James Thomas, Jr. and Enslavement

The business success and wealth of James Thomas, Jr. (1806-1882)—and thus his philanthropy to institutions like Richmond College—were heavily reliant on extensive use of enslaved labor over more than 25 years. At one point in a single year (1860), he held 131 enslaved men, women, and children in Richmond alone, representing a significant proportion of the 150 total “hands” likewise recorded in his Richmond entry in that year’s census.¹ Records also document the consistent use of whipping (both at the hands of law enforcement and, in one case, dictated by Thomas) or the prospect of being sold away to control those he enslaved. This page provides additional information about the extent of Thomas’s involvement in the slave system and recovered information about specific individuals held by Thomas through direct enslavement or his leasing agreements with other enslavers. Government records show the numbers of enslaved people he held in Richmond on census enumeration days over three decades: 1840-1860. In the1840s, Richmond was “the largest slave-trading center in the Upper South.” In 1860, enslaved people represented one-third of the state’s population. Contemporaneous newspaper items, correspondence, bills, receipts, and other business records provide many names and biographical fragments of enslaved individuals held or leased by Thomas. To facilitate the work of those seeking their ancestors, the most current list of all names recovered in recent research available here.

Selected Government Records

The census information below reflects only those held in the Richmond area. Evidence shows that Thomas also held people in other localities.²

Enslaved “Hands”

Personal Property Taxes, 1851-1852

Tax records provide information on Thomas’s concentration of enslaved laborers in his factories. The numbers of enslaved people on whom Thomas paid personal property taxes included those he enslaved directly and those he “hired” from other enslavers for leasing terms that typically lasted one year. His rapid increase in real estate ownership and slaveholding is demonstrated in his tax records of 1851 and 1852.

Individuals

Selected Records of Purchase, Leasing (“Slave Hire”), and Sale

Thomas’s records contain dozens of items related to the transfer and trafficking of enslaved people. These include letters, receipts, and executed pre-printed leasing agreements.

Selected Newspaper Items

The names of many who were enslaved by Thomas are preserved because of their encounters with police and the criminal justice system, leading to reports in a Richmond daily newspaper. The charges reflect the extreme constraints on enslaved persons, for whom singing or being found without a pass resulted in arrest and physical punishment. The accounts describe most of them being whipped 10, 12, or 39 times. 

In and Around the Thomas Home

Details of those held at Thomas’s Richmond residence are emerging from primary records. An 1850 news item and a letter written by Thomas’s niece provide a glimpse of two men Thomas held at his residence on Grace and 2^nd Streets: Jesse and Nath (his name as it appears in the letter; a likely abbreviation of Nathan or Nathanial). The material also reveals fragments of the lives of an unnamed enslaved woman and her child, to whom the two men provided shelter and aid. The woman had escaped the enslavement of “Dr. Watson” and avoided recapture for between 18 months and two years. For at least a year of that time, Nath and Jesse kept her hidden in the loft of Thomas’s large stable, where she also gave birth to a child.¹² In June 1850, she was discovered by two men, “Messrs. Williams and Granger” (likely Francis Williams and Thomas Granger, members of the Richmond Night Police).¹³ The woman, Nath, and Jesse were arrested. It appears that Jesse was released, but Thomas gave instructions that Nath was to be detained in jail with the woman after he had been “punished for his good offices.”¹⁴ The punishment likely refers to whipping. No information has been found on the location of the child. The day the newspaper item was published, Thomas’s niece, Emily Thomas McTyre (1829-1921), described the events to her mother, Thomas’s sister-in-law, Mary J. Morgan Thomas (1805-1854). She refers to Jesse as a carriage driver and “Uncle Jesse,” indicating he may have been an older man. She also reports Thomas’s plan to sell Nath in the wake of the event:

There has been quite a rumpus at Uncle James’ about a woman that has been in his stable[,] it is thought perhaps a year. She ran away from her master Dr. Watson. She has had a child since she has been there. Nath, it is thought, was the head man, he & Uncle Jesse. It is a great secret, but Uncle J. will probably sell N (the other one [Jesse] is a carriage driver). The woman has been hunted for two years.¹⁵

In Factories

Alfred & Edward Hancock

Those who exploited large numbers of enslaved people in manufacturing settings typically used managers to exert day-to-day control over those they held. Managers were generally “white males between sixteen and twenty-six who were given license to discipline slave workers.” That discipline included “striking, cuffing, and whipping.”¹⁶ In 1854, an enslaved man named Alfred, who was held by Thomas, was arrested following what appears to have been an incident with a farm overseer or factory manager. From Warm Springs, Virginia, where Thomas often spent long periods of time, he wrote his then-clerk, Thomas C. Williams, Sr. (1831-1899), who would become a Richmond College trustee and benefactor, indicating that a manager named Wright was to retrieve Alfred from jail and “give him as much whipping as he wants and put him to work until I return.”  

