JOHN STEELE HENDERSON PAPERS, #327, 1755-1945; 1962
Letters, financial and legal papers, and other items of the immediate family and other
relations of Henderson, member of the North Carolina General Assembly, U.S. Congressman, and
lawyer. Slave bills of sale (especially prevalent in 1807); receipts, mercantile account
statements, and other business papers constitute the bulk of the material before the
1840s, while personal correspondence makes up
the bulk of the collection by the 1860s.
Included are a list documenting the hiring of slaves (1850) and a copy of a will discussing
sending freed slaves to Liberia (1841). Letters from Anderson
Henderson, a slave who was hired out to another family (1849, 1857,
1865) and a letter from Isabella, a slave complaining about being
hired out to a black mistress (n.d.). Other letters discuss Archibald Henderson's attempts to
recover runaway slaves (1847); a proslavery speech delivered by
Georgia senator Robert Toombs in Boston (1856); Reconstruction
politics (1860s); an attack on two whites by a
"drunken infuriated negro" (1890); accusations that three black men had murdered a white man
near Salisbury and the possibility that troops would be required to prevent a lynching (1906); and the movement of white women in Massachusetts from domestic to
munitions factory positions, a move which left maid positions open to black women (1916).
