Sent to Liberia by Jacob Wood

The magazine also stated: “Of these people, the executor [of Wood’s will], Dr. Charles West, remarks: ‘These people have all lived as the slaves of the same master for more than twenty years, and most of them have been in his family for a much longer period. They are a sensible, orderly and industrious people — have been used to the culture of rice, sugar cane, corn and cotton. They understand the preparation of rice for market, and the manufacture of sugar. There are several barrel coopers, two carpenters, and William Gouldman is a very ingenious blacksmith and house carpenter, has had the management of a steam saw and rice mill, and has acted as engineer on board of a steamboat. I believe that all were born as slaves, unless the native Africans were not. We do not know whether they have any friends in Liberia; they may be slightly acquainted with some of the emigrants from Savannah. William Gouldman can read and write; but we do not know of any other case.” 

Jacob Wood had inherited enslaved people from his father, Joseph Wood, his brother, Henry Wood, his nephew, Henry Wood Jr., and his brother Jack N. Wood. See Henry Wood’s 1802 estate inventory, Henry Wood Jr’s 1819 estate inventory, and John N. Wood’s 1786 will for clues to the origins of the enslaved people who had been in the Wood family. 

For more information on the Wood family, see the post on Henrietta Hamilton, free woman of color, which states: “[Jacob Wood] was a senator from McIntosh County in the Georgia Legislature and President of the Georgia Senate (1833-34); a judge in McIntosh County’s Inferior Court; and well known and connected across elite white planting families in coastal Georgia. He also was a trustee of Franklin College, which later became part of the University of Georgia, and a founder of the Bank of Darien.”

While we found no information on Wood’s motives, lest we be tempted to imagine that this is a story of kindness, historian Mark J. Fleszar reminds us, “Despite philanthropic pretenses, Kingsley’s colonization experiments were self-interested proslavery schemes designed to preserve his wealth and power against what he feared were overwhelming forces of the Age of Emancipation. In re-imagining the geography of his slave empire, these efforts to strengthen his mastery purposefully bound Florida and Haiti in an intimate fashion.”

For more information about Zephaniah Kingsley, see Mark J. Fleszar’s works “The Atlantic Legacies of Zephaniah Kingsley: Benevolence, Bondage, and Proslavery Fictions in the Age of Emancipation” (source of the quote above, p. 49) and “The Atlantic Mind: Zephaniah Kingsley, Slavery, and the Politics of Race in the Atlantic Wor