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# The Merchant
- URL: https://www.hotelflorida.org/the-merchant/
- Published: 2026-07-27T15:51:09.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-27T15:51:26.000Z
- Description: Of everything that ever passed through Samuel Philbrick's hands, the 202½ acres on the Weelaunee were the one piece of property the republic simply gave him. He sold it like everything else.
- Author: Alexandra Edwards
- Tags: American Property, American Violence

**Every acre of America was owned, at some moment, by someone for the first time. Pull the deed back far enough and you find a treaty signed under duress, a lottery wheel, a war.* American Property, American Violence *traces two lots of Georgia ground—the land that is now Cop City—through the nineteenth century, one owner at a time, because the property did not come before the violence. The violence is what made it. This is the third installment. Start with the* [**introduction*](https://www.hotelflorida.org/american-property-american-violence-introduction/)**, or catch up with* [**The Broker*](https://www.hotelflorida.org/the-broker/) *and* [**The Privateer*](https://www.hotelflorida.org/the-privateer/)**.*

On the fifteenth of January, 1822, a man named Samuel Philbrick sent three people down to the Savannah waterfront and put them aboard a sloop called the *Susan*, then loading lumber for New Orleans.

The [manifest](https://www.afrigeneas.org/slavedata/Roll.3.1822.html?ref=hotelflorida.org#:~:text=%23506%20Savannah%20Slp%20Susan%20M%3A%20Wm%2E%20I%2E%20Rogers%2016%20Jan%201822%20Deposition) records what its printed columns asked for and nothing else. Polydore, male, twenty-six years old, five feet ten. Monday, male, thirty-five, five feet eleven. Hannah, female, thirty-five, five feet two. The rest of the arrangement survives in a deposition the sloop's master swore at the far end of the voyage: Colonel Dennis of Savannah had called on him around the tenth of the month with "three Negroes" and a cargo of lumber to consign "to be disposed of at the Port of New Orleans"; the colonel then "had occasion to make a journey to Philadelphia"; and so it was "one Samuel Philbrick in the employ of Colonel Dennis" who sent Polydore, Monday, and Hannah to the ship.

The law that governed the shipping of enslaved people between U.S. ports required an oath: that no person on the manifest had been brought into the United States after the first day of January, 1808, the day the importation of enslaved Africans became a [federal crime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act%5FProhibiting%5FImportation%5Fof%5FSlaves?ref=hotelflorida.org). The oath was sworn. It came with an explanation attached, because two of the three could not speak English: they had been kept, the sworn account ran, "on a plantation of \[Dennis's\] where the majority of hands were Africans," all of them imported before the legal date.

Twenty-seven days later the *Susan* reached New Orleans, and an inspector looked at the people instead of the paperwork. He wrote his finding on the same sheet that carried the oath: "Monday and Hannah in this manifest have the appearance of New Negroes from the Coast — they can not speak English." His estimate was blunter still: "New Negroes from the Gold Coast three years since." Three years since was 1819—eleven years after the ban. The sheet now said two things that could not both be true.

If you read the [previous installment](https://www.hotelflorida.org/the-privateer/), both white names on that paperwork are familiar. Thirteen months after he sent the three to the wharf, Samuel Philbrick stood in the mayor's office of Savannah and swore out the fullest surviving account of the *Isabelita*—a hundred and ten Africans taken at sea by his privateer and sold at Amelia Island into exactly this Georgia, despite the law forbidding it. Colonel Richard Dennis, the Savannah merchant, testified in the same case; he is the witness who called it "notorious" that William Bowen had marched 70 of the *Isabelita* people into the Creek Agency.

Hold Dennis's sworn story against the inspector's note and it comes apart. For the oath to be true, Monday and Hannah had to have lived in the United States since the first of January, 1808, at the latest—fourteen years, by the time they stood on the New Orleans levee—without learning any English at all. The inspector, who had no story to protect, resolved the contradiction by looking at the two people in front of him: "New Negroes from the Gold Coast three years since." If he was right, Dennis's plantation was not a place where enslaved people grew old without learning English. It was a place where recently-landed Africans were held—and the sworn account of it was the cover under which two of them became legal domestic cargo. That is William Bowen's business described from the paperwork side: smuggled people, a holding place inland, forms that made them sellable. Whether Dennis was in that business the record doesn't say for certain; where Monday and Hannah came ashore, and in whose coffle they walked into Georgia, it doesn't say at all.

## The wheel of fortune

One month before the wharf, and 150 miles inland, there was a drawing.

At Milledgeville, through the last weeks of 1821, the state of Georgia raffled off the land it had taken from the Muscogee that January, via [the cession William McIntosh signed](https://www.hotelflorida.org/the-broker/). The mechanics were [two wheels](https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/land-lottery-system/?ref=hotelflorida.org): in one, a ticket for every eligible Georgian (free, white, male, eighteen or over, a citizen, three years resident in the state); in the other, slips of paper listing the numbers of the confiscated ground cut into squares of 202½ acres each. A name drawn from one wheel, a lot drawn from the other, married by chance, recorded by clerks. Land came in as plunder and went out as luck.

Some turn of those wheels in December 1821 married the name of [Samuel Philbrick of Chatham County to Lot 83 of District 15, Henry County](https://web.archive.org/web/20250904062626/http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/deeds/1821/1821pq.txt): 202½ acres of pine and oak near a river the Muscogee called Weelaunee. He qualified by a margin of months—three years' residency, and the earliest record of him in Georgia is 1818, when a [Spanish brig shot his schooner's rigging to pieces](https://www.hotelflorida.org/the-privateer/#three-hundred-holes-in-the-sails) and the *Carony* limped into the Savannah River with him aboard. He was twenty-eight. He owned no land anywhere else, as far as I can tell. He worked, that winter, as another man's hands.

## The man on the ground

In April 1822 the *Susan* cleared Savannah again, and this time the owner's column reads "Saml Philbrick"—the first time he appears in the trade under his own name. The manifest carries a single line: Menteith, male, twenty-six, five feet eight. Cleared the fourth of April, examined at the [Balize](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%5FBalize,%5FLouisiana?ref=hotelflorida.org) on the twenty-eighth, landed at New Orleans by the sixth of May, under a master's oath, written on the form itself, covering persons "transported Coastwise … to be sold as slaves, or to be held to service or labour."

![| Menteith | Male | Twenty Six | 5 ft. 8 in. | ✓ Black | Saml Philbrick     | Savannah Geo. Balize 28 April 1822. Examined and found to agree. Simion Horne[?], Inspr. New Orleans 6th May 1822. Inspected and found to agree. P. Deneranville[?], Insp. I Wm. J. Rogers do solemnly swear to the truth of the annexed manifests of negroes, mulattoes, & persons of Colour — transported Coastwise in the Sloop Susan from the port of Savannah to the port of New Orleans, to be sold as slaves, or to be held to service or labour; & that no change has taken place in the number or description of the said persons of Colour since my departure from the said Port of Savannah. — Wm. J. Rogers. Sworn before me this __ day May 1822. Ben Chew, Coll. — Let the Slaves be Examined & if found correct permit them to be landed. Ben Chew, Coll.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c9/26/c9268db0-4e33-47e1-ac49-909ef57eb644/content/images/2026/07/31204_188985-00273-1--1.jpg)

The manifest and its oath. Image from "Slave Manifests of Coastwise Vessels Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807-1860," the National Archives in Washington, DC.

By September Philbrick was [advertising](https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn86053121/1822-09-05/ed-1/seq-3/?ref=hotelflorida.org#words=PHILBRICK) several "dwelling houses" to rent, and giving notice in the same papers that I. Minis—[Isaac Minis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac%5FMinis?ref=hotelflorida.org), of the Savannah merchant family—would be out of town, with Philbrick to act as his attorney. The arrangement is the same as January, with Col. Dennis: an established principal absent, and Philbrick trusted on the ground.

