The "Enslaved People in the African American National Biography, 1508-1865" dataset builds on the complete print and online collection of the African American National Biography (AANB), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. The full collection contains over 6,000 biographical entries of named historical individuals, including 1,304 for subjects born before 1865 and the abolition of slavery in the United States. In making a subset of biographical entries from the multivolume work, the goal was to extract life details from those biographies into an easy-to-view database form that details whether a subject was enslaved for some or all of their lives and to provide the main biographical details of each subject for contextual analysis and comparison. 52 fields covering location data; gender; names, alternate names and suffixes; dates and places of birth and death; and up to 8 occupations were included. We also added 13 unique fields that provide biographical details on each subject: Free born in North America; Free before 13th Amendment; Ever Enslaved; How was freedom attained; Other/uncertain status; African born; Parent information; Runaways and rebels; Education/literacy; Religion; Slave narrative or memoir author; Notes; and Images.

The “Contested Freedom” dataset is compiled entirely of information for free persons of color who resided in the city of Savannah, Georgia, registered between 1823 and 1842. The dataset contains 1,321 named individuals residing in Chatham County. Savannah’s free Black population was made up of previously enslaved people who were manumitted by their owners, Black children born to free mothers, and emigrés from St. Domingue who fled to Savannah directly after the Haitian Revolution. This dataset, extracted from the “Savannah, Georgia, Registers of Free People of Color, 1817-1864,” includes the years 1823-1829 and 1833, 1835, and 1842. This register was collected by the city of Savannah throughout the antebellum era and right before the close of the Civil War. The information includes: names, age, current residence, occupation(s), and guardian(s), and, in some instances, property (or lack thereof), number of slaves owned, and parentage.

The Nashville Enslaved and Free People of Color Database (NEFPCD) contains information regarding the movements of more than 14,700 Black people and their enslavers in Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee before Emancipation. Information for this database was compiled using the information found in a total of seventeen Davidson County record books containing wills, inventories, and other probate records dating between 1780 and 1865, all of which are housed at the Metropolitan Government Archives of Nashville-Davidson County.

This collection contains petitions of free Black individuals choosing to be re-enslaved. An act passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1806 required formerly enslaved people to leave the commonwealth within twelve months of being granted their freedom. Individuals were forced to leave behind family, friends, and community that remained enslaved. In addition, many emancipated people did not have the financial means or social support to move to a free state. One option to preserve family and relationships was to return to slavery. In 1856, the Virginia legislature passed an act allowing free Black individuals who desired to remain in the commonwealth to petition for re-enslavement. Only a small number of free Black Virginians petitioned the courts to re-enslave themselves to an enslaver of choice, and an even smaller percentage succeeded. Many petitioners chose enslavers they knew well or who owned a spouse or family member. These petitions include the petitioner’s name, previous enslaver, means of emancipation, and new desired enslaver.

The data in this collection is drawn directly from the historical documents and may contain language that is now deemed offensive.

The records found in this collection include requisition lists filed in local courts and payroll records of the Virginia Engineer Department. Information found in these records include names of enslaved and free Black people, locality of origin, occupation, location of fortification, names of enslavers, and monetary value of enslaved people. Virginia enacted legislation as early as July 1, 1861 during the Civil War to requisition enslaved and free Black people to work on military fortifications and other defensive works around the commonwealth. From 1862 to 1863, at the request of the president of the Confederate States, the General Assembly passed three more laws that requisitioned enslaved laborers to work on fortifications and other works of the defense. Each county and city were given a certain number of enslaved laborers that had to be provided to the government under the requisition act. Enslaved people requisitioned for service did not have a choice. In many cases, the alternative was severe punishment or to be hanged.

Descriptions included in this dataset are drawn directly from the original documents and may contain language which is now deemed offensive.

