Know more about Robert Wright and the economics of enslavement.
PNS would like to thank Ean Parsons for his support and help with researching Robert Wright. For more information on Mr Parsons’ research of Manor House visit https://www.manorhousesedgefield.co.uk/history-book-and-tours
Copies of his excellent book on Manor House, Hidden In Full View are available there or through Amazon.
PNS would also like to thank Professor Greg Brooking for sharing information on Robert Wright’s time in Carolina with us, and for providing the sources we have based the below resource on. His book on Robert Wright’s son James Wright, who became governor of Georgia, is available in July 2024: From Empire to Revolution: Sir James Wright and the Price of Loyalty in Georgia.
Source A - An advertisement from South Carolina in 1741.
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A great friend of PNS, Sean Crighton, told us about Robert Wright (1666 - 1739), a judge from London who resided in Sedgefield in County Durham. Wright left England to become a Chief Justice and plantation owner in colonial South Carolina in 1725.[1] When Wright died, his property and enslaved people were divided amongst his family. On 25th June 1741, the above advertisement was made in the South Carolina Gazette. To date there is very little other information on the enslaved people, whose history we would like to focus on.[2]
There is a runaway advert from 1737 that sheds a little more light. (This could be an enquiry in itself. There is so much to consider. Cafar, ‘speaks good English’ suggests English is not his first language, so maybe taken from Africa. The suggestion of a previous enslaver ‘Major Wickham’ suggests he may have run away to reunite with family there. Dorchester was the site of a market of enslaved people, so why go to such a dangerous place?)
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Source B - A Run Away advertisement from South Carolina, 1737.
PNS wants to concentrate on the enslaved people. We want students to have the opportunity to learn about them even when the archive is against us. How might we address this challenge?
The Archives - Silences and Erasures
One of the recurring problems that historians of Black history encounter is the archive. This is discussed and tackled so well by Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Tiya Miles and Marisa J. Fuentes.[3]
Christina Sharpe in her book In the Wake highlights this problem faced by historians. ‘Again and again, scholars of slavery face absences in the archives as we attempt to find the agents buried beneath’ (Spillers 2003b)’[4]
Saidya Hartman, author of the seminal Lose Your Mother, in the podcast Pod Save the People said, ‘The archive dictates what can be said about the past and the kinds of stories that can be told about the persons catalogued, embalmed, and sealed away in box files and folios. To read the archive is to enter a mortuary.’[5]
The archive is a place for official documents made by people in power, retained by those who decided what would be retained, maintained by archives that perhaps did not have the focus we strive for today: a more representative history. So, despite the millions of people, we know were there, the archive is too often barren. A conclusion reached all too often in the past was that these people were not there, were of little importance because their echo in the archive was thought to be minimal.
In Dispossessed Lives by Marisa J. Fuentes the important questions are asked.
How do we narrate the fleeting glimpses of enslaved subjects in the archives and meet the disciplinary demands of history that requires us to construct unbiased accounts from these very documents? How do we construct historical accounting out of that which defies coherence and representability?
How do we critically confront or reproduce these accounts to open up possibilities for historicization, mourning, remembering, and listening to the condition of enslaved women?[6]
(As history teachers, can we include in our curriculum lessons where the archival evidence is so seemingly thin? Can we move past the silences and distortions with so little to go on. With so little in the archive, there is little that generations of historians have studied and distilled into understandable chunks for the young minds we serve.)
These questions are answered in Fuentez’s stunning work that focuses on the trace accounts of enslaved women in Barbados. Fuentez poses a number of specific enquiry questions in her work which she answers and explains her process as, ‘I stretch archival fragments by reading along the bias grain to eke out extinguished and invisible but less historically important lives.’[7]
Informed Imaginings
This process comes alive in All That She Carried by Tiya Miles. Miles uses one cotton sack, found in a charity store, that once was given to a young girl who had been sold away from her mother in South Carolina in the 1850’s. The sack contained a dress, three handfuls of pecan nuts, and a lock of her mother’s hair. The sack became a family heirloom, and had this story embroidered on to it. Its importance led Miles to use the sack to reconstruct the lives of the mother, daughter, and their world. Miles, like Fuentes, takes leaps which she calls Informed Imaginings to produce a historically sound work that realises it cannot claim total authority, but leaves it open for enquiry.
