When Jacob moved to South Carolina in 1775, his youngest son, George Hite, remained in Virginia to attend William and Mary College with his cousin, Isaac Hite, until both young men joined the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.
After the war, George went south to look for his sisters, Eleanor and Susan, who had been kidnapped after the Cherokee raid on his father’s homestead. As a young man without an inheritance, George was also trying to regain ownership of his father’s enslaved workers, which included Abba, who he was able to bring back to Virginia from the Cherokee Nation.
Abba first arrived at Belle Grove in 1790 with her husband Frank Thornton, 3-year-old Harry, and a baby daughter named Hannah. Isaac traded two enslaved children under the age of 14 for Abba, Harry, and Hannah, and he paid 80 pounds for Frank.
| Question like a historian |
| Why did Isaac trade for Abba and her two children and purchase Frank? Was it so that Abba could be a wet nurse for Nelly Hite? Did Nelly prefer to obtain a wetnurse from within the Madison family’s enslaved community? Perhaps they wanted to help their cousin George Hite financially? How much influence did Nelly have over this decision? |
Abba was married?
Yes, to Frank whose last name, Thornton, historians discovered in Hite family records. However, historians are unsure when or where they met. Was he already enslaved by George Hite? Was he enslaved by the Cherokee in South Carolina? We simply don’t know.
In Virginia, barriers seemed to have gradually fallen away during the early 1800s in regard to recognizing enslaved Blacks’ last names. In the Hite family papers, five additional enslaved people are also listed with last names (Webster/Weber, Jones, Reed, Smith, Brim), none of them Hite. Abba’s grandchildren by her daughter Hannah are also sometimes noted with the last name Jackson in the Hite’s records. Read more about that story here!
Life at Belle Grove
It is highly likely that Abba served as a nursery maid, nanny, and likely a wetnurse to Nelly Hite for at least 10 years. Elite Southern women commonly bought and used enslaved women to nurse their babies. It is well documented that they networked among friends and family to buy women who already had healthy children and toddlers, proving their milk was plentiful and nutritious.
Abba and Frank came to Belle Grove with their infant daughter, Hannah, and went on to have ten more children.
Abba lost two young sons, George (born in 1792) and Adam (born in 1793), around the same time she was likely nursing Isaac and Nelly’s son and Belle Grove heir, James Madison Hite (born on January 29, 1793). Abba nursed two of Nelly’s children (Nelly and James “Madison”) and at least three more of Isaac’s second wife, Ann Maury Hite, while bearing eight more of her own.
Her last child, a daughter named Leah, was born in 1810, at which point Abba likely took physical care of Nelly and Isaac’s young children and then remained involved with nursery operations as Isaac’s second wife, Ann Maury, settled in to motherhood, ultimately bearing ten children. The arrival of a third wet nurse, Philis, in fall of 1809, implies Abba’s retirement as active wet nurse after fifteen babies. By the 1820s, one historian mentions her working as assistant cook in the kitchen, as Harry, in his twenties, occasionally brought in water or plucked fowl to help her.
Vital as Abba was, neither mistress – Nelly or Ann – mentioned her in any surviving documents. Her name appears only as the mother of the twelve children in the Hite family records, and again when she reaches age sixty and is considered retired. She, Frank, and three children were alive at Belle Grove in 1837 when Isaac Hite Jr.’s estate inventory was completed.
While Abba was enslaved for seven decades, without freedom to make life choices and without a voice, there’s one final part of her story to share.