In January 1823 the *Susan* sailed again under a new master, and again the manifest is one line: Antonio, male, thirty-five, five feet nine, owner or shipper listed as "Sam Philbrick, Savannah." In other words, an enslaved man with a Spanish name was sold by the *Isabelita*'s witness just before he would give that [testimony](https://www.hotelflorida.org/the-privateer/) about the illegal importation of Africans from a Spanish slave trader.

## Paid once, never again

Somewhere in those same months, [the land in Henry, now DeKalb County](https://www.hotelflorida.org/american-property-american-violence-introduction/), went.

The tax rolls tell it in one entry and an absence: Philbrick paid tax on lot 15-83 once, in [1822](https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3H3-3SQH-H?view=index&personArk=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3A6ZM5-NJ7S&action=view&cc=4130006&lang=en&ref=hotelflorida.org), and never again. By 1823 it was out of his hands, sold to a buyer whose name may have burned with DeKalb County's records in the courthouse fire. I haven't been able to find it. As far as I know there was no cabin, no clearing, no crop. He never lived on it; he likely never even saw it.

Instead the state's luck was converted into cash, the way the firm's lumber was converted into cash, the way Menteith was, the way Antonio was: an asset entered, priced, and moved off the books. Of everything that ever passed through Samuel Philbrick's hands, the 202½ acres on the Weelaunee were the one piece of property the republic simply gave him. He sold it like everything else.

## The climb

From January 1824 Philbrick was back in Savannah, trading from [Gibbon's building on Market Square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas%5FGibbons%5FRange?ref=hotelflorida.org)—gunpowder and bullets alongside sugar, rum, bacon, raisins, and other groceries. The square was Savannah's commercial heart, and its business was public: produce, dry goods, and, at the stands of the city's auctioneers, people. The building he traded from still stands.

![A historical brickfront building with red and white striped awning, against a blue sky.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c9/26/c9268db0-4e33-47e1-ac49-909ef57eb644/content/images/2026/07/1920px-102-104_West_Congress_Street_-1820-.jpg)

Brickwork detail on Thomas Gibbons Range. Photo by Ron Cogswell, via Wikimedia.

The climb, briefly: Philbrick & Scranton, grocers at the square, [advertising treble refined loaf sugar in 1826](https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn83016084/1826-08-24/ed-1/seq-4/ocr/?ref=hotelflorida.org). A trip north that fall to Ashby, Massachusetts, to marry Priscilla Elvira Bascom, a minister's daughter who had come to Savannah to teach. Philbrick & Baker, "auction & commission business," [announced in September 1828](https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn83016084/1828-09-11/ed-1/seq-3/?ref=hotelflorida.org#words=Philbrick+PHILBRICK) on the dissolution of the firm of I. Minis—the apprenticeship paying out as stock in trade. By 1833 he was [crying sales alone](https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn87062328/1833-06-06/ed-1/seq-3/ocr/?ref=hotelflorida.org); by 1834 the stand was S. Philbrick & Co.

One document from the middle of the climb: on September 14, 1832, Philbrick sold Mary, a woman of about forty, for $337.03, to William Taylor as trustee for Elizabeth A. Goodwin and her children. The deed conveys her "with all her future issue and increase"—a clause that priced children who did not exist, because the 1808 end of importation left a supply problem, and slave owners and traders met the demand with the [babies of enslaved women](https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/hidden-voices/enslaved-women-their-families/motherhood-and-children?ref=hotelflorida.org).

