SLAVERY AT
IVY CLIFF
slave life in antebellum virginia
"You may declare [the slave] free—you may enact laws to make him free—but unless you can reverse his
doom of inferiority—
unless you can exempt him from poverty and toil, your utmost efforts will only change him from a slave into a serf."
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-John Thompson Brown on slavery, 1832 [44]
By 1860, slaves comprised one-third of Virginia’s total population, numbering roughly 500,000, and most inhabited the state’s tobacco belt.[26] In Bedford County alone, slaves comprised 40% of the population by the late antebellum period.[27] Slaves’ experience in Virginia reflected the rigid stratification within a class system that had developed over the course of two hundred years. This patriarchal system placed planters at the very top, and this class of individuals held considerable sway. Slaves existed at the very bottom of the system, and as the population began to move west, they followed in great numbers. When Frederick Law Olmsted toured the South, he noted the presence of slave traders in several cities throughout the Piedmont region, including Richmond, Danville, Charlottesville, and Lynchburg, with the James River acting as a key shipping artery.[28] Thus, the Brown family and their representatives would not have been forced to travel far to purchase slaves.
Many general trends among Virginia’s slave population are visible at Ivy Cliff. By the end of the 1850s, a relatively equal ratio of female to male slaves existed in the Piedmont region of Virginia. The female slave population had once trailed behind, but as the antebellum period progressed, women—most in their teens and twenties—came to populate the area in greater numbers, sometimes surpassing the number of men. This statistic had economic explanations, especially in Virginia’s tobacco belt, as men, women, and children all had significant roles to play in the labor-intensive cultivation and harvesting process.[29] Further, this mirrors a push among the planter class to promote family units who would, in turn, bear children and contribute to the labor pool on their plantations.[30] Census reports from 1810-1840 consistently report the presence of more young women and children than men at Ivy Cliff, and the Brown family reported expenses for calling local physicians to assist in slave births.[31]
ivy cliff's slave quarters
As products of the Antebellum South, the Brown family regarded their slaves as property, listing them in tax records in the same category as their horses.[32] Their living conditions certainly accord with this perception. Archaeological studies of plantations across the South reveal the manner in which the landscape underscored a slave’s social position. Garett Fesler argues that because “most enslaved people circulated within the confines of a highly regulated world,” even the layout of their dwellings in proximity to the Big House speaks volumes.[33] Clifton Ellis corroborates this idea, noting that a plantation’s “spacial arrangement,” which conveyed to visitors an orderly, humane environment for slaves, “was a planter’s fundamental expression of power and ideology in a society founded on paternalism.”[34]
Today, one cabin stands on Ivy Cliff’s remaining 18 acres, downhill and largely out of view from the main house. Built in the dogtrot or saddlebag style, the cabin is made up of two “pens,” split by an open, shared breezeway with a narrow wooden staircase.[35] The cabin is equipped with three fireplaces and, ideally, would hold one family per “pen.” However, as Ellis explains, these versatile cabin layouts were highly practical. Slaves of different family units, genders, and ages could be kept within the same cabin in four separate rooms, and this arrangement could be altered to accommodate new living situations at the master’s or overseer’s command.[36]
One can imagine the manner in which the cabin provided Ivy Cliff’s slaves with something to call their own, an oasis of autonomy in a tightly controlled world. In the words of John Michael Vlach, “Denied the time and resources needed to design and build as they might have wanted, they simply appropriated, as marginalized peoples often do, the environments in which they were assigned.”[37] The cabin at Ivy Cliff would have been the sole location on the plantation where slaves could carve out some semblance of independence.
ENSLAVED PEOPLE AT IVY CLIFF
Unfortunately, the stories of countless slaves across the Antebellum South went unrecorded, though they were central to the Southern economy as a whole. Slaves no doubt assisted the Browns at their general store in New London, and the Brown children often mention dispatching messengers in their letters, most of which would have likely been slaves. The presence of slaves on this expansive plantation would have been ordinary and not especially worth noting, except for expense and tax purposes.
However, family letters and financial records reveal the names of a few individuals enslaved on the plantation during the antebellum period. Captain Brown noted doctors’ visits to ones Sarah, Mimy, and Martha Ann in 1826, 1833, and 1835, respectively.[38] Furthermore, in April 1833, Captain Brown was granted an exemption from paying taxes on two slaves who were “‘infirm and unable to render service,’” Judy and Joshua.[39] When Captain Brown died in 1841, he mentioned several slaves in his will: Dick, Bill, John, George, Charles, Christian, Harry, Wilson, Eliza, Nancy, Mary Ann, Anna, Martha, and Manda.[40] Simply knowing the slaves’ given names is more than many former plantations can boast today.
Barring additional documentary evidence, the record is silent about the treatment of slaves at Ivy Cliff. A 1838 letter from Frances Brown to her father mentions a struggle to hire out the Brown family slaves; Frances laments, “You have had too much trouble with [the slaves] – however[,] if you have a good overseer you will, no doubt have a more pleasant time.”[41] What this “trouble” might have entailed or its resolution is unclear. As prosperous landowners, the Brown family almost certainly feared slave insurrection, as did many Antebellum-era Virginians, which prompted them to keep a tight rein over their “property.”[42]
In short, the family undoubtedly saw slavery as a necessary evil. One letter from Captain Brown’s brother, Daniel, is particularly telling; Daniel writes, “long Habbitts are not easily overcome and altho [sic] I like Slavery as little as you or anyone else, [to] still divest us of [slaves] [would] place us quite in Retirement & I think it probable that we should be as unhappy as we are with them.”[43] As his nephew, John Thompson Brown, would argue years later, Daniel recognized his family’s dependence on slave labor.
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[26] Lynda J. Morgan, Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850-1870 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 19.
[27] Daniel, Bedford County, Virginia, 1840-1860, 126.
[28] Morgan, Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850-1870, 36.
[29] Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls. "Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 1720-1790." The William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1989): 233.
[30] Ibid., 37.
[31] “Personal Bills of Henry Brown 1819-1841.”
[32] “Tax Records for Captain Henry Brown.”
[33] Garrett Fesler, “Excavating the Spaces of Enslaved Africans and Their Descendants,” in Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery, Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 27.
[34] Clifton Ellis, “Building for ‘Our Family, Black and White:’ The Changing Form of the Slave House in Antebellum Virginia,” in Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery, Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 141, 144.
[35] Douglas A. Sandford, Elizabeth Fedowitz, Arianna Drumond, and Randy Lichtenberger. “Ivy Cliff Slave Quarter,” Virginia Slave Housing: An Architectural,Archaeological,and Documentary Archive, accessed November 1, 2018. https://www.dropbox.com/s/8c58ejfc0g5nvdd/IvyClif fDECA%209-8-15.doc?dl=0.
[36] Ellis, “Building for Our Family,” 152.
[37] John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 16.
[38] “Personal Bills of Henry Brown 1819-1841.”
[39] Eakley, The Browns of Bedford County, 55.
[40] Ibid., 56.
[41] Frances Brown to Capt. Henry Brown, 1838, Brown, Coalter, Tucker Collection 1, Box 12, folder 47.
[42] Dr. William Steptoe to John Thompson Brown, September 1, 1819,” Brown, Coalter, Tucker Collection 1, Box 14, folder 10.
[43] “Daniel Brown to Capt. Henry Brown, Bedford, no later than 1818,” Brown, Coalter, Tucker Collection 1, Box 12, folder 9.
[44] Brown, “Speech of John Thompson Brown,” 24.