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.
Reuben was born into slavery near the banks of the Chattahoochee River around 1811, and would have been about 34 years old in 1844 when he migrated by steamboat from Georgia to Arkansas with his immediate family (Eliza, Caroline, Henry, and Orrin) and the rest of the Trulock household: 35 other enslaved African Americans and six members of the Trulock family, including Amanda Beardsley Trulock and her husband, James Hines Trulock.
Eliza, two years older than Reuben, was the mother of his children Henry, Orrin, and Caroline. (Though I have no absolute proof, I am nearly certain that Reuben, Eliza, Caroline, Henry, and Orrin were a nuclear family because Amanda Trulock often mentioned them together and listed them together in the slave inventory she recorded in 1859.)
In Georgia and in Arkansas, Eliza served as cook for the Trulock household. ("Household" refers to the white family and to the people they held in bondage.)
Amanda Trulock referred to Orrin as the "house boy" in 1848, and often mentioned Caroline's duties caring for white children, so Reuben's family can be designated as "house slaves," though we should remember that in Arkansas before the Civil War, very few enslaved people were entirely exempt from field work.
Reuben's leadership of the Trulock slave community is evident from Amanda's first mention of him in 1840, back in Georgia. Writing to her mother in Connecticut, she says, "You wanted to know if Reuben had joined the Church, he was the first."
While working to establish the Trulock plantation in Arkansas, Reuben emerged as the sole overseer no later than 1846, and after James Hines Trulock's death in 1849, Reuben became the manager of the plantation.
As the owner of the plantation and its workforce, Amanda Trulock had the final say about business matters, but so great was her trust in Reuben's management that during the 1850s she spent several summers in Connecticut and left Reuben in charge at home in Arkansas.
During the years of Reuben's management, the Trulock plantation emerged from debt and became profitable, allowing Amanda to send money to her father in Connecticut for investment. Arkansas historian Kelly Houston Jones discovered an 1864 letter from an agent of what would become the Freedmen's Bureau; the agent had met Reuben and repeated his account of the early 1850s: "In three years after old Master died, he [Reuben] had paid off $20,000 of debts of the estate, beside supporting the family." This report squares pretty well with Amanda's bookkeeping from the early 1850s.
The first letter from Reuben is dated April 2, 1852, addressed to Amanda Trulock's brother Bronson Burton Beardsley; the letter is in the hand of Amanda's sister Marcia Beardsley, who was visiting Arkansas at the time. Bronson visited the Trulock plantation in 1850-1851, so he and Reuben were acquainted. (Bronson's account of the manners and mores of Arkansas people is harsh; he writes of white women dipping snuff and beating their slaves, and of their acceptance as "a matter of course" of the "universal licentiousness" of white men with enslaved women, but he ultimately accepted Amanda's wish to remain in Arkansas.)
In 1852 Reuben was a man who was unfree, tasked with extracting labor from about 50 people who were also unfree, for the profit of their owner; yet with Marcia's assistance, he was able to express the productive tension between material ambition and religious piety in a way that belongs both to the history of the Southern plantation economy and to the history of Protestant capitalism:
"[The] season of the year has arrived which engrosses all my time, and nearly all my thoughts, for I feel that I have a very great charge on my hands, to see that everything goes right on this place. I am surprised and astonished at myself, that I should enjoy my religious devotions as well as I do; when I have so much to trouble & annoy me, both by day and by night."
Reuben and the laborers he directed had made a good start on spring planting and clearing acres of bottomland, but "we had a severe storm, which threw down about five or six hundred panels of fence, and strewed the land with fallen trees, which caused us more than a week's labor; we are now just through cutting, rolling, & burning again."
Nevertheless, prospects for corn and cotton were good: "I have one hundred acres of corn planted, which bids fair for a good stand; it is the most forward of any that I know of in the country; some of it is four blades high. I expect to have about two hundred and thirty acres ready for planting cotton, by Saturday night."
Reuben goes on to confess to Bronson his intense rivalry with Peyton Atkins, who owned a plantation adjacent to the Trulocks'. (Atkins Lake, the oxbow southeast of Pine Bluff, is named for his family.) Reuben complains that Atkins "told before a dozen people, what time I blowed my horn in the morning, and said that I was gaining two days in every week," meaning that Reuben was driving his laborers too hard.
Next week we will return to Jefferson County for more words from Reuben and Orrin.