PERRY DOWNS¹Perry [Bailey] Downs (1813–80), Frederick Douglass’s brother and the oldest of seven children born to Harriet Bailey, was the slave of Aaron Anthony. The reason for his adoption of the surname Downs is unknown, but there were several men named Downs living near his family both before and after his birth: a free black man named Daniel Downs, who rented property from Aaron Anthony between 1810 and 1816, as well as Charles and Ben Downs (also free black men), and a white man named Henry Downs. So it is possible that one of them may have inspired its use. In 1826, Aaron Anthony died, and his oldest son, Andrew Skinner Anthony, inherited Downs. The younger Anthony died in 1833, and in the redistribution of his slaves that followed, Downs, his and Douglass’s sisters Kitty and Arianna, and their grandmother Betsey Bailey were among the eight slaves awarded to his three year-old son, John Planner Anthony, and placed in the care of his guardian, Thomas C. Martin. Five other slaves came under the control of White Barwick of Caroline County after he married Andrew Skinner Anthony’s widow in 1835. At some point between 1850 and the outbreak of the Civil War, John Planner Anthony sold Down’s wife, Maria, to a slave owner in Brazos County, Texas. Subsequently, Downs followed his wife to Texas, where a postemancipation labor shortage allowed him to earn “fifteen dollars gold wages a month.” In 1867, Downs, his wife, and their four children traveled to Rochester to reunite with Douglass. Elated by this reunion, Douglass built a cottage for them on his Rochester estate, where the family stayed for two years. In 1869, Downs and his wife returned to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. On a visit to Talbot County, Maryland, in 1878, Douglass found the widowed Downs in poor health and brought him, along with several other relatives, to Cedar Hill, where he died in 1880. Douglass to J. J. Spellman, 11 July 1867, reprinted in the New York Independent, 25 July 1867; Douglass to Theodore Tilton, 2 September 1867, FD Papers, NHi; Anna Downs to Douglass, 5 October 1869, General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 497–99, FD Papers, DLC; Aaron Anthony Slave Distribution, 22 October 1827, Talbot County Distributions, V.JP#D, 58–59, MdTCH; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedule, Maryland, Talbot County, 1, 4; 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedule, Maryland, Talbot County, 557; 1880 U.S. Census, District of Columbia, Washington, 143; Leigh Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (New York, 2017), 24; Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore, 1985), 175–77, 206, 225; “Maryland Marriages, 1666-1970,” FamilySearch.org. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Millican,²In 1824, Robert Millican and his sons founded the first permanent settlement in Brazos County, Texas, and named it Millican. Initially, the settlement consisted of little more than members of the extended Millican family, but by 1849 the town’s population had grown enough to warrant the establishment of a stagecoach depot, restaurant, post office, and hotel. Around 1860, the town became the northernmost stop on the Houston and Central Railroad and experienced both an economic and a population boom. When the Civil War began there were 118 slave owners in Brazos County and slightly over 1,000 enslaved men, women, and children. During the war, Camp Speight, which was located near Millican, served as a training and recruitment center for Confederate soldiers. In June 1865, Union troops were stationed at the camp in order to maintain the peace. In 1867, the completion of the railroad, combined with a deadly outbreak of yellow fever, which killed hundreds of local residents, led to a precipitous decline in Millican’s regional economic significance. Increasing racial tensions erupted into open warfare during the summer of 1868 following a confrontation between local members of the Ku Klux Klan and heavily armed black residents on the streets of Millican. Federal troops were eventually able to restore order, but only after at least 5 men were killed (some accounts put the death toll at 100) and dozens more injured. But the restoration of peace did not slow Millican’s decline, and by the end of the decade it was once again little more than a village. Bob Alexander, Bad Company and Burnt Powder: Justice and Injustice in the Old Southwest (Denton, Tex., 2014), 57–61; Robert C. Borden, Historic Brazos County: An Illustrated History (San Antonio, Tex., 2005), 5–10. Brazos Co., Texas. 21 February 1867.

FRED DOUGLASS

ROCHESTER N. YORK

Perry Downs knowing that he is a brother of yours endeavoring to
inform you where I am at. I am also a son of Harriet Baileys,³Douglass and Downs’s mother was the Maryland slave Harriet Bailey (1792–1825). She died on the Holme Hill Farm after a long illness in late 1825 or early 1826. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 64. Grandson
of Elisabeth & Isaac Bailey, Talbort Co. Maryland, Lea(s’e) mill Hill near
Hilsborough⁴Douglass’s grandmother Betsy Bailey raised him on a farm owned by their master, Aaron Anthony, along the banks of Tuckahoe Creek near Hillsborough, Talbot County, Maryland. Tuckahoe Creek is a tributary of the Choptank River, which forms part of the eastern boundary of Talbot County. “Tuckahoe” is an Algonquin term for “root” or “mushroom.” Dickson J. Preston and Norman Harrington, Talbot County: A History (Centreville, Md., 1983), 140, 191, 256; Paul Wilstach, Tidewater Maryland (Indianapolis, Ind., 1931), 104–05; McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 3, 9–10. & to show you, farther we all used to belong to R.⁵Richard Lee Anthony (1800–28), the second eldest of three children born to Aaron and Ann Catherine Skinner Anthony, trained as a blacksmith for five years before inheriting land, money, and slaves after his father’s death in November 1826. He remained unmarried and childless, and so his property, including members of Douglass’s family, was redistributed among the surviving heirs of Aaron Anthony after his death in May 1828. Harriet L. Anthony, annotated copy of Bondage and Freedom, folders 93, 173–74, Dodge Collection, MdAA; Aaron Anthony Slave Distribution, 22 October 1827, Talbot County Distributions, V.JP#D, 58–59, MdTCH; Fought, Women, 319n, 322n; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 27–29, 52, 91, 218. & A.
Emteney⁶Possibly a reference to Aaron Anthony, but more likely to Andrew Skinner Anthony (1797– 1833), the eldest child of Aaron and Ann Catherine Skinner Anthony. As a young man, he was apprenticed to James Neall, a cabinetmaker, in Easton, Maryland. After completing his apprenticeship, Anthony moved to Indiana, where he married Ann Wingate, of Martin County, in 1823. He and his bride returned to Talbot County shortly thereafter. In 1826, upon the death of Aaron Anthony, Andrew inherited a third of his estate, including eight slaves. He increased his estate and owned twenty slaves by 1830, but suffered from alcoholism and operated a tavern in his final years. In his Narrative, Douglass offers the following assessment of Anthony’s character: “He was known to us all as being a most cruel wretch.—a common drunkard, who had, by his reckless mismanagement and profligate dissipation, already wasted a large portion of his father’s property.” Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 1: 39; John Manross to Douglass, 14 January 1856, General Correspondence File, reel 1, frames 654–56, FD Papers, DLC; Harriet L. Anthony, annotated copy of Bondage and Freedom, folders 93, 176, Dodge Collection, MdAA; 1830 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 51; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 26, 29, 218, 224. who was a clerk for Col. Lloyd.⁷The patriarch of the wealthy Lloyd family was Edward Lloyd V (1779–1834), of Wye house, one of Maryland’s largest landowners and slaveholders. He was also the most successful wheat grower and cattle raiser in the state. As a charter member of the Maryland Agricultural Society, a founder of at least two banks, and a speculator in coal lands, he became the wealthiest of a long line of Lloyds that reached back to colonial Maryland. In slaves alone, his huge holdings increased from 420 in 1810 to 545 in 1830. An eager student of politics as an adolescent and a frequent auditor of political debate at the Annapolis State House, Edward V became a Republican delegate to the state legislature as soon as he reached the age of majority in 1800. The following year, he was active in securing passage of a bill removing all restrictions to white male suffrage. From 1806 to 1808 he was a U.S. congressman, voting in 1807 against a bill to end the African slave trade. For the next two years he was governor of Maryland, and from 1811 to 1816 he returned to the state legislature. In 1819 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, from which he resigned in 1826 to return to the Maryland senate, where he presided until 1831. Edward V married Sally Scott Murray on 30 November 1797 and had six children with her. 1810 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 342; Oswald Tilghman, History of Talbot County, Maryland, 1661–1861, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1915), 1: 184–210; Hulbert Footner, Rivers of the Eastern Shore: Seventeen Maryland Rivers (Cambridge, Md., 1944), 283–90; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 26, 30, 48–54, 57–58, 74, 82; BDUSC (online). I want to see a letter which you
wrote to sister Alice⁸“Sister Alice” cannot be identified; no one by that name is currently among the known members of Douglass’s extended family. But “Alice” may have been a transcription error, and Downs may have been referring to one of his and Douglass’s known sisters, Sarah, Eliza, Kitty, or Arianna. Or Alice may have been a “fictive” relative, known to the family as a sister, but not necessarily a biological relative. Leigh Fought, “Brother Perry in Texas,” 26 April 2012, leighfought.blogspot.com. since that John P. Emteney⁹John Planner Anthony (1830–71) was the only child of Andrew Skinner Anthony and his wife, Ann Wingate. In 1835, his father’s estate was divided between Anthony and his mother, with five slaves being given to his mother’s new husband, White Barwick, and eight, including Douglass’s brother Perry, their sisters Kitty and Arianna, and their grandmother Betsey Bailey, being placed in the hands of John’s guardian, Thomas C. Martin. In 1850, John’s occupation was listed as sailor in the census, and he had apparently been allowed direct ownership of a single seven-year-old boy. In 1855, he married Sarah Tharp Maston, of Delaware, with whom he had at least six children, including Harriet Lucretia Anthony, who owned and annotated a copy of Douglass’s second autobiography. In 1860, census records indicated that John (now identified as a farmer) had gained full control of his father’s estate and owned twenty-three slaves as well as real estate valued at $8,000. In the 1870 census, however, Anthony’s real estate was worth only half as much, and the estimated value of his personal property had fallen to just $500. He died the following year. 1850 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 155; 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedule, Maryland, Talbot County, 1, 4; 1860 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 31; 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedule, Maryland, Talbot County, 557; 1870 U.S. Census, Maryland, Talbot County, 41; Fought, Women, 309, 322n; Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 175, 190, 224, 225; “Delaware Marriages, 1806–1933,” Ancestry.com; Find a Grave (online). has sold my wife¹⁰Presumably Downs is referring to his wife, Maria, who accompanied him when he moved to Rochester, at his brother’s request, in 1867. Maria Downs died sometime between 1869, when she, her husband, and at least some of their children returned to Talbot County, Maryland, and 1878, when her widower (Perry Downs) was invited by Douglass to make his home at Cedar Hill. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 176–77; Fought, Women, 206–07, 224. and
for that reason I am in that State. I have found my wife and am still living
with her. I am doing pretty well here and get treated pretty well also & I
am getting $15[.]00 gold wages a month.

I have a great desire to see you if it is possible to make arrangements
to bring me to you. I am 55 years of age now. Do you recollect the time I
brought uncle Harry Downs¹¹Possibly a reference to Douglass and Downs’s uncle Henry, who was their grandmother Betsey Bailey’s youngest son. Fought, Women, 24. which was the last time I seen you.

I remain your truly Brother

PERRY DOWNS.

ALS: FD Collection, DHU-MS