The Profane Brotherhood: Richmond’s Elite Women Who Shared Their Male Slaves (1849) | HO

Richmond, Virginia, 1849. It was a city draped in prosperity and perfumed with tobacco wealth. Its stately homes along Church Hill stood as monuments to refinement, faith, and southern virtue. But behind those imported French wallpapers and locked parlor doors, something else was taking shape — something that would one day send shockwaves through Virginia’s halls of power and leave an indelible stain on its genteel society.

Between March and November of that year, seventeen enslaved men vanished from the household ledgers of Richmond’s most prestigious families. Official records claimed they’d been sold to plantations farther south. Yet no ships bore their names, no bills of sale matched the transfers. What the ledgers concealed was not a clerical mistake — but a secret that would force the Virginia legislature to hold an emergency session and seal its findings for seventy-five years.

The Hidden Salons of Church Hill

At the heart of this scandal stood eight women — wives of judges, bankers, and merchants — who formed what would later be called The Profane Brotherhood. To the world, they were paragons of propriety: patrons of charity, decorators of churches, hostesses of refined salons. But beginning that spring, their gatherings on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons took on a darker meaning.

The leader was Catherine Harrowe, forty-three, a widow of fortune and intelligence who managed her late father’s tobacco empire with quiet authority. Her husband, a circuit court judge, was often away. In his absence, Catherine began holding “private meetings” at her Franklin Street mansion — meetings attended only by a select circle of women and the same small number of male servants.

Those servants were enslaved men — chosen for their youth, strength, and obedience. And they were not there to serve tea.

It began, as such horrors often do, with one transgression. Catherine summoned her personal servant, Samuel, to move furniture. When he entered, she locked the door. She offered him tea, an act that defied every rule of their world. Then she began to speak of loneliness — of a marriage to duty rather than affection — and crossed a line that neither of them could retreat from.

Within a week, Catherine had confided in her childhood friend Eleanora Randolph, a descendant of the famed Virginia line. What began as whispered confession soon became imitation. By April, six more women — wives of bankers, tobacco magnates, and judges — had followed suit.

They called themselves, with bitter irony, the Sisterhood of Charity.

The Machinery of Exploitation

By summer, the Sisterhood had created a system as secretive as it was depraved. They rotated enslaved men between households under false pretenses, so no single servant’s absence raised suspicion. They kept dual ledgers — one for their husbands’ eyes, the other recording their real activities in coded language. They used signals, phrases, and watchers to ensure privacy.

The men had no choice. To refuse would mean flogging, sale, or retribution against their families. Some returned home silent and broken; others became hollow shells of themselves. In Richmond’s enslaved quarters, their wives noticed the changes — men who once carried dignity in their eyes now looked only at the ground.

One woman, Rachel, a house nurse who had raised her mistress from infancy, dared to confront her employer, Margaret Wickham, a descendant of Jamestown’s first settlers. “You cannot do this to these men without it corrupting everything it touches,” she said. Margaret’s reply was ice-cold: “If you value your daughter’s safety, you’ll never speak of this again.”

Rachel obeyed — but among the enslaved women of Church Hill, whispers began to spread. Quiet acts of defiance followed: spoiled meals, lost letters, misplaced keys — small sabotages to disrupt their mistresses’ obscene rituals.

The Whistleblower

It was Samuel who finally broke the silence. Educated in secret, he could read — a rarity among the enslaved. When he learned that Eleanora Randolph kept a coded journal of their activities, he and another enslaved man, Isaac, took an enormous risk. Late one night, while Eleanora attended a dinner party, they broke into her desk, copied several pages, and brought them to Reverend William Thompson, the pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Thompson was a stern man of faith — and one of the few in Richmond who dared speak publicly about the moral rot slavery bred in both master and slave. When Samuel described the Sisterhood’s “meetings,” the Reverend’s disbelief gave way to horror. He and Samuel decoded Eleanora’s cipher by lamplight. The entries were explicit, methodical, and damning.

Thompson brought the evidence to Bishop William Meade, head of Virginia’s Episcopal Church and one of the most powerful men in the state. “If this is true,” Meade said after reading the pages, “it represents a moral corruption so profound I can scarcely comprehend it.”

The bishop convened a secret inquiry on September 10th, 1849, summoning five men of “unimpeachable character” — a merchant, a physician, a lawyer, a plantation owner, and a professor — to hear the testimony.

