Slavery
L'Hermitage was also known in its time for its harsh regime. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz traveled through the area in June 1798, recounting that he had been told of tyranny and torture at the plantation:
June 15. ... Four miles from the town we forded the river . On its banks one can see a row of wooden houses and one stone house with the upper storeys painted white . ... One can see on the home farm instruments of torture, stocks, wooden horses, whips, etc. Two or three negroes crippled with torture have brought legal action ...
Nine court proceedings against family members for cruelty to slaves are recorded, including proceedings against Boisneuf for "cruelly and immercifully beating and whipping" six slaves and against Victoire Vincendière for beating her slave Jenny. These charges were dismissed, but Boisneuf was found guilty in 1797 of beating a slave named Shadrack and of "not sufficiently clothing and feeding his negroes."
The Vincendières sold L'Hermitage in 1827, after gradually dispersing most of their slaves. Victoire moved to a townhouse in Frederick. Victoire died in 1854, still the owner of three slaves. Her will stipulated their freedom. Slavery at the property continued under the new proprietors. John Brien (or O'Brien) bought the farm and continued the practice, and David Best, the farm's tenant from 1843 kept slaves. Best had six slaves in 1860, making him one of the largest slave owners in the county. Slavery ended in Maryland in 1864.
The l'Hermitage site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.
Read more about this topic: L'Hermitage Slave Village Archeological Site
Famous quotes containing the word slavery:
“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world ... and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)