Patsy Young — American Brewer, Fugitive From Slavery

The second time Patsy Young escaped was different from the first. On August 8, 1824, when she stepped off the property of her enslaver in Franklin County, North Carolina, she likely held her daughter’s hand.

Four-year-old Eliza had not yet been born when Patsy ran the first time, 16 years earlier. This time, though, mother and daughter went together. Perhaps they left on foot, mother pulling daughter along, urging small feet to move quickly. Or maybe they escaped by horse, or hidden in the cart of a helper.

[Editor’s note: This article contains references to physical and sexual violence.]

Also different, this second time: Young’s enslaver, Nathaniel Hunt, didn’t delay in alerting his neighbors. When Young had first fled, in June 1808 at the age of 16, Hunt waited 10 months before publishing a notice in the local newspaper, asking for help recapturing her. 

In August 1824, just eight days after Patsy and Eliza’s flight, Hunt paid the Raleigh Register to run a column of angry text under the headline “$100 REWARD” in bold capitals.

Hunt wasted no time because he understood how skilled Young was at slipping away, even in a rural region dominated by enslavers like himself, and even for a young woman who was surely illiterate, with a child in tow. He had also become more familiar with the tools and skills that Young might use to move from a state of slavery into freedom, as she had before.

Among Patsy Young’s many skills: she brewed beer. The hand that pulled Eliza toward freedom also measured grain and water, stirred a boiling pot, and sold beer. The profits that Young earned from brewing—in addition to cooking, weaving, baking cakes, and sewing fine clothing—had enabled her to support herself as a free woman for almost 15 years.

Young’s skillful brewing was something that had helped her find freedom before. Perhaps it would again. 

FINDING FOUNDING BREWERS

Visions of the first generation of American politicians brewing beer are just that. Rather, it was enslaved people and other household laborers who were critical to beer production in the earliest years of American history. Bondspeople quenched the thirst of the nation’s founding fathers, tending barley at Mount Vernon and brewing beer at Monticello. They grew hops and sold them to the College of William and Mary and Martha Jefferson. These early brewers laid the foundation of a tradition—American beer—that would embed itself in the nation’s culture, economy, and history.

Often, though, historians can only acknowledge these early brewers as a non-specific group—“enslaved people”—or perhaps offer a first name, gleaned from an auction announcement. Recognition can be especially challenging for those who toiled for less prominent enslavers (Nathaniel Hunt was no George Washington) and for enslaved women.

“We can read the words written to force Young’s recapture toward alternate ends: those of bringing to light her resourcefulness, bravery, and skill. Also, to name and honor Patsy Young as one of the nation’s early brewers of beer.”

American enslavers, census enumerators, and other record-keepers treated enslaved women, in particular, as little more than the building blocks of others’ wealth. Many were beaten, raped, and made to watch their children sold away from them. Millions of men, women, and children were enslaved in the United States, but their published autobiographies and interviews are precious and few. The vast majority of bondspeople were barred from learning how to read or write. 

Where can the historian look, then, to find the lives of those who were prevented from telling their own stories? Where is the record of their labors, families, movements, joys, and sorrows? And the beer they brewed?

The 1824 “runaway ad” that sought the recapture of Patsy Young and her daughter opens the door to an exploration of some of the methods with which the story of an enslaved woman brewer may be better understood. In Nathaniel Hunt’s desperation to find Young, he vomited up a plethora of details—names, dates, places—that he would never have taken the time or effort to record elsewhere. He paid the newspaper extra to run a longer-than-typical ad, and run it multiple times, throughout the late summer and fall of 1824.

Ironically, Hunt’s desperation to recapture Young and her daughter—to confine them again to forced labor and violence on his plantation, to return them to the anonymity of slavery during an era when the U.S. census didn’t bother to collect bondspeople’s names—enables more details of Young’s life to emerge than would otherwise have been possible.

We can read the words written to force Young’s recapture toward alternate ends: those of bringing to light her resourcefulness, bravery, and skill. Also, to name and honor Patsy Young as one of the nation’s early brewers of beer.

