Legends of Delaware Dens of Iniquity

Patty Cannon
   The Infamous Prototype of the Bender Family

The Female Freebooter, Kidnapper, Land Pirate and Murderess.

The Gang of Craven Wretches Who Aided in Her Bloody Work

History of Some of Their Horrid Crimes, and the Hag's Death by Suicide.

SPECIAL DISPATCH TO THE ENQUIRER

Seaford, Del, February 6,— The house of Patty Cannon, so well known in this quarter of the world as a inn for negro-traders from the far south, and a prison for kidnapped slaves of Delaware and free men of color, I visited this afternoon with Major W. Allen, the Justice of the Peace of this “Hundred” of Delaware, who was born in 1812 and has a distinct recollection of the house covering a period of sixty years. It stands at a cross-roads, nearly on the boundary line between Delaware and Maryland, the cross-roads being within a few feet of the boundary, but the tavern lying over in Maryland.

The Kidnapper's Den

It was a notable house in its day, and is still one of the largest houses in this old, level, sandy, piney country. Its back is toward the Chesapeake, and its double-story front porch confronts Delaware. This porch is inclosed at one end to make a bar-room below, and a sentry-room or bedroom above, The roof of the house is remarkably high, and has only end windows in it, and no dormers whatever, for which there is a reason. Under that roof was a dungeon, made near the center of the house for the custody of the negroes, and this dungeon had no openings up which the inmates could see what was happening in the world. Heavy staples driven into the joists of this dungeon were visible only a few years ago, and it is believed they are still there, though the present owners of the house somewhat resent the depreciation of their property by visitors ascending to the garret. The chimneys, of unequal size, running outside of the gables of the house, stand straight, and are sound pieces of workmanship, and are what is called stack chimneys; that is built like hay-stacks, being wide at the bottom, where the fire-places of two rooms are contained; and is wide above, to accommodate the second floor fire-places, and toward the top comparatively slender. The north chimney, however, is built very wide to the very top, to provide a garret fire, and near the ground it has a tall arch recessed into it on the out-side. The house looks like an old tavern now turned into a dwelling. Some sheds and kitchens, which extend in front are additions of more recent years. The second-story porch is rather elaborately decorated with a fancy triangular wooden railing.

In its day, when Joe Johnson, the negro-trader put up this house on the proceeds of his felonies, it was said that he was building a palace. Yet it is only about fifty feet by forty, maintaining in height what it lacks ground area. It was never painted till of recent years, and lifted its weather-stained sides to the near roads, as hard and sullen as John Johnson himself. A neat fence incloses the house now, and a little settlement has grown up around it with sundry stores, mechanics and neighbors. From either porch you can see old

Patty Cannons' Little Farm Den,

where she committed so many murders, leading off in a cleared field among the pine-stumps, with its rear extension and its appendages of various small stables and granaries.

This house is now an ordinary Delaware []re cottage, with its sides to the front, [] in the middle and one window on each [], and a sharp garret rising above the only []. It is painted white, and there is a rear building, in which are two dormer windows and a chimney in the middle. Report says that this rear was once in line with the front, and the two together made a one-story house, perhaps forty feet long, in which could [] rooms below stairs.

A lane leading from the front of this house, [] an eighth of a mile in length, comes to the Seaford road, almost on the boundary line. It is tradition that this house was built so as to be across the boundary, and its occupant able to step out of one jurisdiction to another by merely crossing from one area to the next. This is said to be a mistake, and the house to a little inside the Delaware line. I did not text the question, except to note that one of the old lettered boundary stones on Mason and Dixon's line, made of granite is seen a short distance from the house. This memorable line, which was a object of contention between the Penns and the Baltimores for seventy years, was the cause of the deviltry carried on by Patty Cannon's gang.

Age of the Nigger Trader

As I have stated in a previous letter, Delaware took the same position on slavery as Pennsylvania, with which at one time she had political connection, namely, that such slaves as existed there might be kept, but could not be sold outside the State, nor any other slaves, nor even free blacks, introduced. Frequently the slave property of Delaware had slight value compared to what it would bring if seduced or forced across the line into Maryland. Kidnapping these Delaware blacks, both free and slave, began in the latter part of Jefferson's Administration or the early part of Madison's. It arose from the high value price of blacks in the cotton States of the South-west at the stopping of the African slave trade in the year 1800. There was a great rush, consequentially, for Virginia and Maryland negroes, these States being the only ones, except Kentucky, where cotton could not be grown.

