Slavery was ubiquitous and systemic in Augusta County's economy and society. No town or place in Augusta was without slavery, no person distant from it. Slavery extended into every corner of the county, concentrating in no one area.

In fact, slaveholding shows no statistical relationship to soil type, land elevation, household wealth, farm value, or proximity to geographic features. Eight hundred and eleven whites in Augusta owned 5,616 slaves. They were distributed evenly throughout the county in proportion to overall population density. Slaveowners were just as likely to live in the mountainous regions of western Augusta as were nonslaveholders, and at every elevation slaveholders lived in the same proportion as nonslaveholders.

Slavery wove its way deep into the wealthiest families. Thirty-eight slaves--22 men and 16 women--made possible the profusion of livestock and grain on M. G. Harman's place. Harman also hired out six slaves, three men and three women, to neighbors in Augusta. Moreover, his brothers, all in their thirties, also owned substantial numbers of people. A. W., a farmer, held six, and John, another farmer, held fifteen. Their brother William, an attorney, owned thirteen, and Thomas, a stock dealer, owned seven.

Members of prominent families bore many kinds of relationship to slavery. Benjamin Crawford worked 12 black men and 8 black women on his plantation. The other 22 Crawfords in the county owned 155 slaves among them. Some, such as Mary Crawford, had only one, probably a cook or domestic servant; some, such as William, did not rent out any of the sixteen people he owned; others, such as John, a minister, rented out the only enslaved person he owned. While Benjamin Crawford was 55 years old and Margaret, owner of 22 slaves, was 61, other slaveholders in the Crawford family, such as Virginia, were only in their twenties.

Various members of the Crawford family rented enslaved persons to other whites in Augusta, tying the white people of Augusta together in their dependence on slavery. Benjamin Crawford rented one woman each to J. Cochran, C. T. Cochran, and to William Donaghue, all of rural Augusta. J. H. Crawford rented to the Western Lunatic Asylum; J. S. Crawford rented to Jonathan Strafford of Staunton, J. Crawford to Jacob Politz of Staunton, and Mary Crawford rented female slaves to three households in Staunton. Town and country, rich and middling, farmer and professional, male and female, newcomer and long-time native--all bought into slavery, literally and figuratively.

The workings of the market in enslaved people were intense, and some wondered whether Virginia might be drained of slaves. The Vindicator thought not and offered early reports from the 1860 United States census to prove its case. "As compared with the census of 1850, these figures show an increase of 8,152, of which 300 are slaves. It will thus be seen that notwithstanding the plaintive appeals of demagogues as to the decrease of slave population in Virginia, here in Augusta county there has been really an increase. We believe, further, that in Western Virginia, notwithstanding the extensive trade in this species of property, the result will exhibit that we have more slaves than in 1850." They were correct: slavery was expanding in Virginia, and especially in the mountains of the southwest. The most powerful white men of Augusta counted on their county's continued involvement in slavery. The proportion of the county's population constituted by slaves had remained constant for the last forty years, carefully regulated by ongoing sale, and people did not expect that to change anytime soon.

Not everyone welcomed the prospect of Augusta's continued dependence on slavery. Joseph Waddell, one of the editors of the Spectator, confided to his diary his disgust with slavery. Waddell, who owned two men and one woman, was approached by an acquaintance about selling the woman. "Dr. McGill proposed to buy Selena today, and offered me $1000--I would not have sold her for $20,000, unless she desired to go, or had grossly misbehaved. This thing of speculating in human flesh is utterly horrible to me--the money would cut into my flesh like hot iron." Waddell, who never wrote a word against slavery in his paper, admitted in private that "Slavery itself is extremely repulsive to my feelings, and I earnestly desire its extinction everywhere, when it can be done judiciously and so as to promote the welfare of both races." But, even to himself, he rushed to delimit his objections. "Yet I am no abolitionist. The day for emancipation with us has not come, and we must wait God's time. For the present all that the most philanthropic can do is to endeavor to ameliorate the institution, but it is hard to do this in the midst of the mischievous interference of outside fanatics." In his estimation, abolitionists prevented the natural and gradual end of slavery.

Augusta County, Va., Residences with Slavery (map)

Slave Population Comparison, 1860 (graph)

Joseph Addison Waddell, Diary, October 15, 1856

Related Historiography

Lloyd Benson, "Planters and Hoosiers: The Development of Sectional Society in Antebellum Indiana and Mississippi," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1990.

Randolph B. Campbell, "Planters and Plain Folk: Harrison County, Texas, as a Test Case, 1850-1860," Journal of Southern History XL (No. 3), (1974): 369-398.

William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854, Volume 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).