In 1817, at age seventeen, Macy Birdsong married a blacksmith named Charles Gay, who was "very poor but had learned the blacksmith trade from one of his uncles a very industrious and respectable man." A short time later, Gay took his wife's single slave, a woman, and ran off to North Carolina with another woman, Sally Andrews. Macy returned to live with her mother (her father having died many years before) and now, with her mother nearing the end of her life at age sixty-six, Macy fears following her mother's death her husband might return and lay claim to her small inheritance--a few slaves distributed among several family members. She asks for a divorce.
Result: Bill drawn.
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Repository: Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia
