Emancipation: Frederick Douglass and the specter of slavery in Talbot County, MD

[Recursion]

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/shallow-buried-stories-of-slavery-still-haunt-my-home-county/

The wash station was far from the tent and the main house, tucked where none of the guests could hear us scraping plates or see us using the garden hose to fill water pitchers. A few hundred guests multiplied into a few thousand forks, knives, spoons, plates, water glasses, wine goblets, and champagne flutes. It was a harried night, one I spent hoping that I wouldn’t fall into any holes in the uneven yard while carrying trays in the unlit darkness. I hoped, too, that there might be some reason for me to enter the main house.

I had known about this estate since childhood. Wye House is one of the oldest homes on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and among the most famous plantations in America. Built in the late 18th century, the main house is a grand, two-storey structure that bridges late-Georgian and early-Federalist architecture. Its agricultural fields, orchards, and gardens once sprawled across 42,000 acres. It would be easy to mistake Wye House for Tara, the wind-swept, war-torn estate in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Even now that the property has dwindled to 1,300 acres, the pale-yellow plantation home is still an island in a wild green sea.

Thousands of slaves built this house, cultivated these fields, somehow managed to grow bananas, broccoli, oranges, and even ginger root in the plantation’s orangery, which is still heated and irrigated by the original 18th-century pipes.

Of them all, only one is known to me. For two years, the young Frederick Douglass was a child slave at Wye House.

[beveeheart]

1. I lived 35-40 miles northeast of Wye House

until I was 22 and never heard anything about any of this during that time. And of course, didn't hear anything about Harriett Tubman either, who lived several miles away in Dorchester county. I haven't lived in the area since 1966, but do visit every year and sometimes it feels as if not much has changed in 50 years. Makes me both sad and angry.

[RainDog]

2. yes.

At Arlington National Cemetery in 1871, Douglass had observed: ‘We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.’ In 1894, at a Memorial (then ‘Decoration’) Day address in New York, his language was even sharper: ‘Fellow citizens, I am not indifferent to the claims of a generous forgetfulness but whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.’