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.

This study uses historical records from 36 archives in the United States to analyze 8,437 enslaved people's sale and/or appraisal prices from 1797 to 1865.

This study uses historical records from 36 archives in the United States to analyze 8,437 enslaved people’s sale and/or appraisal prices from 1797 to 1865. Demographic information, including name, year, age/age group, gender, state, and trade/skill notations were recorded when applicable. By calculating average appraisal and sale values across cross-sections of gender (male or female) and age group (0-10 years old, 11-22 years old, 23-39 years old, and 40+ years old), a total of sixteen major comparative prices were analyzed (app/male/0-10; app/female/0-10; sale/male/0-10; sale/female/0-10; app/male/11-22; app/female/11-22; sale/male/11-22; sale/female/11-22; app/male/23-39; app/female/23-39; sale/male/23-39; sale/female/23-39; app/male/40+; app/female/40+; sale/male/40+; sale/female/40+). Scholars have the opportunity to use this data set to understand how enslaved people were valued and appraised. The demographic data included will be useful to those who want to explore various aspects of the history of slavery and enslaved people.

The Dutch-speaking Runaway Slaves dataset includes information 483 Dutch-speaking slaves and three black indentured servants who were reported fleeing their condition of bondage in the American colonies and early United States. The data comes primarily from newspaper advertisements digitized and made available through newspapers.com and ReadEx’s Early American Newspaper Database. This current database is the first to gather and organize data specifically concerning runaway slaves who spoke Dutch. The compilation of this data was primarily intended research on the language and economics of slavery in Dutch New York. The database includes 486 rows of entries, with eleven columns of data about Dutch-speaking runaway slaves. These eleven columns of data are as follows: Year, Name, Age, Sex, Language, Speaks, Owner, County, State, City, and Source.

A “runaway slave record,” or as it is officially titled, “Runaway and Escaped Slaves Records, 1794, 1806-1863,” include accounts, correspondence, receipts, and reports concerning expenses incurred by localities related to the capture of enslaved people attempting to escape bondage to pursue freedom. The collection also includes records with information related to enslaved people from multiple localities who escaped to United States military forces during the Civil War. While many independent businesses bought and sold human beings, local and state governments such as the state of Virginia also participated in and profited from human trafficking. Localities were reimbursed for the expenses of confining, feeding, and selling of self-emancipated people, and likewise, the state established procedures to compensate enslavers for their financial loss when enslaved people ran away or were imprisoned or executed. If a person was captured and their enslaver could not be identified, they became the property of the state and were sold. The proceeds from these sales 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 net proceeds were deposited into the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Literary Fund for the public education of poor white children.

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

"North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.

Beginning in the 16th century, European traders began to buy or capture people in the African continent to enslave and sell for profit. This trade began with Portugal and Spain, but it later expanded to include France, England, the Netherlands and other European countries. By the time the trading of enslaved people was finally put to an end in the 19th century, Europeans had abducted an estimated 12.5 million African people from their homelands, forced them onto ships, trafficked them to the Americas, and sold them on the auction block. Almost two million people died during transport; most of the rest were forced into labor camps, also called plantations. This extensive and gruesome human trafficking is commonly referred to as the transatlantic slave trade. The Portuguese began human trafficking in Africa by trading manufactured goods or money for Africans who had been captured during local wars. Later, some Europeans captured Africans themselves or paid other local Africans to do it for them. Europeans traded for or kidnapped Africans from many points on Africa’s coast, including Angola, Senegambia and Mozambique. Most of the people who were enslaved by the Europeans came from West and Central Africa.The most brutal segment of the route was the Middle Passage, which transported chained African people across the Atlantic Ocean as they were packed tightly below the decks of purpose-built ships in unsanitary conditions. This trip could last weeks or even months depending on conditions, and the trafficked people were subjected to abuse, dangerously high heat, inadequate food and water, and low-oxygen environments. Olaudah Equiano, a young boy who was forced into the Middle Passage after being captured in his home country of Nigeria, later described the foul conditions as “intolerably loathsome” and detailed how people died from sickness and lack of air. Approximately 1.8 million African people are thought to have died during the passage, accounting for about 15–25 percent of those who were taken from Africa.For many enslaved Africans trafficked across the Atlantic, the port at which their ship landed was not their final destination. Enslaved people were often transported by ship between two points in the Americas, particularly from Portuguese, Dutch and British colonies to Spanish ones. This was the intra-American slave trade. No matter where they landed, enslaved Africans faced brutal living conditions and high mortality rates. Moreover, any children born to enslaved persons were also born into slavery, usually with no hope of ever gaining freedom.This data set is the culmination of decades of archival research compiled by the SlaveVoyages Consortium. This data represents the trafficking of enslaved Africans from 1514 to 1866. All mapmakers must make choices when presenting data. This map layer represents individuals who experts can definitively place at a given location on one of at least 36,000 transatlantic and at least 10,000 intra-American human trafficking routes. However, this means the enslaved people for whom records cannot place their departure or arrival with certainty do not appear on this map (approximately 170,985 people). This map, therefore, is part of the story and not a complete accounting. You can learn more about the methodology of this data collection here.

