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not even in this enlightened age. Yet that amounts to no more than relics of a bygone time, a curiosity for the antiquarians. There the matter would rest and have no further concern for you, Barnabas, and the House of McDoon such as it is today, were it not for another matter altogether—assuming the two are not somehow linked in ways obscure.”
Sedgewick pulled out a paper.
“This is a long essay, or memorial, written by your mother, dated not long before she died,” he said. “Listen well:
‘I come now to delicate and disturbing matters that I must commit to paper, as I am the only one who knows the unadorned truth. I write this to honour the memory, and above all the actions, of my beloved sister Eusebianna, and I do so knowing that few will believe what I tell, and those who believe will repudiate the tale and call me liar and worse.
I have absolutely not the least doubt that her husband will deny every word I write and will seek to have my words exposed to the most horrid forms of obloquy, if he can not have them obliterated altogether by the Court or other means that may come to his disposal. I beg the Court not to allow this to happen, i.e., to ensure instead that my statement be entered into the judicial record. In the end, all we have is our honour and the trust of those who love us ; so says the Psalmist and likewise Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and many other of the Ancients.
Sibby—for so I called her all her life, as she called me Belle—travelled with her husband, the merchant Anthony Macarius McDoon, to what was then the colony of Maryland in America, in the last years before the rebellion that created the United States. My brother-in-law had business interests there, relating to his import of tobacco, and centred on his quarter-share in the Blair Plantation at the confluence of the Choptank River and the Chesapeake Bay, in the area the colonials called ‘the Eastern Shore.’
The two, having married only months before they sailed from Scotland, settled in rooms within the plantation house (the McDoons being related on their mother’s side to the Blairs). Sibby wrote me eight letters during the initial part of their time there, which I have preserved as being my property (and clearly my sister’s intent was that they should be and remain so in perpetuity, no matter what my brother-in-law has alleged and attempted via this Court);—I attach all eight as adjuncts to this memorial.
What Sibby described in her eight letters veers between her extreme pleasure at the landskip, the bird-life, and the beauty of the foliage and flowers (which are apparently of a lushness and richness unknown to us in Scotland), and her equally advanced displeasure at what she called the ‘debilitating nature of human relations’ that she witnessed on the plantation. ‘Slavery written about by its apologists or commented upon by merchants, jurists and political men, disconnected and at a distance from the reality of the situation, bears no resemblance to the degradation, the inimical bonds placed upon human beings, that I saw with my own eyes’ is what Sibby wrote to me; she then proceeded to document all she could in her ensuing missives.
She disagreed openly and violently with her husband about this state of affairs, and sought to have him sell his share in the plantation and withdraw entirely from the tobacco trade. He was furious with his new wife for her temerity, not least in front of his friends and colleagues, who belittled and tarrowed him without cease about his ill-tempered and illogical spouse. He forbade her to talk about such things in any public place, and he commanded her to discontinue her conversation with the slaves, which was widely remarked upon in the neighbourhood as unfitting for any white woman and especially for the wife of one of the owners.
Sibby, of course, obeyed her husband in neither of these respects (for, if she had, there would never have been a tale to tell, much less the many court
Sedgewick pulled out a paper.
“This is a long essay, or memorial, written by your mother, dated not long before she died,” he said. “Listen well:
‘I come now to delicate and disturbing matters that I must commit to paper, as I am the only one who knows the unadorned truth. I write this to honour the memory, and above all the actions, of my beloved sister Eusebianna, and I do so knowing that few will believe what I tell, and those who believe will repudiate the tale and call me liar and worse.
I have absolutely not the least doubt that her husband will deny every word I write and will seek to have my words exposed to the most horrid forms of obloquy, if he can not have them obliterated altogether by the Court or other means that may come to his disposal. I beg the Court not to allow this to happen, i.e., to ensure instead that my statement be entered into the judicial record. In the end, all we have is our honour and the trust of those who love us ; so says the Psalmist and likewise Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and many other of the Ancients.
Sibby—for so I called her all her life, as she called me Belle—travelled with her husband, the merchant Anthony Macarius McDoon, to what was then the colony of Maryland in America, in the last years before the rebellion that created the United States. My brother-in-law had business interests there, relating to his import of tobacco, and centred on his quarter-share in the Blair Plantation at the confluence of the Choptank River and the Chesapeake Bay, in the area the colonials called ‘the Eastern Shore.’
The two, having married only months before they sailed from Scotland, settled in rooms within the plantation house (the McDoons being related on their mother’s side to the Blairs). Sibby wrote me eight letters during the initial part of their time there, which I have preserved as being my property (and clearly my sister’s intent was that they should be and remain so in perpetuity, no matter what my brother-in-law has alleged and attempted via this Court);—I attach all eight as adjuncts to this memorial.
What Sibby described in her eight letters veers between her extreme pleasure at the landskip, the bird-life, and the beauty of the foliage and flowers (which are apparently of a lushness and richness unknown to us in Scotland), and her equally advanced displeasure at what she called the ‘debilitating nature of human relations’ that she witnessed on the plantation. ‘Slavery written about by its apologists or commented upon by merchants, jurists and political men, disconnected and at a distance from the reality of the situation, bears no resemblance to the degradation, the inimical bonds placed upon human beings, that I saw with my own eyes’ is what Sibby wrote to me; she then proceeded to document all she could in her ensuing missives.
She disagreed openly and violently with her husband about this state of affairs, and sought to have him sell his share in the plantation and withdraw entirely from the tobacco trade. He was furious with his new wife for her temerity, not least in front of his friends and colleagues, who belittled and tarrowed him without cease about his ill-tempered and illogical spouse. He forbade her to talk about such things in any public place, and he commanded her to discontinue her conversation with the slaves, which was widely remarked upon in the neighbourhood as unfitting for any white woman and especially for the wife of one of the owners.
Sibby, of course, obeyed her husband in neither of these respects (for, if she had, there would never have been a tale to tell, much less the many court
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