Archive · After 1783: the Berrien farm and the law of slavery
November 25, 1850
The 1850 slave schedule: the people John M. Berrien held in Chatham County
Three pages of the federal census of 1850, Schedule 2, for District 13 of Chatham County, Georgia, where the assistant marshal listed the people John Macpherson Berrien held in slavery: no names, only an age, a sex, and a colour for each.
What it says, in plain language
The 1850 census counted enslaved people on a separate schedule under the name of the person who held them. Berrien’s listing begins at line 5 of the right-hand column of the first page shown here, after Andrew Holloday’s four lines, runs through both columns of the second page, and ends twenty lines into the third, where William C. Daniell’s listing begins. The ages run from 68 down to 1. The last twenty lines are all women and girls. Nothing on the schedule says where these people lived or what work they did; Berrien’s papers speak of a rice plantation and a farm near Savannah.
What it adds to the boards
Board 3 follows one family of enslaved people at the Berrien farm in New Jersey: Isabella, Harriet, Ess, and Jack. This schedule is the Georgia end of the same family’s story, the child born in the house in 1781 grown into a man who held more than a hundred people and argued in the Senate that the Constitution’s slavery clauses were the price of union.
The schedule is the only place these 142 people are counted. It gives them no names. The ages and the note that twenty of the last lines are women and girls are all the record offers.
Page 1: Berrien begins at line 5, right
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Transcription
[Schedule 2. Slave Inhabitants in District No. 13 in the County of Chatham, State of Georgia, enumerated by me, on the 25th day of November, 1850. Ass't Marshal's signature.]
[The schedule has no names for the enslaved. Each line is one person, with the columns: number of slaves (1), age, sex, colour (B for black, M for mulatto), fugitives from the State, number manumitted, and deaf and dumb, blind, insane, or idiotic. Ditto marks repeat the entry above.]
[Page 1, right-hand column, line 5: "John M Berrien," followed by 38 lines (lines 5 to 42), the first ages 66, 64, 57, 41, 38, 42, 40, 37, 28, 17, 14.]
[Page 2, both columns, 84 lines, continued under his name at the head of each column; ages from 68 down to 1. A pencil note beside lines 23 to 25 of the right-hand column adds up the running total: 84, 38, 122.]
[Page 3, left-hand column, lines 1 to 20, headed "John M Berrien": 20 lines, all F (female), B (black), ages 34, 13, 27, 11, 9, 7, 6, 6, 9, 47, 24, 20, 43, 14, 29, 65, 29, 11, 9, 1. Line 21 begins the listing for William C. Daniell.]
[Our count of the lines under Berrien's name: 38 + 84 + 20 = 142. The figure 143 is sometimes cited for this schedule. The lines are hard to read in places, so the count should be checked again against the original before it is used as a fact.]
There is no transcription to give: the schedule records no names. The bracketed notes describe what is on each page, read from the Internet Archive images on October 21, 2026.