by Kelly L. Schmidt and Cecilia Wright. Last updated July 2022.
Marshall Brotherton administrator of Eliza Brown deceased appears and exhibits his report of his proceedings in making sale of the Slaves belonging to the Estate of said deceased under the order of the court made on the twenty fourth day of September last from which it appears that he sold Sarah and her child in said order named for six hundred dollars to Henry Shaw which being seen read and heard the Court approve said sale set forth in said report and order the same to be filed which is done.”
St. Louis Probate Court Record Book N, September 24, 1850, p.188, Missouri State Archives-St. Louis.
About the record
When enslavers died or wished to legally bequeath people they held in slavery to family members or peers, these “Orders to Sell Slaves,” as carried out by the St. Louis Probate Court, were recorded in St. Louis Probate Court record books, often in the format shown in the image and quote above.
The Probate Court record books documented estate proceedings, and thus do not record all sales of enslaved people in St. Louis, such as a public or private sales by a living enslaver that might otherwise be found in a newspaper advertisement, auction notice, personal papers, or letters.
Compared to census data, probate court sale records reveal much more information about enslaved people and the institution of slavery, especially regarding what James W. C. Pennington called the “chattel principle”–the perpetual dread of being sold away from family and home.
The St. Louis Probate Court Record books are not the same as the full probate records held in the Missouri State Archives for people’s estates. The Probate Court Record books document decisions and actions about estates made in court, whereas probate records contain a broader range of estate papers, such as wills, inventories, administrator’s papers, documentation of debts and their payment, and receipts and other records documenting how a deceased person’s possessions were distributed. Often, much more detailed information about enslaved people can be found in probate records, while decisions and resulting actions regarding what happened to them (such as whether, how, to whom, when, and where they were sold or bequeathed) can be confirmed by the probate court record books. Accounts of these estate auctions of enslaved people can be found advertised, as required for court-ordered sales, in St. Louis area newspapers.
Probate court records have been scanned and are available online through the Missouri State Archives, Ancestry.com, and Family Search. Original St. Louis Probate Court Records and Probate Court Record Books are housed at the Missouri State Archives in St. Louis.
About the database
The Court Ordered Slave Sales database curates records from St. Louis Probate Court books that detail the court’s decisions about enslaved people’s forced transfer between enslavers, usually when an enslaver died and the people they enslaved were bequeathed or sold at auction.
The St. Louis Probate Court Records Court Ordered Slave Sales database was compiled by Miel Wilson and Bob Moore through the National Park Service to documents the enslaved people sold through St. Louis probate courts between 1828 – 1864.
Where possible, the creators supplemented missing record information by incorporating data from newspaper advertisements of court-ordered sales, but the dataset does not contain every sale of enslaved people advertised in local newspapers.
The database contains such information as the names, ages, and sex of enslaved people, the estate from which they were sold, who was involved in carrying out the sale, where and when the sale took place, who bought them, and the price for which they were purchased when this information is included in the record.
Limitations
The National Park Service St. Louis Probate Court Records Court Ordered Slave Sales database is limited to court-ordered slave sales, and does not cover private slave sales and auctions of the period.
The following list of limitations within the database has been adapted from the National Park Service’s methodology for creating the database:
- Not all sales of enslaved people were court-ordered, and thus they do not appear in this database.
- The Probate Court records are incomplete. The St. Louis Probate Court Records began in 1804, and the first two books (Books A and B), only recently rediscovered, are undergoing conservation. The database, therefore, begins with Book C in the year 1828. Books I and J, covering the period June 28, 1842 – December 1, 1844, are missing and presumed lost. Efforts are underway by National Park Service historians to fill these gaps with information from other records.
- Individual names of every enslaved person sold were not always recorded in court documents, and sometimes the record books merely that “all the slaves” of a particular estate were sold, without giving the number of people sold.
- The places where enslaved people were sold by the court were not always recorded; sometimes sales were conducted at a private auction house or at the house of the deceased rather than on the courthouse steps.
The SLIDE dataset
When converting the Court Ordered Slave Sales database to SLIDE, we made some decisions to clean and standardize inconsistencies in this dataset. However, we have not yet reviewed the original Probate Court Record Books to correct transcription errors and other mistakes.
Where possible, family relationships of enslaved people are highlighted to demonstrate the immeasurable emotional costs of family separations and sales.
Cite this page
Kelly L. Schmidt and Cecilia Wright, “About the St. Louis Probate Court Ordered Slave Sales,” The Saint Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement, July 2022, https://sites.wustl.edu/enslavementstl/st-louis-probate-court-ordered-slave-sales/.