Enslaved Persons at the Peyton Randolph House, Williamsburg, VA, 1775-1783

Dataset CreatorsCathleene B. Hellier, The Colonial Williamsburg FoundationPeter Inker, The Colonial Williamsburg FoundationJulie Richter, William & MaryThis dataset consists of all known references to the thirty named male and female enslaved persons who were listed in the probate documents of Peyton Randolph (died 1775) and his widow Elizabeth (Betty) Randolph (died 1783) and who lived at the Randolphs' Williamsburg property. The probate documents consist of the wills (with codicils) of Peyton and Elizabeth Randolph, as well as Peyton Randolph's estate inventory and estate accounts.1 The dataset contains eighty-five event entries.This project is a pilot to determine how the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation might construct and use a dataset of the enslaved people living within Williamsburg's city limits from its founding in 1699 to the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783. The enslaved people at the Randolph property were chosen for this dataset for several reasons. Peyton Randolph's estate inventory lists the largest number (27) of enslaved individuals of any decedent's estate in Williamsburg before 1784. The Randolphs’ deaths occurred during the principal period Colonial Williamsburg interprets (1763 to 1783). The enslaved people whose labor supported the urban lifestyle of the Randolph family were well represented in other local record sets besides probates. Finally, Colonial Williamsburg interprets the Peyton Randolph House with an emphasis on the lives of the enslaved people who lived and worked there near the end of Peyton Randolph's life.To accommodate the several types of events and sources from which the project draws, the dataset has thirty-seven fields, including Event Name, Event Type, Event ID, Event Start Date (Year, Month, Day), Event End Date (Year, Month, Day), Person Given Name, Person Surname, Alternate Name, Person ID, Assigned Value, Sex, Age Category, Race/Color, Occupation, Relationships, Event Associator, Role Within Event, Owner #1, Owner #1 ID, Owner #2, Owner #2 ID, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Site Name, Name of Place, Place Type, Place Identifier, Place Wikidata Identifier, Source Identifier, Document Type, Source, Source Start Date, Source End Date, Contributing Project, and Notes and Comments. There are no known ethical or legal restrictions to the collection or dissemination of this data, as all the sources are either public records or in collections available for public use.The Peyton Randolph House property, where all the enslaved people in the dataset were living, is located on Nicholson Street in Williamsburg, the capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1780. The house fronts the centrally located Market Square. The Peyton Randolph House (an original building) and its accompanying outbuildings (reconstructions) comprise one of the principal domestic sites interpreted by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. The Randolphs’ residence is an example of a small early eighteenth-century urban house that was expanded in mid-century to accommodate the sociability expected of an elite family well placed in government in this capital city. Peyton Randolph's father, Sir John Randolph, had held the offices of clerk of the House of Burgesses, Attorney General of Virginia, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and Treasurer of Virginia.2 Peyton Randolph's career mirrored his father's. He was appointed Virginia's Attorney General in 1744. Among other offices, Randolph served as Speaker of the House of Burgesses (1766-1775) and was elected President of the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress.3 The enslaved people who lived and worked at this site learned and influenced the culture of refinement practiced by elite Virginians and were essential to the implementation of elite cultural practices like dining, hosting overnight guests, and exhibiting fashionable goods and manners. They formed families and community on this site.The history of the house and its enslaved workforce are intertwined. Sir John Randolph purchased the property by mid-1724 when Peyton was about three years old.4 Sir John Randolph died in 1737, leaving life rights to his Williamsburg property and his “household servants and slaves” to his wife, Susannah, and after her death, absolute rights to his son Peyton and his heirs.5 In practice, however, it appears that Peyton might have lived in the house from the time of his marriage to Elizabeth (Betty) Harrison in March 1745/6. Susannah Randolph last appears in the written record in the mid-1750s, so Peyton Randolph came into absolute possession of the urban property and its enslaved workforce sometime after that period.6 He lived in this house- hold until his death in October 1775, when the dispersal of this enslaved community began. By the terms of Peyton Randolph's will, his widow, Elizabeth Randolph, inherited outright the Williamsburg property and certain named enslaved people. By this will Randolph also bequeathed some of the people he enslaved to other heirs. The remainder of Peyton Randolph's estate (including enslaved people) went to his widow for life. At her death, the estate (except for the enslaved “man Johnny,” whom he bequeathed to his nephew Edmund Randolph) was to go to his brother John Randolph for life. At John Randolph's death (which would occur in 1784), the estate was to pass to Edmund Randolph, John Randolph's son, subject to certain conditions concerning provisions for Edmund's sisters.7 Because Peyton and Betty Randolph had no children, when Betty died in January 1783, by her will she bequeathed the people she enslaved to several nieces and nephews, resulting in the final dispersal of this enslaved community.8The dataset documents the enslaved community on an elite urban lot in a colonial capital city in Early America, as well as the precarious nature of that community.1996-2023EnglishWilliamsburg, VirginiaYork County, VirginiaBruton Parish, VirginiaCharles City County, VirginiaMecklenburg County, Virginia1749-1805Appraisal or AssessmentBill of Sale, Invoice, or ReceiptCriminal DocumentDeath or Burial DocumentEducation RecordInventory or Probate RecordRunaway AdvertisementSacramental or Religious RegistryWill and TestamentTax RecordBritish Online Archive collection. 