The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times — Text and Context

The Entailed Hat as a Material Object

The hat that gives the novel its title is never described in the excerpts, but its legal entailing—a form of inheritance that keeps property within a family line—resonates through the objects that do appear. A sailor named Jimmy finds a steel purse filled with 1815 British shillings and guineas hidden in a chimney jamb, alongside a bronze sword hilt. The purse crumbles to 'iron-mould' in his hand, a detail that ties decay to historical residue. Later, the pungy captain Phœbus uses a wrought-iron crane to break the chain of a cannon-ball locked to a woman's foot. These items are not mere props; they are evidence of economic circuits—iron-making, smuggling, slavery—that the novel traces across the peninsula. The will itself, with its bequest of a hat, a kettle, a brandy still, and hand-irons, reads like an inventory of a household economy where every object carries weight.

Navigation and the Landscape of Risk

The excerpts repeatedly stage movement through a dangerous terrain. Phœbus gives a runaway woman named Mary directions from Broad Creek to Laurel, then to Princess Anne, warning that 'every foot of it's dangerous to niggers.' He advises her to tell a preacher she is a runaway slave wanting to return home—a lie he justifies because it is 'so close to the Lord it won't git fur an' pizen many.' The landscape is mapped by waterways (Nanticoke River, Broad Creek) and small towns (Snow Hill, Princess Anne), but also by the threat of recapture. The sailor Jimmy, after finding the hidden money, recites Psalm 23 and prays that the waters be 'pure an' free, to every pore creatur.' His nautical language—'pungy captain,' 'crane's sharp wrought-iron point'—suggests a world where boats and iron tools are the means of both livelihood and liberation.

Voice and the Limits of the Excerpts

The text shifts between a formal, Carlyle-quoting introduction and colloquial dialogue thick with period exclamations: 'By smoke!', 'I say, by George this time caze ole George the Third's picter's on it.' The sailor Jimmy speaks in a rustic vernacular, while the narrator adopts a literary tone. The excerpts do not reveal how the entailed hat connects to the plot, nor do they introduce Patty Cannon, the figure named in the subtitle. The catalog subject 'African Americans — Crimes against' is visible in Mary's flight and the reference to a husband trying to sell her, but the excerpts offer no resolution. Readers should expect a novel that weaves legal documents, material history, and regional speech into a story whose full arc remains, from these pages, partially obscured.

Readers coming to The Entailed Hat through this digital edition will find a work that resists easy summary. The excerpts reward attention to physical details—a crumbling purse, a crane pulled from bricks, a sword hilt left in a wall—and to the moral ambiguities of survival in a slave society. The novel's length (over 185,000 words) suggests a leisurely, digressive structure. Approach it as a period artifact that uses the detritus of the past—old wills, hidden coins, iron chains—to ask what inheritance means when the law itself is corrupt.

Reading about that sailor freeing a woman from her cannon-ball chain, I remembered the weight of constraints in another old story—smuggling’s own quiet desperation. The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler; Or, Working for the Custom House — Reading Notes held a similar ache, that sense of people bound by circumstance, waiting for a hand to lift the iron.