Real People, Real Lives. A Reproduction Silver Collar Reflects on Real Impacts of Slave Trade

“Reign & Rebellion” encourages visitors to consider the impacts that Stuart monarchs had on Virginia’s growing reliance on the labor of enslaved men, women and children which, by the eve of the American Revolution, had come to define the economies of the southern colonies. It’s difficult to grapple with the very real consequences of Virginia’s reliance on the slave trade—we must remember that it is more than a conversation about economies and status, it involves real people and real lives. This reproduction silver collar, on display in “Reign & Rebellion” at the American Revolution

Museum at Yorktown, is among the ways to remember the human stories and lived experiences of those who were owned and enslaved by others. As property, some enslaved men were forced to wear silver collars. A silversmith advertised in a 1756 London newspaper his sale of “silver padlocks for Blacks or Dogs; collars &c.”

Preston Jones, Jr., a silversmith at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, based his reproduction of a collar on an early 18th-century painting in the collection of the Maryland Historical Society. The painting depicts a young, Black child and a son of his enslaver.

The silver collar around his neck boasts the status and wealth not of the wearer, but his owner. While the two are about the same age, we immediately understand from the depiction in the painting that their lives are very different.

Within the void of the reproduction silver collar on exhibit in “Reign & Rebellion,” we can better understand the very real lives impacted by the slave trade, and the ongoing fight for freedom and personal liberty that would run parallel to the Revolution.

—Katherine Egner Gruber, Curatorial Manager