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
Email: Archives@mdarchives.state.md.us
or:
If you have an Email account linked to your WEB browser, click here to activate your mail program to send an inquiry or message to me at edpapen@iname.com. You may also reach me by phone at 410-974-38467-6137.
© Copyright 1995 Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse