Green Spring's Freedom Seeker
by Skyler Foley, Historic Resources Intern, 2022
Newspaper clipping from the Alexandria Times Gazette, August 1, 1798. Photo Credit: Green Spring Gardens Historical ArchiveIn 1795 John Moss, the first owner of the house that would become Green Spring’s Historic House, wrote a deed of delayed manumission to free fourteen enslaved people who lived and worked on Green Spring Farm. Moss’s delayed manumission freed the people he enslaved at set dates in the future, with different terms of service for different people, presumably based on their age.
In this document, a person Moss enslaved named Fox was set to be freed in eighteen years – in 1813. However, we know that Fox attempted to secure his freedom much earlier. Just three years after Moss wrote the manumission document, “WILL, Alias Fox,” fled Green Spring Farm, according to an advertisement Moss placed in the Alexandria Times Gazette in 1798. Moss mentions that this was a second bid for freedom by Will/Fox: “He ran away from me four or five years ago and was apprehended in Annapolis.” But was his second attempt successful? My goal was to find out what may have happened to him.
We knew from the advertisement that Will went by both the names Will and Fox. When looking for documents on him, I used both names to try to locate him. Eventually, the librarians at the Fairfax Historic Courthouse found a William Fox – a free Black man who appeared on the property tax records in 1814, 1815, and 1816. Fox would have been manumitted in 1813.
We did some more digging and found the court minutes of this William Fox’s manumission, in which William Moss (son of John Moss) freed Fox: “...William Fox [was] liberated by the said John Moss in his lifetime and who is now entitled to his freedom.” Now we knew that Fox had indeed been recaptured. We do not yet know why he disappeared from the records in 1817, but it’s likely that he changed his name, or possibly he died.
What motivated Fox to twice seek his freedom from enslavement on Green Spring Farm is another mystery which warrants further research.
Postscript
Read more about John Moss’ deed of manumission here: Freedom at Green Spring…Sooner or Later | Our Stories and Perspectives. Historic House staff continue to research the lives of all the enslaved people who lived and worked on Green Spring Farm, from the Moss era through the Civil War.
