Harold has hit upon a point, as have others engaged without any particular
agendae.  In my research on the Overseers of the Poor, especially in rural
Virginia, the inherited British system attempted to put the onus for caring
for superannuated and disabled slaves on owners.  However, every county
examined shows many instances of slaves of every age and condition simply
being abandoned and left to the local Overseers for care or disposition,
thus giving the lie to the paternalism professed by the system.  (Indeed, in
at least one case which is not to hand, the slave and master wound up side
by side, delicious irony).  HOW they were then treated, depended upon the
locale.  As one might imagine, in Southampton, they were placed upon the
auction block.  In many other counties, Lancaster, Washington, Augusta among
them, they were taken in to the poorhouse or poor farm.

At the same time, those who manumitted their slaves often weren't doing
their erstwhile chattel many favors.  Often wills stipulated that if freed
(at the master's death), the freedmen and women must move to Liberia;
indeed, the laws of Virginia dictated that none could stay more than 12
months without petitioning for the local court's blessing.  On three
occasions in Rockbridge County between 1851 and 1854, slaves "voluntarily"
resubmitted themselves to slavery, unwilling to leave the county and country
of the birth and their friends and relations for so onerous a freedom.

Finally, lost in this discussion, especially on one side, is the essential
brutality of the SYSTEM, if not the individual masters.  This (thanks to
colleague John Hopewell) from the Goockland County Free Negro and Slave
Records, LVA, 1739:  Samuel Burton, John Spears, and Henry Sizemore this day
brought before me the head of Hampton, an outlawed slave belonging to John
Owen . . . which said slave they couls not take without killing of him.
(Signed) George Carrington.  How very matter of fact.  And it's only the tip
of the iceberg.

Jim Watkinson


James D. Watkinson, Ph.D.
Library of Virginia
History Department
Randolph-Macon College

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