The People the History Forgot: Slavery in the Shenandoah Valley
For generations, a comfortable narrative obscured the reality of slavery in the Shenandoah Valley. Historians are bringing the complex, vital truth to light.
There is a persistent and comfortable myth about the Shenandoah Valley’s relationship to slavery. It goes something like this: the Valley was settled by German and Scots-Irish dissenters who didn’t hold with the plantation system, mixed farming replaced tobacco, and the institution of slavery was therefore less central here than in the Tidewater or Southside. The Valley, in this telling, was a kind of “third South,” different enough from the slave-based plantation economy of eastern Virginia to be considered almost apart from it.
Historians have been taking that myth apart for decades. The more honest story is considerably more complicated, and more important to understand if you want to know what this Valley actually was in the two centuries before the Civil War.
The Numbers
By 1860, on the eve of the war, enslaved people comprised roughly 19 to 20 percent of the Shenandoah Valley’s total population. That figure obscures enormous variation from county to county. Clarke County, in the northern Valley, had an enslaved population that amounted to nearly 47 percent of all residents — a figure closer to Tidewater proportions than to the myth of a mostly free Valley. Augusta County’s enslaved population stood at around 20 percent. Shenandoah County, by contrast, had an enslaved population of roughly 5 percent, reflecting the stronger influence of Mennonite and Brethren communities whose religious traditions explicitly opposed slaveholding.
Jonathan Noyalas, a historian who has written what is now the definitive scholarly account of the subject, states directly in Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era that his work corrects “previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better there than in other parts of the South.” The enslaved population peaked, according to his research, at 26.1 percent of the Valley’s population in 1830 before declining to 20.4 percent by 1860; a decline partly attributable to the domestic slave trade, which moved enslaved people from the upper South to the lower South as Virginia’s economy shifted.
How Slavery Operated Here
The Shenandoah Valley’s version of slavery adapted to its mixed agricultural economy rather than the large-scale plantation model of tobacco or cotton production. Small family farms owned one or a few enslaved people; larger plantations owned many. Across the range of scale, white Valley residents were economically entangled with the institution; not only those who directly held enslaved people but those who interacted with a local economy in which enslaved labor shaped land values, produced goods, and set the cost of agricultural work.
One distinctive feature of Valley slavery was the widespread practice of slave hiring, in which enslaved people were leased from their enslavers to other farms or businesses for set periods, typically a year at a time. A Northern visitor to the Valley in 1847 documented the practice in detail, describing an annual auction on January 1 where enslaved workers were put up to the highest bidder for the year, with the hiring person providing bond with security for the hire payment due at year’s end. This system created economic flexibility for small landowners who couldn’t afford to own enslaved people outright while still allowing them to benefit from enslaved labor during peak agricultural seasons.
At the larger end of the scale, Belle Grove Plantation in Frederick County offers a documented case. When Major Isaac Hite Jr. married Nelly Madison in 1783, her father, James Madison Sr., gifted the couple 15 enslaved people. By the 1810 census, 103 enslaved people lived and worked at Belle Grove, laboring in the fields and in the plantation’s blacksmith shop, gristmill, sawmill, distillery, lime kiln, and quarry. Belle Grove is now a National Historic Landmark open to visitors; its interpretive programming directly addresses this history rather than suppressing it.
A Person Worth Naming
Betheny Veney was born enslaved in Luray, Virginia, and eventually purchased her own freedom in Massachusetts in the 1850s. She later wrote a memoir; one of the relatively rare first-person accounts of enslavement in the Valley’s geographic area. In that account, she described her treatment by one enslaver with a specificity that cuts through comfortable generalization: “She was kind to me, as I then counted kindness, never whipping me or starving me; but it was not what a free-born white child would have found comforting or needful.” The distinction between “kind, as enslaved people counted kindness” and actually free is the distinction that the comfortable myth about Valley slavery consistently papers over.
“She was kind to me, as I then counted kindness, never whipping me or starving me; but it was not what a free-born white child would have found comforting or needful.” — Beheny Veney
What Happened During the War
Noyalas’s scholarship focuses heavily on the war years precisely because they created unique conditions in the Valley. Union and Confederate forces fought over this territory repeatedly — Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign, and Sheridan’s 1864 destruction of the Valley’s agricultural capacity — which meant the region changed hands constantly, sometimes within days. For enslaved people, this created both danger and opportunity. Many escaped during the war, fleeing to Pennsylvania or enlisting in United States Colored Troops regiments or serving Union forces as scouts, laborers, and spies. Noyalas documents these acts not as exceptions but as part of a systematic pattern of enslaved people acting on their own behalf to force the Union to reckon with what emancipation actually meant.
The Valley they left, and in some cases returned to, was different after 1865. It was legally free, but it was also shaped for generations by a century and a half of an economy that had depended on enslaved labor to produce the grain that fed Confederate armies and earned it the name “the Breadbasket of the Confederacy.”
Where to Go From Here
Belle Grove Plantation near Middletown in Frederick County is the most accessible site for engaging with this history directly; the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which manages the property, has developed programming explicitly addressing the enslaved community’s history there. The National Park Service’s Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park integrates this history into the battlefield interpretations surrounding the 1864 Battle of Cedar Creek. Jonathan Noyalas’s book remains the most complete single scholarly treatment of the subject and is available through academic libraries and online booksellers.