The auction rooms of that Savannah cried enslaved people with the dry goods, and Philbrick's stand was one of them. In [March 1829](https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn87062327/1829-03-28/ed-1/seq-3/?ref=hotelflorida.org#words=PhiLbrick+PHILBRICK) it sold a girl named Sukey; on the [first of November, 1830](https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3H3-19VH-4?view=fullText&keywords=Samuel+Philbrick&lang=en&ref=hotelflorida.org), Philbrick sold to the highest bidder a woman named Dye, whose husband Jeffrey had just passed away, and her two children. Thirteen years later, on [the same 1842 page](https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82015878/1842-01-04/ed-1/seq-3/?ref=hotelflorida.org) as the firm's ads for watches, sugar, and railroad stock, S. Philbrick & Co. advertised "a likely wench, a field hand"—four words that read as a woman for sale, with no other information provided.

## One spring, twenty-three people

In March 1836 the brig *Augusta* cleared Savannah for New Orleans with eight people aboard under Philbrick's firm. Primus was twenty. Ben was twenty. Tom was twenty-five. Jane was thirty, and traveled with her son, six months old, whom the manifest does not name. Jenny was nineteen, and traveled with her daughter Rosetta, eight months. Fanny was twenty-eight. They were examined at the Balize on the twentieth of March and landed by the twenty-sixth.

![Scan of a manifest listing enslaved people shipped to New Orleans.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c9/26/c9268db0-4e33-47e1-ac49-909ef57eb644/content/images/2026/07/31204_188990-00966-1--1.jpg)

Manifest listing eight enslaved people shipped by Samuel Philbrick's firm, 1836\. The youngest was 6 months old. Image from "Slave Manifests of Coastwise Vessels Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807-1860," the National Archives in Washington, DC.

Two months later the firm shipped fifteen more. The brig *Two Sisters* cleared Savannah on the twenty-fourth of May, 1836, the owner column reading "S. Philbrick & Co." Balcom\[?\] was forty-five. Wilford\[?\] was eighteen. Jerry was forty-seven. John was twenty-one. Moses was twenty-nine. Philo\[?\] was seventy years old. Molly was fifty. Jane was six. Eliza was eighteen. Sally was twenty-four, and traveled with her two children, who have no names in the record. Nanny was fifty. Clara\[?\] was twenty-four. Deborah was seventeen.

The passage took a month. At the Balize on the twenty-fourth of June the inspector compared the people to the paper, found the count one over, and wrote as explanation: "Deborah had a child on the passage."

Fifteen people boarded at Savannah; sixteen landed at New Orleans. The manifests existed precisely for this arithmetic—a sworn count at one end checked against a head count at the other, so that no one could slip an illegal African into the coastwise trade. A seventeen-year-old gave birth somewhere at sea in June, on a brig between the Savannah bar and the mouth of the Mississippi, and the event entered the federal record as a corrected cargo figure. The *Isabelita*'s numbers [shrank at every station of the story](https://www.hotelflorida.org/the-privateer/#a-ship-with-two-names); these add one. The child's name is not recorded.

Ages six to seventy, whole families, two nursing infants in March and a birth at sea in June: this reads less like a market selection than like a household or a plantation force liquidated entire, in the last boom season before the [Panic of 1837](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic%5Fof%5F1837?ref=hotelflorida.org). Whose estate, or whose debts, produced twenty-three people for the New Orleans market in one Savannah spring is a question the 1835–36 papers may still answer, though I haven't found it yet.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c9/26/c9268db0-4e33-47e1-ac49-909ef57eb644/content/images/2026/07/31204_188990-01091-1.jpg)

"Deborah had a child on the passage." Image from "Slave Manifests of Coastwise Vessels Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807-1860," the National Archives in Washington, DC.

These lists put a writing problem on the table, one I'd rather acknowledge than ignore. [Saidiya Hartman](https://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-abstract/12/2/1/32332/Venus-in-Two-Acts?ref=hotelflorida.org) has written about what it means that people like Deborah survive in the archive only in the vocabulary of their sale—a name, a sex, an age, a height, an owner—and about the twin temptations that follow: to say nothing, which finishes the erasure, or to invent an interior life, which takes from them one more time. I have tried, here, to do neither. 

