Lancaster County, in Virginia's Northern Neck, is probably not the best barometer of state-wide statistics for the period of 1835-1865, but it may be useful when doing some statistical analysis of slave ownership and prevailing mores nonetheless.
For an overview of a project funded in part by a matching grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to the Mary Ball Washington Museum & Library, the estate records of Lancaster County were combed through and compiled, which resulted in on-line searchable database which is on the MBW web site, see here:
http://mbwm.org/estates.asp
I was the principal researcher and compiler of the data. I had expected to encounter some horrific stories about slavery. And I must agree with David Hardwick that of course I would wish no person to ever have to live in such a society. That said, my overall impression from these records was not one of horrific abuse and maltreatment, and ripping apart families. To my surprise, a much more compassionate picture evolved, to the extent that it could be called compassionate at all. In these records are medical care and burial charges, and sustaining slaves that were "a charge to the estate", mentions of broken limbs, drownings, the mentally handicapped, and every other human condition. It appeared to me that it was extremely uncommon to break apart families, and very few were sold out of an estate.
As the link will attest, less than half of the people who died during this period owned slaves. The largest slave owner had 94 slaves. The median number of slaves owned was 6.
Of the over 3000 slave records identified in this project, 3% were sold outright from an estate. This was usually due to (1) insolvency of the estate (2) ill behavior of a slave.
There were 10 recorded mentions of runaways, 8 of those during the civil war (which period is not complete in the records).
There were 54 manumissions, of which 44 where by the bachelor Kelley Brothers who directed that these slaves be sent to Liberia (which they were.) The remaining manumissions were by the Downman family of Belle Isle Plantation.
The study period did not include the War of 1812 period, though the eight non-Civil War slaves recorded as runways were from that period. Alan Taylor, in his recent book, *The Internal Enemy* puts the number of escaped slaves from the Chesapeake Bay area (mostly all Virginia) during the War of 1812 at about 3,000. That war was followed by an epidemic centered in Northumberland County which killed an estimated 30% of the population. Still, those figures are a drop in the bucket of the overall slave population of Virginia from 1810-1820, but do account for some anomalies in the Northern Neck statistics for total population schedules.
Craig Kilby
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