Date of Award:

5-1981

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

History

Committee Chair(s)

Michael L. Nicholls

Committee

Michael L. Nicholls

Abstract

The eighteenth century is a critical time in a study of American slavery. The colonial years witnessed the development of cultural, social and demographic processes affecting African and Afro-American slaves, the result of which was an Afro-American culture and society, unique to this nation. The slave family and kin network system of the antebellum south and the post Civil War era had its genesis in the decades preceeding the Revolutionary War.

There have been many studies done on slavery in colonial Virginia, but with few exceptions they have focused on the wealthy planters residing in the tidewater counties. They describe a life found only at the top of the pyramid of slavery. But the majority of the slave territory in colonial America was the domain of small farmers, many of whom owned no slaves, most of whom owned only a few.

This study of slavery in frontier Amelia County describes the emergence of an Afro-American culture and black community in a county that was part of the Virginia piedmont and whose settlement was undertaken by small farmers, most of whom spent their lives in obscurity and poverty. It has been a multi-faceted project focusing on the following points: The constant and rapid change in both white and black populations from 1736-1775; the density of the slave population and the changing sex ratio within the black community which allowed slaves to replace under the horrendous restrictions of chattel slavery and the white power structure, families and kin network systems of their African past. A study of slave resistance in the county has meaning because of what it tells us about the slaves themselves. It is possible to gain insight into the impact of dispersed slave families by studying the slaves who resisted the system by running away.

The records used have been the surviving pieces of the historical records of Amelia such as tithable (tax) returns, wills, court records and newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves. Records that were never intended to be examined by the historian. This "unconscious" evidence has yielded valuable information for the study of a people who were not allowed to write their own history.

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