Very interesting and important observations, Martha -- thank you! Your essay in the Thompson book sounds well worth reading, so I'll look forward to doing that. You closed your message by saying: > 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. > I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the scholarly study of American slavery by perhaps the finest history teacher I know, James Oliver Horton (he is also a superb scholar). Whether to clueless undergraduates or advanced graduate students, Jim's message was the same: if we are to understand slavery, we must never lose sight of what an extraordinarily complex phenomenon it was, and how complex were the human relationships -- economic, social, psychological -- it engendered. An insight whose wisdom my own research has endlessly underscored, and one reinforced, I think, by some of the best discussions on this list. A good weekend to all -- -- Jurretta Heckscher