This is Captain George A. Johnson’s receipt in the amount of $4,300 for the purchase of an enslaved woman named Jane, aged 18 years old. It was confiscated from the schooner Mary when it was captured during the Civil War.
Even though Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, slaves were still being bought and sold in the south. Multiple bills of sale for slaves in Georgia were recovered when the U.S. Navy intercepted the southern ship Mary and claimed both the ship and its contents as prize.
