I do hereby sell

No matter how many times I see one, I still get chills. A recent acquisition includes a bill of sale for a slave girl named Dinah. Not only is there the bill of sale, but there is also a certificate of birth attesting that “Dinah a female child born of the body of a female belonging to Zachariah Drum . . . 26th day of June 1808.” Dinah was sold six years later by Drum to Ebenezer Punderson of Red Hook, New York. I think I am saddest about the fact that we don’t know the mother’s name.

The top document attests to Dinah’s birth, the bottom one is the bill of sale. Ms 101749, Folder 2.

We have many items in our Research Center, both manuscript and object, that relate to the Punderson family. Click on one of the links and explore what we have on this interesting family. They were most noted for being Loyalists during the American Revolution.

George Washington’s Slave

Every once in a while I get a reference question that reinforces just how important our manuscript collections are. A woman from Vernon asked if we had the letter to Oliver Wolcott, Jr.  in which George Washington mentioned a runaway slave.  After a bit of searching, and using the finding aid to help guide me, I found it. I had no idea that this letter existed, although it has been published numerous times.

In the letter, dated 1 September [1796], Washington asked Wolcott to make some inquiries about a young slave girl who ran away from Philadelphia and was last seen in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The slave girl was the personal servant to Mrs. Washington, and he stated that they had raised her like a daughter and hence could not understand why she would want to run away. A transcription of the entire letter (3 pages) can be found in the book George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal, available online through Google Books.

Washington wrote to his Secretary of the Treasury, Connecticut resident Oliver Wolcott, saying he was sending a description of a runaway slave girl. Ms Wolcott, Oliver Jr.

Wolcott’s letters were at one time pasted to slips of paper that were then bound into a book-like form. The strip is very visible here.

Wolcott’s papers arrived at CHS in 54 bound volumes plus several boxes of material, much of it gathered by a grandson of his, George Gibbs. On the first page of the letter illustrated above you can see a volume and item number written in the upper left corner. That mark was made when the volumes of correspondence were dis-bound, thus preserving the”original” organization.

Wolcott served as Secretary of The Treasury in 1795 and was later elected Governor of Connecticut. As I saw in once article I read about Wolcott, what the Adams family is to Massachusetts,the Wolcott family is to Connecticut. The Oliver Wolcott Jr. Papers is an extensive collection and shows just how important Connecticut was to the formation of the United States in the years just after the Revolution. Ask for the Oliver Wolcott Jr. Papers finding aid in the Research Center if you would like to begin exploring Connecticut’s early Federal period history.

What is his name?

In 1752, William Hooker purchased a Negro Man from Willis & Stocker. An image of the bill, which is part of our collections, is shown below. Can you make out the name of the Negro Man?

Bill to William Hooker, 1752, Ms 69557. Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT

The last four letters are “ford.” We have some thoughts, but are uncertain about the first five.

What do you think the first five letters are?

Leave a comment if you have an idea. As usual, this piece is open for research. Come visit us! Don’t forget, you may search our research center holdings anytime via our online catalog, HistoryCat.

I David Barlow, of Sherman

A very recent addition to the collection had me hopping up and down with excitement. We now have  copies of two wills, one written by David Barlow in 1814, and the other by his wife, Sarah Barlow, written in 1822. The couple lived in Sherman, Connecticut.

My original interest in these documents was that David willed “my Negro by the name of Jack” to his wife, along with livestock and cash. Subsequently, in her will Sarah noted that  “to my servant named Jack I give and bequeath one bed and bedding being his bed which he now uses . . . It is also my will that the said Jack shall have his Freedom he being a now a slave immediately after my decease and I hereby emancipate him the said Jack from and after the time of decease.”  Further research revealed that Jack married another Negro servant, stayed in Sherman, and died in 1849 at the age of 83.  Slave-related documents from Connecticut, never mind Fairfield County, are scarce–hence my excitement.

The rest of the will, was equally intriguing.  Barlow was a farmer, but he owned one oxcart, a wagon, a sleigh, and two chairs.  Not the transportation one equates with a farmer.  Research on him did not uncover much, except that on the grand list of Sherman in 1790 he was taxed $600.00, which was one of the highest assessments at the time. So, we have a rather rich man.

Sarah was also a surprise. To her granddaughter Sally Barlow she left her gold beads, and to granddaughter Sarah B. Hubbell, she left a bureau, a large dining table, one tea-table, two looking glasses, one set of silver tablespoons and one set of silver teaspoons. Again, not what one would necessarily expect on a farm. The actual estate inventory is part of the document, and provides a bit more insight.  However, we need to find more information on the Barlow family to fill out their story. Were they active in town government, state politics, the church? As is often the case, I have more questions than answers at this point.

Minnah

No matter how many I see, I still get the chills when reading and handling a bill of sale for a person.  We recently acquired just such a document.  Benjamin Payne of Hartford sold a Negro Woman named Minnah to Samuel Forbes of Canaan for fifty-two pounds, ten shillings.  This particular bill of sale caught our attention because Samuel Forbes, of the iron manufacturing firm Forbes & Adam, freed his slaves sometime around the Revolution, and his account books (which was recently acquired) are filled with customers he identified as “Negro”, individuals who were obviously freemen.  One cannot help but wonder why Forbes had such a dramatic change of heart about owning human beings in an apparently short span of time.