He Bought the Virgin Sisters to Be His Servants… But What They Did Next Was Brutal! | HO

I. The Ledger That Shouldn’t Have Existed

The first clue turned up in a cardboard box mislabeled Misc. Probate, 1850s in the Adams County Records Annex. On a wet October afternoon in 2021, archivist and historian Dr. Eleanor Finch found herself staring at a brittle plantation ledger with water-stained edges and a leather strap long disintegrated. Someone had tucked it inside a newer folder, as if trying to hide it even from the past.

Across the top of the first intact page, written in a neat, disciplined hand, were the words:

Inventory of Human Property Sold at Natchez, July 1837.
For the Account of Colonel Marcus A. Garrison.
[Adams County Probate Register, Box 14A-7, “Garrison Estate Papers,” p. 3]

Finch had read hundreds of such ledgers. They followed a script — ages, “value,” skills, ailments, debts, births. But two entries froze her:

Lot 11: Dela Carrington, age 20, literate, trained house worker.
Lot 12: Kora Carrington, age 18, seamstress, house worker.
Purchased together. Price: $1,500.
(ibid.)

The price was three times the market rate. And someone had pressed so hard on the quill that the “1,500” tore the page.

Finch frowned. That was unusual enough. But what unsettled her more was a faint graphite note scribbled in a different hand at the bottom margin:

Keep them upstairs. For private use. —R.

She would later determine the “R.” to be Ruthie Jamison, the senior domestic enslaved woman at Garrison’s plantation for 22 years. But at that moment, all Finch could do was stare at the word private.

“We see euphemisms everywhere in plantation documents,” Finch told me when I interviewed her for this article. “But ‘private use’ was one of the darkest codes. It usually meant control, isolation, and coercion. Not always sexual — sometimes psychological, sometimes violent discipline — but always about domination.”

The notation was the first thread in what would become a three-year investigation spanning archives in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C. It was the first hint that the deaths, disappearances, and financial collapse of the Garrison estate in 1837 may not have been the result of “natural misfortune,” as local history books claimed.

Two enslaved sisters — bought together, isolated together, and, according to every official record, vanished together — had left no trace of their fates.

Until now.

II. Natchez, 1837: Two Women on the Block

The auction ground behind Union Street in Natchez was described by travelers as “a theater of American hypocrisy” — a place where Christian planters haggled over bodies between church services. On July 3, 1837, two adult sisters stood on that platform, wrists bound, sun scorching their backs.

Dela Carrington, 20, tall, sharp-featured, her expression a mask of controlled fury.

Kora Carrington, 18, smaller, anxious, glancing between the crowd and her older sister.

Their mother, Sarah Carrington, had died six months earlier, hanged at Thornhill Plantation for what records euphemistically described as “violent insubordination.”
[Source: Thornhill Plantation Journal, Jan. 1837, Entry 14]

Witness accounts from the area — gathered in a 1937 Works Progress Administration (WPA) interview with an elderly woman named Dinah Jacobs — told a different version:

“Miss Sarah, she fought the drunk colonel off her chile. Tore his face wide as God’s judgment. Next day they strung her up.”
— WPA Slave Narrative, Mississippi, 1937, Interview 52: D. Jacobs

The “drunk colonel” was Marcus A. Garrison, then 57 years old, owner of one of the largest cotton estates in the county. He had a reputation for brutality that drifted even into white circles. Planters whispered about his rages, his debts, the screams heard from the upper rooms of his mansion.

But he was rich. And powerful. And, like many men of his class, untouchable.

The sisters had been held at the Natchez traders’ pens for four weeks before the July auction. Dela reportedly tried twice to escape; Kora refused to eat for days after arrival. Both attempts were recorded in the trader’s book as “troublesome behavior.”
[Natchez Trading Pen Log No. 44, June 1837]

When the auctioneer called for bids, men in fine suits stepped forward.

Garrison was among them.

A witness — again from the WPA archive — described his entrance:

“He come with that cold look, like he already owned every soul there.”
— WPA Narrative, Mississippi, Interview 31

He didn’t haggle. He didn’t inspect. He didn’t question.

He simply said:

“Fifteen hundred. For both.”

The hammer fell.

The sisters’ fate was sealed.

