Manigault Family Papers

The collection contains information about the people enslaved by the white Manigault family on their rice plantations, Silk Hope in Berkeley District, S.C., and Gowrie and East Hermitage on Argyle Island on the Savannah River in Georgia. Plantation journals kept between 1833 and 1897 by Charles Manigault (1795-1874) of Charleston, S.C. and his son Louis Manigault (1828-1899) include lists of enslaved people at the three plantations and anecdotal information about the free Black communities in South Carolina and Georgia during and after the American Civil War and emancipation. Compiled by the Manigaults for the purpose of recording cloth and blanket distributions, the lists of people they enslaved typically provide first names and familial relationships especially those of parent and child and husband and wife. Additional though inconsistently recorded information on the lists includes ages, occupations on the plantations, disabilities such as blindness, self-emancipation attempts, sickness especially from cholera, deaths, births, and the dates and monetary amounts related to the trafficking of people in the internal slave trade. A photograph of Dolly, a Black woman who emancipated herself on 7 April 1863, is pasted to Louis Manigault’s “runaway slave” notice in volume 3. Other papers include Charles Manigault’s will, essays he wrote on slavery and other topics, a lengthy manuscript autobiography by his son Gabriel Edward Manigault (1833-1899), a physician and curator of the Museum of Natural History at the College of Charleston