An Estate's Story

The Jan. 2 Style story "Right on the Water; the Only Retreat for Cheney and Rumsfeld: St. Michael's" noted that Donald Rumsfeld's house, Mount Misery, was "a former bed and breakfast built in 1804."

It also is worth mentioning that Mount Misery was built by Edward Covey, a notorious "slave breaker" into whose care the young Frederick Douglass was sent in 1834.

In Chapter 10 of his autobiography, "The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" (1845), Douglass describes how he physically resisted Covey's attempts to beat him. Douglass wrote that the "battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career as a slave," for it "revived within me a sense of my own manhood."

ARNOLD KRUPAT

Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.