#slave tag

[archaicwonder]

Roman Bronze Slave Tag, 4th Century

Inscribed: TENE ME NEFUGIA ET REVOCA ME AD DOMNUMEVVIVENTIUM INARA CALLISTI Translation: "Hold me, lest I flee, and return me to my master Viventius on the estate of Callistus."

(This could have possibly been a tag for a dog's collar as well.)

[yearningforunity]

These copper slave tags, dating from 1831–1840, were worn by slaves in Charleston, South Carolina. These slaves were hired out by their masters for work at the trades shown on the tags, occasionally receiving some portion of the wages themselves. They were required to wear the tags, purchased annually from the city treasurer's office, or risk jail with fines levied on the masters. The "hire badges" or "slave tax badges," as they were also called, served to differentiate slaves that were legally "jobbing out" from Black freed-men, runaway slaves, slaves attempting to earn money on their own, and those whose masters did not pay the required tax.

As one of the few enduring artifacts possessed by individual slaves, these tags have become increasingly valuable to both collectors and scholars. Although hiring out slaves for wage labor was common throughout the southern United States before the Civil War, contracts or paper tickets usually documented it. Metal tags, stamped with "Charleston," the year, a trade, and a sequential number for each trade, were issued only in Charleston from 1783–1790 and from 1800–1865.