Enslaved Children as Gifts

Enslaved children were occasionally given to the offspring of the master as a way to encourage a lifelong bond of gratefulness or loyalty on the part of the enslaved person to her or his next-generation white owner.[1]  In no way were these relationships equal, as the enslaved child was groomed to serve her or his white counterpart and also play with inferior toys. For example, enslaved girls would most likely have had to use discarded rags or corn cobs to represent amusing dolls whereas slaveholding girls would have had access to porcelain dolls.[2]

In his 1763 Will, William Eilbeck, the father of Ann Eilbeck Mason, George Mason IV’s first wife, bequeathed to six of his grandchildren an enslaved child similar to their age.[3] Dick, age 14, was willed to George Mason V, age 10; Penny, was willed to Ann [Nancy] Mason, age 8; Cato, age 9, was willed to William Mason, age 6; Cupid, age 8, was willed to Thomson Mason, age 4; Priss, age 7, was willed to Sarah Mason, age 3; and Nan, age 5, was willed to Mary Mason, age 1.[4]

Penny waited on Nancy Mason for more than 40 years.[5] During these decades, the enslaved woman probably traveled with her "mistress” and raised her children.[6] Different domestic work was demanded of enslaved individuals as well, for they had to serve other members of the owner’s family.[7] Penny was probably on call all hours of the day and night, responding when summoned by Nancy and standing deferentially (for long hours) in the presence of whites in Gunston Hall.[8]

It should be kept in mind that when enslaved children were willed to a young owner they were not simply working for one individual.[9] Adult members of the Mason family could at any time command an enslaved child to fetch items such as shoes.[10]

Image of Enslaved Domestic Worker and White Children, South Carolina.JPG


[1] Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 75.

[2] Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 127.

[3] Terry K. Dunn, The Recollections of John Mason: George Mason’s Son Remembers His Father and Life at Gunston Hall (Mason Neck, VA: Gunston Hall, 2012), 196. For an excellent study that chronicles how the eighteenth-century Mason family passed down chattel property , see: Pamela Copeland and Richard MacMaster, The Five George Masons: Patriots and Planters of Virginia and Maryland (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1975).

[4] Dunn, The Recollections of John Mason, 196.

[5] Terry K. Dunn, Among His Slaves: George Mason’s Struggle with Slavery (Alexandria, VA: Commonwealth Books of Virginia, 2016),94.

[6] Dunn, Among His Slaves, 75.

[7] Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family From Slavery to the Present (UNew York: Basic Books, 1985), 23.

[8] Ibid, 27.

[9] Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage, 92.

[10] Ibid.

Creator: Alexis Bracey

Enslaved Children as Gifts