From the Papers: Slavery in Mary Baker Eddy’s neighborhood

In our work on the Mary Baker Eddy Papers, we continue to discover new documents that teach more about Mary Baker Eddy and her opposition to slavery. These findings have produced several previous articles in the “From the Papers” series, including “Mary Baker Eddy’s support for emancipation,” “Mary Baker Eddy’s convictions on slavery,” and “Maj Anderson and Our Country.” Continuing our research, we have been inspired by the White House Historical Association’s project “Slavery in the President’s Neighborhood,” which examines the physical space surrounding The White House, as an entry point into studying the relationship between slavery and freedom in Washington, DC. This led us to consider slavery and its effects in the physical spaces where Eddy worked and lived. Through this research we hope to provide a deeper context for the letters and other writings that our Papers team is editing and publishing online. 

This article takes a look at Eddy’s home at 51 Hasell Street in Charleston, South Carolina. She lived there for a short time in the winter of 1844, after marrying George Washington Glover, before the couple traveled to Wilmington, North Carolina. There Glover died of yellow fever on June 27, 1844, leaving his wife alone and pregnant in an unfamiliar place.

In later life, Eddy expressed her beliefs against slavery through her writings. For example, in correspondence with Major General Benjamin F. Butler, she argued for the freedom of enslaved African Americans held in bondage, based on their shared humanity: “…we all, hold freedom to be the normal condition of those made in God’s image.”¹ Her beliefs and subsequent actions placed her within a small yet powerful minority of Northern women who “felt their souls assaulted by slavery,” suffered “persecution for their views,” and used the “weapons most readily available to them,” such as their pens and voices, to stand on the forefront of the abolition movement.² Along with her correspondence, Eddy also drafted a petition to Major General Benjamin F. Butler, collecting the signatures of like-minded women to support emancipation.³ She also wrote poetry praising the actions of both Major Robert Anderson and General John Frémont against slavery. 

In 1902 Eddy spoke briefly about her connection to slavery in Charleston: “My husband, Colonel Glover, of Charleston, South Carolina, was considered wealthy, but much of his property was in slaves, and I declined to sell them at his decease in 1844, for I could never believe that a human being was my property.”⁴ While her words and actions clearly demonstrate her opposition to the enslavement of human beings, we know little of how she came to form these views, or how the experiences she may have had during her time in the Carolinas could have influenced her later beliefs. Through exploring the racial geography of Charleston, we hope to imagine some of the ways she encountered slavery and its effects in the city where she briefly lived. 

On Christmas day 1843, Mary Baker Glover sailed with her new husband, George Glover, to Charleston.⁵ When they arrived early in January, she settled in the capital of American slavery—where nearly half of slaves transported to be sold into human bondage in the United States first set foot on American soil. Although Mary only spent a short time in the southern metropolis, what she witnessed there likely provided a perspective on slavery that inspired her views and actions in the years to come. The Glovers settled at 51 Hasell Street, in what is commonly known as a “Charleston single house,” a narrow structure one-room wide and two-rooms deep. A piazza, or covered porch held up by columns extending out from the side of the home, helped residents escape from the heat and enjoy the sea breeze.⁶ Eddy called the newly constructed home, which had been built by her husband in his work as a building contractor, “our beautiful home in Charleston.” Glover had first arrived in Charleston not long after the Ansonborough fire—The Great Fire of 1838⁷ —which destroyed around one quarter of the city center, burning nearly 150 acres at the center of the commercial district, including more than 500 properties and 11,000 buildings.⁸ With his experience as a mason, carpenter, and builder, Glover worked alongside his business partner, George William Logan, to build a number of properties, including 51 Hasell Street.⁹  

As the geographical nexus of American slavery, the peninsula known as Charleston, and the surrounding barrier islands—a mixture of sandy embankments and marshland covered in sea grass—witnessed both the arrival of thousands of kidnapped and enslaved Africans, and the continued sale of their children and grandchildren, for generations to come, throughout the surrounding low country. A thriving trade in rice had brought many of the first African slaves to the Carolina shores, and the nineteenth-century shift to cotton growing continued to fuel the need for enslaved workers. In the weeks following her arrival, Eddy could not have avoided the centrality of human enslavement. The secessionist Charleston Mercury, the city’s local publication, filled its pages with advertisements for auctions of human property, notices about runaway slaves, and announcements for the disbursement of slave badges meant to allow enslaved workers to travel throughout the city for work. For example, N. Trowbridge offered a $25 reward for an enslaved man who had run away on the morning of January 2, 1844—”a negro man about 25 years of age, named JOE, about 5 feet 10 inches high, brown skin and full face, winks very quick when spoken to.” The enslaver supposed he had escaped on a vessel headed for Wilmington. Alex McDonald placed a similar notice, a $25 reward for “CHARLES, a blacksmith by trade, about thirty years old, five feet four inches high, jet black, stoops a little, has short whiskers and one of his upperside teeth out.”¹⁰ Notices for the sale of human property, as well as its ancillary profits in such commodities as “negro cloth” (used to make slave clothing), “negro cabins,” and the individuals inhabiting those dwellings, filled the classified pages of local publications. 

