slavery

Black Creek enslavers.

The 1860 slave schedule is the only known surviving, contemporaneous list of the men and women who enslaved black people in Wilson County. It is not a list of the enslaved themselves, as none are named in that census. Rather, the schedule described people by “color” (black or mulatto), sex, and age.

Organized by township, this series will set forth these enslavers, the number of people they held in 1860, and the ages of the youngest and oldest people held. Where possible, I will also name people known to be enslaved by each person. They may or may not correspond to people described in the 1860 slave schedule. The paucity of such identifications is heartbreaking, and I continue to search.

We start with Black Creek district, which was part of Wayne County prior to 1855. The 1860 slave schedule lists 59 enslavers in this section of Wilson County. The largest, by an order of magnitude, was Stephen Woodard Sr.:

Sallie Simms — 10, age 7 months to 72 years

William Thompson — 22, age 0.5 to 44 years

Dr. A.G. Brooks —  29, age 1 to 55 years

Enos Barnes — 2, age 15 and 18 years

Celia Barnes — 2, age 28 and 53 years

James Barnes — 9, age 3 to 50 years

Jesse Watson — 1, age 10 years

Jacob Daniel — 4, age 9 to 60 years

Joseph Farrell — 9, age 5 months to 38 years

James Nusom — 22, age 1 to 28 years

Jesse Sauls — 7, age 3 to  26 years

Nancy Bass —  8, age 5 months to 36 years

Belinda Aycock — 6, age 3 to 38 years

  • Hannah, Arthur and Matilda

Sallie Daniel — 14, age 11 months to 53 years

Elisha Bass — 6, age 3 months to 30 years

Jeremiah Bass — 3, age 4 months to 17 years

Ephraim Bass — 1, age 36 years

Jinnet Holland — 4, age 4 months to 23 years

Jonathan Barnes — 19, age 3 months to 65 years

Henry King — 11, age 3 months to 27 years

Edith Horn — 13, age 2 to 55 years

  • Elijah, Linnet, Patience and child Hilard, Will, Litha, Jeffrey, Sarah

Milly Barnes — 21, age 4 to 78 years

Larry Nusom — 21, age 1 to 39 years

Stephen Woodard Jr. — 16, age 6 months to 30 years

Stephen Woodard Sr. — 65, age 1 to 39 years

Amos Horn in trust — 9, age 2 months to 37 years

Henry Pope and two others — 3, age 1 to 36 years

R.M. Cox — 15, age 9 months to 33 years

Arthur Bass — 7, age 8 months to 35 years

James H. Barnes — 8, age 8 months to  32 years

Joseph S. Holt — 3, age 5 to 40 years

Jesse Bass — 7, age 1 to 35 years

  • Bob and Rhoda

Abigail Simms — 8, age 1 to 60 years

  • Harriet, Frank and Ellen

P.H. Simms — 3, age 1 to 35 years

  • Harriet, Frank and Ellen

Mary A. Simms — 3, age 3 to 33 years

Thomas Amason — 2, age 13 and 17 years

B.F. Briggs — 3, age 6 to 12 years

Ichabod Pearson — 7, age 1 to 35 years

John P. Bardin — 7, age 6 to 50 years

Arthur Bardin — 2, age 19 and 20 years

Zilpha Daniel — 14, age 2 months to 39 years

W.R. Bass — 2, age 11 and 35 years

W.R. Bass in trust — 7, age  6 to 73 years

Benjamin Barnes — 3, age 6 to 9 years

Annis Bass — 1, age 68 years

Ezekiel Smith — 14, age 1 to 33 years

Stephen Privett — 4, age 1 to 20 years

Jonah Barnes — 10, age 2 to 38 years

Calvin Barnes — 1, age 36 years

Ruffin Barnes  — 4, age 6 to 65 years

Elias Barnes — 2, age 7 months to 17 years

Jacob Woodard — 5, age 17 to 65 years

Felix Woodard — 2, age 6 months to 17 years

Joel Rose — 1, age 11 years

McKinley Durden — 6, age 9 to 35 years

Amos Horn — 2, age 12 to 35 years

Robinson H. Baker — 11, age 4 months to 34 years

Granberry Ethridge — 1, age  14  years

W.W. Williamson — 3, age 18 to 50 years

 

A pause to allow some to exit the room.

If you agree that there’s too much emphasis on “how bad Slavery was,” this is not the place for you.

I have chronicled the terrible traumas that slavery inflicted on black people in what is now Wilson County. I will continue to do so. If you want the hopeful, positive, apologist, unwoke version of the history of American slavery, try the Smithsonian museums in about six months.

