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Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections

The African Americans: Rubenstein Recap #2

Each Tuesday, PBS is showing the next installment of a six-part series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. Written and narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the documentary traces African American history from the shores of West Africa to the election of Barack Obama. Join us each week as we feature documents from the John Hope Franklin Research Center that resonate with the previous week’s episode.

Last Tuesday’s episode  focused on the slavery at its height in the American South. Episode 2: The Age of Slavery (1800 – 1860) began at the end of the Revolutionary War, a time when slavery was still legal in all thirteen states. While the demands of enslaved African Americans for freedom and mounting moral appeals helped end human bondage in the North, the exploding international demand for cotton only deepened the South’s reliance on slave labor.

The notebook of a slave transporter who delivered twenty-five slaves from Lancaster, South Carolina to Montgomery, Alabama in 1845.
The notebook of a slave transporter who delivered twenty-five slaves from Lancaster, South Carolina to Montgomery, Alabama in 1845. (Slave transporter’s notebook, 1845). Click to enlarge.

 

Lineage of slave families on the McRae Plantation near Camden, South Carolina in the 1800s. Jacob and July are noted as runaways.
Lineage of slave families on the McRae Plantation near Camden, South Carolina in the 1800s. Jacob and July are noted as runaways. (Plantation Memorandum Book, McRae Plantation)

Enslaved men and women ran away, revolted, and resisted this brutal system in any way they could. The luckiest made their way to freedom in Canada, but the vast majority had little chance of escaping the cotton fields.

List of black men and women emigrating from Essex County, Canada to Haiti in 1861.
List of black men and women emigrating from Essex County, Canada to Haiti in 1861. Alexander Proctor and his wife Margaret were born free in the South and migrated to Ohio before moving to Canada and finally Haiti. Also on the list is William Turner, who is noted as a fugitive. (Alexander Proctor Papers, 1837-1895).
Click to enlarge.

By the mid-19th century, abolitionists and free black citizens, like escaped slave Frederick Douglass, had launched a passionate battle to end slavery in the United States.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)

Post contributed by Karlyn Forner, John Hope Franklin Research Center Graduate Student Intern and John Gartrell, John Hope Franklin Research Center Director



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