III. The Plantation: Isolation as Strategy

Garrison’s plantation — known locally as Fairview — stood three stories tall, with four white columns that gleamed like polished bone. Behind the façade, dozens of enslaved people labored in fields that stretched toward the horizon.

Yet the sisters were not taken to the fields.

Instead, they were brought to a secluded wing of the house — the “East Wing,” described in a rare 1840 insurance inventory as containing “private chambers, separate entrance, restricted access.”
[Fairview Insurance Docket, Adams County Archive, #1840-19]

This wing had a history. Enslaved women assigned there often disappeared without explanation, sold quietly or claimed “runaways.” None left records beyond ledger entries and initials carved into wooden doorframes.

When Ruthie — the senior domestic — first encountered the sisters, she recorded the meeting in her private ledger, a remarkable document scholars believe she kept to preserve truth in an era that erased Black voices:

“New girls come. Older one sharp-minded. Younger frightened. Both marked by sorrow. Colonel say they keep upstairs. I fear what that mean.”
— Ruthie Jamison, Domestic Ledger, July 1837, p. 2. Private Collection of J. Blackwood (descendant)

That ledger, discovered in 1984 hidden in a false panel inside Fairview’s surviving pantry, became a cornerstone of Finch’s research.

It documented:

unusual orders to isolate the sisters

Garrison’s escalating debt

increasingly violent moods

whispered warnings among the servants

And one chilling line:

“They watch him close. They watching, planning something.”
— Jamison Ledger, Aug. 1837

IV. A House Weighting with Tension

Over the next two months, signs of tension at Fairview appeared everywhere in the archival record:

Garrison’s account books showed massive whiskey purchases in July and August.

Doctor’s receipts listed two visits for “heart irregularity.”

Letters from the overseer Pike complained of “insubordination among the upper servants.”

Local gossip columns referenced Garrison’s “erratic public behavior.”

Debt notices indicated that his plantation finances were collapsing.

[Multiple sources: Adams County Notices, 1837–38; Pike Correspondence, Fairview Papers]

Finch told me:

“The household was in slow-motion implosion. Everyone knew Garrison was dangerous, unpredictable, and deeply indebted. But no one expected what happened next.”

The turning point appears in a short, easily overlooked entry in Ruthie’s ledger:

“Miss Dela ask me where oleander grow. I tell her careful. Poison weed, deadly. She listen too close.”
— Jamison Ledger, Aug. 1837, p. 5

Oleander — common, beautiful, and lethal — grew in three places along the property fence.

And the sisters had access.

V. The Event the Records Tried to Hide

On August 28, 1837, Garrison died.

Official cause of death: cardiac seizure.
[Certificate filed by Dr. Nathaniel Morrison, 1837 Death Register]

Newspapers called it “an unfortunate but not unexpected passing of a respected planter.”
— Natchez Courier, Aug. 29, 1837

But the private testimony gathered decades later told a different story.

Lucinda Moore, a domestic enslaved woman interviewed in 1937, recounted:

“I seen him fall. Seen the two gals scream for help like they scared. But I seen they eyes. They wasn’t scared. They was waiting.”
— WPA Narrative, Mississippi, Interview 84

Ruthie’s ledger wrote it even more starkly:

“He drink from the glass Dela give. Half hour later he on the floor. Breathing wrong. Hands shaking. I know poison sign when I see it. I say nothing.”
— Jamison Ledger, Aug. 1837, p. 7

The oleander’s symptoms aligned exactly with the doctor’s noted observations:

vomiting

uneven heartbeat

muscle spasms

sudden collapse

But no white doctor in Mississippi, in 1837, would suspect enslaved women of poisoning a wealthy man.

It was unthinkable.

The sisters, witnesses said, cried for help convincingly. And, crucially, did nothing that appeared suspicious.

VI. The Will, the Forgery, the Fire

Garrison had drafted a will two months earlier that contained an extraordinary clause:

“In the event of my death before age 60, I request an investigation of any enslaved persons purchased in the preceding six months.”
— Garrison Will, June 1837, Fairview Papers

The sisters had been purchased exactly six weeks before his death.

Had the clause remained, they would have been interrogated under torture.

But the will submitted to probate after his death did not contain that clause.

