In May 1871, Charlotte Stevens gave her daughter Harriet Harris a “brindled heifer and a black calf.”
Why does this deed record matter? Why did it make me cry? Charlotte Stevens was a 76-year-old Black woman in poor health living with her presumable daughter, Charlotte Walthour, in Liberty County, Georgia . Only six years earlier, she herself was considered property.
Six years earlier, her daughters were property because they were HER daughters, the children of a woman born in slavery. This deed record used a formulaic term to describe the reason for the gift: “in consideration of the natural love and affection which she has and bears to the said daughter…” Six years earlier, all the love and affection in the world would not have allowed her to prevent her own daughters from being sold away from her.
Now Charlotte Stevens was not only able to dispose legally of her own property but she was utilizing the very same court system that had dehumanized her for so long.
This deed record, recorded in Liberty County Superior Court on September 5, 1871, was witnessed by Abram Walthour, Charlotte’s son-in-law, and by Abial Winn, a White landowner…and the man who had held Charlotte Stevens in slavery.
In 1838 and 1842, Abial Winn used Charlotte and Harriet as collateral on promissory notes to Savannah merchants, just exactly the same way we use our homes as collateral on mortgages. If he had defaulted on the loans, they and the other enslaved people named as collateral would have been sold at auction at the door of the Liberty County Courthouse to whomever had enough money to buy them.
Would Abial Winn have regretted that? Perhaps. But once he signed his name to that collateral mortgage, it couldn’t be stopped and it happened to other people. Sometimes Liberty County families purchased enslaved people sold at auction to keep them in the family, but this did not spare them the traumatization of standing at the courthouse door, waiting to be sold.
See this deed record for yourself at FamilySearch. 1870 was not that long ago. My father knew his grandfather well, and his grandfather was born in Liberty County in 1869.