Martha:  Good points.  As you and others who are interested in Southern Material Culture look further into this you will find that some so-called slave owners possibly passed along even more used articles to both house and field enslaved people on their plantations.  Personally I am beginning to see something of an "extended family" type of situation as far as this goes but even there are limits to this.  Jane Steele.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Martha Katz-Hyman <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Jun 22, 2007 3:31 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Jefferson's soap
>
>Juretta,
>
>Thanks for your comments.  Because I didn't have a lot of time to search my
>files when I answered last night, I was only able to comment on the research
>for Carter's Grove.  But the references come from all over Virginia (Francis
>Taylor was from Orange County or Joseph Ball of "Morattico"), and it is
>clear that slaves both *were* property and *owned* property and that
>merchants had no hesitation in selling goods to slaves who had ready money
>(cash) and were even willing to have them as credit customers.
>
>I have also been doing some preliminary research in the James Logan papers
>at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for a project interpreting the
>lives of slaves at the 1719 William Trent House, and, from the account books
>that survive, it appears that he, too, ran credit accounts with slaves.  So
>I don't think that this kind of economic activity was confined to one colony
>or region.
>
>Much as we, today, have unwritten rules of conduct in our communities and
>neighborhoods as to how we run our households and what is expected of us as
>property owners, so too did 18th century Tidewater slaveowners share some
>unwritten rules.  One of them had to do with the kinds of crops and products
>that slaves could raise or produce for their own benefit.  Over 15 years
>ago, Philip Schwarz kindly pointed out to me a letter written in 1798 by
>Jefferson to his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, that makes this
>understanding explicit. In this letter, Jefferson thanked Randolph "for
>putting an end to the cultivation of tobacco as the peculium of the
>negroes.  I have ever found it necessary to confine them to such articles as
>are not raised on the farm.  There is no other way of drawing a line between
>what is theirs & mine." (Philadlephia, June 14, 1798, Jefferson Papers,
>Library of Congress, 21--see also Orlando Patterson,  Slavery and Social
>Death, p. 182-186).  I also have a reference that Lorena Walsh provided to
>me about a court case in Maryland where it is clear from the slaveowner's
>testimony that the way he treated his slaves was not only just as his
>neighbors did but even better!  A precise reference, however, will have to
>wait a few weeks until I have time to search out the details.
>
>As part of the project to furnish the Carter's Grove Slave Quarter, I wrote
>a furnishing report that is available via Interlibrary Loan from Colonial
>Williamsburg and is also in the Monticello Library.  The title is "In the
>Middle of This Poverty Some Cups and a Teapot:"  The Material Culture of
>Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Virginia and the Furnishing of Slave Quarters
>at Carter's Grove."  It's a lengthy report, but a much shorter  version
>(without all of the details that a furnishing report requires but with
>footnotes) was published in The American Home:  Material Culture, Domestic
>Space, and Family Life, edited by Eleanor McD. Thompson and published in
>1998 by Winterthur Museum and the University Press of New England.
>
>From all of this research, plus the research I have done since then, it is
>clear to me that the relationship between the enslaved and the people who
>owned them was complex and contradictory.  Just accepting that slaves both
>*were* property and *owned* property is pretty difficult for a lot of people
>to understand, let alone finding out that some slaves owned more property
>than some poor whites.  But this is what the records reveal--and I am glad
>to have had a hand in helping thousands of visitors to Carter's Grove (and
>the Peyton Randolph Kitchen, another one of my projects) understand some of
>the complexities of 18th century Virginia society.
>
>Martha Katz-Hyman **


Lillian Jane Steele