At the close of the war with England, in [] the violent spirits engaged in privateer-[] from the Chesapeake—where most of the [] sailing privateers were built, on this [] Eastern Shore— returned and found the more congenial employment to be negro trading. Georgia and Carolina traders or []ers were regularly visiting this region, among the low families they found, to corrupted into the trade of kidnapping from Delaware, was old Patty Cannon and connections, the Johnson family.

Picture of Patty

This woman was a thick-set, large-breasted powerful-necked athlete of a woman, with dark hair and dark eyes. She was beautiful in youth, and had a beautiful daughter by her husband, who was a plain farmer named Joe Cannon, tempted to marry into he low position by her beauty. He soon died—perhaps harassed to death or put out of the way—both consorted with the negro-traders, and set the example of raiding the free negroes of Delaware, putting on male attire, riding her horse astraddle and leading her young kinsmen and familiars on midnight enterprises. They made the roads of Delaware terrible for any black man, and even white people were afraid to go out. Patty taught her boys not to fear to shed blood, and as this band had their imitators, the entire boundary line of Delaware became a dark and bloody land, its low forests and marshy spots []anding with man-stealers, who went about like dog-catchers of these days, with cords and nooses, to run down tie and take away blacks of all conditions. Any unscrupulous Delawarian who had negroes which would be his only for a term of years made arrangements with these gangs to steal them and divide the proceeds. Frolicking of []pated apprentices and white men were engaged to decoy away negroes, or to steal their own or their neighbors' property, and transfer the prey to Patty Cannon and her gang.

Neighborhood Tradition

Patty was of doubtful origin. Mr. Allen said her name was Hanley, and she came from the North when a girl with Joe Johnson's []er. Doctor C. H. Richards, of Georgetown, says to me that “she was a native of Maryland; on her father's side a Moore; on her mother's side a Baker. I get this” says the doctor, “from a relative living here in Georgetown, She married Jesse Cannon, and had a daughter, who married first Harry Bereton, otherwise called Bruington, who was hung, with a man named John Griffin, in this county, about 1814, for the murder of a negro trader named Ridgeway. Patty was believed to have been the third party in this murder, dressed in man's clothing, but could not be identified. All concerned were negro traders. Joe Johnson, afterward indicted with her for another murder, married her daughter after the hanging of her first husband. Johnson was brought to this town (Georgetown),” continues the doctor, “by a large Sheriff's posse, with sixteen negroes, who were kidnapped and fastened in irons in his house.”

From this outline you can get a general idea of the rise of this gang. Patty Cannon was perhaps born during the Revolutionary War, which would make here fifty-five at the time of her death. We may suppose Joe Johnson to have been born about the close of the Revolutionary War, for he is said to have been about forty five years old at the time he ran away. He was not probably more the eight or ten years younger than Patty. Patty's daughter married a young man of her own youth, who being ruined by the mother, died on the gallows, and then she was obliged to take Joe Johnson. This daughter, Margaretta, was probably born at the close of Washington's Administration. Patty's grand-daughter was perhaps born in 1814, the very year her father was hanged. This child, which was nearly grown at the dispersing of the gang, was never heard of afterward but she was said to be also beautiful, like both her female progenitors.

Murdering For Pelf

The gang soon found a more rapid way for making money than even negro stealing; this was by murdering the negro traders who came with large sums of money to the neighborhood to buy kidnapped blacks. It is believed that Patty Cannon was the instigator of this system of murder, the extent of which will never be fully known. The first one happened in 1814, and will be presently described. At that time Patty Cannon was perhaps forty years of age. Two other Southern traders disappeared about her premises, and one of these, whom she killed single-handed in 1820, was so far from his friends in the cotton States that his name could never be put in the indictment, though he died in a town of four hundred people, riding in dead or dying, they had shot him on the way.

