Partially printed writ of detention related to the surrender of the enslaved woman "Lucy" and the enslaved girl "Nancy." Orange County, NC, 1813.

... answer John McMurray of a plea that she render to him a negro Girl called Lucy of the value of five hundred dollars...

Africa to Carolina - The North Carolina Heritage Commission
In North Carolina the recorded sites for the disembarkment of enslaved Africans from slave ships are: Edenton/Roanoke, Bath, New Bern, Beaufort, Brunswick, Wilmington/Battery Island, and Portsmouth Island. While not all locations are specified research is still ongoing.

Image description: "Negro clothing book", plantation accounting ledger book with writing on both pages in black and red colors.
Note: This is from a plantation in Tennessee, though we know many of these clothing record logs were kept by slaver owners in North Carolina also. This gives you an idea of how detailed slave owners kept records on their property. This was a business for slaver owners and most of them kept up with every penny spent on each enslaved Black person they owned.

"The Hunted Slaves"
1861
Oil on canvas
by British artist Richard Ansdell

Image: "To the Highest Bidder"
oil on canvas, 1906, by Harry Roseland -1867-1950
This painting is owned by Oprah Winfrey

Photo description: Top photo-The skulls and modified teeth of three people taken from Africa and buried hundreds of years ago in a mass grave in Mexico City. Credit...R. Barquera & N. Bernal
Bottom photo-Skeletal remains from the African individuals showing signs of physical abuse they suffered during enslavement, such as bones stained green after being shot with copper buckshot. Credit...R. Barquera & N. Bernal

Montgomery, Ala: One of the statues depicting chained enslaved African people at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice...

Esther was being transported from Boston to North Carolina aboard the sloop Endeavor to be returned to enslavement. According to testimony given by the ship’s crew, while the vessel sat in the harbor overnight, Esther despite having her feet bound to a crowbar, her hands tied behind her back and being put down in the hold, was able to jump overboard and make it to shore and freedom.

A political cartoon titled Effects of the Fugitive-Slave-Law depicts four Black men being fired upon by a posse of white men. (The Black men could be free men).

AFRICAN HUMAN CARGO STACKED ON A SLAVE SHIP -THE TRANSAtlantic SLAVE TRADE-A LIST OF THE KNOWN SLAVE SHIPS

British Colonies .
Slave ships were large cargo ships specially converted for the purpose of transporting slaves. Such ships were also known as "Guineamen" because their trade involved trafficking to and from the Guinea coast in West Africa.

The slave trade produced enormous wealth for a variety of industries and businesses

"If the Atlantic were to dry up, it would reveal a scattered pathway of human bones marking the various routes of the Middle Passage. But those who did survive multiplied and have contributed to the creation of a new human society in the Americas and the Caribbean. It is a testament of the vitality and fortitude of the Africans that ten to twenty million lived through the heinous ordeal that many consider the greatest crime ever committed against a people in human history."
- John Henrik Clarke
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American Colonization Society

Rev. Robert Finley (1772 – October 3, 1817) was briefly the president of the University of Georgia. He initiated the American Colonization Society, which later founded the African Country Liberia. Finley was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and graduated from College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University) at the age of 15.

April 16, 1862 President Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act,
Emancipation Day is a holiday in Washington DC to mark the anniversary of the signing of the Compensated Emancipation Act, which president Abraham Lincoln signed on April 16, 1862. It is annually held on April 16.
Emancipation Day is a public holiday in District of Columbia, where it is a day off for the general population, and schools and most businesses are closed.

Ashe’s link to the city of Asheville is admittedly indirect. But it’s also present in the tennis star’s very name. Ashe was born and raised in Virginia, however, genealogical research traces his family’s name back an astonishing 11 generations. His first forebears in America were slaves owned by former North Carolina governor Samuel Ashe.

Words in white section is a partially transcribed bill of sale for enslaved Black people named, "Lonon, "Grase," and "Henderson," auctioned at the courthouse in the city of Raleigh, Wake County, NC. April 15, 1838.

Peter, an enslaved Black man was sold for four hundred dollars in Bertie Co. NC

Enslaved Black family sold for $1000.00

A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young Black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy.

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered. Traditionally, this event has been used to mark the beginning of the Civil War.
The Civil War began-April 12, 1861, and ended May 9, 1865- (4 years and 27 days), except for the enslaved Black people in Texas.

