Two Men, One Day: Finding Jim and Henry in the Virginia Auditor’s Records

I was researching Lewis E. Caperton of Monroe County, Virginia (now West Virginia), when a record from the Library of Virginia's Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative collection caught my attention.

On June 1, 1862, two enslaved men — Jim, age 26, and Henry, age 23 — left Lewis Caperton's holdings and reached Union lines. We know this because after the war, Virginia required commissioners in each county to compile lists of enslaved people who had "escaped to the enemy" during the conflict — part of a Reconstruction-era accounting tied to compensation claims that never materialized. Monroe County's return survives in the Auditor of Public Accounts records at the Library of Virginia, and it names Jim and Henry, their ages, and the date. In the remarks column, the commissioner noted that "Mr. L. E. Capertons were valuable hands."

That date is worth pausing on. Nine days earlier, on May 23, 1862, Union Colonel George Crook's brigade had defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Lewisburg, just one county to the north. Heth's retreating Confederates had actually moved south through Union, the seat of Monroe County, on their way to and from the fight. Union troops were suddenly nearby and visibly winning. Word would have moved fast through the enslaved community along the James River and Kanawha Turnpike. Whether Jim and Henry were responding directly to the news from Lewisburg, or whether June 1 was a date they had been waiting for a long time, the proximity is hard to ignore.

Lewis Caperton appears on the 1860 slave schedule for Monroe County with thirty enslaved people, all unnamed — just sex, age, and color. Routine, frustrating, and easy to set aside. But with Jim and Henry's 1862 ages in hand, I went back to the schedule. A 23-year-old in June 1862 would have been 21 in June 1860. A 26-year-old in 1862 would have been 24.

There is a 21-year-old male on the schedule. There is no 24-year-old male. The closest is a 26-year-old, which is too old to be Jim by two years.

I want to be careful here. Even the 21-year-old male is not provably Henry — correlation is not identification, and a thoughtful researcher could push back. And Jim's absence from the schedule has several possible explanations: he could have been acquired by Caperton after the 1860 enumeration, the commissioner could have misjudged his age in 1862, the enumerator could have rounded incorrectly in 1860, or Jim could have been hired out and counted under another owner that year. What I can say is that two men named Jim and Henry, ages 26 and 23, were held by Lewis Caperton in Monroe County until June 1, 1862, when they chose to leave. They share something with the tick marks on his 1860 slave schedule — they were people Lewis Caperton claimed to own — even if I cannot say with certainty which ones, or whether they were on that schedule at all.

For anyone working slaveholders in Virginia, Maryland, or other states with surviving Reconstruction-era escapee records, these returns are worth searching even when you think the slaveholder's records are exhausted. Virginia Untold (virginiamemory.com/collections/aan) is freely searchable and turns up names, ages, and dates that the 1860 slave schedules deliberately do not.

What came next for Jim and Henry is still open. Freedmen's Bureau labor contracts, United States Colored Troops enlistments, the 1870 census for men of those ages in Greenbrier, Kanawha, or counties along the Union army's lines of advance — any of those could carry their names forward.

The names behind slave schedule tick marks aren't always recoverable — but sometimes they are, and Virginia Untold is one of the places they survive. The work of bringing them back is open to anyone willing to do it.