The second mansion the First Minnesota passed on their march to Gettysburg July 1, 1863 is known as Antrim, which today is a restored high end hotel, wedding and event complex called Antrim 1844. For a year, I mistakenly relied on this history page of Antrim 1844’s website for the name of the owner of Antrim in 1863, which the hotel incorrectly claims was a fellow named James H. Maddox. His name was actually Joseph H. Maddox, whose double agent life appears to have lasted 160 years. I’ve tried to contact the hotel to no avail. Maddox’s trail of intrigue begins below, excerpted from Volume 3 of Ghosts of Plum Run, available soon with Vols. 1 & 2 on Amazon this Christmas shopping season.
UPDATE 8/10/22 - Chris McRoy, general manager of the Antrim 1844, gave me a call today to tell me the local historical society has confirmed that the name on the deed recorded in 1862 is “Laura Maddox”, wife of Joseph H. Maddox. Chris doesn’t know how the error was made, but said the hotel will update their website.
Laura Elizabeth Williams’s husband, Joseph H. Maddox bought the next plantation north from Trevanion, an enormous estate called Antrim, the year before, in 1862. Antrim’s main house was built in 1844 by one of America’s most ardent advocates for slavery’s expansion and perpetuity, Andrew Ege (pronounced ‘Ay-Gee’). Like Louisa Shorb Dallas, Ege was heir to a Pennsylvania child labor built iron fortune, who proved early on in life he knew well how to climb these gilded ladders. At the ripe old age of 18, Ege married into the owners of the land, the McKaleb family, in 1830. His bride only 17, Margaret Ann McKaleb would inherit the land in 1843 when her father John McKaleb died. His father, Joseph McKaleb, was an Irishman born in County Antrim in Ireland and settled on this land just outside Taneytown, Maryland in 1770. The patriarch’s name acquired various spellings over time, thus giving rise to various families in Taneytown such as McKillip, McKellip, etc. The McKaleb patriarch named the land itself Antrim, after the county in Ireland where he was born. Once Ege’s wife inherited Antrim in 1843, Ege spent the next 4 years building out the plantation, capped with the mansion.
Expansion of slavery west, then its imminent abolition, was the driving force of Antrim’s price downward, sparking in 1854 a succession of slave owners to buy and sell the place. The Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 kicked it off like a shot fired to start a horse race, by making the question of whether Kansas entered the Union as slave or free one for voters. Like any self respecting slaver, Ege by 1854 had risen to great political power, first via the Whigs, then the Democratic Party. A lover of the hunt, the chase, dogs and horses, Ege had taken to calling himself “Major” or “Colonel”, despite no one having any memory of Ege fighting anywhere, for anyone, nor there being any record of it. Kansas to Ege was a siren song Promised Land, with perfectly vast open spaces on which to breed and sell slaves westward whilst they picked his cotton. A true believer in slavery’s holiness, Ege hurried west to publicly campaign for slavery in Kansas, used his political skills to rise to the very top of Kansas pro-slavery politics, get elected to office, the works. Every penny he could get his hands on Ege used to buy land by the thousands of acres, and slaves. Within a year of leaving Maryland Ege owned the most slaves in the whole of the Kansas territory. Ege’s all-in bet that Kansas would enter the Union with slaves of course necessitated the sale of his wife’s inheritance, who was conveniently dead in 1851, replaced by Ege’s second marriage at age 41 to Hettie Mathilda Craighead, age 26, another iron fortune heiress.
Ege offered Antrim to future Confederate cavalry deserter William W. Dallas at $60,000 in 1854 when Dallas was shopping around for a suitably dramatic residence in which to distract his wife Louisa from their fraudulent marriage. Dallas had expected Ege would grant him the benefit (in the form of a discount) of all the connections between the two families; Pennsylvania iron fortunes, slaves, inheritances, trust funds, etc. Greed’s fangs deep into Ege’s soul, he held out for top dollar, every red cent needed to buy land and slaves in Kansas. Dallas instead bought the brick mills of George Kephart 2 miles south for $22,000, then spent nearly the difference turning it into his own palace, Trevanion. Otherwise, it would have been Antrim at which Dallas entertained slaver high society in Western Maryland for the next seven years.
