The history of slavery in the United States

Hartford Web Publishing is not the author of the documents in World History Archives and does not presume to validate their accuracy or authenticity nor to release their copyright.

Sources

Petition of 1779 by slaves of Fairfield County
For the abolition of Slavery in Connecticut.
Petition of 1780 by slaves
For the abolition of slavery in Connecticut.
Petition of 1788 by slaves of New Haven
For the abolition of slavery in Connecticut.

Secondary works

James Martin
Extract from George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1972). James Martin, born on a Virginia plantation in 1847, was 90 years old when he was interviewed by the Works Progress Administration in 1937. Description of slave market.
The Hazards of Anti-Slavery Journalism
By Graham Russell Hodges, Media Studies Journal, Spring/Summer 2000. Abolitionists organizing the battle against slavery during the 1830s quickly mastered the potentials of the penny press and the post office in their campaign to compel Americans to examine their consciences.
Review of Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
By Robert Wolff, H-Net Book Review, June 2000. Designed as both complement to and measured criticism of economic and demographic approaches to the slave trade. By placing enslaved African Americans at the center of analysis, Johnson shifts the scholarly focus on the slave market from aggregate numerical measures to the chilling day-to-day commerce in human beings.
Review of John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
By Samantha Manchester Earley, African Studies Quarterly, Fall 2000. Runaway Slaves addresses the still widely held belief that slaves were generally content, that racial violence on the plantation was an aberration, and that the few who ran away struck out for the Promised Land in the North or Canada.
US struggles with slavery's legacy
By Rob Watson, BBC News, Wednesday 5 September 2001. The contribution of African Americans to the economy of America, inclusive of the Old South, was tremendous. The plantation society of the Old South was based on slave labour. It would be impossible to extract from history the results of African American slavery.
Did the Underground Railroad Lead to Haiti?
A dialog from Bob Corbet's Haiti list, 15 November 2002. Documentation for this avenue to freedom for slaves from the South.
The Hidden History of Slavery in New York
By Adele Oltman, The Nation, posted online 24 October 2005. In 1991 excavators for a new federal office building in Manhattan unearthed the remains of more than 400 Africans stacked in wooden boxes sixteen to twenty-eight feet below street level. The cemetery dated back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.