I’ve been busy with other things these past couple of weeks so have found myself working on things that don’t require much thought, like scanning through the “Southeast Coastwise Inward and Outward Slave Manifests., 1790-1860.” This is a record set on Ancestry that provides documentation of enslaved people being shipped along mainly the U.S. East Coast.
The record set is particularly informative after 1808, when the Act of 1807 banning the international slave trade required shippers to provide documentation about the people being shipped and to affirm that they had been “imported” prior to 1808. After 1808, the records give the enslaved person’s gender, age, height, complexion, owner, and owner’s residence.
I’ve been focusing on the records showing shipments outward bound from Savannah. Often these shipments were to Charleston, Darien, and Brunswick, but they also went to Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans among other places.
I’m looking for people held in slavery by Liberty County residents (or Savannahians whose names I recognize as owning property in Liberty County). I’m recording these shipments in a spreadsheet to correlate them later with probate and other information.
So far I’ve covered the period from 1790 to 1821, and most shipments appears to be one or a few enslaved people probably traveling with their owners, possibly as servants.
The most striking, and disturbing, shipments are a few of larger numbers of people, including children, to New Orleans, where I assume they were to be sold.
I’m expecting these numbers to pick up as I move into the records from the 1830s and 1840s, when there was an economic boom (followed by a bust) and prices of enslaved people rose, encouraging their sale.
Research Snippets
I’ve gone down a rabbit hole recently researching a man named James Shannon. He was born in Ireland in 1799, and moved to Liberty County in his early 20s to teach at the well known Sunbury Academy. He was apparently recruited by Dr. William McWhir, a fellow Irishman who had come to Sunbury after the Revolutionary War.
Shannon only lived in Liberty County for about six years. He was an ambitious academic and clergyman, who became president of several colleges, including the University of Missouri, and his pro-slavery views were politically influential in the border state controversies in the critical period before the Civil War.
How did an Irishman come to hold such strong views on the slavery question? Like Dr. McWhir, Shannon married a local Liberty County woman who brought enslaved people into the marriage. Those six years in Sunbury likely deeply influenced his views. I’m working on understanding better how that happened and, most importantly, what happened to the people held in slavery by him, particularly after his wife died during their time in Louisiana.
I did find a reference in a newspaper article to Toney, owned by Shannon, who served as the University of Missouri’s bellringer in the 1850s. Shannon’s wife had inherited a Toney from her aunt in 1823, and probably the same person was listed in her uncle’s estate inventory in 1807. Could this be the same Toney? I plan to contact the University of Missouri to see if I can find out more information about Toney, particularly his age.
What I’ve Been Reading
I’ve been dipping into a book called “Black Americans in Victorian Britain” by Jeffrey Green. I’m hoping to find references to Shadrach, a Liberty County biracial child who was sent to England to live with his uncle after his father died in the late 1820s. His father acknowledged him in his will and tried to leave him 1/4 of his estate but the courts disallowed that. I have a good bit of information about what happened to him in England, and what happened to the other people held in slavery by his father, and plan to write it up.
This book focuses more on formerly enslaved Americans who made their livings in England as anti-slavery witnesses and crusaders, so it’s unlikely to mention him but does provide a very interesting window into how he might have been treated at that time.