Rachael Davis (b. circa 1822 - d. ?)
MSA SC 5496-047815
Escaped from the Rockville District, Montgomery County, Maryland,
1845
Biography:
One of at least seven slaves, Rachael Davis escaped from Alexander F. Boswell's farm in early July 1845. In a July 16th advertisement in the weekly Maryland Journal,1 Boswell described his farm as standing "about 4 miles above Rockville, on the River Road" in southern Montgomery County. Despite Boswell's use of the word "above," River Road ran about four miles south of Rockville, following the Potomac River into the District of Columbia.2 He suspected that Davis had fled to relatives in the Alexandria and Georgetown areas.
Boswell described Davis as twenty-three years old with a “copper complexion [and] a bone felon"—a painful, inflamed tumor3—"on one of her fingers." The advertisement described Davis as "pleasant," although she looked down when addressed. Boswell gave no other physical description of Davis, adding that he did not know what she wore during the escape. Perhaps Davis had stolen an assortment of garments when she fled, a common strategy for preventing slaveholders from providing accurate descriptions.4 However, Boswell may simply have felt that Davis's bone felon provided sufficient identification. In 1807, for instance, a Virginia slaveholder knew that his runaway slave's bone felon made her more vulnerable to discovery, explaining that "if examined [the growth] might be easily discovered."5 In fact, 19th-century medical journals described bone felons as incurable without surgery.6 These debilitating growths often resulted from performing the same manual task repeatedly.
Alexander Boswell's advertisement appeared only once, and we
lose track
of Davis at this point. She did not appear among Boswell's slaves at
the
time of emancipation in 1864. However, a sixty-year-old woman named Rachel Davis
appeared in the 1880 census for Sandy Spring in Montgomery County along
with her son Edwin, his wife Susan, and their four children. A Rachel
Davis, age seventy-six, also appeared in the census two decades later
for
the nearby town of Wheaton, just south of Sandy Spring. The wife of
Govener
Davis and the mother of ten children, she worked as a washer woman.7
Perhaps these census records show the same Rachael Davis who escaped slavery
forty years ago, but no proof has yet been uncovered.
1. "$50 Reward." Maryland Journal. 16 July 1845: 3. MSA SC 3839, Reel M 7933. Maryland State Archives.
2. Montgomery County District 4, Simon J. Martenet, Martenet and Bond's Map of Montgomery County, 1865, Library of Congress, [MSA SC 1213-1-464]. The Huntingfield Map Collection.
3. John Chalmers Da Costa.
A
Manual of Modern Surgery (Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders, 1894) 512-514.
F.J.S. Gorgas,
ed. The American Journal of Dental Science. Vol. 5, No. 7 (Third
Series. Baltimore, MD: Snowden and Cowman, 1871) 330.
4. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999) 80.
5. Qtd. in Daniel Meaders. Advertisements for Runaway Slaves in Virginia, 1801-1820 (Studies in American History and Culture. London: Routledge, 1997) 81.
6. Da Costa, John Chalmers. A Manual of Modern Surgery. Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders, 1894.
7. U.S. Census Bureau (Census
Record, MD) for Rachel Davis, 1880, Montgomery County, Sandy Spring, District
119, Page 3, Line 39 [MSA SM61-324, M 4748-2].
U.S. Census
Bureau (Census Record, MD) for Rachel Davis, 1900, Montgomery County, Wheaton,
District 65, Page 2, Line 57 [MSA SM61-416, M 2386-2].
Researched and written by Rachel Frazier, 2009.
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