HUNT, HUNTER, HUNTED

Nathaniel Hunt’s wealth was taken and inherited, not made. In 1729, British colonizers established the colony of North Carolina on land where Cherokee, Catawba, Tuscarora, and other Indigenous people lived. Settlers from England, Scotland, and Mid-Atlantic colonies, plus free and enslaved people of color and indentured servants, arrived. Nathaniel Hunt was born in 1782; North Carolina became a state in 1789; and an enslaved baby named Piety—who would later rename herself Patsy—was born in 1792.

In 1793, Osborn Jeffreys, one of the largest landowners in early North Carolina history, bequeathed to his 11-year-old grandson Nathaniel Hunt (and his brother William) more than 1,000 acres of land in Franklin County. Forested with oak, hickory, and pine trees, Franklin County sits in northeastern North Carolina, on the edge of the Piedmont region, where the land’s geography transitions to the Coastal Plain. On Jeffreys’ tract of land—cut through by Crooked Creek, which still meanders between Bunn and Youngsville, northeast of Wake Forest—the boy Nathaniel would one day enslave Piety, and others.

Jeffreys passed down his land to secure his family’s wealth long into the future. This future wealth depended, too, on the 25 enslaved people whom Jeffreys gave to his daughter Mary, Nathaniel’s mother, in the same will. With the stroke of a pen, “Old Sam, Easter and her children, Patty, Ippy, Clara, Sally, Anthony, Pheraby, Alice, Moses, Hanna, Simon, Tinker, Tom, Lavina and her children, Stephen, Jordan, Charlie, Rachel,” and others went from Jeffreys to his daughter, “with all their increase to her and her heirs and assigns for ever,” Jeffreys wrote.

Enslavement followed the condition of the mother. If a mother was enslaved, her child would be enslaved too, even if she had become pregnant via rape by a white man. Osborn Jeffreys authored his will trusting that his land, his bondspeople, their children, their children’s children, and children not yet conceived would ensure his descendants had continued ease and fortune.

It is not clear when or how Nathaniel Hunt became Piety’s enslaver—there are no remaining records of her enslavement in the State Archives of North Carolina—but on June 22, 1808, when Piety was 16, she escaped from Hunt for the first time.

“RAN AWAY, On the 22d [sic] of June last, A Bright MULATTO WOMAN, named Piety,” Hunt announced in the Raleigh Register the following spring. “She has a scar under one of her eyes, occasioned by a fall,” a detail that may or may not have been accurate, given the frequent violence inflicted on enslaved people. Piety could also be identified by her “upper fore teeth somewhat decayed. Rather slim made, but tall of her age,” Hunt wrote. His reward: $10 if found within Franklin County, and double that outside its bounds.

Imagine, for a moment, the first step this young woman took beyond the boundaries of Hunt’s plantation. Behind her were hundreds of acres overseen by a man whose family tree rooted itself in the political power and wealth of Great Britain and the new United States. In front of her was the prospect of freedom. In which direction should she go and how far could she get? The county had no networks of turnpikes or canals. (Railroads had yet to be invented.) She was far from a large city or port where she could disappear. Where could this teenage girl be safe, in a region of farms, small towns, and taverns, with little place to hide? How would she support herself?

Into these uncertainties, the young woman stepped forward. She shed the name Piety, chosen for her by an enslaver. In the next 15 years, Patsy Young would build a new life for herself as a free woman, an entrepreneur, a mother, and a wife. Beer would be one ingredient.

‘RAN AWAY’

When Patsy fled, she did so at great risk. In the United States, penalties for bondspeople who attempted to escape were horrific. Enslavers whipped, branded, and maimed the men and women they were able to recapture. Some states’ laws had allowed enslavers to punish repeated escape attempts by severing fingers, toes, ears, testicles, and cutting Achilles tendons and hamstrings.

Evidence of such violence appeared in the July 28, 1808, issue of the Raleigh Register, published one month after Patsy’s escape. “COMMITTED to Salisbury Gaol [Jail],” the notice read, “An African NEGRO FELLOW, who cannot speak a word of English. He … appears to be about 25 or 30 years of age, has lost all of his toes on his left foot, and all his toe-nails on his right foot … and he has lost two of his upper fore teeth.”