It is not clear whether the Johnson boys were concerned in the murder of

The Negro Trader, Ridgeway,

Or not From the fact that they were not brought to trial, it might appear that they were then untrained, or absent, or not suspected, but Patty Cannon was not molested either, though she is believed to have been an actor in it, and local opinion says they were all participants. The general fact of this murder is as follows:

One day a negro trader, with an appearance of being loaded with plentiful money, came to Patty Cannon's well-known resort to buy kidnaped negroes. He was a stranger, driving a vehicle in which was supposed to be his money, and he said he wanted a large drove of negroes, and was ready to pay for them well. At the time the gang had no stock of human chattels, but the idea of murdering this man without farther trouble, unknown, as he was in that isolated region, far from his home in Georgia, or Alabama or Louisiana, immediately occurred to old Patty, and they used many arguments to have him stay over night. He suspected them for some reason, and resolved to drive to the Town of Laurel, about eight miles distant, and put up there for the night. He had to go by Cannon's Ferry to cross the Nanticoke River.

As soon as he started old Patty Cannon and two brothers named Griffin, and her son-in-law Brewington, too, with probably the Johnsons, galloped for a place called Slabtown, a míle above Cannon's Ferry, and crossed the river in a skiff, and reached a point in the road to Laurel Town in advance of the trader, and hastily obstructed the road with brush, or saplings, so as to force him to a halt. Patty Cannon was in man's disguise and the spirit of assassination and urging her son-in-law to the deed and driving the Griffins on. Others say she only instigated Brewington, and he alone knew of her complicity. As the man came to the felled brush the gang arose from concealment and shot him fatally, and also wounded his horse. As the animal leaped wildly with pain, the man fell forward, but, with swooning faculties, drew his pistol and with his dying eyes presented it, while the horse rushed over the barrier and running wild, carried the stranger into Laurel Town.

“Run! scatter! he is not dead,” cried one of the gang, said to be Brewington, still young in blood.

The dying man-dealer lived till next day, and his horse, it is said, also died, but the blood of a white man, shed in that unlawful business, did finally cry for vengeance, and the murder was tracked to the two Griffins and to Brewington and other masculine parties unknown. Brewington was Patty Cannon's first son-in-law, and that matronly relation probably saved Patty from exposure. John Griffin, the more guilty of the two brothers, swore the murder upon his brother Jesse and Brewington.

Brewington is said to have related on the gallows that his first act of crime was while a blacksmith's son, to observe a stranger who entered the smith's shop and dropped a piece of money, and Brewington, then a boy, immediately put his foot on it. When the man passed out, the boy's father clapped his hand on his shoulder and exclaimed, “Smart boy!” John Griffin, who turned State's evidence, confessed when he was himself hanged at Princess Anne, Md., some time later, for another crime that he had been more prominent in the Ridgway murder than Jesse, who, dying at Georgetown, Del., said to the spectators: “I am innocent of this crime. But reckon I have done enough other bad things to stretch hemp.” He was proceeding to say further, when Brewington, perhaps to shield his mother-in-law, interrupted him to exclaim: “Never mind, now, Jesse Griffin. Say no more. We are at the end of our rope.” Griffin is buried in the woods, near a mill-pond, on the road between Seaford and Cannon's Ferry.

Brewington being dead and his beautiful widow a shining prize for the kidnapers, Patty Cannon bestowed her on Joe Johnson, after he sufficiently distinguished himself. Patty had a bound white boy named Cyrus James in the house, and he is the principal witness upon its events. Only a few years after the murder of Ridgway she associated Joe and young Ebenezer Johnson, his brother, in a white man's murder, which, undiscovered for nine years, finally cost her her life.

Murder of Patty's Man.

The murder of the Georgia trader—if from Georgia he came, rather than some other Southern State—was the cause of Patty Cannon's arrest and suicide. This man also came to Johnson's cross-roads to buy negroes, and asked if he could be provided with a bed for the night. He dropped the remark that he had brought $15,000 to spend in negro flesh. As Johnson's house was in an exposed condition, and really an inn, liable at any time to be invaded by other kidnapers, or other callers, Johnson pointed out Patty Cannon's cottage, a quarter of a mile away, its plain low roof and chimney and comfortable back buildings looking serene and hospitable. “There,” he said, “is my mother-in-law's house, and I reckon I can git ye in thar if that'll do ye.”

