Time to talk about slavery

I figured that at some point in the exploration of the histories of our family I'd run into slavery. Some of the people on both sides of the family who immigrated here came as indentured servants, people who agreed to work for a richer immigrant in exchange for the money to pay for their passage to America. 

Their term of servitude was limited, and when their time was up, they were free to go about their lives and make their way as best they could. Most of our ancestors completed their terms and went on to become land owners and farmers, with some taking up trades to earn enough money to provide a home and a decent living for their families. 

In some of the colonies, the richer immigrant benefitted from more than the labor of the servants they brought. By bringing people with them they would receive a headright benefit -- grants of land for every person they brought over. Servants might bargain with their masters to pay for their relatives back in Great Britain to come to America, earning the landowner more property and increasing the colonies' populations 

Slavery had not been abolished in Great Britain when colonization began, and it turns out that the headright extended to slaves brought or imported to the colonies. Unlike indentures, the slaves pretty much not attain freedom, and the laws written in the 1600s pretty much prevented any freed slave from enjoying freedom should they attain it. Given that some of the crops, most notably tobacco, were labor intensive, having a steady supply of workers was a priority, and it didn't take landowners long to figure out that having a servant for life was better than having servants who could walk off after a few years.

I don't normally think of the northern colonies as being hotbeds of slavery, but my research for this post led me to some last wills and testaments of the Prather family, one of the branches that feeds into the Womble side of Sharon's family. An entry in the will of Sharon's 7th great-grandfather, John Smith Prather, contained this entry: "I give and Bequeath unto my well beloved Daughter Rachel Prather One Negroe the first Choice of all my Negroes at my Death ... " 

Interestingly, in the wills I examined, few of the slaves were specifically bequeathed to the men in the family, only the women. Of course, the women didn't receive any of the real property. And though specific requests don't appear often, chances are the bulk of the slaves were included in the residue and remainder clauses of the wills.

You might be tempted to think that the Prathers lived in one of the southern colonies, but you'd be wrong. They all lived in the Maryland colony. Somehow, probably because of a lack of attention to my history studies, I never thought of Maryland as much of a slave holding colony/state. 

In fact, by the time of John Smith Prather's demise in the 1730s, slaves constituted more than a quarter of Maryland's population, most of them imported from Africa. By 1755 between one-third and one-half of the colony's population, depending on which part of the state you're talking about, were African or African descent.. By the end of the century almost all the enslaved adults were born in America.

What was life like for these enslaved individuals? The National Park Service describes the initial conditions: "Adult slaves [who were mostly males] arriving Maryland in the 1670s would live their entire lives as slaves. They would face a harsh environment in which they were subject to hard labor, new diseases, and a shortage of women that would result in a low rate of reproduction. They would face abusive masters, isolation from other Africans, and restriction of mobility." 

Over time, conditions improved somewhat, depending on which part of the state you're looking at. One slave noted, "Down in Prince George's County .. they are a little harder than they are in the upper part of the state." John Smith Prather lived in Prince George's County.

And in case you wondered. slavery wasn't outlawed in Maryland until 1864.

Nothing in John Smith Prather's will tells us how many people constituted "all my Negroes," but he mentions 420 acres of property in his bequests to be split among two of his sons. He may have owned more property that would have been included in the rest and residue provision. I could not find a figure for the average number of laborers needed to support an acre of land, and I'm sure it varied by crop, with tobacco taking the most effort. I guess we'd just have to say, "As many as needed." 

I also failed to find what the average value placed on an individual slave was. Again, it may have been to difficult to compute. 

Next time I'll see what I can find about a Col. Prather who served in the French and Indians wars.

Image: Tobacco -- Stringing the Primings, 19th century newspaper image, retrieved from womeninamericanhistory18.blogspot.com