I’ve returned to building the list of Liberty County slaveowners, which now has more than 500 names. I’ve finished the 1860, 1850, and 1840 census records and am in the middle of the 1830 census, which has the infamous “tick” marks that I have to enter manually into the spreadsheet. I’m creating and building out trees for the slaveowners to be able to see the ways in which enslaved people entered their control through marriage and gifting. It is definitely a tedious process but I’m already seeing so many ways to use the compiled information.
The 1830 census notes the Revolutionary War soldiers, and it has reminded me of having coffee with an older man who had spent a lot of time studying Georgia Revolutionary War soldiers. After I told him about my research, he confessed that he had never thought about these soldiers owing slaves! I think my jaw actually did drop.
Research Snippets
The 1830 Liberty County census included a Joseph Austin, in his 20s, living in a household with no other White people, with 33 enslaved people. His father, also Joseph Austin, had died the previous year and his mother in 1808. Why is this interesting? Neither Joseph nor anyone else with the surname Austin was listed in the 1840, 1850 or 1860 census records. Essentially, the Austin family had disappeared from Liberty County.
But in the 1870 census, we find one Black family with the surname Austin. Sandy Austin, 60 years old, told the U.S. Southern Claims Commission that he had lived on Joseph LeConte’s Syphax plantation his entire life, having been inherited from Joseph’s father Louis LeConte. In 1846, Sandy was a member of the North Newport Baptist Church, which was attended at the time by both white and African-American members; it later became the First African Baptist Church, the oldest African-American church in Liberty County. After Emancipation, Sandy took the surname Austin, and by 1870 was married to Nanny and had three children, Phillis, Fannie, and Sandy Jr.
Why did he use the surname Austin, when he lived on the LeConte plantation all his life and there were no White Austins in Liberty County for about 30 years before Emancipation? It seems very likely that Sandy Austin’s ancestors had belonged to the White Austin family. Unfortunately, no records yet found corroborate this, but there are now so many documented precedents of freedpeople in Liberty County using surnames that lead back to an enslaver family who had disappeared from the county before 1840.
While building the list from the 1830 census, I also discovered a will written in 1832 by Samuel Harville that named 11 people being held in slavery in Liberty County: Sally, Cloe, Jackson, Jenny, Ler??, Stepna, Washington, Georgian, Abram, Cyrus, Lonnon. I hadn’t come across it before because it he wrote it in Alachua County in what was then the Florida Territory. The will names his (Harville’s) children, who each received a named human being. Read the will at: https://theyhadnames.net/2023/08/20/liberty-county-will-samuel-harville-1832/.
What I’ve Been Reading
A book I picked up out of interest in the topic — Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History, by Melissa Walker — has helped me crystallize one of my purposes in building this list of Liberty County slaveowners. The main purpose is to allow descendants of people held in slavery in Liberty County to find their ancestor’s enslaver and then easily “hook” into the family tree and related documents to trace their ancestor back farther through the myriad of ways he or she could have entered the slaveowner’s possession.
Another purpose, however, that I have had trouble articulating, is a desire to make sure that this past cannot be forgotten and to facilitate the rewriting of previous nostalgic, whitewashed histories. The Revolutionary War aficionado who hadn’t thought of slavery in the context of these honored ancestors? I’ve been reading a number of short bios of these soldiers and none of them mention that they were slaveowners…that their very livelihood came from the blood and sweat and lost dreams of enslaved people.
Melissa Farmer, the author of “Southern Farmers” talks about “communities of memory.” She says, “Southern farm people framed their stories about the past by consciously contrasting those days to the present. Stories about the past also served didactic purposes; rural southerners believed that some values were being undermined in contemporary society, and they told stories about the idealized past in an attempt to convince a younger generation that these values were worth preserving.”
I had been watching this in action, without realizing it, in a Facebook group called “Georgia Folk and Farm Life,” where older people tell nostalgic stories about their rural past and lament the present. Somehow past racial tensions never come up in these stories, which are all told by people who could have been no more than children at the time of the events or who were told sanitized stories by their elders. It was fascinating to watch this “community of memory” being constructed in real time. (I eventually left the group because I found the process so disturbing in light of current events.)
I’m also listening to “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism” by James Loewen, which is both fascinating and horrifying. He has identified hundreds and hundreds of these towns where African Americans were deliberately excluded from living across the United States (and ironically, more in the Midwest than in the South). He recounts reading many of those “county histories” written from the early 1900s to even the present that completely ignore this issue, and the many historians he spoke to who had no idea this had happened in the areas they studied. Again, White communities of memory suppress aspects of the past that might lead to recognition of the causes for present inequities.
Through documenting Liberty County’s slavery past in an unquestionable way — They had Names and there are documents — I want to help change the community of memory around this subject among the descendants of slaveowners. Combining the list of slaveowners with the census data in spreadsheets will also make it possible to produce statistics and trends that can, I hope, be used for future analysis by academics.
Lofty goals, of course! At the moment, I’ll just be happy to finish the 1830 and 1820 censuses and get past those darn tick marks.