The trader consented, and was shown to the lane leading northward from the Seaford road. He passed over the little bridge marking the dividing line, and entered Delaware State, for Joe discriminated between jurisdictions, and did not want to kill a white man in “Maryland, my Maryland.” No, he took the Georgian up the lane and introduced him to Patty. That familiar dame took his measure and belongings in, and Joe gave her a meaning look.

“Yes, by God!” said Patty, “I kin give him a bed an' a nice supper. I'll fix ye sweet honey, for I jess like a man that takes away these yer Delaware niggers where they can be wuth somethin'. They'se a pack of damned, go-long, good-for-nothing yer in this nigh about durned abolition country. Have a little whisky an' honey, friend, or a little good peach an' honey. It's allus good yer.”

With this or similar talk the hostess lulled all fears of too much refinement and ceremony in the man-dealer's mind, and adapted herself to his tastes and familiarity. But she and Joe had a word, and Joe and his brother Ebenezer were lurking around like buzzards above a dying steer, and it was arranged that Patty herself would kill the trader. Accordingly, she prepared her horse-pistel one of those weapons current fifty years ago, which carried a charge like a musket, and was also fitted with a spring dagger, so that after firing, if the object was not disabled, the owner of the weapon might finish him with the blade. The traveler's supper was made ready and set before him, and his chair was placed with its back to a window looking out on Patty's little garden—that garden already, perhaps, planted with little seeds of men and women, the bones of murdered children.

“Honey,” said the beldame, as the man started to eat of her fare, “I goes out yer in the garden in the cool of the evenins to weed my greens. If ye hyear me ye'll know I'm close by an' ready to wait on ye, honey!”

She weeded with her black heart sown with tares till the man, being satisfied with food, tipped his chair back against the window, presenting the back of his head to her aim, and then she crept up with her pistol beneath her apron. The man suddenly turned his head.

“I stepped up, honey,” she exclaimed, “to see if ye didn't want a little more pone, or hominy, or biscuit.”

“No.” said the trader, “I have done big, Aunt Patty. Now I'll smoke.”

As he struck fire out of his flint to the tinder, she lurked again near the window, and bold as a tigress, she sprang suddenly forward and poured in the slugs and shot. The man leaped forward upon the table, and his blood, like wine, sauced all its viands.

The bound boy of Patty, one Cyrus James, afterward a tall man, saw old Patty and her son-in-law, Joe, and his brother, Ebenezer Johnson, carrying this man's body in a blue chest out into the garden, but he did not tell the tale for years.

Her Arrest

In the spring of 1829 a man named James Moore, who had rented the farm, was plowing in that garden field, and he was annoyed by various heaps of brush thrown here and there, as Patty had said, to let the fowls lay in them. Moore, something of a kinsman, probably, drove, hits plow over one of those brush sites, when the horse sank into hole and struck something that sounded hollow. Behold, it was a blue chest. In it he found a man's bones, then lying there nine years. He spread the discovery, and the people from all roundabout began to dig.

At this time the old woman was living in the Johnson house, whence Joe had been, compelled to go. She saw the diggers going into her little cottage and mocked them:

“There's Jim Scott; he's going to raise h––l, ain't he?” “There's old Jack Lemont; he thinks he'll find something!”

But her craven tools guided the spaders, and two more parcels of bones were found. A little of the truth began to come out. The old woman, unbefriended, saw that her day had come, and hid herself within the dark den of Johnson's slave-pen tavern. It was considered dangerous to arrest Patty Cannon on account of her desperate courage, but a smallish man, Jacob Wilson, the Maryland Constable, did it, and, it is said, stripped her to search for weapons, and found a pair of pistols under her arm-pits, Her favorite weapons were horse-pistols, Wilson took her down to the little rivulet bridge on the State line and pushed her across into Delaware, where Joseph Neal, an officer of that State, arrested her and consigned her to a Deputy, James Scott, to bring her to Seaford before a Justice. It is said that at the time her son-in-law, Johnson, was lying concealed under the bridge. The Justice at Seaford was named John Gibbons, an Irish school-teacher and doctor. She had not money then, it is said, to hire a lawyer, and being brought in a gig to town, escorted by a large mounted posse, the old woman, now probably in the change of life, made no more impudence. As witness after witness confronted her and charged her with a separate crime, she merely asked for a glass of water, as if to choke her thirst. Perhaps at that moment she carried poison upon her person. Gibbons lived in a long, lean, yellow house, with an office on the corner of his lot. He was an emigrant who had got off a ship at Lewis, Del., and penetrated inland for occupation, and found it at Little Seaford. He married a daughter of Major Frank Turpin, of Northwest Fork, one of the few citizens living in a house of imported bricks. It is said that the trial was adjourned to the old Seaford tavern down by the river.

