Webography, Slavery

The following electronic resources lead the researcher to bibliographic and textual information from the period or about slavery in British America, especially Virginia. For book sources see Researching African Americans in Colonial and Revolutionary Virginia.

Internet Resources from Colonial Williamsburg

Shirley Plantation Collection, 1650-1989 contains material related to slavery -- bills of sale, blanket and food lists, medical accounts, list of dead from an 1849 cholera epidemic, and runaway slaves. Also includes pay journals for freedmen after the Civil War.

Whitlock/Wingfield Family Bible, includes listings of slave births (and some deaths) during the years 177[9?] - 1843.

Enslaving Virginia
The "Enslaving Virginia" story line addresses the development and growth of a racially based slave system that profoundly affected the lives, fortunes, and values of blacks and whites. See a bibliography of recommended readings.

Virginia Gazette
The subject guide leads you to notices of free blacks, runaways and slave occupations under topics such as Negroes, Free; Slaves, Runaway; and Slaves as Doctors, Ferrymen, Laundresses, etc.

Images are available in the Library's Visual Resources Center. Look at some samples:
Slavery

Articles by Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Staff

African-American Experience in Williamsburg (includes audio interview files)
Archaeology at the Atkinson Site
"Little Spots allow'd them": Slave Garden Plots and Poultry Yards by Patricia A. Gibbs
The Newsworthy Somerset Case, by Emma L. Powers
Slavery in John Blair's Public and Personal Lives in 1751, by Julie Richter
After 1723, Manumission Takes Careful Planning and Plenty of Savvy, by Linda H. Rowe
The Burwells Move Their Slaves to the Southside, by Julie Richter
New Findings about the Virginia Slave Trade, by Lorena S. Walsh
A Biographical Sketch of Matthew Ashby, by Emma L. Powers
A Portrait of York County Middling Planters and Their Slaves, 1760-1775 by Kevin P. Kelly
A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Spring, 1619-1803 by Martha W. McCartney.

Articles from the Colonial Williamsburg Journal

Fighting... Maybe for Freedom, but probably not by Lloyd Dobyns, Autumn 2007
Slave Conspiracies in Colonial Virginia by Mary Miley Theobald, Winter 2006
Finding Slaves in Unexpected Places: Keeping Blacks in Bondage Was Not a Southern Monopoly by James Breig, Winter 2006
‘In Mind and Heart’ with the Enslaved of Yesteryear by Will Molineux, Summer 2003
Juba and Djembe: Music Helps Interpret Slavery. by Ed Crews, Winter 2002-03.
To Live Like a Slave by Curtia James, Autumn 1993

Podcasts

Adopted by the Shawnee
The Bray School
The Boston Slave Petition
A Dangerous Man -- Gowan Pamphlet
An Enduring Spirit
Freedom Bound
Jumping the Broom
Merging Cultures
Oral History
A Slave's Perspective

Search the Library catalog:

Subjects:

Slave Trade Slavery Virginia Slaves' writings, American Plantation Life Freedmen Women slaves

Other Internet Resources

Africans in America
This PBS site offers narrative, historical documents, and scholarly commentary on the beginnings and ending of slavery in the United States, 1460-1865.

Afro-American Sources in Virginia
A Guide to Manuscripts, edited by Michael Plunkett. Also included is Guide to African American Documentary Resources in North Carolina edited by Timothy D. Pyatt. These are lists of manuscript resources which list the library where one can find the original document.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
Hundreds of images have been selected, described and categorized. One can search by keyword or browse by topic.

Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People
This site explores an untold story of how Canada became the home of the first settlements of free blacks outside Africa. Digital documents offered by includes a transcript of the Book of Negroes, a list of African-Americans evacuated from New York at the end of the war. The Library also owns a searchable database on CDROM, as well as a photocopy (Number 10427 of the set entitled, “Headquarters Papers of the British Army in America”) and a microfilm copy (M154.29) of the original Book of Negroes.

Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery
The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery is a Web-based initiative designed to foster inter-site, comparative archeological research on slavery in the greater Chesapeake region.

Digital Library on American Slavery
The Race and Slavery Petitions Project at The University of North Carolina Greensboro have collected data on race and slavery from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents that contain detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. The names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners have been extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, and amended petitions.

The Equiano Project
A celebration of the life and times of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, seaman, war veteran, writer and abolitionist, who lived in 18th century England.

Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware.
The history of the free African American community as told through the family history of most African Americans who were free in the Southeast during the colonial period. Paul Heinegg offers online access to his books and adds more transcribed records periodically.

