| AFRICAN AMERICAN SPECIFIC LINKS |
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| COLONIAL ERA TO 1899 |
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| Africans in America: America's
Journey Through Slavery: This
website is a companion to the excellent six hour public television series of the same
name (now available on video tape and dvd). It
chronicles the history of Africans in the United States from the beginning
of the slave trade to the end of
the Civil War and is one of the most comprehensive Black History sites available on the
Internet. It contains hundreds of primary documents, images, stories,
biographies, commentaries from scholars, and a detailed narrative. |
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| Selected
Seventeenth Century Virginia Statutes relating to Slavery: This site is part of
the Virtual
Jamestown Archive, a digital research, teaching, and learning project, which is
a collaboration between Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, and the Virginia Center
for the Digital History at the University of Virginia. The Public Records section
also contains sections on the Practice of
Slavery in the Council and Courts in the Seventeenth Century, Selected
Virginia Statutes Relating to Slavery, which includes laws enacted from 1629 to
1705, and the Laws on
Indentured Servants. These documents indicate that Africans and their
offspring did not receive equal treatment under the law before the General Assembly
declared that children born of enslaved women would be slaves for life, but there was some
fluidity in the relations between English and Africans before slavery was firmly
established. |
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| Virginia Runaways Project
(1736-1790): This site is a digital database of runaway and captured
slave and servant adverisements from 18th-century Virginia newspapers. It offers
full transcripts and images of all runaway and captured ads for slaves and servants placed
in Virginia newspapers from 1736 to 1790. In addition, the site contains supporting
materials in the form of court records and planters' letters to offer clues regarding the
fate of some of the runaways. It also contains teaching materials, a reference page
with a section on
Runaways and the Law, and a bibliography. |
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| The Stono
Rebellion (1739) : This slave revolt involved about 100
armed slaves at its apex and was the largest in Brittish North America before the American
Revolution. This site contains a brief description of the Rebellion by Professor
Vernon Burton of the University of Illinois History Department. |
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| The Stono Rebellion (1739):
This site contains a description of the events leading up to the Rebellion and its
aftermath. Additionally, it contains a report on the revolt written by the colony's
lieutenant governor less than a month after it occurred, another contemporaneous report
recommending rewards for the slaves and Indians who helped oppose the revolt, and comments
from modern scholars regarding its importance. |
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| The
New York Conspiracy of 1741: In New York
City in 1741 there were a series of fires and robberies.
Subsequently, 13 African-Americans were burned, and 18 African-Americans
were hanged. Allegedly, they were part of a vast conspiracy to burn
down the city and kill whites. The primary prosecution witness was a
sixteen year old indentured servant who received her freedom and 100
pounds in exchange for her testimony. The site contains a brief
description of the events. A short article, These
Enemies of their of Own Household: Slaves in 18th Century New York,
describes the historical context in which these conspiracy allegations
arose. A
History of the Negro Plot, with the Journal of the Proceedings Against the
Conspirators is the officially commissioned
account of the episode, originally published in 1744, and was written by
Daniel Horsmanden, one of the judges. |
|
| Crispus Attucks, an
African-American and the First Casualty of the American Revolution (1770): This
site discusses the life and death of Attucks who was shot and killed in the Boston
Massacre. Attucks, the son of an African man and a Natick or Nantucket Indian
mother, had spent the previous twenty years at sea, where he had run upon escaping from
slavery. John Adams, who subsequently became the country's second president,
defended the eight Brittish soldiers who killed Attucks and the four other colonists in a
murder trial. CrispusAttucks.net
is a site which contains a more detailed description of Attucks' life with a bibliography
and a list of links to other sites discussing him. The
Boston Massacre Trials website contains the deposition of the captain who
commanded the Brittish troops involved, selected testimony, the summation of John Adams,
images, links to relevant sites, and a bibliography. |
|
| Somerset v.
