Mar 20 at 10:30 AM - Sale 2697 -

Sale 2697 - Lot 24

Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(ABOLITION--MONTSERRAT.) Compensation claim for slaves registered in Montserrat at the time of abolition. 3 partially printed pages, 13¼ x 8¼ inches on one folding sheet, completed in manuscript on a Montserrat "Counter-Claim" form, with docketing on final blank; moderate wear and soiling, separations and tape repairs at folds. London, circa 1834
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Additional Details

Thomas Meade owned a plantation in the British territory of Montserrat, an island in the Lesser Antilles. When he died in 1763, it was inherited by several children, and then their grandchildren. At the end of British slavery in 1834, his London-born granddaughter Eleanor Lynch Dutoit (1764-1837) of London filed this form to assert ownership so she could receive compensation for her losses. The form does not name individual enslaved people, only values broken down by categories: 8 "head people," 5 tradesmen, 3 "inferior tradesmen," 101 field laborers, 45 "inferior field laborers," 33 children under the age of six, and 6 others "aged, diseased, or otherwise non-effective," with a total value of £13,150--for people she had owned in a place she had likely never been, thousands of miles from England.

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