“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
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Lincoln made the comment, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.” Slavery has not escaped the judgment of history, but have you ever considered how will history judge us today? It is human nature to think that we are farsighted in our attitudes and guided by just principles. In the middle of the 19th Century the institution of slavery was well-established. Those practicing it pointed out that slavery existed in biblical times and appeared to have always been part of the human condition. Moreover, it was accepted by the Constitution and the laws of the United States. They were able to convince themselves that the slaves were much better off than they would be were they allowed their freedom. The "Peculiar Institution" had brought to them the greatest of blessings, the blessing of Christian civilization. The ability of people to rationalize their conduct has few limits. However, there were a small minority of people, the abolitionists, who were actively opposed to slavery. They made their fellow citizens uncomfortable and were considered shrill and neurotic oddballs by many of their contemporaries. The majority believed that it was better to avert their eyes than have the courage to express their convictions.
Today, there are those who point out that our life style is not sustainable. We are guilty are living above our means and in the process are polluting the planet. The most extreme people with this view also make their fellow citizens uncomfortable today. The majority think they surely eat organic vegetables, ride bikes in traffic, want to retard development, take away jobs and look a little too much like former 1960s hippies. However, what if they are correct? Will history judge them to be the farsighted ones and the rest of us, who were too busy living the American dream, to be just like the people who accepted slavery in 1861? In time history will judge, but I am not doing that now. I wish only to draw an analogy. We may not escape the judgment of history and perhaps we also should not throw the first stone at a 19th Century society hypocritically tolerating human exploitation.
Slavery was not practiced because the people doing it necessarily enjoyed it. It was practiced because the economic system was dependent on it. The cash crops grown in the southern United States were labor intensive and various other labor sources, such as new immigrants and convicts did not provide adequate numbers to maintain economic growth. Slavery as such had died out as an institution in Europe after the fall of Rome, but still existed in Africa and the Middle East. We forget that Europeans from both ships and coastal communities were captured by North African pirates, who ranged as far north as the British Isles, and sold into slavery in the Moslem world.
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The original Lanham British immigrants came to Maryland as indentured servants. They were required to work for and obey their master during the term of their service and were subject to receiving corporal punishment should they commit some infraction. In this sense they shared the slaves’ lot. The major difference was that at some point they would be freemen, while the slave had only a lifetime of slavery to look forward to.
Lanhams did participate in the institution of slavery. They settled in an area of the county in which there was extensive tobacco cultivation. The earliest evidence of slave ownership is the inventory of Josias Lanham of Kent County on the eastern shore of Maryland dated August 16, 1728. This document mentions four slaves in Josias’ estate. On the western shore we have a marriage contract of Thomas Lanham of Prince George’s County dated April 20, 1751. This transfers four slaves to his wife the former Martha Pearson. By 1790 there were 85 slaves in the various Lanham households in Maryland. Most of them were living in Prince George’s County. Twelve of the twenty Lanham households in Prince George’s County contained at total of 71 slaves. I will add for the curious that my own ancestor, Lewis Lanham, was not one of them. By 1800 in Prince George’s County the total number of slaves in Lanham households outnumbered the number of free white males and females in the same households. This appears to have been the result of preferential migration out of Maryland by the non-slave holding households rather than a growth of the slave population.
It is not possible to say what life was like for these individuals. It is likely that slave ownership was a multi-generational series of relationships between the slaveholders and their human property. Among the deeds of Prince George’s County are many deeds of gift transferring a single slave from a parent to a child. For example, on August 11, 1796 Bersheba Lanham, widow of Hezekiah Lanham, gave her 15 year old daughter Sarah Leoresa Lanham a slave named Jerry. These kinds of transfers are more frequent in the record than sales to unrelated parties.
Perhaps the most usual circumstance recorded in Lanham records was the case of Harry, a slave of Richard Lanham of Prince George’s County, Maryland. Richard Lanham was the son of Edward Lanham and Susanna Page and the brother of George Horatio Lanham, who was the sheriff of Prince George’s County. Richard’s inventory of 1819 mentions that Harry, age 27 was one of the 14 slaves in the estate. The estate accounts contain a receipt for $50 paid a lawyer for defending Negro Harry in the court of the District of Columbia on a charge of murder. A later account mentions that Harry was dead by 1827 and we can only assume that his defense was unsuccessful.
History tells was that the institution of slavery was in decline and that the numbers of free blacks were increasing relative to slaves. We find examples of manumissions by Lanhams. For example, on September 28, 1786 Elisha Lanham granted manumission to John Hayson. By 1860 there were only twenty individuals held in slavery in Prince George’s Co., Maryland Lanham households. Slavery was outlawed in the District of Columbia in 1862 and by the new Maryland constitution of 1864.
In 1866 the State of Maryland conducted a census of former slaves and slave owners. The original intent was to consider some form of compensation for the late owners. Nothing came of this, but the record is curious in some ways. There were several slave owning Lanham families. However, none of the individuals who were once their slaves were recorded as having a surname of Lanham. On the other hand there were a number of ex-slaves, who adopted Lanham as a surname recorded as owned by other individuals. It may be that African-American surnames were established some years before and that ownership passed to other families in the meantime. I have not tried to work out how families recording these African-American Lanhams might have been connected to the Lanham family, but the surnames are recognized as ones Lanhams intermarried with or lived in the neighborhood. What happened to the freeman, who had been once slaves in Lanham households? I have not researched this point as yet. The numbers of African-American Lanhams recorded in census records during the period 1870-1900 in Maryland and D.C. does not seem anywhere near the number listed in the 1866 slave census of Maryland. Similarly, the attitudes of the former Maryland slaveholders toward emancipation went unrecorded. The 1866 census of slave holders and former slaves does have one interesting entry. One of the former slaves of Mary Lanham, widow of Trueman Lanham, is stated to have enlisted in the United States Colored Troops of the Union Army. Mary Lanham’s son, Benjamin Lewis Lanham (1844-1863) was killed in action at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania while serving in the Confederate Army.
The census records of the District of Columbia establish that there had long been a free black population of Lanhams going back to at least 1820 and maybe before. In fact, in the 1850 census most of the Lanhams listed in D. C. were African-Americans. There may be many reasons that the number of blacks named Lanham seems small. One reason may be that surnames for blacks were not that firmly established. For example we see a certificate of freedom for Sarah Ann Taylor, alias Sarah Ann Lanham, recorded in the District of Columbia on November 3, 1842. This document mentions that she was born a free woman. The odd thing is that she appears not to have settled on Taylor or Lanham as her surname. Census records may not correctly record spellings of African-American surnames or African-Americans households may have gone unrecorded.
It is sad but understandable that we know so little of this story. Time heals all wounds and I hope that the time has come when the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. This is still a very emotional issue for many people. I understand that there are those people who might take issue with my interpretations. One of the great things about our nation is that we have a diversity of views and the right of free speech. I hope those reading this piece understand that I am trying to acknowledge and explain the role of slavery in the family history of Maryland Lanhams. I have no political agenda and am trying to explain the evolution of public opinion and social attitudes as it surround this fact of history. I hope in the future to expand on this topic by transcribing many of the document mentioned above.