Stewart, 98 Eng. Rep. 509 (King's Bench 1772) declared slavery illegal in England:
Somerset
had been a slave owned by Stewart in Virginia. When Stewart took him to England,
Somerset filed suit alleging that slavery was illegal there and that he should be
released. The court agreed, asserting that slavery was "so odious, that nothing
can be suffered to support it, but positive law." Finding no law authorizing
slavery, the court held that Somerset had to be released. The decision meant freedom
for the estimated 14,000 to 15,000 slaves in the country, but not for those in the English
colonies. This site contains also contains another
report of the decision which includes the legal briefs filed by the
parties. For additional links to sites discussing the decision's author, Lord
Mansfield, and its rationale and impact, click here. |
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| Patrick Henry on Slavery
(1773): In this excerpt from a letter written by Henry he discusses the
evils of slavery while admitting that he is a slaveowner "drawn along by the general
inconvenience of living without them." |
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| Abigail Adams' Letter to John
Adams referring to Slavery (1774): After expressing her wish that there
was not a slave in the colony, Ms. Adams opined that "it always appeared a most
iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering
from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have." |
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| Thomas Paine on African
Slavery in America: Paine argues for the abolition of slavery in this
short essay written in 1774 and published March 8, 1775 in the Pennsylvania Journal and
the Weekly Advertiser. |
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| George Washington and Slavery:
This site discusses the slaves Washington owned and the conditions in which they
lived and Washington's attitudes about slavery. |
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| Thomas
Jefferson's Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence: This draft of
the document is as it probably read when Jefferson submitted it for admendments. In
one section deleted
from the final
version the text blames the King of England for slavery described as a
"cruel war against human nature itself." A Library of Congress website, Declaring Independence,
discusses the process of drafting the Declaration and also contains a copy of Jefferson's rough
draft. |
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| Thomas Jefferson
Memorial Foundation Research Committee Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:
Based upon DNA and other evidence this January 2000 Report concludes that
there is a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, son of Sally
Hemings, one of his slaves, and that Jefferson most likely was the father of all six of
Sally Heming's children appearing in Jefferson's records. A pdf version of the Report is
available from this
link. |
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| Thomas Jefferson on
Slavery: Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14
(1787) responds to a proposal calling for the emanicipation of the slaves and their
removal from Virginia. Jefferson contends that the clear superiority of whites over
African-Americans requires that the races be separated. He also writes of how
slavery harms not only the slave but the slave owner as well. |
|
| The Royal Ethiopian
Regiment (1775): On November 7, 1775, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore and
Royal Governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation inviting slaves owned by the rebellious
colonists to obtain their freedom by fighting for the British. This site discusses
the hundreds of African-Americans who answered that call. The text of the Earl of Dunmore's
Proclamation is available from this site which also discusses
the circumstances surrounding its issuance. |
|
| African-Americans
in the Revolutionary War: This website contains a brief overview of the
role of African-Americans fighting in the War on both the British and American sides and a
bibliography. Some 5,000 African-Americans fought in the Continental Army in the War
for American Independence, and by 1779 they made up between 14 and 15% of Washington's
army. Gail
Buckley, American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military, from the Revolution
to Desert Storm, (New York, Random House 2001), p. 5. Another website
discussing this topic is The Roles of African
Americans in the American Revolution, and an informative article discussing
Blacks on both sides of the conflict, The Revolution's Black Soldiers,
is available from yet another site. |
|
| The First Rhode
Island Regiment (1778): The First Rhode Island was the first
African-American regiment in American history. This site contains an excellent short
essay describing the unit's history and the legislation authorizing its creation.
The text of that legislation which allowed slaves to enlist and fight in the Revolutionary
War in exchange for their freedom and provided compensation for their owners is provided
at the beginning of The 1st
Rhode Island Regiment of the Continental Line, another short article on the
unit. |
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| The Colored Patriots of the American
Revolution: This book, written by Black historian William Cooper Nell,
was originally published in 1855. This electronic version is made available by the
Academic Affairs Library the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of its
digitalization project, Documenting
the American South. |
|
| Brom & Bett v. Ashley (1781):
When her mistress attempted to hit her sister with a heated kitchen shovel,
Mum Bett, a slave and Revolutionary War widow, intervened and took the blow.
Bett became angry, left her owner's house, and refused to return. She then
went to an attorney and convinced him to bring a suit seeking her freedom. Another
of Ashley's slaves, Brom, joined the suit. Bett urged the lawyer to rely upon the
Declaration of Independence which she had heard read aloud and the Massachusetts
Constitution of 1780 which she had heard discussed and thus provided him with the
successful legal theory. Bett's successful litigation established a precedent which
was followed in the Quock Walker case, discussed below, and played a major role in
ending slavery in Massachusetts. After winning her freedom in court, she changed her
name to Elizabeth Freeman. |
|
| The Quock Walker case (1783):
In this case the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court charged
the jury that slavery was inconsistent with the 1780 state constitution. Although no
opinion was ever written, the case was widely discussed and is credited by historians with
abolishing slavery in the state. |
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| Slavery and the United States Constitution (1787):
Although the words "slave" and "slavery" did not appear in the
Constitution originally, a number of its provisions accomodated the practice.
Professor Tom Russell of the University of Texas Law School lists four such constitutional
provisions on this page. |
|
| 1790
Census Data: This site contains data from the 1790 Census. It shows that
there were 694,207 slaves, almost 18% of a total population of 3,893,874. The States
of Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont did not have any slaves. |
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| The Fugitive Slave Act
of 1793: The Act provided a mechanism for the arrest and return of
fugitive slaves and made it illegal to aid them. Nonetheless, it was ignored by many
Northerners, and some Northern states passed personal liberty laws prohibiting
state officials from arresting runaway slaves. Professional slave catchers, however,
worked to capture fugitive slaves for monetary rewards. A brief description of the
early fugitive slave laws is available from this link. |
|
| Gabriel's
Conspiracy (1800): This site, part of the Death or Library Exhibition
referred to below, discusses the Conspiracy and the trials which followed. It
contains original
documents relating to the events including a description of the testimony
introduced against Gabriel at his trial. Another site contains three contemparneous
newspaper reports on the Conspiracy. A review of a 1997 book on the Conspiracy
is available from this link, and
the author's response from this
one. |
|
| The Gabriel Prosser Slave
Revolt- Gabriel's Conspiracy (1800): This site contains a detailed account of
the conspiracy and the events leading up to it. It also contains the Confession of Solomon, Gabriel's
brother and a
letter from Thomas Jefferson responding to the Governor of Virginia's request
for advice as to how many of the rebels should be hanged. Another site with a good
description of the plan and what happened is Gabriel's Rebellion. |
|
| Slaves and
the Courts: 1740-1860: This site contains
the text of a large number of case reports, accounts, and arguments as
well as over a hundred pamphlets and books discussing the difficult and
troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the
American colonies and the United States. These documents are from
the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collection Division of the
Library of Congress. The documents can be searched by key words or
browsed by subject, title, or author. |
|
| Research
Links on the History of American Slavery: This excellent site created by
Dr. Harold D. Tallant of the History Department at Georgetown College in Kentucky is truly
comprehensive. It contains a huge list of links to primary sources, secondary
sources, documentation projects, and more. |
|
| American
Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology: This site contains some of
the more than 2,300 interviews with former slaves conducted between 1936 and 1938 under
the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. The site includes photographs of
many of the former slaves taken at the time of the interviews and a list of related sites. |
|
| North American Slave
Narratives: This site when completed will include all the narratives of
fugitive and former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to
1920 as well as the biographies of fugitive and former slaves published in English before
1920. It was created by the Academic Affairs Library the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of its digitalization project, Documenting the American South. |
|
| Slave Voices from the
Duke University Special Collections Library: This site probes the
experiences of American slaves from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth
century and reveals their ambitions, motivations, and struggles. |
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| Excerpts from Slave
Narratives: This site contains excerpts from over forty slave narratives.
