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BY 1859, PHIL, A FORTY-FIVE- YEAR-OLD GEORGIA BONDMAN, WAS AS familiar with the village stables, shops, and houses of Thomaston, Upson County, as he was with many cotton fields and slave quarters in the surrounding countryside. He had been bought and sold at least four times by planters and villagers. In the early 1840s Phil had worked on Amos Rose's Upson plantation, until Rose fled to Alabama in 1842 to escape prosecution for mayhem. Probably to raise cash for his journey, Rose sold Phil to Rose's Thomaston lawyer, who quickly disposed of the slave to planter William Spivey. Spivey lived in Thomaston but operated a five-hundred-acre plantation a mile and a half northeast of the village, where his slaves cultivated cotton, corn, and wheat and raised swine and cattle. While working on the plantation, Phil was probably not the only one of Spivey's bondpeople who also traded his own produce to village residents - Mary Shackelford, the postmaster's wife, recalled that she had bought fruit from Phil on at least one occasion, paying for it with meat and meal (but he claimed she owed him twenty-five cents cash). After fourteen years Spivey sold Phil to Thomas L. Walker, a Thomaston dry goods merchant. Before absconding to Texas under a cloud of debt, Walker hired Phil out as a stable hand for Thomas Cauthorn's hotel. Phil and a fellow stable hand, Calvin, could come and go at will during their evenings, as long as one of them was there to answer the hotel bell that summoned a hand to take a customer's horse to the stable. Calvin said that Phil always left early, because Phil usually slept at Judah's house on William Spivey's farm. Judah testified that Phil was the father of her six children, and "when he goes to Judge Spivey's plantation, he stays at no place but [my] house, & keeps his clothes at [my] house." Although Phil was working at Cauthorn's stable in Thomaston on April 1, 1859, the night he allegedly shot Dr. Ansel T. Shackelford, Phil's double-barreled pistol and ammunition were later found above the door lintel of Judah's house.1
Like many Upson County slaves, Phil routinely traveled between village and plantation, either in coerced changes of residence and occupation or...