Program Information

Estate sales. Wedding and christening gifts. In the antebellum South, these were occasions when slaves were sold or gifted, occasions to break up African families.

A Moment in Time is a brief, exciting and compelling journey into the past. Created to excite and enlighten the public about the past, its relevance to the present and its impact on the future, A Moment In Time is a captivating historical narrative that is currently broadcast worldwide.

Transcript

Lead: Estate sales. Wedding and christening gifts. In the antebellum South, these were occasions when slaves were sold or gifted, occasions to break up African families.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Sale was the greatest threat to slave families, even on plantations and farms where owners advocated and encouraged slave families. Consider slaveholder George Washington. In theory, Washington favored monogamous relationships and nuclear families. At Mansion House, one of his farms, 27% of the slaves were part of such relationships. On the rest of his estate, however, only about 16% of the slaves were married. Evidence indicates that Washington regularly broke up slave families to redistribute labor as needed on his farms. He was not alone in Virginia or the rest of the South.

Some slave women didn’t stand idly by as their children were ripped from them. Some ran, hid, and threatened to kill their children. Some pleaded with their masters and marketed their children as potential assets. Slave Lucy Skipwith twice successfully convinced her owner, Virginia planter John Hartwell Cocke, to not sell her daughters Betsey and Maria, because they still needed their mother, saying “there is nothing like a Mother’s watchful eye over a child.” Her success, however, was the exception.

Slave fathers suffered from separation too. In 1857 one Georgia slave father wrote: “I wish to now (sic) what has Ever become of my Presus little girl. I left her in goldsboro [North Carolina] with Mr. Walker and I have not herd from her Since.” As this letter shows, once separated, few were able to continue any kind of family contact.

Separation from extended families could also make a woman vulnerable to an abusive husband. Many remembered the old saying from Mongo in Central Africa: “Don’t lose contact with your family if you don’t want to become a slave of your husband.”

The drive to reunite was powerful. Dorcas, an Alabama slave sold to a trader, escaped and for months ran in the night, and lived in the woods eating rabbit, squirrel, and handouts from passing slaves. She would beat anyone who tried to interfere with her reunion with South Carolina slave Emmanuel, her common-law husband.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

Virginia Standards