The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare by Sean M. Kelley

Author:Sean M. Kelley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2016-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven: Town and Country

By examining the types of work done on the slaveholdings of the Hare purchasers, it is possible to develop a reasonable portrait of the captives’ lives. For the able-bodied, work occupied most of the daytime hours every day except Sunday. Labor also exerted a strong influence beyond the actual time during which it was performed. Work routines not only delineated masters’ time from slaves’ time, they influenced laborers’ material conditions and imposed broad, if permeable, parameters on community and cultural life. However, any inferences drawn here must be understood to be suggestive, not conclusive. Work regimes did not determine an individual’s destiny; many other things shaped how their lives turned out, and most of these experiences are unrecoverable. One other point deserves emphasis. While it is possible in most cases to know where the purchaser lived, and therefore where the captive lived, it is not always possible to know how long the captive stayed in that location. Some slaveholders moved. Others owned multiple properties and shifted slaves among them. Still others may have sold their captives. And if they conformed to statistical norms, eighteen of the fifty-six Hare captives who reached South Carolina were dead within one year.1

Fourteen Hare captives were purchased by masters who lived in or near Charles Town. Of these, nine were women, four were men, and one was a child of unrecorded sex. This total includes the three women purchased by William Lloyd, who resided just across the Cooper River on Wando Neck, but excludes the nine purchased by Henry Laurens. At the time of purchase, Laurens lived in Charles Town but very likely shipped most or all of his Hare captives out of the city. Wealthy urbanites like Laurens sometimes deployed up to thirty men, women, and children to work in a variety of household- and commerce-related tasks.2 While many Africans lived in Charles Town, most slave owners favored Creole or acculturated slaves for their town houses. In this case, since Laurens was on the verge of purchasing a share of a rural plantation from his brother-in-law, John Coming Ball, it seems probable that Laurens would have dispatched the nine Africans to Ball’s place rather than house several travel-weakened, non-English-speaking slaves at his Charles Town residence.3 The single man purchased by Lachlan McIntosh may have spent a year in Charles Town, where his master worked as a clerk for Henry Laurens and conducted additional business on his own account. McIntosh, a Scot who came to South Carolina from Georgia in 1750, was in the process of accumulating slaves for a move back to Georgia, which he undertook in late 1756. Though separated from his shipmates by hundreds of miles, McIntosh’s captive may well have found himself among people of similar background. Of twenty-three captives known to have been purchased by McIntosh between 1754 and 1758, twelve had sailed from the “Windward Coast” and undoubtedly included many from Sierra Leone. In 1763, McIntosh wrote Laurens to say that he was in financial trouble but would try to avoid selling off his slaves.

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