The Natchez Database of Free People of Color (NDFPC) contains data about Natchez, Mississippi’s free Black community during the Spanish era (1779-1795) and after the United States acquired it in 1796 until 1865. It records the name of every free black individual who surfaced in the author’s research; diligent attention was paid to entering values like gender, age, race, property ownership, occupation, literacy, experiences of violence, among many others (53 in total) in the dataset. The companion to the NDFPC is the Natchez Index of Free Individuals and Families of Color, which is an approximately 500-page text document that archives transcriptions of records on the 1,018 free Black individuals who lived or stayed in Natchez during those years. It is organized alphabetically by surname when known or by first name. Digitization of the dataset and index will facilitate research by descendants engaged in genealogical research and other scholars of enslaved and free people of color.

The "Free Blacks" dataset was created from The Mayor's Register of Free Blacks in the City of New Orleans from 1840 to 1864. The dataset has a population of 2,818 individuals and 50 variables. Registered free blacks are listed by name, sex, age, year of birth, ethnicity, color, country of origin, city of origin, state of origin, date of arrival, profession, method of manumission, date of emancipation, age at time of emancipation, notary of record, court, judges, or recorders of record, baptism church, baptism record, emancipation record index, succession record, former owner’s name, and former owner’s relationship to the free person, among others.

Sometimes referred to as “Applications to Remain”, these records are applications that formerly enslaved individuals submitted to state and local courts for permission to remain in Virginia with their free status. An early 1691 law required a formerly enslaved person to relocate outside the commonwealth within six months of emancipation. In 1782, Virginia law allowed enslavers to emancipate their enslaved people “by last will and testament or other instrument in writing sealed and witnessed to emancipate and set free his slave or slaves.” Realizing that many enslavers were taking advantage of this, the Virginia General Assembly reacted by trying to suppress the growing number of free Black and multiracial people in the commonwealth. They passed a law stating that all formerly enslaved people freed after May 1, 1806 who remained in Virginia more than twelve months could be put on trial by the state. After 1831, if these people were found guilty, they could be re-enslaved and sold by state officials. The proceeds from the sale went to the state treasury, and often, records of those sales can be found in the Public Claims records from the Auditor of Public Accounts. The act required individuals who wished to remain in the commonwealth to petition the state legislature. Beginning in 1837, formerly enslaved individuals could petition the local courts directly for permission. The law required them to place notice on the courthouse door for two months before a hearing.

The documents in these cases will include: the name(s) of the petitioner(s), the circumstances of free status, and a request to remain in the county. Application packets might also include supporting documents such as the formerly enslaved person’s register (for more, see Free Black Registrations), or other evidence for emancipation such as a copy of a will or deed of emancipation. As with the case of obtaining a free Black registration, individuals needed to prove that they had in fact been emancipated. Free Black men and women also relied on their reputation in the local communities and understood the weight of white individuals’ good words in gaining and retaining free status. Applications may also include witness statements, known as affidavits, with signatures and names of white citizens testifying to the free status and character of the petitioner.

The data in this collection is drawn directly from the historical documents and may contain language that is now deemed offensive.