## The regular line

The trade didn't stop when the boom did. In 1840 Philbrick's firm shipped two more people to New Orleans: a man recorded as "Tom," in quotations like that, age thirty-five, and Edward, a boy of twelve.

![Fanny | Female | 40  | 5 ft. 6[1?] in. | Black | Saml Philbrick     | Savannah ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c9/26/c9268db0-4e33-47e1-ac49-909ef57eb644/content/images/2026/07/31888_1421012671_0004-00114-1--1.jpg)

A fragmented manifest document records Fanny's journey from Savannah to Baltimore. Image from "Slave Manifests of Coastwise Vessels Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807-1860," the National Archives in Washington, DC.

Then, on June 26, 1841, a woman named Fanny, forty years old, was put aboard the brig *Rob't Bruce* at Savannah, bound not south but north, to Baltimore. The *Rob't Bruce* was a regular Savannah-Baltimore packet, and her Savannah agents were [S. Philbrick & Co. themselves](https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82015878/1842-01-04/ed-1/seq-3/?ref=hotelflorida.org): the firm booking freight on one side of the page, shipping Fanny on the other. On the reverse of the manifest is the Savannah customhouse clearance, and beside the master's signature, this time, is Philbrick's own—sworn to the boilerplate the coastwise trade had used since 1808, that the persons described "were not imported or brought into the United States since the first day of January, one thousand eight hundred and eight."

![I, Thos. Fitzgeral[d], Master of the [Brig] called the Rob't Bruce of Sava[nnah], and Saml Philbrick, owner o[f the] Slaves, do solemnly swear, to the best of our knowledge and be[lief, that the persons] herein described, were not imported or brought into the United S[tates since] the first day of January, one thousand eight hundred and eigh[t, and that under the l]aws of this State, they are held to service or labour. Sworn to, this 26' day of J[une 1841]. Before me, W. W. Wash, Dpy Col. [Signed] Th[os. Fitzgerald], S. Ph[ilbrick].](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c9/26/c9268db0-4e33-47e1-ac49-909ef57eb644/content/images/2026/07/31888_1421012671_0004-00113-1.jpg)

Detail of the reverse side of Fanny's manifest, where Philbrick signed his own name to the oath. Image from "Slave Manifests of Coastwise Vessels Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807-1860," the National Archives in Washington, DC.

That form had been in Philbrick's life for nineteen years. In 1822 it traveled around him: other men swore it over Polydore, Monday, and Hannah, and a New Orleans inspector contradicted it on the page, and it was filed anyway. In 1841 it bears his signature. He enters this paperwork as the employee a deposition mentions in passing, and leaves it as the principal whose own hand is on the oath.

## The bricks

The 1840 census shows Philbrick and his family living in Percival Ward with 5 enslaved people in the household: one adult man and two adult women, a man or boy between the ages of 10 and 23, and one girl under the age of 10\. 

In February 1842 Philbrick bought lots 37 and 38, Brown Ward—a corner on Chippewa Square, just a few blocks down Bull Street from his 1840 residence—from William Crabtree Jr. The [deed](https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3Q5-7DXY?view=fullText&keywords=Samuel+Philbrick&lang=en&ref=hotelflorida.org) says he paid $2000; Moses Eastman would later swear the payment was actually railroad bonds worth fifty cents on the dollar.

That year Philbrick and his partner Stephen Gardner contracted with [Henry McAlpin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%5FMcAlpin?ref=hotelflorida.org) for the bricks to build two mansions—one for each partner. McAlpin was the brickmaker of the Hermitage plantation upriver, which is to say the bricks themselves were molded and fired by enslaved workers. By [Philbrick's sworn account](https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3H3-19KD-9?view=fullText&keywords=Samuel+Philbrick&lang=en&ref=hotelflorida.org) the terms were easy: pay as convenient while the building went up, in cash or railroad bonds at eighty cents, or take five years' credit at his option.

![A black and white photo of a square plantation home with columns, amid overgrown bushes and large trees.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c9/26/c9268db0-4e33-47e1-ac49-909ef57eb644/content/images/2026/07/4a22334v-1701362618-1.jpg)

The Hermitage Plantation, where enslaved workers made bricks known as "Savannah Grey." Some of those bricks ended up in the Philbrick-Eastman House. Image from the Library of Congress.

The walls went up and the roof went on, and then, on April 28, 1843—McAlpin's bill still owing, the interior of the house untouched—Philbrick sold everything in a single day. To Moses Eastman: both his properties, for $8,500; all his household and kitchen furniture, for $903; and, in the bill of complaint's words, "three negro slaves named Frances Lodoiska & Richard," for $800\. His stated plan was to move his family north. Three days later the firm of S. Philbrick & Co. dissolved; on the ninth of July it stopped payment; on the twenty-second of August it assigned everything left to a trustee for its creditors. Gardner, two weeks earlier, had sold his own lots and "three slaves named Garrick Dinah & Henry" to his brother.

McAlpin sued and won $2,266.85; he had Philbrick and Gardner arrested on the judgment, and they bonded out under Georgia's act for the relief of honest debtors. Then, in December 1844, he filed in equity, charging that the April sales were "mere cloaks"—fraudulent conveyances by insolvent men to favored insiders, made while the seller went on living exactly as before. Because that was the visible fact on Chippewa Square: the house built with McAlpin's bricks was finished with Eastman's money in the fall of 1843, and the man who moved in, and stayed, was Samuel Philbrick.

The answers, sworn in May 1845, had an explanation for the arrangement. Nobody had been insolvent, everything was bona fide, and Philbrick had simply changed his mind about moving north—so from November 1843 he occupied the mansion as Eastman's tenant, paying, by Eastman's sworn account, an annual rent of three hundred dollars for the house, one hundred for the furniture, "& one hundred & twenty five for the two negroes."

The two. Eastman had sold Lodoiska in June 1844\. Frances and Richard had been sold with the furniture in April 1843 and then hired back, by the year, into the household of the man who sold them. The sale moved them, on paper, from Philbrick's column to Eastman's, but it didn't really move them at all.

Two juries heard the case, a year apart to the day. On February 13, 1846, the first found for McAlpin: the sale to Eastman was annulled as fraudulent, and the decree ordered that "the two remaining negroes Francis & Richard be delivered up" and sold under execution, with the house, for the benefit of Philbrick's creditors. The defendants won a new trial. On February 13, 1847, the second jury wrote one line: "We decree for the Defendants." McAlpin took nothing and paid $108.70 in costs.

For the white parties, the year between the verdicts was a mere question of title. For Frances and Richard it was two futures held open at once: the auction block, to pay a brickmaker's judgment, or remaining the property of Eastman and the hired labor of Philbrick, the seller and the buyer splitting them the way the rent receipts split the house. The second future is the one the law chose. No filing in the case asked them anything, and the record cannot even settle whether Frances was Frances or Francis.

The house still stands on Chippewa Square. The marker outside it today calls it the [Philbrick-Eastman House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philbrick%E2%80%93Eastman%5FHouse?ref=hotelflorida.org)—the whole arrangement, his residence and Eastman's money, preserved in a hyphen.

![An American flag is displayed in front of a columned entrance to a Greek Revival-style city mansion.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c9/26/c9268db0-4e33-47e1-ac49-909ef57eb644/content/images/2026/07/17-W-McDonough-St-Savannah-GA-front.jpg)

The front of the Philbrick-Eastman House in Savannah, Georgia. Image from Judge Realty.

