The Unholy Sisterhood: Richmond’s Elite Women Who Shared Their Male Slaves (1849)

Richmond, Virginia, 1849. It was a city enveloped in prosperity and scented with the riches of tobacco. Its stately homes along Church Hill were monuments to refinement, faith, and Southern virtue. But behind those imported French wallpapers and closed parlor doors, something else was taking shape, something that would one day send shockwaves through the halls of Virginia’s power and leave an indelible stain on its elegant society.

Between March and November of that year, seventeen enslaved men vanished from the ledgers of Richmond’s most prestigious families. Official records claimed they had been sold to plantations farther south. However, no ships bore their names, and no sales invoices matched the transfers. What the ledgers concealed was not an administrative error, but a secret that would force the Virginia legislature to hold an emergency session and seal its findings for seventy-five years.

The Hidden Parlors of Church Hill

At the heart of this scandal were eight women—wives of judges, bankers, and merchants—who formed what would later be called The Unholy Sisterhood. To the outside world, they were paragons of decorum: patrons of charity, church decorators, and hostesses of refined salons. But beginning that spring, their Tuesday and Thursday afternoon meetings took on a darker meaning.

The leader was Catherine Harrowe, forty-three years old, a widow of wealth and intelligence who managed her late father’s tobacco empire with quiet authority. Her husband, a circuit court judge, was often away. In his absence, Catherine began holding “private gatherings” at her Franklin Street mansion: meetings attended only by a select circle of women and the same small number of male servants.

Those servants were enslaved men, chosen for their youth, strength, and obedience. And they were not there to serve tea.

It began, as such horrors often do, with a transgression. Catherine summoned her personal servant, Samuel, to move the furniture. When he entered, she closed the door. She offered him tea, an act that defied every rule of her world. Then she began to speak of loneliness—of a marriage of duty rather than affection—and crossed a line from which neither could retreat.

Within a week, Catherine had confided in her childhood friend Eleanora Randolph, a descendant of the famous Virginia lineage. What began as a whispered confession soon became a pattern. By April, six more women—wives of bankers, tobacco magnates, and judges—had followed suit.

They called themselves, with bitter irony, the Sisterhood of Charity.

The Machinery of Exploitation

By summer, the Sisterhood had created a system as secretive as it was depraved. They rotated enslaved men between households under false pretenses, so the absence of any servant raised suspicions. They kept double ledgers: one for their husbands’ eyes and the other recording their actual activities in coded language. They used signals, phrases, and observers to ensure privacy.

The men had no choice. Refusal meant whippings, being sold, or retaliation against their families. Some returned home silent and broken; Others became empty shells of themselves. In the slave quarters of Richmond, their wives noticed the changes: the men who once carried dignity in their eyes now stared only at the ground.

One woman, Rachel, a domestic nurse who had raised her lover from childhood, dared to confront her employer, Margaret Wickham, a descendant of the early Jamestown settlers. “You can’t do this to these men without corrupting everything you touch,” she said. Margaret’s reply was icy: “If you value your daughter’s safety, you will never speak of this again.”

Rachel obeyed, but among the enslaved women of Church Hill, rumors began to spread. Silent acts of defiance followed: spoiled meals, lost letters, misplaced keys—small acts of sabotage to disrupt their lovers’ depraved rituals.

The Whistleblower

It was Samuel who finally broke the silence. Secretly educated, he could read, a rarity among the enslaved. When he learned that Eleanora Randolph kept a coded journal of her activities, he and another slave, Isaac, took a huge risk. One night, while Eleanora was attending a dinner party, they broke into her office, copied several pages, and took them to Reverend William Thompson, pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Thompson was a man of austere faith and one of the few in Richmond who dared to speak publicly about the moral decay that slavery bred in both master and slave. When Samuel described the Brotherhood’s “meetings,” the Reverend’s disbelief turned to horror. He and Samuel decoded Eleanora’s code by lamplight. The entries were explicit, methodical, and damning.

Thompson took the evidence to Bishop William Meade, head of the Episcopal Church of Virginia and one of the most powerful men in the state. “If this is true,” Meade said of