The peculiarities of the Dartmouth College schedule meant that there was roughly a month-long hiatus in on-campus project work on Georgia Black Lives. The gap was more than filled by two especially active transcribers, who appear as “From the Page collaborators” MaryV and Carol Ann. Their contributions pushed us close to the completion of the first 300 uploaded documents and roughly doubled the transcribed lines, which now approaches 22,000. Wow!

As work has recommenced here in Hanover, a team led by two “returning” summer students have staked out three main objectives. We will, with the aid of newcomers, go back through all the transcriptions for additional edits and indexing (our subject headings are growing all the time) of the first 300 items. We plan to upload an additional seventy or so documents in the next couple of weeks and these will focus particular attention on the dynamics of the Reconstruction period of 1865-1870. We plan two more uploads of seventy documents by the end of the 2023-24 academic year, which will represent a tally of more than five hundred transcribed works.

Finally, we will be executing additional capsule biographies, adding two to four pages meant to complement those already posted about George Stephens and Ben Travis. For starters, will likely bring into focus the matriarch Betsy Stephens (married to Bob, one of the men known by Alexander since boyhood) and the shattered lives of a trio of enslaved women Venus, Rody Jordan, and Harriet Blackwell.

It’s been a fast-moving summer!

Since June, “From the Page” collaborators in Hanover and beyond have struggled to decipher nineteenth century handwriting. About half of the uploaded project documents (nearing three hundred items, a threshold that should be achieved before September) are now either completed or in-progress. That represents more than 11,000 lines of text entered. Whew.

In the week to come, as our Dartmouth team prepares for final exams, we will collaborate on two life stories as a way to wrap up the summer term work. The pair were selected based upon these criteria:

• a sufficient body of material for both subjects now exists in fully transcribed form.
• both lend themselves to “manageable” sketches that would not overwhelm this preliminary / pilot effort (they are limited in a way that material related to Pierce Lafayette, Eliza Stephens, and others truly sprawls).
• both have, in different ways, already been “visible” to the public, albeit in highly partial ways. In drawing attention to that aspect of the existing record, we can reflect on what can be gained by a more thorough consideration of difficult materials

By the end of the month, we will have finalized the “compiled life stories” of:

GEORGE STEPHENS, the skilled carpenter and long-time Taliaferro resident, whose domestic life drew attention, and extended commentary, from his white enslavers.

BEN TRAVIS, the “valet” of several powerful white Georgians who attended Alexander Stephens in Richmond during the Civil War. That may well have been a permanent re-location northwards on his part, though materials on his post-1865 existence are scanty.

We have now moved past the mid-point of Dartmouth’s 2023 summer term –week five of a nine week class schedule has just concluded. In the wake of a critical mass of uploads (more than two hundred) and transcriptions (6000 lines recorded) we devoted this week to the subject indexing feature that makes “From the Page” well-suited to tracking individuals. Our “People” category is now available and will continue to grow over the weeks to come. We are placing most individuals in subset categories, initially arranged according to different household groupings. The categories are fluid and we expect to devise other ways to sort and list.

The work of indexing raises philosophical as well as logistical questions. In what circumstances did someone reduced to slavery register a presence as a named individual? The federal census lists sex and age without an actual name. We have several ways to establish the identities further and are prioritizing these in the process of uploading and transcribing.

Three kinds of “naming” documents in our growing cache of materials are worth brief notice. Two constitute the notice of a “sale” (that term is flagged in the titles of all documents that provide that critical life-event for captive Black Georgians). The most basic of these, which the Stephens brothers retained to sustain legal claims for valuable investments, recorded a cash transaction. In formulaic language there was a transfer, at the price listed, of control that would thereafter be exercised over particular humans. Bare description of the individuals conveyed appear in these which can establish age and perhaps a few other details (parents and offspring, for instance).

A companion set of documents feature discussion of purchases made or decisions to sell an enslaved person. The narratives of such actions need to be assessed critically. Alexander and Linton Stephens routinely discussed their role in human merchandizing in a positive light.

A third set of materials have been listed as “inventories.” As with “sale” we put that term in the title of each document in this general category. Alexander Stephens prepared several of these and stuck to the same format that can first be seen in an 1847 document: the tally names and estimated values is provided’ there sequence used suggests rough groupings, especially as the numbers increase, of general family units. The tally of later lists begin with individuals that appear prominently across the Stephens papers. Lower down are some whose stories are far less well documented. We’ll be keeping an eye out for stray mentions of such persons as “Jack” “Jacob” and “Stephen” to determine more about individuals that may elude our efforts to reconstruct lives.

Among these documents are two large inventories that give details about the Hancock County enslaved. The earlier one documents how in 1852 several dozen lowcountry men, women, and children came into Linton Stephens’ control. A letter written four years later show Linton’s unsuccessful attempt to dissolve the relation by his proposal to return the entire group to their previous owner. Tracking the overlap in these two snapshot profiles allows us to see the births and deaths that occurred in the interim. Neither Linton nor Alexanders systematically kept a tally of life beginnings and endings; these are documented often by a stray mention in correspondence and we plan to make such commentary part of our broader project.

Records that list names in this way are both spare and heart-breaking. Such bills of sale and tallies will provide one of the key building blocks of the life stories we aim to compile.

We’ve been busy the past two weeks, despite the break we all took for the July 4 holiday. As the national news reported, Northern New England has been rainy, and now flooded. The hardest hit spots are across the river in Vermont from us.

We have begun with the most obvious materials for this project to feature, the cache of letters written by Black Georgians themselves. These represented the first 120 documents to be uploaded to our From the Page site. The five of us based in Hanover have been working to make the metadata consistent as we familiarize ourselves with the platform. Before long, we plan to dig into the indexing feature, which will greatly enhance our ability to track specific people, places, and themes. It’s great to have active members from the broader world already at digging in to the scrawled handwriting in these letters. A shout out to the time logged and the great work done by “Mary V”!

For the rest of July, we will be moving at a more deliberate pace. Two tasks are before us. First and most importantly, we are methodically moving through the Stephens’ corpus identifying material that is most worth featuring. A goal is to have a total of about 300 documents by the beginning of August.

Uploaded over the past few days are spare, legalistic, documents (heart-breaking in their own way) related to purchase and inventory of enslaved people. We are also featuring the letters that document the suppressed Sparta conspiracy of 1863. Moving into the earliest period, we have those concerned with the Bob Stephens as a young adult (under Linton’s care, he shuttled around the state, including a stint at the University of Georgia) and his sister Mima. A rich collection of Pierce-related material, which I’ve worked on already with the writer Channing Joseph, is next in the queue.

We’ve decided not to turn out the comments section for these posts. But if you want to chime in, send an email to robertebonner@gmail.com and I will cut and paste it into this site!