While watching the February 2012 episode of NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? featuring actor and Petersburg native Blair Underwood investigating his family history, Library of Virginia staff could not help but notice that one of the original volumes displayed on the show was not in great shape.  The Amherst County Register of Free Negroes, 1822-1864, was used on the show to prove that one of Underwood’s ancestors had been a free person prior to the Civil War.  The front and back covers of the volume had become detached from the spine, pages were loose, and overall it did not look like the book could withstand much handling without sustaining further damage to its fragile pages.  This led to a reevaluation of the existing conservation priority for the 30 free Negro registers in the Library’s holdings.  Previously it was thought that since all of the free Negro registers were microfilmed, the original volumes would not be handled by the public any longer, thus conservation money would be better spent on other items.  However, the resurgence of interest in African American genealogy, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and related issues, and interest in the registers for display in exhibits clearly indicated that a change was necessary.  A conservation inventory was done for all of the volumes and the ones that require treatment will receive it over time and as funds allow.

So what is a free Negro register and why do they exist?  In 1803 the Virginia General Assembly passed an act that required every free Negro or mulatto to be registered and numbered in a book to be kept by the county clerk. The register listed the age, name, color, stature, marks or scars, and in what court the person was emancipated or whether the person was born free. A free person was required to carry a copy of this register on them in order to prove their free status.  It was a criminal offense to not be registered, and a free person could be sold into slavery if they were unable to produce sufficient proof of their status.  Enforcement of these laws was done locally and could be inconsistent.  Times of great societal fear about a locality’s black population would often result in an increase in both registrations and prosecutions for being unregistered—for example, following Nat Turner’s uprising.  The free Negro registers were thus both instruments of control over the free black population of the state but also a safeguard of an individual’s free status should it ever be challenged.  The registers provide wonderful physical descriptions of free people that give the researcher a real idea of what someone looked like, information often hard to come by for other groups of the pre-Civil War era.  They are extremely important records for genealogists and have been used by historians for a variety of avenues of inquiry.

The first four volumes chosen for conservation were completed and returned to the Library of Virginia from Etherington Conservation Services in March 2013.  Included among them is the Amherst County register from Who Do You Think You Are?  The pages have been cleaned, mended, and deacidified.  The original boards of the cover have been retained because they were still in good shape although they got a restorative touch-up with watercolor and pencil.  The old leather bindings have been replaced with new leather.  The other volumes are three registers from Amelia County that date from 1804-1835, 1835-1855, and 1855-1865.  These registers all had broken bindings, loose or completely separated covers, and loose pages.  As the pictures show, the conservators completely replaced all of the covers and bindings on the Amelia registers.  The new bindings and board cover patterns were matched as closely as possible to the originals.  All of the pages of the volumes have been cleaned, mended, deacidified, and resewn into their new bindings.  The Amherst and Amelia free Negro registers are now ready for their Hollywood close-ups!  These registers still will not be available to the general researcher since copies exist on microfilm, but their conservation will ensure that these important volumes are preserved for future generations, and, when they are needed for a special display purpose, that they are in a physical state to withstand such handling and exhibition.

Conservation of archival records, maps, and books is expensive and takes time to do properly.  Treatment done right extends the life of the record by slowing down or reversing damage to paper, bindings, and leather while at the same time being reversible and not a permanent alteration to an item.  Stay tuned for future conservation updates about free Negro registers and other interesting records within the Library of Virginia’s holdings.

The Library of Virginia welcomes donations to our general conservation fund in any amount.  Interested in sponsoring a particular book or item?  See suggestions on the Adopt Virginia History page.

-Sarah Nerney, Senior Local Records Archivist

A small slip of paper on display in the Library of Virginia’s latest exhibition You Have No Right: Law and Justice in Virginia, running 24 September 2012-18 May 2013, was of immense importance to twelve people. It discloses, even though it does not state the fact in so many words, that on 2 May 1772 they gained their freedom after being held in slavery since each of them was born. The piece of paper and the fates of those Virginians illuminates a disturbing and little-known part of Virginia’s history, the enslavement of American Indians.

The paper came into the possession of the Library of Virginia in 1988 when it acquired a copy of volume two of John Tracy Atkyns, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery in the Time of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke . . . (London, 1765–1768) that had once been in the library of the colonial government in Williamsburg. One of the librarians in the cataloguing section showed it to me, knowing of my interest in that library. When she lifted it from her desk to hand it to me, a piece of paper that had been slipped between leaves in the middle of the volume fell out and fluttered to the floor. We were surprised, and I was even more surprised when I saw what it was. It was a 1780s or 1790s copy of the judgment in Robyn v. Hardiway (or Robin, or Hardaway), an unusually important case decided in the General Court of Virginia. The librarian and I presented the judgment to the archivists who added it to the meager surviving records of the colonial General Court.