“More recently, scholar and artist Marcus Wood argued that runaway ads were urgent autobiographies—‘a grim, minimal, and deeply moving set of micro narratives articulating the price of freedom’—authored by the many who were unable to publish their stories in fuller form.”

Additional notices in the same issue announced inanities adjacent to tragedies. A leather pocketbook had been found on the road between Halifax and Lewisburg, containing $31 and two pairs of ladies’ silk gloves. Would the owner claim it and pay the cost of this notice? An enslaved man, Jack, had been captured and jailed in Rutherford County. Would his owner come collect him? A woman named Elizabeth had run away from home. Her husband would pay none of her debts while she continued to ignore her “duties of a Wife and a Mother.” The citizens of Charlotte had celebrated the nation’s 32nd Independence Day with a public procession, an oration, 17 toasts, and a ball. “RAN AWAY” announced the escape of 21-year-old Lewis. His enslaver speculated that the young man—“very large feet, stoops considerably when walking, slow spoken, and has a rather downcast look”—might have crossed state lines, trying to reunite with his father.

Such was the news in Raleigh, North Carolina, in late July 1808, as Patsy Young sought to put distance between herself and Nathaniel Hunt.

Thousands of “runaway ads” filled newspapers around the country throughout the first half of the 1800s. British abolitionist Ebenezer Davies was appalled by what he found in New Orleans papers during a visit there in the 1840s. He wrote, “Runaway slaves seem to be constantly advertised … Human chattels assuming their natural right to go where they please are advertised with a woodcut representing them as bending forward in the act of running … a pitiable figure!”

More recently, scholar and artist Marcus Wood argued that runaway ads were urgent autobiographies—“a grim, minimal, and deeply moving set of micro narratives articulating the price of freedom”—authored by the many who were unable to publish their stories in fuller form.

These micro narratives continue to tell their stories. “Freedom on the Move” is a free database from a collaborative team of scholars with more than 30,000 digitized, text-searchable ads. “Created to control the movement of enslaved people,” the team writes, “runaway ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story.”

Together, they recorded experiences of American slavery that stretched across centuries and traversed hundreds of miles.

“Ran-away … a well set middle sized Maddagascar [sic] Negro Woman, called Penelope, about 35 years of Age: With several Sorts of Apparel; one whereof is a flowered damask Gown,” wrote Captain Nathanael Cary in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1704.

“Ran away … a light Mulatto Girl named SARY, and her female child named SELENA,” wrote enslaver Mary Robinson in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1829. “She has a scar under one of her breasts resembling the cut from a whip.”

“RANAWAY … a negro boy named Adison … Said boy has a very bad cough,” wrote enslaver Sydney H. Heart of Salisbury, North Carolina in late March 1865, less than three weeks before the Confederacy would surrender to Union forces, admitting defeat in the Civil War.

The 1824 notice that Nathaniel Hunt published in search of Patsy Young appears in this database. This second ad pointed backward to the first, published in 1809. Both pointed outward, in turn, to an unfolding paper trail of historical records that can be better described as a tree with hyperlinks as branches. Folded, faded, and torn census records, wills, newspaper pages, military muster rolls, a marriage license, a family Bible, nomination forms to the National Register of Historic Places: these documents sit in archives and institutions throughout the country. But their surfaces have been scanned, digitized, and suspended in black and white, in illusively close reach behind the screen of a computer. One digitized document leads to the next, one question produces another, relationships among people and places emerge, and the tree of links grows fuller. 

In the spaces among the branches, the life and work of Patsy Young bloom.

SEAMSTRESS, COOK, WEAVER, BAKER

The second advertisement that Nathaniel Hunt published in search of Patsy Young, in August 1824, traced the outline of Patsy’s trajectory following her 1808 escape. When she fled from Hunt’s plantation in Franklin County, she went north and east. “She spent the greater part of the time she was run away … in the neighborhood of and in the town of Halifax,” the ad stated, as well as “one or two summers at Rock Landing, where I am informed she cooked for the hands employed on the Canal. She has also spent some of her time in Plymouth … At the above places she has many acquaintances.” None of these destinations was more than 100 miles from Hunt.

