I finally finished paging through the Liberty County Superior Court Minutes for 1804-1821! The exclamation point is because it was one of the more tedious projects. Those Liberty County planters spent an awful lot of time suing each other or being sued for debt. There were 653 images, with two pages each, in the record set, and I was only able to find 35 cases that named enslaved people but every little bit helps.
The most disturbing case (of many) was from 1819. Paul H. Wilkins, who owned a plantation on Isle of Wight in Liberty County, sued his neighbor William Ward for slander. The basis? Ward had accused Wilkins in front of witnesses of being “the damndest, cruelest, rascal to your negroes that the United States hold.” It was not a high bar: Ward said in court that he had demanded that Wilkins give up one of his enslaved men to him to be beaten for stealing from him. When Wilkins produced the man, Ward said, “I could not find it in my heart to give him but a light whipping, he was cut up & so cruelly whipped before.” So Ward was perfectly willing to whip a badly beaten man but was shocked by the original beating. Ward also charged in court that Wilkins had put a man named June in the stocks in bitter cold, causing the man to lost part of a toe. Ward won initially but lost on appeal; however, the jury only charged him 10 cents.
Many of the cases were against white men for illegally trading with, beating, or stealing enslaved people. One white man, George Broxson, was sentenced to death in 1811 for stealing an enslaved boy named David belonging to David G. Holms. He was later pardoned by the Governor but two Screven County men later sued Holms for not paying them the reward money for finding David. They won $100.
In 1814 John and Samuel Tanner were charged with beating an enslaved man, Toney, who belonged to William Anderson, almost to death. They did not show up in court and were found guilty and ordered to pay Anderson $500 for damages.
You can read through the court cases I’ve found so far at: https://theyhadnames.net/courts-all/.
There are more court records to look through, but I plan to take a break and work on looking through loose probate court records. More on that next time.
I’m still working on detangling the Simon Frasers of the early 1800s. I plan to write up the research distinguishing them from each other, then document separately the involvement of each with the slave trade, in the hopes of tracing people they held in slavery to freed people in the 1870 census.
Research Snippets
A descendant contacted me asking for information on Elisha James, born in Liberty County in the mid-1870s. The research led me back to Elisha’s great-grandparents in 1825, and further strengthened a hypothesis I’ve been working on. It appears that the people held in slavery by some of the smaller planters in the early part of the 1800s ended up being absorbed into the estates of larger slaveowners such as George W. Walthour and Charlton Hines. At Emancipation, many of these people, or their descendants, formally took the surname of the early enslaver of their family. Perhaps they had always been known by that surname, or perhaps it was a way of documenting their family history. There could be many reasons, but knowledge of this provides a starting point for researching individuals who did not take the surname of the last enslaver, particularly when that last enslaver had a large estate. (If you’re interested in the Elisha James research, you can find it here: https://theyhadnames.net/2023/05/28/finding-elisha-james-great-grandparents/. )
What I’ve Been Reading
I’ve started “The Black Family in Slavery & Freedom, 1750-1925” by Herbert G. Gutman, which was recommended in LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson’s African American Research course at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG) earlier this year. I’m especially looking forward to Chapter 6, which he says will show “that the retention of owners’ surnames over time was a cultural device by which slaves identified with a family of origin as early as the War for Independence,” which is exactly what I’m researching. It will also be interesting to see how this classic 1970s work compares with the 2017 “Bound In Wedlock” book I mentioned last week.