Letter from Bishop Whittingham to Margaret Whittingham mentioning Alexis, September 17, 1861

by Mary Klein, Diocesan Archivist

Several years ago, some controversy arose over whether Bishop Whittingham actually owned a slave. William Rollinson Whittingham was Bishop of Maryland from 1840-1879, and a native New Yorker. He was an adamant Unionist during the Civil War, but his views on slavery were complicated. He was not an abolitionist, and white proponents of that view would have been difficult to find anywhere in Maryland, except among Quakers. He believed that while slavery was legal in the United States, he had no option but to obey the law. His views on the matter were common among the leadership of the Episcopal Church; in fact, as much as we may find it unconscionable, no bishop in the church spoke out in support of abolition before the Civil War.

The document that stirred the controversy over slave-ownership was the Federal slave census of 1860 (highlighted), which enumerated the number, gender and age of enslaved persons, along with the name of the owner of these nameless individuals. The particular record citing Bishop Whittingham is ambiguous because the “Owner” box reads, “Dr. Jones. Employer/ Bishop Whittingham”. The slave in question was identified as a 12-year-old male. For years we have looked for any evidence that a young slave boy lived with the Whittingham’s in Baltimore on Madison Avenue, and for any possible reason the bishop would have “employed” him. The inference to the term “employer”, is that the young lad’s owner was paid by a third party (in this case, Bishop Whittingham) for some sort of work or service. We could find no “Dr. Jones” in the Baltimore City Directories of that era, nor any mention of such a boy in the Whittingham’s’ personal correspondence, nor any proof of payments to a Dr. Jones.

As is so often the case when engaged in historical research, evidence for one line of inquiry appears while we are looking for evidence of another topic, in the always surprising world of constant discovery. The answer to the questions “Who is Dr. Jones?”, “Did Bishop Whittingham really own a slave?”, and “Who is this 12-year-old African American lad living with the Whittingham’s?” came about in just this way, with the random discovery of two letters which answer all these questions.

The first letter is transcribed below:

 

“August 24, 1861

Right Rev. & Dear Sir,

This will be handed to you by my son-in-law, Mr. James F. Ellicott, who visits Baltimore for the purpose of bringing home my truant boy Alexis, who was lately apprehended and confined in the Baltimore jail. Any aid you can give to him will be duly appreciated by us. I think it best to remove him to St. Mary’s as the risk of losing him in town will be great, during the present troubled state of affairs. Moreover, I am disposed to believe that his mother will exercise an influence over him for his good. With great respect and esteem,

I remain your humble servant,

C.M. Jones”

Letter from Dr. C.M. Jones to Bishop Whittingham, August 24, 1861

Bishop Whittingham’s habit of careful record-keeping fills in some blanks with his note written on the letter: “Dr. C.M. Jones, St. Inigoes. Received Aug. 26, replied Aug. 29.” The identity of not only Dr. Jones, but of the formerly nameless boy is revealed: Alexis.

St. Inigoes is located in St. Mary’s County, near St. Mary’s City, and was a stronghold of early Roman Catholic Jesuits. It was also home to a small group of Episcopalians who opened and ran a girl’s school, St. Mary’s Seminary, during the nineteenth century, and formed a small chapel of ease from St. Mary’s Parish, Trinity Church.

Three days after her father wrote to Bishop Whittingham, on August 27, 1861, Emily Jones sent another letter to the bishop, which gives us quite a vivid picture of now-13-year-old Alexis, the young man referred to as Dr. Jones’ “truant boy”, as well as the naïve mind-set of Miss Emily Jones herself. Miss Jones says, “It was a shock to me to learn from your letter that Alexis went off on his own account & and up to the time of reading, I believed that he had been swept off in the current & and would return to you as soon as he could find his way back. I was really not prepared for such a development on the part of Alexis; and that he should affect not to know Mrs. Whittingham after all her kindness to him, is something I could never have thought possible. I do not know what to think of this design of going when he could not again see his mother & father. I am sure such a thing was farthest from his thought when I saw him last. I do not think however that he wanted to go northward with troops to be disbanded – he wanted to be with soldiers, and it mattered little to him whether they were Northern or Southern soldiers.”

