William H.
Davis of Millsboro said 23 Mar 2001:
"Patty
Cannon owned a tavern, hired a gang of Irishmen to kidnap colored
people for transport to slave states. Peter Mosley, despite
being very fair in coloration, was captured by Patty Cannon's gang
in Delaware and sold into slavery in Georgia. Peter gained the confidence
of his owners over time and slipped away. He hid by day and walked
by night, without change of clothing, north thru Baltimore and down
Delaware to his home. Peter married Eliza, daughter of Tilghman Ridgeway."
______________
About Patty
Cannon:
Two communications
from Dick Carter via the Lower Delmarva Rootsweb mailing list follow.
Dick was first appointed to the Delaware Heritage Commission board
by Governor Carper in 1994. Dick is an avid First State historian
and is the author of Clearing New Ground: The Life of John G. Townsend
Jr. and The History of Sussex County.
21
Jul 2003:
"If the "History Detectives" television show (note-link
below following messages) is looking for Patty Cannon's house
in Federalsburg, I'm afraid they're doomed to failure. It was--and,
I believe, still is--in the village of Reliance on the Maryland-Delaware
state line west of Seaford, Delaware, which is seven or eight miles
away. It was still standing the last time I was through there. Some
twenty-five years ago when I was in charge of historic preservation
for Sussex County, Delaware, a rather unconventional gentleman came
into my office one day and introduced himself as the owner of the
Patty Cannon house. During the course of the conversation he claimed
that, being sensitive to such things, he had witnessed various ghostly
manifestations of Patty and some of her victims in and around the
house. I seem to recall that the basement was a particular hot spot.
This was about the time that "The Amityville Horror," the
book about a very haunted house in Amityville, Long Island, was making
the rounds and I somehow got the impression that this guy was hopeful
of using the infamous Patty Cannon to cash in on the public interest
in haunted houses.
"Some
months thereafter a local newspaper did a feature article on the man
and the Patty Cannon House in which he stated that Patty communicated
with him from time to time by sending him messages in Morse Code,
which I gathered was meant to be a kind of modern refinement on spiritualist
rappings. I composed a nice letter to the editor in which I said that
the man's comments about Patty communicating in Morse Code gave me
hope that the educational process could continue in the afterlife.
Patty committed suicide by taking poison in the Sussex County prison
at Georgetown in 1829, and Samuel F. B. Morse didn't get around to
inventing Morse Code until the early 1840s. If the man who owned her
house was correct, Patty had to have learned the skill in Hell or
wherever it was that she went to after her untimely departure from
this mortal coil. One could perhaps look forward to posthumous instruction
in all the arcane and esoteric subjects one never had time to properly
pursue in this life, even, it would seem, if one was condemned to
eternal damnation, as Patty must indeed have been, given the number
and severity of her transgressions. I regret to confess that, fearful
that the man in question might be several bricks short of a load,
I chickened out from sending the letter.
"If
you're interested in pursuing the subject of Patty Cannon in greater
depth, she is featured in a number of books, some of which might be
available through the used book sites on the internet. One, published
in the early 1960s, is "Patty Cannon-Woman of Mystery" by
Ted Giles. My own favorite account of her doings is the fictional
treatment of her in George Alfred ("GATH") Townsend's wonderful
novel of antebellum Delmarva, "The Entailed Hat." This book
also has great scenes of Princess Anne, Snow Hill and the Nassawongo
Furnace, the lower Nanticoke River, Woodburn at Dover (now the Delaware
governor's mansion) and other sites of local interest. It was first
published in the 1880s, but a number of later editions have been published
over the years and one often encounters it in used book stores for
a reasonable sum. Townsend, one of the premier reporters and journalists
of the mid-19th century, was the son of an itinerant Methodist minister
and grew up all over Delmarva in the same time period in which the
novel takes place. I've always had the feeling that, aside from the
rather sensational aspects of the book, it presented a fairly realistic
picture of the Delmarva of that period.
"And
last but not least, Patty Cannon's skull is reputed to be housed in
the Dover, Delaware, public library. I go there all the time but have
never seen it...it isn't the sort of artifact public libraries ordinarily
display. So I can't say with certainty that they do have it."
29 Jul 2005:
"...While numerous booklets and pamphlets have been written about
her, so far as I am aware, no one has ever written what could be considered
a scholarly account of her life, the details of which are sketchy,
to say the least. Cannon, Delaware, is not named for her....
"The
proverbial woods of western Sussex County and adjoining sections of
Eastern Shore Maryland are full of Cannons, the vast majority of whom
have no connection to the infamous Patty. As I recall the basic story,
"Cannon" was her married name and both her origins and her
genealogical connections are obscure, though her husband was reported
to have been one "Jesse Cannon." He was also a criminal
and died during the 1820s, after which she is said to have continued
her criminal activities, apparently achieving considerable notoriety
on Delmarva. She wasn't exactly the kind of relative most people were
eager to claim. One of the early accounts says that her full name
was "Lucretia P. Cannon" but this might well be wrong. The
basic facts, i.e., that she and her gang kidnapped free blacks and
sold them into slavery in the south, that they murdered numerous people,
and that her house and the tavern from which she operated (said to
have been owned by her son-in-law, "Joe Johnson") were on
or near the Delaware-Maryland state line, are apparently true.
"She
was arrested jointly by Maryland and Delaware authorities in 1829
and placed in the old Sussex County jail at Georgetown. Accordng to
one report I have read, the person who actually made the arrest was
Thomas Holliday Hicks, then Sheriff of Dorchester County, Maryland
(and later a Civil War governor of Maryland), who turned her over
to Sussex County, Delaware, authorities. I believe she actually lived
on the Delaware side of the line. Another historical figure, John
M. Clayton, a future Delaware supreme court justice, U.S. Senator
and U.S. Secretary of State, then serving as attorney general of Delaware,
was said to have been involved in efforts to prosecute her for her
crimes.
"According
to most accounts, after confessing to a variety of murders and other
crimes, she took poison and committed suicide in her jail cell before
she could be tried and executed for her crimes, cheating the hangman
as it were. Unfortunately, this prevented a fuller account ofher crimes
from becoming a part of the historical record as would have been the
case if she had gone to trial. Patty was buried in Sussex County's
potter's field and through some sequence of events what is alleged
to be her skull found its way into the collection of the Dover Public
Library in the early 1900s where, according to a newspaper article
I read several years ago, it still remains. I have not seen this gruesome
object myself."
Ned
Heite noted in 2001:
Yes, the Cannons are well known. At one time the governors of Delaware
and South Carolina, first cousins, were Cannons. The South Carolina
bunch included the towel family. For the fictionalized life of Patty
Cannon, the more infamous of the clan (a Canadian by birth, I believe),
see George Alfred Townsend's book, The Entailed Hat. It begins with
the true story of Jacob and Isaac Cannon, infamous skinflints at Cannon's
Ferry, selling out a widow at constable sale. They were dead in a
few days, and the widow's son was arrested for killing one of them.
On the other side was Dr. Annie Jump Cannon, famed astronomer. Her
birthplace house, one of the showplaces of Dover, was bought by a
couple of wealthy artistic gentlemen who installed a huge pipe organ
in a wing, but they have flown away and the house will become a bed,
breakfast, and organ loft.