The Wilson Ledger, 19 February 1861.

Read about J.W. Hamlet and Jacob D. Farmer and their Negro dogs here.

Notes from Mississippi: Aberdeen and slavery.

Monroe Democrat, 12 May 1852.

Why were Robert Adams and Wyatt Moye, slave traders from Edgecombe County, North Carolina, drawn to Aberdeen, today a sleepy town of fewer than 5000 people?

Again, John Rodabough, this time from his 8 April 1971 Aberdeen Examiner column “Part I Slavery”:

“That portion of Monroe County opened to settlement by the treaty of 1816 was a mixture of sandy-loam soils and hills covered with thick forests. It was connected to the outside world by a sometimes navigable river and an almost impossible road called Gaines Trace. This was land which did not attract the large plantation owner with his multitude of slaves. … However, the Chickasaw treaty which gave up the lands west of the Tombigbee River in 1832 greatly changed the situation.

“The Black Prairie, as it is often called was ideal for the plantation system. The thick black lime — impregnated soil was fertile and seemed inexhaustible. … Scions of eastern families rushed into the area, and … the slave population [increased] from 943 in 1830 to 4083 in 1840. … It was a land which in another decade would be a small replica of the Natchez District.

“In 1836 the city of Aberdeen was founded. … During the 1840’s the Aberdeen newspapers frequently had advertisements dealing with runaway slaves and notices of sales. In general it was a decade of fulfilling the processes begun in the 1830s.

“By 1850 the slave population was 11,717, and the white population stood at only 9418. By this time Aberdeen and the western half of Monroe County had become a part of the legendary Old South of thousands of salves toiling in view of the pillared mansion. A contemporary newspaper stated the county’s condition in these words:

The prairie is now one vast cotton field, with nothing to relieve the eye but its lengthy zigzag fencing — where no sound is heard to break the dull monotony of the oppressive silence, save the harsh command of the overseer or the sharp crack of his whip as he drives the sooty negro on through mud and rain. All is dreary, gloomy, and monotonous. On a cloudy day, it forcibly reminds one of the fabulous world of gloom, which borders on the river Styx. Is it not the shore from which many will take ferriage to Pluto’s dominions?

“[By 1850, Aberdeen] was not the second largest city of Mississippi and was rapidly overtaking Natchez, which was only slightly larger. As a result of its size and wealth, the city was considered one of the three permanent slave markets in the state. There was only one regular slave auction house, but many transactions took place at commission houses, certain street corners, and on the Courthouse steps. The slave auction house was that of Robert Adams & Moses J. Wicks; it was located on the southwest corner of Commerce and Walnut Street in a brick building. M.J. Wicks & Co. began advertising in Aberdeen in 1845 as a dry good and grocery house. It appears the firm entered the slave trade in January, 1848.

“By 1850 Robert Adams was associated with the firm, and he served as a purchasing agent in the East. The firm was dissolved and reinstated several times in the late 1850s, finally evolving into a banking partnership. Others important in the trade were: L.D. Leedy’s Action House, Hester & Lancaster; Wm. H. Kidd & Company, who hoped “to be able to please the most fastidious taste: Hampton & Herndon; Saunders & Bradley; and J.B. Franklin of Lauderdale, Tennessee, who advertised in 1852 that he was bringing 100 Negroes to the market at fair prices — ‘Small profits and quick sales is my motto.’

“Most of the Negroes brought in by outside speculators, or ‘speckled ladies’ as the Negroes called them, were sold at Clarke’s Corner, which is now the southeast corner of Commerce and Chestnut Streets. These transient vendors of slaves had to pay $1 for each slave exhibited and $5 for each slave sold in the city of Aberdeen.”

Two negro houses.

On 9 December 1835, James Tartt leased David Shallington for nine years two acres on which Shallington was to build “a log house with a good Shingle roof and plank floor also tw[o] negros houses, crib and smoke house …”

In the 1840 census of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, David Shallington claimed ten enslaved people. [Shallington lived in what is now Joyners township, Wilson County, close to the modern Edgecombe County line.]

In the 1850 slave schedule of Edgecombe County, Shallington again reported ten enslaved people — eight men and boys aged 30, 18, 16, 12, 11, 6, 5, and 2; a woman aged 25; and a girl aged 3.

By 1860, Shallington had relocated to the coast to North Creek township, Beaufort County, North Carolina. The slave schedule reported him with six men and boys aged 50, 30, 28, 25, 23, and 20; a woman aged 26; and a girl aged 14.

