Joe and Nancy Clayton
Henry De Lamar Clayton Sr. was a lawyer, judge, Confederate general, and University of Alabama president. He was also a plantation owner who relied on slave labor, a life his wife Victoria looked back on with nostalgia more than 30 years later, just after his death, in the memoir White And Black Under The Old Regime (1899).
By Victoria's account, Joe and Nancy Clayton were with the family for decades and were among the enslaved people they considered most "loyal." Documentary evidence does not necessarily contradict this. Census records show that Joe and Nancy remained near their former master and mistress until Joe's death in 1874, more than a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation, by which point Henry and Victoria had sold him the parcel of land they lived on. Henry was also the executor of Joe's will.
However, most of what we know about Joe and Nancy's life on the plantation -- their thoughts and behaviors -- comes from the recollections of their former owners, both immediately after the end of slavery and in the years to come, when the realities of slavery became especially distorted in the Lost Cause narrative of the war. Henry and Victoria would have a vested interest in, at best, misunderstanding and misremembering the past, or at worst, actively reframing it to suit their needs.
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Questions to consider:
- What don't the documents tell you about Joe and Nancy? What can't they tell you? Are there other ways to discover those things? What does this deficiency mean for research into the lives of the enslaved?
- Can we use documents expressing the personal stories and opinions of slave owners in telling the true story of slavery? Should we? If so, in what way can they be used, and how do we acknowledge that in our scholarship?