From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Some art history books refer to the Peale painting as ‘‘the chuckling Negro.’’ The patronizing—or at least diminishing—expression does Peale as well as Yarrow an injustice. Peale intended the painting to make a statement about racial equality. 2. Polly was seventeen years older than Simon’s father and forty years older than Simon. To keep the story as simple as possible, she is referred to as Simon’s aunt in this book, but she might have been his great-aunt. 1. Yarrow Mamout, a West African Muslim Slave 1. While the historical record suggests only that Yarrow was from Guinea, the face in Charles Willson Peale’s portrait seems clearly Fulani. 2. Henri Gaden ‘‘Du Nom Chez les Toucouleurs et Peuls Islamises du Fouta Senegalais,’’ Revue d’Ethnographie et de Sociologie 3, nos. 1–2 (1912): 50, 53. 3. Joseph Earl Harris, The Kingdom of Fouta-Diallon, (Ph.D. diss. Northwestern University, 1965), 180. 4. Three other slaves named Yarrow have been found in estates. The will of John Garrett, who died in Frederick County in 1775, bequeaths a slave named Yarrow or Yarrone who was living on the ‘‘Merryland’’ tract along the Monocacy River. Frederick County MD Wills, Book 41, 179–181. The will of Thomas Gantt of Prince George’s County in 1765 also bequeaths a slave named Yarrow. Leslie and Neil Keddie, Prince George’s County Wills, No. 1, 1761– 1770, folios 523–632 (Family Tree Bookshop, 2001), 6:40–41 (folio 575). As will be detailed later, Joseph Wilson of Rockville also owned a slave named Yarrow. 222 | notes to pages 8–14 5. Becaye Traore, cultural affairs office of the Embassy of Senegal in Washington, D.C., telephone interview, September 23, 2010. 6. Tierno Bah, research associate, National Museum of African Art, Washington , D.C., interview, November 15, 2010. 7. Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon the High Priest of Boonda in Africa (London: Richard Ford, 1734). 8. Diallo, also Jiallo, is an anglicized form. 9. Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, 18. 10. Karen Mauer Green, The Maryland Gazette 1727–1761, Genealogical and Historical Abstracts (Galveston: The Frontier Press, 1989) 2, citing Maryland Gazette, 21 January 1728–29, No. 71. 11. Ibid., 31; Maryland Gazette, 19 February 1747, No. 94. 12. Ibid., 96; Maryland Gazette 25 December 1751, No. 348. 13. Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, 19–20. 14. Ibid., 21. 15. The details about the life of Abdul-Rahman are from Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves, the True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 16. On one of his journeys, Newton sailed out of Liverpool on August 11, 1750 bound for Africa in the snow Duke of Argyle, arriving off the coast of West Africa about a year before Yarrow left. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 164. 17. Although the verse of ‘‘Amazing Grace’’—‘‘I once was lost, but now am found’’—could be interpreted to refer to the experience of the slaves on his ships, the hymn is about the spiritual journey that transformed Newton from slave ship captain to clergyman. 18. John Newton, ‘‘Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade,’’ The Posthumous Works of the Late Rev. John Newton (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1809), 247–248. 19. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 41. 20. Vaughn W. Brown, Shipping in the Port of Annapolis, 1748–1775 (Annapolis , Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1963), 22. 21. Robert F. Marx, Shipwrecks in America (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1987), 174; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org. For the genealogy of the Lowndes family, see Christopher Johnston, ‘‘Lowndes Family,’’ Maryland Historical Magazine 2 (1907): 276, 277. notes to pages 15–19 | 223 22. Rediker, Slave Ship, 164. 23. Ibid., 270. 24. When interviewed by Charles Willson Peale, Yarrow’s former owner, Margaret Beall, said that Yarrow was fourteen or slightly older when he was brought to America. Since he was in fact sixteen, Yarrow must have looked young for his age even as a teenager. 25. The age of Yarrow’s sister is arrived at by deduction. According to the 1850 census, her daughter, Nancy Hillman, was eighty-one years old. This means Hillman was born around 1769. Yarrow...