Heading: (African American, 1862)
Author: Hilleary, Eleanor B.M.
Title: Letter from slave-owning heiress about legal problems with newly-emancipated slaves in Washington, D.C.
Place Published: Mount Retreat, Maryland
Publisher:
Date Published: July 21, 1862
Description:

Autograph Letter Signed. 1 pg. To Judge [William] Tuck, [Baltimore].

When she wrote this letter, Hilleary was "very uneasy about my business" - compensation due her for several slaves freed in Washington. She wrote Tuck that one of her fellow plantation owners had just returned from Washington, where he had his "business all fixed", having "carried two gentlemen of his neighborhood" with him to "prove his property" of slave ownership to the Commission. His petition for compensation had been granted except for one of his "servants" who had "got his free papers before he was appraised". Hilleary feared that some of her slaves would do the same.

Eleanor Beanes Mullikan Hilleary was an unmarried Maryland woman, sole heir of a notorious rich plantation owner who had once murdered a young man named Magruder, shooting him in the head, then having one of his slaves hold up the wounded man so that he could "literally knock out the man's brains" with the butt of his rifle; tried for murder, Hilleary's father was acquitted. After his death in 1859, Eleanor inherited vast property, including the many enslaved house "servants" at her plantation near the Washington D.C. border. She had relied entirely on Tuck, an elected judge and her trusted attorney, to solve her many legal problems as a slave owner. These multiplied after Congress, in April 1862, passed the "District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act", by which all enslaved persons living in the nation's capital were given immediate freedom. Maryland slave owners whose slaves had immediately run off to the nation's capital to gain their freedom were to receive up to $300 for each freeperson, after their value had been "appraised", by petitioning a three-man Emancipation Commission with proof of their "ownership". Hilleary was among the 900 slave-owners who would claim compensation for nearly 3,000 emancipated slaves.

Very good.