An Open Letter to the Mariners' Museum

An open letter to the Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia:

I write to you today in my capacity as a teacher, but also as one who fell in love with the Mariner’s Museum some forty years ago. Some of my fondest summer memories were of losing myself in the Great Hall of Steam, or in the darkness of the Crabtree Collection, at a time when the Museum was much smaller than it is today. I was last there in 2018, and consistently recommend the Museum to people visiting the Hampton Roads area, as it is, to my mind, unique among museums.

This moment in which we find ourselves is one pregnant with possibility. A new world struggles to be born and what kind of world it will be cannot be said. Day after day, we see movements, official and unofficial, to move beyond racist legacies of the past, and this, it seems, is a component to building a better world. It is with this in mind that I bring up Lake Maury.

I don’t need to tell you who Matthew Fontaine Maury was. Virginia born, a prominent, internationally-known scientist, who did much to map the ocean’s currents. The nickname “Pathfinder of the Seas” is not inappropriate. Indeed, judged on his scientific credentials alone, he deserves to be a much better-known name. But he isn’t, and we know why.

Maury, not to put too fine a point on it, was a traitor. At the outset of the Civil War, when Virginia seceded from the United States, Maury resigned his commission in the United States navy and accepted one in the Confederate Navy, where he was in charge of naval defenses until the government in Richmond sent him abroad, where he would use his renown in an attempt to rally European governments to the Confederate cause. He was, in short, the agent of a nation founded solely on the premise that Black people were inferior to white people and ought to be enslaved. In the Museum’s first publication, Alexander Crosby Brown’s 1936 Lake Maury in Virginia, this record is, not surprisingly, glossed over as Maury “naturally [identifying] himself with the Confederacy in the War-between-the-States.”

Nor does this work, whose point is admittedly not to serve as a biography of Maury, speak to his views on the South’s peculiar institution. In Matthew Fontaine Maury: Benefactor of Mankind, Captain Miles P. DuVal speaks of Maury “deploring” slavery and hoping to relocate American slaves, and perhaps some planters, to Brazil, in hopes of healing the sectional rift he’d seen by the 1850s. In an 1851 letter to a Ms. Blackford, he spoke of his hopes of ridding Virginia of slavery and involuntary servitude, though evincing a fatalism that if Virginia were to announce a coming end to slavery, slaveowners would simply either pick up and move or sell their enslaved people downriver.

Such were his hopes for Brazil, that as slavery ended in the United States, American slaves could be sold in exchange for a Brazilian promise to end the African trade rationalizing that it would be “the transfer of the place of servitude, but the making of no new slaves” to a place where, he was told, “the black man, and he alone, is capable of subduing the forests.

Thus, his opposition does not seem to be to slavery per se, but to slavery where he could see it. Among those who argued against slavery in America, Maury was very much an outlier. He did not argue for immediate emancipation, gradual and compensated emancipation, or even emancipation and colonization abroad. His moral calculus allowed him to argue that removing the enslaved people of America to a harsher, foreign environment in some way expiated the sin of slavery. Then, of course, there is his choice to stand for a government dedicated to the preservation and extension of slavery in America.

Then, after the war, when he was unable to return to the United States, he accepted a position with Maximilian, the emperor of Mexico. While there, he hatched a scheme for Southern planters to emigrate there, to what he called a “New Virginia.” His idea was that planters and those slaves or ex-slaves who remained loyal might settle in Mexico, which was in dire need of modern farming techniques. Since slavery was illegal in Mexico the Black workers would be, as it were, indentured “until they can learn the language of the country, and make themselves acquainted with its customs and its laws, while they are being instructed in the cultivation of the staples that are new to them,” as he put it in an 1865 letter, after which they will have earned “a home as one of the rewards of his labour, and will be able to take care of himself.”

Hardly a hero, and hardly an appropriate namesake for a beautiful site of recreation in a city that is majority-minority, where 40% of the population is African American. Indeed, naming the lake after a Confederate icon in the 1930s places it squarely in the middle of larger developments of that sort, where organizations led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy peddled the myth of the Lost Cause and sponsored the creation of monuments, a process you can read about in works such as Karen Cox's Dixie's Daughters and Adam Domby's The False Cause. The Maury monument in Richmond had only recently been unveiled when the lake was named.

What, then, should this lake be named? In one sense, Maury did fit the bill. Archer and Anna Huntington, when they founded the Museum, set out to establish a center “to advance learning, the arts and sciences, relating to or bearing on watercraft, the marine, and marine navigation,” and as I have conceded, Maury is consequential in this. The Huntingtons also called for the museum “to develop and maintain a lake and park within the bounds of which the foregoing may be accomplished.” But nothing says the name of the lake has to be related to the museum’s mission and so I would like to make a suggestion related to local and the museum’s history.

