Beginnings at Riverside

Riverside Plantation was not the grandest in Chesterfield County, but it was ambitious. Thomas Hargrove, our owner, was a man with narrow shoulders and restless eyes, always chasing a vision of himself as a Virginia gentleman. The main house stood on a rise, white columns slightly askew, as if the building itself was uneasy about the role it played.

Fifteen of us came with the land when Thomas bought it—my mother, a cook; my father, Jacob, a field hand; my sisters Ruth and Mary; and a dozen others, each with their own stories and losses. Our cabins stood behind the house, twelve in two rows, the population swelling and shrinking with births, deaths, and the market’s cruel whims.

I was seven when I first realized Riverside was different. Not because of the work—everyone knew the ache of endless labor—but because of the watching. Thomas carried a leather-bound journal everywhere, making marks with a pencil sharpened on a wet stone. He watched not just our work, but our habits, our relationships, our breaking points.

Years later, I’d learn the truth: Thomas was not just managing a plantation. He was conducting an experiment.

The Watching and the Vanishing

My mother worked in the big house. My father, though Thomas never recognized such bonds, was a steady presence in the tobacco fields. Ruth, my older sister, sang while she worked; Mary was just a toddler. Our cabin, closest to the main house, was a place of constant summons and interrupted sleep.

Among us was Augustus, a mystery even to the other slaves. He could read and write, a dangerous gift, and had been bought at auction for a sum that made other planters laugh. Augustus managed the plantation’s records and taught Thomas’s son, Richard, his letters—a privilege, but also a kind of prison. He was proof that knowledge could be both shield and shackle.

The year I turned seven, Thomas’s watching became more intense. He’d made a poor investment in a cotton gin, and creditors were circling. I didn’t understand the economics, but I felt the tension, the sharpness in Catherine Hargrove’s voice, the way Thomas’s journal entries grew longer.

That was the year Elijah disappeared. He was a quiet, strong field hand from South Carolina, and one morning he simply wasn’t at muster. His few possessions—shirt, carving, blanket—remained. We searched for days. Three days later, Elijah’s shirt was found floating in the river, stained and torn. Thomas announced that Elijah had tried to run and been claimed by the current. But I saw his hands shake as he held up that shirt. And I saw him glance toward the eastern ridge, where the family cemetery stood behind its iron fence.

Two weeks later, Little Thomas, another field hand, died suddenly. The doctor called it inflammation. We buried him in the slave cemetery. Thomas made a note in his journal, pencil moving fast. That’s when I first noticed: every time someone died or vanished, Thomas spent hours in his study, always with Augustus, always making notes.

A Ledger of Souls

By fourteen, I was working beside Augustus, learning to read and write in secret. My mother bargained extra hours in the kitchen for my education. In Thomas’s study, I saw what most never would: the mind of an owner, laid bare on paper.

These were not just records—they were experiments in human endurance. Thomas measured how long a man could work in August heat before collapsing. He tracked which family separations caused the most grief, which punishments bred compliance or resentment, which ratios of hope to despair produced the most docile labor.

“He thinks we’re mathematics,” Augustus whispered once. “He thinks if he finds the right equation, he can keep us profitable and keep us from running. He doesn’t understand—we’re not numbers. We’re testimonies waiting to be given.”

In 1823, Thomas brought Dr. Silas Winthrop from Richmond. The doctor measured our skulls, tested our pain responses, asked about our dreams and fears. Thomas stood beside him, always taking notes. Augustus explained: there was a debate in the medical societies—were we fully human, or some intermediate species? Winthrop was gathering evidence.

Three months later, Ruth disappeared. She was sixteen, quick to smile, steady in her work. She vanished on a Sunday, her basket of blackberries overturned by the river. There were footprints—hers, and others in boots, not bare feet. My mother stopped singing. My father started asking questions. Two weeks later, Jacob was sold to Georgia, punishment for his curiosity. I never saw him again.

Thomas’s journals grew more detailed. He recorded my mother’s grief as “diminished work capacity following family disruption,” estimating her “recovery timeline” and noting that “emotional attachment creates operational vulnerability.” Augustus let me read those entries. “They’re building a science of us,” he said. “Every observation, every measurement—they’re creating a manual for how to own human beings more efficiently.”

