I was first startled, then intrigued, when I ran across an ancient legal paper in my mother’s Blue Box. I’m now excavating the final layer of letters and papers there; the upper levels have given me the impetus and the materials for my two previous books, The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters and Taken by the Shawnee.
In dense nineteenth-century legal jargon, the paper granted Caroline Clifford Nephew, my great-great-grandmother, continued ownership of her slaves, although she was married to the Reverend Joseph Clay Stiles. According to the rules of that day, all of Caroline’s worldly possessions passed to her husband on their marriage. Did this later agreement signal a divorce?
This ancient version of an antenuptial agreement was signed by Joseph Stiles with his seal. Two other men, Charles West and B. King signed in the same way. Since she had no legal identity, Carolyn did not sign but I’m presuming she at least agreed if she did not initiate this move. The trust established would hold her slaves in perpetuity, assuring her financial independence.
I do not know what this unusual move means in terms of what had happened to Caroline’s marriage. I will find out, in time, with further research into the other letters that lie with the legal paper. Since the book I’m imagining will be an historical novel, I’ll also be free to invent if I find no written proof but only the suggestions that flit, undefined, through ancient letters.
But the list of her slaves, by name, has brought them to life for me, raising the question that may come to define our times: what is our responsibility as the descendants of slave owners?
If I were to divide my inherited money, coin by coin and bill by bill, which could I prove was the result of two hundred and fifty years of slave labor? Of buying and selling?
Not possible, of course.
Here are the names: Thomas, Bella, William. Maria, Sandy, James. Amy, Samuel, Chloe, and her three children. Eve and her child, Squire. Lydia, Joe and Andrew.
They of course had not been given last names when their original names, from Africa, were washed away. And as chattel slaves, their children, even if fathered by a white man (hinted at in the usual choice of Squire), were born slaves and would remain slaves in Carolyn’s possession.
There are further mysteries. The paper is entitled “Marriage Settlement of J.C. Stiles and C.C. Nephew” and cost two dollars and twenty cents.
But Caroline and Joseph were married years earlier.
And the Emancipation Proclamation had already freed her slaves.
What to make of this?
Time—and research—will tell.
Sharing mysteries and the investigations and examinations in which you express your insights is one of your many talents. I will be among those who devour what you write, grateful that included in your inheritance is the candor and heart to ask the question of what we might owe to the present for wrongs committed by our ancestors, but i might add, from a perspective of a descendant of both victims and perpetrators, how i intend to recompense by focusing on the future. The wholesale abandonment, or more accurately, outright attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion, is a return to the past and its injustices. Not to mention the recent news that the trump administration os destroying perfectly good food, tons and tons of it, for no reason but to starve the children of color in the other lands, is a sin i wont be guilty of. To them who know the right thing to do and fail to do it, is a sin. God forgive us.
Respectfully submitting for consideration:
During Reconstruction confiscated land that had been given to formerly enslaved
people reverted to pre war owners, perhaps a potential reason why pre war owners
might have sought to maintain records related to their property even if that property
was no longer legally considered enslaved individuals. Perhaps documentation
of “wives slaves” after the war could be connected to this reverting of existing property
records and the fact that Stiles had left home to travel and preach in the South.