The Demographic Contrast between Slave Life in Jamaica and Virginia, 1760–18651 RICHARD S. DUNN Co-Executive Officer, American Philosophical Society

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HE AFRICANS who were shipped as slaves to the Caribbean sugar islands from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century encountered enormously different conditions from those experienced by the African slaves who were landed in North America. The most obvious difference was demographic. The Caribbean slaves experienced continuous decrease, and the North American slaves experienced continuous increase. In order to sustain their labor gangs the Caribbean planters imported more than four million Africans, whereas only four hundred thousand Africans came to North America.2 Jamaica and Virginia—two of the most important slave societies founded by the British—epitomize this dramatic demographic contrast. More than eight hundred thousand slaves were imported from Africa to Jamaica and fewer than one hundred thousand to Virginia. Yet by the close of the slave trade in 1808, Virginia had a larger black population than Jamaica.3 To get a first-hand sense of what this demographic contrast meant, we need to examine particular communities in Jamaica and Virginia with comprehensive data. In this essay I focus upon two such communities: Mesopotamia Estate in western Jamaica and Mount Airy Plantation in tidewater Virginia. The owners of these two plantations—the Barhams at Mesopotamia and the Tayloes at Mount Airy—kept richly

1 Read

12 November 2005. recent estimate by David Eltis is that 9,468,000 African slaves were landed in America: 4,371,100 to the Caribbean, 3,902,000 to Brazil, and 361,100 to North America. See David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 35–37, 45. 3 In 1808 the Jamaica census recorded 350,000 slaves and 30,000 free colored, whereas Virginia at this date could claim 380,000 slaves and 30,000 free blacks. 2A

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Figure 1. Mesopotamia as it looks today. Photograph by the author.

detailed records. Both the Barhams and the Tayloes compiled annual inventories listing their slaves by name, age, and occupation—which enables me to reconstruct the year-by-year population structure and the individual biographies of the 1,103 people who lived at Mesopotamia between 1762 and 1833, and the 977 people who lived at Mount Airy between 1808 and 1865.4 The Mesopotamia records show nearly two slave deaths for every slave birth. To keep this Jamaica plantation operable, the Barhams were constantly bringing in new workers. At Mount Airy, by contrast, there were nearly two slave births for every slave death. Here the Tayloes were constantly moving their surplus laborers to new work sites, or were selling them to new owners. Thus demographic developments had great impact upon both of these slave communities, but in opposite ways. Mesopotamia, now called Barham Farm, is situated in the fertile Westmoreland Plain of western Jamaica. Sugar cane has been cultivated here for more than three hundred years. When I visited Barham Farm, there

4 The Mesopotamia slave inventories are in the Barham Papers, Clarendon Manuscript Deposit at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (hereafter cited as Barham). The Mount Airy slave inventories are in the Tayloe Papers at the Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va. (hereafter cited as Tayloe). I wish to thank the seventh Earl of Clarendon and Mrs. H. Gwynne Tayloe and her family for permission to cite these records.

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were no visible evidences of the thousands of slaves who once lived here. The eighteenth-century Great House had been replaced by a modern estate manager’s bungalow (fig. 1). I asked to be taken to the old graveyard, and two men led me to a barbed wire enclosure completely filled with trees and invasive tropical plants. As we climbed inside the barbed wire, they warned me to watch out for the stinging nettles. Once inside, trapped by jungle growth, I saw no way to reach the only tombstone I could see, which was jutting upward at a crazy angle twenty feet away. What to do? Suddenly I realized that the ground under my feet was as flat and firm as a table top. I must be standing on another tombstone! My guides hacked away the plants and grass enveloping us with their machetes, and sure enough, there was a large stone slab under our feet (fig. 2). I uncovered an incised date: 1735. Then a name: BARHAM. Gradually the entire inscription came into view: HERE LIETH THE BODY OF SARAH ARCEDACKNE SISTER TO MARY BARHAM WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE MAY 22 IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1735 AGED 58. I had stumbled onto the grave of Sarah Arcedeckne, the sister-inlaw of Dr. Henry Barham, who owned and operated Mesopotamia in 1735. Henry Barham’s wife also died in May 1735; she has a tombstone in this graveyard that I couldn’t find. The deaths of these ladies

Figure 2. Uncovering the tomb of Sarah Arcedeckne. Photograph by the author.