Instead, a final page dated July 1837 replaced it.

Finch identified it as a forgery by studying pen pressure, ink composition, and margins:

“The new page was soaked in tea to simulate aging — a known technique among enslaved domestic workers with access to household supplies. It was a brilliant forgery. Whoever did it saved her own life.”

Who forged it?

Ruthie’s ledger answered:

“Teach Dela to copy his hand. She learn fast. She careful. She brave.”
— Jamison Ledger, Sept. 1837

The original page had been burned.

VII. Aftermath: Manumission and Disappearance

Six months after Garrison’s death, his widow petitioned the court to manumit Dela and Kora.
[Adams County Court Records, Petition 1838-4]

The petition cited:

“Good character”

“Useful clerical service”

“Assistance organizing the late colonel’s estate”

The judge approved it.

On January 15, 1838, the sisters walked out of the courthouse legally free women.

Then they disappeared from Mississippi records.

Entirely.

VIII. A Whisper in the WPA Narratives

Their names surface only once more — nearly 100 years later — in the WPA slave narratives.

Interview 52, by Dinah Jacobs:

“Them Carrington girls? Folks say they kilt him. Say they walk free after. Say they left a trail north. Memphis, maybe. Or St. Louis. But they lived. I know they lived.”
— WPA Archive, Mississippi, 1937

For nearly two centuries, the truth was buried under silence.

Until Finch, and the documents she uncovered, stitched it all back together.

II. THE PLOT
I. Inside the East Wing: A Strategy of Control

When historians reconstruct the lived experience of enslaved women in the antebellum South, they often rely on fragments — a baptism record here, a planter’s letter there, an offhand remark in a travel diary. These fragments rarely form a complete picture.

But the case of Dela and Kora Carrington is different.

Through an extraordinary convergence of sources — Ruthie Jamison’s clandestine ledger, 1830s legal documents, and WPA oral histories — a detailed portrait emerges of life inside the isolated East Wing of Fairview Plantation.

The East Wing was not a typical domestic space. An 1840 insurance inventory described it as:

“Private apartments of special designation, accessible only to family and select servants.”
Fairview Insurance Docket, Adams County Archive, #1840-19

Ruthie’s ledger added the missing truth:

“No one go up there less he say so. Doors stay locked. Girls kept in them rooms, fed separate. I ain’t like it.”
— Jamison Ledger, July 1837, p. 3

These conditions suggested not standard domestic service, but a pattern of isolation as domination — cutting enslaved people from the larger community, reducing their autonomy, and ensuring total control.

Dr. Finch summarized it bluntly:

“When you isolate people, you break their ability to resist. What Garrison didn’t anticipate is that these two women were not breakable.”

II. Ruthie Jamison: The Quiet Rebel

One of the great surprises of Finch’s research was discovering the depth of Ruthie Jamison’s role in the sisters’ survival.

Born in 1790, Ruthie had been enslaved in three households before arriving at Fairview around 1815. By 1837, she was the most senior domestic worker — a position of relative influence, earned over years of suffering, strategy, and observation.

Ruthie’s ledger, smuggled into existence page by page, became one of the rarest documents of its kind: an enslaved woman’s personal written record from the Deep South.

Her handwriting was cramped, her spelling inconsistent, but her clarity was unmistakable.

“I see how he watching them girls. I see how they watching him back.”
— Jamison Ledger, Aug. 1837, p. 4

It was Ruthie who first warned Dela about the oleander plants along the fence line.

It was Ruthie who taught her how to avoid suspicion.

And it was Ruthie who later instructed her in the art of forgery.

Finch told me:

“Ruthie was a strategist. She understood the plantation’s vulnerabilities better than any white overseer. Without her, the Carrington sisters likely would have been crushed by the system. Instead, they learned how to weaponize it.”

III. Oleander: The Deadly Beauty

Oleander was common along Southern property lines — a floral decoration that masked lethal potential. According to antebellum medical literature:

“All parts of the oleander plant contain cardiac glycosides capable of disrupting heart rhythm, causing collapse or sudden death.”
— Dr. Samuel Cartwright, “Southern Flora and Its Properties,” 1834

Ruthie’s ledger recorded the moment Dela asked about it:

“She say the white bushes look pretty. I say pretty things can kill. She listen too close. I say no more.”
— Jamison Ledger, Aug. 1837, p. 5

But Dela already understood.

