Brown Colbert

Brown Colbert, a nailer, was the son of Betty Brown and the grandson of Elizabeth Hemings. In August 1801, Jefferson recorded his name as one of those inoculated against smallpox. Nearly two years later he was brutally attacked in the nailery by Cary, a fellow teenaged nailer, who was punished and sold far from Monticello. Remarkably, Colbert fully recovered from the serious injury that had placed him in a coma. In 1806, Jefferson reluctantly agreed to sell the 20-year-old Colbert to John Jordan, a hired white brickmason, who owned Colbert’s young wife. Colbert, described as “a pious man & first rate blacksmith,” lived in Lexington in Rockbridge County, still owned by John Jordan, until his manumission by private subscription of the Rockbridge Colonization Society. In exchange for freedom, they agreed to leave Virginia for the colony of Liberia in Africa. In February 1833, Colbert, his wife, Mary, and their two youngest sons boarded the ship Roanoke for Liberia, leaving behind three grown children who could not be freed.  Tragically, all but one member of the family, eight-year-old Burwell Colbert, survived the first weeks in the new land of freedom.