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persuaded Henry Barham to leave Jamaica before the same thing happened to him. So in 1736 he departed for England, never to return. Before leaving, he took an inventory of his 248 slaves.5 There were equal numbers of males and females. Ages are not stated, but we know that most of the adults had recently been imported from Africa, and that a quarter of the slaves were children “not yet fit to work”—that is, under age ten. And there were no non-working invalids. Thus the population in 1736 was youthful and healthy. For the next century Mesopotamia was operated by absentee proprietors who lived in England. Henry Barham bequeathed Mesopotamia to his stepson Joseph Foster Barham I (1729–1789). Educated at Eton and Oxford, Joseph visited Jamaica for a year in 1750–51. He was a pious young man, and was distressed to find that the Mesopotamia slaves received no religious instruction, and indeed that no Christian mission work was carried out among the slaves anywhere in Jamaica. After returning to England, Barham joined the Moravian Church, a small sect in England but extremely active in overseas evangelism. Barham persuaded the Moravians to establish a mission at Mesopotamia that continued for more than seventy-five years, from 1759 to 1835. They built a chapel at Mesopotamia, quickly gathered a sizable black congregation, and produced a long series of richly informative diaries detailing their day-to-day struggles to reach and help the Mesopotamia slaves.6 Joseph Foster Barham was also concerned about the rapid turnover in his Mesopotamia slave force. By the time of his visit in 1750 more than half of the people who had been inventoried in 1736 were dead or gone, and they had been replaced with 168 new people—principally from the African slave ships. Wanting to keep track of the population changes after he returned to England, he ordered his overseer to compile annual inventories starting in 1751. Barham’s overseers kept adding new features to these inventories. From 1762 onward they reported the name, age, occupation, and state of health of each slave, along with an annual birth and death register.7 This makes it possible to diagram the age structure of the Mesopotamia population in 1762, as shown in figure 3. An age diagram of a standard population is pyramidal, with numerous young people at the base gradually tapering to the few oldest people at the top—males shown to the left and females to the right. But figure 3 is not pyramidal. The diagram shows many more slaves in their for5 Henry Barham’s inventory of his Mesopotamia slaves, dated 18 April 1736, is in Barham b 37. 6 The missionaries sent their diaries to the Moravian headquarters in Germany; thirty diaries from Mesopotamia, written between 1759 and 1832, are today stored in the Archiv der Brüder-Unität in Herrnhut. 7 The first fully articulated Mesopotamia inventory, dated 10 July 1762, is in Barham b 37.

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Figure 3. Mesopotamia population pyramid, 1762

ties than young children under age ten. Is this because the age estimates are wildly erroneous? My answer is no. Having correlated the 1762 inventory with fifteen previous Mesopotamia inventories, I believe that the age statements are generally quite accurate up to about age forty, and somewhat exaggerated for the older people—although the black and shaded blocks on the diagram show that almost all of the slaves said to be past age thirty had been living at Mesopotamia for a great many years. Figure 3 thus demonstrates that the Mesopotamia population, which had been youthful and vigorous in 1736, had become elderly by 1762. How do we explain this development? Since the managers of Mesopotamia had been constantly bringing in young replacement slaves from Africa, we might expect to find a large supply of prime-aged workers in 1762, but in fact there were not enough slaves in their twenties and thirties for effective sugar production. The answer appears to be that the managers of Mesopotamia had been working their slaves brutally hard in the 1740s and 1750s—particularly the new young African laborers in the first field gang, many of whom died within a few years of their arrival on the estate. Thirteen previous inventories taken between 1736 and 1761 identify 287 slaves who died during this period, or more than 11 per year. Furthermore, in the 1762 inventory a quarter of the adult slaves were described as non-working invalids—adding up to a horrific record

