A remarkable letter, testament to the confused and brutal realities of slavery in the 1840s, as a prominent lawyer describes the fate of an extended family, “given” to him in the will of an old family friend.
The letter was written by Darius Henry Starbuck (1818—1887), from a prominent Quaker family in North Carolina. A graduate of Guilford College and lawyer, he was a delegate to the North Carolina state constitutional conventions of 1861 and 1865. After the War President Andrew Johnson appointed him to the federal district court, President Ulysses S. Grant making him State Attorney in 1770.
Significantly, the letter is addressed to Gerrit Smith (1797—1874), the abolitionist and philanthropist, host of the Fugitive Slave Convention of 1850 and one of the “Secret Six” who gave financial support to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Smith’s house ‘Peterboro’ (misspelt by Starbuck here as ‘Petersborough’) in Madison County, New York, would become a famous stop on the Underground Railway. Smith’s fame was such that Starbuck, more than 700 miles away to the south, felt he could appeal to him for help and support when all of his other avenues were exhausted.
Starbuck writes that the family group had been the “only property” of a man of Salem called Thomas Adams. Starbuck continues that although Adams had expressed “a desire that I should emancipate them,” the labyrinthine debts on the estate had meant that he had only been able to keep the family together by paying off creditors to the amount of $1000.
This brings Starbuck to the heart of his request: “From the fact that the freedom of the slaves was a matter which Mr. Adams had very much at heart, I am desirous to get them free if I can have that amount refunded me. The negroes would bring at this moment more than ($3,000.) three thousand dollars if I would sell them but this is something I wish to avoid if possible. But I am not able to lose this amount of money. Hence I shall be under the necessity of continuing them in slavery, or selling part of them to refund me in order to free the balance. Their being all of one family would make this a painful duty to separate them.” The letter concludes with doubtless the most important section, giving unrecorded details of the family: “Perhaps a more minute description of these slaves may interest you. The two oldest, Syphax & Letty are brother & sister. Syphax is about 35 years old & has a free woman of color for a wife who has three children by him. Letty is about 32 years old, has a slave husband and six children, the oldest of whom is about 15 years of age.“
A full transcript is available on request.
