Doug,

I will have to respectfully disagree with some of what you have  
written here. I am basing my comments on an in-depth analysis of 472  
estates in Lancaster County from 1835-1865. The first two points are  
in answer to what you wrote. The following comments are other  
observations we learned from this project (which will be on line  
later this year.)

1.	With one exception, the cases of runaways were all during a time  
of war (War of 1812 and the Civil War).

2.	Hiring out of slaves was not limited to skilled males. In fact,  
quite the opposite. Skilled slaves were kept in the family plantation  
(or farm but that was another thread) for the reason they could  
produce income for the estate. It was more common to see unskilled  
slaves hired out, and by no means was this limited by sex or skill  
level. It was the product of someone needing labor and an estate who  
did not need the labor (and the corresponding expense of maintaining  
a slave) but needed the income from the labor.

3.	It was a rare time when slaves were actually sold out of the  
estate. I would say out of the 3,000 slave records we compiled (keep  
in mind this does not mean 3,000 individual slaves, many of the  
records are for the same person), maybe 100 AT MOST were sales of  
slaves. The main reasons for selling a slave out of the estate were  
(1) insolvency of the estate (2) ill behavior of a slave and (3) no  
feasible way to divide the assets of an estate among the heirs. This  
almost always included liquidation of land as well.

4.	Contrary to some popular myths about slavery: the accounts of  
estates are replete with expenses for clothing, food, medical care  
and burial expenses for slaves. I realize our study was just in one  
county in the Northern Neck. There were only handful of really large  
slave holding white families. I don't think any of them exceeded 100  
slaves. So, we are not talking Deep South "plantations" here. In this  
case, we are talking about a much more interwoven group of free  
blacks, slaves and whites all living and working together. The  
picture this project has painted is one of relative harmony  
punctuated with occasional disasters and fireworks.



On Jul 30, 2009, at 12:29 PM, J D Deal wrote:

> As Mick Nicholls has observed, if slave husbands and wives belonged  
> to different owners, the husbands would not appear (or be  
> enumerated) on the census schedules along with their wives. The  
> plantation with a equal number of adult male and adult female  
> slaves was rare indeed.
>
> Why else might males appear to be missing?
> 1) running away (most runaways were males);
> 2) hired out (most slaves hired out to employers in nearby towns  
> [or elsewhere] were likely to be skilled males).
>
> If we add all three reasons together, a sizable number of  
> households with no adult male slaves would not be that unusual.
>
> Doug Deal
> History?SUNY Oswego
>
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