Fanny White (formerly Fanny Nowland) looking for her parents Ben and Silvey Nowland and sister Paise Nowland

Searchee Location says, "Camel County".  The newspaper printed a garbled name :  the actual place is "Campbell County".  Please correct,  because anyone using a key word search by place name, will not find this info about Campbell County, VA

Fanny White’s Families, by David E. Paterson

Across the nation, readers of the October 19, 1882, issue of The Christian Recorder, weekly newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, saw this advertisement:

INFORMATION WANTED OF MY RELatives who at one time lived in Camel county, Va. Their names were at that time Ben and Elijah Nowland; my sister's name was Palsie Nowland.  Father and mother's names were Ben and Silvey Now-land. We belonged to a man by the name of Briant Nowland, and at his death I fell to his brother, a speculator, and was brought to Georgia and sold.  Any information will be gladly received by Fanny Nowland then, but now Fanny White.       The Rock, Upson Co., Ga.

             Recollection dimmed by passage of a third of a century had transformed Campbell into “Camel” County, Virginia, and a printer’s error, probably, had rendered sister Patsie as “Palsie”—but there, unmistakably, in black and white, were the names of a fractured family, long-parted but not forgotten—and the names of the perpetrators of the separation, likewise unforgotten and inseparable from that long-ago loss—names that might jog the memories of the Recorder’s readers and prompt them to share information that could reunite the family.[1]

            Five hundred miles from Fanny White’s home at The Rock, Upson County, Georgia, and thirty-five years before Fanny would send her ad to the Christian Recorder, her then-slave owner, tobacco planter Bryan Ward Nowlin of Campbell County, North Carolina, died on October 30, 1847.  Within weeks his widow and their only child also died.  Because all died without leaving wills, Nowlin’s property—including sixty-five slaves—fell to a court-appointed administrator, his brother Mathew Bates Nowlin, to manage and divide among the heirs.  Fanny Nowland (as she said she was known) was then about 22 years old.

            The enslaved often felt deep anxiety when the slave owner died because, perhaps more than at any other critical event in the life-cycle of a slaveholding, families risked being split apart.  Georgia’s leading jurist, Thomas R. R. Cobb, published propaganda for slaveholders (surely written as much to persuade himself as to persuade anyone else), declaring that

. . . the slave is incorporated into and becomes a part of the family, that a tie is thus formed between the master and slave. . . .  The young child is seldom removed from the parent's protection, and beyond doubt, the institution prevents the separation of families, to an extent unknown among the laboring poor of the world. . . .  The master is the head of his family. Next to wife and children, he cares for his slaves.[2]

Slaves knew this was a load of rubbish.  To make fair shares among heirs (fairness to the enslaved not being a consideration) estate administrators often separated children eight years of age and older from parents and siblings, and frequently split husbands from wives.  The Nowlin estate was a good example of that reality.  All five relatives named in Fanny’s newspaper ad appear in the inventory of sixty-five slaves in Bryan Ward Nowlin’s estate, made November 22, 1847, but none of the five were in the same “Lot No. 2” into which the administrator placed Fanny.  Fanny was to be separated from her beloved kin.

[unable to copy figures into this form] Figure 2.  Two snippets of the inventory listing Fanny, appraised at $400, and Fanny’s mother and sister, “Silvey & child (patsy),” appraised at $350.  Also listed were Elijah and three people named Ben (presumably including Fanny’s father and her other like-named relative).[3]

Administrators typically assigned shares by placing a numbered slip of paper for each lot into a hat, then heirs or their representatives would each draw a slip from the hat.  Brother of the deceased, Hopkins Nowlin, drew Lot No. 2.  Hopkins Nowlin, an interstate slave trader since the 1830s, would demonstrate that he did not see Fanny as his new family member.  Instead, she was fresh merchandise for his trade.

From his home in Franklin, Virginia, Hopkins Nowlin organized an annual expedition during the fall and winter trading season with droves of slaves (he called them his “stock”) deep into the cotton South.  Typically he trekked through South Carolina, into western Georgia, and thence into the heart of Alabama—but the 1848-1849 winter trading season would be different.  That season Nowlin made two trips only as far as Columbia, South Carolina.  He travelled with a horse-drawn carryall or wagon (or maybe both) to haul the luggage, camping equipment, and probably people who could not keep pace on foot.  He and his human merchandise might sleep in tents at night.  On April 15, 1849, writing from Chesterville, SC, to brother Matthew Nowlin, he named Fanny and other unsold slaves he had on hand, and suggested the unseasonable weather slaves and traders sometimes experienced as they tramped along southern roads:

I Shant go as far as Georgia  I have Sold 9 of my negros  I Sold the 6 that you Sent me from Campbell [County] . . . [for a total of $2550] . . .  I have on hand Fany [and four more boys and girls]. . . .  We have a fine Snow to Day  it is now Snowing and is nearly Shoo Deep  its a bout 12 [o’clock] and has Bin Snowing Ever since Early this morning  I just Raked the Snow of my Tent and it was from 2 to 3 Inches Deep on the Tint Cloth.

Even worse for Hopkins Nowlin’s business than the weather, the market for slaves was “very Dull oing to negros Coming Back from Ga.”  On the road he had met a fellow trader who he predicted would “not be able to Git Cost for his negros.”  Under such bad conditions, Hopkins saw no point in venturing south into Georgia that season.  From Columbia, SC, on April 27, he wrote that if he had no better luck in ten days, he would return home; and, indeed, he returned to Franklin, Virginia, in May 1849.  Fanny remained unsold that season.[4]

[unable to copy figures into this form] Figure 3.  Fanny, valued at $450, is listed third line from the bottom in Hopkins Nowlin’s share of his brother’s estate, distributed October 1848. [5]

About six months later Hopkins Nowlin set out from his Franklin, VA, home for the 1849-1850 trading season.  Although not named in Nowlin’s preserved documents for that season, Fanny must have been among the people he took to sell.[6]  He wrote to his brother Matthew Nowlin from camp in Union District, South Carolina, December 1, 1849:

I have Just Returned to Camp from Chestervill. . . .  We ar Camped to Day and Lying by on acount of the Rain this is the first Rain that we hav had since I left home. . . .  Rite to me [at] Greenvill Georgia Columbus Georgia Orben Ala Mongomry Ala  I understand that the Proabition Law in Georgia is Repeald  if so I will Rite you as Soon as I understand that fack We ar all Well and Giting on very Well.

The “Proabition Law” mentioned by Hopkins Nowlin was Georgia’s on-again-off-again law prohibiting slave traders from importing slaves into Georgia to sell within the state (transporting through the state was not illegal).  In effect from 1842 to December 1849, the law had not stopped Hopkins Nowlin from plying his trade through Georgia in the 1847-1848 season, but perhaps the risk of enforcement gave him pause in 1849.  Historian Ralph Betts Flanders observed that “[t]hese laws were violated with great frequency and boldness,” but the prohibition law must have caused Nowlin some concern or he would not have cared about its repeal.  The Georgia legislature did, indeed, repeal the prohibition law in December 1849.[7]

Hopkins Nowlin proceeded across the border from South Carolina into Georgia.  He was in Jasper County on January 2, 1850, then encamped near Forsyth, Monroe County, about a week later.  He took a day-trip by train to Griffin (in Spalding County) on January 12, returning to his camp that night.  By January 29 he was in Greenville, Meriwether County.  Nowlin’s letters reveal that his movements during January 1850 were most likely when he marched his “drove of negroes” into Upson County and sold Fanny, or when her purchaser visited Nowlins’ roadside tent camp in a nearby county to buy her.[8]

No record yet found tells who bought Fanny Nowland from Hopkins Nowlin, or how many owners claimed her before emancipation.  Our next glimpse of her is in the 1870 census, in Thomaston, Upson County, Georgia, married to Stephen White, an employee of B. B. White’s shoe factory.  (A different slave trader, Joseph A. Weatherly, had transported Stephen White from North Carolina to Upson in 1847, about three years before Fanny arrived.)  She was “Keeping House.”  Like many freedwomen who withdrew their labor from the fields when slavery ended, she had established domesticity as the nucleus of her life—a signal that her family alone, no task master or employer, could claim her service—a choice formerly denied her in slavery.  The 1870 census recorded a sixteen-year-old boy, Frank (Franklin) White, living in the household.  Frank was Stephen’s son, according to the next census—1880 was the first year a U.S. census explicitly identified relationships between the head of household and co-resident householders—but Frank (born about 1854) certainly could have been Fanny’s son also.  If he was, Fanny and Stephen probably met and married in the early 1850s, although the 1880 census is the first explicit official notice of their spousal relationship.  (Marriages among slaves were not recognized by Georgia law.)[9]  The 1880 census-taker recorded the more formal name “Frances” instead of Fanny.  Was that Fanny’s choice or the enumerator’s?  We do not know.

[unable to copy figures into this form] Figure 4.  1870 Census, Upson County, Town District (Thomaston), p. 14.

Figure 5.  1880 Census, Upson County, Union Hill (588) District, enumeration district 140, p. 16.  Notice the wild inconsistency between ages given for Stephen and Fanny in the two censuses, while Franklin’s age is consistent.  After long experience with these censuses I give greater credence to the local Upson County census takers of 1880 than the enumerator in 1870.

By 1880 Fanny and Stephen White had moved their family seven miles north from Thomaston to The Rock, Upson County, Georgia, where he worked as tanner.  The household still included son, Franklin White, a farm laborer, but also Stephen’s nine-year-old niece, Annie Josey.  As a leading lay member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Upson County, Stephen White would have known the church newspaper, Christian Recorder—he may have been a subscriber—and thus would have read “Information Wanted” ads that former slaves had begun to post.  Although the 1880 census suggests that he could read but not write, Fanny had learnt both to read and write.  Stephen and Fanny White surely discussed their shared yearning to reconnect with lost family members before each of them composed an ad—perhaps both written by Fanny—and mailed them together to the Recorder.[10]

Documents found to date do not show whether Fanny connected with her long-lost family members.  If they corresponded by letter or visited in person, there is probably no public record.  Private family letters, if any, may have rejoined their writers as dust and ashes.

-----------------------  Notes --------------

[1] For discussion of “Information Wanted” ads, see Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 139-168.  A project to make these advertisements accessible on the internet place is Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, https://informationwanted.org (viewed August 3, 2017).

[2] Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry Into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America. To Which is Prefixed, An Historical Sketch of Slavery.  Vol. 1. (Savannah: W. Thorne Williams, 1858), pp. ccxvii-ccxviii.

[3] Campbell County, VA, Will Book 10, 147-148 (appraisement of Bryan W. Nowlin estate, 22 Nov. 1847).

[4] All quotations from Virginia Historical Society, Mss1N8675a, Matthew Bates Nowlin (1792-1856) papers, Hopkins Nowlin to Brother Matthew [Nowlin], letter, April 15, 1849; Hopkins Nowlin to Brother Matthew [Nowlin], letter, April 27, 1849.  Nowlin’s expense records include frequent costs for repairing and equipping carryalls and wagons.

[5] Campbell County, VA, Will Book 10, 197 (distribution of Bryan W. Nowlin estate, October 1848).

[6] The Matthew Bates Nowlin (1792-1856) papers document Hopkins Nowlin’s financial transactions in partnership with his brother.  Because Fanny was Hopkins Nowlin’s personal property, she would not appear in the partnership financial records.

[7] Ralph Betts Flanders, Plantation Slavery in Georgia (1933; rpt. Cos Cobb: John E. Edwards, 1967), 184.  The legislature originally imposed the prohibition in 1817, repealed the law in 1824, revived the law in 1829, modified it in 1836, repealed it again in 1841, revived it again in 1842, repealed it in 1849, re-imposed the ban in 1852, and finally repealed it in the 1855-1856 session of the legislature.  In 1830 Georgia Governor Gilmer had publicly expressed his belief that the state could not enforce the ban “because of the impossibility of distinguishing the trader for profit, from the citizen buying for his own use” (Macon Telegraph, October 23, 1830, p. 3, c. 2).  See interesting discussion of conflicting interests in Georgia that affected the ban in Michael Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and Myth-Making of the U.S. South,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 134-135.