The court case had two parts. First, attorneys argued about whether a 1682 law that allowed for the lifetime enslavement of Indians imported from other colonies had been repealed in 1684, 1691, or 1705. For decades Virginia’s courts had assumed that the 1684 invalidated the 1682 law, and “under that persuasion,” one of the attorneys informed the court, “hundreds of the descendants of Indians have obtained their freedom, on actions brought in this court.” The court concluded the first part of the case by deciding that the 1682 law had remained in effect until 1705.  This decision enlarged the number of residents of Virginia who could not hope to gain their freedom by claiming to be descendants of Indian women illegally enslaved between 1684 and 1705.

A jury trial then established that the twelve people were descendants of an Indian woman who had been illegally enslaved. The jury awarded Robin, Hannah, Daniel, Cuffie, Isham, Moses, Peter, Judy, Autry, Silvia, Davy, and Ned, all of unstated age, one shilling in damages. Each received one penny, but each also received freedom.

Some excellent 21^st-century scholarship demonstrates that English-speaking Virginians enslaved many more Indian residents of Virginia in the 17^th century than earlier historians believed and that the enslavement may very well have taken place in spite of the laws or in the absence of laws governing the enslavement of Indians. Because almost all of the records of the colonial General Court burned in the fire that destroyed the state court house and much of the business district of Richmond in April 1865, the specific record of the outcome of the important 1772 freedom suit naming the persons freed is especially rare and valuable.

It was critically important that the twelve plaintiffs were descendants of “Indian women,” not of Indian men. In 1662 the Virginia General Assembly had passed a law that arose from a case that Elizabeth Key filed in the Northumberland County Court. She was the daughter of Thomas Key, a white man who had been a burgess in the 1630s, and one of his enslaved female laborers of African origin or descent. Elizabeth Key claimed her freedom as the daughter of a free man and won her case, but the assembly then changed the law. The act of 1662 explained that because “some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree” it declared “that all children borne in this country shalbe held bound or free only according to the condition of the mother.”

Two other pieces of paper on exhibition in You Have No Right demonstrate that descendants of enslaved Indian women continued to file freedom suits in Virginia courts well into the 19^th century. In May 1820, after seven years of tedious and delayed proceedings in the courts of Wythe and Powhatan Counties, Rachel Findlay won her freedom for the second time. When she was a girl in 1773, one year after the General Court issued its judgment in Robyn v. Hardiway, the court ruled that she and her family, too, were entitled to their freedom as descendants of an illegally enslaved Indian woman. But her owner, who lived in the part of Cumberland County that in 1777 became Powhatan County, sold rather than freed her. She lived in slavery in far-away Wythe County for forty years until learning in 1813 that she should have been freed in 1773.

When the Powhatan County Court finally issued its ruling in the May 1820 judgment Rachel vs. John Draper, Sr. that Rachel Findlay was a free person, she was an old woman with thirty or forty descendants, all of whom had lived all of their lives in slavery and should have always lived free. It is not known whether any or all of her children and grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren ever learned that they, too, should have been living in freedom and not in slavery since their births or whether any of them actually became free as a result of her persistent pursuit of her law suit. A court judgment was not self-enforcing, especially for a group of people like Rachel Findlay’s descendants who probably lived in wide dispersion, perhaps some of them outside of Virginia. Some of them may have lived the remainder of their lives in slavery, too, as she did for forty-seven years.

About the time that Rachel Findlay won her freedom for the second time, members of the Evans family lost a freedom suit in Lynchburg in Charles Evans, etc. vs. Lewis B. Allen, 1821-033. Their story is truly tragic. In preparation for their case, members of the family or perhaps their court-appointed attorney compiled and submitted to the court a genealogical chart that demonstrated how the family members were related to one another. That sheet of paper is also on display in the Library of Virginia’s exhibition and together with other evidence might have persuaded a court that they were entitled to their freedom. However, their attorney, former Congressman Christopher Henderson Clark, had a stroke sometime in 1820 and failed to appear in court on behalf of his clients. As a consequence of the case not being presented when scheduled, the court dismissed it in 1821, leaving all of the people and the descendants of the females stuck in slavery for the remainder of their lives.

