"Free" slave badge found in South Carolina
DCW
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Here is a very historic badge found by a metal detectorist in a South Carolina construction site. I thought I'd share for those interested. I know it isn't a US Coin, but it is fascinating just the same. The new owner is also an esteemed member here, John Kraljevich @Pistareen. Hopefully, he can chime in with additional info!
From Coin World:
https://www.coinworld.com/news/us-coins/metal-detectorist-finds-10th-known-1800s-free-slave-badge
Veteran South Carolina relic hunter Ralph Fields’ metal detecting prowess paid off Feb. 28 when he unearthed what is now identified as only the 10th known example of a copper Charleston Free Slave badge, one of only five in private hands.
Fields pinpointed the find on a construction site in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, seven miles southwest of Charleston.
Slaves in and around Charleston in the late 18th century and early 19th century were assigned numbered metal badges that were also stamped with the wearer’s occupation.
According to The Charleston Museum website at https://www.charlestonmuseum.org, “Enslavers were required to obtain a badge annually [for five shillings]from the city’s treasury office for any enslaved person working outside their domain. The resulting income from these ancillary services were sometimes kept by the enslaver completely, divided equally, or, in some recorded instances, kept by the enslaved laborer entirely.”
The Charleston Free Slave badge, sometimes referred to as a Freedman badge, was issued under a late 18th century Charleston ordinance.
“A city ordinance in place from 1783 to 1789 required all free persons of color above the age of fifteen to wear these badges in plain view,” according to the Charleston Museum website.
The Charleston Museum’s collection holds one of the five Free Slave badges not in private hands.
The badge’s obverse depicts a Phrygian, or Liberty, cap on a vertical pole. The word FREE in capital letters appears on the cap. Inscribed on a banner bisected by the pole is CITY OF and CHARLESTON. Engraved on the Fields badge in the area below and right of the cap is the number 147. There is no date.
The badge’s reverse illustrates that elements of the obverse motif were embossed through from the obverse.
The Fields badge is holed at the top, but the hole is plugged with dirt. Fields’ discovery has been acquired by a noted specialist in early coins and medals of Colonial America and Americana, John Kraljevich Jr., from JK Americana of Fort Mill, South Carolina.
Kraljevich said the backs of the medals are intended to be blank, though the 147 badge is a flip over double strike so it has a flattened design on the back.
Kraljevich says he currently has no immediate plans to part with the Fields discovery piece. Kraljevich also owns the only Charleston Free Slave badge marked with a letter, U, in the area where a number would normally be. The lettered example is currently in the second year of a five-year loan for exhibition at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
Kraljevich says the badge would have been one of the few possessions a former slave owned. He said institutions actively seek such items that can be interpreted as an important part of American history.
Warrenton, Virginia, writer Cliff Krainik, who is having an article on Fields’ discovery published in an upcoming issue of American Digger Magazine, says the Free Slave badge is considered the “Holy Grail” of badge collecting. Krainik says Fields is one of only four relic hunters to have dug a Free Slave badge — Pete Ellis found Free Badge Number 259 in Beaufort County during the winter of 2005; Hal McGirt recovered Free Badge Number 320 on a plantation site near Charleston in February 2012; and Free Badge Number 258 was dug on the banks of the Black River in the Low Country by Dr. Cantey Haile Jr. on Nov. 21, 2013.
One of the main reasons for the rarity of the 1.5-inch copper Free Slave badge, according to Krainik, is the number of people that would have been required to wear them to identify their free status. “According to the United States Census, no more than six hundred free persons of color were living in Charleston in 1790,” Krainik notes. “And unlike the later issued slave hire badges, the Free badge was not issued annually. So once a badge was obtained, presumably it was good in perpetuity.”
Dead Cat Waltz Exonumia
"Coin collecting for outcasts..."
Comments
That is absolutely fascinating! I've never heard of these badges before. Thank you for the post @DCW !
