I have read many of your blogs with great interest. I wish to add my own comments that I hope will clarify some things.

Many of you have cited your Schweikert and Allen text which says that slave owners treated their slaves strictly as property. This can certainly be seen from the ads as many of you commented. However, the situation was actually more complex than a simple statement of slave owners enforcing property rights. The ads show that slave owners HAD TO view their slaves as human beings despite their wish to see them only as property. Many of the ads mention sending a slave on an errand, giving a slave money; slaves forming family attachments, even slaves’ desire for freedom. These are all actions characteristic of human beings.

When I give my students an assignment using the ads, I usually start them out by asking them “what do you find unusual?” Many of you have identified things avout slaves that surprised you. My own initial surpirses were:

1. The many types of jobs that slaves did–they were not all simply agricultural laborers, but did carpentry, shoe-making, blacksmithing, furniture-making, barbering and hair-dressing, etc. This surprised me, but it shouldn’t have: in a society in which manual labor was done by the “lower orders,” and tobacco was perhaps declining in Virginia (after the 1750s anyway), it is no surprise that slaves did much of the work.

2. The clear attachments to families. Slaves were not allowed to marry legally, but masters recognized slave attachments because it helped make slaves more stable. The ads clearly show that slave marriages were common, and slaves’ attachments to spouses and children were well understood by masters.

3. Slaves also had their own lives outside of the master’s complete control. There is some evidence of this in the ads, “a late night revel,” in the quarters, slaves having access to alcohol, etc.

4. Finally, I think that we must be careful of making blanket statements like “all slaves were tortured,” etc. Some of the scars on the runaways may have been suffered from work injuries, or from getting into fights; unless it clearly states marks from a whip or marks from punishments, I don’t think we can assume that they had been tortured.

Slavery was a terrible and inhumane system though, in which masters had most of the control. Some of you pointed out that slaves had been branded by their masters. But slaves did manage to make themselves human; and as many of you commented, when they ran away, they were making a statement for freedom and showing human agency.

I contratulate you and professor Boggs for some good work.

Tom Costa

Our class will move down the hall to Robinson B 228 starting Thursday, August 31.

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