Fully committed, Patty was taken by the posse to Georgetown, twelve miles distant, then a place of about three hundred people, and put in the little brick jail. The Grand Jury met in the red painted wooden Court-house, long since destroyed, and found three true bills of murder against her and against the two Johnsons, who fled South. Those desperadoes never came near her in her extremity.

“Ah!” said Patty, “I had plenty of money once and then plenty of friends. Now I have no money and every body gives me the cold shoulder.”

She would have been tried at the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October, but soon after her indictment she swallowed the arsenic and died a horrible death on the fifth of the month—I presume April or May.

Joe Johnson had been whipped and pilloried at Georgetown when a comparatively young man for kidnaping. When he was arrested at Johnson's tavern, sixteen black men were found in his dungeon ready for shipment South. His process for stealing Delaware free people is described very fully in an old book, published as early as 1818, by Dr. Jesse Torrey, called

“A PORTRAITURE OF DOMESTIC SLAVERY”

Torrey had been employed or was a volunteer detective of the Freemen's Aid Society. He begins as follows:

“To enumerate all the horrid and aggravating instances of man-stealing which we know to have occurred in the State of Delaware within the recollection of many of the citizens of that State would require a heavy volume. In many cases whole families of free a colored people have been attacked in the night, beaten nearly to death with clubs, gagged and bound, and dragged into distant and hopeless captivity and slavery, leaving no traces behind except the blood from their wounds.

“During last winter (1817) the house of a free black family was broken open and its defenseless inhabitants treated in the manner just mentioned, except that the mother escaped from their merciless grasp while on their way to the State of Maryland. The plunderers, of whom there were nearly, half a dozen, conveyed their prey upon horses, and the woman being placed on one of the horses behind, improved an opportunity as they were passing a house and sprang off, and not daring to pursue her they proceeded on, leaving her younger child a little further along by the side of the road, in expectation that its cries would attract the mother, but she prudently waited until morning and recovered it again in safety. Two or three of these miserable men have since received the ignominious and barbarous punishment of whipping and cropping. One monster in human shape was detected pursuing the occupation of courting and marrying mulatto women and selling them as slaves.

“They have lately invented a method of attaining this object through the instrumentality of the laws. Having selected a suitable free colored person to make a pitch upon, the conspiring kidnaper employs a confederate to ascertain the distinguishing marks of his body and then claims and obtains him as a slave before a Magistrate by describing those marks, and proving the truth of his assertion by a well instructed accomplice.

“I discovered (in a Washington City slave-pen) three persons of color who were born free, and who had been forcibly seized in the time of night, bound and transported in the night out of their native State, Delaware, and sold as slaves for life to itinerant man-dealers in Maryland, who generally range themselves along near the line of division between the two States. One of these was a mulatto man, about twenty-one years of age. I found him thoroughly secured in irons. His arms were manacled, with strong loops around the wrists, resembling a clevis, connected by a strong iron bolt. On the shelf over the fire-place lay a pair of heavy, rough hobbles, with which he said his legs had been fettered until a short time previous, but were then secured by a pair of polished gripes, resembling the patent horse-fetters with locks, connected by a strong new tug-chain, with a loose end of two or three feet in length lying upon the foor. He stated that a journeyman to the men with whom he resided, and to whom be had been bound to service for a term of years, had decoyed him into the fields some distance from the house late in the evening under pretense of hunting opossums.

