The Ridgely Slaves, an Interim Report This is an interim report on my five or six months of research on the Ridgely slaves. Not being sure where further research will take me it seems important to record what I have done so far and to suggest some very tentative conclusions. These conclusions, of course, may be shot down completely by the end of the project. First of all what I have consulted. There are two secondary considerations of Ridgely slavery, or more specifically Hampton slavery, the earlier by Stacia Gregory, the newer by Dr. Hayward Farrar. Gregory's paper is remarkably solid for undergraduate work; her research was wide and intelligent, and her notes are still helpful to a researcher. Farrar is excellent on the secondary literature on slavery, but thin on Hampton and the application of that literature to society there. A number of isolated primary sources exist at Hampton. There is, first of all, the copy of the Memoir of Henry White which gives insights into the minds of slave owners, especially during the Civil War. He is unsettled by some memories of his grandfather's chastizing slaves. Eliza Ridgely's (b 1828) manuscript diary for 1841-42 adds a few details such as her teaching servant children the Lord's Prayer; her record of Christman gifts to servant children from 1841-1854 (Hamp 14733) gives a list of children in those years with surnames and also gives more evidence into owners' minds. Children, for example, whom Eliza judged bad received no gift for that year. Eliza E. R. Ridgely's manuscript account book (Hamp_____) notes Hampton's mistress' Christmas gifts of money over several years to house servants. These accounts can also be mined later for evidence of slave material culture: the types of cloth used in their clothing, the number of yards (usually 8-10) it took to make an adult slave dress, etc. The bulk of my work has been in the microfilm copies of Ridgely manuscripts at the Maryland Historical Society and the Maryland Hall of Records (MHS MSS. 692 & 1127; HofR, G. Howard Whits Collection, MdHR G 1898). Most of my initial energy went into trying to build up lists of Hampton and Ridgely slaves at given times in the family history. The most conscious and complete such listing was made during the administration of Gov. Charles Carnan Ridgely's will after his death in 1829 (MHS MS. 692, box 5). A codicile to the governor's will manumitted many of his slaves, provided future manumission for others and care for those over 45 years old. His executors sucessfully petitioned the court not to have the slaves sold as was provided for the Governor's personal property in general. They, then, had the lengthy task of creating a census of Ridgely slaves. The finished list cited 311 Ridgely slaves divided as follows at the time of the Governor's death: 156 Hampton slaves 54 Forge Works slaves 3 Perry Hall slaves 17 Mrs. Hanson: the Governor's daughter who apparently had husband troubles and for whom the Governor was apparently supplying everything. These were probably Hampton servants. 23 "JH" probably means James Howard, a son-in-law who held the Mine Bank Property under conditions stated in the Governor's will. These wereprobably Hampton slaves. 54 White Marsh slaves. _ 4_ slaves, whereabouts unclear. Total: 311 Ridgely slaves in 1829. The executors then had to determine slave ages, freeing females between the ages of 25 and 45 and males between 28 and 45 and permitting children under 2 to follow freed mothers (one such child was permitted to follow a freed father). This left young and older slaves to be divided among heirs, the youger ones and their future children to be freed at the requisite ages and the older ones to be taken care of and rewarded for their labors. This should have started an immediate flow of freed Hampton slaves into the community and a continuing trickle through the next several decades. If we can solve surname problems, census records may be useful here. The ultimate disposition of the Governor's slaves as the result of the administration of his will was that 75 slaves were freed as being between the ages of 25 or 28 and 45 and 17 children were permitted to go with freed parents (mothers, except in one instance in which the heirs agreed that a boy might leave with his father.) There are discrepancies between numbers in the original census and in the final disposition of the slaves, but the rest of the slaves were apportioned according to the will to David Ridgely, Mrs. Hanson, and the Governor's other seven daughters or their heirs: Harriet Chew, Mary P. Dorsey, Prudence Howard, Achsah Carroll, Eliza Carroll, Priscilla White, and the heirs of Sophia Howard. The will had provided that the executors should take care of those slaves over the age of 45 and charge expenses tothe heirs. I suspect, however, that the old were apportioned with the young to those heirs. (Considerable work can be done in trying to resolve the figures here and on such questions as to what did happen to the older slaves and, of course, on the very important question as to what happened to the freed slaves.) In addition to the slave census following the Governor's death, there are other documents from which at least partial lists of slaves can be derived. The earliest (HofR, M4673) is an untitled manuscript which in fact lists slav clothing given out between 1782 and 1787. It includes indentured servants, too, and it is difficult to separate them from slaves. The same manuscript lists men under the