Edmonson Sisters - Early Life

Early Life

The Edmonson sisters were the daughters of Paul and Amelia Edmonson, a free black man and an enslaved woman in Montgomery County, Maryland. Mary and Emily were two of thirteen or fourteen children who survived to adulthood, all of whom were born into slavery. Since the 17th century, law common to all slave states decreed that the children of an enslaved mother inherited their mother's legal status, by the principle of partus sequitur ventrem.

Their father, Paul Edmonson, was set free by his owner's will. Maryland was a state with a high percentage of free blacks. Most descended from slaves freed in the first two decades after the American Revolution, when slaveholders were encouraged to manumission by the principles of the war and activist Quaker and Methodist preachers. By 1810, more than 10 percent of blacks in the Upper South were free, with most of them in Maryland and Delaware. By 1860, 49.7 percent of the blacks in Maryland were free.

Edmonson purchased land in the Norbeck area of Montgomery County, where he farmed and established his family. Amelia was allowed to live with her husband, but continued to work for her master. The couple's children began work at an early age as servants, laborers and skilled workers. Beginning about age 13 or 14, they were "hired out" to work in elite private homes in nearby Washington, D.C. under a type of lease arrangement, where their wages went to the slaveholder. This practice of "hiring out" grew from the shift away from the formerly labor-intensive tobacco plantation system, leaving planters in this part of the United States with surplus slaves. They hired out slaves or sold them to traders for the Deep South. Many slaves worked as servants in homes and hotels of the capital. Men were sometimes hired out as craftsmen, artisans or to work at the ports on the Potomac River.

By 1848 four of the older Edmonson sisters had bought their freedom (with the help of husbands and family), but the master had decided against allowing any more of the siblings to do so. Six were hired out for his benefit, including the two youngest sisters.