Abstract: George W. Robertson (fl. 1807-1855) of Caswell County, N.C., was a physician who also operated a tobacco warehouse and bought and sold slaves. He married Sarah Allen (1803-1871) and together they had eight children, including Willie P.M. Robertson, who enlisted with the Yanceyville Greys, Company A, 13th North Carolina Infantry Regiment, and died at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill in Virginia. The collection documents the slave and tobacco dealings of George W. Robertson and his business partners in Yanceyville, Caswell County, N.C., as well as the Civil War and Reconstruction experiences of other Robertson family members and friends. Financial papers consist of records with the names, ages, and prices of enslaved people purchased and sold by Robertson and his partners. The slave and tobacco ledger chiefly contains a record of purchase and sale of tobacco, but there are also numerous references to buying and selling slaves in North Carolina and Virginia and evidence of three separate trips to Alabama to sell slaves. Letters describe two of the slave sales trips; anticipation of the Civil War; courtship; the Yanceyville homefront during the war; the concerns of Eliza Baldwin Skidmore Carraway, a newlywed bride in Clinton, Miss., in 1860 and later in the aftermath of the fall of Vicksburg when her slaves departed and Union soldiers encamped on her land; and Mary Royal Robertson Alexander’s everyday concerns in 1870, including her fear of and frustration with African Americans. Other materials include clippings of recipes, housekeeping advice, and home remedies for illnesses and pests; a tintype of Willie P.M. Robertson in Confederate Army uniform; and several copies of the Bible and other volumes, some with marginal notes recording births, deaths, marriages, and thoughts of their owners. There is also a file of background information on curing yellow or bright leaf tobacco; family history; Willie P.M. Robertson’s death and the Battle of Gaines’ Mill; and transcriptions from the slave and tobacco ledger and of the marginal notes in Sallie Robertson’s Bible.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: This collection contains numerous materials related to Robertson’s slave trading and tobacco enterprises. Of particular interest in Folder 1 in background information on the process of curing yellow leaf tobacco, discovered by an enslaved man named Stephen. Folder 3 contains bills of sale for enslaved men and women (which are noted in the ledger in Folder 4), as well as list of 45 free people of color in 1865 with notations about their health.

Correspondence in Folder 5 contains letters from Eliza Baldwin Skidmore Carraway to Eliza Ann Robertson describing the aftermath of the fall of Vicksburg when her slaves departed and Union soldiers encamped on her land, and from Mary Royal Robertson Alexander to her mother Sarah Allen Robertson, about everyday concerns, as well as her fear of and frustration with African Americans (1870).

 

Abstract: The Otey family of Meridianville, Ala., and Yazoo County, Miss., included William Madison Otey (1818-1865), merchant and cotton planter; his wife, Octavia Wyche Otey (fl. 1841-1891); and their children, Imogene Otey Fields, Mollie Otey Hampton; William Walter Otey; Lucille Otey Walker; Matt Otey, and Elliese Otey. The collection includes family and business correspondence, financial and legal papers and volumes, and personal items. Family correspondence is with members of the Wyche, Horton, Kirkland, Pruit, Landidge, and Robinson families in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and Tennessee. A few letters from Confederate soldiers in the field appear as do some letters relating to difficulties on the homefront. There is also a letter dated 27 February 1863 from a slave in Mount Shell, Tenn., to his master about building a stockade. Business papers pertain mostly to William Madison Otey’s merchant activities in Meridianville, Ala., especially with Chickasaw Indians in the 1830s, and to the Oteys’ cotton plantations in Madison County, Ala., and Yazoo County, Miss. Others concern the financial affairs of the Wyche, Horton, and Kirkland families. Included are accounts with cotton factors and merchants, estate papers, deeds, loan notes, summonses, receipts, agreements for hiring out slaves, and work contracts with freedmen. Volumes include account books, plantation daybooks, a receipt book, and a diary of Octavia Wyche Otey that covers the years 1849-1888. The diary and other papers offer detailed descriptions of women’s lives, especially in nineteenth-century Alabama.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Letters from Rebecca Wyche in 1835 and Rodah Horton in 1832, as well as other family members throughout the 1820s and 1830s,  discuss buying and selling enslaved individuals (Folder 1).

Correspondence from William Otey to his wife in the 1850s and 1860s discuss the management of their property in Yazoo County, as well as the welfare of enslaved people on the property (Folders 4-17).  There is also a letter dated 27 February 1863 from an enslaved man named Thomas, in Mount Shell, Tenn., to his master, J. M. Oaty, asking him to get a substitute for him in the building of a stockade (Folder 17).

