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As a Florida-born reporter roaming Southside and Southwest Virginia in the 1980s, I became aware of just how little I understood about the history and culture of the people I encountered.
In 1985, while traveling Route 60 in rural Buckingham County to cover a contentious primary election, I passed over a stream called “Whispering Creek.” I remember wishing I could roll down the window and hear murmuring voices in the woods.
It was only recently, however, that I discovered how deaf I was to my own family’s history in western Virginia.
John Mathews — eight generations back on my mother’s side — emigrated to the Shenandoah Valley, by way of Pennsylvania, with the first wave of Scots-Irish in the decades before the American Revolution. He and his wife raised 11 children near Natural Bridge in present-day Rockbridge County.
When it comes to the early settlement of the valley, we think of industrious Germans and Scots-Irish farmers establishing a self-reliant backcountry culture distinct and apart from Virginia’s slave-dependent tobacco plantations on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge.
But available historical records show involuntary labor — including white convict servants from England and enslaved Black workers imported from Africa directly as well as from eastern Virginia — played a larger role in the Shenandoah Valley’s settlement than is commonly understood.
When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, a state census revealed that in some parts of Augusta County slavery was so commonplace that one in three households owned at least one enslaved Black person.
Augusta County historian Nancy Sorrells said that today there are so few Black people in Augusta County (4% of the population, according to the 2020 Census) that people are surprised to learn of slavery’s role in the county’s past.
“You don’t see it now,” Sorrells said, “so it never was.”
Much to my regret, I learned last year that my mother’s forebearers played a role in supplying Augusta County with involuntary labor — mostly white convict servants, but also some enslaved Black people.
By 1762, two of John Mathews’ sons had set up a tavern and store near the county courthouse, located in the growing village of Staunton. An article in Wikipedia says the brothers were “soul-drivers“ who bought convict servants from British transport ships at port, and headed westward with convicts in tow, selling them to farmers and planters along the way.
To be honest, I was not completely surprised. I grew up in what some in the South refer to as a mixed household. My father was a Yale-educated Yankee from Boston; my mother was raised up by a bunch of self-described Florida Crackers.
As a boy, I learned that my grandfather Mathews had been born in Brazil, where his family emigrated after the Civil War along with other Southerners who fled the Northern occupation. At the time in Brazil, it was still legal to hold other humans in bondage. The Mathews repatriated to Florida in 1882, five years after the end of Reconstruction.
John Boots, my mother’s cousin, did extensive genealogical research in the 1960s, but his findings did not linger on inconvenient questions of slavery and race. The central character in Boots’ research is Augusta County-born George Mathews, who has been described as “by far the crudest, most dynamic, energetic, colorful and capable” of John Mathews’ seven sons.
Born in 1736, George Mathews fought under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. He later sought his fortune in Georgia, where he served in the first United States Congress and was twice elected governor. (In 1812, he led a mercenary invasion of Spanish-held East Florida, but that is a story for another day.)
George and his brother, Sampson, threw themselves into various ventures, including meeting the demand for additional labor in the Shenandoah Valley.
Turk McCleskey, a history professor at Virginia Military Institute, has busted some myths about the early settlement of Augusta County through dogged quantitative research of Colonial-era records.
McCleskey has found that in many ways, Augusta County mimicked the elitist and exclusionary tendencies of Tidewater Virginia. A tiny elite controlled access to land and enforced social order through a near-monopoly on political appointments. McCleskey found that a few dozen families —including the Mathews family — accounted for more than half of all freehold acreage patented by the county before 1770. (Initially, Augusta County was an expansive area that included present-day Rockbridge County and stretched southwest to the headwaters of the Holston River, upstream from present-day Abingdon.)
McCleskey also calculated that in Augusta Couty during the quarter century before the American Revolution, two-thirds of tithable males owned no land. The largest segment of landless were the adult sons of landowners who labored under their fathers’ oversight.
There was a growing demand for more (and inexpensive) labor in Colonial Virginia. Often, laborers had no say in the matter and received no pay.
Virginia’s Colonial labor force was supplemented with an estimated 10,000 convict servants that were shipped here from Great Britain after the passage of the 1717 Transportation Act. The government saved money by paying ship captains to “reprieve” convicted felons to faraway Colonies. There is much debate among historians about the criminality of convict servants. Nearly all were felons, but many had been convicted of crimes that today would be considered no more than petty larceny.
Convict ships would be met at fall-line ports by shopkeepers, artisans, small farmers and foundry owners in search of inexpensive labor. In 1768, when a convict ship paid call on Alexandria, Col. George Washington ventured from Mount Vernon in hopes of acquiring an experienced bricklayer.
