"More than Movable Property": Slaves at the Shadows
"Tell Ma that upon examination, Mary finds that Charity has cut
the jackets so carelessly that they will all have to be trimmed &
altered to give them the proper shape...She thought fit not to cut by
the patterns & has consequently made a pretty mess of it..."
-William F. Weeks to Mary C. Moore, August 5, 1855
As
would be expected, the letters and invoices for the antebellum period
are rarely without some reference to the house servants or field hands
who were such important components of plantation life. A close reading
of family letters and business correspondence, with a detailed study of
invoices shed much light on the institution of slavery, in particular
slavery on the Weeks/Moore plantations.
The Weeks Family Papers document much general information about slavery
as an economic system. Legal records pertaining to the purchase and sale
of blacks, invoices and letters describing the acquisition of clothing
and food, manuscripts discussing the construction of cabins and the annual
work schedule for the plantation give us much insight into the daily lives
of plantation slaves.
An inventory of the David Weeks estate, conducted on February 12, 1835,
in New Iberia at The Shadows, gave a list of "movable property,"
i.e. the names of all slaves on the Weeks Plantation in New Iberia, including:
No. 1st A Negro man named Frank aged about 50 years and his wife named Martha aged about sixty years valued at four hundred and fifty dollars
5th a mulatto woman named Charlotte aged 22 years valued Seven hundred and fifty dollars
8th A Negro man named Isaac aged 35 years and Louisa his wife aged about 24 years with their Eight children named Caroline, Perry, Nathan, Little Isaac, Riley, Granville, Ann and the last one not yet named, valued together at the Sum of Three thousand Seven hundred dollars
9th Amos a Negro man aged about 35 years and Patty his wife aged 30 years and their four children named Philippe, Henry, Caleb and Susan, valued together at the Sum of Two thousand three hundred and fifty
Eleven years after this first inventory of the estate in 1835, a second inventory was prepared in 1846. A comparison of these inventories together with Weeks family letters yields a little more information about these people than just a list of names on a legal document.
Next Page: "More than Movable Property": Slavery at the Shadows - Part II
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