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A Southern Professor Defends the Fugitive Slave Law

Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote this proslavery tract, Liberty and Slavery, in 1856. Bledsoe defended the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, justified slavery as compatible with the Bible, [...]

Exploring Slave Life Through Found Poetry

In this lesson students look at primary source images and read short secondary texts to understand slave life.  In the activity, the teacher models and students practice differentiating between different types of text (primary, secondary, etc.) [...]

A Former Slave Recalls Slave Quarters and Moments of Leisure

Masters and slaves viewed slave quarters very differently. While masters sought to create an ordered world where their control was complete, slaves attempted to create homes, grow food and raise families. Former slaves describe growing flowers, [...]

Item Type: Photograph
"Five Generations on Smith's Planation, Beaufort, South Carolina"

This African-American family was photographed in 1862 after Union forces captured the Sea Island coastal area of South Carolina. One of four photographs taken by Timothy O’Sullivan of the J. J. Smith plantation, this picture was subsequently [...]

Item Type: Photograph
Selling Sweet Potatoes in Charleston

Slaves commonly sold produce like sweet potatoes or peanuts and other goods on the streets of Charleston. Slave owners coordinated this “slave-hiring system” to help raise additional income for the plantation. Mary Reynolds, a former [...]

Item Type: Poster/Print
Table of Naming Practices among the Bennehan-Cameron Plantation Slaves, Orange County, North Carolina, 1778–1842

This table records the names of enslaved children and their parents on a North Carolina plantation over 65 years. Enslaved Africans and African-American slaves on this plantation purposefully established naming practices to link slave families and [...]

A Virginia Slave Puts His Writing Skills to Good Use

In this selection from an oral history interview, William L. Johnson, Jr., describes a fellow slave who resisted slavery by learning to read and write and in turn helped other slaves to resist. The interview was one of thousands conducted with [...]

Item Type: Oral History
A Slave Named Sukie Resists a Master's Advances

While slaves knew that they would face harsh punishments for acts of open resistance, many did so anyway. In this selection from an oral history interview, Fannie Berry describes a surprising act of defiance by a fellow slave, one that illustrates [...]

Item Type: Oral History
Night Patrols Check Slave Passes in Mississippi

This scene of white patrollers examining “Negro passes” in Mississippi illustrates the constraints placed on all African Americans in the slave South. This news illustration captured a scene during the Civil War, when slave owners in [...]

Selections from Alabama's Laws Governing Slaves

While slaveholders defended slavery as a benign system, this selection of laws, on the books in Alabama in 1833, suggest that slaves themselves were finding many ways to resist and escape it. Whites became particularly concerned about slave [...]

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