Convict servants were required to toil seven years without any pay. (By contrast, indentured servants who entered into service voluntarily typically served four years and, upon completion, would receive “freedom dues” that would help establish them as free Colonists.)
There is scant surviving historical record of how many convict servants found their way from Virginia’s fall-line ports to the Valley. Barbara Vines Little, editor of the Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, said that because convict servants were not taxed as property, Colonial officials kept no record of when they arrived or who purchased their contracts.
As a result, there is no definitive record of how many servant convicts reached the Shenandoah Valley. Historian Frederick Hall Schmidt analyzed newspaper advertisements for runaway convict servants after 1765 and found that about one-third came from fast-growing backcountry areas like Augusta County.
The Mathewses put convict servants to work in their various enterprises. Their bookkeeper in Staunton was Joshua Dudley, a man convicted of perjury in England. Sampson Mathews relocated to Richmond to serve as a forward agent for their various enterprises.
Historians agree the convict servants, particularly Irish Catholics, were among the lowest possible social class. In his eight strata of Virginia Colonial society, historian Douglas Southall Freeman placed the convict servant next to the bottom, one step above the Black slave.
At the start, enslaved Blacks provided a tiny portion of labor in Augusta County. McCleskey reports that in 1755, Colonial authorities could find only 40 adult slaves in all of Augusta County, which at that time was a vast area that extended to the Ohio River. The ratio of taxable white adults to taxable Black adults was 57:1.
One notable exception to this racial uniformity was Ned Tarr, a free Black man, who moved from Philadelphia in 1752 and set up a blacksmith shop right off the Great Road between Philadelphia and North Carolina. In his book about Tarr, McCleskey found the community —at least for a time — accepted a free Black neighbor, thanks to Tarr’s artisan skill, fluency in German and devotion to the Presbyterian Church.
Many of Augusta County’s remote settlements hollowed out during the French and Indian War, as Indian raids sent white settlers seeking safety. (Even Ned Tarr sought refuge briefly in Pennsylvania.) As the population began to rebuild in 1764, slavery became more common as settlers sought to expand their acreage or relieve themselves (or their wives) from some of the brute drudgeries of backwoods life. Even some Presbyterian ministers in Augusta County owned slaves.
Slave holdings in Augusta tended to be much smaller than in eastern Virginia. A state census taken in 1783, right as the Revolutionary War was ending, shows that most slave-holding families in Augusta County owned only one or two adult enslaved people.
After 1755, there are no definitive numbers on how quickly slavery spread in Augusta County in the late Colonial period. Tax records, which could provide granular numbers, went missing long ago.
But McCleskey has mined an unexpected source — the court certification of enslaved children. The county government required such records to be established anytime someone brought Black enslaved children into the county. Establishing a child’s age could avoid future disputes over when enslaved minors would reach maturity, rendering them property subject to taxation.
From 1753 to 1774, the number of annual enslaved child registrations averaged just under five, with a peak of 35 in 1760.
In 1767, the opening of a rope-manufacturing business near Winchester led valley farmers to plant and harvest more hemp. In his book, McCleskey notes the “hemp bounties” may have helped finance a growth in slavery. Nearly one-third of hemp growers who owned no slaves in 1767 subsequently acquired them.
An unknown number of enslaved Black people flowed into the valley after the outbreak of the American Revolution, as planters in South Carolina and Georgia relocated their slaves away from hostilities along the coast.
The 1790 census, completed a few years after independence, enumerated 1,567 enslaved Black people living in Augusta County, or 14.4 percent of the population. That was much lower than the 39.1 percent in Virginia as a whole, but slightly higher than 10.4 percent in neighboring Rockbridge County.
Slavery was more common than the overall population figures suggest. That is because many Augusta County families had numerous children, but might have had only one or two enslaved Black workers.
A state census taken in 1783, right as the Revolutionary War was ending, provides a much more granular look at three Augusta County tax districts. An abstract published by Little, the genealogy expert, showed that 37 percent of households in those tax districts had at least one adult Black enslaved person.
Most of the slave-holding families held only one or two enslaved people. There were only three families in those tax districts who owned more than 10 adult slaves. (One of them, I must report, was George Mathews.)
Sorrells, the Augusta County historian, said it was “an enduring myth” that slavery never had a strong hold on the Shenandoah Valley. She noted that Augusta County’s population of enslaved people grew to 20 percent in the 1860 Census, taken just before the outset of the Civil War.
Sorrells is committed to telling the whole story of Augusta County. “What I see is that history is only as rich if all the stories are told,” she said.
I feel the same way about my family history. I’m not proud to have a “soul driver” in my family tree, but I’d rather face the fullness of my lineage (and learn from it) than to wash it away.
