L.[emuel] A. McAfee. Autograph Letter Signed. Newnan, Georgia. Dec. 28, 1850. 3pp.+stampless address leaf. To W.J.Peeples, Gainesville, Georgia.
“…I have sold but 3 Negroes yet, find the business dull and prices rather lower than I anticipated. Yet I think I will clear $1500 on the trip…so far as the Negro business is concerned send the Notice by return mail to Corinth. Heard Co., Ga….”
While Lemuel Austin McAfee was said to be a major landowner at the Alabama-Georgia border, both he and his correspondent, Peeples, were lawyers, not slave traders, and the sale of Negroes was probably a sidelight of his legal practice. Perhaps the slaves he put on the block were his own.
McAfee was later appointed a judge at Gainesville, and, after the start of the Civil War was elected to the Confederate Georgia Legislature, as was his brother, a Confederate Army Surgeon who owned nearly 100 slaves. The brothers were from a pioneer Georgia family, their maternal great grandfather having been killed by Indians while on an expedition with Daniel Boone. After the War, both brothers moved to Texas; Lemuel eventually settled in San Luis Obispo, California, where he died.