In 1830, Eliza Stewart was held in the prison in Washington County, District of Columbia. She was listed as 16 years old, wearing a country cloth frock, linen shift, and coarse shoes.
Burr, the jailor, advertised for her return to her enslaver: Joseph Wilson living near Bladensburg in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
(Daily National Intelligencer, DC, 12 April 1830)
From the age in the advertisement, she would have had an estimated birth year of 1814. Approaching puberty and her child-bearing years, it would have been an anxious time for Eliza Stewart. Enslavers often sold adolescents as the market valued the labor extracted from people aged 14 to 40. And as enslavers valued women who could be breeders to increase their chattel, the likelihood of sexual assault grew as well. While the advertisement omits much about her specific motivations, freedom from a system that reduce her to property and subject to abuse would motivate many to seek liberation.
Three years later in 1833, enslavers in Prince George’s County had their personal property assessed and the names of the people they enslaved were listed in the tax books. Joseph H Wilson had two women who were named with the diminutive “Bet“. One was given the external market appraisal value of $60, the other $120. These values, imposed on the women by men who commodified their bodies as property, allow us to estimate their age in 1833.
Elizabeth (Bet), appraised at $60, is likely either a small child between the ages of 3 and 6 or an elderly woman between the ages of 50 and 60. She was the first female listed which suggests that she was one of the oldest women on the estate. Usually at this age, the enslaved were no longer forced to labor in the fields, rather they took on labor roles that could be considered caretaker roles: cooks, nurses, midwives, seamstresses, caretakers of children. This Elizabeth is unlikely to have been the much younger Eliza Stewart who escaped to the District.
Elizabeth (Bet), appraised at $120, was likely between 6-10 years old, almost a full decade younger than the Eliza advertised in 1830.
This suggests that Eliza may not have returned to Wilson and instead was likely sold with other captured Black people into the domestic slave market, as the District was central to the forced migration of enslaved people from the Chesapeake Slave Society to the Deep South and the cotton plantations.
Joseph H. Wilson, the enslaver of Eliza Stewart, was married to Amelia Virginia Weems in 1825, five years prior to Eliza’s capture in 1830. Her brother, Nathanial Chapman Weems, Jr., owned a cotton plantation in Rapides Parish in Louisiana, after he migrated from Maryland to the Louisiana in the 1830s. While his migration was after the personal property assessment and the advertisement, it suggests the possibility that she was removed from Maryland and sent south.
Eliza Stewart is of interest due to her family name. The slave-holding Wilson family owned property in Prince George’s County near Northhampton, the Sprigg estate as well Marsham Waring and Benjamin Lee’s estates. Marsham Waring and Benjamin Lee both enslaved members of the Stewart family. Waring enslaved James Stewart, born around 1805, as well as Patrick and Notley who were born later in the 1820s. Eliza Stewart, with an estimated birth year of 1814, could be a sister or cousin of the Stewarts enslaved by Waring.
stories of Then 