Image description: Illustration by Currier & Ives. Bombardment of Fort Sumter- Library of Congress

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Image description: Top-Enslaved Black people are depicted working for Confederate forces during the Civil War. (“The Civil War in America from the Illustrated London News”: A Joint Project by Sandra J. Still, Emily E. Katt, Collection Management, and the Beck Center of Emory University)

Bottom-A Confederate payroll receipt from 1864 for the work of enslaved women and children at one of the nitre beds used during the Civil War for the production of gun powder.
(National Archives) (National Archives)

At the beginning of the Civil War, there were approximately two million enslaved women.
An estimated 500,000 of these women fled from slavery as soon as white men left their plantations and homes to join the Confederate army.

Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in 1818 in Virginia. As a slave she encountered repeated tortures meant to break her down into submission. Keckley writes about her teenage years, working as a slave for the Rev. Robert Burwell in Hillsborough, NC. He is thought by many historians to have been Keckley s half-brother.

Uncovering the Lives of the Enslaved Through Newspaper Records and Historical Research
Ever since I heard someone in a meeting say there were no enslaved in Fayetteville, I knew the they were wrong, but I had to prove it with historical records. This place is not my ancestors home.
Slowly, I found NC History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction and the old newspapers. Now, the descendants of enslaved ancestors from Fayetteville who I work with in genealogy can find their ancestors. Among them are free people too. - Robin R. Foster

The Names of the Enslaved People who Built the University of North Carolina
Posted on April 24, 2018 by Caroline Newhall
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was founded in the midst of a slave society by slaveholders. Enslaved people were present on campus from the laying of the cornerstone of Old East in 1793 until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Enslaved people built the earliest structures on the campus, many of which still exist. Old East, Old West, Gerrard Hall, South Building, Steward’s Hall, Person Hall, Smith Hall, and the original President’s House all took shape under the skilled hands of enslaved people owned or hired by the University’s trustees, employees, students, architects, and the townspeople of Chapel Hill.

By the end of October 1862, Collins forcibly relocated 171 enslaved men, women, and children behind Confederate lines to a newly acquired plantation in Franklin County named "Hurry Scurry."

Descendant Of Slave Who Found Sanctuary At Coffin Home Helps Connect The Underground Railroad To The Present

Originally from Murfreesboro, North Carolina, Brown was accompanied by his mother, Hannah, his younger brother, Nathaniel, his aunt, Nancy, and six other family members, all of whom had been freed in the will of their late master, a "Mr. Brown."

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (sometimes spelled Keckly; February 1818 – May 1907 was a former slave who became a successful seamstress, civil activist, and author in Washington, DC. She was best known as the personal modiste and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, the First Lady.

In 1849 Henry "Box" Brown mailed himself To Freedom From Richmond, Virginia To The Anti Slavery Office In Philadelphia. The Delivery Took 26hrs & He Later Became A Public Speaker a And a Abolitionist

Written on back of card: “William Headly, a contraband from a plantation near Raleigh N.C. arrived at Newberne [i.e. New Bern] N.C. on the 20th May 1864 having been six weeks on the road, neither sleeping or eating in a house during the time.

Mr. Demus Taylor, bottom row on right side founded Taylor Town -
April 11, 1934 Old Slaves Day Reunion was held in the Southern Pines Municipal Park with over 3000 attending. Reverend Thomas B. McCain (left) with Demus Taylor. McCain was a retired minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and leading figure in Southern Pines. Taylor was said to be more than 100 years old and was a well-known turpentine worker in Moore County.

Reverend Thomas B. McCain (left) with Mr. Demus Taylor.

This photo is in the November 23, 1934 issue of The Pilot, from Southern Pines, N.C.
The inaugural Spring Blossom Festival, held in Southern Pines in April 1934 featured an “Old Slave Day.”

William Henry Singleton's newly published memoir won't let North Carolina's slave past be forgotten.
Photo collage description: Top image-A year before his death--and his final army reunion--Singleton attended a 1937 Grand Army of the Republic reunion in Gettysburg, Pa., where this picture was made.
Bottom image-Troops of Col. Edward A. Wild's African Brigade, liberating slaves in North Carolina. Wild arrived in New Bern in 1863 to begin organizing black troops, beginning with those--like Singleton--who had already been drilling.

William B. Gould was born in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 18, 1837, to an enslaved woman, Elizabeth "Betsy" Moore, and Alexander Gould, an English-born resident of Granville County, NC. He was enslaved by Nicholas Nixon, a peanut planter who owned a large plantation site on Porters Neck. and at Rocky Point. Gould worked as a plasterer at the antebellum Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington, North Carolina and carved his initials into some of the plaster there

This is an artist rendition of what Abner Jordan (95 years old) may have looked like as he shared his life as an Enslaved Black Person on the Stagville Plantation In Durham, NC.

Photograph:Engraved portrait of Abraham Galloway. From William Still's Underground Railroad.
Many know him as a master spy and a freedom-fighter, but few people know of Abraham Galloway and his role in the Civil War and his leadership during Reconstruction.

