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.

“Slave Statistics” consists of 7,289 records derived from lists of enslaved individuals in Anne Arundel and Montgomery counties as of November 1, 1864, the date when the Constitution of 1864, which abolished slavery in the state of Maryland, took effect. Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, despite the divided loyalties of her people. Because Maryland was a Union state, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free Maryland slaves. Many enslaved people, however, had taken advantage of the war's confusion to leave their enslavers earlier, some by joining the Union Army. Hoping that the federal government would repay the state's loyalty and compensate its citizens for the chattels lost, the General Assembly ordered that a listing be made of all slaveholders and their slaves as of November 1, 1864. The federal government never compensated the owners, but these records, called “Slave Statistics,” are the only evidence available of enslaved people and owners at the time of state emancipation. The Maryland State Archives retains the Slave Statistics reports for 1867-1869 for eight Maryland counties; the dataset includes information from two of the eight counties, Anne Arundel and Montgomery. The dataset includes all information on the original lists, including names of enslavers; county and district of residence; names of enslaved individuals and their physical condition, term of servitude, and Union Army service, including regiment; record date; and compensation (if applicable).

The 1900 full-count US census includes 2,080,169 Black Americans who were born prior to 1866, many of whom were formerly enslaved. This dataset includes the FamilySearch census transcriptions for these individuals including their name, gender, birthplace, birth year, and where they were living in 1900. The dataset also includes a link to a profile on the Family Tree for 84% of these individuals. These profiles provide access to information on other family members, helpful life sketch contextual information, and additional sources attached to the profile. To use the dataset, click the blue "Access Dataset" button to the right or click the blue download arrow next to the dataset file below.

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 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

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

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.

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 is a dataset of sales, probate inventories, and newspaper advertisements of prices of enslaved persons in New York and New Jersey from 1672 to 1856, compiled from primary and secondary sources. It is the largest compilation of such data of its kind for Northern states and can be useful in measuring prices of the enslaved over time, by region, and by sex and age. Local historians will find the database useful for information regarding slavery in particular cities and counties. Tracing particular enslaved persons and slaveholders may also be possible for genealogical and historical research.

"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.

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.

Analysis unit

Persons, households, and dwellings

UNITS IDENTIFIED: - Dwellings: yes - Vacant Units: no - Households: yes - Individuals: yes - Group quarters: yes

UNIT DESCRIPTIONS: - Dwellings: A separate inhabited tenement, containing one or more families under one roof. Where several tenements are in one block, with walls either of brick or wood to divide them, having separate entrances, they are each to be numbered as separate houses; but where not so divided, they are to be numbered as one house. - Households: One person living separately in a house, or a part of a house, and providing for him or herself, or several persons living together in a house, or in part of a house, upon one common means of support, and separately from others in similar circumstances - Group quarters: Yes

Universe

All persons living in the United States including temporarily absent residents and sailors at sea, no matter how long they may have been absent, if they were believed to be still alive. "Indians not taxed", which refers to Native Americans living on reservations or under tribal rule. Native Americans who had renounced tribal rule and "exercise the rights of citizens" were to be enumerated.

Kind of data

Population and Housing Census [hh/popcen]

Sampling procedure

MICRODATA SOURCE: Department of the Interior

SAMPLE SIZE (person records): 273596.

SAMPLE DESIGN: 1-in-100 national random sample of the free population. African-American slaves are not included in this dataset. Individual-level data on the 1860 slave population is available at the

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

The census operation involved six forms. Form 1 was used to enumerate free persons and collected information on individual characteristics. Form 2 was used to enumerate slaves. Other forms were used to record information about agriculture and industry.

Abstract This research analyzes the role of accounting in the slave system of Brazil in the 19th century, looking at the records and inventories of the slave trade and the accounting of the slave buyers. The study had a qualitative approach using historiographical research. In terms of media, it was bibliographic and documentary with an exploratory objective. Part of the documentary research was carried out in the online database Slave Voyages and in person at the Historical and Geographical Institute of Pernambuco (IAHGP). Based on the analysis of the documental sources, from the slave trade to the purchase of the slaves by plantation owners, the slaves were registered in the accounts as merchandise/property to generate wealth. Accounting is considered to have reproduced in its records and financial statements the naturalization of power relations established by the colonial system. This study contributed to the reflection on the role of accounting professionals who, from a more critical perspective, could have understood the process of objectification to which the enslaved were subjected. It also indicates that they cooperated in the abolitionist movement.

The Louisiana Runaway Slave Advertisements Database (LRSAD) contains information about 861 individuals who appeared in 691 advertisements placed in Louisiana (predominantly New Orleans) newspapers between 1801 and 1820. These advertisements were mostly placed by enslavers wishing to capture someone who they claimed to enslave but had escaped or by sheriffs and jailers alerting the public that a person who was African or of African descent had been jailed on suspicion of being a runaway slave. These advertisements are somewhat unique in North America in that they often include information on individuals’ places of origin and language skills.

"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.

About the DocSouth Data Project

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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 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.

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.