In the oppressive heat of August 1843, Dr.William Prescott stood in the drawing room of Magnolia Grove Estate in Wils County, Georgia, cradling the 31st infant born to an enslaved woman called Delila.
This child, like every single one before it, displayed characteristics that were unmistakably those of Cornelius Ashford, not the estate owner Edmund Ashford, but his younger sibling.
the identical distinctive cleft chin, those unusually pale gray eyes, that same birthark positioned behind the left ear, a small crescent-shaped mark that appeared on every one of Delilah’s offspring without fail.
Dr.Prescott had delivered 23 of these 30 one infants over 17 years.
He had observed the impossible repetition of inherited traits that challenged everything he comprehended about human reproduction.
He had watched Edmund Ashford’s expression transform from bewilderment to suspicion to something far more sinister each time another child emerged, displaying his brother’s unmistakable appearance.
And he had maintained detailed documentation of every birth, every measurement, every impossible similarity because William Prescott recognized that he was observing something that would trouble him until his final day.
The physician held the newborn girl in his experienced hands, studying her features with the identical systematic attention he had given to her 30 siblings previously.
Those gray eyes that seemed to peer through rather than at him, that slightly uneven cleft in the chin, that precisely matched Cornelius Ashford’s.
And there, behind the left ear, already apparent despite the baby’s age, that characteristic crescentshaped mark that had emerged on every child Delilah had ever delivered.
Prescott had measured this mark on child after child, recording its exact measurements, its specific location, its unchanging traits.
On this 31st baby, it was identical to all the others within a difference too tiny for his tools to detect.
What occurred at Magnolia Grove Estate between 1826 and 1843 remains among the most disturbing recorded cases of reproductive exploitation in the preivil war south.
The account involves betrayal between siblings, organized abuse of an enslaved woman, and a puzzle that medical knowledge of the period could not solve.
The reality, when it eventually came to light, would completely destroy the Asheford family and leave mysteries that scholars still discuss today.
The Ashford family had possessed land in Wilks County since 1792 when Bartholomeu Ashford obtained a land grant of 2,000 acres as compensation for his service in the Revolutionary War.
Bartholomew had served as a lieutenant under General Nathaniel Green during the southern campaign.
Distinguished by neither exceptional bravery nor strategic genius, but by the basic virtue of surviving, he was among the few soldiers from his original company to witness the war’s conclusion with all his body parts intact.
The Georgia land grant was his compensation for persistence rather than valor.
But Bartholomew demonstrated himself to be a much better farmer than warrior.
By the 1820s, the family had positioned themselves as one of the most significant planting families in central Georgia with properties that included Magnolia Grove, a 1,700 acre cotton plantation, and Riverside, a smaller estate of 800 acres that grew tobacco and rice.
Bartholomew had increased his initial 2,000 acres through clever purchases during the financial crisis of 1807 and 1819.
When desperate land owners sold their property for minimal amounts, he constructed the main residence at Magnolia Grove in 1814.
A Greek revival building with 16 rooms and broad veranders built to capture whatever winds might penetrate the Georgia humidity.
Bartholomew sons Edmund and Cornelius were born 3 years apart.
Edmund came in 1801, Cornelius in 1804.
From their youngest years, the siblings could not have been more different, and Bartholomew made no attempt to hide which son he favored.
Edmund was tall and broadsh shouldered with dark hair and brown eyes that reflected their mother’s Scottish Irish background.
He was sensible, systematic, and completely committed to the business of estate management.
By age 12, he could compute crop yields mentally.
By 16, he was organizing work groups alongside the overseer.
By 20, he had already established crop rotation methods that boosted Magnolia Grove’s production by 40%.
Cornelius, in comparison, was slender and fair with those characteristic pale gray eyes that seemed to peer through people rather than at them.
These eyes originated from Bartholomew’s mother, a woman who had passed away long before her grandchildren were born, but whose painting remained in the main drawing room, her gray stare following guests as they moved through the space.
Cornelius displayed no interest in farming or business.
Instead, he devoted his youth to reading philosophy, composing poetry, and following what his father dismissively termed pointless intellectual pursuits.