Financial and legal papers in Series 2 contain several references to enslaved persons. William Wyche’s 1829 papers concern hiring out slaves to the firm Otey Kinkle (Folder 30). There is also an order issued in 1838 for the delivery of a enslaved woman named Eliza, who had belonged to Dr. A. A. Wyche, deceased, to Joseph Leeman. Also included is a receipt for Eliza signed by Leeman in 1838. There is also agreement dated 1849 for the hire of an enslaved woman and three children belonging to the estate of Jackston Lightfoot, which John Wyche was executor of (Folder 31).

Octavia Wyche’s antebellum diary (Folders 39-42) contains frequent mentions of managing and punishing enslaved people on her property, as well as instances of illnesses.

After the Civil War, Octavia wrote in a large volume about interacting with free people of color on her plantation, as well as copies of contracts in 1866 for Maria, Nina, and Anderson, former slaves at Green Lawn plantation. (Folder 38 also contains a contract Octavia Otey signed in 1866 with Maria, who worked as a laundress and cook). Of particular note in the diary are descriptions, dated 29 November and 6 December 1868 and 19 January and 1 February 1869, of visits to Green Lawn by the Ku Klux Klan.Also included is an entry for 22 November describing wedding preparations for the daughter of a former slave, Maria, and another for 12 January 1880, in which Octavia complains that local blacks “will not work for white people if they can help it.” (Folders 43-63).

A merchant’s account book of William Madison Otey contains an account from at least one customer, Sally Shochoty, is listed as a Negro; the spelling of her name as Shock.ho.ty at one point suggests that she may have intermarried with the Chickasaws (Folder 64).

The daybook from 1857 in Series 4.2 contains records of cotton picked by enslaved individuals on Otey’s plantation, listed by name (Folder 65). Folders 67 & 68 also contain daybooks from the Civil War era.

Folder 74 contains an 1849 clipping related to the enslaved African American musician “Blind Tom” at Camp Davis. Tom Wiggins was born in Columbus, Ga., and was an extremely talented musician who composed a number of songs and could play music by ear. He was an autistic savant and was unfortunately exploited throughout his lifetime for his musical abilities. Click here to link to a website dedicated to preserving Blind Tom’s legacy.

After the war, Octavia Otey’s correspondence received from family in the late 1860s and mid 1870s discusses relations with free people of color (Folders 18 – 23).

 

 

Abstract: John Poynter Streety was born in Bladen County, N.C., in 1820. He arrived in the town of Haynesville, Ala., circa 1839, where he became a prosperous businessman. Streety’s plantation was located in Lowndes County, where he was primarily active in cotton farming, raising livestock, and other agricultural activities. He was also involved in a co-partnership with a firm named J.P. Streety and Company, which participated in several types of businesses, including mercantile and advancing credit, ginning and milling, and acquisition of land. Streety died in Haynesville, Ala., in 1894. The bulk of the collection is manuscript volumes, mostly written by John Poynter Streety, 1874-1894. The volumes contain entries describing life on his plantation and in the town of Haynesville, Ala., as well as a few accounts of national occurrences. Many entries describe Streety’s farming and mercantile endeavors, the weather and its impact on crops, family and town life, the performance of workers, and local politics, while others describe race relations in the post-Civil War American South and include Streety’s personal views, accounts of lynch mobs, and other information. Some entries discuss yellow fever, social and economic conditions, and the national political environment. Also included are research materials, late 1960s-early 1970s, relating to Streety and belonging to Roland Mushat Frye, a Streety descendant and professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania; a 2001 Streety family newsletter; and other items.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: There are several references to race relations and African Americans in Streety’s writings. From Volume 2 in Folder 4, The entry written 12 June 1875 concerns the Radical Republican Party meeting attended by “a crowd of Freedmen,” and describes it as “noisy and turbulent.

Volume 3 in Folder 6 includes entries regarding race relations, such as one written 14 November 1875 that contains the description of a court case against an African American for assaulting a white man, which John Poynter Streety noted as having been arranged to include a majority of African Americans on the jury. In entries written 23 October and 25 December 1875, Streety reflected on his views regarding the presence of African Americans at his store and his concern for the safety of the store’s goods. In another entry from 1 January 1876, he mentioned Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

In Volume 4 in Folder 8 for an entry dated 26 August 1876, Streety discussed the overall dissatisfaction of the African American population regarding the overwhelming Democratic Party victory in the state elections.

