Book is published by Harvard University Press - 1999
C Presidents and Fellows of Harvard
Anyone doing AMERICAN genealogy research is bound to go back far enough to find that someone was a slave, slave owner, or living during slave times. This book is the first and only I have ever encountered which brings the reality of the situations forth in great detail of the human considerations of both slave and slave trader, Masters and Mistresses, people born free, people who bought their own freedom, people who were returned to slavery. It's about the socio-cultural aspects of life in slave territory and how it differed from state to state.
Did you know slaves sometimes attempted to sell themselves and their loved ones when a plantation or estate was liquidating, so that they could be with each other or local to each other and have some influence on who they would work for?
Did you know that some sellers attempted to and succeeded in hiding the fact that a slave was being sold because he or she was terminally ill or unable to work? Sometimes they would blacken graying hair, fill in chests shrunken by TB with straw, or put all their slaves in new matching suits or calico dresses to erase some of the differences between them.
Estate liquidation was one of the main reasons that slaves who had been with one Master for a long time might get sold or split up. If there was debt he or she might have no say in the matter as it would have been a seizure of property. Many slavers were single men who traveled a lot for business and worked only until they could secure land and marry. They slept out in the rough with the slaves they were trading. Some met boats and moved slaves to holding pens in other states where they might be for months between seasons.
As in any other business there were levels of purchase, such as brokers who acted for others, commissions to other traders, and many employees who did had no personal interest in buying or selling themselves but acted as sales people or fed the slaves. Conflicts between traders sometimes meant bad blood and law suits.
The role of women as traders is also explored more thoroughly then I have ever encountered in a book before. A slave woman might be bought because she could reproduce and thus add wealth and value to a owner's estate. Only men went to market to buy slaves for their wife and children's needs. In Louisiana a married woman had no right to buy or sell slaves (real estate) unless he had her husband's permission, declared herself separate in property from her husband and could thus trade in her own name; this meant she legally was not responsible for his debts either. But even if she had the legal right, she did not go to market but sent her husband or another man. How people managed to get around all sorts of existing laws and prevailing attitudes is in play here.
Perhaps most interesting to me is what happened when a slave appeared white or almost white, and became a "fancy" woman, which meant that she might be sold for much more than someone in a first rate category. This means that she was usually bought to be a sex slave or mistress, by someone who had a fantasy and who might or might not fulfill that fantasy.. Some sold for over $5000 at a time when the average was under $1000. (Please don't make the error of assuming that is in today's dollars.) "Fancy" women were sold at auction rather than at set price or negotiated price. Men might compete to get the most beautiful slave women and show off that they could afford to. In the paperwork they would describe these women as cooks or domestics or seamstresses, so if you encounter a very high price for a slave in your research, think again.
Buyers sometimes came up with a physical type they were looking for, for their own reasons. They might decide they needed men with longer arms, for instance.
This book is one for your reference collection, a keeper.
