Harriet Hamilton

Harriet Hamilton (ca. 1803-1887, freed woman, steamboat attendant, and landowner) first appeared in the archival record as part of an 1820 hotchpot deed filed at the Fairfax County Courthouse for the partition of William Gunnell’s estate. Gunnell, a well-to-do planter, had acquired almost fifty enslaved persons over his lifetime, a sizable number in comparison to other enslavers in northern Virginia. The deed bequeathed Hamilton to Ann Gunnell, William’s second youngest child, who lived near her father’s home in present day Great Falls, Virginia. Ann, who suffered from an unknown illness, wrote in her will that her estate was to be divided among her siblings. When she died in 1822, her eldest brother, George Gunnell, became the executor of her estate.

Hamilton, however, was not mentioned in Ann’s will, and George made no account of her as part of the division of his sister’s estate. Instead, George claimed Hamilton for himself, without legally acknowledging that he had done so. Sometime in the early-to-mid-1820s, Hamilton married an unnamed enslaved man with whom she had one son, Alfred Hamilton (1823-1899). Her husband died soon after their marriage. She later bore three additional children—Allen Gunnell (1828-1901), Sanford Gunnell (1832-1916), and John Thomas Gunnell (1836-1902) — with one of George Gunnell’s younger brothers, John, who was also a local enslaver. In 1834, George fled Virginia for Mississippi in response to his mounting debts, leaving Hamilton and her children behind. As a result, Hamilton was “going at large [with] no one controlling her” and needed to be captured before she “made an escape to some free state” (Oscar G. Mix et al. vs. Executors of Ann Gunnell, 1837). A complainant in an 1836 chancery case requested that Hamilton and the children be sold, with the proceeds divided among Ann’s heirs. The remaining Gunnells, however, held a mixture of opinions about slavery and freedom. Hamilton’s youngest child, John Thomas Gunnell, was manumitted as part of the lawsuit, but Hamilton and her three other sons were auctioned off at Fairfax County’s Courthouse in 1837. John Gunnell purchased them and agreed to manumit Hamilton and her sons.

In 1841, John manumitted Hamilton and two of her children, Allen and Sanford, after she paid him $250. Virginia law required newly manumitted residents to leave the state after one year or petition the local court to stay. Hamilton, Allen, and Sanford registered as free residents but sometime in the early 1840s, they migrated to Bridgeport, Pennsylvania. The 1850 U.S. Census shows Hamilton and three of her sons living among other Black families in Bridgeport. Hamilton, however, was determined to unify her entire family and wanted to manumit her eldest son who remained enslaved to John Gunnell (Williams, Help me Find My People). It took Hamilton over a decade to save $800 to purchase his freedom in 1852.

Bridgeport, located upstream from Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River, boasted of a bustling economy tied to the steamboat and railroad industries. By moving to southwestern Pennsylvania, free families like Hamilton’s lived in close proximity to Virginia and could remain in contact with enslaved and free friends and relatives across state lines. At the same time, Pennsylvania granted African Americans rights denied in Virginia. Children attended public schools, and Bridgeport’s Black residents moved an A.M.E. Church from a neighboring town to their community in 1837. Pennsylvania, however, was no raceless utopia. Anti-Black violence occurred periodically, and by 1838, a new state constitution stripped African American men of the franchise (Tomek, Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania).

After her arrival in Bridgeport, Hamilton spent the next thirty years working as a chambermaid on steamboats that ran along the Monongahela, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers. Few women worked on steamboats, but those who did held important roles in the Black community. Like their male counterparts, women circulated information among free and enslaved African Americans and assisted runaways heading north (Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi). Hamilton’s 1850 household included her niece, who was born in Mississippi and perhaps was also owned by George Gunnell. It is unknown how she arrived in Bridgeport. 

Chambermaids working inland waterways made wages similar to those on land, but they received additional monies through tips, especially from white female passengers. Thus, Hamilton accumulated notable wealth through her work on steamboats. In 1845, she purchased a lot with two houses on it from a white Quaker woman who was moving to Illinois. Twenty years later, she bought an eight-room brick home for over $1,600 from the estate of another white Bridgeport resident. By 1870, she held $2,100 in real estate and $100 in personal property, making her one of Bridgeport’s richest Black residents.

The same transportation network on which Hamilton worked facilitated the westward migration of three of her four sons, all of whom became barbers. Such separations, driven by a combination of necessity and opportunity, meant that Hamilton’s family would remain scattered for the rest of her life. By 1860, Allen Gunnell had moved to St. Louis, Missouri while Sanford Gunnell had settled in Burlington, Iowa. Local newspapers later described Sanford as a well-to-do barber who owned his own shop. John Thomas Gunnell moved to Denver, Colorado after the Civil War. He became politically active in the Republican Party and was the first African American to serve in Colorado’s state legislature in 1881. In contrast to his siblings, Alfred Hamilton stayed in Bridgeport where, like his mother, he worked on steamboats.

By the 1880s, local newspapers, which called her “Aunt Harriet,” made Hamilton into a celebrity, commending her perseverance in freeing her family and her longtime employment on the region’s steamboats. These depictions played to a growing nostalgia for the steamboat industry, which had begun to decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. An 1884 article described Hamilton as “known most pleasantly as the colored matron on the packet line” who was “greeted by 500 friends in Monongahela City” when she visited the town (Daily Republican, May 3, 1884). Others noted that Hamilton was “well known to every traveler on the packet boats of those days” (Daily Republican April 16, 1885) and she was especially “well known to our older river men” (Daily Republican June 22, 1886). An article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch claimed that Hamilton’s life story “would make a subject fir for the pen of the most gifted of our novelist, for it is a wonderful illustration of will power, love of liberty and deepest maternal affection” (Pittsburgh Dispatch June 21, 1886).

Harriet Hamilton died suddenly in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, on December 4, 1887. She was buried at Green Lane Cemetery near her home.