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.

Abstract

The 2019 version of the transatlantic slave trade database contains 36,108 voyages compared to 34,940 in 2008 (and 27,233 in the 1999 version of the database that appeared on CD-ROM). Since 2008, several thousand corrections have been made and additional information added. Thus 284 of the 2008 voyages have been deleted either because we found they had been entered twice, or because we discovered that a voyage was not involved in the transatlantic slave trade. For example voyage id 16772, the Pye, Captain Adam, turned out to have carried slaves from Jamaica to the Chesapeake, but obtained its captives in Jamaica, not Africa. Offsetting the deletions are 1,345 voyages added on the basis of new information. Further, many voyages that are common to both 2008 and 2019 versions of the database now contain information that was not available in 2008 (see table 1 of “Understanding the Database” for the current summary).

Usage

The 2019 version has 274 variables, compared with 98 in the Voyages Database available online. Users interested in working with this larger data set can download it in a file formatted for use with SPSS software. Because some users may find it useful to view data as it existed in earlier versions, the database as it was in 1999, 2008 and 2010 can also be selected for download. A codebook describing all variable names, variable labels, and values of the expanded dataset is available as a pdf document. With only a few exceptions, it retains variable names in the original 1999 CD-ROM version

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.

The slave register in the former Dutch colony of Suriname was established by Royal Decree in 1826 to combat the illegal international trade in enslaved people. Slave owners had to report the people in their possession and every mutation (such as births, deaths, purchases, and sales) to a civil servant. By registering people and their transfers, a closed registration was created that made it almost impossible to smuggle people illegally into Suriname. The registration in the slave registers was a continuous process which was maintained until the abolition of slavery in Suriname on 1 July 1863. Once every three to ten years, civil servants started a new series of registers into which the information that was still relevant was copied. As a result, there were a total of five series of slave registers. Not all the books of the slave registers have been preserved. The 1826-1830 series is completely missing. By estimation, a third of the slave registers from 1830 onwards have been lost, mainly from the older series. Of the 1830-1838 series only 42% of the registers still exists. Later series are much more complete: the survival rate is 55% of the series 1838-1848 and 72% of the series 1848-1851. The last series from 1851 to 1863 is more than 95% complete. Within the slave registers, a distinction was made between enslaved people owned by plantations and people owned by private slave owners. This distinction makes it possible to research the workforces of different plantations. However, one has to be aware that slave registers registered ownership, not the actual workplace of enslaved people. People could be hired to other plantations. Between 1830 and 1848, the information for each enslaved person is limited. Beside the name of the owner, only the name of the enslaved, the gender and sometimes the age were registered. By new-born children the name of the mother was also mentioned. The dates mentioned in the slave registers are the ‘mutation dates’, the date of registration of each event, not the actual date of the event. Because some plantations only registered new-borns and deaths only twice a year, there could be months between an event and its registration. Over the years, the information recorded in the slave registers increased. Starting in 1848 the slave registers mention the birth year and the name of the mother of each person, which makes reconstructions of female family lineage possible. From 1850 onwards, the actual dates of births and deaths had to be registered also. Fathers were never registered, and neither was cohabitation. Families were not normally registered together as a group. When slavery was abolished in 1863, two new registrations were generated. Slave owners had to hand in lists of the people they owned, in order to claim a compensation from the Dutch government. These list, called ‘Borderellen’, contains information on owner, name of the enslaved, sex, age, religion and occupation. Furthermore, a register of names was created for each district in which the emancipated former enslaved were registered with their new family name, first names, year of birth, name they had before 1863, place of living and sometimes information on family relations. The information in these two sources was combined by Lamur et al (2004) in one Emancipation dataset. This dataset is added to the database with the permission of the authors. The current version is version 1.1

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.

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.

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.

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 Santos Enslaved and Enslaver Dataset (SEED), created between 2003 and 2006, offers an innovative micro-historical method so users can better understand the diverse lived experiences and oppression of enslaved people. The dataset is one of the most detailed for any city or county of a slave society. It cross-references the identities of thousands of enslaved individuals and enslavers in documents from 13 Brazilian archives and 43 primary source types. It contains more than 42,806 entries drawing from information in medical, church, government, and judicial records of the nineteenth century. More than 1,960 individuals were identified and cross-referenced through multiple historical sources, allowing for a wide range of narratives to emerge from the data.

The Curaçao colonial administration began keeping track of slaves at the beginning of 1839. This so-called slave record was maintained until 1863, when slavery was abolished. All owners were obliged to register the name, gender, year of birth and name of the mother of the people in their property. Furthermore, all changes had to be registered: birth, death, sale, release and the import and export of people in Curaçao. This resulted in a closed registration: as long as someone was alive and in slavery, this person could be followed in the slave registers. In total, the slave registers of Curaçao consist of eight books, with a total of 1,070 folios (pages). The registers consist of 21,515 entries for 13,062 unique individuals. Absent from the registers are governmental owned enslaved persons. This encompasses maybe a few tens to a hundred individuals in Curaçao. Furthermore, as enslaved persons were not permitted to marry and hence are legally fatherless, the name of the father is missing in all slave registry.

This document provides an overview of the construction of the Curaçao slave registers database and the variables therein. A quick summary of the variables is given first. An detailed description of the variables is provided in the appendices, which is then followed by an explanation of how the variables were created.

