Author: Eugene Davis

PRIMARY DOCUMENT

Letter from Eugene Davis to Thomas H. Key (November 1850)

In this letter to Thomas H. Key, a former professor at the University of Virginia who, in 1827, had resigned and returned to his home in England, a lawyer named Eugene Davis writes about Sally Cottrell, whom Key had once owned and ordered free but who may still have been technically enslaved. Virginia law required that any free slave leave the state within twelve months. Cottrell had not left.