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of early death and broken health. The gender balance of 1736 had also been lost by 1762; there were so few young women that the pool of mothers or potential mothers was alarmingly small. In sum, from every point of view the Mesopotamia population was in very bad shape. During the next dozen years, from 1763 to 1774, Barham’s managers reduced pressure on the Mesopotamia labor force by cutting back on sugar production. The death rate dropped and 83 new slaves were acquired, or 7 per year, most of them African boys in their early teens from the slave ships. Then came the American Revolutionary War, which hit Jamaica hard. Shipping to and from the island was disrupted by privateers, food shortages were endemic, and sugar profits were so low that Barham stopped buying new African slaves. Between 1775 and 1783 the Mesopotamia population shrank from 278 to 240. But with the close of the war economic prospects immediately brightened and Barham went on a spending spree; he bought 64 new slaves for the estate in 1784–86, building the population up to 300 at the time of his death in 1789. Figure 4 shows the results of this spending spree. With his recent purchases Joseph Foster Barham I had dramatically strengthened the Mesopotamia production system. There were now many more young adults in their twenties and thirties, and many fewer over-aged workers in their forties, so the labor force was far more functional than in 1762. The diagram shows that most of the prime-aged workers came either from Africa or from other Jamaican plantations; relatively few had been born on the estate. These prime workers had mostly arrived quite recently, between 1784 and 1786. Figure 4 thus shows how it was possible to reshape a Caribbean slave gang very quickly with large purchases of young replacement slaves. But how long would this quick fix last? For in all other respects the old demographic problems at Mesopotamia persisted. The proportion of youngsters under age twenty was even smaller than in 1762, and the proportion of females was also smaller. There were still twice as many deaths as births. In 1789 Joseph Foster Barham II (1759–1832) inherited the estate from his father. He had visited Mesopotamia as a young man in 1778– 81, but never returned once he became the owner of the place. In Jamaica he had witnessed the planters rushing to the slave ships to haggle over the purchase of captive Africans, and that disgusted him. Years later when he sat in Parliament he joined William Wilberforce in voting to terminate the African slave trade in 1807, and stood out as one of the very few Caribbean slaveholders to take that position. But Barham still needed to replenish his Mesopotamia work force, so he told his Jamaica agents to purchase new people from other Jamaican estates rather than from the slave ships. Declaring that he wanted three people to do the work of two

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Figure 4. Mesopotamia population pyramid, 1789

and thereby alleviate the living and working conditions of his slaves, Joseph II brought 260 newcomers into Mesopotamia between 1791 and 1819 and built his gang to a peak total of 415 in December 1820. Thereafter he bought no more slaves. And since deaths continued to outnumber births in the 1820s, the population dropped year by year to 329 in 1833. Joseph II came to believe that his Mesopotamia people must be responsible for their demographic failure. Accepting the arguments of his Jamaican attorneys, Barham judged his laborers to be naturally “dissolute” and “dreadful idlers.” In 1823 he published a pamphlet entitled Considerations on the Abolition of Negro Slavery, in which he claimed that the slaves in the British Caribbean, if given freedom, would be incapable of productive individual enterprise. He did not live long enough to see what happened when his slaves acquired their freedom, for he died two years before Parliament decreed the abolition of slavery in Jamaica and in all other British possessions around the world in 1834.8 Joseph Foster Barham II’s probate inventory taken in August 1833 8 On 1 August 1834 the emancipation process began when slave children under the age of six were fully freed, while all the other slaves were redefined as “apprenticed labourers” and were ordered to work forty-five hours a week for their former owners without pay. After four years of this semi-slavery, the apprentices were manumitted on 1 August 1838.

