|Alabama Blacks and the Congressional Reconstruction Acts of 1867
|The American Missionary Association and Northern Philanthropy in Reconstruction Alabama
||"The results of attempts by . . . the missionary societies to educate the negro in Alabama," wrote Walter Lynwood Fleming at the turn of the century, "were almost wholly bad . . . ."1 "Northern missionaries were religious fanatics,"2 he continued, "w...
|Antebellum Free Persons of Color in Postbellum Louisiana
||During the first fifteen years after the Civil War the landholdings of former free persons of color in Louisiana virtually disappeared. While historians have long shown an interest in the economic activities of Louisiana's free people of color during...
|Black Citizenship and the Republican Party in Reconstruction Alabama
||PERHAPS NO ASPECT OF ALABAMA HISTORY HAS RECEIVED
more scholarly attention in the past decade than the period of Reconstruction. Studies by Sarah van Woolfolk Wiggins,1 William Cash,2 and Robert Gilmour,3 have examined the po-litical, social, and ec...
|Black Owned Businesses in the South, 1790-1880
||This essay analyzes the changing configuration of black-owned businesses in the South over nearly a century. It divides region into two sections-the Lower South and the Upper South-and examines changes that occurred prior to 1840, during the late ant...
|Counting the Costs: Southern Planters and the Problem of Runaway Slaves, 1790-1860
||In our recent book Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, John Hope Franklin and I seek to answer a number of questions about runaways: how, when, and why they ran away, where they went, how successful they were in remaining at large. We also exam...
|Delving into the Past: County Court Records and the Pursuit of History.
||In his famous autobiography, historian and scholar Henry Adams recounted his teaching experiences at Harvard University during the 1870s. Dissatisfied with the lecture method, Adams experimented with different ways to teach. One technique that he ado...
|James Rapier and the Negro Labor Movement
||BORN OF FREE BLACK PARENTS IN FLORENCE, ALABAMA, a quarter century before the Civil War (1837) , James Thomas Rapier emerged during Reconstruction as one of the South,s outstanding political leaders. At the Tennessee Negro suffrage convention (only s...
|John Carruthers Stanly and the Anomaly of Black Slaveholding
||For many years after his death in the mid-1840s, residents of Craven County, North Carolina, recalled the remarkable career of slave-born John Carruthers Stanly, who had risen from bondage to become one of the most prosperous planters in the area. St...
|A Negro Sojourner in Antebellum New Orleans
||Many blacks, slave and free, considered the slave trading capital of the South in quite a different light—as a place of enjoyment, excitement, and delectation, even, ironically, as a refuge from the brutalities of the South's "peculiar institution." ...
|Property Owning Free African American Women in the South, 1800- 1870
||Until recently, historians have paid little attention to the subject of property ownership among African-American women (or any women for that matter) during the nineteenth century. Early studies of slavery concentrated primarily on their role as "ma...
|Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790-1880
||For many years, historians paid only slight attention to blacks who reached the upper economic levels in the nineteenth-century South. In 1905, amateur historian Calvin Dill Wilson wrote a ten-page essay in the North American Review called "Black Mas...
|The Roots of Enterprise: Black Owned Businesses in Virginia, 1830-1880
||In the three decades before the Civil War, even the most resourceful free blacks confronted formidable obstacles in seeking to establish a business. Often illiterate, lacking skills, and mired in poverty, they struggled merely to survive. Some had sp...
|A Slave Family in the Ante-Bellum South
||Twentieth century scholars of Afro-American history have offered two basically different interpretations concerning the effect of slavery on the black family. In his famous 1932 study The Negro Family in the United States, Negro sociologist E. Frankl...
|Slave Independence and Enterprise in South Carolina
||"EVERY MEASURE THAT MAY LESSON THE DEPENDENCE OF A Slave on his master ought to be opposed, as tending to dangerous consequences," a group of slaveholders in Orangeburg District, South Carolina, declared in a petition to the state legislature in 1816...
|Slave women, county courts and the law in the United States South: a comparative perspective
||This article provides an analysis of how slave women, during the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War, filed civil suits for their freedom in the county courts. The cases occurred primarily in the Upper South. It is argued in this art...
|Slavery and Southern Violence: County Court Petitions and the South’s Peculiar Institution
||In subsequent years, and after using From Slavery to Freedom in my African American history classes, I came to appreciate how important it was to understand the place of violence in Southern history. Of course, a number of scholars have focused on th...
|Thriving Within the Lowest Caste: The Financial Activities of James P. Thomas in the Nineteenth-Century South
||Yet, even in slavery James Thomas had laid the foundation for his later financial success, learning the values of frugality, hard work, and business enterprise. At the age of fourteen, in Nashville, Tennessee, he was hired out as an apprentice barber...
|"To the Honorable": Divorce, Alimony, Slavery, and the Law in Antebellum North Carolina
||In both style and substance, the petition of Harriet Laspeyre was similar to many other memorials presented to the North Carolina General Assembly and, in subsequent years, to the superior courts of the state concerning divorce, alimony, and slavery ...
|The Underside of Slavery: The Internal Economy, Self-Hire, and Quasi- Freedom in Virginia, 1780-1865
||From the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars have shown an keen interest in various aspects of black life in Virginia. In 1902, J. C. Ballagh published A History of Slavery in Virginia in. Johns Hopkins Press series on race and slavery; and ...
|A Vanishing Breed: Black Farm Owners in the South,1651-1982
||"I'm getting too old to battle it," sixty-nine-year old farmer Matthew Grant lamented in an 1987 interview. He had purchased his first sixty acres in 1947 for $3500 and eventually expanded his holdings to 190 acres, but increasing costs, low returns,...
|The Vass Slaves: County Courts, State Laws, and Slavery in Virginia, 1831-1861
||In the name of God Amen, Philip E. Vass of Halifax County, Virginia, wrote on 8 August 1831, being of sound mind and disposing Memory, Calling to reflection the Mortality of my body & being desirous to dispose of My Earthly possessions; do ordain thi...