He was born, he says on “a great big place that b’longed to Mister Jim Campbell; I don’t know just exactly how big, but there was a lot of us working on it when I was a little fellow.”  The place was evidently one of the plantations near Tallahassee; Thomas remembers that as soon as he was large enough he helped his parents and others raise “corn, peanuts, a little bit of cotton and potatoes.  Squash just grew wild in the woods; we used to eat them when we couldn’t get anything else much.”

The centennarian remembers his parents clearly; his mother was one Nancy and his father’s name was Adam.  His father, he says, used to spend hours after the candles were out telling him and his brothers about his capture and subsequent slavery.

Adam was a native of the West Coast of Africa, and when quite a young man was attracted one day to a large ship that had just come near his home.  With many others he was attracted aboard by bright red handkerchiefs, shawls and other articles in the hands of the seamen.  Shortly afterwards he was securely bound in the hold of the ship, to be later sold somewhere in America.  Thomas does not know exactly where Adam landed, but knows that his father had been in Florida many years before his birth.  “I guess that’s why I can’t stand red things now,” he says; “my pa hated the sight of it.”

Thomas spent all of his enslaved years on the Campbell plantation, where he describes pre-emancipation conditions as better than “he used to hear they was on the other places.”  Campbell himself is described as moderate, if not actually kindly.  He did not permit his slaves to be beaten to any great extent.  “The most he would give us was a ‘switching’, and most of the time we could pray out of that.”

“But sometimes he would get a hard man working for him, though,” the old man continues.  “One of them used to ‘buck and gag’ us.”  This he describes as a punishment used particularly with runaways, where the slave would be gagged and tied in a squatting position and left in the sun for hours.  He claims to have seen other slaves suspended by their thumbs for varying periods; he repeats, though, that these were not Campbell’s practices.

During the years before “surrinder”, Thomas saw much traffic in slaves, he says.  Each year around New Years, itinerant “speculators” would come to his vicinity and either hold a public sale, or lead the slaves, tied together, to the plantation for inspection or sale.

“A whole lot of times they wouldn’t sell ’em, they’d just trade ’em like they did horses.  The man (plantation owner) would have a couple of old women who couldn’t do much any more, and he’d swap ’em to the other man for a young ’un.  I seen lots of ’em traded that way, and sold for money too.”

Thomas recalls at least one Indian family that lived in his neighborhood until he left it after the War.  This family, he says, did not work, but had a little place of their own.  “They didn’t have much to do with nobody, though,” he adds.