“Underwritten by a ‘We the People’ grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Race and Slavery Petitions Project was a cooperative venture between the Dr. Loren Schweninger’s Race and Slavery Petitions Project and the Electronic Resources and Information Technology Department of University Libraries at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The Project offers a searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia.

“The Race and Slavery Petitions Project contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites, extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, as well as from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners.”

Here’s document set 0686 (Accession #21284312): “Edgecombe County, North Carolina. In February 1830, Abner Eason borrowed $500 from Wright Edmondson,” signing a note for payment. In May 1830, Eason recalls, Edmondson asked him to put a lien on ‘Certain negroes,’ including Sampson, Nancy and her three children Fereby [Phereby], China [Chainy], and London to secure the note, offering him an additional $300 discounted at 20 percent. In early August 1830, Eason recalls, Edmondson told him to give him a ‘right to his negroes & let him have them to work & pay the interest on the money.’ In late August 1830, Eason recalls, Edmondson said that Nancy was afraid that her two children, Henry and Sherrod, would be sold to a speculator, and Edmondson proposed that the boys be exchanged for his slave Milly and he would pay Eason $240, the boys being worth about $500 and Milly $260. To all this Eason agreed. More than a decade later, Eason seeks to pay his debt and retrieve his slaves but Edmondson claims ownership. Eason brings suit.”

I immediately recognized Abner Eason and Wright Edmondson as slaveholding men who lived in the Saratoga-Stantonsburg area and requested a copy of the file. Many thanks to Project Director Richard Cox, who responded quickly with this file and a related one. More to come!