Food for Thought

[L Verge]

(08-19-2019 06:58 AM)bob_summers Wrote:  

(08-18-2019 06:07 PM)L Verge Wrote:  [quote='bob_summers' pid='78327' dateline='1566160031']
[quote='L Verge' pid='78322' dateline='1566151224']
[quote='Anita' pid='78317' dateline='1566091609']
[quote='L Verge' pid='78315' dateline='1566086869']
[quote='Anita' pid='78314' dateline='1566080245']

Thanks for the information, Bob. Were the Mudds able to pay them for their services, or did Henry Lowe Mudd and Jeremiah Dyer help out? What about when Dr. Sam was in prison?

Laurie: Sam & Sara were apparently able to pay their post-emancipation farm hands themselves. Frank Washington testified at the trial that Dr. Mudd paid him $130 a year, equivalent to $4,000 today.

But it was obviously a financial struggle for Sara to pay farm workers and legal bills after Sam went to prison. She paid Ewing his fee, which she said was "not an inconsiderable one." She also paid $2,000 to print 700 copies of Ewing's arguments and the evidence he offered to defend Sam. Ewing gave these out to the military jurors and anyone else he thought could help Sam's case.

The money for all this probably came from a combination of Sam & Sara's own savings, plus help from Mudd and Dyer family members. Online inflation calculators say that $1,000 in 1860 was equivalent to $30,000 today, so the drain on family resources was enormous.

Thanks for the info. Can we assume that they also entered into sharecropping or tenant farming agreements with the free families? I know that's how my family managed two farms from the post-Civil War period until the death of tobacco farming in Maryland ca. 1960.