In 1857, slavery was nearing its end, although no one in the South realized that yet. However, in Roanoke County, a widow named Sarah Betts knew that her time on earth was drawing to a close. She sat down to write out her will.
She seems to have had a soft spot for one particular slave she owned because her will contained this provision: “It is my desire that my slave Claiborne Scott and his wife Ann and their infant child Sally Betts shall have an opportunity to purchase themselves, that they may be free,” Sarah Betts wrote.
It’s unclear why the child had the surname of her enslavers, but that’s not the unusual part. The conditional nature of this promise of freedom was.
Betts explicitly did not grant freedom to the couple’s oldest daughter, Bettie, who was given to Sarah Betts’ niece, who would then take her out of state.
As for Claiborne Scott and his wife, Betts set the price of their freedom at $1,200 — said to be about $40,000 today — and gave Scott 10 years to raise the amount. If he couldn’t raise that amount, then Betts directed that “my Executors shall sell said slaves at auction.”
Scott faced a ticking clock: Raise that amount of money or risk seeing his family auctioned off and split apart. Even then, he never saw his oldest child again.
Scott managed to raise the required amount, doing so in five years instead of the required ten. But as he drew closer to reaching the financial target, he still faced a Virginia law that required freed slaves to leave the state within a year. Scott petitioned the General Assembly for permission to stay. According to a new museum exhibit about Scott’s case, “his request included the signatures of more than 30 Roanoke County residents who supported the family’s continued residency. Among them was Hollins [Institute, now University] president Charles Cocke, who Claiborne and Ann worked under for 14 years.”
The General Assembly approved Scott’s petition to stay in Virginia. This legal victory was a bittersweet one. Ann Scott never saw her purchased freedom. She died in February 1862 — one month before her husband paid his final payment for their liberty.
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The story of Claiborne Scott’s quest for freedom is laid out in a new exhibit at the Harrison Museum of African American Culture in Roanoke.
It’s part of a larger exhibit put together by the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond that calls attention to a population that we often forget existed in Virginia — “Un/bound: Free Black Virginians, 1619-1865” reminds us that history is often not as simple as the version we were taught in school. Throughout the slavery era, there were also free Black Virginians, whose mere presence presented challenges to both the law and Virginia’s prevailing social order.
The exhibit in Richmond is on display through July 4, 2027. If you’re in the state capital between now and then, this is a side trip you ought to take. However, the museum has also put together a smaller traveling show, which is now at the Harrison Museum in Roanoke until Aug. 24 and will be at the Floyd County Historical Society Sept. 2-Oct. 19. Any library, school or museum in Virginia can book this traveling show; the schedule shows lots of dates available. The Harrison Museum exhibit includes additions put together by the museum’s researcher, Brittney Flowers, that bring to light not only Scott’s situation but another Roanoke Valley story about conditional freedom that we’ll get to shortly. Other museums around the state could likely come up with their own stories to add.
The exhibit peels away the shorthand version of history we learned in school to look at just how messy the actual events were. Americans did not invent slavery, but they did invent the laws that governed it on these shores. The exhibit reminds us that when the first Africans were unwillingly brought to Virginia in 1619, there were no laws that governed their status. “Because laws about slavery were evolving, Black people used the courts to challenge their enslavement,” the exhibit says. Most failed, but some succeeded before slavery became an accepted legal fact in the mid-1600s.
One famous legal case involved Elizabeth Key, born into slavery in what was then Warwick County (and today is Newport News). Her mother was Black, her father was white. Key cited English common law at the time to argue that because her father was free, she should be, as well. “She also argued that her enslavement was void because as a Christian, it was unlawful for one Christian to enslave another,” the exhibit says. “The General Assembly agreed, releasing her from service” in 1656. Then legislators apparently realized what they had done, given how many slave owners were fathering children with their enslaved women. In 1662, the legislature passed a new law that said someone’s legal status — free or slave — passed through the mother, not the father. Five years later, the legislature “declared that Christian baptism did not exempt someone from slavery.”
And yet, despite all this, there were still free Black Virginians. They tended to be in the cities, and often were small business owners. The first land battle of the American Revolution in Virginia was the Battle of Great Bridge in modern-day Chesapeake; the hero on the Virginia side was a free Black man from Portsmouth, Billy Flora, who owned a livery stable. He stood his ground and kept the British from crossing a key bridge. (We’ve written about Flora in our Cardinal 250 series on little-known aspects of Virginia’s role in independence; we also have a podcast about him.)