The Maranhão Inventories Slave Database (MISD) contains extracted information about the lives of 8,188 enslaved Africans and their descendants in Maranhão, Brazil from the mid-eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century. The dataset contains 21 variables. MISD data were produced between 1767 and 1831 and have been extracted from inventories of property owners’ possessions that are housed today in the Arquivo Judiciário do Estado do Maranhāo in São Luís, Brazil. When a property owner in the territory died, a representative of the state tallied the deceased’s possessions—including slave property. Inventory takers wrote down extensive information about the enslaved, such as given names, approximate age, marriage partner, children, profession or skills, monetary values, and “defects” such as injuries and illnesses. Enslaved people’s original (African) names were not recorded, since the enslaved in Brazil were baptized and given new names. Inventory takers also asked the enslaved from what “nation” (nação) they hailed.

The “Rio de Janeiro Wet-Nursing Database” (RJWND) comprises all advertisements for wet nurses for the year of 1850 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, extracted from the city’s main commercial newspaper, Jornal do Commercio. “Mercenary” wet nursing, what contemporaries called the practice of paying for other women to breastfeed their children, was a thriving market throughout the nineteenth century. Enslaved women comprised most wet nurses, with freed women of color and white immigrant women also working in the trade. More rarely, white Brazilian women whose newborns had died advertised their milk. We can draw several conclusions from this data. Most importantly, RJWND demonstrates the ubiquity of wet nursing in urban Brazil. All women participated in this activity, whether as elite mothers not breastfeeding their own children, or as free, freed, freed African, and enslaved women breastfeeding other women’s children. It also sheds light on how enslavers valued wet nurses both for their reproductive labors (wet nursing) and their productive outputs (cleaning, cooking).

This dataset contains census records that were summarized at the end of most Daily Journals of Batavia Castle (Daghregisters Batavia) between 1678 and 1807. These records referred to the total population of the inner and outer city of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) headquarters in Asia, Batavia (nowadays Jakarta, capital of Indonesia), while retaining a focus on either the total or the enslaved population. Most of these Journals are part of the collection of Indonesia’s National Archives, the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI), and while the post-1682 Daily Journals have not been transcribed, they have been digitized in recent years by the ANRI and made publicly available. However, to my knowledge, the data has not yet been collected and published as a whole, although there are other census datasets available for Batavia. These records are not complete, as a number of volumes of the Daily Journals are missing. Adding to that, some surviving Journals were damaged by ink- or paper-related issues, sometimes causing data to be illegible. Sporadic copies of these missing Daily Journals were found in the Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren (OBP) using the GLOBALISE HTR Transcriptions Viewer, and have been included here.

As part of the Telling All of Our Stories project, Oatlands created a dataset to record every reference to a named enslaved person. The goal was to provide a source for locating ancestors or certain individuals and learning more about the people who were enslaved at Carter plantations Oatlands and Bellefield in Virginia. The first phase consists of names extracted from George Carter's will, written in 1842, and Elizabeth O. Carter's diary, kept from 1860 through 1873. The database contains over 900 entries, and there are approximately 120 distinctly different names. Information from or questions raised by Oatlands researchers are recorded in the Notes column. “List of slave expenditures kept by B. Grayson,” part of a Works Progress Administration Historical Inventory Project conducted in 1937, also provided some details for the dataset.

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/.

Bills of sale are written agreements which convey title of property, including enslaved people, from seller to buyer. Under the system of chattel slavery, laws permitted enslavers to treat enslaved people as personal possessions in the same manner as livestock, farm equipment, or household items. Enslaved people could be bought or sold without regard to their personal relationships or free will. Bills of sale record the name of the seller, the names of enslaved people being sold and their price, and the name of the buyer. Given that they involved a property transaction, bills of sale were commonly recorded and filed with deeds in the local court. However, there was no official requirement that the transfer of an enslaved person be recorded unless necessary for legal purposes such as a court case or an estate settlement. Enslaved people could also be transferred through a deed of gift, there was no money transaction involved in this case, which distinguishes this record from a bill of sale. Enslavers and their family members often transferred enslaved people between themselves in this manner.

Deeds, likewise are written agreements which convey title of property, such as an enslaved person, from one individual to another. Deeds can involve the voluntary transfer of enslaved people between family members with no financial transaction involved. Deeds record name(s) of the grantor(s), grantee(s), and enslaved people. Deeds were proved and recorded in the local court.

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

Deeds of emancipation and manumission record an enslavers’ intent to emancipate enslaved people from bondage. In 1726, the Virginia General Assembly passed a law allowing enslavers to emancipate enslaved people “by last will and testament or other instrument in writing sealed and witnessed to emancipate and set free his slave or slaves.” A 1782 law added that enslavers were no longer required to seek a special act from the General Assembly. These documents sometimes include an enslavers’ intent for emancipation ranging from religious and moral motivations to binding legal agreements.

Deeds of emancipation and manumission essentially provide the same information and there is little difference between the two. Both include the name of the enslaver, the name of the enslaved person to be freed, the date of anticipated freedom, the date the manumission was proved or certified, and as mentioned, sometimes a reason why the enslaver decided to emancipate the enslaved person. In a deed of manumission, an enslaver directly freed an enslaved person by manumission. In a deed of emancipation, an enslaved person could be freed after the enslaver’s death by those executing a last will and testament. This collection also includes court orders that record the date or age when enslaved individuals were to be emancipated by deed as stipulated in an enslaver's will.

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.

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.

"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.