Browse Items (27 total)

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,…

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…

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…

After the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency on a sectional vote, South Carolina rejected cooperation with other slave states and seceded on December 20, 1860. In the following document, South Carolina set forth the state’s…

David Walker was one of the most influential black voices of the antebellum era. Little is known about his early life. The son of a slave father and a free black mother, Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, perhaps in 1796 or 1797. In…

The son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was born a slave in Maryland. While living in Baltimore and working at a shipyard, Douglass fled the city. He settled in Massachusetts and became the most prominent…