The late 1700s saw many of Virginia’s elite wrestle with how to square slavery with their declarations of liberty. That era saw a wave of manumissions that added to Virginia’s free Black population. Up until then, the governor was required to approve all decisions to free a slave. In 1782, just a year after the Battle of Yorktown, the General Assembly passed a law that allowed any slaveowner to free his human property without involving the governor. The museum says “hundreds, if not thousands, of white Virginians” freed their slaves.
Then came the backlash. “As the number of free Black Virginians grew, so did the number of restrictions they faced,” the exhibit says. Special taxes were imposed on them; failure “could result in someone being hired out in involuntary servitude to pay their debt.” A system of pass laws was set up — special documents that Black Virginians had to carry to prove their freedom. It was illegal for Black Virginians, free or slave, to gather to learn to read.
As with the Scott case later, some of those early manumissions came with conditions. One such example involved a Botetourt County minister named Edward Mitchell.
In 1790, Mitchell seems to have been struck by a crisis of conscience.
He came to believe that slavery was a sin. He wrote out the legal paperwork to free the four adults he enslaved, two men and two women, couples named Roger and Elizabeth Rogers, and Samuel Callendar and Rachel Nelson.
However, Mitchell’s epiphany about the sin of slavery had its limits. Although he told the court that he was “convinced in my own Judgment that it is contrary to the principals of Christianity to hold our Fellow Creatures in bondage or Slavery,” that manumission did not immediately apply to the children of his enslaved workers. Mitchell specified that the girls would remain enslaved until they turned 18; the boys until they reached 21 or, in some cases, 25.
At the time, the oldest of the children was just 12, a boy who faced nine more years of servitude. The two youngest were just a year old. Lucy Nelson faced 17 more years of slavery; William Rogers 20 years. By the time he aged out into freedom in 1810, a full two decades had passed.
“During that time, his parents lived with uncertainty: whether he would survive, whether he would be sold away, and whether the promise of the document would ever be honored,” the exhibit says. There were other complications, too: Had Lucy Nelson given birth before she gained her freedom — and teenage motherhood was not unusual in that era — any children she had would have been born into slavery, because they were not covered by Mitchell’s manumission document.
The 20-year process of freeing all the enslaved people who lived on Mitchell’s land in Botetourt County was unusually long, and presented another challenge. In 1806, the General Assembly passed an even harsher law: Any slave freed after that date had to leave the state within a year. Free Blacks from other states were forbidden to move into the state. Three of the enslaved children covered by Mitchell’s manumission were not freed until after that fateful date.
And yet, despite all this, there still remained a population of free Black Virginians. By the time of the Civil War, there were 58,042 free Black Virginians, a figure higher than any other slave-holding state except Maryland. An unusually high number of free Black Virginians lived on the Eastern Shore, believed to be a consequence of both manumissions and the unique freedoms offered by water-related trades. In 1860, Accomack County had more free Black residents than any other locality in Virginia — 4,380. That meant 23% of the county’s residents were free Black Virginians. Put another way, 43% of the county’s Black population was free, living alongside another 57% that was enslaved. In Petersburg, the free Black population accounted for about 17% of the city’s total residents.
The life of free Blacks in the slavery era was a complicated one. Often families included both free and enslaved members, which meant that even some free Black Virginians faced the threat of their families being broken up if a spouse or child was still enslaved. However, when slavery and the Civil War ended, these free Black Virginians formed part of a new leadership class in the state. In 1867, a Reconstruction-era legislature convened in Richmond to write a new constitution. The assembly was notable because it included 20 Black men. Half of them had been free before the Civil War.
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There’s more to this story: While the Scotts never saw their daughter, Bettie, again, they did stay in touch through letters, some of which are shown in the display. Bettie also did well for herself — and others. “Bettie went on to achieve remarkable economic prosperity after Emancipation,” the display says. “She and her husband, Charles Birthright, became landowners and philanthropists, donating funds to construct local schools and maintaining influence in both the white and Black communities. After the couple died, they donated more than 500 acres of their estate to the Tuscaloosa Institute — today known as Stillman College. Their donation remained the single largest charitable contribution to the historically Black college until the 1980s.”
History is often tragic, but sometimes sublime — and always complicated.
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