Young headed in the right direction for someone who needed to work as an entrepreneur to support herself as a free woman. The U.S. census of 1810 counted 376,000 whites, 169,000 enslaved people, and a little more than 10,000 free people of color in North Carolina. Bondspeople who escaped and stayed in the state, like Young, needed to pass as free within a group that was a fraction of the size of the enslaved population.

The same census clarified the extent to which North Carolina was an agricultural landscape, with little manufacturing or commerce. In 1810, the state counted more blacksmith shops and turpentine stills than any other, plus more than one third of the nation’s spinning wheels, used to process cotton, flax, and wool. North Carolinians fashioned rifles and leather shoes, they tanned hides, and they smelted iron. Still, most free and enslaved residents farmed the land.

Young saw opportunity in other occupations, especially in the town of Halifax, a regional center of political and social activity known for its taverns. “She is an excellent seamstress, can make ladies and gentlemens dresses, is a good cook and weaver, and I am informed is a good cake-baker and beer-brewer, &c. by which occupations she principally gained her living,” noted the 1824 ad. Young had good taste and a deft touch with grain and fabric alike.

The construction of the Roanoke Canal on the Roanoke River, begun in 1819, drew Young north, too. This waterway promised a vital new vein of communication between the Blue Ridge Mountain region and the ocean coast. The laborers who dug the nine-mile canal—through 20 feet of bedrock, in some spots—needed to eat. At Rock Landing, Patsy Young stood at a stove or oven, the sounds and sights of modernization as a backdrop.

As she cooked for the workers, she may have come to understand that the same canal and river that could carry tobacco to eastern markets might also speed the journey toward a freer place. “I forwarn [sic] all owners of boats, captains and owners of vessels,” threatened Nathaniel Hunt in his 1824 ad, “from taking on board their vessels, or carrying away this woman … under the penalty of the law.” Setting down her cooking spoon and stepping on board a boat, catching the current, might be all that was necessary for Young to evade Hunt forever.  

BREWER

Whether in coastal North Carolina, St. Louis, New Orleans, or elsewhere, access to water could enable a bondsperson to slip from enslavement to freedom.

In Patsy Young’s life, beer played a similar role.

Brewing helped her “gai[n] her living” as a free woman, Hunt’s 1824 ad acknowledged. Brewing beer was a household chore, done frequently and at a small scale in kitchens throughout the state. But Young had established a reputation as a brewer that was prominent enough to garner a mention in Hunt’s notice. In other words, Hunt estimated that Young’s brewing was so well known that it might serve to identify her so as to enable her recapture.  

“Brewing in the early United States had a slow start for several reasons that highlight, again, the skill with which Young must have brewed in order to establish a reputation. American brewers suffered from a shortage of ‘strong bottles’ in which to store their beer … In short supply, too, were corks to seal those bottles—the writer suggested that cork trees be planted ‘in all our climates south of the Chesapeak [sic]’—and even the wire to secure corks.”

Young’s success was all the more remarkable given the fact that brewing beer was a much less developed affair than distilling spirits in early 1800s North Carolina. In 1808, grocers in Fayetteville and Wilmington advertised in the Raleigh Register to announce a stock of “linens, calicoes, cutlery, ironmongery … Also on hand, Fifteen STILLS, Philadelphia made.” The census of 1810 counted 5,400 stills in North Carolina, more than any other state. They produced 1.4 million gallons of spirits from distilled fruit and grain, valued at $758,000.

Still, North Carolinians enjoyed wine and beer, too, in addition to spirits. Other grocers’ advertisements detailed customers’ wide-ranging tastes and eager thirst during the era when Patsy Young was beginning to brew as a free woman. “Just received direct from New-York,” announced a Raleigh grocer in 1813, “Wine, Rum, and London Brown Stout.” In 1818, another grocer advertised the availability of “4th Proof J[amaican] Rum, Cogniac [sic] Brandy, Holland Gin, Malaga Wine, L.P. Teneriffe [Wine], Old Madeira [Wine],” all acquired in New York. A third grocer in 1824 sold “London and Philadelphia Porter,” the latter “selected for Medical uses.”