caption"Axis, Mall, Rings & Wedgis". Most of these men appear in the clothing lists, but some 10 do not. I have identified 160 people from these combined lists of whom some 127 seem to have been slaves with the remainder indentured servants or other types of employees. The 1783 Assessment of Captain Charles Ridgely (made for federal tax purposes), MS 1127, Box 1, Reel 2, lists 130 slaves for Ridgely, 31 at the Northampton Company and 99 at a variety of properties, most of which came later to make up Hampton. Ages are given for a good number of these individuals as are relationships and some vital information. Dum Cate, for example, is the wife of Alek, is deaf and dumb and lives at White Marsh with a son Mingo, less than a year old and daughters Pegg 3 and Diner 8; Abraham, son of Cass, was aged one in 1782 and died in that year. More work needs to be done on these relationships to determine how many of these individuals can be identified later. Next chronologically come lists drawn from an "Account of Shoes Given Out" between 1810 and 1827 (HofR M4674 and 4682). I have counted some 302 individuals who seem to have been slaves and 68 who were apparently other types of employees. There may be some duplication here in the slave list as descriptions of individuals vary according to the persons compiling the Account. I have listed as separate individuals, for example: Dick of the Quarter, Dick waiter of Charles Ridgely, Jr.,Wooden's Dick, Boy Dick, Dick the cook, and Dick servant of John Ridgely. I have begun a list from these Accounts attempting to trace individuals through these years. Could, for example, I tell something of longivety or mortality? I will continue this attempt, but foresee problems, for beginning in 1827 the recorder of this information began to use surnames, a problem which I will address below. A final listing of slaves is made up of entries in the accounts of John Ridgely (d 1867) (see card file of persons in the Curator's office, drawn from MdHS MS. 691, Box 14 and see original bills of sale in MdHS MS. 692, Box 12). John inherited no slaves from his father and although there is a tradition that his wife Eliza E. R. Ridgely brought slaves to Hampton, I can find no evidence that she did. It appears that John, then, inherited Hampton without a work force. Some Hampton Blacks, who were by that time former slaves, were paid wages by John (see card file cited above, quoting entries on MdHS MS. 691, boxes 31-33). Between 1829 and 1841, John also bought at least 77 slaves from a variety of owners, including one group of 23 from the estate of James Hawkins. As the evidence comes from bills of sale, we have the ages of most of these slaves as well as the prices paid for them. The Hampton labor force at Emancipation then was probably made up of paid employees from old Hampton slave families and slaves purchased by John. These individuals should be studied very carefully as they constituted the base from which workers filtered out from Hampton into the wider community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. * * * * One of the goals of this work is to support an oral history project, in which it is hoped to find and interview descendants of Hampton slaves in order to capture some common memory. Vital to such a project are surnames, yet surnames are one of the earliest recognized problems in arriving at complete listings of slaves at any given moment. Some few recorders of Ridgely business used slave surnames very fully; others apparently did not recognize them. Some Ridgely sites used slave surnames; others did not. For examples, in the lists of shoes given out from 1810 to 1828, surnames are used very occasionally and for a very few slaves until 1827 (check dates) when use of them becomes almost universal. In the lists of slaves produced after the Governor's death, slaves from Perry Hall and White Marsh are all identified by surnames; few forge and Hampton slaves had surnames in these lists and none of those with Mrs. Hanson or James Howard did. The usage in the shoe list probably depended on the recorder's impulses. The usage among the different geographic locations in the estate papers probably depended on local tradition. Slaves without recorded surnames are usually differentiated from others with the same given name by a reference to a parent, usually the mother, as with Great Betty's Rachel or by some physical characteristic such as size with the same Betty or skin tone, as with Yellow Luce and Black Luce. Unfortunately these designations may be temporary or peculiar to a single recorder and Rachel may appear in time and without warning as Great Rachel. Shifting usage with given names and infrequent use of surnames are blocks in the way of understanding a given population and of following it into freedom. I hope we can find ways around the blocks. * * * * Other problems or at least interesting questions center around emancipation, particularly the Governor's voluntary emancipation and they lead into another consideration: what was the nature of the Hampton owners in relation to their human property? To address the latter first, a single bit of evidence from the Builder's period suggests that later Ridgelys inherited no really humane or benign policy toward servants, for in 1777, Dr. Randel Hulse, who was for a time the attending physician for the forge workers wrote to Captain Ridgely in relation to his capacity at the forge: In the main to act in the Capacity of Doctor to the Major part