Remembered by Name

Enslavers used documents as powerful tools of commodification and control to reinforce the system of slavery and assert authority over enslaved people. Through records such as bills of sale, plantation inventories, slave schedules, account books, birth registers, and work logs, enslavers reduced human beings to units of labor and economic value, transforming individuals into property that could be measured, transferred, mortgaged, or inherited.

Documents allowed enslavers to treat enslaved people as fungible assets. Bills of sale recorded the purchase and sale of individuals, assigning them a price as if they were livestock. Estate inventories appraised them alongside tools and livestock. Insurance policies were sometimes taken out on enslaved laborers, further entrenching their status as financial assets. Through such paperwork, enslaved people were abstracted into numbers, ages, physical descriptions, and dollar amounts—codifying their value in ways that fueled the economy and the internal slave trade.

Enslavers also used documentation to monitor and discipline enslaved populations. Plantation records often tracked daily work output, behavior, punishments, and rations. Birth and death records allowed owners to keep tabs on natural increase or decline. Travel passes—documents enslaved people were forced to carry if they left a plantation—restricted movement and enforced surveillance. In many cases, enslavers kept detailed ledgers to manage debts, loans, and credit lines that used enslaved people as collateral.

These records were not neutral. They were bureaucratic instruments that structured everyday violence, making slavery legible and enforceable within legal, financial, and governmental systems. The act of documenting enslaved people helped solidify their status as property in the eyes of the state, the market, and the law—facilitating transactions, inheritance, taxation, and litigation.

Paradoxically, while these documents dehumanized, they also preserved traces of enslaved lives. Today, historians and descendants use these same records to recover names, kinship ties, labor histories, and resistance. But understanding their origin means reckoning with how deeply slavery was embedded in paperwork—and how paper itself became a tool of domination.