Florida Slave Document, Gadsden County 1832

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• Lot Description
  Florida Slave Document, Gadsden County 1832. This is a slave document written in 1832 as part of the estate of John Martin, from Gadsden County, Florida. Martin was probably a farmer and small landowner, based on the records in this document, and he was a slaveowner as well, and the document was an inventory of all John’s goods, so John probably died recently and his household goods were being inventoried for the courts and his heirs, and his estate - his household goods - included slaves. According to the document, he owned five slaves: a Negro man named Tom, a woman named Chaney, who was probably Tom’s wife, and three young ones named Lishy, Peter, and Beck, who were probably Tom and Chaney’s children, and they all were treated as chattel - as property and things - they were owned by someone, just as John owned a hoe or a horse or a rifle - they were things - and they all had a monetary valued attached to their names. Tom was valued at $400, Chaney was valued at $250, Lishy was valued at $250, and Peter and Beck were both valued at $150 apiece. so Lishy was probably an older girl because of her value, and Peter and Beck were probably younger based on their value, and it feels weird to say someone was worth so much in dollars, but back then, it wasn’t. That’s the value they would have fetched at auction - if someone bought them at auction at the time, and even children could be slaves in Florida then. The inventory also included regular household goods such as cows, calves, steers, bulls, hogs, horses, blacksmith tools, ploughs and gears, handsaws and a wedge, hoes, axes, chisels and augers, a planer, beef hooks, squares and compasses, a rasp, bottles, shoeing tools and a wash noggin, a flax wheel, beds and furniture, a spinning wheel and a loom, chairs, a wool mattress, saddles, a rifle and a shotgun, trunks, books, geese, pot ware and a frying pan, cooper ware [for making barrels], salt shaving instruments, tin ware, jugs and jars, smoothing irons and a grind stone, bee hives - and the five slaves were included on this list as if they were things - or nothings - they were just property, that’s what chattel was, and how slaves were treated all across the South. And now to the background of slavery in Florida, and a little geography lesson. Yes, there were slaves in Florida, much to the surprise of some people, and Florida used to be divided into two territories - East and West Florida. Florida was taken over by the Spanish in the 1500’s, eventually Great Britain pushed out the Spanish, and Great Britain felt the territory it owned was too large to be administered as one unit, so they divided Florida into two territories - East and West Florida, with St. Augustine becoming the capital of East Florida and Pensacola becoming the capital of West Florida. West Florida included what is now the Florida Panhandle, and when the United States came into the picture in 1810, West Florida balked at becoming annexed by the US and preferred to negotiate its own terms to join the Union. In 1821, President Monroe was authorized to take control of both territories, and as a result, the US military stepped in and organized them as one territory - Florida Territory - with Andrew Jackson serving as governor, and eventually Florida became a state in 1845 West Florida also had an effect on choosing the location of Florida’s current capital. At first, a legislative council decided to rotate capitals between St. Augustine and Pensacola, but travel got to be a problem. It was a long distance and a lot of time to travel from one capital to another, so the council decided to pick a new capital for the whole territory, and they settled on Tallahassee, which was halfway between the two capitals, and statehood in 1845. Gadsden County was created in 1823, and there were five counties in northern Florida that was a virtual barony of plantations and farms, with the vast majority of Florida’s slaves living in this central part of the Panhandle, and this region was called Middle Florida, which centered on Tallahassee, Gadsden County, Leon, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton counties, and that is where John Martin lived - in Gadsden County, in the Middle District of Florida. That’s even stated at the top of the document filed on behalf of John Martin’s estate. And now for some background on slaves in Gadsden County. Gadsden County was in West Florida, and the vast majority of Florida's slaves lived along the Panhandle near the Georgia border. When Florida was controlled by the Spanish, Spanish policy about slaves was rather relaxed. When the Americans took over, slavery continued to be permitted, but Spanish policies were replaced with a rigid set of laws that assumed that all Black persons, slave or free, were uncivilized and inferior to whites, and suitable only for slavery. There were free Blacks and Black Seminoles living near St. Augustine, who fled to Havana, Cuba, to avoid coming under US control. In 1827 free negros were prohibited from entering Florida, and in 1828 those already here were prohibited from assembling in public. In 1829 a statute required a fine of $200 (equivalent to more than $5000 today) for every person manumitted (set free) and required the person freed to leave the Territory within 30 days. American settlers began to establish cotton plantations in northern Florida, which required numerous laborers, which they supplied by buying slaves at auction. On March 3, 1845, Florida became part of the United States, and it was admitted as a slave state. East Florida did not establish a formal slave