August 7, 2025
by Tom Ewing
In the summer of 1775, Virginians paid close attention to growing challenges to British royal power in the colonies, including the building of an army in the vicinity of Boston. The July 28, 1775 issue of the Virginia Gazette included this stirring prediction from a Virginia delegate to Philadelphia’s Congress: “Nobody now entertains a doubt but that we are able to cope with the whole force of Great Britain, if we are but willing to exert ourselves.”
At the same time that Virginia’s leaders were asserting their right to freedom from the King, many of these same leaders maintained their control over enslaved persons. The July 28, 1775 issue of the Virginia Gazette also included an advertisement posted about a runaway named Nanny, who had been living on the Corotoman plantation. Nanny ran off in May, three months earlier, according to this advertisement, with a free Black man, “who pretends at being a doctor,” yet has also been accused of stealing horses. A reward was offered for the return of Nanny by John Currell, who posted the advertisement. The owner of the Corotoman plantation, John Carter, inherited vast property from his father and greatly increased his wealth, owing 13,000 acres of land and more than 800 enslaved people by the time of his death in 1806.
Nanny allegedly ran away from Charles City, one of the towns along Route 76 between Williamsburg and Richmond. Fifty years ago, the history of this region was primarily told in terms of plantations. A tourism map produced for the Bicentennial in 1976 listed “James River Plantations,” including Shirley, Berkeley, and Carter’s Grove, as points of interest near Charles City, but without mentioning the 300 enslaved people on these three plantations whose labor created the wealth that sustained the privilege of the white elite.
The Virginia Gazette reveals the contrasting trajectories of lives in Virginia 250 years ago. The men who supported taking up arms to challenge the British King fought for their rights, which included the right to own property in the form of other human beings. We don’t know what happened to Nanny, as her story, like those of other enslaved and indentured people, is absent from historical records. Perhaps she and her companion avoided recapture and established themselves as free people in a Virginia city or elsewhere in the colonies. It is more likely, however, that she was turned in for the reward money, and the remainder of her life, and the lives of her children, and the lives of their children, took place in conditions of enslavement.
To learn more about the history of enslaved people in Virginia, listen to the Kimages episode (4) in the Bike 76 VA podcast.
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