The Inquiry That Shook Virginia

Over a long day inside a sealed room at St. John’s Church, Samuel and Isaac testified. Their voices, steady and stripped of emotion, described the systematic exploitation they had endured. Then came Rachel, who told of threats against her daughter. Finally, a Richmond doctor corroborated their stories, revealing that one of the women had called him for “female ailments” consistent with repeated intercourse.

By nightfall, the panel concluded the evidence was irrefutable. Bishop Meade drafted a formal report and delivered it to Governor John Floyd the next morning. Floyd read in silence, his face turning crimson. “Do you understand what you hand me, Bishop?” he said. “If this becomes public, it will destroy some of Virginia’s most powerful families.”

Nevertheless, Floyd agreed to act. Within three days, he had convened an emergency session of the Virginia General Assembly — a gathering so secret that even clerks were barred from the chamber.

The Night Virginia Faced Itself

On September 14th, 1849, Governor Floyd addressed the assembled legislators:

“Gentlemen, I have called you here today to confront a matter of such grave moral import that I can scarcely find words. What I am about to present will shock you. But justice, however painful, must be our guiding principle.”

He read excerpts from the inquiry report. Silence fell. Men who had known these women for decades sat pale and trembling. One senator, related by marriage to one of the accused, wept openly.

Debate erupted. Some called the women monsters. Others blamed the enslaved men. “They seduced their mistresses!” one legislator cried. But a younger delegate, Samuel McDow, rose with a speech that would be remembered long after his name faded from history.

“These women did not simply commit adultery,” he said. “They systematically exploited human beings over whom they held absolute power. This was not seduction. It was coercion, pure and simple. If we refuse to act, we prove that in Virginia, the law is written for the powerful alone.”

After midnight, the assembly voted. The eight women would face charges of adultery and “moral corruption,” but they were offered a choice: public trial and disgrace, or permanent exile and total forfeiture of property.

As for the men, the assembly ruled that they would be purchased from their owners, freed — but exiled from Virginia within thirty days. They were too dangerous, too symbolic, to be allowed to remain.

All records were sealed until 1924.

The Fall of the Sisterhood

At dawn on September 15th, officials delivered the decrees to each woman.

Catherine Harrowe accepted exile with composure. “You violated everything sacred,” her husband told her. She replied, “And yet you see no sin in a system that gave me absolute power over them. I merely used the tools your world placed in my hands.”

Eleanora Randolph collapsed in hysteria. Her husband, astonishingly, chose to follow her into exile, declaring, “She is still my wife.”
Margaret Wickham raged, accusing Northern abolitionists of conspiracy — until her lawyer reminded her what a public trial would mean for her children.

By month’s end, all eight had vanished from Virginia — scattered to New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Church Hill closed its curtains and rewrote the story. Officially, they had been exiled for financial improprieties. The real reason was whispered only in kitchens and quarters.

Freedom and Silence

Samuel received his manumission papers on September 20th. Freedom, but at a cost — banishment from his birthplace. He left Richmond with his wife and mother, settling in Philadelphia. He found work as a carpenter, lived quietly, and wrote everything he remembered in a hidden journal.

Isaac fled to New York and joined abolitionist circles. In 1853, he stood before a crowd of 200 and said:

“They tell you slavery is a civilizing institution. But slavery corrupts everyone it touches. It gives one man absolute power over another, and that power will always be abused — whether by lash or by lust.”

Rachel, too old to leave, remained in Richmond, living long enough to see the Civil War approach. “Don’t ever let them tell you they’re better than us,” she told her grandchildren. “I’ve seen what they really are when nobody’s watching.”

She died in 1860, buried under a plain stone, her role in unmasking Richmond’s secret forgotten by history.

Seventy-Five Years of Silence

For decades, the scandal was buried — literally. The sealed files lay untouched in the Virginia State Archives, marked only: Church Hill Inquiry, 1849 — Restricted.

When they were finally opened in 1924, archivists found brittle pages, faded ink, and testimonies that read like something from Gothic fiction. But it was all real — the coded journal, the bishop’s report, the legislative decrees.

Richmond’s polite society had long since forgotten the Sisterhood of Charity. But among Black families, the story had never died. It had been passed down in whispers — a warning, a legend, a truth too dangerous to print.

Because in 1849, in the heart of the South’s proudest city, the people who claimed to be civilization’s guardians had built their own private hell.

And for the first time in Virginia’s history, that hell looked back.