22

650 HISTORICAL ANNOTATION

24.17-18 practice of separating mothers from their children] While many pregnant
slave women continued physical labor until mere weeks before their children
were to be born, slaveholders, interested in each child as a new acquisition, often freed
a mother for days or weeks to nurse a newborn. Some owners even established nursing
schedules for the infants. Some mothers, like Douglass's, were hired out to other
plantations and rarely saw their children. But it was more often the case that slave
mothers shared cabins with their children and spent as much time caring for them as
possible, given a demanding work day. During the day, young children were frequently
neglected in the plantation nursery or cared for by siblings scarcely older than
themselves. As a result, child mortality was high. However, many slave autobiographies
attest to the love, compassion, and hope within slave families, relating stories of
children fighting overseers who tried to beat their mothers, or of offspring choosing
to remain in bondage with their mothers when offered an opportunity for escape or
freedom. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the
Antebellum South (1972; New York, 1979), 77-103.
24.24 grandmother's five daughters] Of the twelve children born to Betsey and
Isaac Bailey, five daughters, all owned by Aaron Anthony were hired out. Milly
Bailey (1790-?), the first child of Isaac and Betsey, worked on Aaron Anthony's
Tuckahoe farms and had seven children. Betsey and lsaac's second child, Harriet
(1792-1825), was hired out by Anthony to local farmers as a field hand from 1808
until her death. In February 1818, while serving Perry Steward, a tenant farmer on
Anthony's Holme Hill Farm in Tuckahoe Creek, she gave birth to Frederick Augustus
Bailey, her fourth of six or seven children. In late 1825 or early 1826, she died on the
Holme Hill Farm. Jenny Bailey (1799-?), the third daughter of Betsey and Isaac,
either worked on Anthony's Tuckahoe farms or was hired out to other local farmers.
In 1825, after having had three children, Jenny ran away with her husband, Noah, and
was never seen again. In retaliation, Anthony sold her two living children into the
Lower South. The fourth daughter, Hester Bailey (1810-?), bore one child, and was
last mentioned in 1827, when she was awarded to Thomas Auld after the death of
Aaron Anthony. Priscilla Bailey (1816-?), the eleventh of Betsey and Isaac's twelve
children, was given to Richard Lee Anthony upon the death of his father, Aaron
Anthony, in 1826. Aaron Anthony Ledger B, 1812-26, folders 95, 165, Dodge
Collection, MdAA; Aaron Anthony Slave Distribution, 22 October 1827. Talbot
County Distributions, V.JP#D, 58- 59, MdTCH; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass
8-9, 17-18, 21, 27, 34-35, 37, 62-65, 205-06, 219, 221.
24.32 Prichard's "Natural History of Man."] James Cowles Prichard (1786-
1848) was an English physician, notable for having held a favorable view on the
origin and potential of blacks. In The Natural History of Man, he argues for monogenism,
claiming that humans were originally black, their skin color becoming lighter
over time. Prichard believed that racial varieties were inherent in the original structure
of a being rather than imposed by external circumstances like climate. The figure to
which Douglass refers is a sketch of the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses the Great, found