Israel on the Appomattox by Melvin Patrick Ely

Author:Melvin Patrick Ely [Ely, Melvin Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77342-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

In Prince Edward County’s new courthouse, built in 1832, free blacks continued to file lawsuits and defend themselves against civil actions and the occasional criminal prosecution.

(Bradshaw, History of Prince Edward County, PLATE IV)

At the same time, the boom years may have amplified social distinctions among people. The county justices elevated their own bench four and a half feet above the floor of the new court chamber, and disparities in class and status literally followed citizens to their graves. A person’s standing in life doubtless had always helped determine his or her final resting place, just as it did the simplicity or ornateness of the coffin. But by the 1840s at the latest, people recognized economic differences with striking candor: an attorney, preparing to argue a case about trespassing on Farmville’s public burying ground, casually sketched a map of the place showing distinct sections for “rich,” “poor,” and “negroes.”14 Even more striking than the physical separation of the races is the reflexive segregation of “poor” whites from the “rich” of their own color, with no intermediate category mentioned at all.

The catchall label “negroes” in the cemetery sketch obscured another fact of life in Prince Edward: the marked differences in resources and status between free and enslaved blacks, and within the former group. Specific data on consumption in Prince Edward are far too fragmentary to permit anything like a methodical comparison, but some records hint at how much better some free blacks fared materially than they would have if they had remained in slavery.

Josiah Cheadle noted Shadrach Forgason’s purchases of corn meal and flour for part of the year 1834. One of the few planter-overseer contracts that spells out slaves’ rations comes from the plantation of the Israelites’ sometime neighbor Merit B. Allen and covers the year 1845. Forgason consumed corn meal and wheat flour in equal amounts, whereas Allen’s slaves probably received only the former. In three months, Forgason bought between six and seven bushels of the two grains; divided between him and his wife, that would have amounted to more than three times the per capita ration for Allen slaves. Forgason may have shared or saved some of those provisions—but his very ability to do so, not to mention his right to exercise the option, suggests that even this not particularly prosperous free Afro-Virginian lived a good bit more comfortably than his enslaved brother or sister.15

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