How They Kidnapped

“Two strangers rushed upon him with rope in their hands, and, with the assistances of the person just mentioned, bound his hands and led him, with a pistol held each side of him, with which he said they threatened to shoot him if he made any alarm, fifteen or twenty miles, when he was secreted till the next evening, when another person came with a chaise and conveyed him to a tavern in Maryland, a little over the line; from whence оnе of the man-dealers (who has since been advertised as a man-stealer in a different case) brought him to Washington in manacles and sold him to another as a slave for life. He said that his driver, overhearing him tell a colored woman near Annapolis that his parents (both of whom were light-colored mulattoes) were free-born, threatened to shoot him if he should catch him talking to any body again about his being free. He said the trader did strike him on the head with his fist, after his arrival at Washington, for telling a person to whom he was offered for sale that he was lawfully free, and threatened to flog him if he should fail of selling him in the city on that account. He also stated that another boy, about sixteen, was brought off with him at the same time, and sold for a slave in Washington, who was lawfully free and had been sold to the traders by a person to whom the boy's father had let him to service. The others whom I found in the same garret, and at the same time, were a young black widow woman, with an infant at the breast, both of whom were born free. Her husband had died but a few days previous to her seizure, and she was in a state of pregnancy at the time. She stated that the man in whose house she resided, together with his brother, and three other persons (two of whom she said then stood indicted for having seized and carried her off at a former time) came into the room, a kitchen, where she was in bed, and seized and dragged her out; fastened a noose around her neck to prevent her from screaming, and attempted to blindfold her, which she resented with such violence that she prevented them from succeeding. She said while one of them was endeavoring to fix the bandage over her eyes, that she seized his cheek with her teeth and tore a piece of it entirely off. She stated one of them struck her head several times with a stick of wood, from the wounds of which she was almost covered with blood, She showed me a large scar upon her forehead, occasioned by one of the blows, which a gentleman who saw her the day previous to her seizure has since informed me was not there before. She said while she was struggling against them and screaming, the man in whose house she lived bawled out: ‘Choke the d-d b-h; don't let her halloo, a she'll scare my wife!’ Having conquered her by superior force, she said they placed her with the child in a chaise (her description of which, with the norse and the driver, who was one of the victors, corresponds precisely with that given by the mulatto man of the carriage, &c., by which he also was conveyed), and, refusing to dress herself, three of them, leaving the two who belonged to the house, carried her off in the condition that she was dragged from bed to a certain tavern in Maryland, and sold them both to the man-dealer, who brought them to the City of Washington. She stated that one of her captors drove the carriage and held the rope which was fixed to her neck, and that one rode each side, on horseback; that, while one of them was negotiating a bargain with her purchaser, he asked her who her master was, and, replying that she had none, her seller beckoned to him to go into another room, where the business was adjusted without troubling her with any further inquiries. She stated that her purchaser confessed, while on the way to Annapolis, that he believed she might have had some claim to freedom, and intimated that he would have taken her back, if the man of whom he bought her had not ran away: but requested her, notwithstanding, to say nothing to any body about her being free, which she refused to comply with. She affirmed that he offered her for sale to several persons who refused to purchase on account of her asserting that she was free. She stated that her purchaser had left her in Washington for a few weeks and gone to the Eastern Shore in search of more black people, in order to make up a drove for Georgia.”

“Thomas Clarkson, in his History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, states ‘That the arrival of slave ships on the coasts of Africa was the uniform signal for the immediate commencement of wars for the attainment of prisoners, for sale and exportation to America and West Indies, In Maryland and Delaware the same drama is now performed in miniature.

“The arrival of the man-traffickers, laden with cash, at their respective stations, near the coasts of a great American water, called justly by Mr. Randolph ‘a Mediterranean Sea,’ or at their several inland posts, near the dividing line of Maryland and Delaware (at some of which they have grated prisons for the purpose) is the well-known signal for the professed kidnapers, like beasts of prey, to commence their nightly invasions upon the fleecy flocks, extending their ravages (generally attended with bloodshed, and sometimes murder), and spreading terror and consternation among both freemen and slaves throughout the sandy region from the western to the eastern shores. These two-legged featherless animals, or human blood-hounds, when overtaken (rarely) by the messengers of law, are generally found armed with instruments of death, sometimes with pistols, with latent spring-daggers attached to them. Mr. Cooper, one of the Representatives in Congress from Delaware, assured me that he had often been afraid to send one of his servants out of his house in the evening from the danger of their being seized by kidnapers.

“While at Wilmington (Del.) I accidentally heard a black woman telling the gate-keeper of the bridge that she had set out to go to Georgetown (Del.), but was returning without having reached it, for fear of being caught on the road by the kidnappers.”

