SOME LONG DISTANCE ENSLAVEMENT DEALERS LISTED IN OLD RECORD BOOK FOUND AT ADAMS COUNTY COURTHOUSE IN 1999

Submitted by

^{Ser Seshs Ab Heter-CM Boxley
Natchez, Mississippi}
 

INTRODUCTION

“On August 16<sup>th 1999 in Mississippi, an article appeared in the Natchez Democrat entitled (“Rare slave records found in courthouse”). It went on to say, (“the records are chilling. Written in precise script on yellowing pages, they document the vital statistics of {enslaved persons} slaves brought from Kentucky to Mississippi just before the Civil War”). Bill Hanna and members of Mississippi’s Local Government Records Office of the Department of Archives and History had been working in one of the basement storage areas of the Adams County Courthouse in Natchez as part of a program to document the contents of local court records. Mr. Hanna recalls that they came upon a fairly modern bound book labeled simply ‘Record Book’. They began reading through it to make notes on it contents. It quickly dawned on them that it was not full of records from the 1950s as the binding suggested but contained strangely named (“Certificates of {enslaved persons} Slaves” from the 1850s and 1860s. At that time Mississippi State law required that (“In all cases where any {enslaved person} slave shall be introduced or imported into this State as merchandise or for sale, the person so introducing or importing, shall…exhibit to the clerk of the probate court of the county where such {enslaved person} slave may be introduced….that he has not been guilty of any felony or other crime, and that the person so offering him for sale, came lawfully into the possession thereof..”). These documents then became known as (“Certificates of {enslaved persons} Slaves”). Mr. Hanna and the others were excited when they realized the rarity of the find. He remembers being (“…most impressed that there were so many first and last names. I know I spent some time in the basement going over each page and reading each list of names”)! In fact nearly 30 percent of the ‘Record Book’ contains both the first and last names of enslaved people bought in the Upper South and sold on the Natchez {Enslavement} Slave Markets between 1858 and 1861. Those listed as the {enslaved persons} slave owners and witnesses have nearly all been identified as {enslavement dealers} slave traders. Tommy O’Beirne, the Chancery Clerk in Natchez who was also working on the records program, immediately authorized Mr. Hanna and his department to take the ‘Record Book’ to Jackson to be microfilmed. It was then returned to Natchez and the microfilm was made available to researchers. Roberta Raworth of Natchez went to the courthouse and made copies of the 136 legal sized pages. Gloria McCallum, Georgia Wise and Bill Mudd used the copies to transcribe the handwritten entries into a searchable database. The first entry in the Record Books is a ‘certificate’ drawn up in Louisville, Kentucky on September 7th 1858 just as Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were debating the issues of slavery in neighboring Illinois. The last entry in the record book was made on January 23, 1861 eleven days after Mississippi became the 2nd state to secede from the Union. By the end of the month all six of the Deep South states had seceded and less than two and a half months later the Confederate Army fired on Ft. Sumter.”
[Extracted from An Adams County Mississippi Slave Record Book a Forks-of-the-Roads website link of Gloria McCallum, Georgia Wise and Bill Mudd at: http://pages.prodigy.net/gmccallum/]

{ } Words enclosed with this symbol are Ser Seshs Ab Heter-CM Boxley’s inclusions. There is no social redeeming need to continue to deny our African Descendants Ancestors and Foreparents the humanity denied them during the dehumanizing process of enslavement and plantation institution mind conditioning, by calling them “slaves” today. To call them such is to continue the oppressive language of the white supremacy domination system. Why would African Descendants of today continue to call their mother’s mother’s mother’s and father’s father’s father’s “slaves?” It’s like referring to some aliens or another, so you don’t get to see their humanity.</sup>

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