This is perfectly suited to school history. To allow students to use information to tackle a source to come to their own ‘informed imaginings’ sparks interest and a place for this own critical thinking to come into play rather than just passively watch a historian's work.
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Source C - A list of people, enslaved by James Wright, son of Robert in Georgia made 30 years after his father’s death.
The monetary values refer to their ‘worth’ if they were captured by rebels in the American War of Independence. (Learn more about the importance of names)
We may presume that some of these people would be old enough to once have been on Robert Wright’s plantations and may even have been relatives of the people sold in Source A
The sale process and its effects (Informed Imaginings)
Students may be aware of the auction and sale of enslaved Africans once disembarked from ships. However, the domestic sale process tells students a lot. It shows that the pain of separation always hung over the heads of the enslaved and was mostly out of their control. (I use mostly with caution, as those in the act of rebellion or dissent knew that one possible punishment would be to be sold away. So brave acts of rebellion can be seen in light of knowing what punishments lay ahead.) It also shows that resale could occur for a multitude of reasons that serve to discredit the idea of enslavement being in any way paternalistic or benevolent, as the cold cruelty of seeing enslaved people used as mortgage collateral shows.
Source A now comes alive with possibility. The slight reference to the sale of, ‘a parcel of very good slaves’ allows us to ask these possible enquiry questions - ‘What effect did the sale of the enslaved have? Why were they sold?
The language should be paused on. The use of the word ‘parcel’ is dehumanising. Parcel refers to a collection of objects. These people were being described in a dehumanising way not only in their ‘sale’ but also in the language used to describe the act.
From here we must look outside of this source and get information that will allow us to construct Informed Imaginings. Now we can turn to a multitude of sources, though not directly linked, to help.
It is not our role here to construct these for you. We will, however, give you some sources you can use, selected where possible for their links to the northeast of England, in keeping with the ethos of PNS. We may research abolitionist speakers who came to the area and their accounts inform this source. We would be careful to keep this as rigorous as possible.
The effect on families and communities.
My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result. - Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave 1845.
Douglass's links to the northeast of England have been highlighted in other parts of PNS, and his experience can help make visible the pain of separation that Source A fails to convey. With his strong links to the northeast of England as you can see in other parts of PNS, Douglass’s experience can illuminate that source.
bell hooks make the point that Douglass testifies his mother would travel 12 miles to visit him at night and hold him until asleep. She was gone when he awoke. hooks point out that Douglass’s mother was committing an act of resistance, running away every night that she did this in the full knowledge that this would lead to punishment. Acts of motherhood are also acts of resistance. Made in bravery, the choice was considered, deliberate and repeated.
Douglass’s mother provided, if only for a short time, a space where this Black child was not the subject of dehumanising scorn, and devaluation but was the recipient of a quality of care that should have enabled the adult Douglass to look back and reflect on the political choices of this Black mother who resisted the slave codes, risking her life, to take care of her son.[8]
Mary Prince, although not believed to have visited the northeast of England, provides such a powerful testimony that this can be used.
Oh, that was a sad sad time! I recollect the day well. Mrs. Pruden came to me and said, "Mary, you will have to go home directly; your master is going to be married, and he means to sell you and two of your sisters to raise money for the wedding." Hearing this I burst out a crying, —though I was then far from being sensible of the full weight of my misfortune, or of the misery that waited for me.