|
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| Gilder
Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition:
The Center, part of the Yale Center for International and
Area Studies, is dedicated to the investigation and dissemination of
information concerning all aspects of the Atlantic slave system and its
destruction. The Center's online document collection contains over
200 individual items, including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics,
interviews, and articles which can be browsed by author, date, subject,
and document type. The site also contains papers from and
information about recent conferences, bibliographies, and a links page. |
|
| The
Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record:
This site contains hundreds of images selected from a wide
range of sources, arranged into categories, and searchable by
keyword. It is a project of the Virginia Foundation for the
Humanities and the Digital Media Lab at the University of Virginia. |
|
| Images
of African-American Slavery and Freedom:
These images are from the Collections of the Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division. |
|
| Abolition and
Slavery Links: This vast treasure of links to sites related to abolition
and slavery is a section of the United States
Civil War Center site at Louisians State University. |
|
| Guide to Slavery: This
website, created by the K-12 Teaching and Learning Center, contains a huge list of links
to sites and materials about slavery and related topics. |
|
| Documents on
Slavery: The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School: This site
includes statutes, treaties, and other documents related to slavery. |
|
| The
Roots of American Slavery: A Bibliographical Essay: This
essay, written by Philip J. Schwarz of the Department of History of
Virginia Commonwealth University in 1997, discusses numerous works on
numerous aspects of slavery in the United States. |
|
| The Denmark Vesey
Conspiracy (1822): This site discusses a planned insurrection in Charleston,
South Carolina, which involvled thousands of slaves and free Blacks and is considered the
most elaborate developed by American slaves. Vesey, the leader, was a former slave
who had purchased his freedom. Although he was free, all of his children were
slaves. The site includes a biographical sketch of Vesey from a
report about the insurrection written shortly after it occurred by the mayor of Charleston
and the confession of one of Vesey's lieutenants. |
|
| Denmark
Vesey: This site contains an extensive article about the Conspiracy and the
trials which followed published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861. It provides some
details about the rules of evidence and procedure followed in the trials. |
|
| The Denmark Vesey
Insurrection: This site contains excerpts from the South Carolina Negro
Law of 1740 under which the Vesey conspirators were charged, the rules of procedure
established for their trials, summaries of the evidence presented against four of the
defendants, and the verdicts rendered at their trials. |
|
| Freedom's Journal,
1827-1829, the First African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United
States: This site contains all 103 issues of the paper in Adobe Acrobat
format (pdf). In addition it contains links to related sites, one of which includes
a
brief history of the Freedom's Journal. |
|
| Death or Liberty:
Gabriel, Nat Turner, and John Brown: This Library of Virginia exhibit focuses
upon three dramatic events in that state which turned the country's attention to slavery,
Gabriel's Conspiracy in 1800, Nat Turner's Rebellion in Southampton County in 1831, and
John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. The site includes the transcripts of
original documents and suggestions for additional reading. |
|
| Indiana Laws Restricting the
Migrations of African-Americans, Free or Slave 1831 and 1851: This site
is part of Conner Prairie's
History Online which has articles and exhibits. Conner Priarie is an
open-air living history museum in Fishers, Indiana. |
|
| Exploring Amistad: In
1839 a group of 49 Africans who had been sold into slavery revolted and took over the ship
Amistad off the coast of Cuba. The ship sailed into United States waters, and the
Africans were taken into custody. In 1841 a United
States Supreme Court decision upheld the freedom the Africans had won for
themselves. The site contains thousands of pages from over 500 primary documents,
including court records, in the Library section, a detailed narrative in the Discovery
section, and a chronology. The Teaching section includes a Bibliography of relevant
publications not available on the Internet, and the Forum section includes relevant links. |
|
| Amistad Trials
1839-1840: This site, part of the Famous Trials Project,
includes an account of the trials, a chrononlogy, biographies of trial participants, the Supreme
Court arguments and decision, newspaper accounts, letters and diary entries,
paintings and sketches, a bibliography, and a list of relevant links. |
|
| Amistad Links: This
site contains a comprehensive listing of links to pages about the history of the Amistad,
the Amistad incident, and its legacy. |
|
| "The Meaning of July
Fourth for the Negro" by Frederick Douglass (1852): In this famous
speech Douglass asserts, "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer;
a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and
cruelty to which he is the constant victim." The site discusses the
circumstances in which Douglass gave the speech and also contains its full text. |
|
| Original Court
Records of the Dred Scott Decision: The United States Supreme Court
decision in this infamous case fueled
the tensions that led to the Civil War. The Court asserted that Blacks, free or
slave, at the time the Constitution was adopted and for more than a century before
were "regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to
associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far
inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect..." Dred Scott v. Sandford,
60 U.S. 393, 407 (1856). The site includes all the extant records of the case in
the St. Louis, Missouri, Circuit Court where it was originally filed by the Scotts in their struggle for freedom.
