Jerry (b. circa 1818 - d. ?)
MSA SC 5496-9011
Fled from slavery, Prince George's County, Maryland, 1839
Biography:
Jerry, a slave owned by Notley Maddox, ran away a few days prior to March 17, 1839. His brother, Alfred, also owned by Maddox, ran away on the 17th. Their father was a free man named Peter Johnson, who lived in Washington, D.C. Maddox believed that was one possible destination for the brothers, but he also felt that they may have been hired as free "by some gentlemen of the Potomac fisheries, or public works in or about the District of Columbia."1 Alfred was age twenty-three and Jerry was was age twenty-one when they left, and they took clothes with them as well. A little over two years later, on May 15, 1841, three more slaves, (brothers John and Dumpty, and their sister Louisa), absconded from Maddox. Maddox, in a runaway advertisement on the 19th of May, implied that his slaves had acquired free papers with good imitations of official seals, and were in all probability using aliases.
The following year, Jerry and Alfred's brother, Sam, ran away. Sam, age twenty, ran away on August 28, 1842, and it is possible that he ended up at his free father's residence in Washington, D.C. Sam was well acquainted with Washington, D.C. and its surrounding areas. Notley Maddox lived in Prince George's County, close enough to Washington, D.C. that he asked people to contact him at the Washington, D.C. post office, and for anyone capturing the slaves to lodge them in the jail in Washington, D.C. The reward he put up for the return of all his slaves reached over one thousand dollars in an October, 1842 newspaper ad in the Daily National Intelligencer. In 1840, Maddox owned fourteen slaves, and had a total of twenty-two people enumerated in his household.
1. "Forty Dollars Reward," Daily National Intelligencer, 23 March 1839.
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