Enslaved People of Port Tobacco and Vicinity 1750-1800
This the thirty-eighth painting in this series describing life along the Port Tobacco River in the later half of the 18th century. Some of the people who lived and died here are remembered by historical markers, grand homes, public buildings, schools, surviving historical accounts, and a myriad of books and research. The people introduced in this painting have been long forgotten. My methodology in researching each painting took me through countless land records, wills, and all sorts of historical accounts. Along the way I began pay attention to the enslaved people listed. Enslaved people constituted much of the community’s wealth and came to represent a bit over 50 percent of the population. The enslaved were bought and sold like any other commodity. They were typically listed after land and before livestock and furnishings in public documents. I have not attempted to study slavery; that is well beyond the scope of the research for these paintings. I have simply returned to my notes and references and recorded the names as they appeared. Where possible, I have tried to eliminate duplicating the names of the enslaved who served across generations within extended families and their communities. There are 1795 identifiable individuals shown in this list. Ninety-one are unnamed. There are seven additional entries that simply refer to “all negroes,” “sundry negroes,” “part of all negroes,” “said negroes,” “certain negroes,” or simply “slaves.” There are also the unnumbered and unnamed children of five enslaved women: Bess, Hagar, Violet, Mully, and Jane included.
The death of an owner, his or her economic difficulties, family marriages, or other times of gift giving, or sale of enslaved people were times of high anxiety within the slave communities as kinship and relationships were typically cast asunder to satisfy an owner’s needs or wishes at the time. The story in my painting Celia and Josiah describes one such incident that occurred in Port Tobacco. Josiah Henson’s autobiography became the basis for Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which played a major role in the anti-slavery movement in the runup to the American Civil War. In another painting, Two Boys, I share a bit of my personal journey into the dark stains of enslavement of human beings that continues to plague us in the Twenty-first Century. Clearly there were owners who went to great lengths to insure particular people were not sold, or families were not separated. A few enslaved were even freed, but the anxiety, separation, and perhaps even physical trauma for the individuals named and unnamed here was real, significant, unrecorded, and generally disregarded. My goal in this painting is to honor the enslaved people who lived here before us and who have never been a part of our story. Now I am naming them. Hopefully, in naming them we can begin to hear the silent accounts of their lives and those of their ancestors and their descendants and remember together our shared histories and our shared world.
Oil and Ink on Canvas 24X48 inches
The death of an owner, his or her economic difficulties, family marriages, or other times of gift giving, or sale of enslaved people were times of high anxiety within the slave communities as kinship and relationships were typically cast asunder to satisfy an owner’s needs or wishes at the time. The story in my painting Celia and Josiah describes one such incident that occurred in Port Tobacco. Josiah Henson’s autobiography became the basis for Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which played a major role in the anti-slavery movement in the runup to the American Civil War. In another painting, Two Boys, I share a bit of my personal journey into the dark stains of enslavement of human beings that continues to plague us in the Twenty-first Century. Clearly there were owners who went to great lengths to insure particular people were not sold, or families were not separated. A few enslaved were even freed, but the anxiety, separation, and perhaps even physical trauma for the individuals named and unnamed here was real, significant, unrecorded, and generally disregarded. My goal in this painting is to honor the enslaved people who lived here before us and who have never been a part of our story. Now I am naming them. Hopefully, in naming them we can begin to hear the silent accounts of their lives and those of their ancestors and their descendants and remember together our shared histories and our shared world.
Oil and Ink on Canvas 24X48 inches