As such advertisements indicated, much of the beer available in early-19th-century North Carolina was imported from New York, Philadelphia, or Great Britain. Ales brewed at home were unworthy of a newspaper mention. Although a handful of professional breweries opened in North Carolina in the late 1700s, they were short-lived or too small to attract official notice. The 1810 federal census counted no breweries in the state. Of the nation’s 132 breweries, 103 were concentrated in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. Ninety breweries produced 75% of the nation’s professionally brewed beer. Even much later in the century, North Carolina would continue to lag in this regard. In 1870 and 1880, The Western Brewer counted a single brewery in North Carolina. In 1890 and 1900, there were none.

Brewing in the early United States had a slow start for several reasons that highlight, again, the skill with which Young must have brewed in order to establish a reputation. American brewers suffered from a shortage of “strong bottles” in which to store their beer, wrote an economist in an essay that accompanied the 1810 U.S. census returns. In short supply, too, were corks to seal those bottles—the writer suggested that cork trees be planted “in all our climates south of the Chesapeak [sic]”—and even the wire to secure corks.

Beyond a general difficulty in procuring barley, a separate challenge was “The absence or infrequency of malting,” the economist continued, “[which] has also operated against brewing in the small way and in families.” Furthermore, distilled spirits were simply easier to produce and preserve than beer, he acknowledged. And cider was “particularly convenient” for Americans living in more densely settled regions of the country, such as New England or the upper Mid-Atlantic, given that “orchards admit the cultivation of the ground.” A greater quantity of cider and other harvests could emerge from a small patch of ground than beer from a field of barley. 

There was also Americans’ “peculiar taste for lively or foaming beer, which our summers do not favor.” Americans of 1810 wanted the “head or top of foam (or cream, as it is popularly called here),” the economist observed. But such a demand was silly, as it had been a “principal caus[e] of the inconsiderable progress of malt liquors.” Forget the foam, he scolded.

Still, the economist approved of Americans’ growing taste for beer and encouraged its popularity. “[P]orter, pale ale, brown ale, strong beer and small beer, and even spruce and molasses beer”—American brewers of 1810 were already capable of brewing “to suit all tastes and to accommodate all climates and consumers.” Choosing beer was also a moral choice, the writer suggested. With less intoxicating power per sip, beer, wine, cider, and perry offered “salubrious” alternatives to spirits.

Best, perhaps, from the economist’s point of view: Growing the American brewing industry would push the nation’s fledgling economy toward independence. American breweries and distilleries should serve as the market for “our grain, our hops, our orchards, our lumber and our fuel,” he envisioned. Taxes on beer brewed within the U.S., in addition to increased taxes on imported beer, wine, and spirits, would fill the government’s coffers and encourage growth in the domestic brewing industry.

In short, this economist argued, beer made sense for American health, agriculture, industry, and economy.

Patsy Young likely learned how to brew beer from a fellow enslaved person, perhaps on Nathaniel Hunt’s plantation or in the kitchen of a Halifax tavern. What kinds of beer did she brew as a free woman, between 1808 and 1823? Which grains and other ingredients were available to her? American cookbooks published in the late 1700s and early 1800s included recipes for beers flavored with spruce essence; sage; ginger and lemon; the “chippings of sassafras root” and “pounded allspice;” as well as sweet fern, horseradish, and wintergreen. A midwife in Maine wrote in her diary on April 5, 1805, that she “ha[d] been drinking a beer made of hops and Balm Gilliad [sic].” Molasses, ground and toasted bread, brown sugar, wheat bran, and rye meal offered sugar to hungry yeast when malted barley was unavailable for beer. 

Young may have reached for some of these ingredients, depending on local availability and tastes. These details must be extrapolated or imagined. The simplest and most important fact is certain: She brewed well enough to sustain herself through nearly 15 years of freedom, and perhaps more.

MOTHER, BRIDE

As Patsy Young sewed, cooked, wove, baked, and brewed, other threads in her life and those around her continued to unspool.

In 1820, when Young was about 28, she gave birth to a daughter, Eliza. This was a name chosen by a mother for her daughter; no enslaver had a say.

