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 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.
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