Slave Classification

Photo Courtesy of the National Archives

Truth be told, I'm still recovering from the word slave being attached to my ancestor's name and from the word "owner" being associated with our family group. At the moment, I'm not sure what it'll take for me psychically and spiritually to travel back nearly 150 years, if it's smart to do so, or whether I'll survive the journey.

So, I've begun the pilgrimage by traveling intellectually instead, asking certain key questions like what might be made of the three classes of slave that we find on the Register of Freedmen: House, Field, and Farm. While I am all too familiar with the first two, the third is new to me. I remain of the opinion that the Union Army came up with these classifications or that they questioned the slaves and then, based on their answers, assigned them to one of the three classes.

What did "Farm" slaves do on the plantation that was different than what field slaves did? As it turns out, all of the slaves that appear on the register, who were owned by William Hull, are classified as "Farm." What if anything does this tell us about Hull's slaves or about Hull's operations? Is it the case that this one class of slaves left his plantation while others stayed? (Hull had in 1860 78 slaves; in 1862, approximately 17 appear on the register.)

How might we get at answers to these questions?

Slave

I think I'll let this document speak for itself.

Slave Identification

Examining my ancestor's Civil War service record threw me for a loop. Why, I have wondered, would the Union Army provide a space on the muster paper for "occupation"?

Through readings and through other research, I now realize two things: one, that not all slaves occupied the same positions on plantations during slavery, and, two, that it wasn't only slaves who joined the Union lines or who would be recruited into the service. Free people came from north and south to join the war effort. This space for occupation, then, allowed individual blacks to state their indentity.

As it turns out, there would be among the contraband or freedmen (I use both terms though I understand that Lincoln preferred the latter) former slaves who offered various answers to this question of occupation. This opportunity for self-identification, by the way, was intended I think to represent what the slave had done on the plantation rather than to what task he or she would be put at the contraband camps. I have gathered this by examining a Register of Freedmen compiled in 1862. There, men and women provided one of four identities: "farm(er)," "house," "field," or "free person of color."

One can see from the above document that my ancestor, Daniel Walker Williams, reported "farmer." What, one wonders, would have been the difference between "farm" and "field" or "farmer" and "field hand"? I wonder as well how the interviewer went about gathering this information. What might he have said or how might he have prompted these responses? What prior knowledge did Union officers have of these divisions of labor on Southern plantations? I wonder as well why this information was thought important and how it may later have been used. Did these slave-era classifications follow the freedmen and women into the years they spent at the camps?

On the last page of my ancestor's service record is written, next to "Remarks"--"Slave." See next post for more on this.