E-Mail Me
Get your own Free Home Page
Joseph Hanks had left behind a considerable amount of unfinished business in Richmond County when he first departed from there in or around June of 1782. Firstly, his mother's estate was not yet settled. Although illiterate, by April 1, 1782, he had duly submitted to the county court his account of his administration of the estate. The four men (three of them neighbors of Hanks) who had been appointed to appraise Katherine Hanks' estate had already submitted their inventory and appraisement to the court on August 2, 1779. But the four individuals (again, three of them nieghbors) who were appointed by the court on January 7, 1782, "to divide the estate...according to law and make report" had not yet done so. Apparently, the gentlemen justices of Richmond County were following the letter of the law with this poor family, and not allowing Joseph Hanks to see to the division of the possessions, or the proceeds from the sale of them, among the various heirs himself. Therefore, he had left the Rappahannock and the Tidewater in June, 1782 without his share of the inheritance. It should be noted that one of the gentry appointed to divide the Katherine Hnaks estate was Joseph Hanks' 1781 co-employer Griffin Murdock Fauntleroy, who figures significantly in Joseph's last years in Richmond County.
A second compelling reason for Joseph's return was the fact that he was owed by two former gentlemen-planter employers of his an amount of money that for someone of his standing was the equivalent of a full year's salary: 29 pounds of Virginia money. The debt had fallen past due on January 16, 1782, so it seems it reflected services rendered by Hanks up until the end o 1781. The debt was owed to him jointly, by the above-named Friffin Murdock Fauntleroy (1747-1794), a planter in his mid-thirties who in 1777 had purchased a plantation on the west bank of Farnham Creek, and by Richard Beale (1759-1819), a recently married 23-year-old aristocrat whose plantation faced Fauntleroy's on Farnham Creek's east bank. The diaries and account books of other Richmond County planters of the period indicate that a figure in the vicinity of thiry pounds was considered an acceptable year's salary for an experienced plantation overseer. An assistant or inexperienced overseer would recieve much less-perhaps ten or fifteen pounds. (Sometimes, alternatively, the overseer would be paid a share of the plantation's profits-e.g., one-seventh or one-tenth.) In most cases, overseers were hired for one-year periods beginning and ending around Christmastime or New Year's Day-unless the overseer was hired to fill the unexpired term of a predecessor.
Naturally, the planters of Richmond County hired poor whites, from time to time, for purposes other than overseeing the slaves and the crops. Carpenters, joiners, cabinetmakers and other craftsmen were also in their hire on a temporary basis. But Fauntleroy and Beale did not own their lands and houses in common-it is extremely unlikely that they would have hired a simple craftsmen jointly to erect buildings or wharves, for example, or to craft other improvements on their indivdual plantations.
On the otehr hand, the North Farnham Parish plantations of Fauntleroy and Beale in 1781 were rather small, although destined to grow. Griffin Fauntleroy's two tracts of land that comprised his home plantation in North Farnham plantation was larger-100 acres-but much of it was not tillable. It would have good economic sense for Fauntleroy and Beale to jointly hire as overseer someone like Joseph Hanks-who had lived many years in the neighborhood, whose reputation, as evidenced from his road surveyorship and other functions, was good, and who had sons in their upper teens who could assist him.
Taking these factors into consideration, and comparing Joseph Hanks' case with similiar ones appearing in cour records, it is almost impossible to escape the conclusion that Joseph Hanks was, in 1781 at least, the overseer for the adjoining Farnham Creek plantations of Griffin Fauntleroy and Richard Beale. This is the judgement of the writer, who also judges that it is of great significance that only 27 years before Lincoln's birth, the head of his mother's family was by all appearances a whip-cracking overseer supervising the work of some forty slaves.
Get your own Free Home Page