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Tom, formerly in Albuquerque, NM.
Very interesting. Difficult to comment on though.....people tend to hear what they want to hear. Conformational bias. It is a very interesting piece though. History. It is what it was.
Saw that... wish more cities would require this policy.
The professors at U of SC had a negative view of this practice. Much more labored and scientific approach.
Back in the 1990's, when I was a hard core diver , took a class on underwater archeology. In the U of SC pool gridded and drew objects. Never got to the insider club so to speak so no working on the state projects.
There nearly a dozen rivers between Wilmington NC and Charleston SC so blackwater diving was on the advanced and more than a bit dangerous side of the hobby... Seen everything from bottles, to coins, earthenware... others have found prehistoric canoes and sharks teeth, barges, ships, a T-top Trans Am, gold jewelry from the 1800's, civil war sword handles, cannon balls.
The Black River was decent viz of about 5 feet. The Pee Dee might have been 1 foot.
I had well over a hundred open water, wreck, and cave dives along with several certs... You typically dove solo even in a group. It was all in your mind but it could play freaky mind tricks. Eyes of a 40lb catfish staring back at you under a ledge!
A local dive legend took me under his wing for a few orientation dives. With a third guy they were looking for an old Civil War ship yard and wreck. I found a lost dive light from the early 1970's. The third guy nearly swam into a sunken shad net in the Pee Dee.
From then on kept to the Black River.
Wish I had stuck to it and chased Megalodon teeth.
Brings back cool memories. My metal detecting evolved into detecting lost tourist gold on sunny beaches.
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I would be very curious as to where in Mt Pleasant he was digging as that is where I live. There is so much construction going on all around the area that anyone metal detecting should be having a lot of fun.
WS
Museum piece. Significant historical artifact of a tragic institution of which the damaging effects continue to reverberate in our society.
My views on confederate related coinage are increasingly disturbing....
What a fantastic find
Latin American Collection
Very nice piece and great find.
Imagine walking around town wearing one of these?
Collecting these is almost the opposite of collecting Confederate coins. I wonder if people collect both or people specifically focus on different sides?
WOW!
Looking for Top Pop Mercury Dime Varieties & High Grade Mercury Dime Toners.
I'd like to see that in person
Here's a great article on these including photos of many specimens.
https://www.angelfire.com/sc2/tokenofthemonth/token026/
Here's the T. Harrison Garrett specimen:
Wow. I didn't know how much these are worth now.
This one sold for $32,200 in 2008! The Garrett specimen looks nicer than this one and sold for $4,000 back in 1981. I wonder how much that one is worth today.
This one was also excavated:
https://auctions.stacksbowers.com/lots/view/3-AVU8C/charleston-slave-hire-badge-ca-1783
@Zoins
The Garrett specimen is awesome, but why in the world would it be unholed?
I wonder how much the present example sold for?
Dead Cat Waltz Exonumia
"Coin collecting for outcasts..."
I'm not sure, two tother specimens, T. Grange Simons and Hal McGirt specimens, are also unholed.
Would be interesting to find out. I wonder if John will be selling the Ralph Fields specimen?
I wonder what happened to the person that lost it?
If you lose your id today, you can't vote or get on a plane. I wonder if it was similar back then or if you could be enslaved again?
They might never have lost it. You have 200+ years in between. They could have died of natural causes and it eventually ended up in the trash. Or 1000 other things.
This isn't confederate, it's pre- confederate.
You also can't absolve the federal government of blame, residual considering the Virginia influence in the colonial period.
That's true. I was more thinking what if someone had lost one.
These are from 1783 and 1784. This is even before the US Constitution which said slaves counted as 3/5 of a free person in 1789.
I never said it was Confederate
The Confederacy supported and promoted the institution of slavery.
Your exact quote was: "My views on confederate related coinage are increasingly disturbing...." I apologize if I mistakenly interpreted that as being relevant to this thread rather than simply a random thought.
