The European demand for tobacco was driving the competitive economic market. Plantations in the New World supplied the English empire with an abundance of tobacco.  Cultivation of tobacco was labor intensive and cost prohibitive unless it is produced in large quantities. In order to keep the cost down and the production quantity up, indentured servants and slaves provided an economical labor force.  With indentured servants and slaves, the plantations became the economic backbone of the English empire.

The first record of servants at Shirley Plantation dates to 1616 when John Rolfe documented that Captain Isaac Madison commanded 25 men in planting and curing tobacco. These men were all white and indentured servants, also called indentures. Indentured servants were the original labor force at Shirley as well as in the rest of the English colonies. Indentured servants were people of various races who were contractually obligated to become laborers for a specified period of time in exchange for debt repayment, food, lodging, transportation to the colonies, and the teaching of a trade. Indentured servants were brought from Africa, the Caribbean islands, Scotland, Ireland, and England. In some of the British colonies of New England, servitude took the form of apprenticeships, in which an individual was a servant in exchange for learning a craft. In Virginia and throughout the southern colonies, where the economy was primarily agricultural, most indentured servants were field hands who tended tobacco fields. Though indentured servitude sounded appealing, the lives of these men and women were very difficult. They faced harsh punishments for petty crimes and transgressions against their masters. Penalties included whipping, hanging, shooting, and even burning the indenture alive. Masters could extend servants contracts and they had little recourse, legal or otherwise.

Africans first arrived in Virginia in 1619. The majority of these Africans likely became indentured servants though records from this era were unclear regarding their fates. The first documented African slave in Virginia came in 1640. John Punch, an African indentured servant, ran away from his master and a Virginia court ordered that Punch’s punishment be a lifetime of service to his master. In 1622, records for Shirley Plantation first mention an African or islander when documents indicated that eleven men including “One Negar,” had died since April.

Until Virginians committed to slave labor, indentured servants comprised the majority of the workforce.  Edward Hill I, the first Hill Carter family member to live at Shirley, probably took part in the indentured servant system. He imported 43 people in 1661. These people were likely indentures because the indentured servant system was more cost-effective and practical than the African slave system. 

In The Making of New World Slavery:  From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800, Robin Blackburn argued that indentured servants were a better investment until the end of the 1600s for several reasons. The high mortality rate of new arrivals to the New World was a contributing factor. An indentured contract may have only called for three or four years of service, but if the person only lived three or four years, then investing in more servants and fewer slaves was more cost efficient. White indentures were more popular because their masters knew their language and their work habits. Credit for purchasing servants was more easily received when buying white indentured labor (Blackburn 241-242). By the end of the seventeenth century, these issues became irrelevant and slaves began replacing indentures.

Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675 was a major contributing factor to the demise of the indentured servant system. Former and current indentured servants supported Nathaniel Bacon in his uprising. Colonial elite no longer favored the indentured servants after their collaboration with Bacon. Still in need of inexpensive labor, the importation of slaves to the colonies increased.

When Elizabeth Hill and John Carter married in October 1723, Virginia was no longer a “society with slaves;” the colony had transformed into a “slave society.” According to Ira Berlin in his book Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, “slaves were marginal to the central processes; slavery was just one form of labor among many” in a society with slaves. Berlin further argues that, “slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relationships” in a slave society (Berlin, 8). To John Carter, slavery, and by extension the slave trade was a natural part of the social order. He dealt in the trade of African slaves. In the summer of 1738, a Liverpool ship named the Walpole reached the upper James carrying 290 slaves consigned to John Carter. A year later, in June of 1739, another Liverpool vessel, the Snow Dove, brought him a shipment of 106. John passed on the beliefs and values of the slave society to his son and successor, Charles Carter.

In 1783, the personal property tax of Charles City County listed 193 slaves at Shirley belonging to Charles, the largest number of slaves ever listed as being owned at Shirley. Four years later, the Virginia personal property tax listed Charles as owning 35,108 acres of property and 785 slaves distributed throughout ten counties making him the largest slave-owner in Virginia at the time.  Of the 785 slaves that Charles owned, 26%, or 201 slaves, were in Charles City and 134 of the 201 were working at Shirley. Although Charles was Virginia’s largest slave-owner at the time, one of his children was an outspoken critic of slavery.

