I’m still working my way through the Liberty County antebellum census records as I create a list of all slaveowners documented in Liberty County. I’m almost done with the 1830 census and don’t think I had ever noticed that there was a list of free people of color by name at the end of the census. This census was not by district. There were few enough white heads of household at that time that they just did one alphabetical list. The only names given are the heads of household, and then there are tick marks for age ranges of white males and white females, enslaved men and enslaved women, and free people of color living in the household.
However, these free people of color must have had their own households, so were listed separately. Only one was listed with a surname. They are:
Abram Harman, with 1 boy child under the age of 10, 1 man 24-36 (probably Abram Harman himself), 1 girl child under the age of 10, and one women 24-36;
Sue & Jim, with one man 36-55 and one woman over 55;
Marget [alt: Margaret] & Molley, with one woman over 55, and two children, a girl and a boy, both under 10;
Abram, man over 55 living by himself;
Rachel & Bellow, two women 24-36;
Moriah, a woman 24-36, two girl children under the age of 10, a youth 10-24, and a boy under 10.
There are two other lists of free people of color on the They Had Names website. One is from mandatory registration requirements and covers the period 1852-1864. The other is an unusual cluster of free people of color living on or near Thomas Mallard’s plantation.
From the registration list, we know that Abraham Harman was still living in 1854, and that he lived in Beards Bluff. His white sponsor (a requirement) was the wildly eccentric William B. Gaulden.
Bellow on the above census list is probably Bella in the registration list. In 1852 she was listed as 60 years old, living on “Mr. Walthour’s place” and with prominent slaveowner George W. Walthour as her sponsor. In 1855, Walthour was still her sponsor.
The unusual cluster of free people of color living near Thomas Mallard in the 1850 census, which was divided into districts, showed a Bella Mallard, 55 years old. This is probably not the Bella/Bellow listed above.
There should be records of free people of color in Liberty County starting at least around 1819, when Georgia initiated its registration requirements but I have not found them yet.
Research Snippets
On the subject of free people of color, there is a very interesting story of a free woman of color, Henrietta (Hetty) Hamilton, who was mentioned by name in the 1830 census…but not at the end of it with the free people of color who appeared to have been living independently. She was listed under the entry for Jacob Wood, a White slaveowner. Her name was where the tick marks were for free people of color in the 1830 census, and hers was the only name listed in that section for any of the slaveowners.
Who was she? She was living on a 50-acre tract of land given her as a “life estate” by Jacob Wood. When he sold that land to Thomas W. Quarterman in 1837, he conditioned the sale on continuation of her life estate.
In the 1850 census, Henrietta Hamilton was listed as a free mulatto woman born in South Carolina. In 1850, there was a separate slave census, and she was on it…as a slaveowner. She owned 12 enslaved people ranging in age from 8 months old to 65 years old. Were they her family? I don’t know. Her White “sponsor,” a requirement for life as a free person of color in Georgia at that time, was George W. Walthour, one of the wealthiest men in Liberty County.
Did Quarterman honor her life estate? Yes. In his will, he noted that the land was to be hers until she died.
She died at home on April 3, 1868. There were at least three formerly enslaved men at her deathbed, and she told them verbally that she wanted to leave all her possessions to George C. Dunham, a White man. This oral will was recorded in Liberty County probate court and published in a Savannah newspaper.
I don’t have evidence of the truth about Henrietta Hamilton, but here’s what I think. I think her surname was Hamilton because she had a connection with James Hamilton, who was in business with John Couper. Couper lived in Liberty County; Hamilton is best known for this property on St. Simons Island. I suspect that whatever the connection was, it was thought best for her to live in Liberty County away from Hamilton’s family. I’ve found no record of her manumission but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Alternatively, she could have been born to a free mother, which would have made her free from birth.
Why Jacob Wood? I don’t know the answer to that either, but Wood had been the Liberty County Sheriff and, as such, put enslaved people up for auction when enslavers defaulted on debts for which they had used them as collateral. When he moved to McIntosh County, he became a senator in the Georgia Legislature and was President of the George Senate for a year; he was a judge of the McIntosh County Inferior Court and a founder of the Bank of Darien. A pretty standard man of his times, right? Well, his 1844 will specified, under certain conditions, that his enslaved people were to be sent to Haiti to settle on land he had bought near the property of George Kingsley, the son of Zephaniah Kingsley, who was notorious for having married an enslaved woman in Florida. Wood asked in his will that Zephaniah Kingsley help with the move, but Kingsley died before Wood, and so the people were sent to Liberia instead.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” said L.P. Hartley in his 1953 novel “The Go-Between.” Through official documents, we get only glimpses of people’s lives. I wonder if the truth about Henrietta Hamilton isn’t in a journal somewhere in an archives. I hope I get to find it some day.
If you’d like to read more about her, the details are in this post: https://theyhadnames.net/2021/06/14/henrietta-hamilton-free-woman-of-color/.
What I’ve Been Reading
I’m still working my way through other books I’ve mentioned. I don’t want anyone to be misled into thinking I’m reading one of those books a week! I was distracted recently, though, by an amazing book: “I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said’s America,” by Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst. Omar ibn Said (really pronounced Sayyid) was brought to America as a slave after having spent 25 years in West Africa studying Islam. After running away from his first owner, he was taken in by James Owen, brother of North Carolina Governor John Owen, and spent 50 years in slavery.
He was literate in Arabic and wrote during his life in slavery but of course there were few who could read his reading, and no one who could truly understand it. The title of the book — “I Cannot Write My Life” — is based on a line in one of his letters. The authors believe that he meant that he could not write it because there was no one likely to see it who could understand it, which must have caused him to feel a deep loneliness and sense of isolation.
Lo and Ernst have discovered, though years of research, that his writings quote not only the Koran, as had previously been known, but also Islamic scholarly writing stretching over centuries, showing the breadth and depth of his previous education as an Islamic scholar in West Africa, which had not at all been understood prior to their research. His life had also been distorted; at the time he was thought to have converted to Christianity but Lo and Ernst show how his writings indicate otherwise.
An utterly fascinating story, and the level of scholarship it took to write this book is incredible. The authors not only had to understand slavery in North America and Islam (in Arabic!) at a deep level, but they also had to be familiar with West African manifestations of Islam at the time Omar ibn Said was living there and the kinds of Islamic literature that he would have been educated in, to be able to recognize the fragmentary quotes sprinkled throughout his writing.
It’s a provocative book too, because the idiosyncratic spelling of the time and the passage of time that has affected the legibility of the documents mean that the authors have had to step out on a limb to interpret some of the writings. They also expose the biases and lack of scholarship of the American “Arabists” of the time. For anyone who has any interest in this subject, this is a compelling story.