Unless Mr. Wright is afraid of the chap Alfred, there is certainly no use in keeping him in jail. All he wants is whipping enough & [Wright] will find that it will not take much more than one good one.¹⁷

Following his whipping by Wright, Alfred would then be required to drive a team of horses each day until Thomas’s arrival.¹⁸ It is possible that he had been held by Thomas since at least 1852. The name Alfred appears on a list of shoes purchased for those who labored in Thomas’s factories.¹⁹ To date, nothing more has been located that sheds light on Alfred’s life.

The previous year, Thomas was billed for the police whipping of an enslaved man he held named Edward Hancock. Hancock was accused of stealing chewing tobacco from Thomas’s factory.²⁰ One newspaper reported his arrest, conviction, and punishment as an example of the lack of gratitude among those leased by their enslavers to factory owners in Richmond. The item concluded, “We therefore always feel a degree of satisfaction—a savage one, if you please—at the detection and conviction of these graceless scamps.”²¹

Isaiah Smith & Joseph Henry Hill

Two men enslaved by Thomas escaped Richmond with the intention of going North. In April 1854, Isaiah Smith boarded the steamship Pennsylvania and hid “between decks behind a large iron pipe.” He made it to Delaware before he was discovered and jailed in New Castle. There he awaited identification by an agent of Thomas’s and his eventual return to Richmond.²²

In February 1859, Joseph Henry Hill, age 28, escaped from Thomas’s factory. Thomas placed an advertisement seeking his return, describing him as “well known among the tobacco factory negroes.” Hill, Thomas continued, could “read and write well” and “when spoken to he looks at you with a sort of stare, and perhaps a little sullen.” Despite Thomas’s offer of a $200 reward for capture and return, Hill was able to reach the free state of Pennsylvania en route to Canada. In Philadelphia, Hill encountered William Still (1821-1902), the child of formerly enslaved parents, an anti-slavery and abolition activist, and a conductor who assisted formerly enslaved individuals seeking freedom and is considered the father of the Underground Railroad. Still provided the last known record of Hill’s life:

The spirit of freedom in this passenger was truly the “one idea” notion. At the age of twenty-eight his purpose to free himself by escaping on the Underground Rail Road was successfully carried into effect, although not without difficulty. Joseph was a fair specimen of a man physically and mentally, could read and write, and thereby keep the run of matters of interest on the Slavery question.

James Thomas, Jr., a tobacco merchant, in Richmond, had Joe down in his ledger as a marketable piece of property, or a handy machine to save labor, and make money. To Joe’s great joy he heard the sound of the Underground Rail Road bell in Richmond,—had a satisfactory interview with the conductor,—received a favorable response, and was soon a traveler on his way to Canada. He left his mother, a free woman, and two sisters in chains. He had been sold twice, but he never meant to be sold again.²³

Charles Fleet

Between at least 1851 and 1856, Charles Fleet²⁴ labored in Thomas’s manufactured tobacco factory. In 1853, he was listed among the facility’s tobacco twisters.²⁵ Each year he requested that his enslaver, Dr. Benjamin Fleet of King and Queen County, Virginia, hire him out to Thomas so he could be near his wife, who was held in Richmond. In the years of communication between Benjamin Fleet and Thomas, details of Charles Fleet’s life were negotiated by the two men, including the hire amount Thomas paid to Benjamin Fleet for Charles Fleet’s labor ($75 per year in 1852 and $140 in 1856)²⁶ and the risk that his serious medical issues, including a head injury and a prolonged fever in 1851, would keep him away from his wife if Thomas refused to continue leasing him.²⁷ In his 1855 letter to Thomas’s manager, R.A. Patterson, Benjamin Fleet’s language shifted from occasional paternalistic accommodation to frustration with Charles Fleet’s situation and lack of “gratitude.” Charles Fleet had experienced seizures resulting from his earlier head injury and was hospitalized with pneumonia: 

Charles is & has ever been a mystery to me & what to do with him I know not. I will however give him away (provided I can get any body to take him) before he shall absorb my whole estate in medical fees . . . If Charles were like any other human being I have ever seen, he would command not only my sympathy but the very best in every sense of the word that a kind master cd. do for a servant. But he is as devoid of gratitude for services rendered him even by those of his own colour & race (not to speak of white folks,) . . . I sometimes think of putting him to digging Coal where the light wd. not be so apt to affect his cerebral function, sometimes of one thing & sometimes another. Be pleased to get him away from the Infirmary as soon as his pneumonia disease will admit of his leaving, as if he were to stay there untill [sic] his brain became sound & healthy, he would have to stay there until the “crack of doom” if he could live that long, in all human probability.²⁸

By 1856, Benjamin Fleet was again attempting to hire Charles Fleet out to Thomas. His annual negotiation letter included a reminder that it was the Richmond location of Charles Fleet’s wife that made his hiring out in the city so urgent. He was described as “very anxious to get back to Richmond on account of it being so much more convenient for him to visit his wife.” Regarding his previous health concerns, Benjamin Fleet continued, “If he loses more than two or three weeks at the most from sickness, I am willing to deduct the amount of time lost.”²⁹ This is the last record of Charles Fleet’s life located to date.

