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 **