SLP (Slavery, Law, and Power) is a project dedicated to bringing the many disparate sources that help to explain the long history of slavery and its connection to struggles over power in early America, particularly in the colonies that would become the United States. Going back to the early English Empire, this project traces the rise of the slave trade along with the parallel struggles between monarchical power and early democratic institutions and ideals. We are creating a curated set of documents that help researchers and students to understand the background to the fierce struggles over both slavery and power during the American Revolution, when questions of monarchical power, consent to government, and hereditary slavery were all fiercely debated. After America separated from Britain, the United States was still deeply influenced by this long history, especially up to the Civil War. The colonial legacies of these debates continued to affect the course of politics, law, and justice in American society as a whole.

This dataset covers transcriptions from our 2022-2023 document selection on various curated documents related to slavery, law, and power. The purpose of this set it too make these transcriptions accessible for future scholars as well as store these transcriptions in long term digital storage.

In 1807, the US Congress enacted the "Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves," which outlawed the nation’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade. This very same statute required any captain of a coastwise vessel with enslaved people onboard to file a manifest listing those individuals by name with the collector (or in his absence, the surveyor) of the port of departure and of the port of arrival. As a result of this legislation, the coastwise traffic was systematically documented. Enslaved people were forcibly carried to and from dozens of ports in this period, but by far, the largest portion of the coastwise trade consisted of enslaved people being sent to New Orleans, the largest slave market in the country. In total, approximately 4,000 "inward manifests” documenting the coastwise traffic to New Orleans survive. They list the names of more than 63,000 enslaved people. The Oceans of Kinfolk Database includes information from each of these records, including captive names (first and often last), heights, racial descriptions, as well as each individual’s owner, shipper, and/or consignor. "Every variable found in the first edition of Oceans of Kinfolk presented a new, tidy encapsulation of grotesque epistemological violence," the creator argues; the data is being reconfigured and recontextualized at Kinfolkology, a digital archive, collaborative database collective, and living memorial honoring the humanity and kinships of enslaved people, https://www.kinfolkology.org/.

SLP (Slavery, Law, and Power) is a project dedicated to bringing the many disparate sources that help to explain the long history of slavery and its connection to struggles over power in early America, particularly in the colonies that would become the United States. Going back to the early English Empire, this project traces the rise of the slave trade along with the parallel struggles between monarchical power and early democratic institutions and ideals. We are creating a curated set of documents that help researchers and students to understand the background to the fierce struggles over both slavery and power during the American Revolution, when questions of monarchical power, consent to government, and hereditary slavery were all fiercely debated. After America separated from Britain, the United States was still deeply influenced by this long history, especially up to the Civil War. The colonial legacies of these debates continued to affect the course of politics, law, and justice in American society as a whole.

This dataset covers transcriptions from our 2021 document selection on various curated documents related to slavery, law, and power. The purpose of this set it too make these transcriptions accessible for future scholars as well as store these transcriptions in long term digital storage.

The company known as Franklin & Armfield was the largest slave-trading business in the United States during its years of operation from 1828 to 1836, and it may have been the largest in American history. Partners and agents of the company sold more than 1,600 enslaved people in New Orleans, which housed the largest market for enslaved people in the entire country. The dataset included here contains detailed information about those sales, documenting the names of the enslaved and the individuals who purchased them, some demographic and physical descriptions of the enslaved, the terms of their sales, and other relevant matters. Most information was extracted from records kept by notaries who recorded many of the slave sales in the city.

This data collection contains information about the population of each county, town, and city of the United States in 1850 and 1860. Specific variables include tabulations of white, black, and slave males and females, and aggregate population for each town. Foreign-born population, total population of each county, and centroid latitudes and longitudes of each county and state were also compiled. (Source: downloaded from ICPSR 7/13/10)

Please Note: This dataset is part of the historical CISER Data Archive Collection and is also available at ICPSR -- https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR09424.v2. We highly recommend using the ICPSR version as they made this dataset available in multiple data formats.

This replication package contains code, data, and documentation to replicate the analyses in "Wealth, Slave Ownership, and Fighting for the Confederacy: An Empirical Study of the American Civil War." Abstract: How did personal wealth and slaveownership affect the likelihood southerners fought for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War? On the one hand, wealthy southerners had incentives to free-ride on poorer southerners and avoid fighting; on the other hand, wealthy southerners were disproportionately slaveowners, and thus had more at stake in the outcome of the war. We assemble a dataset on roughly 3.9 million free citizens in the Confederacy, and show that slaveowners were more likely to fight than non-slaveowners. We then exploit a randomized land lottery held in 1832 in Georgia. Households of lottery winners owned more slaves in 1850 and were more likely to have sons who fought in the Confederate Army. We conclude that slaveownership, in contrast to some other kinds of wealth, compelled southerners to fight despite free-rider incentives because it raised their stakes in the war's outcome.