James Curtis (b. circa 1783 - d. circa 1850)
MSA SC 5496-015163
Accomplice to slave flight, Montgomery County, Maryland, 1834
Biography:
A free African American, James Curtis was born around 1783 in Montgomery County, where he worked as a laborer. He likely gained his freedom sometime between 1832 and 1834.1
On March 8, 1834, Curtis stood trial at the Montgomery County Circuit Court for assisting in the escape of an unnamed slave. Chief Judge Thomas Beale Dorsey and Associate Judge Charles J. Kilgour presided over Curtis's one-day trial. Curtis faced a jury that included at least eight slaveholders, including Lloyd Dorsey, Elisha Etchison, Lyde Griffith, William D. Poole, Thomas Scott, William Selman, John L. Trundle, and John T. Veirs.2 A woman referred to as "Negro Lucy" appeared as one of the witnesses for the State, although the court minutes gave no other details regarding her identity.3
James Curtis received a two-year sentence of solitary confinement in the Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore City, beginning on March 13, 1834. Five years earlier, Joseph Owens, the Penitentiary's warden from 1925 to 1939, had overseen the construction of a new, five-story wing. The wing contained 320 solitary cells, a huge increase from the original nine.4 Swams arrived in one of these cells as Prisoner Number 2642. The Prisoner Records for the Penitentiary identified Curtis as five feet seven inches tall, with "a scar of a burn on the right wrist."5 Assigned the occupation of sawing, Curtis's sentence of solitary confinement required that he return to his cell immediately after performing his daily work.
Curtis finished his sentence on March 13, 1836. An 1826 Maryland law forced Curtis, like all free blacks exiting the state's prisons—even those receiving pardons—to permanently leave Maryland by the end of sixty days. If Curtis had remained in the state over two months, he could have faced enslavement for the same number of years as the sentence he had just completed.6 The law also instructed prison authorities to pay these banished prisoners a sum "not exceeding thirty dollars, at their discretion." The law did not specify a minimum sum.
Records suggest that Curtis was living in Georgetown, D.C., by 1840. That year, census records named only the heads of households, although they also listed the number of family members in each age group. James Curtis's household consisted of Curtis himself (in the 55 to 100 age group), one African American woman between 55 and 100, and two African American males between ten and twenty-four. The James Curtis who had left the Maryland Penitentiary would have been around fifty-seven in 1840, which corresponds with the "55 to 100" age bracket of the Curtis in Georgetown.
A younger James Curtis
and a John Curtis resided nearby with their families,7 so
Curtis may have chosen this area of D.C. in order to live close to relatives.
Over fifty percent of Curtis's closest neighbors, or sixteen out of thirty
families, were African American. Curtis did not appear in the census for
D.C. in 1850, or for any state, so he may have passed away by that time.
1. Jerry M. Hynson. Free African-Americans in Maryland 1832 (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 1998). Curtis does not appear in the listings.
2. U.S. Census Bureau (Census
Record, MD) for Lyde Griffith, Slaves, 1850, Montgomery County, Clarksburg
District, Page 2, Line 1 [MSA SM61-168, M 1505-5].
U.S. Census
Bureau (Census Record, MD) for John T. Veirs, Slaves, 1850, Montgomery
County, Medleys District, Page 3, Line 32 [MSA SM61-168, M 1505-5].
U.S. Census
Bureau (Census Record, MD) for William D. Poole, Slaves, 1850, Montgomery
County, Medleys District, Page 7, Line 33 [MSA SM61-168, M 1505-5].
U.S. Census
Bureau (Census Record, MD) William Selman, Slaves, 1850, Montgomery County,
Rockville District, Page 18, Line 39 [MSA SM61-168, M 1505-5].
U.S. Census
Bureau (Census Record, MD) for Elisha Etchinson, Slaves, 1850, Montgomery
County, Clarksburg District, Page 3, Line 3 [MSA SM61-168, M 1505-5].
3. MONTGOMERY COUNTY, CIRCUIT COURT, (Minutes), 1801-1845, [MSA Citation: T413-2]. State of Maryland vs. James Curtis
4. Wallace Shugg. A Monument to Good Intentions: The Story of the Maryland Penitentiary, 1804 – 1995 (Baltimore, MD: Maryland Historical Society, 2000) 22.
5. Maryland Penitentiary, (Prisoner Record), 1830-1840, Legacy Accession Number: S275, Prisoner Numbers: 2180-3386, SE65-3. Page 12.
6. GENERAL ASSEMBLY (Laws), 1826-1827. Acts of 1826, Chapter 229, Section 9.
7. 1840 U.S. Federal Census
Record (DC) for James Curtis, Washington, D.C., Ward 2, Page 50, Line 8.
The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Ancestry.com.
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