[8] Matthew Bates Nowlin papers, finding aid, “Dates and Locales of Hopkins Nowlin Correspondence,” conveniently lists surviving letters to his brother in chronological order and by place where written.  We can follow his route from December 1847 through February 1848 by the datelines of his letters: from Abbeville District, SC, on a quick reconnoiter into Millstone and Elberton, GA, back to South Carolina, then boldly on through Griffin, GA, to Mobile, AL.  The list incorrectly places a letter of January 13, 1850, from “Forsythe County, Ga.,” but reading the letter shows it was actually written from camp near Forsyth, Monroe County, Ga.

[9] The 1870 census form does not specify family relationships and the instructions to enumerators only told them to enumerate the head of each household first, then other members of the family after him or her (this instruction was much less explicit than instructions for enumerating families in the previous 1850 and 1860 censuses).  The 1880 Upson census, by enumerating Franklin as “son,” indicates son of the head of household.

[10]  Stephen White’s association with Thomaston’s A.M.E. Church is attested by his joint purchase, with other trustees, of the land for the church on November 2, 1868 (1868 Upson County Deed Book I, 455-6).  White’s newspaper ad seeking his own kinfolk will be explored in another article.

Fanny White’s Families

by David E. Paterson (last updated 2021)

Across the nation, readers of the October 19, 1882, issue of The Christian Recorder, weekly newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, saw this advertisement:

"INFORMATION WANTED OF MY RELatives who at one time lived in Camel county, Va. Their names were at that time Ben and Elijah Nowland; my sister's name was Palsie Nowland.  Father and mother's names were Ben and Silvey Now-land. We belonged to a man by the name of Briant Nowland, and at his death I fell to his brother, a speculator, and was brought to Georgia and sold.  Any information will be gladly received by Fanny Nowland then, but now Fanny White.                The Rock, Upson Co., Ga."

            Figure 1:  Fanny White’s ad in The Christian Recorder, October 19, 1882.  Image of original on the left, transcription on the right.

            Recollection dimmed by passage of a third of a century had transformed Campbell into “Camel” County, Virginia, and a printer’s error, probably, had rendered sister Patsie as “Palsie”—but there, unmistakably, in black and white, were the names of a fractured family, long-parted but not forgotten—and the names of the perpetrators of the separation, likewise unforgotten and inseparable from that long-ago loss—names that might jog the memories of the Recorder’s readers and prompt them to share information that could reunite the family.[1]

            Five hundred miles from Fanny White’s home at The Rock, Upson County, Georgia, and thirty-five years before Fanny would send her ad to the Christian Recorder, her then-slave owner, tobacco planter Bryan Ward Nowlin of Campbell County, North Carolina, died on October 30, 1847.  Within weeks his widow and their only child also died.  Because all died without leaving wills, Nowlin’s property—including sixty-five slaves—fell to a court-appointed administrator, his brother Mathew Bates Nowlin, to manage and divide among the heirs.  Fanny Nowland (as she said she was known) was then about 22 years old.

            The enslaved often felt deep anxiety when the slave owner died because, perhaps more than at any other critical event in the life-cycle of a slaveholding, families risked being split apart.  Georgia’s leading jurist, Thomas R. R. Cobb, published propaganda for slaveholders (surely written as much to persuade himself as to persuade anyone else), declaring that

. . . the slave is incorporated into and becomes a part of the family, that a tie is thus formed between the master and slave. . . .  The young child is seldom removed from the parent's protection, and beyond doubt, the institution prevents the separation of families, to an extent unknown among the laboring poor of the world. . . .  The master is the head of his family. Next to wife and children, he cares for his slaves.[2]

Slaves knew this was a load of rubbish.  To make fair shares among heirs (fairness to the enslaved not being a consideration) estate administrators often separated children eight years of age and older from parents and siblings, and frequently split husbands from wives.  The Nowlin estate was a good example of that reality.  All five relatives named in Fanny’s newspaper ad appear in the inventory of sixty-five slaves in Bryan Ward Nowlin’s estate, made November 22, 1847, but none of the five were in the same “Lot No. 2” into which the administrator placed Fanny.  Fanny was to be separated from her beloved kin.