“I am afraid Alexis has been a great annoyance to you for some time past, and I am so sorry you did not tell us of it, we should have made a way to bring him home. … I am so sorry he did not come home before this adventure. There is now a very strong & general opposition in the neighborhood to letting him come back here. The neighbors say that he will be the ruin of all the boys in the place if he does not set fire to the wheat fields & dwelling houses. I am not afraid of any harm Alexis may do to us, although he doubtless saw the Northern troops commit outrages enough to make him very hardened in crime, and I am sure the good he really gained in your household will come out after he has been a while from his evil companions…Please give my best regards to Mrs. Whittingham, tell her I am so sorry for all the trouble she has had on account of that worthless & ungrateful boy.”

The tale of Alexis’ adventure seemed to have occurred this way: Alexis evidently “went off on his own accord” with Union soldiers, was subsequently arrested and held in the Baltimore jail, and when Mrs. Whittingham went to bring him home, he said he did not know her. Maryland had been under Martial Law since May of 1861 and the state was occupied by Federal soldiers. Alexis would have had plenty of opportunity to see the troops in Baltimore marching by his own residence and hear the news of the day. In fact, in a letter to his children of May 18, 1861, Bishop Whittingham wrote, “Day before yesterday witnessed a great influx and transit of troops. One regiment, from Michigan, walked down Biddle Street, just as folks were going to Evening Prayers.” Alexis surely would have witnessed the movements of hundreds of troops from the front steps of the Bishop’s residence.

Miss Jones seemed to think that Alexis would never have run away, but Baltimore in 1860 was home to nearly 26,000 free persons of color, in a total population of 212,000, and only 2,218 enslaved persons. The atmosphere in Baltimore was surely full of anticipation and hope for young Alexis, much more so than in his small, rural, closely watched village of St. Inigoes.  Dr. Jones had said “the risk of losing him in town will be great.”, but Miss Jones had convinced herself that Alexis merely wanted to “play soldiers” and didn’t care whether the soldiers he fell in with were Union or Confederate. But Alexis’ actions show us a more determined young man than that. Denying he knew Mrs. Whittingham was perhaps another bid for his freedom, hoping he would not be sent back with her. Evidently, he stayed in the jail, awaiting his fate.

Letter from Bishop Whittingham to Margaret Whittingham mentioning Alexis, September 17, 1861

Letter from Emily Jones to Bishop Whittingham, August 27, 1861, page 1

Letter from Emily Jones to Bishop Whittingham, August 27, 1861, page 2

Miss Jones reflected the fear in the white community of St. Inigoes, and the refusal to see that change to the plantation lifestyle was on its way. She says the neighbors do not want Alexis to come back to St. Inigoes because they fear he will “ruin all the boys” by telling them what is going on in the wider world. Evidently, Alexis was viewed as a leader, not only by “all the boys”, but by the white neighbors. The unfounded fear that he will “set fire to the wheat fields & dwelling houses” because he has seen atrocities committed by Union soldiers, is evidence of the fear white slaveholders harbored ever since the slave uprising in Santo Domingo in 1791.

We do not have any other correspondence to Bishop Whittingham from either Dr. Jones or his daughter Emily, nor his son-in-law James Ellicott, so we don’t know why Alexis came to live with the Whittingham’s in the first place. However, the bishop did mention the incident of Alexis’ adventure in a letter to his daughter Margaret, who had been sent to live with relatives in New Jersey at the bishop’s insistence, for safety’s sake. Written on September 17, the bishop said, “Did I tell you that we are officially shed of our would-be volunteer Alexis? I wrote to Dr. Jones and he sent up Mr. Ellicott, to whom I got him delivered. What do you think of my degrading your poor old trunk into making it part of his kit? It is ever so; it was the best we could do.” The tone of the letter is certainly not angry, but rather good-natured, and seems to back up the idea that Alexis had run away to join the Union army as a “would-be volunteer”. And the fact that the bishop had given his daughter’s trunk as part of Alexis; “kit” was interesting. Why would Alexis need a “kit” if he were returning to St. Inigoes? Did Miss Jones’ expression of fear of Alexis’ return signal some other destination for the young man?

 Miss Jones apparently saw Alexis as easily led and childish, a commonly taught stereotype of African Americans, because she hoped “the good he really gained in your household will come out after he has been awhile from his evil companions.”  However, the teenager seems much more focused than childish.

These letters clear up the mistaken idea that Bishop Whittingham was a slaveowner, but do not give the answer as to why Alexis lived in the household in 1860 and 1861. A next interesting step is to try and find Alexis in later years. His bravery and determination at the age of 13 may have been a precursor to a life of leadership as an adult, and perhaps he can be located in the historical records of St. Mary’s County, the United States Colored Troops, or other collections of records. The hunt for Alexis is on!

Bishop Whittingham’s residence on 277 Madison Avenue