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This is Part 1 in a new series, Against the Grain, by Libby Cook about her research over the past few years to discover and tell the stories of the enslaved community at White Plains in King George County, Virginia.

Part 2 | Part 3

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When I think of White Plains, the image that immediately springs to mind is not the house. It is not the timbers in the attic that reveal multiple building episodes. It is not the exposed tenons on the tops of the doors, which indicate they were cut down over time, and the subsequent admonishments to “Stop fondling the doors.”

The moment that springs to mind is standing behind the house, across from the garage-turned-studio, and gazing out over a verdant landscape, hanging somewhere between manicured lawn and reclaimed woodland. Nature’s slow reclamation of what was once a curated landscape captivates the imagination – what could have been there, how it changed over time, how hedges became orchards became fields became lawns and eventually returned to the wild grasses of Virginia. 

I also distinctly remember when, after a moment reveling in the natural beauty of that landscape, my historian’s brain kicked in and started wondering. Where was the quarter? Where did the enslaved men, women, and children who shaped those landscapes live? Were those dwellings oriented to provide a clear view of them from the house? Did the Thornleys and the Quesenberrys even care so much as to take the time to ensure that they could see the quarter, with all its demanded and illicit activities, from the central hall of White Plains?

Those questions led to others: Who were the men and women who lived and worked at White Plains? How did their communities compare to others? If no physical remnant of their lives remains on the landscape, what can we know about them and where do we start looking? What can we recover and preserve of lives lived of necessity, but unacknowledged? What can we learn of the people who built and maintained White Plains through their labor, but who had no ability to leave their personal, individual marks in the historical record?

To find the history of enslaved peoples, the saying goes, one must read “against the grain” of history. According to History (as an academic profession), this requires looking for traces of individuals and agency where one might not expect it, reading documents with an eye toward what the original authors assumed, rather than what they explicitly recorded.

To begin though, a historian starts with what they expect exists: personal papers and public documents. Unfortunately, neither Aaron Thornley, nor his son Thomas Thornley, nor White Plains’ subsequent owner James S. Quesenberry left substantive personal papers documenting the enslaved community at White Plains. Without those sources, we start with a broader perspective than we might otherwise like. Public documents, such as the King George County personal property tax rolls and census records, provide annual and decennial snapshots of life at White Plains between 1786 and 1862.

To find the history of enslaved peoples, the saying goes, one must read “against the grain” of history.

While personal property was consistently assessed and the taxes consistently collected every year, the categories of what was taxed shifted annually. Broadly speaking, any property that denoted wealth could be taxed. Depending on the year that might include carriages and harness, cattle, sheep, hogs, horses, watches, gold and silver plate, and pianos and harps. 

Taxes always included one category, however: tithables. A tithable was a legal category in Virginia, defined by an individual’s ability to work the land. Such individuals contributed their economic labor to the state and therefore could be taxed for its benefit. All men over the age of 15 were taxed. Free white women were exempted, as the societal expectations held that they either did not work the land (which was unlikely if the woman lived on a farm, as the majority did) or they existed in a state of femme cover, in which their legal personhood was subsumed into that of their husband’s. Women of African decent, whether enslaved or free, were not accorded the same presumptions, and were taxed for their labor. 

Though tithables appear on every tax roll, categories of “tithable” changed over time. White men were the most consistent category, though by the 1850s those over age 16 were delineated from those over the age of 21. Categories of enslaved individuals were more readily manipulated. For the eighty years between 1782 (Aaron Thornley’s first tax assessment in the county) and 1862 (James Quesneberry’s last assessment before the cessation of tax collecting during the Civil War), “tithables” included: “black tithables,” “blacks over 12 under 16,” “blacks over 16,” “blacks under 16,” “slaves between ages 9 and 12,” “slaves over 12,” and “young negroes.”

These categories provide only a moderate amount of useful demographic information, since they neglect sex and therefore obscure family structures. Changing age categories, paired with the possibility that an enslaved individual’s age may not have been definitively known, further complicate an understanding of the generational structure of the enslaved community at White Plains. (See Figure 1: King George County Personal Property Tax Rolls, 1803, Library of Virginia, and Figures 2 & 3 below.)

Census records have a similar sleight of hand. The Slave Schedules of 1850 and 1860 enumerated the enslaved individuals who resided on a plantation, but without recording anything beyond their “color,” age, sex, and occasionally their occupation. This provides a greater degree of information regarding individual demographics, but continues to obscure the textures of the community and life in the quarter. Still invisible are the family groupings, the friendships, the shared joys and mutual animosities that shape how people live in a community, as well as how the Thornleys and the Quesenberrys managed the enslaved individuals they owned through mechanisms of purchase, sale, or leasing out. (Figure 4: 1860 Slave Schedule, James Quesenberry).

With the obscurations of official documents in mind, we can glean the following from the readily available historical records: The enslaved community at White Plains was substantial, but not extravagant. It never achieved the stature of Virginia’s grand plantations. Instead, it fluctuated between being a small plantation (less than 20 slaves) and a middling one (20-40 slaves). (Figure 5: Calculated Enslaved Population). These numbers do not include children under varying ages and may not include elderly individuals. They likely undercount women in some years based on the use of male descriptors in the category titles. They definitely do not include kinship networks that might extend to neighboring plantations or neighboring counties. 

Major events in the lives of White Plains’ white owners generated drastic shifts in the enslaved population. White Plains’ construction in 1786 under Aaron Thornley and Thomas B. Thornley’s inheriting the property in 1821 correlate with precipitous decreases in the enslaved population. At these moments, enslaved individuals were commodified to the utmost, becoming the capital to be made liquid in order to pay expenses or debts. Similarly, James Quesenberry’s increase in enslaved labor shortly after his purchase of White Plains in 1836 highlights his investment in his new economic venture. The peaks and valleys evident in this demographic analysis signal moments of sale and separation for enslaved individuals, which served to keep the enslaved population at White Plains to a number appropriate to the labor needs of its owners.

The enslaved individuals enumerated as part of the annual King George County personal property tax and the federal census supplied the labor that allowed the Thornleys and the Quesenberrys to amass the wealth necessary to construct and maintain White Plains. As the property passed through various other hands following the Civil War, however, the physical traces of those individuals slowly vanished, leaving only echos of their lives. 

When we listen for those echos though, when we read against the grain and think critically about the natural and the built environments that surround us, we begin to recover what the documents hide. Enslaved men and women moved through the house just as the Thornleys and the Quesenberrys did: down to the basement kitchens, up to the dining room, up again to straighten the bed chambers, then possibly up into the garret to sleep or out to one of the houses in the quarter, or across the fields to visit friends or kin.

The grain of history remains evident at White Plains and is part of its enduring appeal. It is so tempting and would be so easy to follow that grain, to follow the lives of the Thornleys and the Quesenberrys, to become enamored of the house’s soothing symmetry and the prettish wildness of the surrounding fields. That approach, while charming and romantic, does a disservice to the men and women whose labor was vital to White Plains’ continued existence. It relegates them to anonymity when we seek to restore their names.

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