Freedmens Bureau Online
The Bureau was established in the War Department by an act of March 3, 1865. The Bureau supervised all relief and educational activities relating to refugees and freedmen, including issuing rations, clothing and medicine. Information is being added on an ongoing basis.

From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection, 1824-1909
Offers complete page images of the 397 titles in the African American Pamphlet Collection, as well as searchable electronic texts and bibliographic records. Most pamphlets were written by African-American authors, though some were written by others on topics of particular importance in African-American history.

Geography of Slavery in Virginia
A digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in Virginia newspapers, 1736-1790. Other documents including court records and correspondence on slavery and indentured servitude are being collected as well.

Guide to African American Manuscripts in the Collection of the Virginia Historical Society
The Society's holdings of African American materials consist largely of the records of slaves and slavery in the Old Dominion, the great bulk of which is concentrated on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collections are listed with brief descriptions and can be browsed or searched by keyword.

Images of African-American Slavery and Freedom
From the collections of the Library of Congress.

Monticello Plantation Database
A database of information on over six hundred slaves --details of life span, family structure, occupation, and transactions like purchases and sales.

Parliament and the British Slave Trade, 1600-1807
The Parliamentary Archives has digitised a wealth of archival material which provides evidence of the issues, processes and people at the heart of Parliament's relationship with the slave trade.

Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Raw data and documentation on records of slave ship movement, slave ships of France, the Virginia slave trade in the 18th century, Enclish slave trade, Angola slave trade and more.

A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Spring, 1619-1803 by Martha W. McCartney with contributions by Lorena S. Walsh. 262 page report for the Nat'l Park Service. Hardcopy in library collection: F234 .J3 M334 2003.

TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database: Voyages
An expanded and continually growing online version of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM [Cambridge UP, 1999], the Voyages Database contains records of nearly 35,000 separate slaving voyages between 1514 and 1866, gleaned from original documents and historical publications located in archives, libraries, and other institutions throughout the world.

The Virginia Heritage Project offers subject access to manuscript collections in Virginia. Enter “slave?” to find collections that concern slave, slaves, or slavery or “African-american?” for broader information. Limit by institution to find out which items are available at Colonial Williamsburg.

Subscription Resources (available only to Colonial Williamsburg staff)

African American Newspapers, 1827-1998
Explore African American history, culture and daily life in the 19th and 20th centuries.

African American Studies Center
A database focusing on the lives and events that have shaped African American history and culture. (Contact Reference Desk, 565-8510, for assistance.)

American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography
Between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project hired field workers to collect the life histories of former slaves. The full-text of the transcripts for 2,000 interviews, from seventeen states, are now available and searchable. (Contact Reference Desk, 565-8510, for assistance.)

America: History and Life indexes over 2,000 historical journals published worldwide. Approximately 16,000 new entries are added each year. Enter “|Slavery|” as a subject and type in the pertinent years in the Historical Period boxes. (Contact Reference Desk, 565-8510, for assistance.)

American State Papers, 1789-1817
Legislative and executive documents, many originating from the important period between 1789 and the beginning of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set in 1817. (Available only on computers on the CWF network; contact Reference Desk, 565-8510, for assistance.)

America's Historical Imprints
Search simultaneously: Early American Imprints Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 and Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819. (Available only on computers on the CWF network; contact Reference Desk, 565-8510, for assistance.)

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800
Full-text books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the renowned bibliography by Charles Evans - the definitive resource for information about every aspect of life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft, and just about any other topic imaginable.

Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819
Full-text books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the distinguished bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker.

America's Historical Newspapers, Series I, 1690-1876
Hundreds of historic newspapers to search or browse. (Available only on computers on the CWF network; contact Reference Desk, 565-8510, for assistance.)

ECCO, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online
This library of 150,000 printed volumes and more than 26 million pages can be searched by author, title and keyword.

Footnote / African American Archives
Browse or search the records of the American Colonization Society, the Southern Claims Commission (1871), the Court Slave Records for the District of Columbia (1862).

JSTOR
This digital collection of periodicals includes 15 African-American studies titles. Search by topic or browse by date.

Parliamentary Papers
British government documents includes reports such as The Report on the Lords of Trade of the Slave Trade 1789.

Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice
Primary sources collected from archives and libraries across the Atlantic world including the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the Wilberforce House Museum and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. (Available only on computers on the CWF network; contact Reference Desk, 565-8510, for assistance).

Southern Life and African American History, 1775-1915. Plantations, Part I.
Search or browse full-text documents from the Virginia Historical Society and from institutions in Maryland, South Carolina and Louisiana microfilmed as part of the “Records of the Antebellum Southern Plantations” series. (CWF users only; Contact Reference Desk, 565-8510, for assistance.)