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“…William Westcott was not her master anymore.”
It took a long time to find Dr. Nathan Harris in Montgomery, in part because he was not primarily a doctor, but a lawyer who sometimes specialized in medical jurisprudence. I did extensive work in old plat books to verify that plantation property belonging to Harris fell on the border between Montgomery and Lowndes counties—land through which the new Selma highway, famous for MLK’s march from Selma to Montgomery, would eventually run—although he was more prominently a citizen of Montgomery and had property and a home in Autauga County, as well.
Harris’s affiliation with Sims is verified by a docket report, and his ownership of Anarcha is verified by an 1847 document in which Harris bequeathed to his fiancé a significant amount of property, in the form of enslaved persons, to be held in trust by George Goldthwaite. The purpose of this was to protect his future bride in case Harris died insolvent and intestate. A document from a later period of the Harris estate includes “Anacha,” “Betsey,” and “Lucy Ann” all on the same piece of paper, suggesting that Harris came into ownership of all of the women who were part of Sims’s earliest experiments.
The Harris estate materials are held at the Montgomery County Archives, in Montgomery, Alabama.
Extensive lists of enslaved persons from the Westcott plantation—also at the Montgomery County Archives—dating after the period of Sims’s experiments fail to include Anarcha, suggesting she never returned to the Westcott plantation.
“…the white doctors that Dr. Sims had invited…”
While Sims’s accounts of his first experiment agree that other doctors were invited and had time to examine his notes and instruments, they disagree in almost every other regard. In 1857, Sims said Lucy’s case was simple; in his autobiography he described it as incredibly difficult. Worse, the 1857 account leaves out completely the disaster that nearly killed Lucy—a story that Sims was willing to tell only when his legacy was secure.
SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 236.
Sims, J. M., & New York Academy of Medicine. (1858). Silver sutures in surgery. New York: S.S. & W. Wood, p. 53.
