A renegade census taker charged with recording the population of a rural county in 1860 left behind a rare record of slave names.
The discovery by a state archivist researching his family background stunned historians and genealogists who routinely find slaves listed only by gender, age and color -- black or mulatto.
The handwritten Camden County record, discovered last year, was compiled by census taker Jesse Bell and includes the first names of the slaves owned by each family. Under the entry for farmer A.P. Cherry, for example, Bell listed the names of 16 slaves -- ranging from 55-year-old Moses to 3-month-old Enoch. The letter "S" is written beside each name on yellowed ledger paper, which has the header "Free Inhabitants."
The names are not listed in the official federal index of the 1860 census.
"We see a lot of things here at the archives, but there are very few things that make us stop," said Earl Ijames, an archivist for the state Department of Cultural Resources who helped verify the record first noticed by colleague Chris Meekins.
Listing the names of slaves violated census regulations of the time, said Michael Hovland, a historian with the US Census Bureau. Census takers were instructed to list only the number of slaves and their vital information -- and even that was in a part of the census report separate from the list of free people. Slaves were considered property and each counted as three-fifths of a person when determining population.
The 1860 Census lists the population of Camden, which borders Virginia, as 5,343, including 2,127 slaves.
Hovland said he has never seen or heard of a census document that included slave names.
Ijames suspects that Bell may have included the slaves' names on purpose since the Census Bureau had an unquestionable policy on the matter.
"I think he did it kind of tongue-in-cheek. He probably could not help but understand the personable nature of people and that they were people, not property," Ijames said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of