Abstract: Bedford Brown was a state legislator and United States senator from Caswell County, N.C. The collection includes scattered papers of the family of Bedford Brown and of his son, Livingston Brown, whose wife was a daughter of John Bullock Clark (1802-1885), United States and Confederate congressman of Fayette, Mo. Papers include Brown and Clark family letters, beginning in 1836; political correspondence of Bedford Brown only in 1860, and of Livingston Brown, 1866-1876; and Caswell County deeds and miscellaneous papers.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Folder 3 contains a 12 May 1860 letter from an enslaved man in Arkansas (name unknown) to his Uncle Ned on another plantation. There is also a bill of sale dated 31 August 1863 for an enslaved woman named Lucy.

Abstract: Rice Carter Ballard (c. 1800-1860) was a slave trader based in Richmond, Va., who worked in partnership with the large slave trading firm of Isaac Franklin and John Armfield in the late 1820s and early 1830s. By the early 1840s, Ballard had settled down as a planter with several plantations in the Mississippi Valley. He married Louise Berthe around 1840 and made his home in Louisville, Ky. Ballard and his wife had three children: Ella (b. 1841), and twins Ann Carter and Charlotte Berthe (b. 1847). Letters, financial and legal materials, volumes, and other material documenting Rice Ballard’s life as a slave trader and planter. Letters include several from Henry Clay about court cases involving the legality of the slave trade and one from Mississippi Governor John Anthony Quitman about payment of a debt. Letters and financial records, 1820s-early 1830s, document day-to-day operations of the interstate slave trade among Ballard in Richmond, Va., John Armfield in Alexandria, Va., and Isaac Franklin in Natchez, Miss., and New Orleans, La. Records, 1840s-1860, document Ballard’s administration, in partnership with Judge Samuel S. Boyd, of a number of cotton plantations in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, especially Karnac, Magnolia, and Outpost. There are many letters from Boyd, from the overseers at the various places, and from Ballard’s cotton commission merchants in New Orleans. Letters discuss the slaves, improvements on the plantations, family life, politics (including especially the Know-Nothing Party), and financial arrangements. Also included are letters to and from Louise Rice about her life in Louisville, Ky. There are also three letters from slaves, 1847, 1853, and 1854, all from women asking Ballard for help with emancipation or with pending sales of themselves or others. Other materials in the collection supplement the letters with details of the slave trade, Ballard’s other financial activities, and plantation life.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: H. Smith Richardson, born in Greensboro, N.C. In 1907, he became sales manager for the Vick Company (later Richardson-Vicks, Inc.), which his father founded in 1905 to market Vicks Family Remedies. Richardson was also an early leader in management development, including the Vick School of Applied Merchandising, a college recruiting program in the 1930s, and special reports to shareholders on the importance of management development. He was also a pioneer in corporate governance, initiating practices in the 1940s that spread to other companies in later years. Personal and business correspondence, writings, newspaper clippings and other printed material, and business and association records documenting H. Smith Richardson’s career; papers of Richardson’s family, including his father Vick Chemical founder Lunsford Richardson and his brother Lunsford, Jr.; and papers relating to Smith and Richardson family history, including audio cassettes of interviews with 17 Richardson family members and printed and videotaped oral histories of the Richardson family. Richardson’s correspondence addresses a broad range of issues, including his business interests in the Vick Chemical Company, Richardson- Merrell, Inc., Reinsurance Corporation of New York, and other companies. Letters also document his participation in the America First Committee, the Republican Party, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Boy Scouts of America, the First Presbyterian Church of Greensboro, and the Richardson Foundation. They also document his interests in anticommunism, Senator Joe McCarthy’s tactics, local politics in both North Carolina and Connecticut, and segregation both in the U.S. and South Africa. Writings include a series of articles about the causes of the Depression in North Carolina. Also included are diaries and correspondence of his father-in- law Jacob Henry Smith, Presbyterian minister in Greensboro during the second half of the 19th century, and his wife Mary Kelly Watson Smith, including materials relating to Greensboro during the Civil War and a letter from a slave. Pictures and other documents relate to Richardson’s father’s birthplace Parker Heights Plantation near Salem, N.C.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: In Series 1 (Correspondence ), there are numerous letters that discuss race relations.A few letters Richardson wrote deal specifically with South Africa. In a letter of 7 June 1955, Richardson described his trip there, which combined bird watching with observing the country’s political situation. Of the growing institution of apartheid, Richardson noted, “These people are thinking exactly as we did in the South when you and I were boys.” Richardson’s continued interest led him to correspond with officials in the Information Service of South Africa (series filed with 11 September 1964).