'Bray Schools' in Canada, America and the Bahamas, 1645-1900. Volume: Correspondence and records for schools in America. https://britishonlinearchives.com/collections/30/bray-schools-in-canada-america-and-the-bahamas-1645-1900.Bruton Parish Register. Special Collections, Swem Library, William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA.Charles City County, Virginia. Personal Property Tax Lists. Library of Virginia. Richmond, VA.Charles City County, Virginia. Will Book 1(1789-1808). Library of Virginia. Richmond, VA.Edward Charlton Account Book, Galt Family Papers, Special Collections, Swem Library, William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA.Mecklenburg County, Virginia. Personal Property Tax Lists. Library of Virginia. Richmond, VA.Peyton Randolph Estate Papers. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.St. John's Episcopal Church burial ground, Chase City, VA.Virginia Gazette Daybooks, 1764-1766. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.Virginia Gazette, Alexander Purdie, ed., December 12, 1777.York County Project Biographical File. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Williamsburg, VA.York County, Virginia. Judgments and Orders 4. Library of Virginia. Richmond, VA (microform).York County, Virginia. Wills and Inventories 22-23. Library of Virginia. Richmond, VA (microform).Many enslaved people occupied the Peyton Randolph House property during the tenure of Peyton Randolph and his parents, but we chose to focus here on those living there at the end of Peyton and Elizabeth Randolph's lives, from 1775 to 1783. We considered this an important and manageable dataset for a pilot. Names of the enslaved individuals were extracted from the probate documents described above. Not included were the unnamed children of Little Aggy, Great Aggy, Eve, and Lucy, whom Peyton Randolph bequeathed to his wife Elizabeth Randolph at his death in 1775. Although unnamed in Peyton Randolph's will, George (child of Eve) and Henry (son of Great Aggy) were included as bequests because they appeared in earlier and later sources, but it is unclear if the other references in the bequests were to children born already or yet unborn.Once the list was complete, a search was made for other references to these enslaved people in other local record sets. Dr. Julie Richter did much of this research in the late 1990s as part of an effort by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to highlight the presence and life stories of the enslaved in Williamsburg during the period the Foundation interprets. Her work was greatly facilitated by a biographical file created by the York County Project (or YCP), a prosopographical urbanization study funded in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s by the National Endowment for the Humanities and conducted by the Research Department at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.9The York County Project Biographical File was constructed by creating a reference to each person, free or enslaved, who was mentioned in the York County records from the early 1630s through 1784. The York County records are important to the study of Williamsburg because in the eighteenth century, Williamsburg was divided between York County and James City County, and only the York County records survive. Once the references from the York County records were inserted into the biographical file, references to names from additional local records, such as the parish register, the Virginia Gazettes, and private papers were added. References to enslaved people were inserted into two biographical files separate from the main biographical file: one with the person's first name and an assigned surname of the person's owner (and filed alphabetically by said surname), and one filed by first name only, to help researchers trace enslaved people who had experienced a transfer in ownership for which no paper trail had survived.Richter also began the construction of a database of the enslaved who were associated with sites in Williamsburg. Its fields (including residence, family relationships, enslavers, and occupations, among others) were consistent with the database the YCP created of the free persons it studied. Because the objectives of the YCP database were to determine who was in York County within certain date parameters, and to capture the digested information about their occupations, officeholding, landholding, etc., one of the main ways of sorting the YCP database was its “first date mentioned” and “last date mentioned” fields, which determined when people entered and left the record set. Richter's database of the enslaved residents was constructed the same way and became a crucial first step in pulling together information about enslaved individuals for interpreted sites at Colonial Williamsburg.In this pilot dataset of the enslaved community at the Peyton Randolph site, we are hoping to capture each reference to each enslaved person, so that users can sort the dataset by event, document type, and other fields useful to museum interpretation. In addition, including each reference to the enslaved people in the dataset will enable