The Widow Who Married Her Late Husband’s Slave: Mobile’s Forbidden Union of 1842 | HO

In 1842, in the port city of Mobile, Alabama—where cotton was wealth and slavery its engine—a young woman named Anne Brennan Deloqua vanished without a trace. So did Isaiah Bennett, a man who, until months earlier, had been legally enslaved by Anne’s late husband.

Their disappearance from the Deloqua mansion on Government Street set off one of the most enduring mysteries in Alabama’s antebellum history—a story of love, rebellion, and reinvention, pieced together from scraps of records and the whispers of time.

Anne had married James Deloqua, a cotton magnate thirty years her senior, in 1837. The marriage, as letters suggest, was less a romance than a transaction: her father’s debts erased in exchange for her hand. For five years, she played the role of dutiful wife, her beauty and restraint praised in society columns, though her letters hinted at despair.

Her husband’s favored servant, Isaiah Bennett, was unusually educated—literate, articulate, a skilled carpenter and valet. Purchased in New Orleans, he had been secretly taught to read and write, likely by a Northern tutor under Deloqua’s employ.

When Deloqua died suddenly in February 1842, Anne inherited his estate—and, curiously, Isaiah’s freedom. A codicil to the will granted Isaiah manumission, $500, and a plot of land—an act that raised eyebrows and suspicion among Mobile’s elite.

Within months, Anne sold two of her husband’s plantations and began spending her days in the company of her former servant. According to a cook’s testimony decades later, “Miss Anne started having Mr. Isaiah take his meals with her in the small dining room, not the kitchen. Then she’d have him sit with her evenings, reading books.”

By September, a Methodist minister’s letter described marrying “a widowed lady of means” to “a freeman of color”—a ceremony that would have been illegal under Alabama law. The couple’s defiance scandalized the city. Days later, a sheriff’s log reported a raid on the Deloqua mansion. It was empty.

A notice soon appeared in the Mobile Register:

“Reward—$500 for information leading to the capture of Isaiah Bennett, a negro man fraudulently claiming freedom, and Anne Deloqua, widow, believed to be traveling in his company.”

They were never found.

For over a century, the story lingered in rumor—some claimed vigilantes caught them; others whispered they escaped to New Orleans, or even to the North. Then, in the 1950s, researchers uncovered tantalizing traces: a New Orleans baptismal record from 1843 for James Smith, son of “Isaiah and Anne Smith”; a Cincinnati deed from 1854 naming Isaiah Bennett, free man of color, and wife Anne Bennett, formerly of Louisiana; and a family Bible inscribed, “United in the sight of God, September 1842.”

If these Bennetts were the same fugitives from Mobile, they had not only survived—they had reinvented themselves. Isaiah’s workshop in Cincinnati crafted communion tables for abolitionist churches. Census records list their children, James and Mary, born free. When Anne died of tuberculosis in 1867, she was buried as a widow in Spring Grove Cemetery. The grave, now unmarked, was once noted simply as “Anne Bennett—aged 48, formerly of Louisiana.”

Their story blurs the boundaries between love and rebellion, freedom and defiance. Was theirs a union of hearts—or an alliance born of desperation, shaped by the inequalities of their time? Historians remain divided. What is certain is that Anne and Isaiah stepped beyond the world’s permissions, leaving the roles assigned to them—mistress and servant, white and Black—and wrote a new one: husband and wife.

Today, the Deloqua mansion still stands, its façade restored, its official tours silent on the scandal that once rocked its walls. But beneath the floorboards, during renovations in the 1960s, workers found a woman’s silver hairbrush and a man’s carpentry tools tucked side by side—a quiet testament, perhaps, to two people who chose each other when the world forbade it.

In the end, their disappearance wasn’t merely an escape. It was a declaration.
In 1842, a woman born into privilege and a man born into bondage looked at the world that defined them—and refused to live by its terms.