Robert, Charles’s son and heir, opposed the institution of slavery. He once wrote his children, “[f]rom the earliest point in time when I could distinguish right from wrong, I conceived a great distaste for the slave trade and all its barbarous consequences.” Although Robert died before he could inherit Shirley, he stipulated in his will that the slaves were to remain on the plantation and that slave families were not to be separated when Shirley was divided between his four children. Though Robert abhorred slavery, his eldest son and inheritor, Hill Carter, did not free Shirley’s slaves. He did, however, practice more humane ownership and bore witness to the emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War.

Much of the documentary evidence of slavery at Shirley came from Hill Carter. He began keeping records when he officially inherited Shirley at the age of 20 in 1816. His meticulous journals catalogue and describe daily occurrences on the plantation. Hill Carter kept receipts and records of doctor’s visits, weddings, funerals, runaways, shoes lists, and construction of quarters for all of his slaves. These original receipts are still in the Shirley Plantation archives today.

While Hill Carter was master of Shirley, the number of slaves ranged from 98 in 1830 to 193 in 1860. A cholera epidemic in 1849 killed 30 slaves. Hill Carter recorded that the first to die was Harry Tanner, who passed away within the first twenty-four hours. Receipts indicate Hill spent $725 dollars on doctor bills, medicine, and brandy. Confederate tax records of 1862 show that Hill Carter owned 153 slaves at Shirley Plantation. 

Mary Braxton Randolph Carter, Hill’s wife, was raised with a strong antipathy for the institution of slavery. She spent long hours at the slave quarters, caring for the ill and teaching the slaves how to read, which was an illegal practice in Virginia and throughout the South. She even wrote that she would rather scrub floors than be forced “to hold 134 souls in thrall.” In 1850, Hill recorded that his wife sponsored 40 colored children for baptisms at one time at Shirley. Mary Braxton died during the Civil War of pneumonia before she was able to see her slaves gain their freedom.

The Civil War brought about many changes at Shirley. From 1860 to 1865, 80 slaves fled the plantation in hope of gaining freedom with the Union armies. The first recorded slave to desert was Siah Carter, also known as Josiah Hulett, who escaped on May 15, 1862. Siah saw his chance when the Union ironclad USS Monitor anchored down river at City Point, which is the present day city of Hopewell. Under the darkness of night, Siah rowed down river and sought refuge on the Union ship on which he later served as an assistant to the cook and as a carpenter, which was also his occupation as a slave.

In 1862, 18 slaves, including Siah, ran away while the Union army occupied the property. Hill Carter noted in 1863 that when the Union gunboats came up the James River, 15 slaves left with them. Many of the slave men who had left with the Union army in 1862 returned to Shirley in 1864 to collect their wives. This action in 1864 was the last of the mass exodus by the slaves at Shirley because in 1865 the 13th Amendment was ratified, and slavery was abolished. The former slaves who remained at Shirley after the abolition of slavery became hired workers, known as tenant farmers. 

While slaves were on the property, they were provided housing. Slave dwellings differed according to the slaves’ primary responsibility. House servants lived on the upper floors of the Kitchen and Laundry buildings as did the staff of those dependencies. Field hands lived in the “Great Quarters” up to a mile away from the Great House. The “Great Quarters,” as they were called, were documented as a result of an archaeological field school held at Shirley from 1979 to 1980, as well as a 2005 archaeological excavation and artifact recovery. Both archaeological and documentary records reveal that the 19th century slaves at Shirley lived primarily within family households. Their dwellings were wood frame cabins, 20 by 40 feet, with a double chimney that provided the interior space to serve two households.

Discoveries about slave life are still being made at Shirley. A vast collection of family documents are still being transcribed today and reveal more and more of the 19th century slaveholdings at Shirley. Excavations from 2004 and 2005 yielded vast amounts of artifacts and information about Shirley’s slaves. An excavation of the North Yard revealed much new evidence of African servants or slaves as early as the late 17th century including such items as cowrie shells, clay pipes, and glass bottles. This dig also uncovered what was recorded as a spirit protection bowl believed to be of African origin. The archaeological research, along with the study of the family archives, provide an interesting look at the life of the people here at Shirley, free, indentured, and enslaved.

A new slavery exhibit is scheduled for completion in the latter part of 2010 in the courtyard Kitchen building, an original early 18th-century outbuilding.