Born: February 8, 1837, Southport, NC
Died: September 1, 1870, Wilmington, NC
Galloway died unexpectedly of fever and jaundice on September 1, 1870. He was 33 years old at the time and had just been reelected to the senate. An estimated 6,000 mourners gathered at his funeral.

This is Betsy Spruill Riddick at her home in 1927. Betsy Spruill Riddick (1844-1934) married Richard Riddick (1842-1917). Her parents were Allen and Sarah Spruill. Sarah Spruill was born in 1825, and Allen in 1820.
In the 1930s, she was still serving her evening meal in the African tradition by placing food in a large wooden tray centered on her table. . #facesofsomerset #socialhistory

This is Doc Edwards, and he was born into slavery at Stagville Plantation, Durham NC in 1853.
Doc Edwards was one of three former slaves at the Stagville Plantation who were interviewed for the WPA Slave Narratives in the 1930s.

Uncle Doug Ambrose, a former slave, at Lewis turpentine still and plantation in Brooksville, Florida. From a post card postmarked in 1938.

Ambrose Hilliard Douglass (1845-1940) was the son of Albert and Betsy Douglass. He claimed to have been born a free man in Detroit. His parents, were originally born in North Carolina, they returned there to visit their enslaved relatives, and were enslaved themselves along with little Ambrose.

Photograph: Fannie Moore was 88 years old when she was interviewed in 1937. She lived at 151 Valley Street, Asheville. She was formerly enslaved in Asheville, North Carolina
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WPA Slave Narrative Collection.
Library of Congress (LOC)
.

Part of the Federal Writers' Project mission was ethnography — the sociological study of people and their customs — so many of the interviews were transcribed phonetically to help preserve the speaker's distinctive accent, which sometimes held clues to their cultural origins. Since the phonetic transcriptions can be difficult to read, the passages below have been edited for clarity while staying as true to the original speech patterns as possible.
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DR. FLINT owned a fine residence in town, several farms, and about fifty slaves, besides hiring a number by the year. Hiring-day at the south takes place on the 1st of January. On the 2d, the slaves are expected to go to their new masters. On a farm, they work until the corn and cotton are laid. They then have two holidays.
Some masters give them a good dinner under the trees. This over, they work until Christmas eve. If no heavy charges are meantime brought against them, they are given four or five holidays, whichever the master or overseer may think proper. Then comes New Year's eve; and they gather together their little alls, or more properly speaking, their little nothings, and wait anxiously for the dawning of day.

LOUISA ADAMS, formerly enslaved in Rockingham, Richmond County, North Carolina
This is her WPA Slave Narrative

Photo credit: NC Archives.

Lunsford Lane was born in Raleigh, NC on May 30, 1803 – he died on June 27, 1879. .After the death of his youngest daughter in April 1872, Lunsford Lane moved to Greenwich Village in New York City; he died sometime during the month of June 1879 in a multi-family tenement at 15 Cornelia Street in the West Village of dropsy and old age.

Shortly before his death he helped found a school in New Bern, North Carolina.

Millie McCoy and Christine McCoy (July 11, 1851 – October 8, 1912) were American conjoined twins who went by the stage names "The Carolina Twins", "The Two-Headed Nightingale" and "The Eighth Wonder of the World". The Twins traveled throughout the world performing song and dance for entertainment.

During the 1850s, a young slave named Henry Washington ran away from the Virginia plantation where his mother, Mary Cord, was also a slave, and his father was the plantation master. Before leaving, Washington gave his mother a gold ring and promised to return someday to free her.

The mother, who was subsequently sold to a North Carolina plantation owner, heard nothing from Washington for years.

Image description: An 1887 Photo of - Left to right: Harriet Tubman; Gertie Davis [Tubman’s adopted daughter]; Nelson Davis [Tubman’s 2nd husband seated wearing hat)]; Lee Cheney; “Pop” Alexander; Walter Green; Sarah Parker [“Blind Auntie” Parker] and Dora Stewart [granddaughter of Tubman’s brother, John Stewart].

Photo Credit: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library.

Slave Narrative of Ora M. Flagg
Updated: August 21, 2012 | Black Genealogy, North Carolina

Image:NC Slave population,1860, showing percentage by county. Map by Mark Anderson Moore, courtesy North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh.

Interviewer: T. Pat Matthews
Person Interviewed: Ora M. Flagg
Location: 811 Oberlin Road, Raleigh, North Carolina
Place of Birth: Raleigh, North Carolina
Date of Birth: October 16, 1860

My name is Ora M. Flagg. I wus born in Raleigh near the Professional Building, in the year 1860, October 16. My mother wus named Jane Busbee. Her marster wus Quent Busbee, a lawyer.

