Juretta,

Thanks for your comments.  Because I didn't have a lot of time to search my
files when I answered last night, I was only able to comment on the research
for Carter's Grove.  But the references come from all over Virginia (Francis
Taylor was from Orange County or Joseph Ball of "Morattico"), and it is
clear that slaves both *were* property and *owned* property and that
merchants had no hesitation in selling goods to slaves who had ready money
(cash) and were even willing to have them as credit customers.

I have also been doing some preliminary research in the James Logan papers
at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for a project interpreting the
lives of slaves at the 1719 William Trent House, and, from the account books
that survive, it appears that he, too, ran credit accounts with slaves.  So
I don't think that this kind of economic activity was confined to one colony
or region.

Much as we, today, have unwritten rules of conduct in our communities and
neighborhoods as to how we run our households and what is expected of us as
property owners, so too did 18th century Tidewater slaveowners share some
unwritten rules.  One of them had to do with the kinds of crops and products
that slaves could raise or produce for their own benefit.  Over 15 years
ago, Philip Schwarz kindly pointed out to me a letter written in 1798 by
Jefferson to his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph, that makes this
understanding explicit. In this letter, Jefferson thanked Randolph "for
putting an end to the cultivation of tobacco as the peculium of the
negroes.  I have ever found it necessary to confine them to such articles as
are not raised on the farm.  There is no other way of drawing a line between
what is theirs & mine." (Philadlephia, June 14, 1798, Jefferson Papers,
Library of Congress, 21--see also Orlando Patterson,  Slavery and Social
Death, p. 182-186).  I also have a reference that Lorena Walsh provided to
me about a court case in Maryland where it is clear from the slaveowner's
testimony that the way he treated his slaves was not only just as his
neighbors did but even better!  A precise reference, however, will have to
wait a few weeks until I have time to search out the details.

As part of the project to furnish the Carter's Grove Slave Quarter, I wrote
a furnishing report that is available via Interlibrary Loan from Colonial
Williamsburg and is also in the Monticello Library.  The title is "In the
Middle of This Poverty Some Cups and a Teapot:"  The Material Culture of
Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Virginia and the Furnishing of Slave Quarters
at Carter's Grove."  It's a lengthy report, but a much shorter  version
(without all of the details that a furnishing report requires but with
footnotes) was published in The American Home:  Material Culture, Domestic
Space, and Family Life, edited by Eleanor McD. Thompson and published in
1998 by Winterthur Museum and the University Press of New England.

From all of this research, plus the research I have done since then, it is
clear to me that the relationship between the enslaved and the people who
owned them was complex and contradictory.  Just accepting that slaves both
*were* property and *owned* property is pretty difficult for a lot of people
to understand, let alone finding out that some slaves owned more property
than some poor whites.  But this is what the records reveal--and I am glad
to have had a hand in helping thousands of visitors to Carter's Grove (and
the Peyton Randolph Kitchen, another one of my projects) understand some of
the complexities of 18th century Virginia society.

Martha Katz-Hyman **