BEXAR COUNTY – Among its storehouse of maps, documents, and records dating back to the mid-1700?s, the Bexar County Spanish Archives and Special Collections has bills of sale for human beings.
“I didn’t even know that slavery existed as much as it did in Bexar County,” said Lucy Adame-Clark, the first woman and Latina to become Bexar County Clerk.
She and Raven Correa, a researcher, and assistant in the clerk’s office, said a map shows nearly a third of Bexar County’s population was enslaved.
Although slavery wasn’t as prevalent as it was in East Texas or in the Deep South, Correa said, “There was still a lot of people being sold here, and that’s still an important thing to know.”
Correa said old handwritten records show men, women, and children were not bought and sold here in large groups, more than likely because Bexar County didn’t have an agricultural economy.
Instead, she said less than a handful were needed at a time, often for domestic work.
That was apparently the case, she said, with Jose Antonio Navarro, a prominent Tejano statesman, who had nine slaves, “mostly young women.”
Their bills of sale are in a Juneteenth display that Correa helped organize alongside Dr. David Carlson, the archivist for the Bexar County Clerk’s Office.
“I didn’t realize some of the influential people that were buying slaves,” Correa said.
Historian Mario Salas said his research shows Bexar County had 42 plantations at one time.
He said they were located wherever there was a creek, “All the way from the back of Fort Sam Houston to the back of Randolph Air Force Base, all the way south to where I believe the San Antonio River has a confluence with several creeks.”
Adame-Clark said this coming year, her staff will try to confirm those findings by cross-referencing maps and deed records.
“Once everything’s released and digitized, we are looking forward to see what else we can learn,” said Adame-Clark.
She said, “We have to face the fact that there was enslavement in Bexar County.”
The proof, Adame-Clark said, is in the bills of sale, which frequently describe the person sold as “a slave for life.”
Adame-Clark said she can only hope and pray they were free when they died and were no longer enslaved.
Related