Initially taken in 1838 to demonstrate the stability and significance of the African American community and to forestall the abrogation of African American voting rights, the Quaker and Abolitionist census of African Americans was continued in 1847 and 1856 and present an invaluable view of the mid-nineteenth century African American population of Philadelphia. Although these censuses list only household heads, providing aggregate information for other household members, and exclude the substantial number of African Americans living in white households, they provide data not found in the federal population schedules. When combined with the information on African Americans taken from the four federal censuses, they offer researchers a richly detailed view of Philadelphia's African American community spanning some forty years. The three censuses are not of equal inclusiveness or quality, however. The 1838 and 1847 enumerations cover only the "old" City of Philadelphia (river-to-river and from Vine to South Streets) and the immediate surrounding districts (Spring Garden, Northern Liberties, Southwark, Moyamensing, Kensington--1838, West Philadelphia--1847); the 1856 survey includes African Americans living throughout the newly enlarged city which, as today, conforms to the boundaries of Philadelphia County. In spite of this deficiency in areal coverage, the earlier censuses are superior historical documents. The 1838 and 1847 censuses contain data on a wide range of social and demographic variables describing the household indicating address, household size, occupation, whether members were born in Pennsylvania, status-at-birth, debts, taxes, number of children attending school, names of beneficial societies and churches (1838), property brought to Philadelphia from other states (1838), sex composition (1847), age structure (1847), literacy (1847), size of rooms and number of people per room (1847), and miscellaneous remarks (1847). While the 1856 census includes the household address and reports literacy, occupation, status-at-birth, and occasional passing remarks about individual households and their occupants, it excludes the other informational categories. Moreover, unlike the other two surveys, it lists the occupations of only higher status African Americans, excluding unskilled and semiskilled designations, and records the status-at-birth of adults only. Indeed, it even fails to provide data permitting the calculation of the size and age and sex structure of households. Variables for each household head and his household include (differ slightly by census year): name, sex, status-at-birth, occupation, wages, real and personal property, literacy, education, religion, membership in beneficial societies and temperance societies, taxes, rents, dwelling size, address, slave or free birth.

This dataset was created from a collection of over nine hundred incidents of sexual violence identified in the mainland North American British colonies and early United States from 1700-1820. Gathered from legal, manuscript, and print records in twenty archives, it identifies over four hundred individuals who were enslaved, of African descent, and/or of Native American descent. This collection offers unique historical evidence about individuals who may not appear in any other extant records. Significantly, it reveals how enslaved and free(d) Black and Indigenous people both addressed and were involved in incidents of sexual violence, revealing how communities of color are far more visible in historical records than has been traditionally recognized.

Copy and paste abstractVirginia Untold: The African American Narrative is a project that provides digital access to historical records that document some of the lived experiences of enslaved and free Black and multiracial people in the Library of Virginia’s collections. This dataset, regarding Bills of Sale and Deeds, include documents that convey title of property, including enslaved people, from one party to another. Bills of sale typically involved a financial transaction, whereas deeds did not. The dataset represented here is the combination of two separate presentations of the indexed data: a spreadsheet index of individuals listed in each bill of sale or deed and a corresponding metadata record for each document. Records regarding specific individuals were created using data available on the Virginia Open Data Portal (https://data.virginia.gov/). These individual records are “matched” with item, or document, records available via the Library’s catalog discovery layer, and a link to the appropriate document accompanies each individual’s entry. The discovery layer also provides user access to the digitized version of the document, along with any available full-text indexes or transcriptions.

Documents in this collection differ from the loose documents in the “Free Negro” Registrations collection. Documents in this collection represent pages from bound registers recording free Black and multiracial people of Black descent across Virginia localities. Language for registering as a free person may have originated from a 1748 law for servants and enslaved people.

In 1793, the Virginia General Assembly specified that “free Negroes or mulattoes” were required to be registered and numbered in a book to be kept by the town clerk, which shall specify “age, name, color, and stature, by whom, and in what court the said negro or mulatto was emancipated; or that such negro or mulatto was born free.” The process was extended to counties in 1803.This bound register often coincided with a loose certificate containing largely the same identifying information. The 1793 and 1803 laws reflect Virginia legislators’ reaction to a quickly growing free Black population across Virginia. Both the registration system and the process of renewal was enforced differently in the various Virginia localities. Thus, the information found in these registers may differ from year to year and across regions. Although some clerks were already recording such features, an 1834 Act of Assembly made it a uniform requirement to record identifying marks and scars and the instrument of emancipation, whether by deed or will. In some instances, the clerk included additional information not required by law such as date or place of birth, the name of parents or spouses, trades and occupations, or where a person was emancipated. The amount of detail and type of information a clerk chose to record varied by locality and over time

Descriptions included in this dataset are drawn directly from the original documents and may contain language which is now deemed offensive.