And, at the risk of getting this thread closed, I'm simply pointing out that one cannot absolve the 13 colonies or resulting federal government from blame as they too supported and promoted the institution of slavery.
Yes, which is why even Founding Fathers are getting a new look from a historical perspective.
All of the northern States abolished slavery in the early 1800's.
Southern States persisted until the Civil War. Just because it occurred previously does not make it morally acceptable.
Look I respect the legal right iof collecting that material, I just find the fawning over it distasteful.
I guess it’s a neat piece and cool find but it’s something I have no interest in collecting. I get shivery just looking at it. I was at a Long Beach show a few years ago and there was someone selling historical artifacts. He had a few signs from German concentration camps and I thought that was very distasteful. Badges and concentration camp signs are very different but they’re not for me.
New York had slaves through 1827. New jersey had the equivalent of slaves until 1865.
You are more than welcome to turn up your nose at Confederate material. And, if you wish, early Federal material and all Washingtonia, Jeffersonia, etc. It's absolutely your right.
like it or not, it's a piece of history. Can we leave it at that?
I agree. There's a difference between studying artifacts and endorsing them.
It is fascinating and sickening at the same time.
Not sure what I’d do if I found that. I know I couldn’t keep it. It would have to go to a museum I suppose.
People are free to react as they see fit, but I think all history should be preserved. It is in the past - that's what makes it history.
That Free tag is an incredible piece of history. (Although I am not sure why its called a Freed Slave tag as it was for any person of color who was free, not just freed slaves).
I remember that years ago when I first heard this I thought it was inhumane to only count slaves as 3/5 of a person. In reality, they would have been better off if they were not counted at all.
Either way they weren't going to have rights - especially not the right to vote - but counting them as 3/5 of a person resulted in greater power for the slave states in Congress, since the census was inflated and those states were apportioned more Congressmen. Therefore, the states that allowed slavery had greater power in Congress to perpetuate the institution.
I’d guess most people today would be surprised by just how many slaves were in the US back then. By 1860, 40% of the population in the South were slaves. There were more slaves in the country than the population of the most populous state, NY.
Worth more graded and slabbed.
A very interesting piece of history. Would be a thrill to find such an artifact. Cheers, RickO
Agreed.
You can attach egregious behavior to any era, nation, peoples, from the dawn of time. Greeks, Roman's, British...
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Oh my... I see your point.
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...finally, the professor pays non-numismatic dividends to the boards!
I'm not drinking the kool aid that morality is static through the ages. The confederate flag issues are a clear indication society doesn't think so either.
Confederate material is offensive to a great percentage of Americans. If something is offensive we all should care. That is how we move forward.
To be honest I don't really understand this reasoning. Everything is offensive to someone. There are a lot of things that are offensive "to a great percentage of Americans" but proponents plow ahead nonetheless.
I agree that morality is not static throughout the ages, but it is very problematic to judge historical people by current standards.
As for slavery, there are more slaves in the world right this very moment than there were in America in all the pre-Civil War era years combined. Yet, we only hear people protesting the slavery that ended in 1865.
If the slave or freedman's tags help promote these discussions then that is one more reason to preserve and study them.
Because obviously it doesn't fit the current narrative.
I like historical debate as much as the next guy, but let's keep the conversation about the relic found. Please.
Dead Cat Waltz Exonumia
"Coin collecting for outcasts..."
That's an important artifact. Thanks for posting about it, Dennis.
I agree, let's keep the political and rationalizations out of this thread.
Well, just Love coins, period.
Alabama State Fair Association: Instituted A.D. 1875 Award Medal - by Tiffany & Co.
I found this Alabama State Fair piece interesting for its historical context.
As late as 100 years later in 1875 (and later), after the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation, the South was pretty open about how their economy was run.
It > @Zoins said:
What politics? I didn't post any.
It's a piece providing historical context, like the original.
It was mostly sarcastic.
Don't read things into what's not there.
Focus on history, not politics.