Heading: (African American - Slavery archive)
Author: Van Bibber, Elizabeth (Betty) Carter
Title: Archive of letters from the wife of the owner of the Avondale estate in Maryland, to a relative the Rosewell Plantation of Gloucester, Virginia, with much reference to their slaves
Place Published: Westminster, Maryland
Publisher:
Date Published: 1848-1853
Description: Approximately 30 autograph letters signed by Elizabeth (Betty) Carter Van Bibber, the Virginia-born wife of the owner of the Westminster, Maryland Avondale estate. To her relative, Mary Virginia Yeatman Deans, at the Rosewell Plantation of Gloucester, Virginia. Various sizes and lengths. The letters include stampless address leaves or original stamped envelopes. Housed in plastic sleeves in a three-ring binder.
Significant and revealing series of letters from the grand lady of a southern plantation to one of her peers, a decade and a half before the Civil War would send their fairy tale lives into the ash bin of history. Avondale and Rosewell were both antebellum properties of somewhat tarnished legend. Nearly a century before the Van Bibbers moved into Avondale in 1848, locals whispered that the brutal original master of the estate, a British immigrant foundry owner, having attempted to rape one of his women slaves, had the woman walled up alive when she resisted him, and burned to death a male slave who came to her aid. Two hundred miles to the south in Gloucester County, Virginia, Rosewell, the beautiful 750-acre (and 100+-slave) plantation was reputed to have been a resting place of Thomas Jefferson while he pondered the ideas that became the Declaration of Independence. During the decade before the Civil War, Betty Van Bibber wrote these letters at Avondale to the woman she called her sister, whose husband, Josiah L. Deans (possibly Betty‘s half-brother) became the third owner of Rosewell shortly before Betty‘s death in 1853. Elegantly-written, the letters are full of family chit-chat as well as recurrent references to favored slaves, shared between the families, who went back and forth between the estates after the widowed Betty, who had lived with the Deans in Virginia, moved north, with a few enslaved Blacks in tow, to marry the Baltimore aristocrat, corn farmer, and amateur poet who inherited ”haunted” Avondale from his father.
As slave-owners went, the Van Bibbers, bookish intellectuals, were eccentrically benevolent. Betty insisted that one of her slaves, ”valuable property” who traveled across state lines without supervision, should not be sold to a Virginian (who intended to emancipate him in Liberia) without first being asked to give his personal consent. And she even hosted, at her mansion house, the wedding ceremony of her enslaved ”nanny” and housemaid to another worthy slave, owned by her neighbors, the Shrivers (ancestors of the political celebrity in-law of the Kennedy clan).Also includes: Claude O. Lanciano, Jr. Rosewell / Garland of Virginia (Gloucester County Historical Committee, Gloucester, Virginia, 1978) Original cloth in Dust Jacket. These letters were unknown to the author, who only touched upon the Deans family as antebellum owners of Rosewell, and said nothing of the Van Bibbers.

Click here to see annotated excerpts from the letters

Very good overall.