Master Paid $5 for Ugliest Slave at Auction She Became the Most Desired Woman in Coun | HO

The Day the Auction Fell Silent

On a blistering August morning in 1847, the air in Charleston’s Ryan’s Mart hung thick with heat, salt, and sweat. Dozens of planters gathered under the whitewashed arches, waiting to bid on human lives. It was business as usual — until the auctioneer called Lot 39.

“She requires special consideration,” announced Thomas Gadsden, his voice uneasy. “Twenty-four years old, strong constitution, no illness… but disfigured beyond repair. Face burned in a childhood fire. Capable only of field labor. Starting bid — ten dollars.”

A murmur rippled through the courtyard. Disfigured slaves were considered bad luck — unsellable, unprofitable. No one moved.

Gadsden’s tone hardened. “Eight dollars. Seven. Six. Five?”

Still, silence.

At last, a man at the back of the crowd — Samuel Rutledge, a planter from Magnolia Bend Plantation in Colatin County — raised his hand.

“Sold,” Gadsden said quickly, relief flooding his voice. “Sold for five dollars.”

It was the lowest recorded bid in the history of Ryan’s Mart.

A Purchase Born of Shame

Rutledge later wrote in his journal that he bid not out of greed, but shame.

“Thirty men stood watching a human being offered for five dollars,” he wrote that night. “And no one moved.”

He told himself it was a practical purchase. Magnolia Bend needed workers. Two field hands had died that spring, and his finances were failing. But as his wagon rolled away from Charleston with the silent woman sitting in back — her head still covered by a burlap sack — Samuel felt something he could not name.

Magnolia Bend: A House of Uneasy Quiet

Magnolia Bend sat on 800 acres of rice and pine, its grand white columns peeling under the humid sun. Samuel lived there with his two daughters — Louisa, 17, and Margaret, 14 — and an overseer named William Prew, a cruel but efficient man who ran the fields with an iron hand.

The woman, known only as Number 39, was sent straight to the rice fields, her head still covered. Samuel never asked her name. He told himself he was sparing her dignity; the truth was, he couldn’t bear to look.

For three weeks, nothing unusual happened. She worked silently, efficiently, never removing the burlap sack. Then, on the first Sunday in September, Margaret collapsed after church — seizing, foaming, her eyes rolling back.

The Unnamed Woman and the Dying Girl

Dr. Henry Middleton arrived hours later, baffled. He diagnosed “hysteria” and prescribed laudanum. But as days passed, Margaret’s condition worsened. She forgot names, screamed from blinding headaches, and slipped into fits that left her unconscious for hours.

Desperate, Louisa begged her father to let the enslaved healers try traditional remedies. Reluctantly, Samuel agreed.

When Prew asked around the quarters, only one woman claimed to know anything about healing — the woman with the burlap sack.

That evening, as the sun burned red behind the cypress trees, she stood on the back veranda, quiet and still. Her voice, when she spoke, was soft but steady.

“I might help her,” she said. “If you’ll let me see her.”

“Your Daughter Is Being Poisoned”

Under candlelight, the veiled woman examined the unconscious girl. She asked calm, precise questions: what Margaret had eaten, what she’d touched, what she’d smelled. Then she turned to Samuel.

“Sir,” she said, “someone has been poisoning your daughter.”

Samuel froze.

She named the culprit: white snakeroot, a wild plant whose toxins build up slowly, mimicking illness until the body fails. She explained how to counteract it — fresh water, isolation, clean food — and warned him that the poisoner would strike again if not stopped.

Within days, Margaret began to recover. By the end of the week, she could walk. Dr. Middleton called it “a miracle.” Samuel knew better.

The Poisoner in the Family

Samuel’s overseer investigated quietly. The evidence pointed to Louisa, his elder daughter. She had been preparing herbal teas for Margaret’s headaches. She had asked the housekeeper about plants with “white flowers.”

When Samuel confronted her, Louisa denied everything — then broke down in fury.

“You believe that creature over your own daughter?” she screamed. “That woman hides her face for a reason. She’s evil!”

The argument tore the house apart. Samuel didn’t know whom to believe. His eldest child, proud and jealous? Or the mysterious woman who had saved the younger one’s life?

Rumors and Visitors

Within weeks, word of the “$5 woman” spread across Colatin County.

