Creator: Hubard family.
Collection number: 360
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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).