Photograph:Sarah Gudger, 121, of Asheville lived in slavery for about fifty years. Library of Congress

Asheville, NC
WPA stories of three of Asheville's last slaves — whether they worked the Swannanoa Valley fields or eked out a living in Asheville after Emancipation — being enslaved in their own words.
'Better to the animals than to us'
Sarah Gudger may have been the oldest woman in the United States at the time of her interview. (As best anyone in the area could calculate, it seemed Sarah was 121 years old. There were 70-year-olds who remembered Gudger being "old" when they were children). Toward the end of her life, Gudger lived at 8 Dalton Street in South Asheville — in what the Federal Writers Project interviewer describes as "the Negro section lying north of Kenilworth."

Miss. man claimed to be 130-year-old last slave
October 15, 1971 Sylvester Magee died at the age of 130. He was thought to be the last surviving American enslaved and the oldest living American in history.. May 29, 1841? – October 15, 1971).

Note: (One account has J.J. Shank owning a plantation in Granville county, and another account has this plantation in Carpet, NC. )

Sylvester Magee was purported to have been born in North Carolina in 1841 to slaves Ephraim and Jeanette, who were held and worked on the J.J. Shanks plantation in Carpet, N.C.

Photograph Tempie Herndon Durham, Age 103 ca 1937 - Formerly enslaved In North Carolina - she grew up on a large plantation in Chatham County, North Carolina, west of Raleigh.
by Federal Writers' Project

Interviewer: Travis Jordan
Person Interviewed: Tempie Herndon Durham
Location: 1312 Pine St., Durham, North Carolina
Age: 103

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938

From the outside, 625 South Delhi Street looks like an average Philadelphia rowhouse. But in the 1850s, it was home to Underground Railroad leaders William and Letitia Still.

Many enslaved Black people from NC were taken to Gee's Bend when the slaver who owned them moved from NC to Gee's Bend

George “Chicken George” Lea (1806 - 1890).
He was Alex Haley’s great-great grandfather.

Illustration from The Harper’s Weekly, 21 February 1863. P. 116.
Title: The effects of the proclamation - freed Negroes coming into our lines at Newbern, North Carolina
Source: LOC

As the Union Army took over New Bern, NC and word got to the Enslaved people, they Emancipated themselves by fleeing the resistance of the slave owners to comply with President Lincolns Order to free all the enslaved people. By the hundreds they made their way to New Bern to seek protection as they sought their freedom.

Image: This image shows an illustration from the Feb. 15, 1862, edition of Harper’s Weekly of the Hotel De Afrique at Hatteras, N.C. The hotel, which no longer exists, was one of several lodging buildings where about 100 escaped slaves stayed after federal troops captured the Outer Banks early in the Civil War A ceremony to mark the inclusion of the Hotel De Afrique in the National Underground Network to Freedom is being held .

Photo collage description: Top Left-This facial approximation was produced by Lisa Bailey, now retired from the FBI. (Anatomical Division/National Museum of Health and Medicine)
Bottom Left: An 1890 illustration depicts members of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment at Fort Wagner in South Carolina in 1863. (Kurz & Allison/AP
Right Side: The skull of the Black Civil War soldier was punched through by a 1-inch iron ball from a Confederate howitzer. The exit wound is stained with rust from a fragment of iron found with the skull. (Anatomical Division/National Museum of Health and Medicine)

Igbo Landing (alternatively written as Ibo Landing, Ebo Landing, or Ebos Landing) is a historic site at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. It was the setting of a mass suicide in 1803 by captive Igbo people who had taken control of their slave ship and refused to submit to slavery in the United States. The event's moral value as a story of resistance towards slavery has symbolic importance in African American folklore and literary history.

"The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History - The year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown is drilled into students’ memories, but overemphasizing this date distorts history"

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States by Free Black people during the early to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada..

John Anthony Copeland, Jr. (1834–1859) was born free in Raleigh, North Carolina, to John Anthony Copeland, who was born into slavery in 1808, and Delilah Evans, born free in 1809. Copeland, Sr. was emancipated about 1815.

"According to a letter by the tobacco planter John Rolfe, the widower of Pocahontas, a ship landed in England’s 12-year-old Jamestown settlement and “brought not anything but 20, and odd, Negroes, which the Governor and the Cape Merchant bought for victuals’’ – provisions.

July 23, 1859, (Slaver) Josiah Collins III wrote to Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, abolitionist, and author who escaped bondage in Edenton, NC by hiding in her grandmother’s crawlspace for seven years. Harriet’s autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, was published in 1861.

