The antique documents were tied up by a ribbon and kept in an old safe for years, first in the general stores that Danny Dyer’s family ran in Accokeek, Md., and later in his house nearby.
He wasn’t certain what they were. “Deed of Manumission,” many of them said, and named dozens of men, women and children. Unsure what manumission was, he looked it up. It was the act of freeing a slave.
“Good God,” he thought.
What Dyer had in his safe in Prince George’s County was a trove of paperwork that recorded the freeing of scores of slaves, many belonging to Maryland’s first families, decades before the Civil War.
The papers showed that some slaves were granted freedom that did not take effect for 20 years. Others were freed by purchasing themselves. Still others were freed outright.
A 6-year-old slave, Pheby Ann Tyler, was bought by her father, John, of Washington, for $70. A slave woman and her children were manumitted by her husband, who had probably bought them to set them free.
A sampling of the documents, which Dyer loaned for study to the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, has been put on display this month at the museum’s Visitor’s Center. They have never been made public before.
“The collection to me is absolutely mind-boggling,” said the museum’s director, Laurie Verge.
Colleen Walter Puterbaugh, the Surratt House research librarian who has studied and transcribed the 30 documents, said, “We immediately knew that it was really a treasure. . . . (The papers tell) a story. It’s only the first layer of that story. And it really hints at a lot more drama going on.”
One deed was executed on Oct. 23, 1838, by a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Snowden. Her in-laws had built Montpelier, a grand Georgian mansion in Laurel, Md., and owned thousands of acres in Prince George’s County.
For generations, the Snowdens were known in the area for their elegant home by the Patuxent River and for their hospitality. George Washington lodged there several times. So did first ladies Martha Washington and Abigail Adams.
At one point in the early 1800s, the family owned 141 slaves.
Elizabeth Snowden’s husband, Nicholas, died in 1831, at age 41, leaving her with 12 children and a large plantation, according to records provided by Montpelier.
An inventory taken after his death listed about 60 slaves, mainly by their first names, ages, and monetary value, along with horses, cattle, sheep, corn, tobacco, potatoes, a “pleasure sleigh” and 23 champagne glasses.
Seven years later, Elizabeth, a native of Philadelphia who noted that “natural freedom is the right of all men,” freed 30 slaves, according to Dyer’s documents.
But for most of them, the freedom was effective only in the future.
She ordered Henny, 43, freed in 1839; Hazel, 41, freed in 1840; and their four children freed over the next 20 years.
Their child Let, then 9, would not be free until 1851, when he was 22. Nace, then 11, would not be free until 1853, when he was 26. Daughter Ann Elizabeth, 5, would remain a slave until 1855, when she was 22.
And daughter Sarah Jane, then 1, would stay a slave until 1859 – two decades after her father got his freedom.
Snowden did the same for all the slaves she freed, except for Fanny Ridgely and her two children, Rebecca, 6, and Ellen, 2, whom she set free immediately.
It’s not clear why Snowden freed Henny and Hazel but kept their children in bondage for years.
Fourteen of those kept enslaved were children ages 10 and under. There were four other mothers whose children’s freedom did not take effect until after mothers’ – in some cases, for 15 or 20 years.
Puterbaugh, the research librarian, theorizes that Snowden may have meant well in keeping the children in slavery.
Many manumission laws discouraged masters from freeing slaves who couldn’t take care of themselves. The aim was not to be benevolent, but to protect communities from the burden of caring for them.
“It may have been more for their safekeeping than for any monetary gain,” Puterbaugh said in an email. “For the most part, the girls were freed when they reached the age of 22 and the boys when they reached 26 . . . (perhaps) considered the age of maturation at the time.”
Dyer, 74, a retired executive assistant with the state and county governments, was given the combination to the safe holding the documents by his late father, and he started studying the contents after his parents died in the 1980s.
There were, among many other things, land deeds, records of the sale of horses and cows, and the manumission papers, which span the years 1781 to 1858.
“I have no idea how long they’ve been in there,” he said in an interview at Surratt House recently. “My father didn’t seem to know. He said, ‘Well, they were just here. They’ve always been here.’ ”
He realized the papers’ historic and emotional value, but he wasn’t sure what to do with them. He did a little research. But then years went by, family events came, and the issue of the papers fell into the background, Dyer said.
A year and a half ago, he brought his papers to the museum.
They now reside in a gray archival box in the museum’s James O. Hall Research Center, where they will stay for the foreseeable future.