and punished those involved. One black man was executed, two died while trying to escape, and two others were deported, perhaps to a slave colony in the Caribbean or Louisiana. William Churchill gave Chatham as a wedding present for his widowed daughter Hannah and the three-time widowed Judge John Coalter. Coalter died in 1838, so Chatham passed to his wife Hannah, who did not remarry (married women at the time could only hold property through their husbands). Hannah Coalter enslaved 51 people in the 1850 census and, as an anti-slavery Methodist, unlike her late husband, tried to free enslaved people through her will upon her death in 1857. Hannah's will provided that her slaves would have the choice of being freed and migrating to a free state like Ohio, or to Liberia, with passage paid for, or of remaining as slaves with any of her (Coulter's) family members they might choose. However, in 1848, Hannah's much younger half-sister Betty had married J. Horace Lacy, a prosperous businessman and enslaver at Ellwood Plantation, further to the south in the Wilderness area of Spotsylvania County. Lacy convinced the will's executors to seek court direction. The Stafford court upheld the manumissions, but the Virginia Court of Appeals (the name at the time of the Virginia Supreme Court), in a 3 to 2 decision, overturned the 92 conditional manumissions (only upholding Charles' outright manumission). The court denied Coalter's slaves any chance of freedom by ruling that the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court had declared that enslaved people were property and not persons with choice. Ellen Mitchell, an enslaved laundress at "Chatham", had known of and counted on Mrs. Coalter's promise of manumission. When Lacy's court case took her freedom away, Mitchell, irate, loudly proclaimed how unfair this denial was, particularly as she feared being sent to a plantation in Monroe, Louisiana. To be rid of her (and the problem she represented), Lacy sold her to a slave trader, James Aler, in Fredericksburg. Aler, active in his church and unsure what to do with Mitchell, allowed her a 90-day pass to leave Fredericksburg in early 1860 on a tour during which she and one of her sons attempted to raise money to buy their freedom for $1000. She gave speeches to church and political groups in Washington City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, raising enough money to return to Fredericksburg