I’ve added a “Recent Additions” item to the website menu for people who dip in now and again to check on their ancestors.
Court Cases Naming Enslaved People
I’m continuing to read the Liberty County Superior Court “Minutes” and “Proceedings” page by page, looking for mentions of enslaved people. The ratio of “pages read” to “cases found” is a little depressing, but when I find them, they tend to be very interesting.
Have you heard of “trover cases”? In layman’s terms, trover means that someone had something and lost it, and someone else found it and would not give it back. How does this apply to enslaved people? Apparently, this was a method of taking someone to civil court instead of taking them to criminal court for theft. In criminal court, the thief might go to jail but the victim might not get his or her property back. In a civil case, all the victim wants is the value of the property. So these cases had to be tortuously worded so as not to accuse the person of theft. Most of the cases say that someone “casually lost” something (including an enslaved person) and that someone else found the property, started using it for themselves, and would not return it.
Want an extreme example? Read this one: https://theyhadnames.net/2023/06/28/court-case-bacon-vs-mcgowen-re-sambo-on-estate-of-james-girardeau-1818-1820/. The phrase “casually lost” is a signal feature of these cases.
You can find all the court cases found so far, with a list of the record sets, here.
New Census Project
Thanks to Lana Reed and Terri Ward, I’ve started a new project. I’ve copied all the Liberty County censuses from 1820 to 1870 into a spreadsheet, as well as the 1867 voter registration list and the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules. First I’m correcting the indexing while building an overall list of every documented slaveholder, each assigned a unique identification number. I’m building trees for them to distinguish people of the same name. The ultimate goal? To build a picture of how these planter family lines interacted with slavery through purchases, inheritance, gifting, and marriage. What I really want to do is to be able to link as many freed people as possible back into their pre-Emancipation histories so that their descendants can find them. Putting the data all together will also allow for extracting statistics to build a more accurate picture of slavery in Liberty County. #NeverForget
Research Snippets
After recent contacts from a descendant, I’ve traced freedmen Jacob Dryer’s family back to a 1790s estate inventory, with all the enslavers in between: John Hext, Elizabeth Hext, Dr. Nathan Dryer, William Ward, George W. Walthour (his last enslaver).
That led to research on one of the enslavers of Jacob Dryer’s family, William Ward, who was a major land- and slave-owner in Liberty County before his death in 1830. Many people held in slavery in Liberty County passed through his hands, yet he is largely forgotten today and many African Americans who bear his surname may not know why.
What I’m Reading
Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century by Tera W. Hunter (2017)
Liberty County may have been distinctive for the Midway Church’s recognition of “marriages” between enslaved people. There were enslaved men who were authorized by the Church to perform these marriages (though I’ve not been able to find any record of the marriages). Yet of course, in the absence of civil marriage rights, there must have been many other kinds of relationships, and owners were able to break up any type of relationship at any time for any reason. Hunter’s book examines all the various types of relationships people formed during slavery. The most thought-provoking part of the book for me was the section on how these relationships that did not look like traditional “marriage” transitioned into freedom. (I originally got the book from the library but liked it so much I bought it.)
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