The 6'8" giant slave woman who used her bare hands to crush her master's skull is known as Goliath's Daughter | HO

The muggy quiet of a Charleston rice farm on the morning of August 14, 1827, was broken by a find so hideous that even seasoned slaveholders were unable to process it.

Josiah Crane, a forty-two-year-old plantation owner, was discovered sprawled across his mahogany desk, his skull so severely smashed that pieces of bone were imbedded in the wood six feet distant. The wounds were "consistent with compression by hands of extraordinary size and strength," according to the coroner's report that is still in the Charleston County records.

There was no male primary suspect. Sarah Drummond was a female enslaved giant who weighed more than 240 pounds and was six feet eight inches tall. And she was nowhere to be seen in the marshy darkness.

The Female Known as "The Wall"

The story of Sarah Drummond started years before, in 1823, when a Virginia slave dealer brought thirty-seven people for sale to Charleston's auction yards. A young woman who was so tall that she had to duck to enter the auction hall was among them. Her hands were big enough to "wrap fully around a man's head," according to witnesses who called her "a creature of unnatural proportions."

Today's doctors think Sarah had pituitary gigantism, an uncommon condition that results in extreme growth. However, she was seen as a commodity rather than a medical marvel in Charleston in 1823.

Josiah Crane, the successful bidder, spent an extraordinary $1,300 for her, which is more than twice the typical cost of a competent male employee. Deep in the tidal wetlands southwest of Charleston, Crane's plantation, Marshbend, was home to enslaved people who worked waist-deep in mosquito-infested water to grow rice. Sarah became both Crane's workforce and his spectacle within days of her arrival.

They came to stare. Crane displayed her like a circus show by making her lift anvils, barrels of rice, and even cattle. "Her proportions exceed all I have witnessed among humankind," a doctor from Charleston who came that spring noted in his journal. I felt uneasy, as if nature herself had overreached, when I saw how powerful she was.

Sarah, though, was no exhibit. Because she was a human, the humiliations she experienced would eventually turn into something much more harmful than dread.

The Breaking Point

Even by plantation standards, Marshbend life was harsh. Workers toiled in the flooded fields until they were sick or exhausted. Because of her power, Sarah was both valued and a target. Crane used dramatic punishments, such as flogging a huge lady in front of the others, to convey a strong message. But Sarah hardly ever cried out in spite of the beatings. Her captors were disturbed by her stillness and simple presence.

By 1824, she was known among the slaves as "the Wall"—the unmovable person who would stand between a youngster and a whip. She suffered much more because Crane felt intimidated by her silent disobedience.

An act of love marked the beginning of the last rupture. Marcus, a carpenter who was held as a slave on the farm, became close to Sarah. After a difficult labor, she gave birth to a son, Jacob, in January 1827. She possessed something that was entirely her own for the first time.

Crane's finances fell apart six months later. He reportedly boasted that he sold Jacob to a Savannah merchant for $400, "a fine price for an infant," since he was in dire need of money.

Crane chuckled as Sarah pleaded with him not to. She remained there in the yard the following morning, watching her kid vanish down the dirt road as the merchant loaded the sobbing baby onto a wagon. She remained there for an hour after the wagon disappeared, according to witnesses.

That evening, Marshbend's world started to fall apart.

The Killing in the Library

Sarah entered the main home through the kitchen door shortly before 9:30 p.m. Crane was drinking brandy and revising his account books while sitting in his library indoors. Only two of the servants were still awake. Ruth, a woman, subsequently claimed that she heard two voices: one quieter, steady, and unmistakable, Sarah's, and Crane's, rose in rage.

As Crane yelled, "You have no rights here," Ruth could see the massive figure standing nearly to the ceiling through the partially open door. The figure was quiet and bloodless. You have nothing, not even yourself!

Sarah calmly responded. "I want my son to return."