In an entry written on 9 May 1878, Streety discussed the time African Americans spent in court and their convictions for what he considered minor infractions (Volume 5, Folder 10)

Volumes 7 and 8 in Folders 14 and 16 contain numerous references to Streety’s views on race relations, and incidents involving newly freed African Americans

Volume 9a in Folder 18  contains entries concerning race relations, such as an account of a lynching written on 30 March 1888. In the account, Streety described an African American man being abducted from jail, where he was awaiting trial for allegedly killing a white man by a mob of masked men who hung him from a tree by the town’s public square. A few days later, on 7 May 1888, Streety commented on the consequences of the lynching, wherein numerous African Americans were arrested for organizing with the intention of avenging the action and state troops were called upon to handle the situation. In a 20 August 1889 entry, Streety reflected upon possible race troubles brought about by comments published in a newspaper edited by an African American man, in which an article characterized “the White race in most uncalled for and scandelous manner.”

There are accounts of local and national economic matters, such as the entry on 1 March 1892 noting the sharp decrease in the price of cotton and the dire situations encountered by farmers, especially African Americans. Another entry regarding race relations was written on 14 October 1893, describing a young African American girl being whipped by a white man for “rudely walking against his daughter.” The same white man had the parents of two smaller girsl whipped for the same reason. The entry goes on to describe the white man responsible for the whippings receiving a letter saying that future acts of this sort would result in the town being burnt down (Volume 10, Folder 21)

Abstract: The collection includes business and personal papers of Edmund Wilcox Hubard (1806-1878), planter, militia officer, state legislator, and U.S. Representative from Virginia, and of his family in Virginia, Washington, D.C., North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, consisting of diaries, account books, plantation accounts, slave lists, notebooks, and physicians’ daybooks. Includes papers relating to the cultivation of tobacco, cotton, and wheat, as well as other phases of plantation life, the legal and medical professions, railroads, colleges, schools, teachers, churches, welfare organizations, agricultural societies, newspapers, publications by private individuals, and social life in North Carolina and Virginia. Also includes papers concerning the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the Civil War, and offices and affairs of the Virginia militia. Families mentioned in the papers include Bolling, Eppes, Jefferson, Jones (Willie), Littlejohn, Mosely, Page, Randolph, Thurston, Thweatt, Wilcox, and Williamson.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: There is an order, dated 27 August 1781, from Brigadier General Peter Muhlenberg, allowing Edmund Wilcox to move the slaves and effects of Governor Nelson, and those of Wilcox’s sister, Mrs. Rootes, without impressment of horses and wagons (Folder 18).

There is a letter, dated 9 November 1782, from Thomas Nelson to Edmund Wilcox, about selling slaves belonging to Nelson and to Colonel Rootes’s family (Folder 19).

There is a letter, dated 16 November 1790, from Edmund Ruffin at Coggin’s Point, to Francis Eppes, at Bermuda Hundred, Va., about selling 20 slaves to take care of a debt (Folder 23).

An indenture dated 29 October 1818 places property of Susan Wilcox Hubbard’s into the hands of Lenaeus Bolling and William M. Thornton, to be handled for her children. This property includes a number of enslaved individuals (Folder 39).

There is some correspondence in 1826 to Martha Eppes about her slaves at the Grove property (Folder 43-44).

There are also several letters in the 1830s, offering to buy or sell a slave in order to prevent the separations of married couples (Folder 53).

In a letter, dated 4 March 1832, J. W. Flood at Buckingham County gave his views on slavery and other issues (Folder 57).

There is a letter, dated 24 July 1844, to Martha Burke Jones Eppes, from Joseph B. Littlejohn, in Tennessee, telling of family affairs, hard financial times, and the necessity of try to sell slaves (Folder 101).

Subseries 1.9 contains various letters between 1854 – 1860 from Robert Hubard to his brother about a number of topics, including possible emancipation of the enslaved.

A letter dated 16 October 1856 from John T. Watkins discusses Hubard’s helping with the moral and religious uplift of the slaves in. There are also a few other papers pertaining to Watkins’s organization, the Cumberland African Society for the Amelioration of the Moral and Religious Condition of the Colored People of the County, including its constitution (Folder 147).

A letter dated 4 November 1864 by Robert Thruston Hubard voiced objections to slaves being put into the Confederate army (Folder 190).

The collection also contains papers relating to the Freedmen’s Bureau and arrangements for hiring African Americans in 1865 (Folders 192-194), and a letter dated dated 12 June 1871 that  discusses the treatment of African Americans laborers by whites in the workplace (Folder 233).