Another fellow calling himself a colonel, forty year old James Piper from Baltimore, bought Antrim from Ege in 1855. Buyer’s regret hit Piper almost immediately. Piper advertised Antrim for sale every year, as in The American Farmer in 1857, “There are few farms to exceed in value the Antrim farm—the buildings alone cost nearly or quite as much as the farm is now offered at; the land is of excellent quality, the location unsurpassed for health, and the taste and judgment displayed by Col. P. since he has owned it, renders it one of the most beautiful and desirable estates in Mary-land.” Ege of course took his slaves with him to Kansas, so Piper who owned only 3 house slaves, could not farm the entire property. He tried with all his might, with his own family, as seven other Pipers lived at Antrim in 1860, including his own father at age 70. Soon though, Antrim’s acres of fruit trees were left to drop their apples and peaches to the ground, the wheat, oat, and hay fields laid fallow. Piper died in April 1861, nearly simultaneous with the start of the war, having spent the final years of his life holding out for a higher price while working himself to death. His heirs were left Antrim.
Antrim’s next slaver buyer materialized out of nowhere, oddly, as would become his lifetime fashion. Joseph Harris Maddox was born November 18, 1823 in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, into generational slave built money and power. Joseph’s father, William Theobolt Maddox, came from nearly two centuries of tidewater Maryland tobacco plantation gentry in St. Mary’s County, born on the family plantation near Leonardtown in 1790. The first Maddox in America was Samuel in 1665, from Wales, who exhibited a flair for marrying into money his distant descendant Joseph would carry on ably.
In 1669, Samuel Maddox married Ann Notley, a daughter of Walter Notley, to whom King Charles II had granted 20,000 acres of tidewater land on which to raise tobacco with slaves. Joseph’s mother Anna Maria King was born in Georgetown, Maryland in 1800, from a similarly old money family of Delaware plantation owners. Both sides in tobacco, Joseph’s parents raised him between the new country’s new capital Washington, DC, and the family plantations in Maryland and Delaware. Then, Maddox went west as a young man to fight in the Mexican War to expand slavery at age 24. After the Mexican War, Maddox settled in New Orleans, and soon married into one of Louisiana’s most powerful slave plantation families. His 18 year old bride Laura Williams claimed to descend on both sides from “the Knights of William the Conqueror”. Laura’s mother’s side, the Routh family, claimed such lineage thus; “They are usually blondes, and a physical characteristic that has been present in the generations in England follows them to America, and we find here the same large physique as the Norman.” They wed at the Williams plantation near Alexandria, Louisiana, called Willow Glen, on a Thursday, February 15th, 1849.
Bored with all this, Joseph H. Maddox, like any slaver heading west, sought more exciting pursuits, such as those of his new Louisiana friend John Wesley Crockett, a son of Davy Crockett, who founded Joseph’s favorite local paper The New Orleans Daily Crescent in 1847. One of Crockett’s first editors was none other than Walt Whitman, who in 1849 at age 29 brought his younger brother Jeff with him from New York to work as an office boy at the brand new paper. Whitman lasted only a few months over his anti-slavery views. One of Crockett’s first partners in the paper, William Walker, who hired then fired Whitman himself, was so pro-slavery he became the most legendary of what were then called “filibusters”; American slavers so maniacally committed to their greed they raised private armies to invade countries in Central America to start their very own slave empires, over which they would lord as king. Walker left New Orleans soon after Whitman did, in 1849, to begin his adventures in Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, even Granada. Maddox briefly considered joining Walker on his crusade, who left no slaver stone unturned in recruitment. Luck smiled on Joseph H. Maddox when he decided filibustering was just a touch more adventure than he wanted, as Walker met his end by firing squad in Honduras in 1860.
The Daily Crescent carried onward, and soon, on February 15, 1851, Joseph & Laura’s second wedding anniversary, Crockett published a “Partnership Notice” on the front page of the Daily Crescent to announce “the business of the concern will in future be conducted under the style of J.H. MADDOX & CO.” Maddox presented the paper he now owned with his name on the front page to his wife as an anniversary gift, and proceeded to use his new position to hob nob with the most rich and powerful of New Orleans, whose port gave Maddox access to every plantation owner shipping cotton via the Mississippi. Maddox had arrived, so in June, 1852, he purchased a prime lot in the Garden District to build himself a magnificent mansion, hiring three architects. The next month, July, 1852, Maddox published the story that would cost him his mansion and his newspaper, but only begin his reputation as a liar.
