Thank you, Vincent, for posting the Lynchburg ledger. I guess that only an
obsessive would say that a ledger is fascinating. As have many members of
this list, I’ve spent many months, years, scrutinizing ledgers. I remember
25 years ago when I was finishing my work on the Hairston families I
mentioned to Ed Ayers that if any of his grad students were looking for a
Master’s thesis idea, they should go to Alderman and read the microfilm of
the Beaver Creek plantation ledger kept by Ann Hairston Hairston (that’s
not a typo: Ann Hairston married her cousin Marshall Hairston and became
Ann Hairston Hairston. The original Beaver Creek ledger is at Southern
Historical Collection at UNC.) Far as I know, none of the students picked
up on that idea. It was only by finding Ann Hairston’s list of the
distribution of blankets that I stumbled across mothers-fathers-children
and from those lists of names, families emerged, and I was able to link
those lists to the Cohabitation Register. And so, out of a mundane business
record, life stories came forth. I’m working on a new study of the Hairston
family and I expect that this ledger will be revealing because all the
Hairston business flowed through Lynchburg.



As many of you know, Lynchburg was the major center of trade and the James
River shipping point for southern Virginia in all kinds of goods, farm
equipment, imported luxuries, and tobacco, &c. Many roads led to Lynchburg.
Hogsheads of tobacco, raised by enslaved people, passed through the
Lynchburg traders and from there to Richmond and then by ship to Europe,
mainly to France. (One of the things I noticed in studying the Hairston
papers is how closely the planters in the interior – the broad region of
Danville, Martinsville, Halifax, and into North Carolina -- followed
newspaper reports of the markets, banking, currency, and war news from
France, which was the major market for Virginia tobacco.) Lynchburg was a
financial center, in its way. At one point a Hairston planter had a $12,000
credit with a Lynchburg merchant but couldn't withdraw any hard money
because there was no specie in southern Virginia. It’s revealing to see how
the market worked. Through these records we can see how the wealth flowed,
and we can “follow the money.” And everything, all the wealth, came from
forced labor. So in these pages there are life stories.

Henry Wiencek

Charlottesville

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