Beschreibung:

Title: Job for emancipated Alabama slave, Judge's letter Author: Place: Athens, AL Publisher: Date: 1850 Description: Daniel Coleman. Autograph Letter Signed. Athens, Alabama. Nov. 20, 1850. 1pg.+ stampless address leaf. To Hon. John W. Otey, Huntsville, Alabama. Uncommon antebellum solicitude for a young slave who had not yet been formally emancipated - possibly because both Coleman and Otey, while themselves large slaveholders, were also lawyers and jurists Coleman, son of a Virginia State Senator, was a Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court, Otey a Judge of the Probate Court. Coleman’s brother Robert Ruffin died in Mississippi in 1849, leaving all his property to Daniel, “except my servant boy, Horace Holly, who I have emancipated.” Later census records, just before and after the Civil War, show a Horace Holly living as a clerk in Selma –but give no indication that he was African-American; if this was the same man, perhaps, thanks to the Colemans, the freed slave was able not only to receive some education, but also to “pass” as white. “…My Brother left a col'd [colored] boy, whom he emancipated & requested he should be learned a trade & sent to Liberia or a free State. He is now about 22 yrs old, honest & every way trustworthy… liberated for his good conduct in a long attendance to my brother in his sickness. I want to bind him to a Boot & shoe maker…write me whether an honest, steady & suitable master can be found in Huntsville, willing to learn him his trade, & if so, what would be his terms…I deem a proper & moral training all important to the boy…Under the present great excitement as to free negroes, &c., I think it would be best to say nothing to any one…about the Boy's contemplated emancipation…” Lot Amendments Condition: Very good. Item number: 247777