On Lake Pontchartrain in the wee morning hours of July 5th, 1852, every boiler in the steamboat St. James exploded. The boat filled with July 4th revelers, forty people died, many of whom were landed gentry hoi polloi, such as a justice of the state supreme court. Recovery of the dead ignited a further horror; some bodies missed fingers where gold and diamond rings used to be. A schooner, the George Lincoln, was seen floating near the shipwreck on July 6th. On July 7th its Captain Frederick Tresca and his three man crew were arrested on suspicion of robbing the dead. Tresca and his men were quickly cleared, but Maddox reported the arrests in the Daily Crescent on July 8th with an assumption of guilt and an accusation of piracy on the high seas. Maddox declared Tresca “a land and water rat” with “piratical leanings” and “a brawny, thick-set, low-browed bandit, and to all appearance - As mild a mannered man As ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat.” The very next day, July 9th, Maddox published a groveling retraction; “Our report of the matter yesterday appears to have been founded in mistake and did great damage to Captain Tresca...We learn from the best sources that Captain Tresca is an old trader to Tampa Bay, and has hitherto sustained an irreproachable character.” Sadly, Tresca had already decided to sue.
Tresca’s libel lawsuit sucked Maddox dry for nearly four years. In April, 1856, the trial court’s award to Tresca of $1,000 in damages was upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court. Maddox by then was forced to sell his interest in the Daily Crescent in 1855, his mansion in the Garden District was seized by the sheriff before Maddox had spent a year in it, and his reputation was in tatters at the age of 33. Luckily, he’d been born into, then married into more, slave money, so money was never a problem. Maddox retreated to his wife’s family’s plantation until 1858, then he briefly moved his family to another plantation in Lexington, Virginia. Then, as if sensing the Civil War coming, Maddox packed them all up again, to bloom on his ancestral lands into a rather curious sort of land and water rat with piratical leanings.
Throughout 1859, Maddox accumulated a series of plots near Leonardtown, the old family homestead in St. Mary’s County Maryland. The plots were all near inlets of the Potomac River. His mansion and main plantation hugged the shoreline on a peninsula cape called Medley’s Neck, one side’s shore on an inlet called Breton Bay, the other side directly on the Potomac. The land connected about 4 miles southeast to another inlet called Herring Creek. The St. Mary’s Beacon reported one of the larger splurges on January 12, 1860, “The purchase includes 280 acres of land and thirty three negroes, and the amount of the purchase nears $44,000...this makes over $100,000 this gentleman has invested, in real and personal estate, in this county within the past twelve months.” By October, 1860, Maddox was in partnership with a George Simms, a “mercantile business” called Simms & Maddox, selling a variety of goods shipped into Maddox’s piers and stored on the plots he’d collected. In November, 1860, immediately after Lincoln’s election sparked secession, Simms & Maddox began a months long advertising campaign in the Beacon of all the sorts of luxuries the assumed imminent sea blockade would keep from the lords and ladies of the looming Confederacy, such as “Ladies’ dress goods”, “bacon, lard, butter”, and of course “wines, brandies, and whiskys”.
Then, the Civil War gave Maddox a new life, more accurately, two of them. It all started innocently enough, Maddox simply smuggling goods through the Union blockade across the river to Virginia from his piers on the Potomac in Maryland. As Maryland teetered on the edge of secession, Maddox supported secession visibly throughout 1861, not least with a series of ads in the Beacon to raise a cavalry regiment under his own command, a promise he repeated to the Confederates in person in Richmond, even to Jefferson Davis himself in writing. Maddox relied on his position as former publisher of a notoriously pro-slavery newspaper in New Orleans, but more importantly his marriage, his wife’s family’s slaves, and his own. Refined, debonair, a schooled heir to centuries of slave owning gentlemen, Man of The South Maddox was given entry to the very top of Richmond high society and the Confederate government.
