In 1807, Priscilla gave birth to a daughter whom she refused to name. I know this because John Hoge said as much when he registered the child as his property at the Washington County courthouse in compliance with the state’s gradual-abolition law. In doing so, he produced one of the most remarkable documents in the archive of Pennsylvania slavery:
John Hoge of Washington Town has a black Woman named Priscilla at his Mill in Chartiers Township, who had on the 7th day of May 1807 a female child born, which he understands she will ^not name under the impression that it cannot be otherwise recorded. He therefore names it Maria and desires it may be so recorded. Jn Hoge.
Priscilla was correct and John knew it. Under Pennsylvania law, enslavers could not legally claim a bound woman’s child as property without supplying the child’s name. John knew this because he had helped maintain the slave registry while working at the county courthouse in 1789 and 1790. He wagered that naming Priscilla’s daughter himself would not offend his colleagues in the clerk’s office, which proved to be a fine instinct: an assistant neatly copied down the child’s registration without bothering to note her mother’s objection. Yet Priscilla’s refusal to name her daughter—or at least to withhold this precious information from John, and thus from me—reveals that she, too, was familiar with the intricacies of Pennsylvania’s gradual-abolition program. By asserting herself as the keeper of her daughter’s name, Priscilla gestured to her right to sue John for her daughter’s freedom by invoking improper registration. She would not have taken this step lightly, as her decision to speak out—or rather to remain silent—forced John to confront the fact that someone he enslaved knew enough about the laws of freedom to attempt to rob him of his property.
Priscilla was attempting to prevent John from legally transforming her free-born daughter into a term slave. If John had done nothing—if he had chosen not to register Priscilla’s daughter—then she would have remained free. But since John chose to register the child—to claim her as his property until she turned twenty-eight—Priscilla chose to act. Her attempt to frustrate John’s efforts to register her daughter likely invited his ire, although perhaps less than if she had gathered her daughter and absconded from the mill. Despite the obstacles, pregnant women and new mothers continued to seek refuge from slavery, even in states that were divesting from the institution.