At length the vendue master, who was to offer us for sale like sheep or cattle, arrived, and asked my mother which was the eldest. She said nothing, but pointed to me. He took me by the hand, and led me out into the middle of the street, and, turning me slowly round, exposed me to the view of those who attended the vendue. I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words—as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts. - The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave by Mary Prince. 1831
William Wells Brown’s narrative, Narrative of a Fugitive Slave, provides many instances of sale throughout his early life that illuminate many reasons for sale. In Chapter 6 of his narrative, he tells us about Cynthia who was sold by her master as she would not succumb to his sexual advances.[9] This refusal in the knowledge that it could be met with extreme violence is more evidence of resistance.
In Chapter 4 he recalls, ‘My master sold my mother, and all her children, except myself. They were sold to different persons in the city of St. Louis.’ After this he is hired out to another enslaver, a printer. There, Well Brown learned to read. However, the ability to make more money from Wells Brown may indicate why he was retained by his enslaver and not sold (therefore separated) with the rest of his family.
So, we are building a picture that sales throughout life was a common feature and must have been devastating. He also recounts auction processes in his narrative, brutal punishments for family members who try to reconnect, songs sung by the enslaved about separation through sale.
We should be mindful that the crux of Wells Brown’s narrative is his journey to self-emancipation: a supreme act of rebellion. Lessons, even if focusing on this source should have this at their forefront rather than a victim narrative.
Using the methods above, in a distilled way in the classroom, we can give focus on those who their contemporaries and the archive did not. We can also ignite students’ enquiring and critical minds (a question I would ask would be what can we still not be sure of? Where may we find those threads?)
The History - What world did Wright move to?
Wesley Frank Craven states in The Southern Colonies In The Seventeenth Century 1607-1689 that the settlement of Carolina was an attempt to ‘diversify the colonies’ economy and thus to find through colonisation an answer to the problem of national self-sufficiency’.[10] Tobacco being the first cash crop grown there.
Betty Wood makes the point in Slavery in the Colonial era 1619 - 1776 that Indigenous peoples who had Britain’s colonies imposed on their lands were seen by the colonisers as ones who could be used for trade and converted to Christianity which created an idealised image that aided initial colonisation. This was subverted when it came time to persecute these people during later expansion. These, Wood argues, made Indigenous peoples less attractive for enslavement along with other racial stereotypes.[11] Wood also talks in other parts of her book about Indigenous resistance to colonisation and the spread of disease, but these too were huge factors in early colonisation and a decision to transport enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
Enslavement became integral to colonial South Carolina. By the 1730’s, Wood states, rice was the main export in South Carolina. ‘South Carolina’s enslaved population grew from around 4,000 in 1708 to just over 39,000 in 1740. In 1708 South Carolina was already half black; within a few years it would be two-thirds black, and the only mainland colony with a Black majority.’[12]
The Economics
Much has been said about macroeconomics recently to do with enslavement. This source gives us an insight to the microeconomics enslavement fuelled and that fuelled enslavement.
Source A states, ‘Credit will be given to the first of Jan, next, paying Interest from the day, and giving Security if required.’
The people were sold, along with other goods, but at the point of sale, no money needed to be exchanged. This could wait for up to six months. This system of finance would earn (presumably both parties) more money on the backs of the enslaved. The credit would accrue interest, so the price of the sale would increase, helping the seller. The enslaved people would be put to work for their new enslavers as soon as possible, creating wealth for the new enslaver (Maybe this wealth would go towards the payment).
Also, the date of the sale and end of credit may give us more information. The enslaved were sold in June, just before the start of harvesting rice, the dominant crop in colonial South Carolina, and a busy period in a plantation’s year. Money owed could be paid once the crop had been harvested and sold and therefore the enslaver may have the cash then to pay.[13]
The sale itself may suggest that after Wright’s death there was some changes, or some debts to be paid, causing the sale and the tremendous heartache and upheaval to the enslaved. The credit agreement in the advert may suggest that the Wright family needed as much money as they could get, but not necessarily as quick as they could get it. Brooking states Wright was rich, owning 10,000 acres, in addition to receiving £1,000 a year for his role as Chief Justice.[14]
Our younger students may not have the background knowledge of economics to grasp this, however, many would understand loans and interest.
