Digital Library on American Slavery

Digital Library on American Slavery

The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The Digital Library contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly 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, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are 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.

One of the inherent tragedies of slavery is the fact that the masses of black people often remain nameless in the historical record. The 1850 and 1860 United States Population Slave Censuses, for example, recorded the age, gender, color, and owner's name for approximately 7.2 million slaves, but failed to record the names of individual slaves.

One of the unique aspects of the Digital Library is the information on individual slaves that will be made available along with additional data on their owners stretching over time. For each slave, other data, when included in the documents, will be added: an alternate name, name extension (Jr., Sr.), age, gender, color, dates of ownership, as well as economic and family information. Free black data will include name, name extension, age, gender, color, occupation, how and when freed, names and status of family relations. Despite these unique profiles, the total number of names in the database, compared with the millions of slaves and free blacks over time, is small. Even so, no other online database connects slaves with their owners in such a manner.

The Digital Library is a rich resource in other ways as well. The list of subjects reveals the variety of "causes" or "bills of complaint," in the language of the courts, that petitioners brought, or defendants raised, in their civil suits. The general topics include slave ownership, slave management, freedom suits, crime and punishment, health, death, social and civic life, marriage, women, and family, among others. In addition, all of the petitions relate in one way or another to a broad range of legal issues and state laws concerning race and slavery.