Creator: Bullock and Hamilton family.
Collection number: 101
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Abstract: Bullock, Hamilton, Coleman, Tarry, and Watkins families of Granville (now Vance) County, N.C., Mecklenburg County, Va., and Lowndes County, Miss. Bullock family material consists of correspondence regarding finances, household expenses, and plantation management, with some letters on family matters and social events; financial and legal papers, including the 1854 will of Sally Fain, a “woman of colour,” who owned slaves. Genealogical information; and printed material; as well as five manuscript volumes of general store and blacksmithing accounts and some diary entries for Bullocks of Williamsboro, Granville (now Vance) County, N.C., especially William Bullock (1776-1829) and his son John Bullock (1799-1866). Materials of members of the Hamilton and related families relate chiefly to Charles Eaton Hamilton (1816-1855), planter of Granville County, N.C., and Lowndes County, Miss. And the families of his wives, Jane Coleman (d. 1850) and Sally Tarry, both of Mecklenburg County, Va., and consist primarily of personal correspondence giving family and neighborhood news, documenting courtship and discussing child raising and the role of women as wives and mothers; the management of the family’s plantations, including references to the use of Native Americans to pick cotton in Mississippi; crop and land sales; Episcopal Church matters. The purchase and treatment of slaves and cases of fugitive slaves; the Civil War; and descriptions of life in Mobile, Ala., after the Civil War. There are also a few financial and legal papers of the Hamilton family, a record book detailing plantation expenses in Mississippi, and miscellaneous financial and legal documents belonging to unknown individuals.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: The Bullock papers contain a letter discussing opinions on slavery (1844) and the will of Sally Fain, an African-American woman who owned slaves (1854).See Folder 2 and 6.
Hamilton family papers refer to the purchase, rental, and treatment of slaves and to the issue of runaway slaves as well as to the North’s view on the treatment of slaves and the relocation of freed slaves to the North. The collection also contains a letter from a freedman in New Orleans who was trying to purchase his enslaved sisters from Hamilton in 1851(See Folders 18 – 31).
Undated items include a letter to Charles Eaton Hamilton regarding a runaway slave, a police constable seeking to entrap him with “negro spies,” and the runaway’s chances of escaping to the North (See Folder 34)