Story by: Myah Ward
Photo by: Nathan Klima
DURHAM — The thumb prints of enslaved people are molded into the bricks.
There are knuckle prints too, formed from slaves gripping the clay, turning over the bricks to harden in the sunlight. Up higher on the wall of the former slave dwelling, the markings of five little toes can be seen — the foot of an enslaved child leaving its mark.
More than 900 people were enslaved at one time on the Stagville Plantation. Down the gravel road in Durham, trees cover the land of what used to be one of North Carolina’s largest plantations.
The 47-square mile plot of land was once mostly bare of trees, filled with crops and slaves at work. The white plantation owners documented their history through letters and land deeds, dominating the narrative of slavery in the America, a story that began 400 years ago when the first African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619.
But below the surface of Stagville’s paper trail lay the fingerprints of a larger story — one of horror, resistance and sacrifice.
That’s what weighs on the minds of historians at Stagville as they sift through tens of thousands of documents to piece together the past. And many documents don’t have names of the slaves, leaving researchers with holes as they read between the lines, said Vera Cecelski, the site manager at Stagville.
“The stories of persistence and survival — (we’re) trying to document the ways that enslaved people were forging new family and community bonds and creating new cultural traditions and pushing back against this system every step of the way,” Cecelski said. “And those things are often not acknowledged, or certainly not documented at length by the white people who are keeping most of the records on this plantation.”
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The two enslaved stonemasons had learned the “art of moving slowly.”
The project was taking the men longer than expected, and the white man supervising them didn’t understand why. In a letter, he wrote that the project would no longer be as profitable as he once hoped.
This was one thing stonemasons could control, one way they could resist and sabotage the system. They were eating away at the profits of their labor.
“You have this image of these two men kind of somehow, gradually sort of eroding the pace of this work,” Cecelski said.
Other letters reveal more gruesome acts of resistance. Like the enslaved man who burned his foot and leg so he would no longer work in the cotton fields.
There are many stories like this at Stagville, a plantation so large it operated like a small city. The history of enslaved people at Stagville dates back to 1771, and the last records of Stagville descendants living on the land continues until about 1980.
Stagville was born in an era when slavery was well-established in the South.
The Bennehan family’s investment in the plantation is part of the larger narrative of wealthy landowning families in the wake of the American Revolution. These families began using slavery as their primary means for profit.
By 1860, the Bennehan-Cameron family owned 30,000 acres of land, with more than 900 slaves scattered across the property.
A portrait of Duncan Cameron in the kitchen of the Bennehan House at Stagville Plantation. The Cameron family lands and enslaved community were combined with those of the Bennehan family around 1807.
The slaveholders didn’t interact or even know everyone they owned, but Paul Cameron, who inherited the estate in 1847, would ride his wagon around the land and ask the slaves who they were owned by.
They would respond: “Mr. Cameron.”
Stagville’s large operation was not typical for most plantations in North Carolina, said William Andrews, UNC professor of English emeritus. About 25 percent of the white adult population in North Carolina were slaveholders, but the average slave owner in the state had six-to-eight slaves.
Enslaved people outnumbered white people in 19 counties in 1860. The number of slaves in the state was more than 330,000 that year, about one-third of the state’s total population. That year, depending on gender and skillset, slaves were sold for $1,300 to as much as $2,000.
And for the thousands of enslaved people throughout the state, and the hundreds at Stagville, there’s not a simple way to sum up their experiences.
There were some slaves who were born at Stagville and spent most of their lives on the plantation, laboring in captivity.
There were others who were sold, separated from their children. With the Cameron family’s power and land, they could move people as they wanted, even if that meant separating them by several miles.
“If you look at the plantation records, or you look at how the Cameron family described the experience of families here at Stagville, you might see a family who are all on the same Cameron tax record, are all listed under the Cameron family’s ownership,” Cecelski said. “But that by no means means that family are not experiencing great separation and great pain and great distance from each other.”
For some, it was being ripped away from their loved ones. For others, it was rape and exploitation.
