1833 personal property assessment

The 1833 Personal Property Assessment for Prince George’s County provides invaluable data for reconstructing kinship groups amidst the chattel slavery of the Jacksonian Generation. Organized by the election districts, it explicitly links individual enslavers to the enslaved people they claimed as property, listing the given names of individuals and their corresponding external market value for taxation purposes. This record is invaluable as it goes beyond the anonymized data of federal census schedules, which merely provided age and sex brackets. Moreover, unlike the 1867 compensation lists (slave statistics), which were voluntary submissions and therefore incomplete, the 1833 Personal Property Assessment was a tax document and collected from all enslavers by county officials in the course of their duties. Except for omissions due to error or poor preservation, the assessment provides as complete a list as possible of the enslaved individuals in Prince George’s County.