Silas Burke was one of the Attorneys, Business Manager and Overseer for William Henry Fitzhugh, 1792-1830, the largest landowner in Fairfax County at that time, who owned 22,000 acres referred to as ‘Ravensworth.’ As background on William Henry Fitzhugh see the topic; ‘Drafting Slave Release Provisions,’ and read his Wikipedia entry for background knowledge. Because of his position at Ravensworth, Silas would have been involved in helping to evaluate ways to prepare the Ravensworth slaves for their future freedom release set out in William’s Will. They set up an experimental plan that had never been done before in Virginia – and received praise in several written Articles referenced below. They decided to teach a selected number of slaves how to run a farm – from planting-production-profit – skills that Silas was already demonstrating as part of his overall job for the Ravensworth farm in his position as Business Manager and Overseer.
As one of the Attorneys, Business Manager and Overseer of Ravensworth, Silas’ role included maintaining records, account books and daily operations in order to track and achieve successful productivity. Although he was the Business Manager of his own personal farm of about 187 acres, which also had slaves he had inherited from his father’s Estate, he had an Overseer, John A. Marshall, to run daily operations. Silas was in an excellent position to pass on knowledge in the ‘slave tenant farm’ experiment on the Ravensworth farm. In addition, both William Henry Fitzhugh and Silas were documented anti-slavery proponents so their desire to encourage development of slaves for their future release was mutual.
The experimental idea they developed was to take 2 slave family units and settle them on small pieces of land on the vast Ravensworth property. On these small farms, the slaves were considered to be ‘tenants’ (hence the experiment became known as the ‘Slave Tenant Farms’ of Ravensworth) who had to ‘pay rent for the land and livestock that William Henry Fitzhugh furnished to them.’ They were provided with a team for ploughing whenever they requested it – charging them a ‘moderate fee’ for its ‘hire’ like in the normal world of trade. They were also given ‘credit’ for the work they did in the overall Ravensworth farm accounting books. This taught record keeping and profitability responsibility as to how to run their own independent farm in their future freedom life. (NOTE: Although it was not mentioned in the various research materials, they must have been taught how to ‘read and write’ in this experiment in order to understand receipts and bookkeeping. At that time in history, it was against the law to teach slaves to ‘read and write.’ https://scholarworks.wm.edu pgs. 115-123
Sources for above statistics and structure of the Ravensworth ‘slave tenant farm’ experiment:
(1) Northern Virginia Slavery : a statistical and demographic investigation, by Donald M. Sweig, College of William & Mary; (2) William H. Fitzhugh, Esq., African Repository and Colonial Journal (1825-1849), American Periodicals, Vol. 6 (August 1827): 185; and (3) Freedom is Not Enough: African Americans in Antebellum Fairfax County by Curtis L. Vaughn, pg. 65
In this experiment, they began with one slave family – settling them on the farm land set aside, experimenting with procedures for accountability. They studied how the plan was working for 6 months before expanding it to their second slave family unit. The second slave family unit was settled in. It was planned to bring in additional slave families, with the same guidelines as they expanded the experiment. Unfortunately, William unexpectedly died in 1830. At his death, Abolitionist Editor, Benjamin Lundy, praised the experiment project managed on the Ravensworth farm. Lundy was Editor of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, founded in 1821, forerunner to The Pennsylvania Freeman:
‘The untimely demise of this patriotic Virginian will, probably, arrest an experiment that he set on foot, relative to the advantages of a system of mitigated slave labor— emphatically one of the most important steps yet taken by the friends of emancipation, in our southern States. Would that we had a few more such men as him—whose prejudices were sufficiently subdued to let intelligent philanthropy and even-handed justice have a due influence upon their actions.’
“The Late Wm. H. Fitzhugh,” Benjamin Lundy, Genius of Universal Emancipation, December 1830, Vol. IX Edition, pg. 132
Also, The Obituary Memoir in the Phoenix Gazette (forerunner to renaming it The Alexandria Gazette) on June 5, 1830 referenced the activities happening at the Ravensworth farm at William’s death:
…. ‘Upon his estate of Ravensworth, Mr. Fitzhugh was earnestly engaged in plans for bettering the moral condition of his slaves, and had made considerable and satisfactory progress therein, at the time of his loss to society and his country.
"Obituary Memoir,” African Repository and Colonial Journal (1825-1849), American Periodicals, 6, no. 3