Reaching inside his drawer, Crane pulled out a revolver and shot. Sarah was hit in the shoulder by the bullet, which caused her to spin a little but not collapse. With one hand, she grabbed the revolver from him and tossed it across the room.

"What do you still want from me?" She said.

Witnesses reported hearing a sound "like a pumpkin crushed underfoot" moments later. When Ruth and the others came back, Crane's body was lying next to the desk, with two human hands pressing his cranium forward.

Drummond, Sarah, had left.

The Phantom Hunt

The following morning, Marshbend was overrun by police enforcement and slave collectors. A trail of blood was followed by dogs from the library window over the rice fields, but it disappeared at the swamp's edge. The marshes of the Lowcountry may engulf an individual. Her body never turned up.

Charleston's aristocracy were appalled. Sarah was evidence to them that slaves were "monstrous when unchained." Patrols were increased. New legislation prohibited enslaved persons from congregating. However, another tale circulated throughout the Black communities, both enslaved and free, about a mother who had rebelled against her oppressor and disappeared into mythology.

The letter appeared next.

"I'm Still Here."

A Charleston magistrate got the following unsigned letter from Columbia in September 1827:

"To those in search of the lady I'm not dead, Sarah. I'm not going back. I'm heading up north to locate my son. A guy will suffer the same fate as Josiah Crane if he attempts to stop me.

Despite its roughness, the penmanship was intent. Authorities suppressed it out of fear of panic. The tale, however, had already broken free.

Ten years later, reports of seeing a huge lady started to spread throughout the South. Slaves on the run who made it to Pennsylvania through the Underground Railroad described a tall man who led them through the woods.

"She moved like a shadow," someone commented. "I am searching for my son," she stated when we inquired her name.

Planters in Georgia and the Carolinas whispered that "the Marshbend Giantess" was responsible for food, medicine, and blanket thefts. Some said they saw her standing in the trees at dusk. She pulled him off the ground with one hand and tossed him aside "like a child," according to one supervisor.

Regardless of the veracity of those tales, Sarah Drummond's transformation into a myth—part ghost story, half symbol of rebellion—was a tangible result.

Truth, Myth, or Both?

By the time slavery was abolished, Southern legend had adopted Sarah's name. She was referred to as "the woman who broke the white man's skull" in secret songs among enslaved people. She served as a warning to white planters about what may occur when brutality went too far. She was evidence to abolitionists in the North that human slavery produced justice on its own.

Whether she survived her wound was a long-standing question among historians. Most people thought she passed away in the wetlands, where the reeds and alligators claimed her remains. However, in 1889, a doctor in Philadelphia made an odd confession.

An elderly Black lady who was near death informed him that her mother had previously been a giant who had fled north after "crushing her master's head in South Carolina." She stated that until her death in 1867, her mother looked for a missing kid called Jacob. The doctor wrote it off as hallucination until he saw her hands were "broad as a man's and marked by old scars" after she passed away.

She could have been Sarah's daughter. The timelines align, but there's no evidence.

The Heritage of Sarah Drummond

What we are confident of is terrifying.

There is still the coroner's report. There are still the sale records. The testimonials are still there. Furthermore, Josiah Crane's smashed skull, which is recorded in official records, is still the indisputable proof that Sarah Drummond existed.

Also documented is the fate of her son Jacob. After being sold to a Savannah family, he worked as a carpenter until old age and had six children of his own. According to Jacob's descendants interviewed by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s, he called his first daughter Sarah after the mother he never met and retained a tiny wooden toy horse made by his father.

Even now, some 200 years later, the Marshbend Giant tale still causes unease. Was Sarah Drummond a mother protecting her kid, or was she a murderer? Is she a fiction or a real lady who momentarily disobeyed the rules of her time?

Maybe she was more than one of those things.

Because underlying the myth is a reality that history will never be able to eradicate: that one enslaved lady refused to submit even in a civilization based on dehumanization. After all of her freedom was taken away, she used her bare fists to regain what little authority she still had.