Slavery and the laws that created and protected it were cruel and unjust. Adding to the cruelty and injustice were the many unpredictable factors, like the illness of an attorney, that could prevent people from presenting their cases in court, or like the sale of Rachel before she could become free. It is now clear that colonial Virginians enslaved more Indians than historians once knew about, and it is evident that many more people had been illegally enslaved than historians once believed. Men, women, and children of African, American Indian, and also of European and mixed ancestry like Elizabeth Key fell victim to the system of slavery that sustained Virginia’s economy and society from the early years of the colonial period to the end of the American Civil War.

It is also now convenient for the first time to do thorough research on some of the freedom suits that people filed after the American Revolution. People who filed suits seeking freedom and alleging illegal enslavement often sought justice through local courts of chancery. The record of each surviving court case contains unique personal stories about the enslavement of one or more Virginians and the conditions under which they lived and how they attempted to gain their freedom. As part of the Library of Virginia’s project to preserve and make available to researchers the records of the commonwealth’s local chancery courts, archivists at the library have to date digitized thousands of case files containing several million pages of documents, including more than one hundred freedom suits. They are processing and digitizing more every day. The records of the cases that have been digitized can be viewed online in the Chancery Records Index.

Clerks of court did not know or use the surnames of the people who filed freedom suits, so to identify freedom suits it is necessary to search for chancery causes in which the style, or title, of the case does not include a surname. In the search field for the surname for the plaintiff(s), simply enter a tilde ~ which will return a list of cases in which the surname of the plaintiff is not part of the official name of the case.

-Brent Tarter, Founding Editor of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography

In the years following the Civil War, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly referred to as simply the Freedmen’s Bureau) provided assistance to former slaves still living in the South, helping them transition from a society based on slavery to one allowing freedom. Established as part of the War Department by an act of Congress on 3 March 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau, operational until 1872, helped introduce a system of free labor, provided food and clothing, helped locate families and legalize marriages, promoted education, supervised labor contracts, and provided legal representation.

One of the Bureau’s most important roles was to help safeguard the rights of African Americans and ensure they received justice from the court system. Following the Civil War, several southern states, including Virginia, enacted a series of laws commonly known as “black codes” that restricted the rights and legal status of freedmen. African Americans were often given harsh sentences for petty crimes and were sometimes unable to get their cases heard in the state courts. In September 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau courts were established to adjudicate cases involving freedmen. By February 1866, Virginia had amended her laws and the Bureau courts were discontinued by May of that same year, but because of the failure of many local court officials to administer equal justice, the Bureau courts were reestablished in certain areas of the state.

One instance of the Freedmen’s Bureau interceding to ensure the legal rights of African Americans happened in the Highland County criminal courts. In November 1865, Stephen J. Reynolds accused Alexander McCray, an African American, of feloniously stealing and carrying away his bay horse valued at seventy-five dollars. Alexander McCray successfully postponed his trial until January 1866 by claiming that he had already been tried and acquitted in Staunton before a military court for the crime he now stood accused of again. McCray claimed that he could not safely go to trial without the benefit of a statement from the military court. In January 1866, Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Clay, then stationed in Staunton, wrote a letter stating that McCray had been tried for the alleged offense and further claimed that the horse was proven to be the property of the U.S. government. Clay went on to write that “at the time of trial, civil authority was yet unrestored” and that the provost court was “competent to decide all cases in which the U.S. Government or its soldiers were parties or a party.”

To further ensure that McCray was not tried for his alleged crime a second time, the Freedmen’s Bureau sent a letter by command of Major General A. H. Terry, then Assistant Commissioner for the Bureau in Virginia, on 14 February 1866. The Bureau wrote to James M. Sieg, prosecuting attorney for Highland County, and ordered that all further action in the criminal prosecution against McCray be suspended until further orders were received from the Freedmen’s Bureau. It is unclear why Stephen J. Reynolds was convinced the horse was his property or why the case was brought against McCray for a second time. And, it is also unknown exactly how the Freedmen’s Bureau became aware of McCray’s plight, but they did and the Bureau ensured that the legal rights of this African American were upheld.

The Highland County (Va.) Commonwealth Causes, 1852-1867, are open for research and available at the Library of Virginia. Other Freedmen’s Bureau records can be found at the Library of Virginia in the Free Negro and Slave Records, Court Records, and Cohabitation Registers of various localities.