He could recite Virgil and Homer in the original Latin and Greek, but he could not distinguish between a cotton bowl ready for harvest and one that required another week on the stalk.
When Bartholomew passed away in 1824, his will showed his evaluation of his son’s abilities.
Edmund inherited Magnolia Grove and the bulk of the family’s enslaved workers.
147 individuals whose names were recorded in the will as assets alongside animals and farming tools.
Cornelius inherited Riverside, a modest cash payment of $8,000 and directions to achieve something with himself or face lasting disinheritance through a trust arrangement that would ultimately transfer his assets to Edmund’s offspring.
The brother’s connection, already stressed by their father’s obvious preference, worsened further after the will was disclosed.
Cornelius thought he had been robbed of his inheritance, that his father’s favoritism toward Edmund had blinded the old man to Cornelius’s genuine value.
Edmund thought his brother was an idol dreamer who deserved precisely what he had gotten, that their father had been, if anything, too charitable in leaving Cornelius anything at all.
For 2 years, they hardly communicated, corresponding only through attorneys when property conflicts emerged over boundary marks and shared water access.
Then in the spring of 1826, everything shifted.
Cornelius came to Magnolia Grove unexpectedly on a Tuesday afternoon in March.
Arriving up the long oak lined path on a borrowed horse because he had been required to sell his own.
He stated he wished to make peace with his brother Edmund, recently wed to a woman called Margaret Townson from a well-known Savannah family was initially wary.
Margaret, who had heard nothing positive about her brother-in-law from anyone in the area, encouraged Edmund to send Cornelius away.
But Edmund, despite his sensible nature, carried guilt about the situation of their father’s will.
He had not requested to be preferred.
He had merely been himself, and Bartholomeu had reacted accordingly.
Cornelius was engaging when he wanted to be, gifted with a humor and eloquence that Edmund completely lacked.
Over several weeks of meetings, the brothers seemed to mend their broken relationship.
Cornelius complimented Edmund’s enhancements to the estate.
Edmund provided Cornelius guidance about managing Riverside.
They rode together through the crops, ate together in the evenings, and slowly reconstructed something resembling the connection they had shared as young boys before their father’s preference had separated them.
Cornelius started spending longer periods at Magnolia Grove, supposedly assisting Edmund with estate management while acquiring the abilities their father had never troubled to teach him.
It was during one of these stays that Cornelius first met Delilah.
Delilah had come to Magnolia Grove in 1825, acquired at auction in Augusta for $750.
She was roughly 18 years old at the time of acquisition, though no precise birth documents existed.
The receipt of sale maintained in the Ashford family records describes her as a fit female of mixed background appropriate for household service or field work with no record of escape or behavioral issues.
The paper was signed by her former owner, a failed merchant called Harkkins, who was liquidating everything he possessed to satisfy lenders.
What the paper failed to document was her remarkable beauty, a detail mentioned in numerous sources from this time.
She stood roughly 5′ 7 in tall, exceptional height for a woman of any background in that period.
Her appearance suggested a complicated heritage that might have included African, European, and possibly Native American bloodlines, though such assessments were always uncertain in the context of American bondage.
What was definite was that she attracted notice wherever she went, and that this notice would prove to be both her greatest shield and her greatest peril.
Dr.
Prescott, who checked her shortly after her arrival as part of Edmund’s standard health evaluations of new acquisitions, wrote in his personal diary that Delila displays a striking physical bearing with features that indicate considerable European heritage.
Her complexion is light enough to be mistaken for Mediterranean.
Her hair flows in loose waves rather than tight coils, and her eyes are an exceptional shade of amber that I have seldom observed in persons of African heritage.
She conducts herself with a grace that indicates either previous household service or perhaps even some learning, though she admits no understanding of reading or writing.
Her teeth are in outstanding shape.
Her body is upright and strong, and she displays no evidence of previous sickness or abuse.
She will command a high value if Edmund ever decides to sell her, though I believe he will not.
That final remark proved to be one of the most accurate in Prescott’s lengthy career.
Edmund originally assigned Delilah to kitchen duties under the guidance of an older enslaved woman called Hattie.