The site includes small, large, and very large representations of the documents in
jpeg format, transcriptions, and a chronology. |
|
| Dred
Scott v. Sandford (1857): This site
contains background information on the parties, the trials, and slavery in
Missouri, a chronology of events, and links to other sites containing
information about the case. This site is part of landmarkcases.org,
which provides teachers with resources and activities to
support the teaching of landmark Supreme Court cases. |
|
| A Hard
Shove for a "Nation on the Brink": The Impact of Dred Scott:
This
excellent article discusses the beginnings of the case, its treatment in the judicial
system, the decision itself, and its impact on the country. The
Dred Scott section of of Furman University's Secession Era Editorials Project
contains over 20 editorials discussing it published in newspapers
shortly after it was issued. |
|
| Toward Racial Equality: Harper's Weekly
Reports on Black America, 1857-1874: This site contains a number of articles,
editorials, and illustrations discussing African-Americans which appeared in one of the
country's leading 19th century newspapers. They discuss slavery, the Civil War, and
Reconstruction and provide contemporaneous accounts of events such as John Brown's Raid
and the New York Draft Riots. |
|
| John Brown and the Raid on
Harper's Ferry (1859): This site provides a brief description of Brown's life
and the Raid on Harper's
Ferry. It also contains Brown's address to the Court at his trial and a
description of the African-Americans who were involved in the attack. |
|
| John
Brown and the Attack on Harper's Ferry: This site contains a number of
different accounts of the Raid, trial documents, and correspondence from some of those
involved. Another interesting site, John Brown's Holy War, is a
companion to a film shown on public television by the same name. This site contains primary
source documents including letters, speeches, and an editorial, a transcript of
the film, transcripts
of extended interviews with the program participants, suggestions
for further reading, a timeline, and maps. Over 50 editorials on Brown's Raid
appear in the John
Brown Editorials section of Furman University's Secession Era Editorials Project
from newspapers around the country publsihed between October and December of 1859. |
|
| John Brown Trial
Links: This site contains a list of links to sites and materials on John
Brown. One of the articles linked to attempts to answer the question, Was John Brown Crazy?. |
|
| Chronology
of Emancipation 1860-1865: This site
contains a brief chronology of important events in the history of the
emancipation of the slaves and contains links to primary documents
including statutes, reports, proclamations, and speeches. The
chronology is part of the site of the
Freedmen and Southern Society Project of the History
Department of the University of Maryland. The Project seeks to
depict the drama of emancipation in the words of the participants:
liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common
folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners. Drawing upon the
National Archives of the United States, the project's editors reviewed
millions of documents and selected some 50,000. They are now
transcribing, organizing, and annotating them to explain how
African-Americans traversed the bloody ground between the beginning of the
Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Reconstruction in 1867. These
documents are to be presented in Freedom: A Documentary History of
Emancipation 1861-1867, which is expected to reach nine volumes.
Several volumes are already in print and are described at the site.
The website also contains a sampling of the documents which are to be
published. |
|
| The Emanicipation Proclamation: President
Lincoln issued this Proclamation January 1, 1863 to free the slaves in the Southern states at war
against the United States. |
|
| United
States Colored Troops Institute for Local History and Family Research:
The Institute, located at Hartwick College, promotes and
encourages original historical and genealogical research about the 200,000
African-American men and their 7,000 white officers who compromised the US
Colored Troops during the American Civil War. The site includes
information about the overall make-up of the troops, information about the
troops from various states and units, and a long list of relevant books
and websites. |
|
| United
States Colored Troops of Franklin County, Pennsylvania: This
site, created by University of Virginia students, is an effort to recount
the stories of the men from Franklin County who served in the U.S. Colored
Troops during the Civil War. Using the service records of over 100
men from the County and other primary sources from the era, the site
attempts to place their experiences in the greater context of the
War. It discusses not only the War years, but the years preceding
and following it as well. The site was created under the guidance of
the Valley of
the Shadow site, which chronicles the experiences of
two counties, one North and one South, before, during, and after the Civil
War. |
|
| The Freedmen's Bureau by
W.E.B. DuBois: The United States government established the Freedmen's
Bureau in 1865 to supervise all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and
freed slaves. In this essay DuBois examines the origins, successes, and failures of
the Bureau which he calls "one of the most singular and interesting of the attempts
made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social
condition." The Freedmen's
Bureau Online site includes Bureau records relating marriages, labor
contracts, and crimes and links to related sites. |
|
| The
Freedmen's Bureau of Augusta County, Virginia: This
site, built by four University of Virginia students as a class project,
divides the work of the selected Bureau office into four areas, Social
Services, Violence and Justice, Labor and Contracts, and Family Services,
and details some of the work it did in each. The research was based
upon records from the National Archives, two local newspapers, and a
variety of secondary sources. The site includes a brief overview of
the Bureau, an Image Gallery, and a bibliography listing the sources they
used. |
|
| From Slavery to
Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection 1824-1909: This Library
of Congress collection presents 397 pamphlets published by African-American authors and
others who wrote about slavery, African colonialization, emanicipation, Reconstruction,
and related topics. The authors reprsented include Frederick Douglass, Charles
Sumner, Mary Church Terrrell, and Booker T. Washington. |
