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Showing results 11 – 13 of 13

Glossary Term – Person

Lord Dunmore

Lord Dunmore (1732–1809), or John Murray, was the royal governor of Virginia best remembered for offering freedom to slaves who joined British forces during the American Revolution. After serving in Parliament and as governor of New York, Dunmore became the British royal governor of Virginia in 1771. In 1773, he officially dissolved the Virginia House of Burgesses in response to its efforts to create a Committee of Correspondence; however, the body continued to meet. In 1774, he waged Lord Dunmore’s War against the Shawnees in the Ohio...

Teaching Resource

The First Emancipation

Historical Background

January 1, 2013, marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. This revolutionary document ushered in the Thirteenth Amendment and the end of slavery in the United States. These two great legal documents were the culmination of a long struggle that began in the colonial period with the arrival of the first African slaves in North America. The Great Emancipation of the 1860s cannot be understood without studying what is often called the “first emancipation”—the growing belief among many...

Teaching Resource

American Slavery in Comparative Perspective

Of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, over one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in what is now the United States. Yet by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South.

For a long time it was widely assumed that southern slavery was harsher and crueler than slavery in Latin America, where the Catholic church insisted that slaves had a right to marry, to seek...