During the month of February, research associate Emma Hartman will be sharing information that she has uncovered here at the Historical Society of Montgomery County as well as other Montgomery County repositories while looking into the lives of African Americans living in the Perkiomen Valley in the 1700s and early 1800s.
One of the largest sources of data about enslavement practices in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is state and county tax records. Enslaved persons were considered property and therefore taxable, by both colonial and early republic governments. Typically, the assessment will only show the number of enslaved persons someone was taxed for, but occasionally records will specify the enslaved person’s age or gender. For example, the 1785 assessment for Lower Salford township includes Jacob Reiff paying taxes on a 43-year-old enslaved man and Andrew Cammel paying taxes for a 32-year-old enslaved woman. Tax records will also show the enslaver’s profession or if they owned a mill, tannery, or forge. These details help provide a clue as to the type of labor an enslaved person was expected to perform. For example, in 1782 in Worcester Township, John Bean is listed as a farmer, indicating that the two enslaved persons he was taxed for likely engaged in agricultural labor, while Jacob Wentz Jr. is listed as an innkeeper and the enslaved person he is taxed for may have engaged in domestic work that aided in the running of the inn. Tax records also help demonstrate changes in enslavement practices over time. For example, in 1783 in Upper Salford ten people were enslaved, but by 1785 only three people remained enslaved, and by 1788 just one.
However, the numbers of enslaved persons appearing in tax records likely consistently underrepresents the total number of enslaved persons living in each area. There are a number of reasons for this underrepresentation. First, the tax records generally only account for able-bodied slaves of working age. This exact definition varied over time, but in the case of the 1798 direct tax, it was considered between the ages of 12 and 50. Thus, if an enslaved person was sick or injured or older than 50 or younger than 12, they would not have been counted in the tax records.
Also accounting for the underrepresentation of enslaved persons in the tax records is the practice of hiring out the labor of an enslaved person. Oftentimes owners of industrial operations such as ironworks, tanneries, or mills would hire enslaved labor from a neighboring farmer rather than purchasing slaves themselves, or to supplement full-time enslaved labor. Enslaved persons could be hired out on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis, but monthly was most common. For the business owners, this practice proved cheaper than purchasing enslaved persons who would need to be employed full-time and more reliable than hiring free part-time labor. This also allowed neighboring farmers to make a profit off of their enslaved persons during the seasons when they were not needed for agricultural labor. Additionally, this process allowed both parties to avoid paying the tax for the enslaved person, as the business owners would only pay tax on those enslaved persons whom they owned, not those who were hired hands, and the neighboring farmers would only pay taxes on those enslaved persons who were physically on the property and thus visible to the tax collectors. There are also instances in which a business owner would hire out their own personal enslaved persons to their business to avoid taxation. For example, in 1802 Jacob Lesher of Longswamp hired out an enslaved man by the name of Negro Tom to Mary Ann Furnace, of which he was part owner, for several months; yet Jacob Lesher does not appear to own any slaves in the Longswamp tax records for that year.
While these practices contributed to the routine undercounting of enslaved persons in Pennsylvania tax and census records, the extent of said undercounting remains unclear, and more research is needed. Despite this undercounting, tax records remain one of the largest sources of information about enslavement practices in early Pennsylvania. Various tax records are available at various county historical societies, including the Historical Society of Montgomery County, at the Pennsylvania State Archives, online through services such as Ancestry.com and Family Search, and through the published PA Archives series.
Research Associate Emma Hartman shares information from her work uncovering the lives of African Americans living in the Perkiomen Valley in the 1700s and early 1800s. This project of the Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center in partnership with the Historical Society of Montgomery County is funded by the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial.