"This is the history, beginning in the 1820's, of two plantations – one in Virginia and another in the Florida Territory – connected with two Presidents, two members of Congress, the 4th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the wealthiest man in America, the author of the Star Spangled Banner, a slave ship, slave trading, and the enslaved people and their descendants who worked those plantations."
Our brochure “The Enslaved at Casa Bianca Plantation” is now available! It includes a short history of Casa Bianca Plantation, information about the two largest groups of enslaved workers acquired by White and Wilde (including their names!), and more about the Take Them in Families Project.
Please, download, print, and share the brochure!
The latest family tree includes Jefferson County deed and tax assessments, all transcribed! The earliest deed for a Casa Bianca freedman was Henry Clay White, who purchased a town lot in Monticello in 1866. A year later Lewis Harris purchased a Monticello town lot. Other deeds recorded the transactions between freedmen and town merchants. David Straws, Jr. signed a mortgage with J.D. Cole & Co. for all the crops he grew in exchange for provisions from Cole’s store. An 1873 deed recorded all the terms and conditions for Ned Washington’s and Isham Nelson’s families to work the old Casa Bianca plantation, at that time owned by J.D. Cole. Another deed specified that David Straws, Sr. lived on and farmed another portion of the old Casa Bianca property. It’s not until almost twenty years after emancipation that other freedmen from Casa Bianca were able to purchase small properties in Jefferson County, beginning with William McGuire purchasing one square acre in 1884.
Robert W. Williams of Tallahassee purchased 82 of Casa Bianca’s enslaved families from Ellen Beatty and promised to insure them as they traveled from Florida to his plantation in Louisiana. Among the families purchased were William McGuire, Sr., his wife Bella, and their children Bill (William), Rhoda, Moses, and Minty. They, along with Frank Nelson, his family, and his mother Hope, were shipped to William’s plantation. While Frank and his family stayed in Louisiana after emancipation, William McGuire, Sr. made his way back to Jefferson County, Florida sometime before 1872, when he was one of the founding trustees of the Casa Bianca Missionary Baptist Church. But his son William (Bill) stayed in Louisiana. He was enumerated with his wife Francis and their children in the 1870 census for St. James Parish, west of New Orleans. His younger brother Moses also lived in St. James Parish and married Ellen Bishop in 1879. And between 1875 and 1880 two of their cousins, Robert and Clement Nelson (their mother was Jane McGuire, William Sr.’s sister), joined them in St. James Parish. Work is ongoing to determine how the McGuires ended up in St. James Parish and what happened to them after the 1880 census.
An updated family tree has been posted and includes the descendants of Mary Baker, and more about her can be found in the Stories section. The Bakers were enslaved families owned by President James Monroe and his son-in-law George Hay. Family members included Mary Baker’s mother Sally and Mary’s brothers Jeffrey and Nicholas. Sally Baker and her two sons were given by George Hay to his daughter (from his first marriage) Maria Antoinetta Ringgold, while Mary was sold along with Monroe’s other enslaved families to Joseph M. White in 1828.
Emily Stanfill, a fellow independent researcher, has uncovered that after President Monroe’s death in 1831, his son-in-law Samuel Gouverneur sold the enslaved people from the Oak Hill plantation in Loudoun County, Va., to George Kephart, an Alexandria, Va.-based slave trader. Kephart shipped the families from Baltimore to New Orleans in September 1838. Lewis Baker, John Baker and his wife Mimy along with their children John, Sally, and Nicholas, and Rachel Baker and her children Moses, Thomas, and Claibourne made the voyage to New Orleans and ended up in Iberville Parish, Louisiana. Their descendants are still in Iberville Parish. Though it is unknown how Lewis, John, and Rachel are related to Sally and Mary Baker, it is hoped that connections can be made between the Iberville Parish and Jefferson County, Florida branches of the Baker family.
Mark your calendar for Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 7pm for a presentation with James Monroe’s Highland. We’ll be discussing the families Monroe sold to Florida, the Casa Bianca plantation, and our data submission to the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. More info at https://highland.org/event/virtual-talk-florida-bound-casa-bianca-plantations-enslaved-people/ and signup on Facebook at https://cwm.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eIePs_5xREKro04ojWbiOQ
In the first quarter of 2020 we began working with the editors of the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JDSP) to make our research more widely accessible to scholars and other investigators exploring the history of slavery in America and the Caribbean. The second issue of this online journal has just been published, and contains our research findings about the history of enslavement at the Casa Bianca plantation in Florida. The article can be accessed at https://jsdp.enslaved.org/fullIssue/volume1-issue2. In particular, the dataset in JSDP differs from that presented here on our website by its inclusion of the particular historical details of the enslaved people of Casa Bianca. This journal, and its partner site Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade: Enslaved.org, are part of the Mellon grant-funded Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, in partnership with the University of Maryland and other scholars. This project has twice appeared in Smithsonian magazine in 2020, as well as in the Washington Post, and we are pleased to have our work accepted by them as a peer-reviewed contribution. The following is taken from the JSDP website, and more fully explains the project’s mission.
The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation volume 1, issue 2 December 2020.
“The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP) is a digital academic journal that publishes original, peer-reviewed datasets about the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants drawn from documents produced from the fifteenth to the early twentieth-centuries. The JSDP works in conjunction with Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org) to make the data contributed discoverable and interactive and to establish a sustainable scholarly repository for digital projects concerned with the history of African slavery. The JSDP focuses mainly on publishing peer-reviewed datasets and editorial reviews of projects and datasets while Enslaved.org acts as an interactive, searchable repository for digital data.”
“All datasets published by the JSDP will be included on Enslaved.org. Moreover, JSDP archives a copy of each published dataset with Harvard Dataverse, accessing an infrastructure of sustainability and “‘long-term care’ of valuable digital assets” that undergirds the FAIR approach to data stewardship.”
The Florida Historical Quarterly has published an article by Taketheminfamilies researcher Miranda (Randy) W. Burnett on the history of the enslaved people of Casa Bianca Plantation. This peer reviewed publication is the “journal of record for Florida history”, and will provide access to this new research to a wide range of scholars.
ABSTRACTS FOR VOLUME 98, NO. 2
“Florida Bound: Casa Bianca Plantation’s Enslaved People” by Randy W. Burnett
Seeking to contribute to the scholarship of slavery in Jefferson County, Florida, this essay discusses the origins of the primary groups of enslaved people brought to Casa Bianca, one of the larger plantations in the county, by Joseph M. White and his business partner Richard H. Wilde, emphasizing how the two men used their social, political and financial influence to assemble an enslaved workforce to clear the Florida frontier.
More importantly, this essay explores the lives and experiences of those enslaved at Casa Bianca, both during their enslavement and after emancipation, subjects that have previously been undiscussed in literature except in terms of quantity. For the first time in scholarship, the names of those forced to labor at the plantation are acknowledged, along with some of their stories and successes. It is hoped that this study will not only enhance the African-American narratives in Jefferson County, but will also encourage future endeavors of investigation in this area.”
Florida Historical Quarterly, August 25, 2020. In Facebook floridahistoricalquarterly. Retrieved October 1, 2020 from https://www.facebook.com/floridahistoricalquarterly /posts/3679313068762662?__tn__=K-R.
The latest family tree is now available. One of our larger goals is to document all individuals enslaved at Casa Bianca. This latest tree includes everyone from the plantation lists and 1860 plantation sale.
The past few months of Covid quarantine gave us the opportunity to research, update and add more biographies to the Stories page. New biographies include Mary Baker, Jim and Calypso Harris, and Henry Clay White. We think you’ll find Henry’s story inspiring – not only did he experience financial success immediately after Emancipation, as a literate freedman, he was instrumental in the creating of the Howard School, the first freedmen’s school in Monticello.
Stay tuned as we compile more biographies about those who were enslaved at Casa Bianca!
An updated family tree has been added to the Genealogy section under the Families tab. The database now includes 369 individuals and 59 different surnames. We’ve also incorporated information detailing plantation documents, deeds, and other legal documents in which individuals are named.
