COMMENTARY: Unraveling my family's history of slave ownership in Culpeper (2024)

Janine Roberts

There are rumors my Roberts great-grandparents were enslavers in Culpeper County. I begin researching them before a 2023 southern road trip with a friend of 50 years, Delores Brown.

Exploring Georgia, where Delores lived as a child with her sharecropper grandparents, visiting the National Lynching Memorial and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, walking the Pettus Bridge in Selma — all catapulted me further into my family history.

I thought, if they enslaved people, it was just a few. Around 24% of heads of households in the South “owned” slaves in 1860, and 15-17% enslaved between one and nine people. Only around 7-8% of households were 10 to 99 children, women and men forced into grueling labor, according to statistics from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

After seven hours online, I discovered a 1783 “property” tax list in Culpeper County for Joseph Roberts (1760-1834), my fourth great-grandfather. His so-called “property” is listed as “Sawney, Will, Jacob, Adam, James, Joe, Voll, Kesar, Lett, Jenny, Easter, Lucy, Sarah and 7 small negroes.”

I curled into myself, gut-punched; these were people, not his “property.” Thirteen names, most likely imposed by so-called “masters.” Seven people with names unwritten; probably children ages eight and under. Eight, the age of my granddaughter. I started to see images in my mind of her picking tobacco leaf by leaf, absorbing nicotine through her skin, vomiting, weak with green tobacco sickness.

I was ashamed of my earlier minimizing thoughts.

I dug deeper. Within two months I held in my hands a copy of the February 14, 1782 will of Benjamin Roberts (1706-1782), my sixth great-grandfather. With a magnifying glass I read tight-cribbed handwriting, an eighth of an inch high. In it, Benjamin bequeathed to my fourth great-grandfather Joseph, “One Clock, one Feather bed, two Stills …” and what he had no right to “give,” “Sixteen negroes viz Sawney, Seth, Rose, Nell, Nan, Winny, Alice, Jacob, Ginney, Sarah, Bett, Jack, Eve, Will, Georgia, & Easter, to him and his Heirs forever.”

I was aghast. Forever? And no distinctions made between “two Stills” and human beings?

There’s more. Sam, Tim, Sue, Molly, Dolley and Adam were left to Benjamin Roberts, Jr., while Lewis and Leanor, Richard and Lett went to two other grandsons. Phyllis, Harvey, Simon, Dennis and Reuben, along with three other unnamed “negroes,” were “left in the care” of my sixth great-grandfather’s executors. Thirty-four people in all.

I said their names softly, then louder. Repeated them like a litany, a prayer. But how can I say a prayer for them when it was my kin who bought and sold them, worked them from dawn to dark? Three without even their imposed names recorded. What were their given names, called out with a lilt, with love, in the enslaved quarters?

Near the end of the will: “Benjamin Roberts, a grantor, voluntarily conveys title of property to grantees.” Fissures in my heart. Nothing is voluntary for the 34 people in bondage, and their lives and livelihood. Or, for that matter, the actual property of the bondspeople, which is illegal to pass down.

Embedded, as well, in the will were the forced labor camps my great-grandparents ran on about 2,000 acres stolen from the Manahoac. But what happened to the people my relatives enslaved? I couldn’t find wills, deeds or tax property lists for my relatives in the 1830s and ’40s.

By the 1850s, my second great-grandfather, William Roberts, was in Kansas with no bondspeople. I thought, maybe some of my relatives had a reckoning and freed their slaves. I scoured the Free Negro Registers. Nothing. I then trekked to Culpeper with my friend Delores.

There, in the county courthouse with Virginia activist-historian Zann Nelson, we unearthed two key documents. The first shows “a contract this 24th day of August 1838” made by my third great-grandfather, George Melton Roberts (1787-1860). He received, from James Shotwell, $263.52 and ½ cents in exchange for his inheritance from my fourth great-grandfather, which included “six slaves, to wit Kale, Sam, Priscilla, Maria, Wyatt and Ellen.”

In the second document, dated Sept, 17, 1851, widowed Elizabeth Roberts, my fourth great-grandmother, “grants unto the said Carter B. Cropp, the following named property to wit: certain slaves namely Sam, Maria, John, Ellen, Susan, Martha, Sarah, Hand, Wyatt, Louisa, Andrew, and Spencer with the increase of the females thereof.”

Deep jolts: increase of the females — the babies do not belong to their mothers and fathers! My goddaughter has a three-month old. Lele is not hers? No one was freed. My relatives paid off debt with human lives, including the unborn.

Delores and I roamed the land along Crooked Run my ancestors stole. We found a summer kitchen where enslaved people worked and slept in sweltering lofts.

We studied new markers about Black heritage put up by the town and local groups, Right the Record and the African American Heritage Alliance. Welter of sadness, recognitions of deep resiliencies, fury that fuels accountability.

Some ideas started to percolate: support Right the Record’s community-based reconciliation projects; add the names I found to 10millionnames.org; and create and fund a marker, with oversight from local Culpeper citizens, about what I’ve uncovered. Most importantly, do more investigation about the people my ancestors enslaved.