Especially interesting are exchanges relating to how the South African government could present “the true picture of what South Africa has done and is doing, particularly in the racial field,” as represented by a pamphlet entitled “Progress Through Separate Development-South Africa in Peaceful Transition” (pamphlet not included).

Many letters mention Richardson’s attitudes on race. Richardson believed that communism and unionism, both of which he opposed, were strongest in the North, where, he believed, “vast populations of a different breed have arisen” (16 June 1944). He also felt that there was more contact between members of different classes in the South than in the North (11 May 1933).

There is also an 1854  letter from an enslaved individual belonging to Judge E.R. Watson, Richardson’s father-in-law. The first name of the person is undecipherable, but the last name is Smith. The content of the letter seems to be the individual is thanking Watson for getting them  out of jail (or at least attempting to).

Abstract: Lewis Thompson was the owner of plantations near Woodville (also called Hotel), Bertie County, N.C., and at Bayou Boeuf, near Alexandria, Rapides Parish, La. Thompson was also a political leader in North Carolina, serving in the House of Commons and State Senate, 1831-1852, and as a member of the General Convention of 1865. He was a UNC trustee from 1848 until his death. The collection includes business papers, ca. 1840-1871, of Lewis Thompson, consisting chiefly of correspondence, accounts, bills, receipts, slave lists, sharecropping contracts, and other documents relating to the production of cotton and wheat in Bertie County, N.C.; to sugar in Rapides Parish, La.; and to the sale of crops through factors in New York, Norfolk, New Orleans, and Baltimore. There is also a considerable amount of correspondence relating to Lewis Thompson’s role as executor of many estates, particularly that of his father-in-law, William M. Clark, and to Thompson’s investments with brokers in New York. Papers before 1840 consist chiefly of land grants, deeds, and estate papers of Thompson’s Pugh, Williams, Clark, Thompson, and Urquhart relations. There is also a group of papers relating to land controlled by the Tuscarora Indians. Few papers relate to Thompson’s political career or to his involvement in UNC. Papers after Thompson’s death in 1867 relate chiefly to the activities of his son, Thomas W. Thompson, who took over his father’s North Carolina business affairs. The plantations in Louisiana had been run by Thomas’s brother William for many years before their father’s death.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Included are slave lists from 1792, 1830, and 1850 (Folders 1, 5, and 15); records of slave purchases and sales  in 1812, 1820, 1859, and 1860 (Folders 3, 45, and 47); a letter written on behalf of a slave in Orange County, North Carolina, to a slave who had apparently been purchased by Lewis Thompson in March 1860 (Folder 48).

Also included are several sharecropping agreements between freedmen and Thomas W. Thompson in June 1865 (Folder 59 ); a letter from William Thompson about taking some of his black workers to register to vote on 2 June 1867 (Folder 68); and a record book registering accounts with black sharecroppers (Folder 98).

 

Abstract: Blackford family members lived in Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, and Alexandria, Va. Chiefly correspondence of three generations of the Blackford family. Included are letters relating to the involvement of Mary Berkeley (Minor) Blackford (1802-1896) in the American Colonization Society; diaries, 1842-1844, kept by William Matthews Blackford (1801-1864) while serving as United States charge d’affaires in Bogota, New Granada (now Columbia); Civil War letters from Launcelot Minor Blackford (1837-1914) and his brothers; scattered correspondence from missionaries and former slaves in Liberia; three issues of a newspaper, 1854, published in Cavalla, West Africa; Blackford family history information (typed transcriptions), including microfilm of a scrapbook of Launcelot Minor Blackford containing genealogical sketches of the Blackford, Minor, Byrd, Willis, Washington, Ambler, Mason, Jacquelin, and Gray families.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Much of the correspondence relates to the activities of the American Colonization Society and its counterpart in Great Britain, and documents the Blackford family’s antislavery sentiments and their attempts to organize a colonization society in Fredericksburg. The collection includes discussion of fears of a large-scale slave insurrection in the slave states (1831); difficulties in educating black women to be teachers; the life of missionaries in Liberia (1836, 1843, 1845, 1852, 1855); freeing slaves to send to Liberia (1841); observations of South American slavery (1842-1843); antislavery views in Richmond, Virginia; and opposition to the annexation of Texas as a proslavery plot to enable the South to secede (1844); the outfitting with tools of a slave manumitted by the Blackfords (1844); letters written by the slave Maria West for her blind owner and occasional personal notes from West herself (1846-1847); news of Abraham, a manumitted Blackford slave who joined a colony in Liberia (1845); opposition faced by abolitionists in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and nationally (1849); views on slavery and colonization (1850); response to a plan to send slaves to the Amazon Valley (1851); Charles Blackford’s opinion of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853); a proslavery argument and description of the treatment of slaves written by V. M. Randolph of Forkland, Alabama (1859); an account of the life, death, and philosophies of Richard Randolph, a Virginian who freed his slaves and moved to Ohio (1859); reaction to John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry (1860); the Northern working-class view of the war and slavery (1862); the secession crisis and Confederate army life (1861-1865); problems with freed slaves (1865); news of Liberia and the hope that emancipated slaves would join the African colony (1865); the idleness of freedmen and thievery among blacks and whites (1866); experiences of the white M. Payne in teaching black children (n.d.); and a description of a Danville, Virginia, race riot (1883).