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Figure 5. Mesopotamia population pyramid, 1833

gives us our final look at the Mesopotamia slave population. Figure 5 shows that the age structure was now considerably more pyramidal than it had been in 1762, and far less distorted by the recent importation of slaves than in 1789. From a labor perspective, the proportion of prime-aged workers was much smaller than in figure 4, which reflected the fact that Barham had acquired almost all of his new slaves in 1791– 1819 from other Jamaican estates in family groups, including many non-working children and elderly invalids. But from a social perspective, Barham’s policy had begun to stabilize the Mesopotamia population. By 1833 the proportion of young women was increasing a little, and the proportion of young children was larger than in 1762 or 1789, although still strikingly small. Perhaps the most significant demographic change was that by 1833 there were fewer males than females at Mesopotamia. The gender imbalance of 1762 and 1789 was now reversed, and in the prime field gang the women now considerably outnumbered the men. Thus, although Mesopotamia’s population structure in 1833 was quite different from the structure in 1762, we once again see a work force not very well designed for effective sugar production. Unfortunately, I do not know what happened at Mesopotamia after the slaves were emancipated in 1834. Joseph Foster Barham II’s heirs continued to operate the plantation, but they left no paper trail, so it is impossible to tell how many (if any) of the new freedmen and freedwomen continued to work for wages as sugar laborers. Further-

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more, though the government of Jamaica took a census of the entire island population in 1841, all of the detailed local census returns have disappeared, so it is impossible to trace any of the individual Mesopotamia slaves from bondage to freedom. Restricting our attention to the slave era, the most striking of the many demographic problems at Mesopotamia between 1762 and 1833 is the extremely low birth rate. Almost half of the women had no recorded children, and generally the mothers had very small families. The African-born women produced even fewer babies than the Mesopotamia-born women, perhaps because they had more difficulty finding sexual partners. Ironically, the Mesopotamia birth rate was boosted somewhat by the sexual predations of the white managerial staff. These men constituted less than 5 percent of the adult males on the estate yet sired more than 10 percent of the children born between 1762 and 1833. And the Mesopotamia birth registers, which identify the mothers of the mulatto and quadroon babies,9 indicate that the whites pursued young slave girls who were Jamaica-born rather than African, and that they particularly sought out light-skinned women. There are clearly several reasons for the low birth rate at Mesopotamia—and on all other Jamaican sugar estates—which can be categorized as disease, diet, depression, and labor. First, the slaves inhabited a toxic environment in which African newcomers had no immunity against Caribbean diseases and Caribbean natives had no immunity against African diseases. But many of the Mesopotamia people survived to old age in this environment, and some of the women described in the inventories as “dreadfully diseased” bore children, while others in better health were childless. Second, the slave diet was very deficient in protein and fat content, and some of the semi-starved women on the estate may not have been able to ovulate, let alone produce healthy offspring. Third, we know from the slave records that several Mesopotamia mothers were accused of infanticide because they “overlaid” their newborn babies, and it is certainly possible that some of the pregnant women deliberately aborted their fetuses. But the most important factor in my opinion was the brutal labor regimen, which particularly affected almost all of the women of child-bearing age. At Mesopotamia, as on all Jamaican sugar estates, the most attractive jobs—for craft workers and stock keepers—went exclusively to the

9 The Mesopotamia records carefully identified all mixed-race babies because they were considered to be of a higher order than the all-black slaves. Once they were old enough to work, the mulatto and quadroon males were given skilled craft jobs and the females became domestics; they were never put into the field gangs. Twelve of the fifty-two mixed-race slaves who lived at Mesopotamia between 1761 and 1833 were manumitted by their fathers.

