African American Slavery Documentation Virginia Receipts and Tax Records Enumerating Enslaved Persons as Property 1815–1854

Virginia Slavery

Ephemera and pamphlets

Manuscript fiscal records from antebellum Virginia demonstrate how enslaved people were formally incorporated into legal and economic systems as taxable property. These documents record enslaved individuals not as citizens but as items of assessed value within the personal property systems that structured the slave economy. Such records provide direct evidence of the bureaucratic mechanisms through which slavery functioned in the United States, revealing how local governments and property holders catalogued enslaved African Americans alongside land, livestock, and other assets. The present group of Virginia documents dating from 1815 to 1854 records the ownership and taxation of enslaved people in Washington County during the decades preceding the Civil War.

Archive of three manuscript fiscal documents from Washington County, Virginia, dated between 1815 and 1854. The earliest document, dated 1 April 1815, records “A list of land & slaves owned by Jacob Campbell the first day of April 1815. The first district of Virginia Washington City.” A second associated receipt enumerates eight enslaved persons identified by gender and age categories with assigned monetary values, totaling 2,170 dollars. A later tax receipt dated 1848 documents revenue obligations for Robert L. Berry and John Berry and includes “Slaves” among taxable property categories alongside horses, clocks, and land. The third document, a tax receipt issued to Miss Francis Jane Irby in 1854, records taxable categories including “Black” titheables in addition to land, salary, and road levies, reflecting the legal classification of enslaved African Americans within Virginia’s tax system. Together the documents demonstrate the routine administrative recording of enslaved people as financial assets within county taxation and property accounting.

Virginia occupied a central role in the history of American slavery. The first documented Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, and by the mid nineteenth century enslaved African Americans constituted a substantial portion of the state’s population. By the 1860 census, more than one third of Virginia’s inhabitants were enslaved people whose labor sustained the agricultural economy of the region. Manuscript tax records such as these provide stark evidence of the legal and economic framework that reduced human beings to taxable property within local government systems. Three manuscript documents measuring approximately 6.75 x 2 inches to standard letter size. Original folds present with minor foxing and a small chip to the lower left corner of one document; docketing on versos; text clear and legible. Overall condition very good.

Item #20156

Price: $1,250.00