Progress on Projects
I’m almost done documenting the slaveowners listed in the 1830 Liberty County census. By documenting, I mean adding their names to the overall list of Liberty County slaveowners and building a family tree to try to determine the essential facts of life for slaveowners: birth, death, marriage, names of family who could have gifted them enslaved people or received such gifts, etc. I’ve worked on the 1840, 1850, and 1860 censuses now; all together, there are 567 slaveowners on my list so far.
Research Snippets
While researching this last week, two stories jumped out at me demanding to be told.
Hannah and Plenty
I was trying to research the family line of Liberty County slaveholder Margaret Stewart, and stumbled across her sister Eliza Bowler, living in Savannah. Eliza wrote her will in Savannah in 1826 while she was suffering from dropsy, which ended up killing her. She left “my negro woman Hannah and her son Plenty” to Margaret’s son, Henry Ripley Stewart, and made General Daniel Stewart and John Elliott, prominent Liberty County citizens, her executors. They never took up that role, but Eliza’s doctor, Dr. James P. Screven, did. In 1827, he filed a petition to sell Hannah and Plenty, and an unnamed infant of Hannah’s, saying that even hiring them out for a year had not been enough to pay the estate’s debts. Hannah was sickly, and Plenty too young to work, he said, and it would be best for the estate if they were sold.
Dr. Screven had to file estate accounts, and those accounts showed that he was hiring Hannah out, despite her sickliness, from at least 1827 through February 1830, receiving $4-5 a month for her labor[7]. The only employer mentioned was P. Laurens. Dr. Screvens was also charging the estate for his medical care for Hannah and for himself[8].
I couldn’t find out whether they were sold, in spite of looking through deed record indexes, and could only think Hannah’s terror, with two children and an owner who wanted to be rid of her.
Then it occurred to me to look in the 1870 census for Chatham County. There they were! Hannah Stewart living in the household of Plenty Golden, next to William Stewart. In the 1880 census, Hannah was living with William, who was identified as her son. They made it to Emancipation!
Then it got even better. Earlier records revealed the name of Hannah’s probable mother, Fanny, who came to Margaret from Eliza’s and Margaret’s father, Hepworth Carter. (Always look for those pathways of transmission of enslaved people.) Plenty named his own daughter Fanny.
For the details on this story, see: https://theyhadnames.net/2023/09/21/hannah-and-plenty/
Off to Charleston
The next story is sadder. In 1836, fifteen enslaved people, listed as the property of Josiah Wilson’s estate, travelled on a steam ship from Savannah to Charleston. I looked for possible other reasons they might have been sent to Charleston, but the estate was heavily in debt and selling off other enslaved people locally, so the only logical reason they would have been sent there was to sell them. Fortunately, the surviving records gave their names, ages, gender, height and complexion. Why send them to Charleston to be sold, when the estate had already sold people locally in previous years? I don’t know for sure, but the country was experiencing a boom in 1836 (to be followed by the Panic of 1837), and it’s possible that prices were simply higher in Charleston.
I wrote up this story and put it on the website in the hopes that one day some descendant of theirs may find a DNA connection to Liberty County and go looking for them. For the details: https://theyhadnames.net/2023/09/25/sent-to-charleston-enslaved-people-of-josiah-wilsons-estate-1836/.
What I’ve Learned This Week
I’ve changed the title of this section from “What I’ve Been Reading” to “What I’ve Learned,” since of course learning takes many forms these days but this week it’s still a book.
I’ve still reading Melissa Walker’s Southern Farmers and Their Stories, which focuses on oral histories, and am appreciating her insight into the self-awareness (or not) of the farmers. This paragraph struck my eye:
“By the same token, West never acknowledged any advantages that his race, class status, or gender might have given him. He certainly benefited from his father’s status as a successful farmer, with tools to loan and advice to give. As a white man, he enjoyed opportunities that a black man would not have enjoyed in Jim Crow-era east Tennessee. For example, he was able to obtain a mortgage for his first farm and subsequent loans for equipment and cattle, loans that no Maryville bank would have granted to an African American farmer at the time. Like most of the prosperous white farmers I interviewed, these advantages remained invisible to West, and to have acknowledged them would have undermined his steadfast belief that he was a self-made man.”
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