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men. Only a few women could be employed as domestics to serve their white masters, and all of the other women were forced into field labor. Typically at about age twenty a healthy girl was placed in the first field gang—which performed the most strenuous physical labor on the estate in regimented lockstep—and there she stayed for a decade or more until her constitution began to break down and she was moved to the second gang, where the work load was much lighter. From 1762 to about 1790 the Mesopotamia first gang was male-dominated, but after 1790 there were always more women than men in this work unit. Toiling twelve hours a day, six days a week, the first gang workers did everything in unison and by hand, digging cane holes, planting and weeding the cane, and harvesting it at crop time. This was punishing work, very hazardous for a newly pregnant woman, and it undoubtedly facilitated large numbers of miscarriages and stillbirths. Interestingly, the Mesopotamia woman who bore the largest recorded number of children—thirteen—was Minny (1770–1826), who spent all of her career as the overseer’s housekeeper and never worked at field labor. 10 Minny was the closest thing possible in the Jamaican slave era to a homemaker, which is what all of the other slave women wanted to be. And as soon as emancipation occurred in Jamaica, most of the freed women stopped working in the cane fields and embraced domestic duties, and the birth rate immediately zoomed upward. Turning to Mount Airy, we encounter a very different scene. When I visited this estate, I greatly admired the Palladian plantation house, which is one of the finest architectural showplaces of colonial Virginia (fig. 6). It was built by John Tayloe II in the 1750s, and has been occupied by the Tayloe family ever since. The house contains a splendid collection of family portraits and heirloom antiques, and to the rear, beyond the garden, one sees the spreading fields where the slaves grew tobacco in the eighteenth century and corn and wheat in the nineteenth century (fig. 7). Today the cash crop is soybeans. There are no visible reminders of slavery at Mount Airy. The old slave quarters and workshops are long gone, and the slave graveyard has not been identified. But two members of the Tayloe family kept outstanding slave records: John Tayloe III, the master from 1792 to 1828, and his son William Henry Tayloe, who operated Mount Airy through the Civil War. The Tayloes were among the largest slaveholders in Virginia from

10 After a stillbirth at age thirteen, Minny produced her first (mulatto) child, Susannah, at age fifteen. She had five more mulatto children and seven black children. Her last child, born in 1814 when she was forty-four, was a black boy named Joseph Foster Barham.

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Figure 6. Front view of Mount Airy. Photograph by the author.

Figure 7. Rear view of Mount Airy. Photograph by the author.

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the 1730s to the 1860s, but unfortunately we have very little information about their slaves before 1800. We know that William Tayloe, the founder of this Virginia dynasty, owned 21 slaves in 1710. His son John Tayloe I greatly expanded operations and in 1747 held 167 bondsmen at Mount Airy and 161 at other Chesapeake worksites. During the next generation John Tayloe II probably built up the Mount Airy total to about 250 at the time of his death in 1779. The county tax lists tell us that in 1785 the Mount Airy slave population stood at 265, and that it was youthful in composition, with 110 children under the age of sixteen, and only a dozen people too old or too sick to be taxed. John Tayloe III (1771–1828), a contemporary of Joseph Foster Barham II at Mesopotamia, inherited Mount Airy at age eight in 1779 and was sent to England for his education immediately after the Revolution, first to Eton and then to St. John’s College, Cambridge. When he returned home in 1792, John III found that there were about 380 slaves at Mount Airy, which was more than he needed. So he placed the following concisely worded advertisement in the local newspapers: “For sale. 200 Virginia born men, women, and children, all ages and descriptions.” The phrase “Virginia born” is telling: none of the slaves were African because the Tayloes had stopped buying from the slave ships at least fifty years before. Probably John III was selling slaves to pay his father’s debts, and he may also have been pruning his agricultural work force because he was switching from tobacco to grain production, which was much less labor intensive. How many slaves did Tayloe sell in 1792? Probably more than 100. His records from the 1790s have not survived, but according to the county tax lists the total number of slaves at Mount Airy fell from 380 in 1792 to 270 in 1794. But these huge losses were quickly eradicated as the population built up again through natural increase. By 1809, when the first complete surviving inventory was taken, there were 381 slaves at Mount Airy— just about the same total as in 1792. The Mount Airy slave inventory taken on 1 January 1809 lists every man, woman, and child by name, age, occupation, and value, and identifies the mothers of all children under the age of ten.11 The Mount Airy slaves in 1809 were divided into two groups: 105 people (domestics, craft workers, and their children) who lived on the home plantation, and 276 people (the field workers and their children) who lived on eight farm quarters. The age statements in the inventory of