Hattie had been at Magnolia Grove since before Edmund’s birth, had known his mother, and held a position of comparative power within the enslaved population.
She was accountable for feeding everyone on the estate, from the Ashford family in the main residence to the field laborers in the quarters, and her kitchen was her domain.
She took one glance at Delilah and recognized trouble.
That girl is too attractive for her own benefit.
Hattie supposedly told another enslaved woman called Rose.
Master Edmund already gazing at her like she created from gold.
Nothing beneficial comes from white men staring at colored women that way.
Nothing beneficial ever results from it.
Hattie’s judgment proved correct within months.
Edmund discovered excuses to visit the kitchen with growing regularity.
He commended Delilah’s cooking, though she was simply helping and had prepared nothing herself.
He demanded that she serve food in the dining area, a duty usually allocated for house workers with more practice.
He had new garments created for her better than what other enslaved individuals wore, and directed Hattie to guarantee she was always neat and suitable.
Margaret Ashford watched her husband’s prolonged looks at the new worker with increasing concern.
She had been wedded to Edmund for less than a year, and was already expecting their first child.
The union had been organized by their families for sensible purposes, combining Ashford property with towns and shipping links, but Margaret had wished for fondness, if not love.
Now she observed her husband become fipsated with an enslaved woman who embodied everything Margaret was not unusual, mysterious, and completely unable to reject any request made of her.
In the fall of 1825, Margaret insisted that Delila be sent back to the kitchen and kept away from the main residence completely.
Edmund agreed, but his attention had been observed by others on the estate, including his brother.
Cornelius, during his reconciliation stays, had also noticed Delilah.
Unlike Edmund, who was controlling but careful, Cornelius handled the situation with the carelessness that marked his entire existence.
He started seeking out chances to be alone with Delila.
Showing up in the kitchen during calm periods, arranging meetings in the storage buildings where she was occasionally sent to collect materials.
The precise details of what occurred between Cornelius and Delilah were never documented directly.
Enslaved women did not provide testimony in courts.
Their experiences were not deemed worthy of recording by the white individuals who managed such documents.
But the result of those meetings became obvious in March of 1826 when Delila became expecting for the first time the child, a boy, was delivered in December of that year.
Edmund documented the birth in his estate record with the entry male child born to Delilah healthy called Samuel.
The record contained no reference of paternity which was normal procedure for enslaved offspring.
Under Georgia regulations, the children of enslaved women were assets belonging to the mother’s owner, regardless of who the biological father might be.
This legal pretense enabled estate owners to benefit from their own sexual exploitation of enslaved women while preserving the appearance of respectable family existence.
What was not normal was the entry Edmund inserted in different ink seemingly months afterward.
Unusual coloring and then underneath that in writing that had clearly been written while Edmund was drunk or extremely disturbed.
Not possible.
Samuel, like all 30 of his brothers and sisters who would come after, was delivered with pale gray eyes, and the characteristic features of Cornelius Ashford.
The likeness was impossible to miss.
By the time Samuel was 6 months old, anyone who had ever encountered Cornelius could observe the family similarity.
The identical bone formation with its angular cheekbones and slightly narrow chin, the identical unusual eye shade, that pale gray that seemed to absorb light rather than return it, the identical crescent shaped mark behind the left ear, a marking that Cornelius had possessed since his own delivery, and that his mother had always termed his angel’s touch.
Edmund’s response to this revelation went unrecorded in any remaining document, but the indirect evidence indicates a deep psychological crisis.
He sent a message to Cornelius in April of 1827, officially ending their reconciliation.
The message kept in the Cornelius Ashford collection at the University of Georgia is brief and destructive in its meaning.
Brother, it states, “I understand what you have committed.
I understand what you are.
Do not come back to Magnolia Grove.
If you do, I will end your life.
There is no name.
Only Edmund’s wax mark pressed so hard into the document that the wax split.
Cornelius’s answer sent a week later, was equally mysterious and far more harsh.
Dear brother, I have committed nothing that you did not force me to commit.
You possessed everything, the property, the wealth, father’s affection, and still you desired more.