What kept him there, at great profit, was Maddox’s daring to run the blockade to bring the rich slavers of the Confederacy their favorite fancy northern goods, particularly whisky, then buying their plantations’ tobacco with Confederate money to take back on his own boats, to his own piers. For his Unionist suppliers, customers, and Maryland neighbors, Maddox embraced a position common among plantation owners in border state Maryland like himself - save the Union with slavery in it. When Maryland did not secede from the Union, Maddox quickly deduced he could easily convince both sides of the war he was their spy. His lifelong connections in Washington and Maryland made Maddox an irresistible intrigue to the Richmond parlors where his smuggled whisky loosened many lips. Maddox thus embarked on a most complicated adventure - as a double agent blockade runner.
Suspicion arose immediately on both sides of the river. His wife Laura required extra reassurance of his commitment to “the cause”, who since their move to Maryland never ceased to worry all her slaves would flee. Louisiana slaves, where Laura grew up and married Maddox, did not have Pennsylvania’s Mason Dixon line within fugitive distance. Laura’s nerves frazzled every time she saw the constant ads in the local Maryland papers from slave owners offering bounty for their escaped property. Her dread multiplied to a mania September 2, 1860, when one of the Maddox slaves made a run for it, a field hand named Columbus.
Never one to miss such an opportunity, Maddox put Columbus to work in absentia to both calm his wife, and prove his slaver bona fides. Columbus made his debut in the Beacon September 16, 1860. The ad read, “He was bought out of the estate of Mrs. Cusick and has a wife living at Mr. George Tarlton’s at Forrest Landing head of Cuckold’s creek, near which place he is doubtless lurking. He stoops a little, is of a light chocolate complexion, and about 30 years of age.” Maddox offered the usual $50 reward. After the ad ran for two weeks, Maddox tried to explain to Laura that Columbus was surely long gone, but Laura would have none of it. She could only be calmed by continued placement of the fugitive slave ad.
Thus the Legend of Columbus was born in Leonardtown, the most famous fugitive slave in the history of St. Mary’s County. His star rose every week, for an entire year, as Laura demanded Maddox place the ad in every single edition of the Beacon, every time with no result. By summer, 1861, Maddox well into his blockade running career, Columbus had become a running joke in town. Folks stooping a little asked each other, “Have you seen Columbus?” All wondered if Columbus was doubtless lurking nearby. “Perhaps we should alert Mr. Maddox.” Mrs. Cusick could barely walk the streets of Leonardtown any day of the week without being asked for a bit of chocolate by little children whose favorite brand had become “Columbus Light”. At Cuckold’s Creek, George Tarlton had grown so tired of being in the paper as the owner of Columbus’s wife, he sold the wife. On and on the tale of Columbus was told in the Beacon, which caught the eye of an agent of the Union Army’s most notorious detective and spy, Allan Pinkerton.
Pinkerton’s agent in Leonardtown noticed that along with the Legend of Columbus, whose value to Maddox must have been rather high indeed, Maddox also advertised for slave overseers while at the same time publishing ads regularly declaring, “Wanted, TO HIRE four able bodied negro men, for whom the highest wages will be paid.” Further, not only were fugitive slaves rarely found, no fugitive slave would ever be found for whom a year of ads ran in futility offering reward for his capture. None of it added up, so Pinkerton made Maddox a surveillance priority, and in no time, after four months of blockade running, thirty Union soldiers arrested Maddox and two associates at his landing on Herring Creek on September 2, 1861, exactly one year to the day after Columbus made his run for it into legend. Maddox was sent to Fort Warren, an island off of Boston, Massachusetts where particularly valuable Confederate captives were taken upon their arrest. The jig, as they say, was up. Simms dissolved his partnership with Maddox in a panic, taking a page from his former partner’s playbook by printing in the Beacon’s first issue after the arrests, and then every issue for a solid year, a “Dissolution of Partnership” announcement, with the direction that this ad appear adjacent to any ad Maddox would ever print, should he ever return. Laura burst with pride that her husband was such a tried and true Johnny Reb he was now in a Yankee prison, but still obsessed with losing a slave, paid the Beacon to revive the Legend of Columbus with precisely the same ad. Mrs. Cusick’s ordeal resumed, children stooping a little once more asked for “Columbus light” at the candy store to howls of “He still doubtless lurks!” not least since the Return of Columbus often appeared right next to Simms’ constant ad of the dissolution of partnership with Maddox.
