentation of the documents, called “Many Rivers Crossed,” at 7 p.m. March 12 at the Carroll Board of Education.
“It?s important to have the names out there,” said commission member Laura Rhodes, who organized the event. “Slavery shouldn?t be swept under the rug. It?s disgusting that we devalued people to see them as property. We can take these documents and celebrate how far we?ve come.”
For years, Carroll?s slave records amounted to 33 browned documents folded into an envelope marked “slaves” in the basement of the Carroll County Courthouse Annex, with copies of the same 1869 files stored in a binder at the Westminster branch of the Carroll County Public Library. The library also has microfilm of slave records from 1850 and 1860.
The names on the records are a who?s who of old Carroll County and Maryland families, black and white ? Owings,Gorsuch, Stocksdale, Shipley, Warfield, Dorsey, Reese, Dehoff, Zepp, Engler, Nichodemas, Hammond, Shriver, Longwell and Grimes, among others.
While Alex Haley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Roots: The Saga of an American Family,” spent a decade traveling thousands of miles to Africa before writing his book in 1976, the public soon will be able to take a walk back in time and view slave history with just a click of a mouse as the records are placed online for the whole world to see.
Enoch Pratt Free Library receives anonymous donations all the time, but when someone dropped off the documents ? all from 1869 ? three months ago, the library gained a rare historical gem, said Wesley Wilson, chief of the State Library Resource Center. The documents included papers submitted by slave owners to claim government compensation for slaves who had enlisted in the Union Army. They detailed a slave?s age, his health, his period of ownership ? most say “for life” ? and whether he fought in the Civil War. Andrew H. Baker, for example, owned ? for life ? 15-year-old Sarah J. West, who was in “sound” condition, the “Tabular Statement of Ownership of Certain Slaves” shows.
It took three days to scan both sides of the documents, which are especially fragile along the folds, said Nadia Nasr, coordinator for Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage. “This brings them to life in a way no textbook ever has,” she said.
Hammond?s ancestor, Sebastian “Boss” Hammond, was a slave from New Windsor with a talent for engraving tombstones. He couldn?t read, but Boss copied names onto gravestones. His skill allowed him to buy not only his freedom but also that of his wife and 10 children.
“We don?t hear anything about the positive aspect of that time,” Hammond said. “To think he was able to find a trade, overcome obstacles and then free himself and his family ? I am just so proud.”
The registry will appear online at www.mdch.org by the end of spring.
Time to acknowledge whitewashed past
Jesse Glass grew up in Westminster during the 1950s and ?60s, when “white-only” shadowed everyday life. Separate water fountains, barbershops and movie theaters dotted the town, and the Ku Klux Klan was alive and well.
In 2004, Glass, now an American history professor at Meikai University in suburban Tokyo, compiled “The Witness,” a collection of newspaper accounts and trial transcripts that detail the persecution of Carroll?s slaves and runaways and the hanging of Rebecca McCormick, the first execution in the county?s history.
McCormick was a 20-year-old slave hanged in 1859 after a trial in which her masters were never questioned. Glass surmises that McCormick murdered another slave, Frank Miles, 12, because he disclosed that their master, William Orendorff, a Westminster farm owner, was the father of McCormick?s 10-month-old baby.
“For 150 years, [Carroll] was happy to talk about [slavery] indirectly with rumors,” Glass said. “But now is the time for people to face the long history of America?s holocaust. It still hasn?t really been dealt with, and people ask why African-Americans are angry. If you?re African-American, your family name is probably the name of the person who exploited your ancestors and did horrible things to your great-great-grandmother.”
It was Glass? suggestion that kick-started a film project, which would give Carroll?s African-Americans a chance to tell their families? stories. The Human Relations Commission hopes that next week?s slave registry presentation can serve as a starting point for the oral-history project. The Community Media Center, which produces shows for local cable-access channels, plans to use a $5,000 state grant for the documentary, said Marion Ware, the center?s executive director.
In his introduction to “The Witness” Glass, who is white,wrote: “In order for a community to begin to heal, it is necessary for a dialogue to begin about those past events whose repercussions linger to divide the present. This is especially true for a community like Carroll County, Maryland, a place where only certain aspects of the past have been deemed worthy of a sanitized preservation.”
“Explaining it away by saying it was a practice of the times is unacceptable,” former Westminster Mayor Kevin Dayhoff said. “Slavery was wrong, plain and simple.”
Carroll?s future, Dayhoff said, lies in embracing its diversity.
“In order to go forward, we need to meaningfully address old wounds,” he said. “Done correctly, it can bring us closer together. A meaningful portion of the quality of life we enjoy today in Carroll County was built on the backs of African-Americans in bondage.”
Still, 142 years after the Civil War ended, African-Americans in Carroll County face less-than-equal treatment, according to Hammond, who runs a company that helps businesses and government agencies reach out to minorities.
“Qualified people of color are still not the executives or managers of most businesses,” she said. For example, Carroll has only one black school principal.
And there?s still the ugly side, too.
Six months ago, someone spray-painted the word “nigger” across a campaign sign for Perry Jones Jr., the first black county commissioner. Racism? Some insist it was just a teenage prank. But, there?s no question racism was behind the slur several young white children hurled at Michael Johnson, a 24-year-old African-American man and Westminster resident. “The little kids said it right in front of their parents, and the parents said nothing,” Johnson said. “That?s just life.”
Just life? That?s not how the Human Relations Commission, the Carroll NAACP and the South Carroll Diversity Roundtable see it. And the hope is that the slave-registry presentation will get people thinking about where the county has been and where it should go.
For Hammond, discovering the stories of her slave ancestor made her feel “so alive.”
“I feel like a whole new person,” she said. “I feel like I actually have roots now. Everybody?s got that history. Everybody.”
Famous slave owners and their Carroll County connection
» Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence and the last of the signers to die (in 1832 at the age of 95), owned more slaves ? 330 ? than anyone else in Maryland. He continued to own slaves after signing the Declaration.
» David Shriver, a wealthy merchant and farmer from outside Westminster, freed some of his slaves after he died in 1826. His last will and testament freed slaves who could make a living on their own and provided that his estate take care of the old ones who couldn?t. His family Bible showed 35 entries for the births of slaves.
» Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” owned slaves. The Carroll County town of Keymar was named after his family. Key?s sister married Roger Brooke Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who issued the Dred Scott decision. ? Kelsey Volkmann
Maryland Archives online
Read slave statistics for Howard, Anne Arundel, Prince George?s and Montgomery counties.
Source: Chris Haley, director of the Study of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland.
If you go» What: “Many Rivers Crossed”
» When: March 12, from 7 to 9 p.m.
» Where: Carroll County Board of Education, 125 N. Court St.,Westminster.