You desired her too.
Though you acted otherwise to your dear Margaret, the blame rests not in my behavior but in your unbearable arrogance.
I will keep away from your valuable estate.
But recall that blood will reveal itself.
It always does.
Yours in everlasting brotherhood, Cornelius.
What neither brother clearly declared in their letters was the reality that both comprehended.
Cornelius had made Delilah pregnant, either through seduction or force during his stays at Magnolia Grove.
The child Samuel was his biological offspring, not Edmunds.
And this deception, this basic breach of trust between siblings would influence everything that came after for the next 17 years.
But here is where the account takes its most disturbing and most unexplainable direction.
Instead of selling Delilah, which would have been the anticipated reaction of a shamed estate owner wanting to eliminate the proof of his disgrace, Edmund did something far more troubling.
He retained her.
More than that, he started methodically making her pregnant himself year after year for the next 17 years.
Delilah would deliver 31 children total between 1826 and 1843, and every single child she delivered, regardless of the year or conditions of conception, continued to appear exactly like Cornelius.
This biological impossibility was recorded by Dr.
Prescott in increasingly worried diary entries that cover nearly two decades.
The second child delivered in 1828 displayed the identical gray eyes and cleft chin as the first.
Prescott studied the baby carefully, calculating the distance between eyes, the angle of the jaw, the exact location of the crescent mark.
His calculations matched Samuels precisely within differences so tiny they might have been the identical person.
So did the third child delivered in 1829 and the fourth in 1830 and the fifth in 1831.
By the time Delilah had delivered 10 children, all showing matching features that resembled Cornelius rather than Edmund, Dr.
Prescott had started doubting his own mental state.
He asked for a break from his practice to meet medical associates in Charleston.
Looking for any reason for what he called unprecedented hereditary persistence.
I have studied the newest baby, he wrote in December of 1833, and I am required to determine that either everything I understood about human inheritance is incorrect, or something profoundly abnormal is happening at Magnolia Grove.
The mathematical likelihood of 10 successive children showing matching paternal traits when fathered by two separate men is basically zero.
I have reviewed mathematical writings to verify this evaluation.
The chances are higher than one in several billion.
Yet here they are, 10 children with Cornelius Ashford’s appearance, delivered to a woman who has not encountered Cornelius in seven years.
Prescott’s Charleston associates were equally confused.
The accepted medical understanding of the period maintained that both parents added to a child’s traits through blending of bodily essences during conception.
Some characteristics from the father, some from the mother, combined together to produce a new person.
The concept that a mother could keep delivering children who appeared matching to a man who had not been near her in years was deemed impossible by every doctor Prescott consulted.
Several explanations were suggested, each more frantic than the previous.
Perhaps Cornelius had marked Delilah in some spiritual way that went beyond physical presence.
Perhaps Edmund and Cornelius, despite their obvious differences, were actually twins who had been told they were born 3 years apart.
Perhaps Delila was somehow encountering Cornelius secretly despite Edmund’s increasingly suspicious security procedures.
None of these explanations fulfilled Prescott’s scientific education, but he could provide no better reason.
The enslaved population at Magnolia Grove created their own understanding of this situation, one that circulated through hush discussions in the quarters and around cooking fires after nightfall.
They thought Delila had been marked by Cornelius in some spiritual manner, that his essence had been stamped on her womb in a way that went beyond physical presence.
Some termed it a curse, penalty placed upon Edmund for wrongdoings, actual or imagined.
Others termed it justice, divine involvement to guarantee that Edmund would never have children by Delilah that he could genuinely claim as his own.
Old Hattie, who had known Dila since her arrival, supposedly told younger laborers that some men leave their spirits behind when they plant their seed.
And mistered Cornelius left his entire self inside that girl.
Every infant she creates going to display his appearance until she passes.
Edmund’s reaction to this continuing shame developed through separate phases over the years.
In the initial period, according to evidence given decades afterward during legal actions, he beat Delila harshly after each delivery, requiring to know how she was succeeding to create children that appeared like his brother.
These beatings happened in the small shelter where Delila was restricted during her pregnancies, observed only by Hattie and sometimes other enslaved women who helped with the deliveries.