The Clearing

When I was nineteen, Augustus called me into the study late one night. Thomas and Richard were away in Richmond. He led me through the woods, past the family cemetery, to a small clearing I’d never seen. Fourteen stones, plain and unmarked, each a grave.

“Fourteen people who didn’t die of disease or accident, but were disappeared,” Augustus said. “Your sister Ruth is the sixth from the north. She asked too many questions.”

He handed me a bundle of papers—his counter-ledger, every disappearance, every experiment, every crime. “I’m 48, Samuel. I’ve lived longer than most of us do. You’re going to outlive this place. And when you do, you’re going to tell this story.”

Three days later, Thomas called us both into his study. On the desk lay Augustus’s hidden papers. Thomas was calm. “You’ve been keeping unauthorized records,” he said. Augustus stood tall. “Yes, sir.” Thomas fed the papers into the fire, one by one. “You’ve written the truth, Augustus. But it changes nothing. You are property. Your testimony is voiceless.”

Augustus was sold to Georgia the next day. As the wagon pulled away, he looked back and nodded: remember, document, testify.

The Machinery of Bondage

After Augustus was gone, I became the plantation’s record keeper. Every number I entered represented suffering quantified; every letter I copied spread Thomas’s philosophy of “rational slavery.” Riverside was not just a plantation—it was a prototype for others. Thomas corresponded with planters from North Carolina to Mississippi, exchanging methods for maintaining discipline, suppressing literacy, and optimizing family structures for stability.

In 1834, Thomas hosted a symposium. Planters gathered to compare notes. Matias Cutler from South Carolina described his “graduated pressure system”—minor punishments for small infractions, “erasure responses” for major ones. The key, he said, was plausible deniability. “A slave who vanishes creates speculation. But a slave who drowns in the river, or dies of sudden illness—these create cautionary tales the others will internalize.”

After dinner, I overheard Thomas and Cutler discussing where to hide bodies. “I use the old cemetery,” Thomas said. “The slaves won’t go there—too many superstitions.” Cutler laughed. “I use a ravine. Tell them it’s dangerous, they avoid it naturally.”

That night, I resolved to memorize everything—not in writing, but in memory so detailed it could be reconstructed if I ever saw freedom.

The Breaking of Isaiah

In 1837, Isaiah arrived at Riverside. He could read—a dangerous skill. Thomas bought him for a “degradation study,” wanting to see how quickly an educated man could be reduced. He gave Isaiah meaningless tasks, monitored his decline, and recorded every change. After three months, Isaiah tried to escape. He was caught, whipped, and moved to the main house—his punishment, to become a living example of broken hope.

Thomas explained his methods to me. “I’ve stripped away Isaiah’s illusions. It’s not cruelty. It’s correction. Slavery isn’t a moral wrong. It’s a social necessity. Your people need structure, guidance, control.”

I looked at the man who’d owned me for nearly three decades and saw not a monster, but a man desperate to justify the unjustifiable. You can document and theorize, I thought, but testimony will outlast your lies.

The Ledger Survives

By 1840, Thomas’s health was failing. My mother died that year—her heart, the doctor said, though I knew it was grief. Thomas recorded her death with clinical detachment: “Female, age 51, house servant, minimal economic value at death.”

With no family left at Riverside, I began to think beyond survival. The world was changing. Abolitionist literature spread, the Underground Railroad grew, and the conflict between North and South intensified.

In 1842, a neighboring slave named Henry escaped to Pennsylvania, keeping a journal that described plantations where slaves vanished and experiments in endurance were conducted. Henry never named Riverside, but the details were close enough that Thomas and his correspondents began burning their records. I’d already memorized the most damning information and hidden key letters beneath the floorboards.

That summer, Thomas called me into his study. The room smelled of smoke and old paper. He told me he was dying. “I need a witness,” he said. “Not for forgiveness, but to confirm that I understood what I was doing was evil. And I did it anyway, because admitting the truth was more terrifying than any individual act of cruelty.”