The urgent task for Maddox now was to convince the Union Army of both his loyalty and the value of information obtained in Confederate salons from the lips loosened in Richmond with Maddox’s smuggled whisky. This took three months in a jail cell at Fort Warren, which was a good investment. Upon release in November, 1861, other than three months Maddox had not lost a thing, quite the contrary. He had obtained a pass to cross enemy lines at will through a loose chain of command all the way through commander of the Union Army, General George McClellan, to Secretary of State Seward. The trick of it was Maddox would not be put on the US government payroll. Instead, Maddox would be paid by allowance to continue his highly lucrative smuggling, the better to convince Richmond he was just a simple blockade runner.
Business boomed, lubricated by a bit of information from Maddox to the Confederates in one direction, and much more information to the Union Army in the other. Despite this arrangement, thanks to the Legend of Columbus, among much else, Maddox had his wife Laura as much convinced he was spying for the Confederacy as the Confederates were. Maddox spent nearly all his time in Richmond, away from home. He continued to promise both Richmond and his wife to raise a regiment in Maryland which, of course, Maddox, never raised. The freed slaves “for whom the highest wages will be paid” Maddox hired to infiltrate and pacify his ever growing number of actual slaves (by 1862 at least 50) in order to keep his wife convinced the slaves were happy and content, thus would not run as Columbus had, let alone into legend. One last step of reassurance was required with Laura; a new plantation and more slaves for it.
With child since June, 1861, three months before her husband Joseph’s arrest, Laura convinced Maddox upon his release that November to use some of his newfound fortune to purchase yet another plantation further away from all this...business. She did not like her four children so near such intrigue as could result in, among much else, their father in a federal prison for three months while their mother was pregnant, even if for “the cause”. Lucky for Maddox, on the other side of Maryland, Antrim’s price was dropping like a stone. The late Piper’s heirs were happy to take from Maddox $40,000 for Antrim in September, 1862, a third less than James Piper paid for it seven years earlier. Had Maddox waited one month for the Emancipation Proclamation, he’d probably have gotten Antrim for half that.
Thus, by early September, 1862, Joseph (while in Richmond, of course) had the slaves move Laura 126 miles north from Leonardtown to Antrim at Taneytown with the children; 10 year old William, 8 year old Laura, 4 year old Fanny, 2 year old Johnnie, and the newborn arrived that March, Archie. Maddox left half his now 70 slaves in Leonardtown to keep his plantation there and more importantly the blockade running operational, the other half sent to Antrim to keep Laura and the children in the generational comfort to which they’d grown accustomed, and grow oats, wheat, corn and hay on the fields the previous owner Piper had left to nature. Despite now being only 8 miles from the fugitive slave goal of the Pennsylvania border, it all worked as splendidly on Laura as on the landed gentry of Richmond. Laura was so convinced Joseph whistled Dixie, she wrote her husband of Union soldiers passing on their way to Gettysburg a year later, “They tried to corrupt our servants, but finding them so loyal to us they said it was useless to talk to them, they knew we were a set of secessionists from the master down to the niggers.”
In this way, Laura Maddox met William W. Dallas and his wife Louisa, at the final Trevanion ball the night of Rosser’s Raid of Westminster, MD, September 11, 1862, Western Maryland slaver high society’s last gasp. After Louisa’s husband ran off the next morning with the 5th Virginia, Laura began visiting Trevanion daily to comfort Louisa, both enduring the trial, they supposed, of spousal sacrifice for the Confederate cause. When Louisa learned that Christmastime of 1862 her husband had in fact deserted the Confederate cavalry the day he joined it, and was a fugitive in Canada perhaps never to return, it was Laura’s shoulder she cried on. When, on Christmas Eve, 1862, Louisa read her husband William’s diary of his 1848 Grand Tour to learn her marriage was a colossal lie, it was Laura who sat with bed ridden Louisa the winter she fell into a sort of madness. Laura often brought the children to Trevanion, and once she could talk, move, and breathe again, Louisa just as often had Big Joe take her to Antrim. By the summer of 1863, Laura and Louisa were the best of friends, calling themselves “next door neighbors”, the dozen or so plots along the two miles between their two plantations utterly invisible to them, just scenery out the window of a carriage.