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88 5 traded babies Enslaved Children in America’s Domestic Migration, 1820–60 susan eva o’donovan Sometime in 1843, a young Hawkins Wilson went on the block at a sheriff ’s sale. A quarter century later, Wilson, who had been born in Caroline County, Virginia, wrote from Galveston, Texas, eager to set back to rights what had been nearly demolished by a lifetime in slavery. “Dear Sir,” Wilson opened his letter to a Freedmen’s Bureau official from whom he sought assistance, “I am anxious to learn about my sisters, from whom I have been separated many years—I have never heard from them since I left Virginia twenty four years ago—I am in hopes that they are still living and I am anxious to hear how they are getting on.” Tapping into a domestic and affective lineage that he had kept alive all those years in his mind, Wilson provided what clues he knew of his loved ones’ coordinates: One of my sisters belonged to Peter Coleman in Caroline County and her name was Jane—Her husband’s name was Charles and he belonged to Buck Haskin and lived near John Wright’s store in the same county—She had three children, Robert, Charles and Julia, when I left—Sister Martha belonged to Dr Jefferson, who lived two miles above Wright’s store—Sister Matilda belonged to Mrs. Botts, in the same county—My dear uncle Jim had a wife at Jack Langley’s and his wife was named Adie and his oldest son was named Buck and they all belonged to Jack Langley—These are all my own dearest relatives and I wish to correspond with them with a view to visit them as soon as I can hear from them—My enslaved children in america’s domestic migration 89 name is Hawkins Wilson and I am their brother, who was sold at Sheriff’s sale and used to belong to Jackson Tally and was bought by M. Wright of Boydtown C.H. [Virginia].1 Hawkins Wilson stands out for his remarkable letters, the light they shed on a child’s life in slavery, and the effort he made to reconnect with a faraway family. In most other respects, however, Wilson stands in for many. His story was a common story, one shared by hundreds of thousands of black youngsters. Neither marginal to nor by-products of an agricultural revolution that swept the United States between 1800 and 1861, enslaved children played integral roles in a process that would define and nearly destroy a young nation. Except for the absolute youngest, they performed a wide range of agricultural, industrial, and domestic tasks. Their potential as workers and parents underwrote the reproduction of a slaveholding class. Their bodies represented half-liquid capital, forms that in the heady years of national expansion were easily converted by slaveholders to cash. But perhaps most important, slaveholders and planters saw in black children’s youth and inexperience a homegrown means to dilute the collective and troubling power of their elders, that savvy and largely native born population of adult slaves whose labor and lives underwrote both regional and national power. Between 1820 and 1860, better than four million slaves traded hands and homes in the United States. Nearly a fourth of those were carried across state lines. Two million more were relocated more locally: bought, sold, or moved within the boundaries of state lines. An even larger number found themselves shuttled from place to place by owners who hired slaves’ labor out by the job, the week, the month, or the year. It was a migration that dwarfed the two-hundred-year-long transatlantic traffic between Africa and British mainland North America. It tipped the locus of American slaveholding from southern Virginia to the Deep South. It decimated enslaved families and communities that had been generations in the making, stripping away those considered the most fit and more fertile for the express purpose of recreating slaveholding society on the western frontier. The antebellum migration was also, however, a process of national economic and political expansion that preyed hard on enslaved children, for though the majority of forced migrants fell somewhere between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, smaller boys and girls accounted for better than 30 percent of all those who were sold into the interstate trade.2 Many more were sold or traded locally. As Steven Deyle recently observed, “Young children were always present” and often wholly alone. Across...

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