Around Christmas time, one of Stagville’s elderly slaves was sent to deliver a letter to another slave holder in the area. The elderly man was told he could stay for a few days, and he would be able to see his daughter who was held there.
The letter described the elderly man’s daughter as the carpenter’s “winch” he keeps with him where he works.
“She’s not a carpenter, she’s not a carpenter’s assistant. She’s facing sexual assault and harassment by that man,” Cecelski said, taking a pause and shaking her head. “And that image of that elderly man on Christmas, going to go see his daughter in that horrific place.”
This great separation — this great pain — was often too much to bear. And some acts of resistance turned to violence, what felt like the only choice they had.
An enslaved woman tried to set fire to one of the property’s homes. It was filled with members of the Cameron family. She laid the fire starter on an oak board, hoping for a quick blaze.
But the board instead smoldered and burned slowly. If she had just placed it a few boards to the side, the letter says, who knows what would have happened.
“She obviously had experienced great danger and great exposure and great horrors in that building or from those people and was willing to risk her life, and probably the life of people she loved, in order to use violence to try to push back,” Cecelski said.
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Cy Hart was 8 years old when the Union soldiers came to Stagville in April 1865.
The Cameron family was no longer there, Hart said in an interview from the 1930s. The family had fled when they saw the end of the war coming.
The soldiers asked Hart’s mother to cook them a meal. When they finished eating, they told the slaves they were free — the same message slaves across North Carolina would hear.
The Cameron family eventually returned, and angry letters show frustrations that no one was working. Most of the slaves had fled immediately.
The formerly enslaved people who had skills and could work as brick masons, blacksmiths and shoemakers moved into Raleigh, Durham and Hillsborough, said Khadija McNair, the assistant site manager at Stagville.
Those skilled in agricultural labor stayed on the land. They didn’t have land or money, so they turned to signing contracts with Paul Cameron. They became sharecroppers.
“And this contract says that Paul Cameron will give them a house to live in, he’ll give them land to farm. He’ll give them tools, animal seeds, whatever they need, and in return, they give him three-fourths of their harvest every season,” McNair said. “So that is still economic slavery. They are still making no money on their labor. They are still subjects of violence and abuse.”
The families stayed for generations, many until the early 1970s. Ricky L. Hart, 56, is part of the Hart family line that still lives in Durham today. Cy Hart was his great uncle.
When Ricky Hart was about 14 years old, his father took him on the front porch of the old Hart house that still stands at Stagville today. He’d smoke his pipe and tell him to look out as far as his eyes could see to the horizon. “That’s all tobacco,” his father told him.
Then he’d take him around to the other side of the house and point to where other buildings used to stand. They’d walk through the unmarked slave cemetery.
His father taught him about what he saw as a kid. He grew up making everything he owned, and he would tell Ricky he couldn’t just go buy a bag of popcorn. They would get the dried corn from the cornfield and bring it back to the house.
Around 15, his father bought him his first pony. It wasn’t just for Ricky’s entertainment, his father told him. This pony had to “work for what he eats.”
Together, Ricky and his father made everything for the horse from the “nose to its tail” out of leather.
Ricky Hart says it was all to teach him one lesson. He should always have a skill.
“A man can take your job, but he cannot take your skill,” his father would tell him. So, in high school, Ricky Hart took brick masonry.
Today, Hart is a child support enforcement worker for Orange County. He’s the last of his siblings to retire, but most of the family still lives in Durham.
Hart and his sister have gathered documents and traced their family history back hundreds of years. With all he’s learned, Hart brings it back to a quote from Alexander the Great.
“The conqueror writes the history of the conquered.” And that’s what happened with slavery, Hart said.
As Hart continues to learn about his family’s past, Stagville historians walk visitors around the historic site, giving tours of the property. The researchers continue to dig through documents to learn more about the lives of enslaved people, and the depths of depravity among white people.
And 400 years later, as Andrews studies narratives of the past, he said what stands out to him is how white people committed such acts of horror, yet couldn’t see it.
He sees this as a lesson for the future.
“The day may come when people will look at us, and say, you people could just overlook those things?” Andrews said. “You just pass on by?”
