On April 30, 1820, Elihu Embree published the first issue of his newspaper, The Emancipator, at a print shop in Jonesborough, Tennessee. By the time of Embree’s unexpected passing in December of the same year, the paper had seven editions and over 2,000 subscribers, reaching all the way to Boston and Philadelphia. It is also widely believed to be the first periodical in the country dedicated solely to abolitionism.
In the first issue, Embree stated that the paper was “especially designed by the editor to advocate the abolition of slavery, and to be a repository of tracts on that interesting and important subject.” Its contents, he continued, “will contain all the necessary information that the editor can obtain of the progress of the abolition of the slavery of the descendants of Africa; together with a concise history of their introduction into slavery, collected from the best authorities.”
However, contrary to his beliefs, Embree had been an enslaver. At the time of his death in December 1820, he still owned a woman named Nancy and her five children.
Who was this woman, and what became of her and her family? As a historian and playwright, I have always been interested in the stories of people who came before us. I’ve made it my goal to shine a light on stories that aren’t often told or encountered in our history books. I learned about Embree, including the fact that he was an enslaver, when I first began working with the Heritage Alliance of Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia in 2008. Nancy and her children were mentioned in the introduction to the first bound edition of The Emancipator from 1932.
The knowledge that both realities, emancipator and enslaver, existed in Embree at the same time fascinated me. I felt Embree’s story was relatively well-known and celebrated, but I wanted to know more about Nancy. I wanted to know her story. But where to begin? Given her position in life as an enslaved person, Nancy did not leave behind the extensive written record that Embree did. It was time to put my skills as a trained historian to use.
Some answers to my questions about Nancy can be found in a handful of historical documents. The first mention of Nancy dates back to 1809, when Embree used her and her children as collateral for a loan. The deed of trust for the transaction provides little information about Nancy and her children beyond their names and ages. Then 25 years old, Nancy was at the time mother to 6-week-old Sophia, 4-year-old Abigail, 7-year-old William and 9-year-old Frank, who is described as “a mulatto.” Embree himself would have been 26 or 27 years of age, just about the same age as Nancy.
He had not always been an enslaver. Raised in the Quaker faith in Virginia and then in Washington County, Tennessee, Embree spent his teenage years in a stone house his father built for the family in Telford, Tennessee. His father, Thomas, was a staunch abolitionist who had written to the Knoxville Gazette in 1797, not long after Tennessee became a state, imploring that “patriotic zeal” not be “limited to those of their own color.”
However, his father, along with many other Quakers in Washington County, soon became disillusioned with the advancement of enslavement in Tennessee; so he sold all of his property and moved the family to Ohio. Embree remained behind to continue running the family’s iron ore business.
In 1808, Embree married Elizabeth Worley Carriger in Carter County. She was a widow and owned several enslaved people from her first marriage. Once they were married, her property became his property, and Embree became an enslaver, too. It is not known how many enslaved people Embree ever owned at one time, or even whether Nancy herself came to the Embree household with his new wife, although this seems likely.
Sometime between 1809, when he used Nancy and her children as collateral, and 1814, when he later claimed to have let his other enslaved people go free, Embree’s beliefs began to shift. Some of this was a direct result of his shipping business, which ran to Philadelphia and other northern cities. Even though this business was a financial disaster, it introduced him to other abolitionists and Quakers in those cities. He became acquainted with members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the oldest such society in the U.S.
By 1817, Embree was committed to the cause of abolitionism and became the secretary of the local Manumission Society, which had over 474 members and 16 chapters in Tennessee. Embree also took charge of the society’s newspaper, The Manumission Intelligencer, but soon had issues with its editorial policy, which required all members to approve the stories before they were published, resulting in news being much delayed. This frustration, along with the Manumission Intelligencer’s practice of running ads and other stories about non-abolition-related topics, led him to create his own newspaper despite having enslaved people — including Nancy and her children — at home.