Delilah, who suffered these beatings in silence, supposedly told Edmund the identical thing each time.
I cannot manage what God places in my belly, master.
Only God determines what a child appears like.
I do what you command me.
I remain where you place me.
I do not encounter your brother.
Not since before Samuel was delivered.
I cannot clarify.
Only God can clarify it.
This response, which was either truly innocent or designed with exceptional sophistication to maximize Edmund’s mental suffering, seemed to push him to ever greater extremes.
He became certain that Delila was somehow contacting Cornelius through magical means, that she was performing African magic or sorcery that enabled her to call his brother’s essence into her worm.
He employed a minister to pray over her.
He had her studied by a doctor who focused on female issues, looking for any physical reason for the situation.
He even consulted a woman recognized locally as a spiritual woman, a free black woman who was believed to have abilities over the spiritual world.
Though this meeting was performed in private and is only recognized through indirect mentions in Edmund’s personal letters, none of these actions made any change.
Children 11 through 20 delivered between 1835 and 1840 all came out with Cornelius’s characteristics.
Dr.
Prescott, increasingly troubled by what he was observing, started recording each birth with compulsive detail.
He calculated the baby’s heads with measuring tools.
He documented the precise tone of their eye color using a method of his own creating.
He drew the birth marks and assembled charts displaying their matching placement and measurements.
His diaries from this time fill three books and constitute one of the most thorough medical records of birth traits ever assembled in preivil war America.
By 1835, according to stories from surviving formerly enslaved individuals documented by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, Edmund had become fixated with disproving the impossible.
He separated Delilah in a shelter far from the main slave quarters, placing guards to guarantee no other man could reach her.
The guards were rotated regularly to stop any of them from forming sympathy for Delilah or being corrupted by possible intruders.
Edmund directly managed her meals to stop any possible giving of substances that might clarify the situation.
He even had her studied by Dr.
Prescott before and after each of his visits to her shelter, looking for proof that anyone else had been near her.
Meanwhile, Cornelius Ashford had declined into complete decay at Riverside without the control that Edmund had naturally.
Cornelius had permitted his smaller estate to decline into destruction.
crops failed year after year because he could not be troubled to manage their planting correctly.
Enslaved laborers escaped with growing frequency and Cornelius lacked both the means and the drive to retrieve them.
His overseer resigned in 1832 after going unpaid for 6 months.
Obligations gathered at a worrying rate.
By 1838, Riverside was mortgaged to the maximum, and Cornelius was drinking excessively, spending most of his days in a days, and most of his nights telling anyone who would hear about his brother’s shame.
The stories circulated throughout Wilks County and further transported by travelers and traders who moved through the area.
In parlors and bars across central Georgia, people talked about Edmund Ashford’s unusual problem.
Some versions of the account portrayed Edmund as a sufferer of his brother’s trickery.
a man betrayed not just once but continuously for more than a decade.
Others implied that Edmund himself was unable to father children and had brought in Cornelius purposely to create children he could not father himself only to be deceived by his brother’s unwillingness to create children that appeared like Edmund.
Still others suggested at more disturbing possibilities sorcery African magic or agreements made with powers that proper Christian individuals did not mention openly.
Margaret Ashford, Edmund’s wife, was possibly the most unfortunate person in this complete situation, apart from Delila herself.
She had delivered Edmund two legitimate children in the main residence, a son called Edmund Ginder in 1827, and a daughter called Elizabeth in 1830.
Both children were healthy and clearly looked like their parents in the normal anticipated way.
But Margaret had observed her husband father at least 20 additional children with an enslaved woman during their union by 1840.
children who embodied not just adultery, but a continuing mental injury that never recovered.
According to messages Margaret wrote to her sister in Savannah, messages that somehow remained and eventually entered the historical documentation through the sister’s descendants.
She pleaded Edmund repeatedly to sell Delilah and finish the horror that had taken over their lives.
“I cannot bear another year of observing those children develop,” she wrote in 1836.
They are throughout this estate, nearly 20 of them now.