If Young lived in Halifax County in 1820, the year of her daughter’s birth, she slept and woke and nursed her infant less than 50 miles from her former enslaver’s plantation. Young was one of only 142 free women of color within the county’s total population of 17,200. Even 12 years after her escape, Patsy Young’s existence was one of constant risk.

Nevertheless, Young took another remarkable step. On June 15, 1822, she married Ackil Johnston, a free man of color, in Halifax. As described in the 1824 ad, Johnston (there spelled “Chrael”; in other sources his name is transcribed as Aehrael, Arkel, Aikel, and Arnel Johnson) had lived “in and about Plymouth, and followed boating on the Roanoke.” Perhaps Young had met Johnston during one of her summers at Rock Landing, on the Roanoke River.

This slip of paper, preserved by Halifax County’s Register of Deeds and now digitized, feels different from all others that touched Patsy Young’s life. It is a tangible artifact of a decision that Young made of her own free will. Young and Johnston likely stood over this piece of paper as two witnesses signed it—one with a signature, the other with a + mark. So many of the other documentary records of Patsy Young’s life derived from attempts to ascribe value to her body and her labor and control her movement. But this marriage license recorded a day and a place of her making. Here she identified herself with the name she chose.

Young was 30 years old. Her daughter Eliza was two. The wedding took place almost 14 years to the day after Young had escaped from slavery. Her former enslaver had not forgotten.

PRISONER

Patsy Young and Ackil Johnston were married for less than a year when Nathaniel Hunt found her.

Around June 1, 1823, Patsy was captured at the home she shared with Ackil, a farm he was leasing in Scotland Neck, in Halifax County.

The runaway ad that Hunt had published when he started searching for Young was 14 years in the past. It should have been forgotten, the paper on which it was printed disintegrated into ash or pulp. Yet her whereabouts reached him via a prying neighbor, perhaps, or malicious whispers across a tavern table.

Hunt had both Patsy and Eliza arrested, even though the three-year-old girl had never known slavery. He brought them 50 miles west, back to Franklin County. By a Franklin County court order, Hunt claimed—though no such record could be found in court archives—Patsy and Eliza were put up for sale, as slaves. Nathaniel Hunt purchased them.

The woman who had first fled from him as a teenager was back on his property, now with her young daughter. In Hunt’s ledger, two bondswomen had taken the place of one.

And yet, 14 months after being plunged back into slavery, Patsy Young did it again.

FUGITIVE

$100 REWARD.

RUN AWAY, or was stolen from the subscriber on the night of the eighth instant a bright mulatto woman (slave) and her child, a girl of about four years old….

She is a tall spare woman, thin face and lips, long sharp nose, and fore-teeth somewhat decayed….

She is an excellent seamstress, can make ladies and gentlemens dresses, is a good cook and weaver, and I am informed is a good cake-baker and beer-brewer, &c. by which occupations she principally gained her living….

I have but little doubt, that [Ackil] Johnson [sic] has contrived to seduce or steal her and child out of my possession, and will attempt to get them out of the State and pass as free persons….

I will give sixty-five dollars for his detection and conviction…I will give for the apprehension of the woman and child….thirty-five dollars; or, I will give twenty-five dollars for the woman alone, and ten dollars for the child alone. The proper name of the woman is PIETY, but she will no doubt change it as she did before. 

Nathaniel Hunt published this notice in the Raleigh Register on August 20, 1824. It ran again, on the front page, on September 3, and again on September 10. Hunt paid for it to run again on September 24, October 1, 8, and 29, and November 5 and 12. 

After that date, nothing.

Decades later, Hunt and his wife moved to Tennessee. He was too old to fight in the Civil War and he died the year after the war’s end.

There is no evidence of Hunt’s success or failure at capturing Young yet again. Links to digitized records and documents grow sparser. The branches of this tree thin at the top, allowing more sunlight into the space between.

On August 8, 1824, Patsy and Eliza stepped off the boundaries of a plantation and—one hopes—never returned. 

Perhaps cakes, or beer, or a river that could carry them swiftly to a safe haven were ahead. Or perhaps something else entirely. Where the branches of their recorded history ended, they started their own story.

Words by Theresa McCulla
Illustrations by Colette Holston