Maria thought that she herself would soon be sold, as well. The letter, dated October 8, 1852, was written from Charlottesville to her husband Richard, who was owned by a different master. She told him that Albert had been sold and, fearing further estrangement, that she wanted to try to reunite their family suggesting possible actions—but rarely could slaves have such control over their future. She asked her husband to try to convince his owner or a Dr. Hamilton to buy her and an "other child". According to historian David Brion Davis, Perkins was almost certainly one of the more than one million slaves who were in the 1850s taken from their original residences by traders to the Old Southwest. Perkins "was naturally more alarmed at the prospect of being bought by a trader who might sell her far from home and family," Willie Lee Nichols Rose writes, "than if he were a local person." The Perkins family's situation was out of their control, author Walter Dean Myers wrote in 1992: "It is the dignity of the human reduced to the idea of "thing". For this is what this woman has become. This is what her child has become. It is a situation that no kind treatment can assuage, a wound of the soul that will never heal." The second chapter of Hager's book "Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing" (2013) explores Perkins's letter—a commonly cited example of slave writing—as a case study. According to Hager, high-school textbooks on US history which quote the letter emphasize different themes. Some focus on the toll of her heartsickness, while others highlight her strategic suggestions to reunite her family. Hager states that both aspects are present in the letter. Modern publications generally use just the first half of the letter, he finds, in which Perkins was more "careful" in writing. Hager notes that Perkins's penmanship, such as the use of the long "s" (""ſ""), suggests that she was taught to write by an older person who was formally educated. Structurally, the letter's first ten lines explain what has happened and what Perkins would like to happen. At the start of the letter, she corrected some grammatical errors (adding the word "on" before "Monday" and adding the letter "n" in "want") and was more "deliberate". But toward the end the letter, she appears to have sped up and neglected to dip her pen in ink, with misspellings and heightened urgency.