code until 1782. Those who were black or of mixed race of European and African origin and could not prove they were free were considered to be slaves, and Middle Florida’s economy was based firmly on slavery. Nearly all of the slaves (98 percent) were involved in agricultural labor; most of them worked on large plantations established by wealthy “planters”, an elite class composed of farmers who owned at least 20 slaves and more than 500 acres. This planter class - 21 percent of Florida’s slaveholders – held more than 75 percent of Florida’s slaves. (Note that the slave document mentions Middle Florida near the top.) The vast majority of Florida’s slaveholders ran much smaller operations. They owned small or medium-sized farms and held fewer than 10 slaves, often only one or two. Usually the slaves at these farms worked alongside their white owners on a variety of jobs and lived in small cabins near the main farmhouse, and this was John Martin. He was probably a small landowner and small slaveholder because he had five slaves in the county - he wasn’t a large landowner or a large slaveholder, but he owned slaves, nevertheless, and that’s why this document is so important. It was also a common practice in the decades before the Civil War to lease slaves to work on jobs outside of the owner’s farm or plantation. Slaves purchased like this were often part of estate planning. The state’s early railroads, canals, and fortifications often owed their existence to the labor of leased bondsmen, and we don’t know if John Martin leased out slaves, but it was one way to make profits and pay off debt. (This information was originally published in Florida Humanities ’magazine “The Forum” Vol.XXXIV, No. 1, Spring 2010, and written by Larry Eugene Rivers.) In 1830, Gadsden County had 2501 slaves among its 4894 residents (about 40 percent of the population of the county). By 1860, the county's population had nearly doubled, and the slave population was 58 percent of that total. By 1829, six years after its creation, thirty Gadsden County residents had acquired tracts of land consisting of 500 acres or more. Ten years later, the number had increased to fifty, and, by 1860, 109 plantations of 500 acres or more were located in the county, with thirty properties worked by at least thirty slaves. Unlike Leon and other Middle Florida counties, more blacks than whites were living in Gadsden County by 1830. They continued to outnumber the white population until after the Civil War, and John Martin owned slaves who contributed to that number. Except for the practice of hiring out slaves by their owners, relatively few blacks were sold or traded in the county. Most of those who were sold were advertised in the Tallahassee newspapers, and the transactions usually occurred in that community. Forty-two Gadsden County families owned one slave in 1830; eighty-two owned two to four slaves; seventy-five owned five to nine; seventy-one owned ten to nineteen; sixty five owned twenty to forty-nine; thirteen owned fifty to ninety-nine; and seven owned 100 to 199 for a total of 355 families owning slaves at the time, and John Martin was a relatively small slaveowner in Gadsden County, according to these statistics. Not surprisingly, male slaves outnumbered females during most of the antebellum period. In 1830, 449 male slaves, or 35 percent of the county’s total of 1,280 male slaves, were described as being twenty-four years of age or older. In the same age category were 370 females, or 30 percent of a total of 1,221. A decade later, sixty-four males, or 4 percent of 1,683 male slaves, were listed as fifty-five years or older, as compared to fifty females, or 3 percent of a total of 1,658 female slaves. We don’t know how old Tom and Chaney were when they worked as slaves on John Martin’s land, but they were clearly statistics on that list, and not a great legacy for their future lives. The price of slaves rose during the 1850’s as the demand for the labor increased with the boom in cotton and tobacco production. By 1855, John Wooten’s slaves ranged in value from a high of $1,200 for a prime male hand and $1,000 for a female slave, to a low of $500 for children under ten years of age. Newspaper advertisements of the period suggest that Gadsden County slave prices averaged approximately $1,000. Few free blacks lived in Gadsden County. Only five were residents in 1830. A high for the antebellum period was reached in 1840 when the total increased to thirteen. By 1860, though, only six free blacks remained in the county. Among the free persons of color, and more numerously among county slaves, were a considerable number of mulattoes. Gadsden’s mulatto population, as a percentage of total black population, constituted only half that of the state - 4 percent as opposed to 8 percent in 1860. (Sources: Fifth Census; or Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the United States, 1830 (Washington, DC, 1832), 156-57; Sixth Census of the United States, 1840 (Washington, DC, 1841), 96-99. So this document is more than a history of the life of John Martin. It is a testimony to the lives of five other people - Tom, his wife Chaney, and their three children - and they weren’t just things or chattel, but that’s the way they were treated in Gadsden County in the 1830’s. A living document, a sad document with brutal truths for many people. The document is 12 x 8 in. wide and in very good condition, There are no tears or condition issues that would make a person question owning the document, only the past and what it represents. A rare document of Florida history, and something that provides a teachable moment. #5444
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