"On June 19, 1865, Major Gen. Gordon Granger came to Galveston, Texas, to inform a racist and reluctant community that President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier had freed the slaves and to press locals to comply with his directive."
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Juneteenth Emancipation Day Celebration, June 19, 1900, Texas. [Photo: Mrs. Charles Stephenson/Wikimedia Commons]

"6 things to know about Juneteenth and why it matters more than ever"
BY MELISSA LOCKER

Today is Juneteenth, also known as Juneteenth Independence Day or Freedom Day, which commemorates the emancipation from slavery in the United States. In honor of the day, and the critical turning point it represents, we rounded up six facts:

Article Image description: An 1823 cross-section diagram of a ship used to carry enslaved people. The illustration, which was used in abolitionist campaigns and contains several historical inaccuracies, has become one of the most famous depictions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Credit: incamerastock/Alamy

Last Seen is recovering stories of families separated in the domestic slave trade.

Formerly enslaved people placed these ads hoping to reconnect with family and loved ones for decades following emancipation.

The ads serve as testaments to their enduring hope and determination to regain what was taken from them.

About the Project

Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery aims to identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation.

On October 28, 1798, Levi Coffin, an anti-slavery leader and reputed “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, was born in the Guilford County, NC Quaker community of New Garden.

He joined the Quakers of New Garden in 1818, and soon after began a Sunday school in the schoolhouse adjoining the meeting house. As an opponent to slavery, he joined Guilford County’s first manumission society. Together with his cousin Vestal Coffin, he began a school for slaves, teaching them about Christianity and hosting Bible reading on Sunday afternoons. Slave owners opposed this and forbade their slaves to attend. Within a few years Coffin moved to Newport, Indiana.

Distribution of Slaves in 1860
In 1861, in an attempt to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers, the Census Office produced and sold a map that showed the population distribution of slaves in the southern United States

March 25: International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Of the 12 million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, more than 5 million were transported to Brazil by Brazilian and Portuguese slave merchants.

The knowledge and skill of black boatmen, or watermen, (both free and enslaved), was key to a successful escape via the Maritime Underground Railroad.

@IrememberOurHistory®
Throughout the Albemarle region, blacks held a variety of jobs on and around the water. Some of these jobs included working as fishermen, sailors, ferrymen, and even riverboat pilots. This gave them a vast knowledge of eastern North Carolina’s abundant waterways and coastal landscapes.

On April 25th, 1808, an advertisement requesting the return of a runaway slave named Dinah appeared in the Edenton Gazette and North Carolina General Advertiser. Phillip McGuire, a Chowan County slave holder had purchased the ad, asking for a $20-dollar reward for Dinah’s return. @IrememberOurHistory®

Image: Monument to the Hatteras Island’s Hotel De Afrique, a freedom colony in North Carolina; Image was taken during the dedication of the monument in July 2013. Image Source: Blog for OuterBanksVacations dotcom.

Federal representatives fanned out across the original 13 states, tabulating information on American households, just as they have every 10 years since. The information was used to estimate taxes, assign congressional representation and generally make demographic sense of U.S. society.

At the time, that society – "excluding Indians not taxed" – numbered some 3,929,326 people (later revised to 3,929,214 by some counts). Of them, nearly 700,000 were slaves. In Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, slaves outnumbered free white men. Vermont, population 85,539, reportedly contained 16 slaves, a number later corrected to zero.

November 11, 1831, Nat Turner was executed for leading the uprising of enslaved Black Americans in Virginia, where more than 50 whites were slain, and hundreds of enslaved and free Black Americans were killed in retaliation.
Nat Turner was able to form a group of enslaved Black people who banned together in one force and begin to fight for their freedom.
This terrified and angered the enslavers , and they responded by passing more violent forms of oppressive new laws against those enslaved. This included the prohibition of their education.

Nat Turners powerful determination in not only obtaining his freedom, but the freedom of any others that wanted it enough to fight for it.

Interesting note: William Styron's 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, is one of the books that Texas lawmakers put on their 850 book titles to ban in schools.
Because "those books make White students feel discomfort."

Image: An MRB&PA broadside features both Isaiah Dickerson, the general manager, and Callie House, a national promoter and assistant secretary of the association, with the emblem of the United States in the center. (Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, RG 15)

No Pensions for Ex-Slaves
How Federal Agencies Suppressed Movement To Aid Freedpeople
Summer 2010, Vol. 42, No. 2
By Miranda Booker Perry

Records on the ex-slave pension movement housed at the National Archives reveal an immense amount about a social movement on the periphery of history, the organization at the epicenter of the movement, and the government's response to it.

