I wonder though if surveying wills demonstrates the obvious, while missing
nuances. Yes, slaves were property to be distributed to heirs, and the
relatively few manumissions at death show that owners generally desired to
keep them as property--but then, if they didn't, they probably wouldn't
have bought them in the first place.

So slavery was, at base, inevitably about ownership, and that idea is
enough to horrify most people today, as it should. But if one looks
further, I think there were differences in relationships, in the same way
that a beef farmer and a dog lover both own their animals with the same
legal status and could will or sell them, but their psychological
relationship to those animals is vastly different. Even the same person
might mourn the death of a dog and lovingly bury him under a tombstone,
while callously shipping steers to be slaughtered and eaten each year, with
a prize bull treated somewhere in between. Such nuances among slaveowners
can only be teased out by looking at other clues--letters, other legal
documents, observers' writings, plantation records, burials, etc.

That is no excuse for slavery of course, but instead I think it shows how
humans always are capable of compartmentalizing their feelings, and that
social conventions and pressure can make ordinary people do things that
seem obviously evil only in retrospect.

Hank Trent
[log in to unmask]

On Tuesday, September 9, 2014, Paul Heinegg <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The largest collection of statements by Virginia slave owners on the
> subject of their slaves is contained in the wills recorded in Virginia
> counties, so it should be useful to analyze those.
>
> I abstracted the wills of two counties (Halifax County, North Carolina,
> and King George County, Virginia) to see how slave owners referred to their
> slaves. I did no analysis, but "to my loving wife...a negro, horse, cow,
> furniture" is typical.
> http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/halifax.htm
>
> Paul
>
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