Figure 2.  Two snippets of the inventory listing Fanny, appraised at $400, and Fanny’s mother and sister, “Silvey & child (patsy),” appraised at $350.  Also listed were Elijah and three people named Ben (presumably including Fanny’s father and her other like-named relative).[3]

Administrators typically assigned shares by placing a numbered slip of paper for each lot into a hat, then heirs or their representatives would each draw a slip from the hat.  Brother of the deceased, Hopkins Nowlin, drew Lot No. 2.  Hopkins Nowlin, an interstate slave trader since the 1830s, would demonstrate that he did not see Fanny as his new family member.  Instead, she was fresh merchandise for his trade.

From his home in Franklin, Virginia, Hopkins Nowlin organized an annual expedition during the fall and winter trading season with droves of slaves (he called them his “stock”) deep into the cotton South.  Typically he trekked through South Carolina, into western Georgia, and thence into the heart of Alabama—but the 1848-1849 winter trading season would be different.  That season Nowlin made two trips only as far as Columbia, South Carolina.  He travelled with a horse-drawn carryall or wagon (or maybe both) to haul the luggage, camping equipment, and probably people who could not keep pace on foot.  He and his human merchandise might sleep in tents at night.  On April 15, 1849, writing from Chesterville, SC, to brother Matthew Nowlin, he named Fanny and other unsold slaves he had on hand, and suggested the unseasonable weather slaves and traders sometimes experienced as they tramped along southern roads:

"I Shant go as far as Georgia  I have Sold 9 of my negros  I Sold the 6 that you Sent me from Campbell [County] . . . [for a total of $2550] . . .  I have on hand Fany [and four more boys and girls]. . . .  We have a fine Snow to Day  it is now Snowing and is nearly Shoo Deep  its a bout 12 [o’clock] and has Bin Snowing Ever since Early this morning  I just Raked the Snow of my Tent and it was from 2 to 3 Inches Deep on the Tint Cloth."

Even worse for Hopkins Nowlin’s business than the weather, the market for slaves was “very Dull oing to negros Coming Back from Ga.”  On the road he had met a fellow trader who he predicted would “not be able to Git Cost for his negros.”  Under such bad conditions, Hopkins saw no point in venturing south into Georgia that season.  From Columbia, SC, on April 27, he wrote that if he had no better luck in ten days, he would return home; and, indeed, he returned to Franklin, Virginia, in May 1849.  Fanny remained unsold that season.[4]

Figure 3.  Fanny, valued at $450, is listed third line from the bottom in Hopkins Nowlin’s share of his brother’s estate, distributed October 1848. [5]

            About six months later Hopkins Nowlin set out from his Franklin, VA, home for the 1849-1850 trading season.  Although not named in Nowlin’s preserved documents for that season, Fanny must have been among the people he took to sell.[6]  He wrote to his brother Matthew Nowlin from camp in Union District, South Carolina, December 1, 1849:

"I have Just Returned to Camp from Chestervill. . . .  We ar Camped to Day and Lying by on acount of the Rain this is the first Rain that we hav had since I left home. . . .  Rite to me [at] Greenvill Georgia Columbus Georgia Orben Ala Mongomry Ala  I understand that the Proabition Law in Georgia is Repeald  if so I will Rite you as Soon as I understand that fack We ar all Well and Giting on very Well."

The “Proabition Law” mentioned by Hopkins Nowlin was Georgia’s on-again-off-again law prohibiting slave traders from importing slaves into Georgia to sell within the state (transporting through the state was not illegal).  In effect from 1842 to December 1849, the law had not stopped Hopkins Nowlin from plying his trade through Georgia in the 1847-1848 season, but perhaps the risk of enforcement gave him pause in 1849.  Historian Ralph Betts Flanders observed that “[t]hese laws were violated with great frequency and boldness,” but the prohibition law must have caused Nowlin some concern or he would not have cared about its repeal.  The Georgia legislature did, indeed, repeal the prohibition law in December 1849.[7]

