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Lyle-- I meant to reply earlier to say you hit on two very strong points. Thank you.
--Joanne
"Lyle E. Browning" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Two things spring to mind here. A will is in essence a legal document
and will have a language structure of its own, tending to be formal.
Given that slaves were viewed as property, the logical expression
generally would be dispositive, especially as most folks tend to
follow the template in legal matters. Also, where a number of slaves
were owned, household slaves were obviously more familiar than field
slaves, leading again to a differentiation from more or less friendly
to chillingly cool terms.
The other issue is that we view that era through the filter of Jim
Crow, seeing African-Americans as essentially an unknown "other" set
of folks (not in the TV program Lost "other" sense). The owner-slave
dynamic was then much less separated than it was in Jim Crow. How
might that affect perception and interpretation? And again, we are
not dealing with monolithic blocks of people on either side but
rather people with wide ranges of sensibilities crammed into the
mores of the day.
Lyle Browning, RPA
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