The verdicts appear to have had little impact on the family's respectability. In November 1843—three months after the assignment for creditors—Philbrick sat as a founding board member of the [Savannah Port Society](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/southerncharitiesproject/database/state/georgia/spsmins/?ref=hotelflorida.org); in 1844, 1847, and 1848 the city elected him [port warden](https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3HQ-V94Z-T?view=fullText&keywords=Samuel+Philbrick&lang=en&ref=hotelflorida.org). In 1849 the Chatham court granted him [letters of guardianship](https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L93G-JR24?view=fullText&keywords=Samuel+Philbrick&lang=en&ref=hotelflorida.org) over the persons and property of his three minor daughters: Catherine Alice, Eliza Eastman, and Ellen Holman Philbrick. 

The 1850 census finds the family in District 13, Chatham County: Samuel, his wife, the daughters. The slave schedule for the same household finds another five people, recorded the way the schedule was printed to record them—as ticks in age columns, because the form provided no space for names. A man of sixty-five. A woman of fifty-five. A man of fifty. Two men of twenty-five. Who the older couple were to each other, whether the men of twenty-five worked the store or the house, whether any of them had come through the manifests of the previous thirty years, the schedule was built not to say.

## The last lot, ten dollars

In 1852, with the new Laurel Grove cemetery barely opened, Philbrick bought lot 200 for ten dollars. Of all the ground he ever held—the raffled 202½ acres he never saw, the wharf lots, the mansion corner on the square—this is a lot he chose, and the last. He died on January 13, 1855, of what the register calls "debility," aged sixty-two, and was [buried in lot 200 the next day](https://www.interment.net/data/us/ga/chatham/laurel-grove-north-cemetery-surnames-p-q.htm?ref=hotelflorida.org). Two weeks later the Rev. Mr. Pierpont delivered a discourse at the Unitarian Church, "suggested by the death of the late Samuel Philbrick, Esq." The next winter, in a single February proceeding, five of his children who had died young were moved into the lot beside him. The three daughters survived him; the family went north after the war.

In 1886 a family genealogy printed the whole life as the family kept it: Samuel, born in Deerfield, "went to Georgia in 1819 as a teacher … d. 13 Jan., 1855 … in Savannah, Ga., [where he was a merchant](https://archive.org/details/genealogyofphilb1886chap)." A teacher who became a merchant. No privateer, no Amelia Island, no deposition—and no mention of the enslaved.

110 or 112 unnamed Africans, taken off the *Isabelita*, fought over in court and never freed. Polydore, who was twenty-six. Monday and Hannah, who had survived the Atlantic around 1819 and could not say so in English. Menteith, twenty-six, five feet eight. Antonio, whose Spanish name is the only clue to where he may have been before Savannah. Sukey, a girl, sold at the auction stand in 1829\. Dye and her two children, sold the same way the next year. Mary, about forty, sold with her "future issue and increase." Primus, Ben, and Tom. Jane, and her son of six months, who has no name. Jenny, and Rosetta, eight months. Fanny, twenty-eight. Balcom\[?\], Wilford\[?\], Jerry, John, and Moses. Philo\[?\], who was seventy. Molly and Nanny, both fifty. Jane, who was six. Eliza and Clara\[?\]. Sally, and her two children. Deborah, seventeen, and the child born at sea between Savannah and the Balize, who exists in the federal record as a corrected count. "Tom," thirty-five. Edward, twelve. The five people of the 1840 census, 3 adults and 2 children. Fanny, forty, carried north on the firm's own packet. The woman advertised in 1842 as "a likely wench, a field hand," who has no name in the advertisement. Frances—or Francis; the courts never settled the spelling. Lodoiska, sold on by Eastman in 1844\. Richard. And five people in an 1850 column: a man of sixty-five, a woman of fifty-five, a man of fifty, two men of twenty-five.

A federal judge once praised Samuel Philbrick's testimony as "so full clear & explicit as to preclude the necessity of resorting to any other." The manifests that carry his name are exactly as full, as clear, and as explicit—about sex, age, height, and owner, everything the forms wanted, and nothing the people were.

## The other ticket

The ticket drawn against the adjacent square—lot 82—carried the name of Uriah Brown, a Revolutionary War veteran. He never came either.

The Yeoman is next.