11 The 1809 inventory is entitled “A General Inventory taken at John Tayloes Esq Mount Airy Department the beginning of January 1809”; it is found in the earliest surviving Mount Airy inventory book, Tayloe d 538.

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Figure 8. Mount Airy population pyramid, 1809

1809 appear to be quite accurate,12 and I have used them to construct the population pyramid shown in figure 8. Unlike any of the Mesopotamia diagrams, we have here a genuine step pyramid. Mount Airy in 1809 had twice as many young children and half as many old people as Mesopotamia at the same date. The Mount Airy pyramid is not perfect, of course. The shortfall of boys aged zero to four and of girls aged five to nine probably reflects childhood deaths. But most of the other distortions result from John Tayloe III’s policy of selling people or moving them to other work sites. Relatively few of the slaves living on the estate in 1785 (shown in black) were still there in 1809, and it appears that when Tayloe had his big sale back in 1792 he sold more females than males in order to shape a male-dominated work force. The deficit in 1809 among young women aged fifteen to twenty-four is especially evident. But this shortage did not seriously impede population growth, since the Mount Airy women bore many more children than their counterparts in Jamaica. By 1809 John Tayloe III had a large family. He wanted to provide land and slaves for his seven sons. So he bought new farm quarters in Virginia and Maryland as well as two ironworks, and between 1809 and 12 The age statements for the older slaves show no evidence of guesswork age-heaping in five-year increments (i.e., forty, forty-five, fifty, etc.), which leads me to believe that this 1809 inventory was based upon a series of previous listings, and that John Tayloe III had begun to register his slaves annually perhaps as early as 1792 in a book of inventories that has not survived.

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1828 he transferred more than one hundred slaves that he didn’t need at Mount Airy to these new work sites. For example, he sent 44 young people to Cloverdale, an iron furnace in the Blue Ridge one hundred and fifty miles to the west, to work as founders, woodcutters, and colliers. In other ways Tayloe was constantly manipulating his slave force. He brought promising young people to the home plantation to be trained as domestics and craft workers. On the farm quarters he routinely separated boys and girls from their parents in their mid-teens and sent them to work at other farms. And he sold 44 slaves, mostly female farm hands— while sometimes keeping their young children. Whenever a slave defied him by running away, Tayloe sold him as soon as he was recaptured. All of this movement played havoc with family life. For example, a carpenter named Harry and his wife Agga (a spinner at the textile workshop) had eight children—John, Michael, Kitty, Caroline, Georgina, Ibby, Tom, and George. The parents lived out their lives at the home plantation, Harry dying in 1829 and Agga in 1856. But their children were widely dispersed. John was sent to Doctors Hall quarter at age ten to become a farm hand, and was sold in 1819 at age twentyone. Michael joined his father as a carpenter at Mount Airy until he was transferred to Cloverdale in remote western Virginia in 1827 at age twenty-seven. Kitty was sent to the Tayloes’ Octagon House in Washington as a housemaid in 1816 at age eleven. Caroline was sold the year before John in 1818 at age eleven. Georgina became a farm hand at Doctors Hall quarter in 1819 at age ten. Ibby was sent forty miles away to Windsor in King George County in 1822 at age eleven. Only the two youngest boys, Tom and George, who both became carpenters, remained permanently with their parents on the home plantation. Figure 9 shows the results of all this manipulation: the Mount Airy population pyramid in 1828, the year of John Tayloe III’s death. Less than half of the people who had been inventoried twenty years before were still living on the estate, yet the population was virtually the same size as in 1809, the sex ratio was unchanged, and the age structure was very similar. To be sure, the continuous out-migration had somewhat depleted the strength of the Mount Airy labor force. But, as in 1809, it was a strikingly young population, with half of the slaves under the age of twenty. And despite the exodus of many prime-aged slaves to new work sites, there were still plenty of males of prime working age. When John Tayloe III died in 1828, he liberated one slave—his faithful body servant Archy—and bequeathed more than seven hundred other African Americans to members of his family. His six sons 13