Abstract: Prominent members of the Elliott and Gonzales families of Beaufort and Colleton districts, S.C., included William Elliott (1788-1863), planter, state legislator, and writer; Phoebe Waight Elliott (d. 1855); Ann Elliott Johnstone (1824-1900); Ralph Emms Elliott (1834-1902); Harriett Rutledge Elliott (1838-1869); Ambrosio Jos? Gonzales (b. 1818); Ambrose Elliott Gonzales (1857-1926); Narciso Gener Gonzales (1858-1903); and William Elliott Gonzales (1866-1937). The Elliotts owned cotton and rice plantations, houses in Beaufort and Adams Run, S.C., as well as a summer home in Flat Rock, N.C. Ambrose Elliott Gonzales, Narciso Gener Gonzales, and William Elliott Gonzales founded “The State,” a newspaper published in Columbia, S.C. The collection is chiefly correspondence, but also financial and legal papers, account books, maps and plats, a few writings of William Elliott and others, and a small amount of other material. The bulk of the material before the Civil War is correspondence of William Elliott Gonzales about South Carolina politics; sectional differences; his travels to Saratoga Springs and other health resorts, the northern states, and Europe; plantation management; rice and cotton crops; slaves; the education of children; summer at Flat Rock, N.C.; and various family matters. Only a few letters document William Elliott’s career as a writer; four are from William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870). Correspondence during the Civi War years discusses the lives of civilians and soldiers in South Carolina and in western North Carolina. Post-Civil War correspondence reveals the Elliott’s financial difficulties, their struggles to educate the Gonzales children, and their efforts to rebuild their plantations. It also documents the education and early professional lives of Ambrose and Narciso Gonzales. There are a few letters about the early years of their newspaper, “The State.”

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Correspondence covers various topics, including a slave rebellion (22 July 1822); buying and selling of slaves (8 February 1827); ; attitudes of Northerners and Southerners toward slavery and slaveholders (25 January 1847 and 15 April 1847, ? April 1847); the refusal of slaves to work, concern that slaves would run away to the Union Army, and efforts to recapture runaway slaves (1861); and a comparison of the black and white work ethic (9 March 1867). See Folders 8, 12-13, 32-33, 63-65, and 84-89).

A letter from Ann Elliott to her mother, Ann R. Smith, dated 12 October 1829, advised her mother that the crop at Social Hall plantation would probably not be a good one and that her mother should make only necessary expenditures, hire out some slaves, or cut wood to sell.

Letters from Letters from Ben (11 November 1848) and Isaac (22 October 1849) to William Elliott appear to indicate that they were slaves who were drivers on Elliott’s plantations (See Folders 34-37).

Financial and legal papers contain slave bills of sale and slave lists from 1855 and 1863 (See Folder 275). The collection also includes a memorandum book listing names, probably of slaves in 1857 (Folder 283); a plantation journal listing slaves bought with the plantation between 1840 and 1851 (Folder 301).

Abstract: Nicholas Washington Woodfin was born in Buncombe County, N.C., in 1810. In February 1831, he was admitted to practice law in the county courts, and soon after settled in Asheville, N.C. In 1840, Woodfin married Eliza Grace McDowell; the couple had three daughters. For ten years starting in 1844, Woodfin represented Buncombe and Henderson counties in the state senate. He was active on the Asheville school board and in the Episcopal church, and acted as the Buncombe County delegate to the North Carolina Secession Convention. During the Civil War, he was superintendent of the North Carolina Salt Works. Afterwards, he returned to the practice of law and died on 23 May 1876. The town of Woodfin, N.C., in Bumcombe County, is named for him. The papers include photocopies of deeds, legal papers, very scattered family and political correspondence, clippings, and speeches on agriculture, and other items of Buncombe County, N.C., lawyer and legislator Nicholas Washington Woodfin, his wife Eliza G. McDowell Woodfin, and other family members, chiefly 1840s-1870s. Included are a photocopy of the bill of auction for the Woodfin Mansion House and Grounds in Asheville, N.C., to be sold 13 August 1879, and a biographical sketch of Woodfin written by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton in February 1950. There are also photocopies of county deeds; family and business letters; Civil War letters; obituaries; clippings; indenturies; estate papers; family history materials; remarks made at a presentation of Woodfin’s portrait in Asheville in 1950; land warrant from Governor Patrick Henry to William Gibbs (apparently unrelated to the rest of the collection); three letters, 1853-1855, from slaves or ex-slaves who had gone to California with members of the family to work in the gold fields; letters of John W. Holland, including a few dated 1898-1901 when he was serving in the United States Army in the Philippines; and an original 1862 letter from Woodfin to Governor Clarke about the defense of eastern Tennessee.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The papers contain three letters from slaves or ex- slaves who had gone to California with members of the family to work in the gold fields between 1853-1855 (Folder 4).