-Bari Helms, Local Records Archivist

November is Native American Heritage Month, a month set aside to recognize the significant contributions the first Americans made to the establishment and growth of the United States. Here at the Library of Virginia we have documents that tell the story of the Gingaskin Tribe. In 1641, the Accomac Indians, an Algonquin-speaking tribe located on the Eastern shore and part of the group collectively referred to as Powhatan Indians, became known as the Gingaskins when they accepted a patent from the English government for the remaining 1,500 acres of their ancestral lands on the ocean side of Northampton County. Various legal and boundary struggles with their English neighbors over the years reduced the lands reserved for the Gingaskins to 650 acres, which was patented again in 1680.

Over the years, Indian lands were often leased to outsiders by the state and county governments in order to help support Gingaskin members, most of whom chose to maintain a traditional lifestyle and not farm the lands. Great concern was exhibited by white neighbors about the Gingaskins intermarrying with free negroes and charges were made in petitions to the General Assembly in 1784 and 1787 that there were no more “real” Indians left on the reservation and therefore the land should be given to whites who could better protect it, by which they meant farm it in the traditional English way.

Beginning in 1792, the General Assembly had required the Northampton County court to appoint trustees to manage the reservation lands and settle any disputes that arose.  The trustees of the Gingaskin reservation, never very enthusiastic about their duties, convinced (or forced) the remaining members to accept a division of the land among themselves in 1812.  The General Assembly passed a law in 1813 to eliminate the Gingaskin reservation and divide the land between the official members, deeding the divided plots to individuals in the same way as anyone else in Virginia would own land. This was the first instance of termination or legal allotment of reservation lands and detribalization of its owners in United States history. Three-fourths of individual Gingaskin owners retained their lands until 1831 when most were forced out following the Nat Turner insurrection.

For more information about the history of the Gingaskins and other Indians of eastern Virginia, see Dr. Helen C. Rountree’s book Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). The Library of Virginia’s holdings include Northampton County land records relating to the Gingaskin lands, 1785-1815, (Barcode 1168316) and Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776-1865, (Accession 36121) concerning the division and selling of the Gingaskin lands dated 26 November 1784 and 10 October 1787.

 -Sarah Nerney, Senior Local Records Archivist

 

The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce that the first installment of images from the Petersburg chancery causes digitization project have been added to the Chancery Records Index. This project has been funded, in part, through a $155,071 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Images for the first forty-four boxes of chancery suits have been added to the index (circa 1803-1845). The boxes are not strictly chronological, so not all images for a given year are available. Additional images will be added periodically as the project progresses. Be sure to check back!

Here are some interesting suits that archivists found while processing, indexing, and conserving the collection. Many other fascinating and complex stories will surely be uncovered once the project is complete and the collection is studied by students, scholars, and family historians.

Transcript of Benjamin W. B. Jones Letter to William Smith, 5 February 1826

Petersburg chancery cause 1827-003 involves a dispute over a runaway slave named Davey, alias Davey Smith. Exhibits found in the suit include a notice published in a local newspaper describing Davey’s physical appearance, occupation, and his escape (image 22). The suit also contains letters from Benjamin W. B. Jones of Alabama claiming that he was Davey’s owner (image 27). 

Also in the newly released images there are two suits that involve an African American woman named Jane.  She was a slave of Edwin Lanier of Sussex County, who owned the Prince George County plantation where Jane lived.  Lanier’s will called for Jane to be emancipated upon his death, which occurred in 1828. She was the only one of Lanier’s slaves to be set free. In the first suit, 1834-015, Jane sues the administrator and heirs of Lanier’s estate to receive the property and cash bequeathed to her in Lanier’s will (image 23). The second suit, 1840-066, has its origin in several judgment suits heard in Sussex County. Lanier’s administrator and others successfully sued Jane for debts she owed as a consequence of the property she received from her former owner. When Jane could not repay the money owed, she was placed in the Petersburg jail. The case details Jane’s efforts to win back the freedom she had enjoyed only briefly. 

Jane’s certificate of freedom, the paperwork that had to be carried by freed persons of color, is used as an exhibit in the suit (image 46).  To add to the drama, Jane had several children and became pregnant during the course of the litigation. Sadly, Jane lost the case. Since she was unable to repay the debts, which included interest, Jane and her children were to be hired out as “servants and apprentices” for fourteen years to work off their debts. The sheriff auctioned Jane and her family to the highest bidder on the steps of the Petersburg courthouse (image 31).