He handed me his final journal—a confession, a ledger of 27 names, not 14. “This is yours now. Hide it, burn it, publish it when you’re free. Someone needs to know that we all knew.”

“I’ll testify,” I said. “But not for you. For them.”

The Fire and the Reckoning

Thomas died in 1843. Richard inherited Riverside, but lacked his father’s obsession. The plantation declined. In 1846, with creditors closing in and Margaret, Richard’s wife, gravely ill, I made a decision.

On November 12, 1846, I set fire to the main house. I made sure Richard and his family were away, warned the house servants, and walked away as the study filled with flames. The official story was an accident. But I knew: I had burned every remaining journal, every piece of the machinery of bondage that hadn’t already been hidden or memorized.

Riverside was sold off, the land subdivided, the slaves scattered. I was sold to a Richmond merchant, Harrison Collins, to work as a clerk. For the first time, I had hours of relative freedom, access to books, and a wider world. I learned of my father’s death in Louisiana, Mary’s fate in Virginia, and Augustus’s legacy—teaching others to read, passing testimony hand to hand.

The War and Freedom

The 1850s brought crisis after crisis. The Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision—each tightening the grip of slavery or fueling the fires of resistance. When John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry, Richmond panicked. But for most of us, survival was its own quiet rebellion.

When the Civil War came, Richmond became the Confederate capital. Collins’s business thrived, then collapsed. In April 1865, Union forces entered the city. I stood in the doorway of Collins’s shop as blue-coated soldiers marched by. Freedom came not as a moment of liberation, but as a quiet realization: no one was coming to claim me. I was, for the first time, recognized as a human being.

I was 56 years old.

Testimony for the Future

Some freed people left immediately, searching for family or new beginnings. For me, freedom meant testimony. I returned to Riverside, now abandoned and overgrown. The clearing was still there, fifteen stones, more overgrown than ever. I knelt and spoke the names, this time as a free man.

I retrieved Thomas’s confession and the letters I’d hidden. I brought them to the Freedmen’s Bureau in Richmond. Lieutenant James Whitfield listened to my story, examined the documents, and told me, “This needs to be preserved. It’s historical evidence that must not be lost.”

Together, we created a formal testimony—forty-three pages, the longest in the Richmond Bureau’s files. It wasn’t justice, but it was truth entering the official record.

In 1872, one of the letters I’d preserved was read into the Congressional Record as evidence that slavery had been a system of deliberate dehumanization. Thomas Hargrove’s philosophy became part of the documented history of slavery’s intellectual foundations.

The Importance of Testimony

I spent the rest of my life in Richmond, working for the Freedmen’s Bureau, then as a teacher. I taught literacy and mathematics, but also history—the true history, not the softened versions. I married Sarah, a woman who’d walked from North Carolina after emancipation searching for her sister. We never found her, but we built a life, and our children grew up free.

In 1879, I spoke at a convention of former slaves in Washington, D.C. I told them about Riverside, about Augustus, about the ledger that would not burn. An older woman approached me afterward, saying her owner had kept similar journals, now destroyed. “It’s not lost if you remember it,” I told her. “Our memories are testimony. Our survival is testimony.”

Now, at seventy-five, I write these words for the future. The clearing at Riverside is overgrown; modern homes stand where tobacco once grew. There is no marker, no monument. But I have made sure the names are recorded—in the Bureau’s files, in my written testimony, in the stories I have told my children and students.

Testimony survives. That’s what Augustus taught me. That’s what I pass forward.

The world is changed, but not finished. The laws that made people property are gone, but the beliefs, the justifications, the habits—they persist in subtler forms. That is why testimony matters. That is why the truth about what slavery actually was—painful, complicated, and real—must be preserved and repeated.

This is my testimony. It is the testimony of Ruth, Elijah, Augustus, Isaiah, and all those whose names might otherwise be forgotten. It is about how cruelty can be systematized and justified, and how truth survives—in memory, in stories, in the simple fact of survival.

May it serve as one small piece of the great ledger that history is still compiling. A ledger that recognizes the humanity of those who suffered, the crimes of those who profited, and the importance of testimony that refuses to be silenced.