13 The

eldest of the seven brothers, John Tayloe IV, had died in 1824.

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Figure 9. Mount Airy population pyramid, 1828

took some trouble to keep slave families together when dividing their property, but they broke up their father’s large slave community totally and permanently, and the social disruption must have been very great. Mount Airy went to the third son, William Henry Tayloe, together with four farm quarters and a reduced—though still very sizable— work force of 212 slaves. William’s slave force was exceptionally youthful: a full third of his people were under the age of ten, and more than half were less than twenty years old. He had only forty-three men and women of prime working age in 1828, so he was short-handed, but the structure of his slave population boded well for continuing rapid growth and an ample future labor supply. William Henry Tayloe was labor rich, but land poor. The grain fields in tidewater Virginia were less productive than they had been, and agricultural prices were low. In the 1830s, William Henry began a bold effort to escape from this predicament. He joined with two of his brothers, Henry Augustine Tayloe and Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, in a pilot project to try growing cotton in the Deep South. Henry was the leader in what he called “our Alabama speculation.”14 Henry purchased a virgin tract of rich black soil in Marengo County, Alabama, and assembled a group of 43 Tayloe slaves to clear and plant this tract, which he 14 Henry A. Tayloe to Benjamin O. Tayloe, 26 December 1833, Tayloe Papers, Alderman Library, UVA.

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fittingly named Adventure Plantation. William took a quarter share in this venture by contributing 12 slaves, including 7 from Mount Airy. Henry gathered the Tayloe slaves at Cloverdale in December 1833 and set out with them for Alabama in January 1834, traveling in muledrawn wagons and camping each night in tents. The eight-hundredmile journey took forty-five days.15 William Tayloe moved another 27 Mount Airy slaves to Alabama in the 1830s, 41 in the 1840s, and 48 in the 1850s—so that altogether 123 of his Mount Airy people took this long-distance trek. They were almost all field hands by training, and young enough to learn how to cultivate and pick cotton. Two-thirds of them were over age ten and under age twenty-five on arrival. In addition Tayloe purchased another 75 slaves in Alabama, including some (from his brother Henry) who had previously lived at Mount Airy. By 1850, according to the U.S. slave census taken that year, William had 133 slaves in Alabama, which was close to his total of 166 at Mount Airy. A decade later the U.S. slave census credited him with 277 slaves on his two Alabama cotton plantations—Oakland and Larkin—and 169 at Mount Airy. His chief business activity was now in the Deep South. Then came the Civil War. Mount Airy was dangerously close to the Union lines, and 13 slaves escaped to the Yankees. But in 1861 and 1862 Tayloe managed to bring another 99 of his Virginia people to Oakland and Larkin in Alabama. Figure 10 presents the population pyramid for William Henry Tayloe’s 457 slaves in Alabama and Virginia when he and his son Henry (who managed Mount Airy during the war) last made complete inventories in 1863.16 This diagram is more complex than figures 8 and 9 since it combines four groups of people: 67 Mount Airy slaves who stayed in Virginia, 186 Mount Airy slaves who had moved to Alabama between 1833 and 1862, 111 children born to Mount Airy slaves in Alabama after 1833, and the 93 non–Mount Airy slaves acquired by Tayloe in Alabama or born on his Alabama plantations. Figure 10 shows how decisively Tayloe had shifted his labor force from Virginia to Alabama. Mount Airy was now a nursery for young children and a retirement home for old people. Figure 10 also demonstrates that—despite the repeated shocks of sale and transfer and long-distance migration, plus the war crisis—the African American population under Tayloe’s control remained vigorously