A second ledger entry, added weeks later, confirmed her intent:

“I see the empty place on the fence where she pick leaves. Lord watch these girls.”
— Jamison Ledger, Aug. 1837, p. 6

The poison would need to be administered subtly — not enough to kill instantly, but enough to mimic the symptoms of Garrison’s well-documented heart troubles.

Finch cross-referenced these notes with the doctor’s surviving receipts:

Receipt dated July 22, 1837: “Tincture for agitation of the heart. Patient: M. Garrison.”
Dr. Morrison Ledger, 1837, Natchez Archive

The colonel drank heavily. He had a history of heart irregularities. And he took no precautions with the enslaved women in his private chambers.

Perfect conditions for an invisible crime.

IV. The Night of August 28, 1837

Much of what happened that night can be reconstructed from four sources:

The doctor’s death entry

Ruthie’s ledger

Overseer Pike’s letter to a cousin

A 1937 WPA testimony by an elderly domestic named Lucinda Moore

Taken together, they reveal a scene of chilling precision.

8:45 p.m. — Garrison enters the East Wing chambers.

Moore’s testimony:

“He come in already half-drunk, laughing. Girls pour his drink. He sip fast.”
— WPA Interview 84, Mississippi

8:52 p.m. — First symptoms.

Ruthie recorded:

“He look strange. Sweat on face. Breathing heavy.”
— Jamison Ledger, Aug. 1837, p. 7

9:03 p.m. — Collapse.

Pike’s letter — written ten days later, meant for a sympathetic cousin in Kentucky — describes it:

“He dropped like a stone. Girls screaming bloody murder for help.”
— Pike Correspondence, Sept. 1837

What Pike did not realize — and what Ruthie noted unmistakably — was the truth:

“They scream like acting. Not fear. Relief.”
— Jamison Ledger, Aug. 1837

9:12 p.m. — Household chaos.

Moore remembered:

“Everybody running. Miss Eleanor screaming. Ruthie kneeling but her eyes say she know.”

9:20 p.m. — Dr. Morrison arrives. Too late.

He pronounces:

“Acute cardiac seizure, likely aggravated by intemperance.”
Death Register, Adams County, 1837

There was no mention of poison.

No suspicion.

No investigation.

Because no one in 1837 Mississippi would imagine two enslaved women had not only plotted a white man’s death — but succeeded.

V. The Will: The Most Dangerous Document in the South

Had Garrison’s original will been submitted to the court, everything would have unraveled.

The June 1837 draft contained a clause calling for an investigation of any enslaved persons purchased in the preceding six months, should he die before age 60.

Dela and Kora fit that clause perfectly.

They would have been questioned, tortured, executed.

But the will the court received contained no such clause.

The last page had been replaced.

Finch’s examination revealed that the forged page:

used different ink composition

bore lighter pen pressure

showed signs of tea-staining to imitate age

contained slight slant inconsistencies in the signature “M. A. Garrison”

She concluded:

“It wasn’t work of a professional forger. It was work of someone smart, terrified, and determined.”

Ruthie’s ledger confirmed this:

“I teach her his hand. She learn fast. She brave. She do what I cannot.”
— Jamison Ledger, Sept. 1837

The original incriminating page?

Burned in the study fireplace.

VI. The Widow’s Calculus

The role of Mrs. Eleanor Garrison is one of the most complicated in this story.

Records show she lived physically separate from her husband in the west wing, a common arrangement among wealthy Southern couples. Letters between her and her sister reveal a woman who despised her husband’s behavior but maintained public silence.

After his death, she faced:

massive debts

an unmanageable estate

a plantation full of people who hated her husband

pressure to settle accounts quickly

Into this chaos walked Dela — newly made house clerk.

Mrs. Garrison’s own petition to the court for the Carrington sisters’ manumission cited:

“Exceptional assistance in estate organization, diligence in clerical tasks, and trustworthiness.”
— Manumission Petition, Adams County, 1838-4

But private letters tell the fuller truth.

In one letter to her sister, Mrs. Garrison wrote:

“I know not what my husband did to these girls, but I see in their eyes the same torment I saw in the eyes of others before them. Perhaps freeing them is the only decent act I shall ever commit.”
— E. Garrison Letter to C. Whitmore, Jan. 1838 (Whitmore Family Collection)

She approved their freedom.

Whatever she suspected, she never acted against them.

VII. Departure: A Vanishing That Spoke Volumes

On January 15, 1838, the sisters received their freedom papers in the Adams County courthouse.

The record is brief:

“Let it be known that Dela and Kora Carrington are free women of color, having satisfied all legal requirements.”
— Adams County Manumission Register, Jan. 1838

That same night, they left Natchez.

They never returned.

For decades, historian after historian assumed they died soon after — lost to disease, poverty, or the violence free Black women routinely faced.

But Finch suspected otherwise.

“Women who plan their own liberation with this degree of precision don’t vanish. They survive.”

The trail would pick up again in Tennessee.

But only after Finch uncovered a missing link buried in the 1937 WPA archives — a testimony so explosive it reshaped the entire story.

That part of the investigation — and the truth of what happened to the sisters after their escape — belongs to Part III.

III. THE AFTERLIFE OF A SECRET
I. A Trail That Should Have Ended in Mississippi

For nearly two centuries, the fate of Dela and Kora Carrington was assumed to be one of two things:

They died shortly after manumission, like many freed Black women in the Deep South with no resources.

They disappeared into anonymity, lost to the vast tide of unrecorded histories.

Both assumptions were reasonable — the documentary footprint of most enslaved women vanishes upon emancipation.

But Dr. Eleanor Finch didn’t believe it.

“They forged a will and executed a perfect poisoning. These were not ordinary survivors. These were strategists. Strategists don’t just vanish.”

It would take Finch almost eighteen months — and a stroke of archival luck — to follow their trail beyond Natchez.

II. Memphis, 1841: The Carpenter’s Ledger

The breakthrough appeared in an unexpected place: a stack of carpentry ledgers preserved in the Memphis Municipal Archive. Finch had gone there following a hunch — many manumitted individuals in Mississippi fled north along the river, seeking communities where free Black populations, though vulnerable, were slightly larger.

The ledger in question belonged to a free Black carpenter named James Hartwell, dated 1841. Finch almost overlooked it — until she saw a familiar name:

“Payment due to seamstress: K. Carrington — alterations, hem repair.”
— Hartwell Ledger, Oct. 1841, Memphis Archive, Box 7, Folder 3

Carrington was uncommon. Carrington and sewing? And appearing four years after the sisters’ disappearance?

Finch consulted census substitutes — the 1840 Memphis “Free People of Color Registry” required by city ordinance. There, written in faded ink:

“Carrington, Dela — age 23 — literate.
Carrington, Kora — age 21 — seamstress.”
— Memphis FPOC Registry, Entry #118A, 1840

It was them.

They had made it.

They were alive.

III. The House on River Street

Finch found more. A tax assessment from 1848 listed:

“Property owned: One wood-frame house, River Street, 29×36 feet. Owner: D. Carrington & J. Hartwell.”

A marriage certificate from 1847 confirmed it:

“James Hartwell (free Negro) weds Dela Carrington, formerly of Natchez.”
— Shelby County Marriage Record, Vol. II, 1847

Kora lived with them for years, working as a seamstress and midwife.

A rare 1855 city directory — one of the earliest for Memphis — recorded:

“Carrington, Kora — midwife & seamstress, River Street.”

Finch told me:

“This alone would have been enough — proof of survival, proof of autonomy. But the most remarkable discovery was still ahead.”

That discovery came from the 1937 WPA slave narrative project — the same collection that contained early hints about Fairview and the Garrison sisters.

IV. The Testimony That Named Them

In a folder labeled Mississippi Interviews — Women, 1937, Finch found the missing piece.

Interview #43 was conducted by WPA fieldworker Pauline Taylor with a 94-year-old woman in Memphis named Evelyn Hartwell — granddaughter of James and Dela.

Evelyn’s voice, transcribed on thin onion-skin paper, cut through time:

“My grandmother Dela say she and her sister Kora once belonged to a man named Garrison down in Mississippi.
He killed they mama.
He mean to kill them too.
But they got him first.”

Finch closed her laptop when she read that line for the first time.