While this constitution granted privileges and rights to the former enslaved African Americans of NC, these freedoms, privileges and rights were limited by the creation of the "Black Codes".
In the first two years after the Civil War, white-dominated southern legislatures passed Black Codes modeled after the earlier slave codes. They were particularly concerned with controlling movement and labor, as slavery had given way to a free labor system. Although freedmen had been emancipated, their lives were greatly restricted by the Black Codes.

"I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything.

Property Destroyed--Loss to the Rebels--Union Loss--Large Accessions of Negroes--Views of a North Carolina Newspaper; A VIEW OF THE SITUATION.
Correspondence of the New-York Times/Aug. 5, 1863

This is the Presbyterian Church in downtown Washington NC as it appears in a sketch in the mid 1800's.

Exercising his powers as commander in chief, President Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation primarily as a wartime measure. Key provisions allowing for the service of formerly enslaved black people in the Union Army and Navy opened the door to the gradual enlistment of almost 200,000 black men.

It's when Maurice Imhoff dons his vintage Union Army soldier uniform that he feels most connected to history. With his navy blue wool jacket, a wooden rifle with a bayonet fixed into the muzzle, and a gold eagle breastplate across his chest, he represents an often forgotten group of soldiers — the United States Colored Troops.

Photo: His photo appeared in a September 1913 edition of the King City Democrat. In an interview reported in the Kansas City Star in 1894, Richard put his birth year at 1770. He was apparently born to a slave woman belonging to the John Haeden family in Chatham County, North Carolina. The Haeden family moved with their slaves to Missouri sometime in the early part of the 19th century where Richard was sold to the George Hoops family near Vienna.

Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor.

RANAWAY from the subscriber, living in Cabarrus co. on the 7th of June last, a Negro man named Frank, about 5 feet 8 or 10 inches high, 27 or 28 years of age.

After seven years of Dr. Norcom trying to rape her, Harriet Jacobs had had enough. and In 1835 she escaped from Norcom.

RAN AWAY from Elijah Malone, on the 14th of May last, near Gordonton, in Person county, a negro boy by the name of WILLIAM. Said negro is about twenty years of age.

RANAWAY from the Subscriber a Negro Boy Jim, aged about 22 years,

RAN AWAY from the subscriber living in Bladen county, on the 20th April last,
a negro fellow called QUASH,

About August 1, 1831, and who was described as a bright mulatto boy about 14 years old with “considerable” freckles, with straight hair and with blue or grey eye color. He was expected to have gone back to Wake County, North Carolina where he was from.

Photo and text credit: Somerset Place State Historic Site. This was a plantation in Creswell, North Carolina

A freedom-seeker named Isaac escaped from one of Josiah Collins I’s Edenton plantations on August 29, 1807. Josiah offered a reward for Isaac’s capture in the Edenton Gazette on September 24.

This ad appeared in the (Edenton) Sentinel and Albemarle Intelligencer. May 1, 1841, and was preserved in a miscellaneous collection of early Edenton newspapers on microfilm in the NC Collection of the UNC library and the State Archives.

RUN away from the Subscriber, in Edenton, on the 16th ult. a Negro Man named ISAAC, about 33 years old,

Five Dollars Reward. Runaway from the subscriber on the night of the 17th of June last, negro girl
HARRIET,

RUN AWAY from the subscriber on the 11th instant, a yellow negro slave, about twenty years old, named SIP

TAKEN up and Committed to the Jail of Onslow county, a negro man, who says his name is LISHUS, and that he belongs to Mr. Burney, of Craven county...

RUN away from the subscriber, on the 7th of April last, an old stout negro fellow named DICK PEPPER; a caulker by trade, and is well known in the neighbouring counties.--He had been run away from November1793, 'till the above date...

Ran Away from the Subscriber, on the night of the 15th instant, two apprentice boys , legally bound, I will pay the above Reward to any person who will deliver said apprentices to me in Raleigh, or I will give the above Reward for Andre Johnson alone.

a Negro man named PETER, about five feet nine inches high, 26 years of age, speaks good English

RUN away from the subscriber, on the 10th of May last, a negro man named BRISTO about 20 years of age

The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
By Thom Hartmann, Truthout
Published January 15, 2013

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the framers knew the difference — see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason and James Madison were totally clear on that… and we all should be too.

Image: The Capitol stands in the background of this 1830 engraving.
Credit: Library of Congress/Corbis,

@IrememberOurHistory®
When Slaveowners Got Reparations
Lincoln signed a bill in 1862 that paid up to $300 for every enslaved person freed.
By Tera W. Hunter

Dr. Hunter, a professor of American history and African-American studies, specializes in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Image: Cohabitation Record listing Sandy & Leah’s Marriage, August 1866. They were enslaved on Vances’ Reems Creek Valley Plantation. Source: Buncombe County Register of Deeds, Asheville, NC.

