Enslavement in the Shenandoah Valley

The Shenandoah Valley had small family farms that enslaved no one, one person or a few, and larger plantations that enslaved many. Either way, every white resident of the valley was economically tied to slavery. Like the rest of the United States, the valley's culture was part of a system of race-based slavery, upheld through racism, violence and fear.

An enslaved woman ties a sheaf of wheat. NPS / Mark Maritato.

Bethany Veney

Bethany Veney was enslaved in Luray, Virginia, and won her freedom in Massachusetts in the 1850s. In her 1889 memoir, The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman, she weighed the treatment she had received against what a white child would have expected: "She was kind to me, as I then counted kindness, never whipping me or starving me; but it was not what a free-born white child would have found comforting or needful."

Bethany Veney, from her 1889 memoir. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Belle Grove

When Major Isaac Hite Jr. married Nelly Madison in 1783, her father, James Madison Sr., gave the couple 15 enslaved people. By the 1810 census, 103 people were enslaved at Belle Grove. Their labor ran the farm and the plantation's industries: a blacksmith shop, gristmill, sawmill, distillery, and lime kiln and quarry.

Hiring out enslaved people

By the early 1800s slavery in the valley had adapted to local needs. Slaveholders leased enslaved workers to nearby farms for set periods. A Northern visitor in 1847 described the practice: those to be hired were gathered at a set place in each county on the first of January and "put … up to the highest bidder for the ensuing year," or placed by private arrangement. The person hiring gave a bond to pay at the end of the year and, by custom, supplied two summer suits and one winter suit of clothing and paid the tax the court assessed on each enslaved person over 16.

Hiring by the year was most common for farm work and for industrial jobs such as iron forges.

Selling people south

"Slave Trader, Sold to Tennessee," from Lewis Miller's Sketchbook of Landscapes in the State of Virginia*, about 1853. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; gift of Dr. and Mrs. Richard M. Kain in memory of George Hay Kain.*

The United States banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. At the same time, cotton farming spread across the Deep South and the price of enslaved workers rose steeply, and many Virginia slaveholders sold people south. Lewis Miller's 1853 drawing shows two white men on horseback driving twenty enslaved men, women and children, barefoot, from Staunton to Tennessee. The Shenandoah Valley became a corridor for moving enslaved people out of Virginia to the southern states.

In the fall of 1836 the Staunton Spectator carried a weekly advertisement from a trader seeking to buy "one thousand likely negroes, of both sexes for Southern Market, for which I will give the highest cash prices."

Sources

• National Park Service, Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historical Park: "Enslavement in the Shenandoah Valley," part of the series From Backcountry to Breadbasket to Battlefield and Beyond.