Slave Traders – Reckoning, Inc.

Thomas McIntire’s father was “taken by slave traders from Africa,” brought to the United States, sold, and enslaved. Jim Lane enslaved around 550 people, including Thomas McIntire. In this excerpt, the interviewer recounts in the first person Thomas McIntire’s recollection of the slave trade and how his enslaver treated enslaved people.

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Excerpt:

…Lane and the people who owned mother were friends, and betwixt them they gave father and mother in order so they could be man and wife. You see, in those days all they did was to give an order in writing for a man and woman to be man and wife. Lane was a little more human than some of the slave owners back in those times, so he allowed Mother and Father to go by the name of McIntire as the married name…

I never saw a Lane slave whipped nor treated cruel, and he never allowed any of his families to be separated. That was the reason he had so many slaves, because when he went to sales, he’d just buy a whole family before he’d allow them to all be separated. Then when his children married he’d give them four or five families, but he never gave it in writing to them. So, they couldn’t sell them…

The folks that owned the next plantation to ours, the Bigstaffs, were cruel to their slaves, and some the Bigstaffs boys would know the patrollers and help to catch slaves and whip them if they couldn’t show a pass from their masters.

I saw them driving long lines of slaves chained together, with the little ones pitched up in an ox cart, and I don’t know how many men on horseback with long whips slashing them and driving them along the road. The slave traders went all around and bought up men and women, some of them right from the field; no time for them to say goodbye to the families, buying and selling them worse than cattle.

The slave traders took them to a halfway house on the Tennessee highway close to us, owned by Billy Wurtz. He had a big cellar where they put the slaves till they were going to sell them or else take them further south. They used to make a big sale day at Mt. Sterling and auction off the slaves. They’d whip them on the block to make them holler. I saw all that, and more…

Interviewee Formerly enslaved person	Birth Year (Age)	Interviewer WPA Volunteer	Enslaver’s Name
Thomas McIntire	1847 (90)	Unknown	Jim Lane

Interview Location	Residence State	Birth Location
Clark County, OH	OH	KY

Themes & Keywords	Additional Tags:
Slave Traders, Violence	Bath County, First Person, Dialect, Witnessed Extreme Cruelty, Sold, Slave Traders, Notable

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Barney Stone was 91 years old when interviewed. He was enslaved for 16 years before he escaped and joined the Union Army during the Civil War. After the Civil War, Barney Stone was a self-taught teacher at a Black school and then became a preacher. The interviewer notes that Barney Stone had a “remarkable memory,” which is evident in the excerpt below where Barney Stone explains the practice of buying and selling enslaved people.

*Historically-used terms that are offensive, marginalizing and/or disparaging have been removed from the transcripts and replaced with [redacted]. See more information.

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Excerpt:

My master was a hard man when he was angry, drinking, or not feeling well, then at times he was kind to us. I was compelled to pick cotton and do other work when I was a very small boy. Master would never sell me because I was regarded as the best young slave on the plantation. Different from many other slaves, I was kept on the plantation from the day I was born until the day I ran away.

Slaves were sold in two ways, sometimes at private sale to a man who went about the Southland buying slaves until he has many in his possession, then he would have a big auction sale and would re-sell them to the highest bidder, much in the same manner as our live-stock [farm animals] are sold now in auction sales… He came to the plantation with a doctor. He would point out two or three slaves which looked good to him and which could be spared by the owner, and would have the doctor examine the slave’s heart. If the doctor pronounced the slave as sound, then the [redacted] buyer would make an offer to the owner and if the amount was satisfactory, the slave was sold. Some large plantation owners, having a large number of slaves, would hold a public auction and dispose of some of them, then he would attend another sale and buy new slaves, this was done sometimes to get better slaves and sometimes to make money on the sale of them.

Interviewee Formerly enslaved person	Birth Year (Age)	Interviewer WPA Volunteer	Enslaver’s Name
Barney Stone	1847 (91)	Robert C. Irvin	Lemuel Stone

Interview Location	Residence State	Birth Location
Noblesville, IN	KY	KY

Themes & Keywords	Additional Tags:
Economics	First Person, Third Person, Whipped, Witness Extreme Cruelty, Sold, Slave Traders, Union Troops, Veteran or Widow, Notable, Spencer County

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