Enslavement in the Shenandoah Valley

An enslaved woman ties a sheaf of wheat

NPS / Mark Maritato

The Shenandoah Valley had small family farms that owned none, one or a few enslaved people. The Valley also had larger plantations with many enslaved people. White residents of the Valley were all economically connected to slavery. Therefore, their culture, like that of the rest of the United States, was part of a system of race-based slavery and they used racism, violence, and fear to maintain it.

Bethany Veney from her 1889 published memoir "The Narrative of Bethany Veney a Slave Woman"

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bethany Veney

Bethany Veney, was an enslaved woman from Luray, Virginia. Bethany achieved her freedom in Massachusetts in the 1850's and later compared her treatment as a slave to a white child, "She was kind to me, as I then counted kindness, never whipping me or starving me; but it was not what a free-born white child would have found comforting or needful."

Belle Grove Plantation Enslavement

When Major Isaac Hite Jr. married Nelly Madison in 1783, her father, James Madison Sr. gifted the couple 15 enslaved people. By the time the 1810 census was taken, there were 103 enslaved people at the plantation. Enslaved labor was used for farming as well in the plantation's industries that included a blacksmith shop, gristmill, sawmill, distillery, and lime kiln and quarry.

Slave Hiring in the Shenandoah Valley

By the early 1800's slavery in the Shenandoah Valley adapted to meet the needs of local communities. Capitalistic slaveholders leased enslaved workers to local farms for periods of time. A Northern visitor to the Valley in 1847 wrote:

"The system of hiring, feeding, and clothing colored people... is to collect at that place - for that County - on the first of January, those to be hired and to put them up to the highest bidder for the ensuing year, or to bargain with more generally by individual arrangement. The person hiring gives his bond with good security to pay the hire at the end of the year, and the universal custom is to give two good summer suits, and one winter suit of clothing to pay the tax bill, which is assessed by the Court, so much for each slave of both sexes over 16 years."

Annual hiring was most common for farming and industrial jobs, like iron forges.

"Slave Trader, Sold to Tennessee" from Sketchbook of Landscapes in the State of Virginia by Lewis Miller, Virginia, ca. 1853

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; gift of Dr. and Mrs. Richard M. Kain in memory of George Hay Kain

Virginia as an Exporter State

The United States abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808.

At the same time cotton farming expanded in the Deep South, and the value of enslaved workers rose sharply leading many Virginia slaveholders to sell people south. This 1853 Lewis Miller drawing shows two mounted white men and a group of twenty enslaved men, women, and children who are being forced to walk barefoot from Staunton to Tennessee. The Shenandoah Valley became a corridor for moving enslaved people from Virginia to southern states.

The Staunton Spectator ran a weekly advertisement during the fall of 1836 proclaiming, "1,000 Negroes wanted - I wish to purchase one thousand likely negroes, of both sexes for Southern Market, for which I will give the highest cash prices."