Enslaved people made up a quarter of one enslaver’s wealth

Evidence

By the time the DC Compensated Emancipation Act was passed, Margaret Barber was a fifty-two-year-old widow living with her twenty-four-year-old son, John, and thirty-four enslaved people on the seventy-three-acre farm at Northview. Her property holdings included 75,000 in real estate, 25,000 in enslaved people, and 258 ounces of silver. Her wealth, like that of her parents before her, largely came from owning land and enslaving people. Ever the skilled businesswoman, Margaret filed her petition quickly on May 22, 1862, little more than a month after the act was written into law. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 78

Categorization

• SHARE: 258 ounces of silver — for someone into material culture or estate inventories of slavery-era wealth.