"First-Person Narratives of the American South" is a collection of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

The narratives available in this collection offer personal accounts of Southern life between 1860 and 1920, a period of enormous change. At the end of the Civil War, the South faced the enormous challenge of re-creating their society after their land had been ravaged by war, many of their men were dead or injured, and the economic and social system of slavery had been abolished. Many farmers, confronted by periodic depressions and market turmoil, joined political and social protest movements. For African Americans, the end of slavery brought hope for unprecedented control of their own lives, but whether they stayed in the South or moved north or west, they continued to face social and political oppression. Most African Americans in the South were pulled into a Darwinistic sharecropper system and saw their lives circumscribed by the rise of segregation. As conservative views faced a growing challenge from Modernist thought, Southern arts, sciences, and religion also reflected the considerable tensions manifested throughout Southern society. Admidst these dramatic changes, Southerners who had lived in the antebellum South and soldiers who had fought for the Confederacy wrote memoirs that and strived to preserve a memory of many different experiences. Southerners recorded their stories of these tumultuous times in print and in diaries and letters, but few first-person narratives, other than those written by the social and economic elite found their way into the national print culture. In this online collection, accounts of life on the farm or in the servants' quarters or in the cotton mill have priority over accounts of public lives and leading military battles. Each narrative offers a unique perspective on life in the South, and serves as an important primary resource for the study of the American South. The original texts for "First-Person Narratives of the American South" come from the University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which includes the Southern Historical Collection, one of the largest collections of Southern manuscripts in the country and the North Carolina Collection, the most complete printed documentation of a single state anywhere. The DocSouth Editorial Board, composed of faculty and librarians at UNC and staff from the UNC Press, oversees this collection and all other collections on Documenting the American South.

Context

The North American Slave Narratives collection at the University of North Carolina contains 344 items and is the most extensive collection of such documents in the world.

The physical collection was digitized and transcribed by students and library employees. This means that the text is far more reliable than uncorrected OCR output which is common in digitized archives.

More information about the collection and access to individual page images can be be found here: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh

The plain text files have been optimized for use in Voyant and can also be used in text mining projects such as topic modeling, sentiment analysis and natural language processing. Please note that the full text contains paratextual elements such as title pages and appendices which will be included in any word counts you perform. You may wish to delete these in order to focus your analysis on just the narratives.

The .csv file acts as a table of contents for the collection and includes Title, Author, Publication Date a url pointing to the digitized version of the text and a unique url pointing to a version of the text in plain text (this is particularly useful for use with Voyant: http://voyant-tools.org/).

Copyright Statement and Acknowledgements

With the exception of "Fields's Observation: The Slave Narrative of a Nineteenth-Century Virginian," which has no known rights, the texts, encoding, and metadata available in Open DocSouth are made available for use under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Users are free to copy, share, adapt, and re-publish any of the content in Open DocSouth as long as they credit the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for making this material available.

If you make use of this data, considering letting the holder of the original collection know how you are using the data and if you have any suggestions for making it even more useful. Send any feedback to wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

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From 1820 to 1904, more than 16,000 African Americans traveled from the United States to what became the Republic of Liberia. Although these migrants have been the subject of a rich historical literature, much of this work has focused on subsets of people who migrated at a particular time or from a particular place. This dataset is the most comprehensive listing to date of the people who migrated to Liberia over this period, and includes data on their names, ages, the states they migrated from and their first destination in Liberia. It also provides information on their levels of literacy and occupations.

The “Manumissions on Maryland’s Western Shore, 1775-1785” dataset identifies 618 people manumitted as the result of 83 private land deeds recorded between the years 1775 and 1785 in five Maryland counties: Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford, Montgomery and Prince George's. An ongoing project, this dataset is the first effort to compile and make public extant eighteenth-century slave manumission data for Maryland in a single location. Each record includes (a) the name, age, sex and deed type (immediate or delayed) for the enslaved individual manumitted; (b) the name, location and religion (if known) of the slave owner; and (c) the year the deed was recorded by the county court. Two-thirds of the enslaved people manumitted during the period under study were freed by Quakers or Methodists. Of the total 618 enslaved people, slightly more than two-fifths were manumitted immediately; others were required to serve further terms of service ranging in length from a few months to several years. Overall, this project departs from economic explanations of Maryland's relatively large free Black population, suggesting that during the Revolutionary Era private manumissions undertaken for moral and religious reasons were at least as important, and possibly more, as those undertaken for other motives.

