From the day when the first enslaved people encountered the Merry Tree, through Emancipation, more than two hundred human beings were held in bondage at greater Smithfield. They far outnumbered the Prestons and the other white people who lived alongside them.
For ninety years, those two hundred human beings worked without compensation to create the Preston family’s wealth. The wheat they grew paid for the beds in which the Prestons slept, and which the enslaved would be forced to clean. The cattle they tended paid for the china from which the Prestons ate their meals; meals that the enslaved were forced to cook. Their sweat and blood made Preston gentility possible.
The unpaid labor of the enslaved paid for the carriage that carried William Ballard Preston to Richmond in 1831, where he argued for the abolition of slavery – but let us never forget that he did not call for the immediate freeing of the enslaved, but gradual abolition, to be followed by the exportation of freed people to Liberia. In his Virginia there would be no slaves, but there would also be no Black people.
The unpaid labor of the enslaved paid for William Ballard Preston’s journey to Richmond thirty years later, where he introduced articles of secession to remove his slave state from the Union.
The Prestons knew the monetary value of the linens and porcelain in their home. Some items would also have had sentimental value. The Prestons ultimately considered the enslaved only in the former way.
When James Patton Preston died in 1843, his will distributed land and the enslaved amongst his heirs. Margaret Saunders and three of her children, for example, became part of the White Thorn estate, one child stayed at Smithfield, another three were sent to Solitude. They, at least, would have remained physically close. Others were willed to Catharine Preston Gilmer who took them to an estate in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, including two McNortons whose parents and siblings were left behind.
Even when sentiment crept into a Preston’s consideration of the enslaved, it was always secondary to the family’s financial prosperity and safety. James F. Preston seemed to desire that those he enslaved be kept together, in his will noting that none should be sold off. None to be sold off unless “it shall be deemed necessary by my executors or by my wife in consequence of unsubordination [sic] or other bad conduct or unless it should be necessary to make sale of them or some of them to pay my debts.” As for Taylor McNorton, the enslaved man Preston forced to join him during the Mexican War and the Civil War, Preston left it up to his wife to free him or not, “as his conduct to me during my continuance in service may deserve.” For whatever reason, his widow Sarah decided McNorton would continue to be treated as property. The “loyalty” and the humanity of the enslaved would never carry greater weight than the personal interests of the enslavers.
And yet, being treated as less than human does not mean that one is less than human. Being treated without dignity does not mean that one lacks dignity. To be sold off or listed in a will like a plot of land does not mean that one is without emotions, and dreams, and desires.
Just as they or their ancestors had during the Middle Passage, those enslaved at greater Smithfield expressed their humanity through human connection. They married and had children, and watched their children bring forth another generation. They gossiped and laughed, argued and made love. In a world of insult, forced labor, and violence, they created families. This kinship was not only through shared ancestry, but also through shared experiences. They decided that they were brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, by blood and by circumstance.
That they continually created loving relationships is all the more remarkable for the fact that they knew kin could be taken away at any time, never again to be seen.
That the enslaved were unlike anything else the Prestons listed among their possessions was all too evident to the Prestons themselves. Later generations of white Americans would attempt to erase and deny the horrors of slavery. Enslaved people, they said, had enjoyed their lives. Whites had treated the child-like Black folk with kindness and were rewarded with loyalty – this was nostalgia for a world that had never existed, Gone with the Wind as history instead of fantasy. In the 1920s the United Daughters of the Confederacy even advocated for a statue for the mythical “mammy” who loved the master’s white children as if they were her own. Whatever their descendants imagined, the Prestons of slavery days knew better than this.
William Preston, Jr., knew better. He purchased Jim Barbour in 1812. Two years later Barbour escaped in a desperate attempt to reunite with his wife in Norfolk. He was captured and sold by Preston, only to drown once more seeking his freedom – unsatisfied, clearly, with his enslavement.
Robert Preston knew better. Anywhere Lincoln’s soldiers went in the South, enslaved people risked their lives to flee to Union lines. (Many later risked their lives again, on the battlefield in uniform.) According to Othello Fraction, “our master said if any of his ‘n—s’ went to the army & came back he would kill them.” If the enslaved were so content and loyal, surely it would not have been necessary for Preston to issue this threat.
All the Prestons knew better. Today the Smithfield museum house displays a pair of shackles in the midst of the pristine tea room – staged and frozen in time in the 19th century. The shackles come from Buchanan, Virginia, but are the same as any irons that would have been clasped around the wrists of a Black person in greater Smithfield. To lay eyes on these shackles is a jarring reminder that the civility of the master’s home was inseparable from the violence of forced labor. The shackles bring into the quiet domestic space a mute witness of oppression and dehumanization.
But we can also see the shackles as evidence of the power and humanity of the enslaved. We can see in them evidence of the enslavers’ fear. A Preston would not have tightened irons on a Black person’s hands unless those hands threatened to become weapons.
After Emancipation some of the formerly enslaved stayed on greater Smithfield, others moved elsewhere in Montgomery County or Virginia. How they received their names is unknown, but two neighborhoods in the town of Salem in Roanoke County came to be known as “Africa” and “Liberia.” It is deliciously ironic that people formerly enslaved by William Ballard Preston had in fact ended up living as free people in Liberia, though not quite as he had wished.
Over the next several decades more and more of the formerly enslaved and their descendants decided to seek better opportunities elsewhere – West Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Maryland, Montana, and more. Earlier generations had been forced from their homes, their families torn apart. Now, against gentrification and the inequalities of urban ghettos, their descendants would fight to decide on their own where to make their homes, how to raise their families.
As generations passed on, stories of slavery and Smithfield and the Merry Tree were shuttered away. Recognizing the strength and humanity of the enslaved was not worth reliving the trauma of enslavement. Families and individuals scattered. Time and distance, rather than enslavement, weakened kinship links. The Merry Tree remained, holding in its roots and branches the ancestral spirits that connected them all, and awaited their return.
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Works consulted
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940.
Daniel B. Thorp, In the True Blue’s Wake: Slavery and Freedom among the Families of Smithfield Plantation. 53, 63, 68.