of the Iron Manufactory in Maryland, is an Imployment adapted to those only whose Ignorance, Poverty or trivial private practice will induce them to submit to the meanest Indignity, or the haughty mandate of some imperious Task Master of Overseer. Such acts of cruelty have prevailed as would extort a blush from a Turkish Bushano (sic) and he must possess a heart of stone and be deaf to every sentiment of humanity who can be an unconcerned Spectator at excesses that call aloud for redress. (Anne C. Edmunds, The Land Holdings of the Ridgelys of Hampton, 1726-1843, typescript of Masters thesis, Baltimore, 1959, p. 46, quoting only Ridgely Papers, MHS.) The written evidence is sparse but Governor Charles Ridgely seems a more considerate and concerned master than does his son John. He, certainly, bought great numbers of slaves during his lifetime and pursued runaways in the same ways as did any other owner. His executors (daughter Mary P. Dorsey and her husband) however, claim in their accounts moneys paid out to slaves for overtime in times of agriculatural stress, citing as justification that the governor had traditionally done so. The codicile to the Governor's will seems to reflect a really benevolent act, providing freedom immediately for some and eventually for others and promising honorable care for the rest, the superannuated. One has to realize, however, that manumission by will deprives the manumitter of absolutely nothing; he loses not one day of the life style he has established for himself and essentially he settles on his heirs any problems attendant on manumission. The Governor, too, made certain that if the provisions of the codicile were followed all Hampton slaves, at least, even the old, would be physically displaced for no slaves at all were left to John, the heir to the estate. There was, too, no provision at all for help to freed slaves in establishing themselves in freedom (Providing help was a fairly common practice in freeing slaves in Maryland at the time and gave the freedman a chance at least to make a go of his/her freedom.) John's role as a master, on the other hand, seems unequivacal. Although his nephew, Henry White, suggests the Hampton slaves were happy, no one recorded any soft action on John's part vis-a-vis his slaves. Left none, he immediately began to buy and to build up his own slave population. His attitude toward the slaves was perhaps colored by the Nat Turner Revolt in Southampton County Virginia in 1831 just as he took over Hampton--an event that caused near panic among slaveowners. And the old order broke down rather dramatically on Ridgely property in the period when the will was being administered, for during that time at least twelve slaves from the forge absconded simultaneously. Henry White notes that his aunt, John's wife Eliza, had trouble sleeping in the 1860's because she feared slave trouble at night. He notes, too, John's striking one male slave and shaving the head of a female as discipline. There appears to be little sense of community during John's years. Indeed, when going abroad in 1846 and appointing an attorney to manage his Hampton affairs, he noted that that attorney had the power "in case any or all of my slaves on said Farm, "Hampton," should become disorderly, disobedient, or unruly, then I do authorize" the attorney "...to sell and dispose of any or all of the said slaves as to him shall seem proper and most advantageous to my interests." There is, indeed, no feeling of community evident in that injunction. * * * * More important certainly than the exact nature of each Hampton master is what happened to emancipated slaves. Ninety-two slaves were freed immediately by the Governor's will and they were to be followed by scores of others as they reached the requisite age. Did all of the 92 leave and can their absorption outside be documented? Did the heirs honor the Governor's will and free the younger slaves as they reached the ages of 25 or 28 and can they be traced outside? And what happened at Hampton as the result of national Emancipation in the 1860's? Was the whole slave population dispersed or did some of many stay under new arrangements? Dr. Hicks will certainly address many of these questions; she is going to need help though in combing through the many civil records that may hold some of the answers. * * * * Other things that are emerging from my research or things that need attention are: 1) the material culture of Hampton slavery--what can be said about clothing, shoes, quarters, etc. 2) diet 3) costs of slaves and of commodities they used; comparisons with white consumption. 4) satisfaction Can it be measured? I have some material on runaways. 5) where slaves came from? We know for John and have occasional purchases for the Captain and the Governor, but how did Captain R. get 130 slaves and the Governor 311? Did slaves come with acquired lands, for example. 6) Can we tell anything about freed slaves in their early days; were they able to move from Hampton into a viable existence? 7) Can we trace the origin of surnames? White Marsh, where everyone had a surname, might be a good place to start. 8) Will the Federal Assessment of 1798(?) and censuses add anything we need? I would appreciate it if you would give me other questions that we might be working on as they occur to you. (I have considerable data on numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7.) Kent Lancaster 11/30/93
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