A Just and True Return

In 1780, the Pennsylvania General Assembly declared that all enslaved persons should be registered. In 1788, it declared that their children should also be registered. Together, these returns constitute a vast northern slavery archive and a promising resource for African-American genealogical research.

Original documents or reliable transcriptions exist for fifteen counties, and several other counties’ returns can be at least partially reconstructed. These materials should exist in a single, accessible place. I envision A Just and True Return as a searchable database centered on these registrations that, where possible, traces families through last wills and testaments, newspaper advertisements, court cases, and census records. In the meantime, I have produced a dataset aggregating biographical information from more than six-thousand surviving county slave registries.

Below are several examples of these slaves returns and related materials. Click on any image to learn more.

The name of the project comes from this 1788 registration of five children. Palm, Ruth, Nell, Pegg, and Jo each owed twenty-eight years of labor to their mother’s enslaver, a Shippensburg farmer named Robert Peebles.

A Just and True Return is intended to serve as a kind of reparative justice. The information contained within these documents—these slave returns—must be returned to the descendants of those whom they purport to describe.
Many individual slave returns have been lost. However, it was the task of the county prothonotary, or lead clerk, to compile all of the individual returns into a single registry. These books can help help fill in the gaps. Sometimes they can even clarify important details.

For example, the Cumberland County prothonotary identified Joe as male in his registry, whereas Peebles’ original return did not specify the child’s gender. An 1823 state supreme court case, Stiles v. Nelly, determined that registrations such as this—where the registry clarified the return—were valid.
It is rare that these returns clearly identify family relationships. However, there are often clues. On 27 October 1780, Robert Peebles registered a twenty-three-year-old woman named Peg. It is likely that Peg was the mother of the five children that Peebles registered in 1788, including two-year-old Pegg.
When Robert Peebles drew up his last will and testament in 1808, he declared that his “Negro Girl Peggy be & Shall Go free on the first day of April Next.” He also specified that his son James was to learn “some Mechanical Trade” and that his other son John be given the means to become a physician.

Peggy was twenty-two years old in 1808. It is unclear what happened to the others, people who were likely her mother and siblings.
The original slave returns and compiled slave registry for Lancaster County are missing. At some point in the last nineteenth century, however, County Commissioner J.B. Eshleman transcribed the entire registry for all children born after 1780. It is because of his labors that we know that it was common in Lancaster County for enslavers to include the name of a child’s mother, thereby seeding the smallest of family trees.

Here we can see that a child named Jane was born on 20 June 1783. Her mother was a woman named Ruth. Ruth had been enslaved before the 1780 gradual abolition law took effect, but secured her freedom after David Breading failed to register her. It appears that Ruth did not learn of her freedom, however, before giving birth to her daughter. As a result, Jane would experience term slavery.
David Breading’s brother, Nathaniel, was a prominent early figure in Fayette County. He registered at least eight children as term slaves between 1788 and 1818.

In this remarkable return, Breading identifies three generations of women: Maria, the daughter; Lydia, the mother; and Jude, the grandmother, registered by George Ewing in Lancaster County.
On 6 October 1780, George Ewing registered “1 negro child named Jude [aged] 11 months” with the Lancaster County prothonotary. The way that Ewing registered the people he enslaved—first a woman and a child, then another woman and two children—suggests that the women were mothers.

If Maria was Jude’s mother, then the Maria whom Nathaniel Breading registered was her great-granddaughter. Four generations of women captured by two slave returns, spanning fifty-six years of Pennsylvania history.
The various materials shown here are made available by the Cumberland County Archives, Lancaster County Historical Society, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and Ancestry.com.

The primary goal of A Just and True Return is to identify families. To relate Peg and Pegg. To weave together Maria, Jude, Lydia, and Maria across decades and counties. To return them to one another.

Here is a tentative, sample landing page for George Cooper, a man who in 1802 fled bondage in Carlisle and successfully sued for his freedom in Philadelphia.