On August 10, 1842, Hannah Moore Vance, the youngest child of Mira and David Vance, was born.
Her father died in 1844, and a week after Hannah's second birthday, Mira held an auction of David's property.
Eleven enslaved men, women, and children were included in the auction, and Venus, who was Hannah's nanny, ascended the auction block carrying baby Hannah in her arms.

Image description: Slaves for Sale ads, Slaves for Hire ads, from Asheville, Buncombe Co, NC newspapers.

For my recently published book, “The Ledger and the Chain,” I visited more than 30 archives in over a dozen states, from Louisiana to Connecticut. Along the way, I uncovered mountains of material that exposed the depravity of the men who ran the largest domestic slave trading operation in American history and revealed the fortitude of the enslaved people they trafficked as merchandise.
But I also learned that many Americans do not realize that a domestic slave trade existed in the U.S. at all.

According to the article, taken from the 3 October 1843 issue of The Charlotte Journal, Bartoloméde las Casas, one of the first Spanish settlers in the Americas, was compelled to oppose the abuse committed by the colonists against the Native Americans, and “suggested that their place as laborers might be supplied by negroes from Africa..."

Freedom from being enslaved was announced to the enslaved Black people inside this church on May 21, 1865 by a Union Army cavalry chaplain.

Photo descriptions: Left-The original kitchen, where Grace Bennett and her daughter worked, both were enslaved.
Right - Rowena (Reenie) Reeves Bennett, great-granddaughter of Suckey Davis.

Every once in a while, antebellum Wilson County estate records will offer details about enslaved people that allow you to identify nuclear families and to trace their movements in the tumultuous period after a slaveholder died and a community was broken up. The probate of the undated will of Elias Barnes of Edgecombe County [later the Saratoga area of Wilson County], drafted prior to 1855, is a rich example.

Archivists in Washington, D.C., made a timely discovery this week: the original handwritten Union Army record of an order that brought emancipation to enslaved people in Texas at the end of the Civil War.
Image description: Top image-“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” the order says.Credit...National Archives
Bottom image-The leather-bound ledger containing the order, the end of which can be seen on the upper left side of the page.
Credit: National Archives

March 13, 1862, The Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves is a law passed by the United States Congress during the American Civil War forbidding all officers or persons in the military or naval service to return escaped former slaves to their owners with the aid or use of the forces under their respective commands.

Project 1619 Inc. represents the first enslaved Africans brought from Africa to English North America to Point Comfort, today's Fort Monroe in Hampton, VA. We remember and honor the arrival of the first Africans in America. Hampton is ground zero.

Photo Collage Description
Top Left to Right: 1. A mural of the Clotilda slave ship, which was successfully located in 2019, on display in Africatown, Alabama. Carmen K. Ssson/ Cloudybright/ Alamy
2. A diver with Diving With a Purpose (DWP), a non-profit organization focused on the protection, documentation and interpretation of African slave trade shipwrecks, is among those attempting to bring this painful history to the surface.
3. Divers scatter sand from Mozambique near the site where the wreckage of the Sao Jose-Paquete de Africa was found. Credit: Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images

Bottom Left to Right: 1. Some of the graves of those who survived the Clotilda voyage can be found at the Old Plateau Cemetery in Africatown. Credit: Emily Kask / The New York Times/Redux
2. Visitors look at An artifact from the Sao Jose-Paquete de Africa on display at the Slave Lodge museum in Cape Town. Credit: Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images
3. DWP founder Ken Stewart launched the Youth Diving With a Purpose program, pictured in 2013, in order to get young people involved in the project. Credit: DWP

Photograph: Slave Dwelling-Johnston County, NC
These one room small, cramped slave dwelings would sometimes have families as large as 5-10 people living in them.

The Boyette slave dwelling was built at an indeterminate time in the early 1800s by George Boyette or his son Larkin G. Boyette, who jointly reported eight slaves in the 1850 census.

Based on the span of years this photograph may have been taken, these two young Black boys were either born enslaved, or born during the Civil War, or not long after the Civil War ended.

"The Fugitive Slave"-1853-Oil on canvas
by John Adam Plimmer Houston
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We know that many enslaved Africans and African Americans from North Carolina and other southern states sought their freedom from chattel enslavement by escaping, running away. Many did go North to Boston, NY, and even Canada. Recent research has found that many also ran seeking freedom to Mexico.

"This pic of the 'Gathering place' was were many escape plans were made, not in the church but under the church where freedom seekers hide and listened to 'special messages' with coded information. From the book 'Bright Ma.'."

