The Road to Black Ned’s Forge: A Story of Race, Sex, and Trade on the Colonial American Frontier by Turk McCleskey (review)

Correction:
An error from the print edition of the July 2016 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly has been corrected in the digital edition found here. This sentence (page 583, lines 27–30) erroneously read, “He faded from the records at the same time that the Virginia backcountry became increasingly intolerant of free blacks, one that existed in awkward tension with revolutionary calls for liberty.” The editors sincerely regret the error.

In his deeply researched and meticulously documented microhistory, The Road to Black Ned’s Forge, Turk McCleskey unearths the story of Edward Tarr, a free black landowner and blacksmith in Virginia’s colonial backcountry. Using trace evidence and providing richly textured context, McCleskey compiles the narrative of Tarr’s life, providing a unique and compelling perspective on the eighteenth-century frontier through his subject’s connections to kin and community.

McCleskey documents the life of a slave named “Ned” who was born in the early eighteenth century and raised in the iron-producing regions of Pennsylvania. Ned spent his life around ironworks, first as a furnace hand and later as a skilled blacksmith with his own forge. He could read and write, spoke fluent German, and kept meticulous records of his finances. At some point in the 1740s, Ned became the property of Thomas Shute, a Philadelphia Quaker who was heavily invested in mineral mines and ironworks. In his will, Shute stipulated that Ned and two of his other slaves could purchase their freedom by paying annual installments over the course of six years. Ned paid for himself in half that time and secured his freedom from Shute’s executor.

As a free man, Ned took the name Edward Tarr and moved to Augusta County on the Virginia frontier. There he purchased 270 acres of land on a well-traveled road that led to the Augusta courthouse. He started work as an independent blacksmith, married a white Scottish woman, and joined the Presbyterian Church. In many ways, Tarr was a valued member of his backcountry community and a skilled and prosperous craftsman. His impressive income made Tarr a good credit risk and networks of debt and mutual obligation connected him to his mostly Anglo and Irish neighbors.

When violence ripped through western Virginia in the late 1750s, however, things began to change for Tarr. During the Seven Years’ War, Tarr and many of his neighbors evacuated their Timber Ridge community. Upon their return, Tarr’s household came under a new level of scrutiny. In 1759, a grand jury presented Tarr for selling beer without a license. That same year, a grand jury also presented Ann Moore, a white woman allegedly “harbour’d” (104) by Tarr, for disturbing the peace. Then, too, the county court bound out a young child who was living with him. Although the relationship between Tarr, the woman, and the child is unclear, the unwanted attention likely motivated him to move elsewhere. The following year, Tarr left Timber Ridge for the more densely populated town of Staunton, Virginia. Legal troubles followed him. Augusta County’s senior magistrate sued him for debt. He fell behind on his rent. Finally, in 1761, a former Augusta County resident attempted to re-enslave Tarr by fraudulently purchasing him from the son of his former owner. Tarr fought this attempt in court and his solid evidence and documentation of freedom prevailed.

Even though Tarr successfully defended his freedom in court, it was clear that the world around him was changing rapidly. Throughout the 1760s, the slave population of western Virginia grew dramatically. Augusta County found its first staple crop in hemp and the economic boom this produced helped finance the importation of slave labor. The demographics of slaveholding changed as well. Whereas early frontier slaveholders were mostly wealthy elites, small farmers increasingly...