The federal government purchased the Norfolk Navy Yard from Virginia in 1801. The new federal shipyard was, in reality, the successor to the former State of Virginia Naval Yard, where enslaved labor was a common place, and these practices continued until the Civil War. Norfolk Navy Yard employed many slaves and these enslaved laborers provided their owners with a steady income. On occasion slaveholders dropped all subterfuge as they blatantly placed their enslaved workers on the federal payroll. A glaring example,is found in 1830 when Navy Yard Commandant,Commodore James Barron, placed two enslaved women Lucy Henley and Rachel Barron on the shipyard payroll, as "ordinary seamen" and signed for their wages, see thumbnail. Some idea of the human scale can be found in this exert from a 12 October 1831 letter of Commodore Lewis Warrington to the Board of Navy Commissioners in response to various petitions by white workers. His letter attempts both to reassure the Board, in light of the recent slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, which occurred on 22 August 1831, and to serve as a reply to the dry dock's stonemasons who had quit their positions and accused the project chief engineer, Loammi Baldwin, of the unfair hiring of enslaved labor in their stead.