He'd provided me, on an earlier visit, a newspaper article from 1992 that pictured Mr. Jones' beautiful, curly walnut bedroom suite-procured in the 1850s in Philadelphia. My Mr. Jones' brother Martin's descendants in Lewisburg had inherited the suite and offered them for sale earlier in the 1990s.
He showed me one piece he had fortunately acquired in the late 1990s after the four-piece set had been broken up in an estate sale. It was a wonderful, eight-foot tall, double door wardrobe/chiffonier in pristine condition. When Mr. Wyatt turned to lead me to the shop's sitting room, I touched the polished, red-brown wood. It was surprisingly cool, though the shop was more than cozy. It was very warm.
Late in the afternoon, while riding about town processing my day's activities and discoveries, I noted the orderliness of civilized society.
The law requires records: a filing of assets, bequests, the details of the settlement of a person's things at death. Those, and much other information on a person's existence, can be found in the thousands of county courthouses across this land.
Thirty-pound ledgers and record books, hefty indices filled with excellent, old-fashioned handwriting in faded ink, an aged medium purple, provide a limited vantage point into the lives of those who live in a public way-civilized people, one could say. These are people who own and require what they own to be secured by law. They pay taxes and buy and sell land, and, before Emancipation, traded in black slaves. I learned that in 1860 a good twenty-something male slave was valued at $1,500-$1,800, and a female maybe $1,000-$1,200. In today's dollars, a male worth $1,500 then would equate to a value of some $40,000-$50,000. Children were worth less then because of life expectancy, I suppose. Those prices reflect when the market was good.
These are records for people who accumulate possessions and want the power of the legal system to protect their worldly goods. It does that without moral judgment. Thus is maintained a lawful and ordered society. There are people who leave their accumulated treasures to others and require the legal system to see that their wishes are carried out. Mr. Jones fit both those classifications. In his life and at his death, he was an archetypical "man on the make" as F.N. Boney in Southerners All (1990) called the expanding and era-shaping "bourgeoisie" of the white, Antebellum South. This vibrant, achieving middle class used the freedoms of the white, male, American experience to establish and enhance worldly wealth: families, farms, businesses-in short, the values and culture that were the standards for living and being. Such was the establishment and enhancement of nineteenth century civilization for white men in the growing United States.