            Hopkins Nowlin proceeded across the border from South Carolina into Georgia.  He was in Jasper County on January 2, 1850, then encamped near Forsyth, Monroe County, about a week later.  He took a day-trip by train to Griffin (in Spalding County) on January 12, returning to his camp that night.  By January 29 he was in Greenville, Meriwether County.  Nowlin’s letters reveal that his movements during January 1850 were most likely when he marched his “drove of negroes” into Upson County and sold Fanny, or when her purchaser visited Nowlins’ roadside tent camp in a nearby county to buy her.[8]

No record yet found tells who bought Fanny Nowland from Hopkins Nowlin, or how many owners claimed her before emancipation.  Our next glimpse of her is in the 1870 census, in Thomaston, Upson County, Georgia, married to Stephen White, an employee of B. B. White’s shoe factory.  (A different slave trader, Joseph A. Weatherly, had transported Stephen White from North Carolina to Upson in 1847, about three years before Fanny arrived.)  She was “Keeping House.”  Like many freedwomen who withdrew their labor from the fields when slavery ended, she had established domesticity as the nucleus of her life—a signal that her family alone, no task master or employer, could claim her service—a choice formerly denied her in slavery.  The 1870 census recorded a sixteen-year-old boy, Frank (Franklin) White, living in the household.  Frank was Stephen’s son, according to the next census—1880 was the first year a U.S. census explicitly identified relationships between the head of household and co-resident householders—but Frank (born about 1854) certainly could have been Fanny’s son also.  If he was, Fanny and Stephen probably met and married in the early 1850s, although the 1880 census is the first explicit official notice of their spousal relationship.  (Marriages among slaves were not recognized by Georgia law.)[9]  The 1880 census-taker recorded the more formal name “Frances” instead of Fanny.  Was that Fanny’s choice or the enumerator’s?  We do not know.

Figure 4.  1870 Census, Upson County, Town District (Thomaston), p. 14.

Figure 5.  1880 Census, Upson County, Union Hill (588) District, enumeration district 140, p. 16.  Notice the wild inconsistency between ages given for Stephen and Fanny in the two censuses, while Franklin’s age is consistent.  After long experience with these censuses I give greater credence to the local Upson County census takers of 1880 than the enumerator in 1870.

            By 1880 Fanny and Stephen White had moved their family seven miles north from Thomaston to The Rock, Upson County, Georgia, where he worked as tanner.  The household still included son, Franklin White, a farm laborer, but also Stephen’s nine-year-old niece, Annie Josey.  As a leading lay member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Upson County, Stephen White would have known the church newspaper, Christian Recorder—he may have been a subscriber—and thus would have read “Information Wanted” ads that former slaves had begun to post.  Although the 1880 census suggests that he could read but not write, Fanny had learnt both to read and write.  Stephen and Fanny White surely discussed their shared yearning to reconnect with lost family members before each of them composed an ad—perhaps both written by Fanny—and mailed them together to the Recorder.[10]

Documents found to date do not show whether Fanny connected with her long-lost family members.  If they corresponded by letter or visited in person, there is probably no public record.  Private family letters, if any, may have rejoined their writers as dust and ashes.

                                                              ֍

Recommended Reading:

Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 251).

Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, http://informationwanted.org

Sources for Hopkins Nowlin’s slave trading activities include:

Virginia Historical Society, Mss1N8675a, Matthew Bates Nowlin (1792-1856) papers.

Emma D. Poole, “List of Articles Presented to the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, Volume 13, Number 4, October 1930, 276-277. (available at https://journals.psu.edu/wph/article/view/1533/1381).  Includes text of four bills of sale and a letter to Hopkins Nowlin ca. 1835.

Pinckard v. Woods, in [Peachy R. Grattan, reporter] Reports of Cases Decided in the Supreme

Court of Appeals and in the General Court of Virginia, Volume VIII (July 1, 1851 to July 1, 1852), 2nd edition (Richmond: 1893), 141. (available at Google books website)

Loren Schweninger and Marguerite Ross Howell, eds., Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks, Series II,

Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1775–1867, Part C: Virginia (1775–1867) and Kentucky (1790–1864) (Bethesda, MD: LexisNexis, 2004), [microfilm] reel 5, frame 0689 (Accession # 21683602).

