Hannah (and Neil)

I am not sure where you two are coming from but it certainly is not  
the direction that my research has led me to.

On Jul 30, 2009, at 1:04 PM, Hannah Powell wrote:

Hannah wrote:

> "Slave Schedules" on the census were about the slaves owned by a  
> head of household.  Quite often the only ones he or she owned were  
> the household slaves.  Many times they did not own male slaves for  
> the household.  Slaves for the labor on roads and fields ..etc...  
> were rented from the State Government from it's inventory of  
> slaves.   There were State Owned and County Owned slaves as well as  
> those owned by a household.
> Hannah Powell


Hannah: What is this all about? I have never heard of state or county  
owned slaves. The only time I can think of when the county Glebe took  
possession of a slave was because he/she/it was in the state contrary  
to law, and it was confiscasted from the owner in order to be sold  
and removed out of the state. Please elabororate on this topic. This  
will be all new material for a lot of us.


Then Neil McDonald wrote:

<The type and amount of personal data to be included in the 1850 and  
1860 slave census was also strongly argued between Northern and  
Southern <members of US Congress from what I read, but finalized or  
limited each time to basically age, sex and color.  Possibly  
something can be derived <from this about some slave-owners' intent  
to minimize the degree of public information?  Likely not.

This is basically true except for the last sentence. There was a big  
debate in Congress over whether or not to list slaves by name. The  
Southerners balked at this by saying it would be too difficult to do.  
This was of course not really true, since their plantation account  
books and inventories of their estates, and subsequent estate  
accounts, named them all. But his another issue.

I will state again that if the purpose of the research is to find  
detailed information on the slaves in the slave family (by which I  
mean the master and his  or her white and slave families), definitely  
check the inventories and estate accounts.

Craig Kilby



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