Each one displaying the appearance of a man I have never encountered, but whose characteristics are etched into my memory from the painting in the drawing room.
I observe them in the crops.
I observe them transporting water and cutting wood.
I observe them in the kitchen assisting old Hattie.
And every time I observe them, I see my husband’s disgrace and my own inability to maintain his interest.
My husband is ruining himself with this fixation and he is ruining me along with him.
Please, sister, talk to father about stepping in.
I worry for my mental health if this persists.
Margaret’s father, a prosperous savannah trader called Thomas Townson, did step in during the spring of 1837.
Traveling to Magnolia Grove to challenge Edmund directly.
The encounter reconstructed from numerous sources, including Townson’s own journal did not go successfully.
Edmund supposedly flew into a fury when his father in-law proposed selling Delilah, yelling that no one comprehended what he was attempting to achieve.
What precisely Edmund thought he was achieving remains uncertain from the historical documentation.
Some scholars have proposed that Edmund was trying to demonstrate through repeated breeding that he could ultimately create a child that appeared like himself.
conquering through pure determination whatever power was making Delilah’s children look like Cornelius.
Others have suggested that Edmund’s fixation had become self- sustaining, that he could no longer cease, even if he desired to, because doing so would be accepting loss to his brother.
Still, others have proposed more disturbing reasons related to the mental dynamics of exploitation and control that defined so much of the system of bondage.
Whatever Edmund’s thinking, his unwillingness to finish the situation pushed Margaret to growing despair.
By 1840, she was spending more time at her family’s residence in Savannah than at Magnolia Grove, coming back only for short visits to keep up appearances.
Her legitimate children were taught by teachers in Savannah rather than at the estate.
Her union, whatever real fondness might once have existed within it, had become an empty facade, preserved only by the legal and monetary difficulties that would come with official separation.
By 1840, Delila had delivered 25 children, all surviving childhood, which was itself extraordinary given the high infant death rates of the time.
Even among prosperous white families, losing one or more children before age 5 was typical among enslaved individuals who got minimal medical attention and often inadequate food.
Childhood death rates surpassed 30% in some areas.
Yet all 25 of Delila’s children had lived, as if whatever power was guaranteeing they displayed Cornelius’s characteristics was also guaranteeing they stayed alive to show them.
These children ranged in age from 14 down to newborn, and all of them displayed Cornelius Ashford’s characteristic features.
Edmund had long since ceased attempting to present them as his own children or clarify them to guests.
Instead, he allocated them to various work positions around the estate, treating them with neither special treatment nor specific harshness, simply adding them into the workforce, as he would any other enslaved individuals.
But everyone on the estate understood who they were.
They were the marked children, the spirit children, the living proof of something that could not be clarified.
The mental burden on Edmund was obvious to everyone who met him during this time.
Dr.
Prescott recorded in 1841 that Edmund has aged 20 years in the past 10 years.
His hair is completely gray at 40 years of age, and his face displays lines that would be a man of 60.
His hands tremble constantly.
Whether from too much drink or nervous condition, I cannot establish, and he talks often of evil spirits and curses, and the wrongs of his brother, sometimes in discussions where such topics have no importance.
I worry for his mental soundness, and have proposed he seek care at the hospital in Milligville, but he refuses to leave the estate for any duration of time.
Prescott’s worries about Edmund’s mental condition proved justified.
As the 1840s advanced, Edmund became increasingly suspicious, seeing plots everywhere.
He blamed his overseer of working with Cornelius and fired the man without warning.
He blamed his houseworkers of watching and had several of them whipped for crimes they had not done.
He started carrying a weapon everywhere he went, even to meals in his own dining area.
Certain that killers sent by his brother might show up at any time, the situation reached its crisis point in the summer of 1843.
Shortly after the delivery of Delila’s 31st child, this final baby a girl came out with the identical gray eyes, the identical cleft chin, and the identical crescent mark as all her brothers and sisters.
Dr.
Prescott, holding the infant while Delilah recovered from the birth, supposedly said aloud what he had been thinking for years.
This is not achievable.
None of this is medically achievable.
I have delivered hundreds of babies in my practice, and I have never witnessed anything like this.
