© Kathy Duncan, 2024
On 19 March 1796, Gilbert Walker, father of Izannah Walker, placed an advertisement in The Medley or New Bedford Marine Journal, in order to sell a twelve-year-old female slave.
A search of the U.S. Census for 1790, 1800, and 1810 reveals that there was only one Gilbert Walker in the United States, so there is no doubt that the Gilbert Walker of this advertisement is the same Gibert Walker who was Izannah Walker's father.
Since there were no slaves in Gilbert Walker's household in 1790 or 1800, that means he acquired the girl after 1790 and sold her before 1800. She entered the Walker household sometime between the age of seven and twelve.
Typically, there were three ways a person acquired a slave: through inheritance, as a gift, or by making a purchase. The advertisement does not refer to this as an estate sale, so it is not a sale that was triggered by an estate settlement. However, there is the possibility that Gilbert was making the sale on behalf of someone else like his widowed mother.
Generally, the only slave transactions that generated county or city records were sales made during the settlement of an estate or deeds of gift. Records for settlements of estates are found in probate files. Deeds of gift are often found mixed with land records or occasionally in court minutes. Transactions associated with estate settlements may have also generated newspaper notices for a public sale or auction. A straightforward transaction between individuals would generate a bill of sale from seller to buyer which was not recorded at the county or city level, thereby, leaving no surviving record.
In 1796, Gilbert Walker was about 33 years old and was a resident of Tiverton, Newport County, Rhode Island. He had been widowed once; his first wife, Bridget Corey, had died in 1793, just months after their marriage. There were no surviving children from that marriage. He then married Mary Cory in about 1794 or 1795. Given that her surname is the same as his first wife's, she was likely to have been an in-law. In March of 1796, Mary was in the beginning stages of her first pregnancy.
By 1796, Rhode Island was in the process of phasing out slavery. In 1784, the Rhode Island legislature passed the Gradual Emancipation Act which stipulated that anyone born after March 1, 1784 would be born free. However, those children were to be held as indentured servants until they reached the age of twenty-one. During that period, they would serve their mother's master. Meanwhile, anyone born prior to March 1, 1784, would remain a slave for life.
Every state in the U.S. had a different series of laws concerning the owning and manumission of slaves. Some states forbade the freeing of slaves while others required freed slaves to leave the state within a year of manumission or made the previous owner financially responsible for any misdeeds of their former slaves while they remained in the area. This made it impossible or extremely difficult for someone who inherited slaves, but who had no desire to participate in slave-owning, to free them outright.
According to the Tiverton Historical Society, in 1790, Tiverton had a total population of 2,453. Of that number, 2,251 were coded as free whites, 177 were "other free persons," and 25 were slaves. Slave ownership seems to have been in decline within six years after the passage of the Gradual Emancipation Act. By 1800, there were an estimated 380 slaves in the whole state of Rhode Island.
Based on the timing of the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1784 and the timing of Gilbert Walker's advertisement, the girl he was selling would have probably been born between March 19, 1783, and February 28, 1784. If she was sold to someone local, then she could have remained a slave until 1843 when slavery was banned in Rhode Island. She would have been about 60 years old then. However, if she was sold to someone in a southern state, then she might have remained a slave until 1865 when she would have been 82 or 83. In other words, she may have remained a slave for life.
