The Hermaphrodite Slave Who Was Shared Between Master and His Wife… Both Became Obsessed (1851) | HO

The Ledger That Should Not Exist

On a humid August night in 1851, deep in the tobacco country of Southside, Virginia, a single line in a slave trader’s ledger recorded something so extraordinary that it would echo through generations of whispered legend. The entry read:

“One specimen, age approximately 19, purchased from Charleston Market. Unique physical characteristics. Price: 2,8470.”

The buyer was Thomas Rutled, owner of the 3,000-acre Belmont Estate—a prosperous plantation in Prince Edward County. Within fourteen months of that purchase, three people would die, Belmont would be sold for a fraction of its worth, and every record connected to the property systematically destroyed.

For nearly two centuries, what happened at Belmont was erased from official memory. But scattered diaries, court ledgers, and the folklore of Virginia’s enslaved community preserve fragments of a story that defies belief—a story about obsession, guilt, and the human soul’s descent into darkness.

A Marriage Crumbling Behind Red Brick Walls

In 1851, Thomas and Catherine Rutled were the picture of Virginia gentility. Thomas, thirty-seven, was a magistrate and landowner descended from old planter stock. His wife, ten years younger, was a fragile beauty from Richmond society. Behind their Georgian mansion’s white columns, however, lay a marriage hollowed by loss. Catherine had borne a stillborn son in 1849. Since then, her vitality had drained away, replaced by long silences and sleepless nights.

Into this quiet despair stepped Samuel Wickham, a slave trader known for “specialty acquisitions”—slaves with rare skills, deformities, or conditions that made them profitable curiosities. He arrived at Belmont on August 14, 1851, offering something he described as “a unique specimen.”

Wickham presented medical papers and an impossible description: a young enslaved person named Jordan, born with both male and female anatomy—what physicians of the day termed a “hermaphrodite.” Trained under a New Orleans doctor, Jordan could read and write, spoke with perfect composure, and had been “conditioned for medical inspection.”

Thomas, skeptical at first, demanded to see the slave. Twenty minutes later, he stood before Jordan—and his fascination began.

“Neither One Thing Nor the Other”

Those who later wrote about Jordan spoke of a beauty that could not be categorized. Delicate features, dark eyes, and a voice balanced between masculine and feminine registers. To look at Jordan, witnesses said, was to feel a disquieting confusion about one’s own desires.

Thomas purchased the slave immediately. But rather than send Jordan to the quarters behind the house, he placed the young person in a small cottage near the garden—private, isolated, and within sight of his study window.

When Thomas introduced Jordan to his wife, Catherine, her reaction mirrored his own: fascination tempered by unease. She examined Jordan as one might a specimen, then—perhaps for the first time—felt something stir beneath her grief. Within a week, Jordan had been moved into the main house, designated as Catherine’s “personal maid.”

The Third-Floor Room

By September, the household had changed. The field slaves noticed their master and mistress vanishing upstairs for hours at a time. Strange noises came from the third floor. Jordan emerged pale, distant, moving like a ghost through the corridors.

Catherine’s former maid, Dileia, and the cook, Harriet, whispered of something evil growing in that room. Harriet once asked Jordan quietly, “Are they hurting you, child?” Jordan replied, “I do what I was born to do. It’s easier when you don’t think about it.”

Upstairs, Thomas filled notebooks with anatomical sketches and private musings. Catherine, in turn, transformed Jordan into a living experiment—dressing the slave alternately in men’s and women’s clothing, studying how the change altered perception. She told Jordan, “I want to understand what you are.” Jordan replied softly, “I am what you want to see.”

Their obsession blurred the line between curiosity and desire, morality and madness. That autumn, their physical fascination with Jordan rekindled their long-dead intimacy with each other—but it was a union born of corruption, not love.

The House Begins to Rot

By winter, Belmont had started to decay—both literally and spiritually. Fences fell into disrepair, tobacco rotted in the barns, and bills went unpaid. Neighbors whispered that Thomas was ill, that Catherine was “not herself.”