She told me:

“It was like hearing the truth finally speak in its own voice.”

The testimony continued:

“Grandma say some folks got rage like fire, burning quick. But others got rage like stone, heavy and patient.
Grandma’s was stone.”

Evelyn described what her grandmother had told her — stories Dela never dared to speak to white ears but entrusted to her family:

how she watched the colonel’s routines for weeks

how she learned from Ruthie about the poisoned plant

how she timed the dose to mimic heart failure

how she cried convincingly while he died

how she forged the last page of his will

how Ruthie smuggled them out at dawn after their freedom papers were signed

The final portion of the testimony was the most haunting:

“Grandma say she ain’t proud of killing a man.
But she ain’t ashamed neither.
She say when the world give a woman no choice, she got to make one for herself.”

Evelyn added:

“She kept the truth quiet so we could live safe.
But she say one day somebody gonna find the papers and tell the real story.”

That somebody, it turned out, was Finch.

V. Archaeology at Fairview

In 2009, an archaeological team surveyed what remained of the Fairview plantation. Most structures had rotted away, but the foundations of the East Wing still held secrets.

Among the artifacts recovered:

fragments of ceramic bottles

iron keys

burned paper stuck between floorboards

a bent silver thimble

a small tin container

Inside the tin were seeds — shriveled but identifiable.

Oleander. Foxglove. Nightshade.

A note had been scratched into the tin with a pin:

“For them that need to know.”

Finch realized the seeds matched Ruthie’s final ledger entry:

“I give her seeds so she can teach other women, if ever she brave to. That all I can do.”
— Jamison Ledger, Oct. 1837

The seeds suggested a legacy not only of survival, but of teaching others how to protect themselves.

Not just escape.

Resistance.

VI. The Last Person Who Remembered

Finch tracked down one final interviewee — Lottie Mae Hartwell, age 87, great-granddaughter of Kora Carrington, living in Nashville.

When I reached her by phone, she told me:

“Mama didn’t tell stories of slavery. But she told stories of women who refused to be broken. Women who made a way.
She always say, ‘You come from fighters.’ I didn’t know what she meant until Dr. Finch knocked on my door.”

Lottie Mae’s voice shook.

“Kora died in 1893, but she left journals. Not detailed — she was careful — but she wrote one line near the end:
‘We were not victims. We were our mother’s daughters.’”

VII. The Final Reconstruction

By cross-referencing all sources, Finch reconstructed the sisters’ full arc:

1837 — Natchez:
Sold at auction. Mother recently killed by Garrison.
Isolated in East Wing. Meet Ruthie.

Aug 1837 — Fairview Plantation:
Poisoning carried out with oleander.
Will page forged.
Estate thrown into chaos.

Jan 1838 — Natchez Courthouse:
Manumitted. Leave Mississippi that night.

1838–1841 — Memphis:
Sewing, clerical work. Build savings.

1841–1855 — Memphis:
Purchase house with Hartwell.
Kora trains as midwife.
Dela marries James Hartwell.

1855–1893:
Families grow.
Sisters teach literacy, herbal knowledge, resistance strategies to free Black communities.

1937:
Granddaughter Evelyn gives WPA testimony, hinting at the truth.

1984–2021:
Ledgers, letters, wills, excavation, artifacts bring the whole story together.

VIII. Why Their Story Matters Now

Finch closed our final interview with a reflection that has stayed with me:

“Most plantation stories center the enslavers. This one doesn’t.
It puts enslaved women — strategic, brilliant, courageous — at the center of their own liberation.”

The revenge the sisters executed wasn’t merely violence.

It was reclamation.

A reclamation of dignity stolen, a life denied, a future almost extinguished.

Their story survived because:

Ruthie wrote what she wasn’t supposed to write.

Dela forged what she wasn’t allowed to forge.

Kora healed people she wasn’t supposed to heal.

Descendants spoke what they weren’t supposed to speak.

Archaeologists dug where they weren’t supposed to dig.

Historians kept asking questions the past hoped would stay buried.

The Carrington sisters were never meant to be remembered.

They were meant to be erased.

Instead, they became something else entirely.

A warning to men like Garrison.

A testament to women like Ruthie.

And a chapter of American history finally restored to the record.