15 Same

to same, 29 July 1839, Tayloe Papers, Alderman Library. Henry Tayloe’s Alabama census for 1863 is in Tayloe d 13453; Henry’s Mount Airy census for 1863 is in Tayloe d 8539–8590. The Alabama census is especially informative, grouping parents with their children and identifying each family by surname. 16 William

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Figure 10. Mount Airy and Alabama population pyramid, 1863

expansive. The population possessed an even stronger pyramidal structure and potential for further growth than in 1809 or 1828. In June 1865 William Henry Tayloe reported to his daughter-inlaw Courtenay Tayloe that his neighborhood in Alabama was now controlled by Union troops. “The blue coats are in Selma, Demopolis, Uniontown and other towns. Negroes have crowded to them . . . [and] are told they are free.”17 All of a sudden, nearly four hundred people in Oakland and Larkin were no longer slaves, and William Henry Tayloe had lost property worth more than $250,000 by his valuation. 18 What happened to the freedmen at Oakland, Larkin, and Mount Airy after 1865? Because Tayloe identified his bondsmen so fully, I have been able to trace 231 of the 457 people in his 1863 inventory via the U.S. census of 1870.19 The overwhelming majority—82 percent— 17 WHT

to Courtenay Tayloe, 8 June 1865, Tayloe d 5292–5327. WHT’s valuation of all his slaves at Larkin and Oakland, c. 1863, is in Tayloe d 8597– 8605, and d 8632–8667. His valuations are on the high side, ranging from $100 for a newborn infant to $2,500 for his most prized craft workers. 19 I found 92 ex-Tayloe freedmen in Townships 17–18, Perry Co., Ala., U.S. Census, 1870 (M 593, microfilm roll 33, National Archives); 98 in Beat 7–8, Hale Co., Ala. (M 593, roll 18); and 38 in Marshall Township, Richmond Co., Va. (M 593, roll 1674). Some of the people in the 1863 inventory were dead by 1870, but most of those I cannot trace in the 1870 census had probably changed their surnames after emancipation. 18

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were still in Alabama, living at or near Larkin Plantation or Oakland Plantation. Another 17 percent were in Virginia, living at or near Mount Airy, including four families who had returned from Alabama. Three ex-Tayloe freedmen had moved to Washington, D.C. Otherwise it appears that the identifiable ex-Tayloe freedmen in 1870 were working as sharecroppers on their former master’s plantations. Of the 112 males with listed occupations in 1870, very few held skilled jobs and 106 were described as farm laborers—including boys as young as ten years old and men who had pursued higher-level jobs such as coachman or carpenter during slavery. Among the 84 females with occupations, most were also farm laborers, but 34 had escaped field labor to become homemakers by 1870. The most discouraging finding is that only 5 children—all girls—were listed as attending school in 1870, and in this cohort of 231 freedmen just 1 adult and 7 children were able to read and write. So these people collectively were very poorly prepared to achieve economic prosperity or to liberate themselves from their lowly social status. Obviously the Mount Airy slaves did not experience the disastrous demographic problems found at Mesopotamia. But they had been manipulated to a high degree and were just as ill-prepared as the Mesopotamia slaves to capitalize upon their freedom when it finally came. Denied education and blocked from exercising any entrepreneurial initiative, they were victimized by one of the most degrading and dehumanizing systems ever devised. The institution of racial enslavement was pernicious to the core at all times and in all places. This is no news. But it should never be forgotten.