Browse Items (63 total)

P. H. Anderson, a planter, wrote his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, who had previously served as a driver or an overseer and escaped during the war, to offer him employment after the war. P. H. Anderson, deep in debt, hoped that his former slave…

Reverend A. T. Holmes of Hayneville, Georgia, wrote the following essay in response to a contest offered by the Alabama Baptist State Convention in 1849 on “the Duties of Christian Masters to Their Servants.” Holmes won $200 for this winning entry,…

Before the war, Abraham Lincoln expressed antislavery sympathies and recorded his hostility to slavery's further expansion, but he opposed abolishing the institution altogether. He continued this stance once elected president. However, as the war…

Alexander H. Stephens (1812-1883), although originally opposed to secession, was elected vice-president of the Confederacy. After the war, he returned to political service in Georgia and in the House of Representatives. He served as governor of…

Congress’ Joint Committee on Reconstruction, composed of nine representatives and six senators, held extensive hearings in the spring of 1866 about the condition of the South and various proposals for reintegrating the former Confederate states into…

Colonization was one of the first post-revolutionary movements seeking to deal with the problem of slavery in the new United States. Whites from both slaveholding and nonslaveholding states formed the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1817 in…

Anthony Burns, a slave, escaped Virginia and fled to Massachusetts. He was captured and returned to slavery. He later spoke at a black church in New York in February of 1855. In this speech, published subsequently in newspapers, he gave his account…