Slavery

A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie

In the summer of 1700, the English merchant-slaver Henrietta Marie sank in unknown circumstances thirty-five miles west of Key West, Florida. Shortly before this mishap, she had sold a shipment of 190 captive Africans in Jamaica...... Read more

Caribbean Slave Narratives: Creole in Form and Genre

In Michelle Cliff’s novel Abeng (1984), Clare Savage and her father, Boy, spend an afternoon wandering through an abandoned plantation that once belonged to their ancestors, the white, slave-owning Savages. While the main house remains, only “faint gullies” mark the presence of the slaves. Like Clare Savage and author Michelle Cliff, I too am haunted by the shadows of West Indian slavery because, unlike in the United States, relatively few Caribbean slave narratives have come to light...... Read more

The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown b

An exposition of the American law of slavery designed to reveal the illegitimacy of the institution...... Read more

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia

The Geography of Slavery in Virginia is a digital collection of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants in 18th- and 19th-century Virginia newspapers. Building on the rich descriptions of individual slaves and servants in the ads, the project offers a personal, geographical and documentary context for the study of slavery in Virginia, from colonial times to the Civil War...... Read more

A free man of color tracks a maroon slave

Dompète or Dom Pedro was a new form of vodun or Voodoo that had been identified in the 1760s in Saint-Domingue's southern peninsula, not far from where this affidavit was filed. Strongly identified with Congo slaves, the largest African ethnic group on the southern peninsula, the Petro rite was associated with a formidable array of supernatural powers. In 1814 Drouin de Bercy identified the Petro cult as "the most dangerous of all the black societies..... Read more