Through this part of the source, we open the micro-economic world of enslavement. Not only were people getting rich from their labour, but they are also themselves were treated as economic commodities, as human currency.
In the excellent ‘Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism’ by Bonnie Martin in Slavery’s Capitalism, Martin explains how dependent local economies were in European colonisation and later in the US. Martin points to South Carolina as an example of colonial expansion through mortgages on enslaved people[15] (as opposed to foreign, or absentee investment).
The Local Connection (Sedgefield)
How does this link to the northeast of England? We started looking at the advertisement from Robert Wright’s estate. Robert Wright, born in1666 lived for a short time in The Manor House in Sedgefield, County Durham. He moved from London to Sedgefield in 1689. Manor House was built using money gained from Wright’s marriage in 1707 to Alicia Johnson-Pitt.[16] When his wife died in 1723, Wright, who had kept a mistress and their six children in London, decided to move to America to take up the Chief Justice role and to own plantations. His time in Sedgefield was brief and as we can see, his heart was never there. He gave up The Manor House in 1725, the same year he and his family sailed to Carolina and later sold Manor House to someone called John Cotton.[17]
A Classroom Process
To distil a historian’s process to a chart is never going to be accurate or do justice to their work. However, as a crude working model of Miles’ process that we can follow we use this that can be followed in a classroom.
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[1] Brooking, Robert G., "“My Zeal for the Real Happiness of Both Great Britain and the Colonies”: The Conflicting Imperial Career of Sir James Wright." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2013. Doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/4905069 pg 70
[2] Brooking, Robert G., "“My Zeal for the Real Happiness of Both Great Britain and the Colonies”: The Conflicting Imperial Career of Sir James Wright." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2013. Doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/4905069 Pg 76
[3] Stella Dadzie’s A Kick In the Belly is also a great book on the role of women in resistance to enslavement.
[4] Sharpe, C.E. (2016) In the wake: On blackness and being. Durham: Duke University Press. Pg 12
[5] Pod Save The People January 2020
[6] FUENTES, M.J. (2018) Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive. UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR. Pg 1
[7] FUENTES, M.J. (2018) Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive. UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR. Pg 7.
[8] hooks, bell ‘Homeplace: A site of resistance. In ‘Yearning; Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. 1990. Accessed via - https://libcom.org/article/homeplace-site-resistance 04/03/2024
[9] Narrative of William W. Brown, a fugitive slave. (no date) The Project Gutenberg eBook of Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, by Himself. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15132/15132-h/15132-h.htm (Accessed: 03 March 2024).
[10] Craven, W.F. (1962) The southern colonies in the seventeenth century, 1607-1689. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State U.P. P.316
[11] Wood, B. (2005) Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1776. Lanham (Md.): Rowman & Littlefield. P. 6
[12] Wood, B. (2005) Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1776. Lanham (Md.): Rowman & Littlefield. P.12
[13] How rice grows (no date) Default. Available at: https://www.usarice.com/thinkrice/discover-us-rice/how-rice-grows (Accessed: 03 March 2024). Presumably, rice grows all year, but the heat of the summer months would make late summer a main time for harvest.
[14] Brooking, Robert G., "“My Zeal for the Real Happiness of Both Great Britain and the Colonies”: The Conflicting Imperial Career of Sir James Wright." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2013. Doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/4905069 Pg 75-76
[15] Beckert, S., Beckert, S. and Rockman, S. (2016) Slavery’s capitalism: A new history of American economic development. University of Pennsylvania Press. Martin quotes the work of Menard and Hancock 109
[16] Parsons, Ean (2018) Hidden In Full View: A History of the Chief Justice of Carolina’s Mansion House in Sedgefield. Alpha Graphics Preston Farm. Stockton on Tees. Pg. 8
[17] Parsons, Ean (2018) Hidden In Full View: A History of the Chief Justice of Carolina’s Mansion House in Sedgefield. Alpha Graphics Preston Farm. Stockton on Tees. Pg. 28-30