ABSTRACT
ON January 1, 1809, John Tayloe, one of Virginia’s leading planters, took a detailed census of the 384 slaves on his Mount Airy estate, listing each man, woman, and child by name, age, occupation, and monetary value. On the same day the overseer for a big Jamaican absentee planter, Joseph Foster Barham, was taking a similar census of the 322 slaves on Barham’s Mesopotamia estate in which he listed each person by name, age, occupation, and physical condition. Thousands of other North American and West Indian slave inventories survive, especially in probate records, but what gives the Mount Airy and Mesopotamia lists special value is that the owners of these estates made a systematic practice of cataloguing their slave gangs annually over a long time span. The Barhams at Mesopotamia kept annual inventories from 1751 to 1832; seventy-five of these lists survive. 1 The Tayloes at Mount Airy kept annual inventories from 1808 to 1855, and forty-five of these lists survive. 2 Setting the two lists of 1809 against each other, we 216can compare the structure of a Virginia plantation with a Jamaica plantation at a particular moment—just as the slave trade was closing in the United States and the British West Indies. Setting the two series of inventories against each other, we can make a running comparison between the two estates over a considerable stretch of years, and get a sense of two distinctly different slave communities in action.
