Slave Transactions of Guadalupe County, Texas (review)

By using the wealth of information that can be found in local records, Mark Gretchen has put together a unique book that identifies by name almost 1,500 slaves in Guadalupe County, Texas. These names were drawn mainly from deed, probate, and court documents from the County and District Clerk's Offices. In a brief introduction about slavery in Texas and the formation of Guadalupe County, the author states that slaves were 32 percent of the county's population (as opposed to the state's average of 30 percent) by 1860, and represented more wealth than all of its combined land.

The first half of the book identifies slave holders (men and women) and their known histories, accomplishments, and connections to other slave holders. Here, Gretchen used the county tax records to list the owners and their declared number of slaves and values from 1846 until 1865. Information about the slave holders covers subjects such as war service, public offices held, and how they treated and used their slaves before and after emancipation. Arranged alphabetically, this section is foolproof in its layout, using easy to read tables with links to slave records that appear in the following chapters.

The second half of this book is dedicated to events concerning the slaves. A section on purchase transactions includes the names of the sellers and buyers, the value of the slave, the type of transaction, and sometimes why the transaction took place. The names of the slaves are also listed here, making the transactions about people not property. A section on mortgages demonstrates the many ways slaves and their assessed values were used as security to benefit their owners. Information for these sections is listed chronologically and also arranged in table format. A probate section, which is alphabetically arranged by owner, details the fate of slaves after the death of their owners. These records include orders on what the owners wanted done with their slaves such as selling, gifting, keeping families together or separating them, shipping them out of state, and slave-hire contracts. As he has throughout the slave section, the author lists the names and other information about the slaves along with information about their owners in easy to understand tables. The final section looks at criminal transactions involving slaves. Most of these cases were dismissed or involved laughable fines, but one resulted in a death sentence for a slave named Jack.

Each section of Slave Transactions of Guadalupe County, Texas is introduced by an informative summary. A number of secondary sources were used, but Gretchen relies mainly on Randolph B. Campbell's An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 1989) for facts pertaining to slavery. Other sources were used to fill in background information about the slave owners and their accomplishments.

As stated, the author's main purpose was to record the names of slaves who lived and worked in Guadalupe County, Texas. He achieved this and more, not only by giving the slaves back their names, but by demonstrating the wealth of information often overlooked in local repositories and then organizing it in a concise format, providing a deceptively large amount of detail. This book, a boon to genealogists, will also be a valuable asset to students of slavery as it provides, and shows where to gather, evidence that demonstrates how slave ownership helped propel certain people into the upper echelons of society.