In the 1700s, debt relief for wealthy colonists didn’t involve courts or bankruptcy laws. Instead, indebted planters used estate lotteries to liquidate everything they owned, including enslaved people.
Newspapers marketed these lotteries with multi-column “lottery schemes” that listed land, mills, livestock, tools, furniture, and the enslaved men, women, and children as prize lots. Slaves were described by name, age, and skills, treated the same as cattle, wagons, and acreage.
One example appeared in The Virginia Gazette in 1768. Planter Bernard Moore offered thousands of acres, a forge and gristmill, horses, cattle, and dozens of enslaved people, with prominent Virginians, including George Washington, named as official managers overseeing the drawing.
The clipping shows how entrenched this practice was and how deeply slavery was embedded in Virginia’s financial system, where human lives were routinely folded into estate liquidation.