Embree chose to address this contradiction head-on in his own publication. In the August 1820 edition of The Emancipator, he printed a letter from one of his readers addressing rumors that the founder of the abolitionist newspaper “owned a number of slaves.” The reader, identified only by the initials G.M., noted he did not personally believe the rumors, but felt obligated to give Embree the chance to defend himself against those who “feed on this report with as much pleasure as a buzzard would on carrion.”
In his response, Embree acknowledged the truth of the rumors. “To my shame,” he wrote, “I have owned slaves.” Describing his history as an enslaver as “the worst acts of the worst part” of his life, he expressed his hope that this would not prevent readers from embracing the “self-evident truth: ‘That all men are created equally free and independent and are entitled to their liberty, whatever may be the misconduct of others.’”
Embree explained that he first became an enslaver when he “married a woman who had several slaves, and afterwards purchased a man his wife and their only child.” Most of these people, he claimed, he “let go free about 6 or 7 years ago, soon after [he] became convinced of the reality of the Christian religion, and have not claimed them, nor exacted any of their labor since, without compensation.”
That’s not to say that Embree had emancipated these people in a legal sense. He continued, “One circumstance, over which I have not yet had control, prevents their legal emancipation.” By this, he was likely referring to the fact that Nancy and her children were legally tied up as collateral in a loan with his wife’s family, a detail he mentioned in his will. In other words, Embree was not their sole owner.
There may have been additional reasons Embree felt unable to emancipate Nancy and her children in 1820. First, according to Washington County law at the time, enslavers were prohibited from freeing a mother and not her children, and they also had to provide a certain level of financial reparation to their formerly enslaved people. As successful as Embree was in some aspects, he also had a lot of debt. In addition to his difficult shipping business, he personally financed The Emancipator so he could retain complete editorial control. He may simply not have had the cash to legally emancipate Nancy and her family.
In his will, Embree did try to provide for Nancy and her children’s freedoms. Embree’s will was a desperate plea for his brother, Elijah, the executor of his estate, to do right by Nancy and her children. Later in the will, Embree asked that Nancy be allowed to live on Embree family land and that money be set aside to further educate her children.
What became of Nancy after Embree’s death? That has been difficult to track. In a perfect world, his brother paid off the loan to the Carrigers, and Nancy and her children were emancipated. However, Embree’s second wife, Elizabeth, died in July 1820, just a few months before him. They left seven orphaned children behind for his brother to care for. Embree also left behind a mountain of debt. If Elijah was unable to pay the Carrigers, or chose not to, the Carrigers could have taken permanent possession of Nancy and her children.
The 1830 census provides a glimmer of hope that Nancy somehow made her way to freedom. While she was not recorded in the census for Washington County — or even for Carter County, where the Carrigers lived — there was a Nancy Embree listed as living in Sullivan County as a “free woman of color” with five other “free people of color” in her household. Based on the ages of the other people living in the household, these could’ve been some of her children or even her grandchildren.
Is this the same Nancy that influenced Embree and The Emancipator? It’s hard to know for certain, but it is a promising lead. No mention of Nancy has been found in the 1840 census, but she might have passed away before that. Elijah passed away in 1840, and he and Embree are both buried in the family cemetery in Washington County. Where Nancy lies buried remains a mystery.
As with any personal history of enslaved people, there are often more questions than answers about their lives. Who was Nancy to Embree? Was he the father of any of her children? We may never know, although the fact that some of her children are described as “mulatto” or “yellow” suggests their fathers were White. There is unpublished correspondence between Embree and his abolitionist colleagues up north, in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, that may hold some answers for historians willing to comb through the documents.
Regardless of the many questions left unanswered by the historical evidence, it is obvious that Nancy meant something to Embree. As a historian who has extensively studied Nancy and the Embree family, I believe living with Nancy and her children helped influence Embree’s return to abolitionism. I’m not sure the original Emancipator would have existed without her.
This article first appeared on The Emancipator and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.