Cemeteries & Graveyards Series Part 1
Unearthed Bones Reveal a Graveyard for Maryland’s Enslaved, A Funeral Pyre for Democrats Nationwide
Activists Accuse Congressman Jamie Raskin of Failing to Protect Cemetery that Contains the Remains of Sex-Trafficked Slave Girls
Dry seasons in the antebellum South cut deeply into the profits of plantation owners, leaving them with too many slaves and not enough work to go around. Tobacco growers in Virginia and Maryland addressed this crisis by leasing their surplus labor to craftsmen in Richmond, Washington, DC and Baltimore to learn carpentry, ironwork and fishing. By the time President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1 of 1963, Black captains helmed one of every 10 fishing boats in the Chesapeake Bay, and there were more Negroes than whites in the skilled trades in the District.
Slaveholders found other ways to redeploy enslaved women, however. An 1808 law prohibiting the international trafficking of Africans had the same effect as a tariff intended to protect local growers from foreign trade. The ban raised the price for homegrown slaves, leading European settlers to do a crude accounting: if the barren soil would not produce ample crops for them to sell for a profit at market, then they would compel fertile enslaved women to bear them slave children who would, like livestock, fetch a tidy sum at auction.
Over the half century that followed the ban on the international slave trade, plantation owners in the Deep South cornered the market by effectively industrializing rape, using violence—or its threat—to coerce Black men with good physiques to impregnate women and adolescent girls and then selling their progeny to other landowning aristocrats across the Deep South.
In 1937, a former slave named Louisa Everett told researchers with the Works Progress Administration that her former owner, Jim McClain, forced her and more than one hundred enslaved people on his Virginia plantation to “mate indiscriminately and without any regard for family unions.” One evening, McClain summoned Louisa and a male slave named Sam, ordered him to undress, and queried Louisa “do you think you can stand this big [man]?” As he spoke, he brandished “that old bull whip … acrost his shoulder,” reminding them both that he “could hit so hard!” Fearful, Louisa answered in the affirmative, and McClain barked that they “must git busy and do it in his presence.”
So profitable was the slave breeding business that some planters abandoned agriculture and stock altogether, adding to slavery’s house of horrors a pinch of The Handmaid’s Tale, erecting twelve-foot-high fences topped with iron spikes to fortify the concentration camps, and often compelling enslaved women to wear hoods during intercourse so that they could not identify their mates who were sometimes related by blood. The largest breeding farms were on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and in and around what would become the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, which at its height, exported between 10,000 and 20,000 slaves every month to points South and West, raking in windfall profits that far eclipsed that of any other crop.
Worsening matters is that many of the women who were made to breed weren’t women at all but children as young as 10 whose pelvises are simply too narrow for even a small fetus to pass through. Said Robert Stubblefield, the unofficial historian for the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition, a historic preservation group in the Washington, DC suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland.
“A lot of them died in childbirth. When they’re that young, their bodies are still developing and they bleed out. We don’t know their names but we know what happened to these young girls and we know that when they died, (the slaveowners) would simply dump their bodies in a ditch or a swamp. But the other slaves, after working all day, would go back and give them last rites and a proper burial.”
From this liturgy of grief and grace was born Moses African Cemetery that was the centerpiece of the River Road community incorporated by freed slaves in 1869. And it is the unearthing of the bones of enslaved children who suffered unspeakable terror in their final days that animates Stubblefield and nearly 50 other activists with the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition to fight the desecration of the graveyard where their remains are interred.
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Black Republic Media is a weekly online publication that explores the afterlife of chattel slavery in America through documentary and long-form narrative journalism. Fundamentally, BRM is a critique of the white settler project from the perspective of 42 million Black people whose political and economic struggles, and acts of daily resistance remain mostly unaccounted for in American culture and yet are the cornerstones of public life in the New World.
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