In 1860, the population of Arkansas was 435,450. Of those, 111,115 were enslaved people and 144 were free Blacks. The free Black population is believed to have been close to 700 a few years earlier, but in 1859 the Arkansas General Assembly passed an act banning manumission (the freeing of slaves), expelling free Blacks from Arkansas, and threatening them with enslavement if they remained.
"Julia is fading. There is a No Visitors sign on the door, and now only the family and the minister visit her. Julia once told me she was never one for religion . and that once Mr. Devlin, the Episcopalian minister, had come by to see her and noticed a book on her desk.
"The night after the death of our baby, Elizabeth had a little Negro born, which was named by some of the Ladies Mississippy, Virginia, after the river and boat."
Last week I introduced the letters of Reuben and Orrin, the enslaved father and son who helped Amanda Beardsley Trulock run her husband s plantation in Jefferson County from his death in 1849 until the early 1860s.
Up in Connecticut, a famous piano teacher preserves a rare artifact of Arkansas history: four letters from Reuben and Orrin, most likely father and son, who were enslaved on the Trulock plantation in Jefferson County from 1845 until the early 1860s.