The Battle of Nashville was the pivotal conflict of the Civil War. The Union troops required an extraordinary amount of labor to build a system of fortifications, trenches, redoubts and other wartime infrastructure to successfully capture and defend the city. With a mix of enslaved and free laborers, some of whom were impressed and others who volunteered their time and expertise, Nashville became the most fortified city in the war. Previously, the number of laborers necessary to complete such a monumental task was estimated at just under 3,000. The team used two different types of documents to add to this number: One, we extracted information about additional unlisted laborers from military correspondence regarding their claims and the claims of their widows, wives, and descendants. Two, we merged multiple lists created by various Federal officers that kept track of the Black laborers with whom they worked at various sites in and around the city in the Spatial Historian program. Through comparing these lists with the original labor rolls generated by General Morton, the team was able add an additional ~2,000 people to the toll, for a total of ~5,000 laborers who worked on Nashville’s defenses during the Civil War. This article expands on the process of extracting community-sourced data and linking it to previous datasets in order to create the most complete and recent count of enslaved and free Black laborers whose labor and craftsmanship in Nashville’s defenses helped bring the Civil War to its end.

Commonwealth causes are criminal court cases filed by the state government that consist primarily of warrants, summons, subpoenas, indictments, recognizances, and verdicts handed down by juries and other legal authorities in order to prosecute individuals who violated the penal code. Some commonwealth causes commonly found in Virginia Untold include cases against enslavers who permitted their enslaved people to travel as free people without permission or permitting a gathering of enslaved people on their property. White Virginians and legislators feared insurrection and passed laws restricting the number of Black and multiracial people allowed to gather in groups. Other cases found in this collection might include crimes committed by both enslaved and free Black people such as breaking and entering, stealing, assault, murder, arson, and aiding enslaved people to self-emancipate. Formerly enslaved men and women could also be tried for remaining in the commonwealth more than one year following emancipation. In 1806, the General Assembly passed a law stating that all formerly enslaved people freed after May 1, 1806, were required to leave the commonwealth. Those who remained in the commonwealth more than twelve months could be put on trial by the state, and if found guilty, would be re-enslaved and sold. The proceeds from the sale went to the state treasury, and often, records of those sales can be found in the Public Claims records from the Auditor of Public Accounts.

The commonwealth causes reveal an inconsistency in forms of conviction and punishment for white versus Black and multiracial individuals. Throughout the early nineteenth century, Virginia legislators revised the laws in ways that reduced the legal status of free Black and multiracial people to that of enslaved, thereby creating a legal system based on race. In 1831, Nat Turner led a revolt in Southampton County that prompted more legal restrictions on Virginia’s Black population including prohibiting Black people to learn to read and write, practice certain trades, and sell goods. After 1832, Virginia law required free Blacks to stand trial in the same courts as enslaved people, known as Oyer and Terminer. In various years, free Black men and women were sold into slavery as punishment for certain crimes. While public whipping originated as a form of punishment for all those convicted, in Virginia, it was retained for those who were Black, free or enslaved, and officially outlawed as a punishment for white criminals in 1848. Often, Black individuals served much longer penitentiary sentences while the cases of white men, who had committed the same or similar crimes, were dismissed.