Abstract: John Houston Bills was a Tennessee planter who was active in the Democratic Party, the Freemasons, a temperance society, and was a friend of President James K. Polk (1795-1849). The collection includse a diary of Bills, 1843-1871, and a few letters and miscellaneous accounts. Diary entries describe daily life on Bills’s plantations near Bolivar in Hardeman County, Tenn. The largely terse entries include information on slavery; the Civil War, especially the Battle of Shiloh; agricultural production; weather conditions; religious services; and descriptions of Bills’s travels in the eastern United States, Canada, and Europe.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The diary contains references to the work, treatment, and prices of slaves.

Abstract: Members of the Manly family of Wake County, N.C., and other locations included Charles Manly, governor of North Carolina, 1849-1851; his son, Basil Charles Manly, a lawyer who served as mayor of Raleigh, N.C.; and son-in-law George Badger Singeltary, lawyer of Greenville, N.C. Correspondence, financial and legal items, military papers, estate papers, account books, genealogical material, and other items relating to the family of Charles Manly. Materials pertain to the daily lives and financial and legal interests of the Manly family, chiefly 1847-1870, with some material concerning military careers during the Mexican and Civil wars. Topics include Charles Manly’s personal business and law practice; lives of students at the University of North Carolina in the 1850s, including seven student essays by William Henry Manly and one letter concerning the closing of the University in 1868; the lives of women on a plantation in Wake County, especially in the 1850s, including their relations with slaves; George Badger Singeltary’s dishonorable discharge during the Mexican War and other aspects of Singeltary’s life; activities of the 9th and 44th North Carolina regiments in the Civil War; and the estates of William H. Haywood Sr., James C. S. McDowell, and others.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Personal correspondence describe the plantation mistress’s relations with slaves, primarily between 1850-1860 (Folders 2-28). Financial items from 1854-1868 document the sale of several Haywood family slaves, the value of slaves, and terms and costs of hiring freedmen after Emancipation particularly in 1865 (Folders 73-81 ).

Abstract: Elizabeth Amis Cameron Hooper Blanchard (1873-1956), author, art collector, and interior decorator, was related by birth and marriage to the Amis, Hooper, Blanchard, and Butterworth families. Prominent persons represented in the collection include her husband, John Osgood Blanchard (d. ca. 1912); her mother, Mary (“Mamie”) Amis Hooper (b. 1843); and her mother’s three sisters, Elizabeth (“Bettie”) Amis (1837-1872), Sallie Amis Nowland (b. 1841), and Julia Amis (1848-1876). Other prominent family members included the Amis sisters’ parents, Thomas Amis (fl. 1834-1876) and Sarah Davis Amis (d. 1852), and their aunt, Mary Amis Butterworth (fl. 1855-1880), and uncle, Samuel F. Butterworth (fl. 1855-1866). This collection is divided into two parts. Subcollection 3367(A) contains correspondence, notes, memoranda, diary entries, clippings, pictures, and breeding and racing records, all relating to Elizabeth Blanchard’s book, “The Life and Times of Sir Archie: The Story of America’s Greatest Thoroughbred,” as well as a typed draft of the book. Also included in 3367(A) are genealogical materials on the Amis and Dulany families and copies of Amis and Cameron family wills. Subcollection 3367(B) contains family letters of the Amis, Butterworth, and Blanchard families. Included are letters from Sarah Davis Amis while she was living on a plantation near Columbus, Miss., in the 1830s and 1840s, to her grandmother in Warrenton, N.C.; letters to and from the four Amis sisters after their mother’s death in 1852, while they travelled in Europe and lived with their Butterworth relatives in New York and Morristown, N.J.; letters among the Amises and Butterworths after the latter moved, in 1864, to California, where Samuel Butterworth was managing a mine at Almaden; letters from Thomas Amis, who went to live with relatives in Madison Parish, La., in 1870; and correspondence to and from the Blanchards after their marriage when they travelled to Japan, 1906.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: This collection contains family letters written from a plantation near Columbus, Mississippi. The correspondence contains plantation letters from Sarah Amis that routinely mention the welfare of two slaves named Lethe and Sophia, including an 1840 note stating that Lethe gave birth to a child who was “right good looking and not black of course”; a letter from Sophia to Bettie and Sallie Amis (1858); a North Carolina letter referring to “old negroes” at the end of the Civil War (1867); a comment from Sallie Amis in Petersburg, Virginia that “the niggas are as impudent as they can be” (1867); a report from Mamie Amis in San Francisco of Irish prejudice against free blacks (1869); and discussion of the political actions of blacks in Louisiana (1870-1876).

