Enslaved People of the John Marshall House, 1783-1835

This dataset documents the enslaved people owned by Chief Justice John Marshall (b. 1755, d. 1835) from 1783-1835, most of whom labored at his Richmond home. In his early life, Marshall inherited enslaved individuals from his father and through marriage to his wife, Mary Willis Ambler. Throughout his adult life he actively purchased and sold individuals, acquiring a portion of wealth doing so. When Marshall passed away in 1835, his daughter, Mary Marshall Harvie, inherited the property and those who labored on it. Marshall’s five remaining sons inherited the majority of Marshall’s enslaved holdings at rural Marshall properties. In 1911, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (today known as Preservation Virginia) took stewardship of the home and in 1913 opened the house as a public museum. APVA staff compiled research throughout the twentieth century for the purposes of interpreting Marshall, his family, the physical structure, and the material objects of the home. However, it has only been in the last several decades that Preservation Virginia has conducted more focused research to understand the enslaved people who lived and labored at the John Marshall House. For this project, names of these enslaved people were extracted from a number of sources compiled by Preservation Virginia. These sources are located in different archives and libraries but have been digitized and collected as digital files. While Marshall likely enslaved almost 300 people, this dataset focuses on 64 who lived and labored at the John Marshall House in Richmond, Virginia.