Lists of Clothing and Medical Services

Thomas’s business papers contain several long lists of those held in his facilities and items and services he purchased for specific people who labored for him. Each line includes a named recipient. 

Winter Clothes, 1853

One list from winter 1853 details the amounts Thomas spent on clothing for individuals laboring in his facilities.³⁰ Leasing agreements between enslavers typically stipulated that enslaved people be returned with new clothes and shoes, and this list would have been kept, in part, to account for such purchases. Some on the list are noted as having been “clothed by Master” (likely indicating a shorter lease term), while a few others received money in lieu of clothing. The occasional practice of cash payments to enslaved people instead of clothing is described by Robert Ryland and has been detailed by historians including Midori Takagi and Jennifer Oast.³¹

The six extant pages of the list—shown in the images below and organized by job title (twisters, screwmen, stemmers, job men, and job boys) with names and notations—details the amounts Thomas spent on clothing for individuals laboring in his facilities. The original list of names is located in the extensive collection of Thomas’s business papers held by the Rubinstein Library at Duke University.³²

Medical Care

Dr. A.G. (Albert G.) Wortham (1810-1873), Thomas’s friend, brother-in-law, and fellow Richmond College trustee, treated the Thomas family and those Thomas enslaved on a regular basis. He billed Thomas using long itemized statements, at times detailing the nature of treatment. Wortham treated enslaved men, women, and children for typhoid fever, consumption (tuberculosis), croup, wounds, and convulsions. His repeated visits to individual women may have indicated pregnancies.³³

Danville, Virginia

Thornton Gregory

In 1862, Thornton Gregory, age 26, escaped enslavement in Danville, and Thomas placed an advertisement in a Richmond newspaper offering $100 for Gregory’s capture and return. Referring to him as “my negro man Thornton, who calls himself Thornton Gregory,” Thomas provided Gregory’s physical description, a common feature of items seeking the return of those who escaped enslavement. He believed that Richmond was Gregory’s likely destination, pointing to the probability that he had been held there originally and may have had friends, family, or other connections in the city. The following year, Thomas adjusted his framing of Gregory’s escape (and the reported date of escape) when he paid his personal property taxes, describing Gregory as among the “Slaves that have escaped to the enemy” during the Civil War.³⁴ No documentation has been located that indicates Thornton Gregory was returned to Thomas’s enslavement prior to the Confederate surrender in 1865. Preliminary genealogical research points to the possibility that at least three generations of his descendants lived in Mecklenburg County, Virginia.³⁵

Hanover County, Virginia

Margaret, Georgianna & Others

While numerous sources provide details of Thomas’s exploitation of the slave system in his factories, references to the enslaved laborers on his farms are typically scattered across correspondence from his overseers. One exception is an 1863 list of enslaved people leased for Thomas by the man acting as his agent, Harvey N. Broaddus (1839-1918). The list provides the names of men, women, and at least one child; the names of their enslavers; and the amount paid. 

A January 1864 letter to Thomas from B.F. (Benjamin F.) Gresham, the enslaver of Margaret and Georgianna, is both an example of the typical conflicts between enslavers and “hirers” and an illustration of the effects such conflicts had on enslaved individuals.³⁷ Gresham objected that Margaret and Georgianna, “two young women,” had been returned to him without the new sets of clothing typically required in slave leasing agreements. He also noted that one of the women had received a “pair of shoes that would not last a month.” He wrote that he had agreed to a low price for a year of their labor with the understanding that the women would be “well treated and clothed.”³⁸ Gresham insisted that the items to be delivered immediately since Margaret and Georgianna were “much in need of their clothes.”³⁹ A historic cold snap had affected the region during the period between the two women’s return from Thomas’s farm and Gresham’s letter to Thomas: one Richmond newspaper described January 2, 1864 as “one of the coldest days ever felt in this latitude by the present generation.”⁴⁰ To date, no further material has been located that provides information on the lives of Margaret or Georgianna.

Documentation & Lives

The individuals in the summaries above represent a small fraction of those enslaved or held by Thomas whose names appear in newspaper items and in the correspondence, receipts, medical bills, purchasing statements, and other material in his business records. A table that includes all the names encountered during recent research is available here.