Connecticut State Library collection; Powell, L. H.; Bill of sale made by L. H. Powell to Hopkins Nowlin for the sale of Sarah, a slave, 16 years of age, for life, Mar. 22, 1850 [call number Main Vault 326 P3] (cited in James M. Rose and Alice Eichholz, Black Genesis: A Resource Book for African-American Genealogy, 2nd ed. [Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2003], 89).

END NOTES

[1] For discussion of “Information Wanted” ads, see Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 139-168.  A project to make these advertisements accessible on the internet place is Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, http://informationwanted.org (viewed August 3, 2017).

[2] Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry Into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America. To Which is Prefixed, An Historical Sketch of Slavery.  Vol. 1. (Savannah: W. Thorne Williams, 1858), pp. ccxvii-ccxviii.

[3] Campbell County, VA, Will Book 10, 147-148 (appraisement of Bryan W. Nowlin estate, 22 Nov. 1847).

[4] All quotations from Virginia Historical Society, Mss1N8675a, Matthew Bates Nowlin (1792-1856) papers, Hopkins Nowlin to Brother Matthew [Nowlin], letter, April 15, 1849; Hopkins Nowlin to Brother Matthew [Nowlin], letter, April 27, 1849.  Nowlin’s expense records include frequent costs for repairing and equipping carryalls and wagons. Fanny (spelled “Fany”) appears in this personal letter to Hopkins Nowlin’s brother, but does not appear in the business accounts of the brothers’s slave-trading partnership because Fanny was Nowlin’s personal property, not property of the partnership.

[5] Campbell County, VA, Will Book 10, 197 (distribution of Bryan W. Nowlin estate, October 1848).

[6] The Matthew Bates Nowlin (1792-1856) papers document Hopkins Nowlin’s financial transactions in partnership with his brother.  Because Fanny was Hopkins Nowlin’s personal property, she would not appear in the partnership financial records.

[7] Ralph Betts Flanders, Plantation Slavery in Georgia (1933; rpt. Cos Cobb: John E. Edwards, 1967), 184.  The legislature originally imposed the prohibition in 1798, then again in 1817 adding a registry requirement, then repealed the law in 1824, revived the law in 1829, modified it in 1836, repealed it again in 1841, revived it again in 1842, repealed it in 1849, re-imposed the ban in 1852, and finally repealed it in the 1855-1856 session of the legislature.  In 1830 Georgia Governor Gilmer had publicly expressed his belief that the state could not enforce the ban “because of the impossibility of distinguishing the trader for profit, from the citizen buying for his own use” (Macon Telegraph, October 23, 1830, p. 3, c. 2).  See interesting discussion of conflicting interests in Georgia that affected the ban in Michael Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and Myth-Making of the U.S. South,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 134-135.

[8] Matthew Bates Nowlin papers, finding aid, “Dates and Locales of Hopkins Nowlin Correspondence,” conveniently lists surviving letters to his brother in chronological order and by place where written.  We can follow his route from December 1847 through February 1848 by the datelines of his letters: from Abbeville District, SC, on a quick reconnoiter into Millstone and Elberton, GA, back to South Carolina, then boldly on through Griffin, GA, to Mobile, AL.  The list incorrectly places a letter of January 13, 1850, from “Forsythe County, Ga.,” but reading the letter shows it was actually written from camp near Forsyth, Monroe County, Ga.

[9] The 1870 census form does not specify family relationships and the instructions to enumerators only told them to enumerate the head of each household first, then other members of the family after him or her (this instruction was much less explicit than instructions for enumerating families in the previous 1850 and 1860 censuses).  The 1880 Upson census, by enumerating Franklin as “son,” indicates son of the head of household.

[10]  Stephen White’s association with Thomaston’s A.M.E. Church is attested by his joint purchase, with other trustees, of the land for the church on November 2, 1868 (1868 Upson County Deed Book I, 455-6).  White’s newspaper ad seeking his own kinfolk will be explored in another article.