Sotterley Plantation

  In June, I spoke at Sotterley Plantation in St. Mary's County, Maryland.  http://www.sotterley.org/  The restored plantation is an historical gem.  It is the physical embodiment of Chapter 2 of From Slave Ship to Harvard:  Tobacco and the Importation of a Labor Force.  Situated on the Patuxent River, just up from the Chesapeake Bay, it had a wharf for the plantation owners and others to use to load tobacco directly onto sailing ships bound for England and to buy slaves from arriving slave ships from Africa. Sotterley's first owner, James Bowles, was married to Rebecca Tasker Addison.  She was the niece of Benjamin Tasker, Sr., who would become acting colonial governor of Maryland in 1752.  Governor Tasker's inaugural address to the colonial legislature was delivered the week Yarrow Mamout arrived in Annapolis on a slave ship.  In fact, Tasker's daughter had married the merchant and transatlantic slave trader, Christopher Lowndes.  Lowndes and the governor's son, Benjamin Tasker, Jr., placed the advertisement for the arrival of the Elijah which brought Yarrow, in the Maryland Gazette.
slave ship,

Maryland Gazette, May 1752