Mariner’s Museum sits on a plot of land that was chartered in 1624 to Edward Waters, for whom the creek that was dammed to create Lake Maury was named. In the charter the plot is specified as “being on the edge of the forest about two miles below blunt point abutting Eastward upon a Creek commonly called by his own name Waters Creek Westward upon the land of Percivall Ibbison Northward upon the forest and South upon the Great River [the James].”

Blunt Point, whose namesake had been killed by Native Americans in 1611, was home to some of the earliest settlements in what was then called Warwick River County (or Shire). In 1636 Blunt Point became part of the larger story of slavery and race in America, connecting it both to the Civil War and to the current moment in race relations.

Blunt Point also holds a place, albeit a tangential one, in the racial history of Virginia and of the nation. In 1636, a court convened at Blunt Point found that a planter, named Thomas Key, was the father of a girl named Elizabeth, whom he had fathered by raping an enslaved laborer. The court record is largely lost, and we only know of this through later proceedings, but it had profound implications for Elizabeth Key, then about six, and all future products of such liaisons. Though the subjecthood of such children was up for debate, the conclusions seemed to be that as the daughter of a free Englishman, she was not a slave.

Key apprenticed her to a planter named Humphrey Higginson for a period of nine years, after which she was to be free, making her essentially an indentured servant. The next nineteen years are something of a mystery. Elizabeth should have gone free in 1645, but at some point between 1636 and 1655 her indenture was transferred to John Mottrom, who moved her to Northumberland County. Whether she was seen as an indentured servant or a slave at this time is unclear, but what is clear is that, when John Mottrom died in 1655, ten years after her indenture was supposed to end, the estate saw her as property.

During that interval, Elizabeth had become involved with another indentured servant, and Englishman named Thomas Grinstead who had trained as a lawyer. When Mottrom died, she had born a son by him and, in 1655, she sued for her freedom, arguing that as the daughter of an Englishman she was entitled to the same privileges, including freedom, as any English subject. She was making a play not only for her own freedom, but that of her son who would have been considered chattel along with her.

In county court her case was argued, probably by Grinstead, and the court revisited the matter of her parentage. It determined that Elizabeth was the daughter of Thomas Key, and ordered her free. Mottrom’s estate appealed the ruling to the General Court in Jamestown, which reversed the lower ruling, after which Grinstead appealed to the General Assembly, which was the court of last resort. Before the General Assembly Key, through her lawyer, argued that she should be freed because she was born the child of a free Englishman, because she was Christian, and because she was an indentured servant, not a slave. At the time, the laws about slavery were still very much in flux, and the argument was that free or unfree status was determined by the father, meaning Elizabeth would be free. There was also an argument that Christians could not be enslaved.

A committee of the General Assembly investigated the case and the circumstances of Elizabeth’s indenture to Higginson, the transfer to Mottrom, and the findings of the lower courts. It found that Elizabeth’s father was Thomas Key, that whatever her status her transfer to Higginson constituted an indenture, one improperly extended by Mottrom. The judgment was that “Elizabeth ought to be free and that her last Master should give her Corn and Clothes and give her satisfaction for the time that she hath served longer than She ought to have.”

Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom, and that of her child, and won it. When Thomas’s indenture ended they married, living together until his death in 1661. She remarried, but died a few years later, dying a free woman, and with her children’s future secured.

Later enslaved people, themselves the product of the rape of an enslaved woman by her owner, would not be so fortunate. Perhaps to forestall more suits like Elizabeth Key’s, the General Assembly in 1662 eliminated any ambiguity about the offspring of such unions, declaring “that all children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother. This act secured hereditary slavery in Virginia and was a model for other colonies. In 1667, the General Assembly further entrenched slavery by declaring that conversion to Christianity would not lead to freedom either. How consequential, then, the story that began at Blunt Point in 1636.

According to legal scholar Taunya Lovell Banks, the name Grinstead appears on an 1833 committee to ascertain the willingness of enslaved laborers to emigrate to Africa, in the aftermath of the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion. This meant that John Grinstead was accepted as white and, indeed, he owned 31 enslaved laborers, a tragedy perhaps enabled by the laws passed due to his ancestor's success.

But this need not detract from the story of Elizabeth Key Grinstead whose journey to freedom and recompense, if not reparation, began in a courtroom a short distance from the Mariner’s Museum. Lake Grinstead sounds good in my ears, far better than a man who, no matter his other accomplishment, fought in defense of the institution Elizabeth worked so hard to escape. Yours, Michael G. Bazemore, Jr. *I have modernized 17th-century spellings