us to construct complete biographies of them.Because we are capturing each reference, the dataset lends itself well to organization by event. Each event was assigned a name based on what was happening in the event and referencing at least one person involved (such as “Bequests of enslaved people in the will of Peyton Randolph”). Each event was assigned a unique identifier, and the Event Type was identified according to the controlled vocabulary of Enslaved.org. Event dates were recorded based on the type of event. In cases for which the absolute date of an event was known (such as a baptism or school roll date), that date was recorded. In an event like a bequest, the date the event started was the date of the will, and the end date of the event was the date the will was recorded in court. The explanation for how start and end dates of an event were chosen appears in the Notes and Comments field. More recent publication of additional sources and the proliferation of primary sources online since Richter's 1990s research have allowed us to add a few more event references to the enslaved people who lived and worked at the Peyton Randolph House.We would like our dataset to be compatible with Richter's database, so we have used the personal identifiers she used for the people associated with the Peyton Randolph site. Persons in our dataset who were not part of either her database or the YCP database (typically free persons from another county) received new unique personal identifiers. These new identifiers were subsequently recorded in the YCP's log book of personal identifiers.Names of persons were entered as they appeared in the primary source for each event, with the person's identifier linking references to variant spellings and alternate names among events. Names in brackets indicate that a name was assigned to a person whose name was not included in a reference, based on other documentation. For example, a mother is named in a document describing an event, and her child is referenced but not named in that document. If earlier and later references indicate the child's name, the child's name will be entered for that event in brackets. If a name appears in the Alternative Name field in brackets, the alternative name appears in the context of another event or source, but not in the event referenced in Column A. There is a Surname field to record any surname used by the enslaved person during the event described in the source.Additional fields used to record data pertaining to personal characteristics and transcribed directly from an event's primary source include Assigned Value and Race/Color. Assigned value is expressed in pounds, Virginia currency.Where possible, Age Category (child or adult) was assigned based on actual age or age descriptors found in the source document. People with children were assumed to be adults, as were persons with the descriptor man or woman. A person described as boy, girl, or child was categorized as a child. Age category was not assigned based on appraisal value, as there are many reasons for high or low appraisals. Similarly, Gender was typically assigned based on gendered descriptors (such as boy or girl), traditional pronouns associated with that person, or gender-specific given names.Occupation was recorded only when stated in the event's source. No suppositions about occupation were made from valuations or other incomplete evidence. Occupation was recorded, however, using the controlled vocabulary, and the original source was quoted in Notes and Comments for that event.A person's relationships specifically identified in the primary source for each event were recorded using the controlled vocabulary of Enslaved.org and the personal identifiers of the people involved. Similarly, a person's Role Within Event was recorded using the controlled vocabulary for the Event Type.The first or only owner of an enslaved person in an event is identified in the Owner #1 field by name and by the owner's unique identifier in the Owner #1 ID field. If this event is a transfer or sale event, this person was the one who sold or transferred the enslaved person. In a transfer or sale event, Owner #2 (identified by a unique identifier in the Owner #2 ID field) was the person who received the enslaved person.Places in which events took place are identified in several fields. All locations are in Virginia. For our institution's purposes, in the CWF Site Name field, the event is located by the site name in the Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg. Within the Name of Place field, the event's location is identified by the most specific of the city, parish, or county in Virginia. The Place Identifier is the city, parish, or county identifier of that location compatible with the YCP database. Finally, the Place Wikidata Identifier field records Wikidata's identifier for the city, parish, or county in which the event was located. The exception is Bruton Parish, for which there is no Wikidata identifier for the parish as a whole, so the Wikidata identifier for the church itself, located within the city of Williamsburg, has been substituted.Each source is identified in the Source Identifier field with a unique identifier. Its full citation appears in the Source field. The Document Type is identified by Enslaved.org's controlled vocabulary. The Source Start Date and Source End Date fields are populated with a YYYYMMDD format (if a full date is possible) identifying the earliest and latest dates encompassed by the source.Finally, Notes and Comments contain clarifying quotations from primary sources and any additional explanations considered helpful.Dataset Repository: Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KMYSSMLinked Data Representation: Enslaved.orgThe Colonial Williamsburg Foundation