Please excuse any cross-postings.

The following comes from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, and I thought
members of this group would be interested in this resource.

Martha Katz-Hyman
Independent Curator
**************************

*UNC-Greensboro Web Site Tells Forgotten Tales of Slavery*

*http://www.uncg.edu/ure/news/stories/2009/dec/slavery120409.htm*



GREENSBORO, N.C. — The 1860 U.S. Census registered the names of slave owners
and the age, gender and color of slaves. But there, as in much of the
historical record, slaves are nameless.



UNCG’s new Digital Library on American Slavery
http://library.uncg.edu/slavery/ provides the names of more than 83,000
individual slaves from 15 states and the District of Columbia.



The web site, created in cooperation with University Libraries, features
petitions related to slavery collected during an 18-year project led by
history professor Loren Schweninger. The petitions filed in county courts
and state legislatures cover a wide range of legal issues, including wills,
divorce proceedings, punishment of runaway slaves, calls for abolition,
property disputes and more.



“It’s among the most specific and detailed databases and web sites dealing
with slavery in the U.S. between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,”
said Schweninger, the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor in History.
“There’s no web site like this, either in extent or content. The amount of
information in here to be mined is enormous.”



Started in 1991, the Race and Slavery Petitions Project collected, organized
and published the petitions. The Digital Library on American Slavery is the
final phase of the project.



A complete collection of the full petitions, “Race, Slavery, and Free
Blacks: Petitions to Southern Legislatures and County Courts, 1775-1867,”
has been published on 151 reels of microfilm. In addition to UNCG’s Jackson
Library, North Carolina university libraries with all or part of the
microfilm collection are located at Duke, East Carolina, N.C. A&T, UNC
Chapel Hill and Wake Forest.



Schweninger knows the value of conducting research from primary sources,
something he learned from his mentor, the late Dr. John Hope Franklin. The
stories he found in legal records were often not preserved anywhere else.
“This was info that was not tapped,” he said. “Very few scholars had gone to
county courts.”



Building the database for the archive was painstaking work. Schweninger
visited about 160 county courthouses in the South and 15 state archives
between 1991 and 1995. “The first three years, I was on the road 540 days,”
he said.



Marguerite Ross Howell, senior associate editor, worked on the project for
11 years and was responsible for entering tens of thousands of slave names
and connecting them with their own family members as well as their owners,
creating a unique resource from original documents. Nicole Mazgaj, associate
editor, worked on the project for seven years and focused her analysis
especially on the rich documentary evidence from parish court houses in
Louisiana.



“The archive is chock-full of information detailing the personal life of
slaves,” Mazgaj said. “It’s probably about the most detailed that you’ll
find.”



The project was supported by $1.5 million in grant money, a particularly
impressive sum in the humanities, from the National Historical Publications
and Records Commission at the National Archives, the National Endowment for
the Humanities, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and UNCG.



The library includes petitions by more than 2,500 slaves and free blacks who
sought redress for numerous causes. For example, George Sears of Randolph
County, a blacksmith and a free man of color, purchased his slave wife
Tillah for $300. He then petitioned the North Carolina General Assembly in
1818 to emancipate his wife and daughters and “render them Competent in Law
to inherit the Estate of your Petitioner.”



Other petitions show how race and slave status were sometimes in dispute. In
one case, a Georgia slave owner sued one of his neighbors for slander for
calling him a “damned negro,” averring that he was a black man. In another,
a woman in Baltimore petitioned for divorce because her husband “instead of
being a white man is a mulatto and in reality had been born a slave.” A New
Orleans teenager who was put on the auction block to be sold as a slave
asserted in her petition that she was in fact a free white woman.



A number of the petitions also speak to how slaves fought their enslavement,
providing details of slaves who ran away, burned down plantations, or
plotted to murder slave owners. As the petitions show, the position of free
blacks in the South was also precarious, especially as certain states and
counties sought to expel them or refused to allow them to enter.



In some cases, whites petitioned for free blacks to be allowed to remain in
the state, citing their value to the community. In others, a few free blacks
petitioned to be returned to slavery so that they could be with loved ones
who were slaves.



One such case occurred in Davidson County in the midst of the Civil War,
when free black Percy Ann Martin petitioned to become a slave. Martin states
“she belongs to that class of our population called ‘free negroes’ and has
had a husband for the last five years who is a slave.”



She laments that her husband “has been sold under execution, and she is
informed that the marriage and cohabitation between her and her husband is
against the law and will be broken off.” Confiding that “she is attached to
her husband and does not wish to be seperated [sic] from him,” Martin cites
that she is “poor, has no property” and is unsure of how she will support
herself “in these time of scarcity of provisions and high prices.”

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