Abstract: Pendleton was a graduate of the United States Military Academy, an Episcopal clergyman and schoolmaster in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, a Confederate brigadier general, serving under Joseph E. Johnston and Robert E. Lee, and rector of Grace Episcopal Church, Lexington, Va., 1853-1883. Family letters to and from William Nelson Pendleton and his wife, and from his children and Page, Nelson, Pendleton, and other relatives, giving an extensive picture of the private and public life of Virginians through most of the 19th century. The 35 items dated earlier than 1837 are Nelson and Page family letters. Approximately 1,400 items were written during the Civil War years, including military communications among officers in the Virginia theatre of war, correspondence concerning promotions, personal rivalries and criticism among Confederate officers, letters to and from Mrs. Pendleton at Lexington, Va., and other members of the family. There is correspondence before, during, and after the war concerning the Episcopal Church and specifically the affairs of the Lexington church and threats to Pendleton’s tenure as rector, and (from 1870 onwards) Pendleton’s work in raising a Robert E. Lee memorial fund. There are also some papers relating to Pendleton’s life in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland before he came to Lexington in 1853.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Letters cover such topics as his opinions on slavery; slaves building Confederate fortifications (1861); thoughts of slaves on possible Yankee victory (1862); instructions on handling rebellious slaves (1863); the postwar situation with African Americans (1865); and justifications of the institution of slavery using passages from the Bible (1880). The collection also includes an Annual Report of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society (1881).

Abstract: George Washington Sargent, the son of Winthrop Sargent (1753- 1820) and of Mary McIntosh (Williams) Sargent, was born in Mississippi, where his father was the first territorial governor. After his marriage to Margaret Percy, he lived in Philadelphia, Pa., and Natchez, Miss., from which he managed his family’s extensive property holdings in Ohio, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The collection includes ten letter books and letterpress copybooks, 1840-1862, primarily containing copies of business correspondence related to the management of Sargent’s extensive property in Ohio and Mississippi, including detailed letters, 1851-1862, on plantation management, the collection of notes and mortgages, the sale of crops, and other financial matters. Also included are copies of letters from Sargent to his wife, Margaret Percy Sargent, and other members of his family. There are also an account book, 1842-1846, relating to the estate of George Washington Sargent’s mother, Mary McIntosh Williams Sargent, including her land holdings in Mississippi and Louisiana, and another account book that is pasted over with political newspaper clippings, 1862-1900.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Folder 7 includes an account book containing speeches and statements of political leaders concerning the North and South, slavery, and emancipation, and Reconstruction (1860- 1865). Microfilm available.

Abstract: Cameron family of Orange and Durham counties and Raleigh, N.C. Among antebellum North Carolina’s largest landholders and slave holders, the Camerons also owned substantial plantations in Alabama and Mississippi. Prominent family members included Richard Bennehan (1743-1825), merchant; Duncan Cameron (1777-1853), lawyer, judge, banker, and legislator; and Paul C. Cameron (1808-1891), planter, agricultural reformer, and railroad builder. The bulk of the collection consists of correspondence, financial and legal documents, and account books. In addition, there are speeches, writings, printed material, pictures, and miscellaneous other types of personal papers. Included is extensive information about Richard Bennehan’s store at Stagville, N.C., and the Stagville and Fairntosh plantations, including crop and slave records. Family correspondence details the familial relationships and social behavior of a wealthy planter family, particularly the women. In addition to documentation about Duncan Cameron’s legal career, there is also information about the State Bank of North Carolina and the banking industry, the education of the Cameron children at various schools, the development of the University of North Carolina, the state militia, the Episcopal Church, railroads, and state government.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Correspondence regards attitudes toward slavery; plantation management (1830s); runaway slaves (1847); a former slave’s attempts to buy her children (1859); and the aftermath of emancipation, including the looting of Fairntosh Plantation by former slaves. Additional materials include a narrative about a test case brought by an African-American servant (1865); slave lists and a slave ledger which provide information on the hiring and expenses of slaves, transfer of slaves, contracts to sell slaves, recording birth and deaths and slaves’ occupations; student essays on slavery (1796-1805); an undated essay “A Peep into the Old Dominion” discussing problems of free labor; and an account book recording accounts for African Americans (1866). The collection also includes letters written to and from a former Cameron family slave living in Liberia (1840s) and letters from a slave in Alabama reporting on plantation business to the Camerons. Microfilm available.