Inside, the couple’s fixation deepened. Jordan became their shared addiction, a mirror reflecting their emptiness. “You’re destroying each other now,” Jordan told Thomas one night. “You submit to your desires because you’ve lost the ability to choose anything else.”

In December, a visiting physician, Dr. Edmund Carlile, confirmed what gossip had hinted: the Rutleds were no longer sane. After examining Jordan, he warned Thomas, “Whatever is happening here must stop before it destroys you.” But in that house, warnings came too late.

The Valentine’s Day Tragedy

On the night of February 14th, 1852, rain lashed against the windows. Catherine sat in Jordan’s room, clutching one of her late father-in-law’s dueling pistols. “I can’t wake up one more day in this life,” she said. “We’ve turned you into a symbol of our own brokenness.”

Thomas burst into the room, soaked and trembling. “Catherine, please—put it down.”

She turned the gun toward herself. Her final words were to Jordan: “I’m sorry—for all of it.” The gunshot echoed through the halls. Servants froze. Catherine lived another seventeen hours, suspended between life and death. At dawn, she was gone.

When Jordan quietly said, “Master, we need to call for help,” Thomas turned, hollow-eyed, and whispered, “This is your fault.” Jordan’s calm reply would echo for generations: “No, master. You did this to yourselves.”

The Aftermath of Madness

The local magistrate accepted Thomas’s claim that Catherine’s death was accidental—a misfire while handling an old pistol. Suicide was unthinkable for a woman of her standing.

Three days later, mourners gathered under cold rain to bury her. Only the enslaved knew the truth, passing it in whispers: that the mistress of Belmont had looked into the mirror of her own sin and couldn’t bear the reflection.

Within weeks, Thomas ordered the third-floor room sealed and the key thrown into the well. He burned every document related to Jordan—medical records, letters, even Catherine’s diary. Then he sold the plantation, dispersing its enslaved workers across Virginia. All except Jordan.

A House of Ghosts

Thomas relocated to Lynchburg with Jordan and two elderly servants. They lived in silence, bound by guilt and memory. Neighbors saw a man aged decades beyond his years, wandering the streets before dawn, haunted and alone.

In November 1852—exactly nine months after Catherine’s death—Thomas was found dead in his bed. The doctor who examined him wrote:

“A man can die of a broken spirit as surely as from a broken bone.”

Jordan was sold at auction for $412, a fraction of the price that had once marked them as “a phenomenon.” After that, history went silent.

Some say Jordan escaped north and lived free under a new name. Others claim the slave died young, passed from master to master like a cursed object. Whatever the truth, Jordan vanished—absorbed into the void where so many enslaved lives disappeared.

The Curse of Belmont

Belmont stood empty for three years before a Petersburg merchant purchased it. Within weeks, servants complained of cold drafts and whispers near the sealed room. Ignoring the contract, the new owner ordered it opened.

Inside, they found dark stains on the floorboards that no amount of scrubbing could erase. Workers refused to enter again. Each new family who bought the estate reported the same unease—the same sense of something wrong. By 1865, as the Civil War swept through Virginia, Belmont burned to the ground.

Some said Union soldiers did it. Others swore the house destroyed itself, unable to contain what it had witnessed.

Today, only fragments of the foundation remain, buried beneath forest and ivy. The land is marked “Private Property—No Trespassing.” Local historians acknowledge that a plantation once stood there, but records of the Rutled family are conspicuously absent.

The Legend and the Lesson

Among descendants of the enslaved in Prince Edward County, the story of Jordan endures—not as ghost tale, but as parable. They say the hermaphrodite slave didn’t curse Belmont; the Rutleds cursed themselves.

Their sin was not desire, but the belief that a human being could be dissected, owned, or understood like an object. In trying to define Jordan, they destroyed the boundaries between morality and madness—and in the process, revealed the darkest truth of the antebellum South:

That power without empathy always devours its masters.