One Ledger, Two Women: Miss Cotton and an Enslaved Woman Named Anna

By: Brenda Sutton Williams

Estate records often reveal more than the distribution of a deceased person’s property. Hidden among receipts, vouchers, debts, and payments are fragments of lives that were never intended to become part of the historical record.

In the estate papers of Charles Cotton of Bibb County, Georgia, I found two women recorded on the same page. One was identified as Miss M. J. Cotton. The other was identified only as “Negro Woman Anna.”

Their entries tell two very different stories about the lives of women in Macon during the 1850s.

One voucher came from Wesleyan Female College in Macon. The estate was charged $55 for the regular tuition and related expenses of Miss M. J. Cotton. The account was verified in January 1853, and E. H. Myers acknowledged receiving full payment from Edwin Graves, administrator of Charles Cotton’s estate, in November 1854.

Miss Cotton was receiving an education at Wesleyan Female College, an institution founded in 1836 and recognized as one of the earliest colleges chartered to grant degrees to women. Her tuition became an obligation of her father’s estate and was carefully documented, verified, and paid.

A few entries later, another woman appeared.

Her name was Anna.

The voucher stated that the estate of Charles Cotton owed Abner P. Powers for the “hire of Negro Woman Anna” for the year 1852. The account indicates that Powers received approximately $95 from Edwin Graves in November 1854 as full payment.

Anna did not receive that money.

Under the slave-hiring system, an enslaver could rent an enslaved person to another individual or business for a specified period. The person hiring the enslaved worker paid the agreed amount to the enslaver. The laborer performed the work but had no legal right to the wages generated by that labor.

Based on the language of this voucher, Anna was likely enslaved by Abner P. Powers and hired to Charles Cotton during 1852. After Cotton’s death, the unpaid cost of her hire became a debt against his estate. The administrator later paid Powers for the value assigned to Anna’s labor.

The record does not tell us what kind of work Anna performed. She may have cooked, cleaned, washed clothes, cared for children, worked in a household, or completed other labor demanded of enslaved women. It does not tell us her age, where she lived, whether she had children, or whether her family remained near her during the period of hire.

The record tells us only that someone placed a monetary value on one year of her labor.

On the same page, Miss Cotton’s education was treated as an investment and a protected expense. Anna’s labor was treated as a debt owed to a man who claimed ownership of her.

We must be careful not to conclude that Anna’s labor directly paid Miss Cotton’s tuition. The document does not establish that connection. However, the placement of these vouchers in the same estate file reveals how the economic system operated. White families used estate administration to preserve educational opportunities, settle business obligations, and protect family wealth. At the same time, the labor of enslaved people circulated through that economy without compensation to the people who performed it.

Miss Cotton was recorded as a student.

Anna was recorded as hired property.

Still, the clerk wrote Anna’s name.

That single name gives us a place to begin.

Researchers can now look for Anna in Abner P. Powers’s estate papers, tax records, slave schedules, account books, deeds, court cases, and family papers. Because Powers served as a prominent judge in the Macon Judicial Circuit, his personal and professional records may contain additional references to the people he enslaved.

We can also examine Charles Cotton’s estate papers for other payments involving Anna. Additional vouchers may identify the work she performed, the length of her hire, or other enslaved people hired by Cotton.

This is why estate vouchers matter. A small receipt may be the only surviving document that records an enslaved person by name. Anna’s appearance in this account was never intended to preserve her story. It was created to document a financial obligation between two white men.

But Anna was more than an entry in an estate ledger.

She was a woman whose labor had value, even though the law denied her the right to receive its rewards. Her full story has not yet been recovered, but her name has survived.

Anna was here.

Let the ancestors speak.

Source: Estate of Charles Cotton, Vouchers Nos. 32–35, Bibb County Court of Ordinary records; FamilySearch, image 126 of 349, Image Group Number 005768118.

Brenda Sutton Williams is a Genealogist, Historian, and Co-Founder of Let the Ancestors Speak