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| Sinah was apparently the first child of Aggy and William Lee. She was a dower slave and most likely one of the slaves illegally disposed of following the death of Martha Washington; .... sold to a free colored man, who apparently resold her as slave breeding stock. Assumptions are that she began giving birth to children around age 13 years. She lived at the time of Virginia's economic shift from a reliance on agricultural products to that of breeding slaves for export to the deep south and west in the face of demands driven by the ending of slave imports from Africa and the Caribbean. Indeed, slave breeding had been such a large industry in the Caribbean that the British government in 1734-1735 period had issued a law ending the export of slaves from Caribbean places like Bermuda to places like Jamestown, ... because the practice reduced the profits available to merchants acquiring slaves in Africa for direct shipment and sale to English colonists in America. The practice of breeding established in America included the use of male slaves as studs rewarded to perform and more often than not leased out to various plantation owners with fertile females.
This record of Sinah being freed in 1814 does not indicate the disposition of her son Lott who would have been three years of age when his mother was sold to Charles Thomas and about 15 years when his mother was freed. |
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