Men began arriving at Magnolia Bend — planters, merchants, even a Charleston banker — offering hundreds, then thousands of dollars for her. They spoke in coded tones, asking if she “knew herbs,” if she “saw things others couldn’t.”

Samuel refused every offer.

The plantation began to change in strange ways. The enslaved workers quarreled less. Productivity rose. Even the overseer admitted discipline had become unnecessary. “She’s good luck,” some whispered. “Or maybe she’s something else.”

The Night the Mask Fell

One night in November, a scream shattered Magnolia Bend.

Samuel rushed upstairs to find Louisa standing in her doorway, white with terror.

In her bedroom stood the woman — the burlap sack lying at her feet. For the first time, Samuel saw her face.

She was not disfigured. Not scarred. Not monstrous. Her features were smooth, her eyes intelligent, her presence unsettling in its calm.

Louisa screamed, “She’s a demon! Her face changes! Make her leave!”

And as Samuel looked closer, he thought — for the briefest second — that her face did change. Like ripples in water, another face seemed to shimmer beneath the surface, then vanish.

“People See What They Expect to See”

The woman’s voice was steady, almost weary.

“People see what they expect to see,” she said. “The auctioneer saw a monster, so that is what I became. You saw a damaged woman, so that is what you saw. Your daughter saw guilt and ugliness — so that is what reflected back at her.”

Her name, she revealed, was Adah Marie Freeman. Born free in Pennsylvania, educated, literate, trained in medicine and herbs. She had been betrayed by a man who sold her into bondage. Her ability, she claimed, was to alter perception — to make others see what their minds demanded.

The Bargain

Adah asked for three things: her freedom, $50 for travel, and a horse.

“I saved your daughter’s life,” she told Samuel. “But I cannot stay. The men who come here will not stop. Release me, or they will take me by force. And when they do, they’ll destroy you, too.”

Louisa sobbed downstairs. Margaret watched from the doorway, silent and pale. The overseer arrived with a rifle, but Samuel told him to lower it.

He chose.

That night, he wrote out Adah’s manumission papers, declaring her a free woman. He gave her $75 instead of $50 and wished her safety. Before dawn, she rode north, disappearing into the dark line of trees along the Edisto River.

The Mirror Left Behind

When Samuel told his daughters, Louisa flew into a rage. “You’ve freed a witch!” she cried. “She’s cursed us all!”

Samuel asked one question. “Did you poison your sister?”

Louisa stared at him, speechless, then fled the room. She never answered.

Within months, Margaret recovered completely. Louisa withdrew into silence, later marrying a merchant she did not love. The sisters never reconciled.

The men who had sought Adah stopped visiting. The plantation grew quiet — too quiet.

The Legend of the $5 Woman

By the time Samuel died decades later, the story had already become legend.

Some said the woman was a witch who could bend minds. Others swore she was an angel who revealed the rot within human hearts. County records from the era vanished mysteriously — pages missing, archives burned.

Then, in 1902, a journalist searching the Charleston Library Society stumbled upon a forgotten document: Samuel Rutledge’s manumission papers, freeing a woman named Adah Marie Freeman of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Her trail after 1848 was faint but haunting.

An “Adah Freeman” appears in Underground Railroad archives the next year, helping fugitives reach the North. Another surfaces in Philadelphia during a cholera epidemic, nursing the sick. In 1871, a Quaker teacher in Ohio writes of “a woman named Adah who runs a school for freed slaves and makes her students believe in their own worth.”

Was it the same woman? No one knows.

The Final Entry

In Samuel’s journal, one last entry stands out — written the night he freed her:

“Tonight, I released the woman I bought for five dollars.

I do not know if she was witch, saint, or something in between.

She showed me the truth in my household — one daughter poisoned by jealousy, another saved by grace.

She held up a mirror, and what I saw was myself.

Whether she was real or an illusion, she left this place emptier — and me, changed.”

The Woman Who Could Not Be Owned

More than 175 years later, historians still argue whether Adah Freeman ever existed. But in Colatin County, her legend remains.

They say that on humid nights, when the air grows heavy and the river fog curls through the pines, a figure sometimes appears near the ruins of Magnolia Bend — a woman riding north beneath the moon, her face hidden by shadows.

And if you look too long, they say, you’ll see your own reflection in hers.