, Fanny

Fanny was an enslaved woman who lived and worked on the Mason family’s Raspberry Plain plantation from about 1795 to 1825. The exact location and date of Fanny’s birth are unknown, but she was likely born prior to 1775. Before being owned by Stevens Thomson Mason, Fanny was enslaved by Burgess Ball. On 4 November 1795, Ball sold Fanny to Mason along with forty-eight other enslaved individuals.

Fanny was only mentioned once in the Mason family manuscript account book. On 15 August 1802, the Mason family gave Fanny nine shillings to pay the weaver for Benjamin Jackson, a neighbor who lived down the hill from Raspberry Plain.

All that is known of Fanny’s family life is that she was mother to at least two children. Enslaved women on average had their second child around twenty-one years of age, so Fanny was probably older than twenty-one. The father of her children is unknown. Fathers of enslaved children were rarely recorded since Virginia law stipulated that the enslaved status of offspring was the same as their mother’s.

Fanny probably remained at Raspberry Plain enslaved in the household of Mary Elizabeth Armistead Mason. In 1825, when Mary Mason passed away, she willed an enslaved woman named Fanny Jackson to her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Baker Moir Mason. This may have been the same Fanny mentioned in the account book. Mary Mason specified that Fanny Jackson was intended for Elizabeth B. Mason’s nursery. Elizabeth had just given birth to Cornelia Madison Mason in Lexington, Kentucky. Fanny Jackson may have expressed a desire to stay with her own children and family in Virginia, because Mary Mason proclaimed in her will that if Fanny Jackson refused to go to Kentucky, she would be “put in the general stock of slaves & be sold with the rest of my ungrateful slaves.”

Fanny’s fate is unclear. If she was, in fact, Fanny Jackson, and if she agreed to go to Kentucky, she would have been responsible for the care of the youngest of John Thomson Mason’s and Elizabeth B. Mason’s children. Census records show that John Thomson Mason owned at least two enslaved women above the age of fifty-five in Montgomery County, Kentucky, in 1830. One of the women may have been Fanny Jackson. John T. Mason and his family moved to Michigan about ten years later. It is possible that Fanny Jackson was moved to Michigan as well, and perhaps became a free woman as a result of her relocation. Elizabeth Baker Moir Mason died in New York City in 1839. Fanny’s place and date of death are unknown.

By Elizabeth Paynter