Enslaved Individuals: Isaac

Isaac

Documented History

Isaac was a resident of Page County, Virginia, in 1857; he is listed as one of ten enslaved individuals in an inventory of the estate of Benjamin Sedwick taken on 1 July of that year. When the estate was settled, Isaac went to the household of Sedwick’s son Joshua, a resident of Missouri.

While no record of Isaac’s role on Sedwick’s farm has been located, it is virtually certain he was involved in agriculture. The agricultural schedule of the U.S. census for 1850 gives a sense of the size of the farm and its activity; it comprised 160 acres of improved land and thirty-three acres of unimproved land near the south fork of the Shenandoah River, with livestock that included seven horses, seven cows, one ox, eleven cattle, nineteen sheep, and seventeen pigs. That year, 500 bushels of wheat, 530 bushels of corn, fifty bushels of oats, fifty pounds of wool, thirty bushels of potatoes, four bushels of sweet potatoes, orchard products worth $10, 100 pounds of butter, twelve tons of hay, and three bushels of hops were produced.

Speculations

Isaac may have become a resident of Holt County, Missouri (where Sedwick’s son Joshua T. Sedwick was living) in 1857 or 1858. It is possible that he is the enslaved man of twenty-two enumerated in Joshua Sedwick’s household in 1860.