In his will, Lanier allowed that Jane could remain on his plantation for nine months after his death and then move to a free state of her choosing. A statute passed by the General of Assembly of Virginia in 1806 stated that freed slaves had to leave the commonwealth within one year of their emancipation or they forfeited their freedom. The defendants in the earlier suit (1834-015) cited this law in their response to Jane’s complaint regarding the money and property.  They argued that Jane was no longer free because she had remained in Virginia beyond the twelve months. The defendants in the later suit (1840-066) also cited the 1806 law telling Jane that if she were truly a free person she would leave the commonwealth.

Did Jane need the money from Lanier’s estate to travel to a free state? Did she choose to stay in Virginia in spite of the law? Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions as to why Jane remained in Virgina in the comments.

-Vince Brooks, Senior Local Records Archivist

-Roger Christman, Senior State Records Archivist

“Remember Americans, that we must and shall be free and enlightened as you are,
will you wait until we shall, under God, obtain our liberty by the crushing arm of power?
Will it not be dreadful for you? I speak Americans for your good. We must and shall be free
I say, in spite of you. You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery,
to enrich you and your children; but God will deliver us from under you.
And wo, wo, will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting.”

David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World

David Walker, a free black man from Boston, wrote to Thomas Lewis in Richmond on 8 December 1829 enclosing thirty copies of the first edition of his pamphlet An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker instructed Lewis to sell the pamphlet for twelve cents among the Richmond’s African-American population or to provide them free of charge. Walker used Old Testament theology and the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence to describe the plight of African-Americans, both slave and free, in four articles: “Our wretchedness in consequence of slavery,” “Our wretchedness in consequence of ignorance,” “Our wretchedness in consequence of the preachers of the religion of Jesus Christ,” and “Our wretchedness in consequence of the colonizing plan.” Walker’s Appeal advocated rebellions throughout the South and caused many southern states, including Virginia, to pass laws against slave literacy and the dissemination of anti-slavery literature. Criticized by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as too radical, Walker’s publication of the Appeal is considered by some historians as the beginning of the Abolitionist Movement. This pamphlet along with the letter to Thomas Lewis is part of the Office of the Speaker’s Executive Communications collection.

David Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to a slave father and a free mother around 1796. He relocated to Boston in 1826 where he owned a used clothing shop on Brattle Street. Greatly influenced by his experiences with slavery in the South, Walker served as a member of the Massachusetts General Colored Association and as Boston’s principal agent to the Freedom’s Journal, America’s first African-American newspaper. Walker authored the first edition of Appeal in 1829, along with two further editions by 1830. He distributed his pamphlet throughout the South by sewing copies into the lining of sailors’ clothing. The wide distribution of the pamphlet caused a stir amongst the whites of the South, especially in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. As a result of the discovery of the pamphlets, black sailors were quarantined in Georgia ports, a white mariner was arrested in South Carolina, and a black carpenter was killed in North Carolina.

In Virginia, Walker’s letter to Thomas Lewis was discovered by Joseph Mayo, Commonwealth’s Attorney for the Hustings Court of the City of Richmond, and promptly delivered to Governor William B. Giles. Mayo informed the Governor that Walker’s letter never reached the intended recipient on account of the death of Lewis. Instead, the letter made it to the hands of another freedman who began to circulate the literature. The Mayor of Richmond managed to reacquire twenty of the thirty copies of Walker’s pamphlet. Governor Giles presented Walker’s letter and one of these pamphlets to the Executive Council who advised him to transmit the literature to the Legislature to obtain a law to prevent the further circulation of insurrectionary materials. The Governor’s communication to Linn Banks, Speaker of the House of Delegates, was labeled “confidential” and no mention is made of it in the House Journals, however, the communication’s endorsement indicates that it was laid on the table on 7 January 1830. As a result of Walker’s Appeal, the General Assembly passed an act at their next session to amend the act concerning slaves, free negroes, and mulattoes which prohibited meetings for teaching free negroes or mulattoes and fined any white person for teaching slaves to read or write.

Walker died on 6 August 1830 of consumption, shortly after the publication of the 3rd edition of his pamphlet. Walker never saw his vision of an immediate abolition of slavery, but the impact of the Appeal was far-reaching. In August 1831, Nat Turner led a rebellion against the white slave owners in Southampton County. Although there is no evidence that Turner had knowledge of Walker’s Appeal, the historical significance of the pamphlet is undeniable. Equally important is the letter from Walker to Lewis which remains the only extant document written in the hand of David Walker.

-Craig S. Moore, State Records Appraisal Archivist