258 items
A northerner’s view of southern slavery, 1821
Aurelia Hale of Hartford, Connecticut, offered her impressions of southern life in this letter of June 11, 1821. Hale, then about twenty-two years old, had recently traveled to Washington County, Georgia, to serve as a schoolteacher....
Lincoln on the execution of a slave trader, 1862
This stunning document, a refusal of clemency for a convicted slave trader, stands out among the papers of Abraham Lincoln, a man renowned for his mercy and willingness to pardon. In November 1861, Nathaniel Gordon was convicted of...
Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
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"In the end you are sure to succeed": Lincoln on Perseverance
If there was one quality Abraham Lincoln believed essential both to individual success and to social advancement, it was industriousness. A child of the impoverished frontier who went on to take proud advantage of what historian Gabor...
Slavery and the Constitution
Historian James Oliver Horton briefly examines the protections for slavery embedded in the US Constitution.
Study Aid: National Expansion
National Expansion Free States Slave States Connecticut Delaware Massachusetts Georgia New Hampshire Maryland New Jersey North Carolina New York South Carolina Pennsylvania Virginia Rhode Island Kentucky (1792) Vermont (1791)...
Slavery in the New York State census, 1800
While numbers do not explain the everyday realities of slavery in the eighteenth century, they do provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the peculiar institution even in a northern state like New York. This broadside provides figures...
"The whole land is full of blood," 1851
"The whole land is full of blood." These ominous words were uttered by James W. C. Pennington, a former slave and noted abolitionist, in the wake of Thomas Sims’s infamous trial. Sims had escaped from slavery in Georgia before being...
Buying Frederick Douglass’s freedom, 1846
After he had escaped from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass became a well-known orator and abolitionist. He wrote an autobiography in 1845, but because he was a runaway slave, its publication increased the chances that he would be...
George Washington on the abolition of slavery, 1786
Of the nine presidents who were slaveholders, only George Washington freed all his own slaves upon his death. Before the Revolution, Washington, like most White Americans, took slavery for granted. At the time of the Revolution, one...
Runaway slave ad, 1852
Broadsides and notices posted by slave owners or their agents offer dramatic and concrete evidence of the inhumanity of slavery. Defined as both property and responsible persons by law, slaves were sold with cows, sheep, and furniture...
Kellie Carter Jackson - "Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence"
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Alan Taylor - "Thomas Jefferson's Education"
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Manisha Sinha - "The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition"
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Tamika Nunley - "At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C."
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Claire Bellerjeau and Tiffany Yecke Brooks - "Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution"
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Brenda Stevenson - "What Is Slavery?"
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