It breaks everything we understand about human reproduction.
What occurred next was assembled from numerous witness statements.
During the following investigation, Edmund, who had been drinking heavily since the beginning of Delila’s labor, came into the shelter where she had given birth.
His garments were messy.
His eyes were red.
The weapon he now carried constantly was apparent in his belt.
He stood for a long period looking at the baby in Dr.
Prescott’s arms, his face moving through feelings too complicated and too quick to interpret.
Then he turned to Delilah, who lay tired on her bed after nearly 18 hours of labor, and questioned her, a question that witnesses would struggle to understand for years afterward.
Where is he concealing? Delila’s answer went unrecorded, but whatever she stated seemed to activate something in Edmund.
He drew the weapon from his belt, aimed it at Delilah, and declared that he was going to finish the curse once and for all.
Dr.
Prescott stepped in immediately, positioning himself between Edmund and the bed.
The newborn still held in his arms.
He cautioned his old friend that killing would bring results.
Even Edmund’s riches and status could not avoid, that murdering an enslaved woman in front of witnesses would require even the most understanding sheriff to take measures.
Edmund paused, the weapon shaking in his hand, his face a display of conflicting desires.
Then he lowered the gun, but his words as he left the shelter were frightening.
“If I cannot finish it this way,” he supposedly said, “I will discover another way.
My brother’s offspring will not receive what is properly mine.
I will see them all in hell before I allow that occur.” 3 days later, Edmund Ashford traveled to Riverside Estate, where his brother Cornelius still resided in increasingly poor conditions.
The once beautiful residents had deteriorated into disrepair.
The fields had gone.
Most of the enslaved laborers had been sold to pay obligations, leaving only a few to maintain what could not be maintained.
Cornelius himself had become a shadow of the engaging young man he had once been.
swollen by drink, aged by excess, surrounded by empty containers and unpaid accounts.
What precisely happened between the siblings during this meeting was never determined with certainty as no witnesses were there.
What is understood is that when Edmund came back to Magnolia Grove the next morning, Cornelius Ashford was deceased.
The official account which Edmund told to anyone who would hear and repeated in his official statement to the sheriff was that Cornelius had attacked him with a blade during a conflict over old obligations and Edmund had shot his brother in self-p protection.
The single bullet wound to Cornelius’s chest was consistent with this story, as was the blade found near the corpse with Cornelius’s fingerprints on the grip.
The Wilks County Sheriff, a man called Patterson, who owed considerable gambling obligations to Edmund, performed only a basic investigation before declaring the death justified killing.
The complete inquiry took less than 4 hours, but the enslaved population at both Magnolia Grove and Riverside understood better.
Tales spread that Edmund had killed his brother in cold blood, that he had been organizing the murder for years, that he thought Cornelius’s death would somehow finish the curse that had troubled him for 17 years.
These tales were rejected by white officials as slave superstition and causing problems, the natural habit of enslaved individuals to see evil where none existed.
But the tales continued because they had the sound of truth.
The matter of whether Cornelius’s death would influence future pregnancies, became irrelevant almost immediately.
Delila, whether through intentional action, collected physical burden, or simply chance, never conceived again after her 31st child.
Dr.
Prescott theorized in his diary that her reproductive system had simply been depleted after 17 years of continuous childbearing.
A not unreasonable medical judgment given the physical requirements of producing 30 one children with minimal recovery period between pregnancies.
But others murmured that the curse had been ended with Cornelius’s death.
That whatever spiritual link had existed between him and Delila had been cut when he died, and that no more children would arrive because the origin of those children had been eliminated.
What happened next changed this already troubling story into something far more terrible.
A descent into insanity and brutality that would disturb even people familiar with the casual violence of bondage.
With Cornelius deceased and Delila no longer creating children, Edmund turned his focus to a new fixation.
He became certain that among Delila’s 31 children, one must be concealing papers that Cornelius had officially recognized paternity.
This paperwork, Edmund thought, could possibly give Cornelius’s children legal rights to the Asheford property, though no such legal process actually existed for enslaved children under Georgia regulations.
Edunds.