Joe Johnson had quarter-races on the road by his tavern for the benefit of negro traders and rustics, and he excelled in fighting. though he was too much of an offender to risk unpopularity.

Miscellany

Patty Cannon frequently engaged negroes in a presumed friendly wrestle, and could throw almost any black man with her powerful arms, which were said to be as thick as a man's thigh. A negro engaged in hauling pig-iron ore was once grappled by her in this way, and he said if he had not been scared she would have got him down, “but I was afeared she would tie me and kidnap me if I give in, so every time she throwed me I turned her, and at last I throwed her so hard that I had time to turn and run.”

Another time she was pursued with a black woman she had stolen worth a round sum of money, and she released this woman in the woods where she was fastened, and put her in a scow and rowed it across the Nanticoke River at Twiford's wharf; and a boat starting after her, and the black woman in her irons being unable to follow her, Patty rushed back. put the black woman on her back, plunged in the mud of the marshy shore up to her middle, and waded to solid ground with the prey and disappeared in the woods.

The old gentleman who drove me to Patty Cannon's said that among the other negroes Joe Johnson corrupted and used to decoy their fellow blacks into his clutches was one belonging to my informant's uncle, Jacob Wright, the Cannon's Ferry merchant. This negro twice escaped from Joe and was twice pursued and brought back, for fear he would give information. The third time he was sold, though Mr. Wright's property. Years afterward, about 1859, when his mother-in-law was moldering in the jail-yard, Joe Johnson was discovered by Jacob Wright on a Mississippi River steamboat, and he looked very fugitive and disturbed when Wright recognized him, perhaps expecting a rendition to Delaware. Finally he came up.

“Mr. Wright,” he said, “I once did you a great wrong, but I want to make amends. I am a changed man, sir. I am now a District Judge. I hope you will not mention to any one in this part of the country the character I bore in Delaware!” He then took of his gold watch and chain and, presented them to Mr. Wright in recompense for his kidnapped slave.

Joe Johnson is believed to have killed a score or more of negroes. As he went down Broad Creek once in a hurry, it is said he feared pursuit, and the negro children were bawling at the prospect of being carried off. Joe picked up a pair of them in the sight of their horrified parents and dashed their brains out, and threw them overboard.

It is also told that Patty Cannon occasionally brained a child and pitched it on the back log of her chimney-fire, and sat grimly regarding its combustion. She was a merciless criminal, drinking her whisky straight, swearing like a man, and driving her young banditti on to avarice and ferocity.

Patty's Skull

On Tuesday, January 4, 1881, I called at Fowler & Wells' Phrenological Museum on Broadway, New York, and after making a purchase asked a woman at the sales-counter if there was not in the museum the skull of Martha, or “Patty” Cannon, a woman who died or committed suicide under sentence of death. She said there was, and took me to a case and brought out a portion of a skull. It contained the bridge of the nose and the eye-sockets and the whole forehead and crest of the head, and the back of the head to the base of the skull. The sides of the head, however, were gone. It was of a light walnut color, and the woman said that it had been in the grave some time when Mr. Fowler obtained it, and being probably buried without a coffin or any protection the earth had destroyed a portion of it.

I took up the skull, and at once observed its extremely low forehead, the depressed, almost level, line on the top of the head, and the extremely large posterior, which swelled toward the base of, the brain to a perfect deformity, being a great bump or bone tumor, indicative certainly of sensuality if not of all the animal propensities, The saleswoman, who believed in phrenology, said that it was strong in causation or causativeness, being a pretty broad skull at the forehead, although low. She said the organs of secretiveness were large; that it was the lowest forehead, perhaps, on a human being in the museum, and the cerebellum or lower back brain was a marvelous size. “Mr. Fowler, who is still living,” said this woman, “at about seventy-five years of age lectured in a little town in Delaware one night over thirty years ago, and they told him that they would give him a certain skull if he would describe the character of its possessor. This was the skull, and, they admitted that he had determined the character well. He thinks a great deal of this trophy, and has another skull, belonging to Ebenezer Johnson, the guardian or pal of Patty Cannon and father of her son-in-law, which he also dug up and took to New York.”