I thought I knew about slavery. I mean, I learned about it in school and my parents were good about teaching me what they knew about it. The first time I saw a photo of a man with scars from a whip, I was about 6. I’ve seen movies and documentaries. I knew that – on top of the labor and torture and physical abuse – families were separated and that slaves were forced to breed like prized dogs. I knew about Thomas Jefferson.
Then I started looking into my genealogy.
Frustrated with the FamilySearch.org site, which automatically fills in info provided by randos from all over the world who don’t bother actually looking at the documentation or doing research, I decided to pay the price and build a documented family tree on Ancestry. That meant I had to look through tons of individual records. It’s tedious, but it would sometimes turn up some cool and surprising information that filled in stories that were only partially known until then.
Working on the timeline of a grandmother’s family, I came across some war pension files and found that her grandfathers and great-grandfathers were confederates. Two died in the war, and two were so messed up that they probably wished they had. Finding that felt like something in between disappointment and alarm, which was weird because I knew they were from the south. I just never considered that I could be related in any way to confederates.
Going backward in time, I then discovered the existence of slave schedules. You can see on the right that one of my 4th great-grand uncles, Alfred Booth, had 12 slaves ranging in age from 1 year old to 54. There are no names, just age, sex, and race. In some cases, the names might have been included but most of the time these schedules are just cold, impersonal, itemized listings of human property.
The midway between disappointment and alarm turned into anger. Actually seeing a handwritten list of human beings counted out as a herd of cattle might be counted was a far different kind of information than reading the basic points of slavery in a history book. Twelve human beings, whose ages were 1, 3, 5, 8, 12, 18, 24, 25, 26, 31, 47, and 54.
At that point, I was asking myself whether I even wanted to look further into that branch of the family. It was like a car-crash moment, where I knew there would be nothing good but looked anyway. That’s where I found the kicker – a slave mentioned by her actual name in my 5th great-grandfather’s last will.
Jude.
“Then I lend unto my beloved wife Prissiley Booth during her life or widdowhood my Nigro woman Jude and two fether bed and furniture and all my houshould and kichin furniture and the south plantation and (?) where I now live I also lend to my sd wife two work horses four cows and (?) sows and pigs fifteen fat hoggs forty barrels of corn and fidder (?) equipment.“
There was a woman named Jude listed along with “kichin furniture” as property left to his beloved Prissiley – after he first bequeathed his soul to the almighty god and Jesus Christ and all that bs, of course. He went on to split the plantation up between all of his sons and leave a few items for his daughters. One son received “dwelling houses” along with his portion of the plantation, which I assume was for the slaves. No other slaves were mentioned, but I had to try and find out what their names were.
I found the People Not Property project at the website of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I searched for Daniel Booth, and got a result for his son that was also named Daniel. The result from that search was where any semblance of anger turned into pure fucking rage.
On May 20, 1825, Daniel Booth Jr. bought a woman named Judah, about age 30, along with her 4 year old daughter, Mariah and 2 month old son, Demarius, for $437.50. The very next day, Daniel sold that family to a man named John Henderson for $450, making a little profit for himself. The question I have here – besides the obvious one of how does this happen – is that if Judah was “about age 30,” she probably had children before that that were taken from her and sold into bondage. How many other children did she have and lose? Was she able to stay with Mariah and Demarius (probably not)? What happened to them? Who was their father and where was he sold? Was it forced breeding or were Judah and the father in love and dreaming of freedom and a normal life for themselves and their children?
I looked up the name of my 4th great-grandfather, Tapley Booth, but got no results, so where I normally wasn’t concerned with the details of the siblings of my direct grandparents, I was now. I found bills of sale for three of the brothers -Alfred, Joseph, and Daniel Jr. Here are some that I found,
I found that Joseph Booth Sr. sold an unnamed 5 year-old to his son, Joseph Jr., for the low low family discount price of five dollars. I found that William Mason sold an 18 year-old girl to Alfred Booth, who was named either Sal or Sarah (they didn’t give a shit) for $300. I found that $225 got Alfred an 11 year-old girl named Nelly, purchased from John Davis. Alfred also got a 12 year-old boy by the name of Edmond from Stephen Dodson for $395, Joseph got a 9 year-old boy named Harry from John Daniel for 70 pounds, and that Daniel and Nancy Booth along with Henderson Marcom sold a 4 year-old girl named Clolelda to Hubbard Upchurch. Clolelda must have been owned in shares, and there is no price listed.
I also learned about passing slaves among family members with the sale of “a certain negro fellow commonly called and known by the name of Sharper,” about age 50, who was sold by Daniel Booth to his brother John in 1820 for $300. In 1824, John sold Sharper to brother Alfred for $200 using the exact same wording – estimated age 50 years old.
Who was Sharper? Where did he come from – was he sold away from his parents as a child? Did he have a given name that he kept private and sacred? Did he have, at any point in his life, a wife or loved one? Did he have children? Did he work in the fields or did he have some special skill that made the Booth brothers want to keep him around? How old was he really?
That’s all I’ve been able to find, so far. I honestly can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for the descendants of Jude or Harry or Sal / Sarah or Edmond or Judah or Clolilda or Sharper or the unnamed 5 year-old to try and find their own history.
Most importantly, as disgusting as these written slave schedules and bills of sale are, it doesn’t give any insight into the horrors of their personal stories. These are simply evidence of the sanitation of the history that the majority of us have been taught.
The erasure and further sanitation of history is currently in the works by the regime that somehow – by democratic fucking elections – was put in charge of the future of our country. The idiot-in-chief himself publicly complained about the Smithsonian’s focus on slavery and the downtrodden instead of success. I guess he thinks that all of us are going to suddenly wonder about all the success stories of rich people in our country (as if that hasn’t been beaten into our heads already) and forget about the labor – both physical and knowledge-based – that got them there.
We need to ensure that this history remains alive and available. If you’re a white person whose family has been in America since before the Civil War, go ahead and check out your family’s history. It won’t be easy, but you can cleanse it with the light of day. Save that information so it will always be available to others.
It’s recommended by professional genealogists to add slaves to your family tree with whatever information that you can find, so that any descendants they may have will be able to find them easier. This blog post by Kelly Bembry Midura helped me.
I’ve had a draft of this post in my pile for months. After seeing Mikki Kendall’s post on BlueSky about how white people have gotten angry at her for telling them about the child-size manacles she saw at Monticello, and after the revelations that Prager U – which is being increasingly incorporated into elementary schools throughout the south – is teaching that slavery was just the way it was back then and no big deal…after the complaining of the orange ape that it’s just too depressing for his thick fucking skull, I figured that now’s as good of time as any to just get this out there.
I hope it helps enlighten people in some way. I hope that anyone reading this, who – like me, is just realizing how dumb they actually are about this subject – will be inspired to learn more.
Black people have been dismissed for trying to educate the rest of us about this – accused of lying or exaggerating. I think it’s pretty clear now that there will be no solution to that unless we help them wake people up.
We have to all be in this together.