Page 128

“…a dozen slaves now, or near a dozen…”

I’ve erred on the side of uncertainty here because the documents are conflicting. Sims’s autobiography claims that taxes on the enslaved women were paid by their masters, but the 1850 Slave Schedule for Sims lists a number of enslaved women who are of the proper age for the fistula experiments—and I assume if the census counted them as his, he paid the taxes on them. Most commentators have assumed that these are Sims’s experimental subjects, but documents I uncovered (See, for example, “…Burnett and Nat and Allen…,” above) reveal the names of a number of enslaved persons that Sims owned—and the numbers don’t quite add up. Also, Sims’s experimental subjects more or less disappeared after he achieved his “cure” in 1849, so it’s unlikely they would have been counted in the 1850 census. In any event, I have opted for some ambiguity here, and as with William Rufus King (See “…he had so many of them,” above), it was not uncommon for slaveowners to themselves be uncertain about the extent of their slave holdings.

SIMS, J. Marion, (1885). The Story of my Life, ed. by H. Marion-Sims. D. Appleton & Co: New York, p. 236.

The 1850 Slave Schedule for Alabama was retrieved from Ancestry.com.