May 24, 2010
The History Behind a Slave’s Bill of Sale
This Bill of Sale recently acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture was written in 1835 for a 16-year-old girl named Polly. Image courtesy of the museum.
On a worn, aged piece of paper dated 1835, a judge describes the details of his sale: a 16-year-old girl named Polly, with “yellow complexion and black eyes,” the sale and purchase of whom the judge says he will warrant and defend “at all cost.”
The Bill of Sale, as documents like this became known, is one of dozens of new artifacts that the National Museum of African American History and Culture is assembling for its growing collections. The Bill of Sale is one that Director Lonnie Bunch says can enlighten people’s knowledge about the lives of slaves.
“Part of what is so interesting to me is that there are so many aspects of the enslaved that we don’t know anything about,” he says. “But because they were treated as property we have a whole legal trail.”
This particular document reveals several things about the enslaved. For one, the buyer and the seller were from Arkansas, Bunch says, indicating that at the time, the use of slaves was spreading from areas like North and South Carolina to places further south and west, like Alabama, Kentucky and Arkansas. Also, the price paid for the slave girl—$600—also offers a way to measure how slavery evolved in later years: By the time the Civil War began, Bunch says, a girl of Polly’s age was sold for about $1,500.
Bunch says the bill will make an appearance in the museum, which is set to open in 2015, but that there is also a lot that can be done with the artifact online. Its simplicity will help it reach many people, he says.
“I think for me whats most important is trying to close my eyes and imagine what this girl felt like, that she had no control over where she was going; she has no idea what the future was going to hold for her,” he said. “The bill itself really is something simple, but to realize it’s something about a person makes it very powerful.”
To see some of the other artifacts in the NMAAHC’s collection, visit the online museum.
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I predict very few comments for this item.
I think it’s very hard for most Americans to get their minds around the reality of slaves as individuals and slavery in general. For most, they don’t want to think about it and/or don’t know what to think.
Only when we as a diverse people honestly explore the experiences of ALL of our ancestors, will we even have a hope of finally being free of the more toxic aspects of our shared American heritage.
I am african American and have seen a few bills of sale like this one. I think that it is great that things of this nature, about American slavery, are being shared. There are so many people who have no idea as to what these people went through, especially if you are not African American. When I was a child, I would sit around the elders in the family and listen to stories that had been passed down from generation to generation and it is amazing that our ancestors survived to bring us here to this present time with their sanity in tact.
In fact, it has been said that after the emancipation proclamation was signed and the slaves were freed, many were placed in state mental instatutions because they had been abused to the point of extreme disfunction and mental illness and not able to function in this new society.
I would like for the image to be enlarged so that it can be read.
I have always been interested in history. This is sad but it is also part of our American History. I am an African American and I am so looking forward to the completion of the museum. One of my favorite writers E. G. White says it perfectly “We have nothing to fear for the future except as we forget how God has led us in the past”
It is an amazing piece, but not many people going to show their interest in it as it is a part of history.