We have met two of the men enslaved by David Pender Shallington — John Shallington and Union veteran Daniel Shallington.

Deed Book 22, page 370, Edgecombe County Register of Deeds Office, Tarboro, North Carolina. 

Rules and regulations for patrollers.

Prior to Wilson County’s formation in 1855, much of its present-day territory lay in Edgecombe, including everything east of a line running a couple of miles inside present-day Interstate 95 and north of Contentnea Creek. In 1844, the Tarboro’ Press published “Rules and Regulations to be Observed by the Patrollers of the several Districts in the County of Edgecombe.” Slave patrols, known as patrollers or patty rollers, were government-sanctioned groups of armed men charged with monitoring and enforcing discipline upon enslaved people.

Edgecombe County patrollers operated under a set of comprehensive and precise rules. Tasked with visiting ever house inhabited by enslaved people at least once a month, they rode at night. They searched for firearms and “seditious publications” and kept a sharp lookout for any enslaved person out and about more than a mile from home. They could beat people — up to 15 lashes — for having too much fun. On Sundays, their job was to make sure enslaved people were not “strolling about” enjoying their one day off or selling trinkets for pocket change. Patrollers ran down runaways and, if met with “insolence,” could drop a whip 39 times across a black back. They were compensated for their services.

Tarboro’ Press, 9 March 1844.

Recommended reading, no. 8: the Second Middle Passage.

You cannot understand the men and women who emerged from slavery to appear in the 1870 census of Wilson County without understanding who was not there — the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and children sold South in America’s domestic slave trade, known as the Second Middle Passage. 

I have no ancestors from Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana or Texas, but my DNA matches scores of African-Americans who do. They are descended from the close kin of my North Carolina and Virginia ancestors, and the bits of identical chromosome we share is the only evidence of the crime that befell our common forebears.

To understand the depth and breadth of this trade, please study Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. 

To glimpse how this trade unfolded among our own Wilson County people, see:

To see how buying and selling men, women, and children even locally devastated families:

Distribution of the slave population of the U.S. South.

In about 1861, the United States Coastal Survey issued a map showing the distribution of enslaved people throughout the South. As Susan Schulten noted in a 9 December 2010 piece called “Visualizing Slavery,” “[t]hough many Americans knew that dependence on slave labor varied throughout the South, these maps uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion.”

Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States Compiled from the Census of 1860 — Sold for the Benefit of the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of the U. S. Army.

A close-up of eastern North Carolina shows that Wilson County, with a population 37% enslaved, lay at the western edge of the state’s heaviest band of slave-holding counties.

Lane Street Project: Juneteenth.

This headstone may mark the burial of someone who lived and died in slavery. It stands in a small cemetery in western Wilson County known to have been established for enslaved people and situated adjacent to the cemetery of the slaveowning family.

Though every large slaveholding farm probably had one, I know the exact location of only one cemetery in Wilson County established prior to the Civil War to hold the remains of enslaved people. (Please speak up if you can lead me to more.) Rountree, Odd Fellows, and Vick Cemeteries were not so-called slave cemeteries, but many men and women buried within them were born enslaved.

I call the names of those we know:

Dave Barnes (1861-1913)

Della Hines Barnes (1858-1935)

Smith Bennett (1852-1920)

Mark H. Cotton (ca.1840-1934)

Lucy Hill Dawson (1860-1917)

Rev. Henry W. Farrior (1859-1937)

Prince Mincey (1841-1902)

Rev. John H. Scott (1857-1940)

Hardy Tate (1853-1938)

Rachel Barnes Taylor (1863-1927)

Daniel Vick (ca.1840-1908)

Fannie Blount Vick (ca.1842-1890s)

Samuel H. Vick (1861-1946)

 

The great black section.

The Local History Room of Wilson County Public Library’s Main Branch holds a copy of Daisy Hendley Gold’s typewritten manuscript, “A Town Named Wilson,” published in 1949. It doesn’t have anything to say about African-Americans except this:

“Evidence of prosperity and the possession of cash money was found in the large number of slave owners in Wilson town and county. This was the period when this area was one of the great ‘black’ sections of the state.

“In 1855 William Daniel was prosperous enough to pay Amos Horne the following substantial sums for slaves: $875 for slave Harry, 19 years; $875 for Alfred, 18; $800 for Oney, 17; $675 for Gray, 14.

“In the same year John Harper who lived near Wilson left three slaves, Jason, Lettice and Martha, in trust with General Joshua Barnes for the ‘sole and separate use and benefit of Mary Harper.'”