Photo Credit and Description: Washington Waterfront Underground Railroad Museum fb page. Washington, NC

"The Great Dismal Swamp"
Oil on Belgian Linen
24"x30"
By Mason Archie

The Green Duke House-Warren County, NC --It was built about 1800 as a Georgian style dwelling, and remodeled in the post-Victorian style about 1900. It is a two-story, five bay, frame dwelling with a hipped roof.

Duke was the surname of an early landowner, and Green the maiden name of his wife. they both owned the tobacco plantation and were slave owners.

This date was chosen to commemorate the beginnings of the uprisings which happened the night of August 22nd-23rd in Santo Domingo which, on proclaiming its independence reverted to its original Amerindian name: Haiti. (now Haiti & the Dominican Republic) and which played a crucial role in slavery’s eventual abolition.

That banner with a bursting star in the middle is the Juneteenth Flag, a symbolic representation of the end of chattel slavery in the United States. The flag is the brainchild of activist Ben Haith, founder of the National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation (NJCF). Haith created the flag in 1997 with the help of collaborators, and Boston-based illustrator Lisa Jeanne Graf brought their vision to life.

On July 8, 1860, more than 50 years after Congress banned the importation of enslaved Africans into the United States, the slave ship Clotilde arrived in Mobile, Alabama, carrying more than 100 enslaved people from West Africa. Captain William Foster commanded the boat, and was later said to be working for Timothy Meaher, a white Mobile shipyard owner who built the Clotilde.

The regiment became the 35th United States Colored Troops (USCT), fighting all of its battles and skirmishes in South Carolina and Florida, including siege operations at Battery Wagner (but after the engagement made famous in the movie Glory), before seeing Reconstruction era service at Charleston.

The Slave Experience of the Holidays

From Documenting the American South. University Library,
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

("Not every slave was able to relax at during the holidays. Many families hosted elaborate Christmas dinners and parties, so some household slaves had an increased workload at Christmas time. What’s more, slaves could not count on time off at Christmas, since the master could always cancel their holiday. Indeed, some slaveowners withheld the privilege of celebrating Christmas from slaves who had displeased them during the year.")

When you read about Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge being found in Old Topsail Inlet in North Carolina, now known as Beaufort Inlet. NC, what you might know is that before he stole the ship, it was called the La Concorde and it was a French slave ship.
Many pirates carried enslaved peoples as cargo from one place to another because it was a lucrative business for them.

"On January 22, 1834, Will, a slave belonging to James Battle of Edgecombe County, killed a white man. The killing resulted in the State v. Negro Will case, in which the North Carolina Supreme Court protected slaves from a charge of murder when acting in self-defense."

Naval Patrol

The West Africa Squadron: The British Royal Navy’s Deadly Battle Mission To End The Slave Trade
They faced the seemingly insurmountable task of trying to eliminate the slave trade for good.

For Thavolia Glymph, spending days in government archives – searching for one detail – can be worth it to help tell forgotten and dismissed narratives of the lives of Black women who labored during the Civil War.

Raleigh: An Unorthodox History of North Carolina's Capital

The Enslaved ingenuity and their medicine.
This is one of our newest collection items to our exhibits at the Harbor District Market. We have just acquired several of these 'turpentine pots.' This is a more modern version of the tar clay pots but the ones the enslaved people used were made just like this one.

Image description= Unsung Founders Memorial on the campus of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. By Artist Do-Ho Suh

Charles White began the Wanted Poster series after winning an award from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, widely regarded as one of the leading graphic workshops in the United States.

Before December 31, 1862, New Year's Eve was called "Watch Night", and New Yea's Day was referred to as “Heartbreak Day,” according to Valdosta State University history professor Dr. David Williams in his book, “A People’s History of the Civil War.” because, New Year’s Day was often the day when slaveholders sold slaves and or "rented" them out. It was when families, parents and children, siblings, husbands and wives, were separated.

Image description: Top photo-A group of freed slaves during the Civil. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images. Bottom photo- A statue in Galveston, Texas, depicts a man holding the state law that made Juneteenth a state holiday. Credit...David J. Phillip/Associated Press

William Gould-Freedom Was His Goal

Photograph: William Gould with his wife, Cornelia, and their children. Image from Wikipedia.

William B. Gould (1837 – May 25, 1923) was a formerly enslaved and was a veteran of the American Civil War.

William Still Found His Brother While Operating The Underground Railroad

This 1901 illustration from Harper's Monthly magazine shows an artist's interpretation of the first documented slave ship to be put ashore land in the English colony of Old Point Comfort, in what is now Hampton, Virginia.