T.J.C. Williams, his History of Washington County, and Slavery

Thomas John Chew Williams literally wrote the book on the history of Washington County, Maryland, and in doing so he wrote the first widely read history of slavery in the county. In 1906, he published his two-volume History of Washington County, Maryland.[1] Williams’s work became the standard reference for local historians and is still frequently used today.

On the subject of slavery, Williams’s History declared, “Slavery in Washington County was necessarily of a mild character. Any harsh treatment upon the part of a master resulted in a flight to Pennsylvania, and the recovery from that state, with many of its people in sympathy with the fugitives, was difficult. Indeed, slaves were generally unprofitable…”[2] Like other aspects of his history, Williams’s judgment about slavery has dominated historical writing about Washington County ever since. But Williams was wrong about slavery. The reasons for Williams’s distorted perspective become clear when we take a closer look at him and his work.

Who was Williams?

Born in 1851, T.J.C. Williams grew up in a slaveholding family in Calvert County in southern Maryland. He was ten years old when the Civil War broke out, and, according to his grandson’s later account, “although Southern in sympathy there was little [Williams] could do because of his age.” He became a practicing lawyer at age 19 and moved to Hagerstown in 1872. His wife came from the local Maddox family, who had also held slaves before Emancipation. The couple were Episcopalians and moved in social circles that were full of former enslavers. Eventually Williams became a judge and a newspaper editor.[3]

As a son of the slaveholding elite, Williams grew up believing slavery was the natural order. He was steeped in pro-slavery ideology and was even pro-Confederate as a child. (Many Maryland enslavers supported the Union, but apparently not young Williams.) When he came to write the history of Washington County, all his sympathies lay with people like himself, from wealthy white slaveholder families. His perspective was theirs. And like many southern whites in the early twentieth century, he wanted—consciously or unconsciously—to justify their former way of life, by means that included painting a positive picture of slavery. In this, he was part of the Lost Cause movement among former Confederates, which has profoundly influenced how Americans think about the Civil War and slavery.

Williams on slavery

About two and a half pages of Williams’s massive History are devoted specifically to slavery and related matters.[4] More than half of that space is spent on one famous 1847 episode, the so-called “Carlisle riot,” when people of color came to the Carlisle, PA, courthouse to rescue escaping Washington County slaves. A Hagerstown enslaver was injured in the struggle and later died. Williams’s focus throughout this section is on the sufferings of the white enslaver and generally on the feelings of white folks during the resulting controversy. It never occurred to him to consider the African American perspective on this event. Instead, Williams gripes repeatedly about how Pennsylvanians failed to support Maryland enslavers.[5]

At the same time, Williams did know about the suffering of enslaved people and recorded some examples of it. “The general penalty for running away,” he wrote, “was to be sold to the Cotton States, and the buyers came to Hagerstown for the purpose of purchasing those unfortunate creatures…” He mentioned the “mortal terror” that enslaved people felt about being sold to the south, and he told several stories about enslaved men and women who injured or mutilated themselves to keep from being sold.[6] These details hardly fit with Williams’s argument that slavery was “mild” in Washington County, and that any enslaved person who was mistreated could easily get away to Pennsylvania. (The ability to make contradictory statements was typical of slavery supporters.) Despite these horrific facts, Williams’s empathy for slaves (and for black people in general) was minimal. He described enslaved people as “an unruly class” and uncritically repeated antebellum newspaper complaints about “noisy crowds” of black people in Hagerstown, “drinking, gambing and carousing”—as if these activities were limited to African Americans.[7]

Influence

As a researcher, I’ve found that local history writers and speakers on local history topics have been broadly influenced by Williams’s benign outlook on slavery. His book is the foundation of written Washington County history, and it remains the only full-length history of the county. When local historians begin research, they naturally reach for Williams, and students—commendably!—use it as well in their research. Fortunately, in recent years, as people are becoming more knowledgeable about black history, I think they’re less influenced by T.J.C. Williams’s distorted view of the slave era. This is a positive development. His perspective deserves to be tossed into that legendary receptacle, the dustbin of history.

Williams’s History and its influence offer a larger lesson for local historians, though. It’s easy to accept the authoritative statements of “standard” histories, and to absorb their perspectives as well. Williams’s work is important for his research and the wealth of information he gathered. But his personal lens meant that he omitted crucial perspectives and thus created an incomplete narrative, one that we can see as false. We need to analyze old histories with a critical eye, understanding what’s useful in them—and what needs to be rejected.

 

Footnotes

[1] Thomas J.C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland, from the Earliest Settlements to the Present Time, Including a History of Hagerstown (Hagerstown, 1906).

[2] Williams, History of Washington County, 251.

[3] Thomas J.C. Williams (b. 1914), “Records of My Family” [unpublished family history] (1985), 21-2 (consulted at St. Mark’s Epicopal Church, Lappans, Boonsboro). This author Thomas J.C. Williams is not the subject of the present blog post, but his grandson of the same name.

[4] Williams, History of Washington County, 249-51.

[5] Williams, History of Washington County, 249-50. For a fuller account of the Carlisle rescue and a different perspective, see Jenny Masur’s recent book, Maryland Freedom Seekers on the Underground Railroad (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2023), 122-34.

[6] Williams, History of Washington County, 250-51.

[7] Williams, History of Washington County, 251.