In the eighteenth century, many enslaved people convicted of capital crimes were hanged. To curb the spectacle of so many public executions, an 1801 law allowed the governor to sell condemned enslaved people to those who agreed to transport them out of Virginia. The state hoped that by exiling these individuals, they would not commit a second offense in the commonwealth. In 1858, another change occurred when the state realized that they were losing money on convicted felons. Additionally, territories such as the West Indies and states in the Deep South such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were no longer interested in receiving enslaved felons. The new act allowed the governor to commute sentences of transportation to labor on the public works for life. Commuting sentences meant that the state assigned enslaved people a value, and their enslavers received payment from the state for their human property. Enslavers submitted public claims to the Auditor of Public Accounts, the chief auditor and accountant of the Virginia General Assembly and the records of those sales can be found in Public Claims.

Localities and individuals submitted public claims to the Auditor of Public Accounts to obtain payment for services rendered to the state. The Auditor of Public Accounts was the chief auditor and accountant of the General Assembly Auditing Committee, and functioned much like the state treasurer. They were responsible for ensuring proper payments to localities and that those payments were issued in accordance with established rules and procedures. The public claims found in Virginia Untold largely document years before the Civil War. The collection contains affidavits, bonds, correspondence, local court records, death warrants, estate files, powers of attorney, receipts, sheriff certificates, and valuations of enslaved, free Black, and multiracial people convicted for capital crimes and sentenced to be executed or transported from the United States. The state established procedures to compensate enslavers for their financial loss when enslaved people ran away or were imprisoned or executed. Some condemned enslaved people were transported beyond the state's boundaries to Africa. The American Colonization Society chartered ships to transport free Black Americans and condemned enslaved people to Liberia.

The data in this collection is drawn directly from the historical documents and may contain language that is now deemed offensive.

This dataset brings together all 698 known references to ‘Black’ or possibly Black African heritage people or groups in records of London criminal justice (1720-1841). Each entry includes references to primary sources mentioning the person(s), including in the Old Bailey Proceedings, Ordinary’s Accounts, and Middlesex Criminal Registers. Individuals are trial witnesses, victims, defendants, and people mentioned in passing during testimony. For each entry, a confidence level is offered by the authors, as a person’s ethnicity cannot always be determined with certainty. Evidence for making that judgment is provided. This dataset is useful for anyone interested in Black history in Britain, Black people and justice, or Black London during the age of enslavement.

Significant background material is available on the Old Bailey Online website, which provides additional context for these records. The authors also recommend the following works:

* Kathleen Chater. Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales during the Period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660-1807 (Manchester, 2011).
* Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past (Frank Cass, 1996).
* Marika Sherwood. ‘Blacks in the Gordon Riots’, History Today, vol. 47 (1997), 24-28.

Each record includes details on the name of the Black individual(s), as well as information on up to three sources in which he/she/they have been identified, and an indication by the authors on the likelihood the person is actually Black.

Each entry has 17 columns of data, all of which are described in full in the ReadMe.txt file.

This dataset enumerates 12,857 enslaved individuals who were described as runaway maroons in colonial Haiti’s newspaper advertisements from 1766 to 1791. Throughout the Americas, plantation personnel such as owners, lawyers, accountants and other agents routinely sought to reclaim escaped runaways – who were considered private property as well as a source of unpaid labor – using newspaper advertisements to announce the runaway’s escape and to offer a reward for their return. In colonial Haiti, plantation personnel placed advertisements for runaways primarily in the newspaper Les Affiches américaines, with descriptions of the individual or individuals who escaped. In order to reclaim their missing “property,” enslavers and other personnel included information in the advertisements that they deemed relevant to identifying, tracking down, and returning runaways to plantations. The advertisements often offer financial rewards to incentivize the public to assist with re-enslaving suspected fugitives. But when read subversively and from theoretical perspectives that prioritize enslaved people’s human experiences, the advertisements can provide a unique lens through which to understand the ways enslaved people resisted their conditions by deploying the social networks, knowledge and skills, and other resources that were in their immediate grasp. These resistance practices helped to establish the foundation for Haitians’ rebellious activities during and after the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and can help inform understanding of enslaved Black people’s self-liberation efforts across plantation societies in the Americas.