Abstract: Accounts kept by Burke of Rowan County, N.C., as guardian of Joseph D. Cowan, and, presumably, as a general merchant,

including records of hiring slaves and selling tobacco.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Abstract: John Harding (1777-1865) established the plantation Belle Meade near Nashville, Tenn. His son, William Giles Harding (1806-1886), was a Tennessee militia general, planter, and horse breeder. Brothers William Hicks Jackson (1835-1903) and Howell Edmunds Jackson (1832-1895), were sons-in-law of W. G. Harding. W. H. Jackson, a Confederate general, managed Belle Meade in association with J. H. Harding and later as a partner of H. E. Jackson, who was a lawyer, Democratic legislator, U.S. Senator, and U.S. Circuit and Supreme Court judge. The papers are primarily related to Belle Meade, but include scattered personal and family correspondence, material on W. H. Jackson’s interest in agricultural organizations, some political and legal papers of H. E. Jackson, account books, and copies of letters by Elizabeth McGavock (Mrs. W. G.) Harding to her husband while he was a political prisoner at Ft. Mackinac, Mich., in 1862.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: There are letters from 1850 to 1852 from H.W. Paynor to William Harding discussing, among other topics, celebrations and religious ceremonies among the enslaved community on his plantation (Folder 4).

Letters in 1862 from Harding’s wife Elizabeth to him while he was imprisoned by the Federal forces in Detroit discuss day to day life on the plantation as well as news about the neighbors. One letter from July mentions enslaved individuals offering her money for her trip to see Harding in Michigan as it would be a costly journey (Folder 7). There is also a letter to Harding from 25 August 1862, apparently dictated to one of his friends by an enslaved woman named Susannah (Folder 7)

Abstract: George W. Burwell was a physician, planter, and businessman of Mecklenburg County, Va. He had family and business connections to Henderson, Granville County, N.C., and other locations along the North Carolina-Virginia border, largely through his brothers H. H., Louis, William, and Armistead R., and the family of his wife Elizabeth Gayle Burwell, particulary her parents Thomas Gayle (d. 1855?) and Elizabeth Gayle (d. 1868?). Correspondence, 1849-1883; financial and legal materials, 1786 and 1800-1884; and other papers relating to the Burwells, Gayles, and members of related families. Business letters chiefly document lending money and collecting debts, purchasing and selling land, managing tobacco plantations, and selling tobacco and other crops through commission merchants in Richmond and Petersburg, Va. Some letters document plantation life, including buying and selling slaves, work performed by slaves and others, and hiring out of slaves.Scattered throughout is a small number of family letters, chiefly dealing with health and other routine matters. During the Civil War, there are a few letters relating to slaves forced from their homes by Union soldiers during a raid and a letter probably dictated by a slave who was sent to work at a Confederate camp near Richmond. Financial and legal materials include agricultural records–overseers’ accounts, slave bills of sale, contracts with freedmen and other laborers, and household bills and accounts.Other financial and legal items relate to money lending and debt collection. Also included are deeds, wills, and papers relating to the estates of Thomas and Elizabeth Gayle and of John S. and Frances Gregory. There are also a few printed advertisements and related items, 1860s- 1870s; documents relating to Burwell’s exemption from conscription during the Civil War; and a few medical notes and accounts.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Several letters in series 1 discuss buying, selling, and hiring slaves. There is a 8 January 1852 letter from brothers H. H. Burwell and Armistead R. Burwell to George about hiring out a slave in Raleigh, N.C.  During the Civil War, there’s a 10 May 1864 letter from James Burwell, apparently one of George’s slaves, from a camp near Richmond, Va. The letter, probably dictated by James has two parts: the first part is addressed to “Mr. Master” and requests food and other supplies; the second part is addressed to James’s wife Mary and sends his love and respect.