Cheesy Grits: Slaveowners in the Family?

In an earlier post, I wrote about Jane's great-great-great-great-grandfather, John Stocks Thorne and the estate he left behind in trust to provide for his children by his former slave, Rebecca Thorne. After listing all of the financial instruments in his estate, I mentioned that there were "other listings" in his estate that I would return to later.

Well, today is later, and here is the complete inventory of the contents of John Stocks Thorne's estate as of his death in 1824. You've already seen the top part, so look more closely near the bottom:

John Stocks Thorne's estate inventory.

Among the assets Thorne left in trust were three slaves: a man named Tom deemed to be worth $100, a man named Damon deemed to be worth $250, and a man named Harry deemed to be worth $350. And a gold watch that was deemed to be worth more than Tom.

We do not know anything more about these slaves or their fates. What we do know about their general situation is reported from the various censuses and slave schedules by Larry Koger in Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slavemasters in South Carolina, 1790-1860:

• Rebecca Thorne of Charleston received wages from hired-out slaves during the 1830s.
• In the 1830 federal census, Rebecca Thorne is listed as a Free Black head of household in which three slaves were held.
• John Stocks and Rebecca Thorne's son John Thorne is listed as a slaveowner in the 1850 Slave Schedules for the federal census:

Here is what that Slave Schedule listing for John Thorne looks like:

U.S. Census 1850--Slave Schedule for Charleston, SC, St. Michael and St. Philip's Parishes.

Thorne owned seven slaves, ranging in ages from a 70 year old female to a 27 year old male. Whether he used them in his tailor shop or hired them out to others (a common practice among urban slaveowners) is not yet known.

There is no record of any of the other children of John Stocks and Rebecca Thorne owning slaves.

Some historians have held to the thesis that most African American slaveholders were mostly acting to preserve their families, e.g., spouses were purchasing spouses and children so that they would not be sold and sent away, or were otherwise benevolent. While this indeed did happen, Koger has presented solid evidence that at least in South Carolina, many African American slaveholders pursued slave ownership as a purely commercial activity: they hoped to make money from the purchase and sale of slaves and their labor. That they might have purchased their spouses and children as a means of protecting them did not seem to inhibit them from owning other slaves for purely commercial purposes.

It's hard for me as a modern to get my mind around how Rebecca Thorne, who was born into slavery and then set free, could then turn around and own slaves. And for her son John to have owned slaves as well.

But time and distance can lead us to think we're ethically superior to our ancestors when the history of my century, the 20th, has its own set of horrors to contend with, some of them perpetrated by nations which think of themselves as the most "highly-civilized" in the history of humanity.

So I must abandon the pretense that I would surely have acted differently in such situations, when the reality is that I do not know how I would have responded. And I must grant our ancestors the full range of their humanity by respecting the complexity of their lives and their ethical decisions, even while disagreeing with what they did. To deny them the same complexity that I would grant myself would be to deny them their full humanity, warts and all. But I would fail my own precepts if I didn't ask "Great-grandmother Thorne, what on earth were you thinking?!"

Here endeth today's sermon.


Source: Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (McFarland Press: 1985)