Black Families of Edgefield Plantation – Woodville, Mississippi: Part 7

Part 7. Sold Again

Nathaniel Ware and his wife Sarah moved to the town of Washington, near Natchez in Adams County, Mississippi. They continued to own and profit from the Woodville Plantations just 30 miles south.

Terry Alford’s book Prince Among Slaves: The True Story of An African Prince Sold Into Slavery In The American South, tells the story of Abdurahman Ibrahima, an African Muslim, son of the Almami Ibrahima Sori – Commander in Chief of the army in the Futa Jallon town of Timbo, Guinea, West Africa. Abdurahman, at the age of 26, was taken prisoner in a war between Futa Jallon and Kaabu around 1788.  He was sold to Thomas Foster, a plantation owner in Natchez.  After being enslaved on the Foster plantation for 38 years, Abdurahman managed to negotiate his release on the agreement that he return to Africa and not live as a free man in the United States. The book tells the story of how the Natchez newspaper printer and publisher, Andrew Marchalk, provided an escort to travel with Abdurahman – first to Cincinnati, then to Washington D.C.  where he met with the U.S. President, and on to Philadelphia.

The escort Marchalk had arranged for the trip was Nathaniel Ware, a planter and once acting governor of Mississippi.  Ibrahima had known him for ten years as a neighbor of Thomas’s. He was a handsome person, fair-skinned, with long, thin hair that fell onto his neck.  Ware was selling his Mississippi farms and moving himself and his daughters to Philadelphia.  His domestic life at Natchez had been shattered when his wife, Sarah, went insane at the birth of their second child.

Nathaniel Ware’s wife, Sarah Percy Ellis Ware, who inherited one-fourth of the Charles Percy Estate and enslaved families, and one-third of her husband John Ellis’ Estate and enslaved families, also inherited the Percy mental illness.

In Prince Among Slaves it states, “Ware had long had an interest in Africa, and he held Africans as slaves on his plantations.  He would later travel on the African continent.”  In the September 11, 1816, edition of Andrew Marchalk’s newspaper The Washington Republican and Natchez Intelligencer, Ware placed an ad offering a $10 reward for the return of Peter, an African “fellow” who was sold to him by R. Terrel of Natchez.  Peter, in the never-ending spirit of African resistance, had run away from the Plantation.

(In the same September 11, 1816 edition of the Natchez Intelligencer, an ad is placed by Andrew Marchalk – the printer and publisher of the newspaper, selling a “Negro Woman.)

Ware, who described himself as “a planter of cotton and owner of slaves,” wrote Notes On Political Economy As Applicable To The United States. In the book he discusses the United States chattel slavery and plantation economy and gives a stark view of the conditions of the Black enslaved families on his plantations in Woodville. He writes.

The slaves live without beds or houses worth so calling, or family cares, or luxuries, or parade, or show; have no relaxations, or whims, or frolics, or dissipations; instead of sun to sun in their hours, are worked from daylight till nine o’clock at night.  Where the free man or laborer would require one hundred dollars a year for food and clothing alone, the slave can be supported for twenty dollars a year, and often is.

… A slave consumes in meat two hundred pounds of bacon or pork, costing in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, and Western Virginia, $8; thirteen bushels of Indian corn, costing $2: this makes up his food.  Now for salt and medicines add $1, and it runs thus: a year’s food is $11. Their clothing is of cottons—fifteen yards Lowell, $1.50; ten yards linsey, $4; one blanket, $2; one pair of shoes, $1—making $7.50.  Now this sum of $18.50, say $20, divided among the working days, is six cents. 

Ware, and the Mississippi plantation slaveowners, constructed a life for our enslaved families so they could work 16 hours a day in the cotton fields – roughly August to December, with only enough food, clothing, shelter, and medical care to survive.  Further, the goal was to strip away any sense of  personhood, or “family cares,” or memory of life before enslavement. This was the life designed by the plantation owner to maximize profits by controlling the minds and bodies of the enslaved.

Inside the cabins, the families continued to grow. Most found ways to hold on and take care of themselves and their families. Some, like Peter, ran away.

After the death of Sarah Percy, Ware sold the plantations, cashed in on the windfall profits, and later moved on to Philadelphia and then to Waco, Texas. 

Next: Dr. J. C. Patrick of Edgefield South Carolina – The Last Owner