Alongside the advertisements were articles purporting the positive good of human enslavement, such as one titled “Free Negroes.” It recounted the story of an enslaver from Georgia who upon his death left a number of his enslaved workers in Ohio. According to the author, the enslaved individuals applied to the executor of their former enslaver’s will, in order that they might be returned to Georgia, because “they had rather be Georgia slaves than Ohio free negroes!”¹¹ 

Not only were the literary spaces of Charleston teeming with the language of slavery but so, too, were the physical places Eddy likely frequented—the streets on which she would have walked, the buildings she passed, and the markets where she shopped. The sights, smells, and sounds of human bondage permeated the city, making enslavement a reality its residents could not escape. The Glovers’ home was situated in Charleston’s commercial center, north of the more fashionable southern end of the peninsula but conveniently located near the public market and municipal buildings. Eddy’s everyday meanderings likely allowed her to confront common scenes that included the sale of enslaved men, women, and children, who were auctioned off ships in the harbor, in city taverns, and at various wharves on the peninsula. For the Glovers it was just an 11-minute walk to Gadsden’s Wharf, which served as a center for the African slave trade to the United States. A seven-minute walk along Anson street, with a left turn on Market Street, could have placed Eddy at the Custom House, a common site for slave auctions, including those advertised on Tuesday, January 30, 1844. That chilly morning, Horse-Savannah plantation was auctioned off, along with “thirty-eight prime SLAVES,” who were likely lined up for inspection.¹² The Mart, opposite the Planter’s and Mechanics bank at 131 and 133 East Bay Street, was another popular site of slave auctions; it was only another seven-minute walk continuing south on East Bay Street from the Custom House. There Eddy might have witnessed sales like that of “fifty-three very prime NEGRO SLAVES, accustomed to the culture of both cotton and rice” and advertised as “remarkably prime” by agents Condy and Dawes. Or perhaps she saw the sale of “a remarkable prime gang of 30 NEGROES, belonging to the estate of Mrs. Anne Lehre.”¹³ On State Street—about a 10-minute walk down the peninsula from the Glover home, Eddy may have seen those looking to exchange their enslaved property for cash. Both Alex McDonald and J.M. Gilchrist advertised their willingness to purchase enslaved workers: “Persons wishing to dispose of SLAVE PROPERTY, may obtain the highest market price in cash, for their property.”¹⁴ 

By the 1850s Charleston was home to more than 30 slave-trading firms and more slave-dealing brokers, auctioneers, and commission agents. The domestic slave trade in Charleston moved inland and concentrated itself at the center of the city near City Hall and St. Michael’s Church. Private sales also moved inside to the offices of brokers near Adger’s Wharf and on Broad, State, and Chalmers streets. When public auctions did occur, they were held just north of the Exchange Building. These sales were still occurring in the years during and after Eddy’s time in Charleston, as one European visitor wrote after witnessing a sale that made his “hair stand on end” outside the Exchange in 1853. Although the 1830s and 1840s had seen city officials pass ordinances against the sale of slaves in public spaces, these regulations were regularly ignored, which convinced the city council to repeal them in 1848.¹⁵ 

Enslaved people not only lived and worked on the rice plantations down the Ashley River from Charleston but also in the urban spaces, within the townhomes of plantation owners who had come to the city for relief from the heat and mosquitos and also in the shops and businesses around the city. Enslavers could purchase badges for their workers to be hired out as tradespeople, porters, day laborers, fishers, house servants, washers, and other various jobs.¹⁶ Eddy likely saw these men and women moving through the streets, visibly displaying their credentials in the form of tickets or metal badges to avoid confrontation. Charleston probably felt more like what Eddy might have expected from a Caribbean port city than other North American urban centers, with majority African American populations mostly composed of enslaved Black people, along with a small free Black community that included some successful mulattos, some of whom held slaves of their own. She would have heard a mixture of European languages—likely French from the large Hugeonot population, various African dialects, and a distinctive hybrid language called Gullah, developed by enslaved individuals on coastal plantations. 

The Charleston of 1844 had also been shaped by a particular event that occurred before the Glovers’ arrival. When Denmark Vesey, a free Black man, planned an insurrection on July 14, 1822, he was executed, and 131 of the conspirators were arrested and tortured. Vesey’s ghost seemed to haunt its streets, through the structures of force and power subsequently erected to prevent another similar uprising. The African Church’s house of worship had been torn down, and South Carolina had allocated funds to support a permanent municipal guard of 150 men, along with a Citadel to house them. At the corner of Meeting and Broad streets, the Guard House was also remodeled, and on the corner of Magazine and Mazyck streets stood the infamous Work House, where many of the accused in the Vesey conspiracy had been imprisoned and which continued to serve as a house of correction for slaves. Originally the site of an old sugar refinery, the Work House had been converted into a place of torture, equipped with a whipping post and a treadmill, propelled by human steps to grind corn. Eddy could have reached the Work House on foot by walking down Hasell Street until it turned into Beaufain Street, roughly 15 minutes from her home. In walking past the building, or perhaps as she approached it, she might have heard what one described as the “savage yells of insurgent negroes and the shrieks of widowed ladies.”¹⁷ 

Walking the streets of Charleston, Eddy likely saw, and perhaps wondered at, broken bottles placed on top of walls, to prevent enslaved workers from escaping. Other homes had constructed more sophisticated iron railings to achieve the same end. And she would have seen the City Guard as they traveled through the streets on horseback, a force that by 1850 included 250 men. She might have also found the nightly curfew surprising, marked by the sound of a drumbeat that signaled the black population could no longer be outside of the home.¹⁸ 

Little is known about Mary Baker Eddy’s time spent in the South, in part because of its brevity and the tumultuous events that followed in her young life. She wrote that while accompanying her husband on a business trip to Wilmington, he was “suddenly seized with yellow fever and died in about nine days.” Through the help of Glover’s friends within the Freemasons, she was brought back to her father’s home in Tilton, New Hampshire.¹⁹ While we may never fully understand what she experienced while in Charleston, we can, through research on the historical geography, gather a better understanding of how she encountered slavery—and how those sights and sounds might have influenced her later views on the subject.