Searching in the FamilySearch Wiki can bring up an amazing amount of information.
You find the FamilySearch Wiki by going to http://familysearch.org/ > click learn > then click ehte Wiki photo > then use the search box.
As an example the search for "African American Slavery" has several articles. This is a poriton of one of them.
Brief History of
Slavery in America
Nearly 75 percent of people who arrived in America
from Europe and Africa before 1776 were immigrants in bondage. Those from Africa
almost always arrived enslaved. Those from Europe were often convicts,
indentured servant apprentices, or became indentured servants to pay for the
cost of their ocean crossing. In colonial times indentured servitude as an
apprentice was considered the normal way to learn a trade (part of growing up),
or a normal option for paying a large debt.
[1]
In 1619 a Dutch ship blown off course came looking
for fresh water near Jamestown, Virginia. At Jamestown the Dutch sold 20 of the
African slaves they had captured from a Spanish ship originally bound for
Mexico. These were the earliest known African immigrants to arrive in what is
now the United States. It was the custom of that time to free servant-slaves
after seven years.
[2][3]
Caribbean and Brazilian plantations (95 percent of
the trans-Atlantic slave trade) usually grew sugar and few slaves survived there
for seven years. In America (five percent of the slave trade) slaves lived
longer and had children. In the thirteen British-American colonies a milder
climate and better working conditions growing tobacco, cotton, hemp, and indigo
allowed slaves to live long enough to be freed. But the institution of lifetime
chattel slavery applied to people of African descent was slowly accepted and
developed when owners were reluctant to free such valuable labor to compete with
their former owners. This form of slavery was formally legalized first in
British-America in 1654.
[4]
All 13 British-American colonies participated in the
slave trade before 1780. In the 1750s a slavery abolitionist movement began and
grew stronger. Vermont was the first to abolish slavery in 1777 and by 1804 all
individual states north of the Mason-Dixon line had gradually ended slavery. The
Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was a federal law that prohibited slavery north of
the Ohio River. Slave labor works best when the assigned task is relatively
simple, such as large scale agriculture. Slavery in increasingly industrialized
America was becoming too expensive until the invention of the cotton gin in
1793. A healthy young adult male slave was worth about two years wages, so most
owners considered freeing slaves an economic hardship. The Constitution of the
United States permitted the outlawing of the importation of slaves starting in
1808, but the internal slave trade continued until the end of the Civil War and
the Thirteenth Amendment prohibited chattel slavery in 1865.
[5]
Fi
ding Plantation Records
| Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations Collection or
Repository[7] |
User Guide |
FHL First Film |
Series A, Selections from the South Carolina Library. University of South
Carolina
- Part 1: The Papers of James Henry Hammond, 1795-1865
- Part 2: Miscellaneous Collections
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| Series B, Selections from the South Carolina Historical Society |
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Series C, Selections from the Library of Congress
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- Part 2: Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina
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| Series D, Selections from the Maryland Historical Society |
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Series E, Selections from the University of Virginia Library
- Part 1: Virginia Plantations
- Part 3: Virginia Plantations
- Part 4: Cooke Family Papers
- Part 5: Ambler Family Papers
- Part 6: Virginia Plantations
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Series F, Selections from the Duke University Library
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- Part 2: South Carolina and Georgia
- Part 3: North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia
- Part 4: North Carolina and Virginia Plantations
- Part 5: William Patterson Smith Collections
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Series G, Selections from the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
- Part 1: Texas and Louisiana Collections
- Part 2: William Massie Collection
- Part 3: Bank of the State of Mississippi Records, 1804-1846
- Part 4: Winchester Family Papers, 1783-1906
- Part 5: Other Plantation Collections
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| Series H, Selections from the Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University, and the Louisiana
State Museum Archives |
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Series I, Selections from Louisiana State University
- Part 1: Louisiana Sugar Plantations
- Part 2: Louisiana and Miscellaneous Southern Cotton Plantations
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- Part 4: Barrow, Bisland, Bowman and Other Collections
- Part 5: Butler Family Collections
- Part 6: David Weeks and Family Collections
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Series J, Selections from the Southern Historical Collections, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Part 1: The Cameron Family Papers
- Part 2: The Pettigrew Family Papers
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- Part 4: Georgia and Florida
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- Part 6: Mississippi and Arkansas
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- Part 8: Tennessee and Kentucky
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- Part 10: Hubard Family Papers, 1741-1865
- Part 11: Hairston and Wilson Families
- Part 12: Tidewater and Coastal Plains North Carolina
- Part 13: Piedmont North Carolina
- Part 14: Western North Carolina
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| Series K, Selections from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library, The Shirley
Plantation Collection, 1650-1888 |
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Series L, Selections from the Earl
Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary
- Part 1: Carter Papers, 1667-1882
- Part 2: Jerdone Family Papers, 1736-1918
- Part 3: Skipwith Family Papers, 1760-1977
- Part 4: Austin-Twyman Papers, 1765-1865 and Charles Brown Papers, 1792-1888
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Series M, Selections from the Virginia Historical Society
- Part 1: Tayloe Family, 1650-1970
- Part 2: Northern Neck of Virginia; also Maryland
- Part 3: Other Tidewater Virginia
- Part 4: Central Piedmont Virginia
- Part 5: Southside Virginia
- Part 6: Northern Virginia and Valley
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| Series N, Selections from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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Registers of Slaves and Freedmen and Manumission Papers
By the time of start of the Civil War in 1861 about ten percent of African
Americans were free. Most free African Americans carried their own papers, but
these could be stolen. In order to distinguish between slaves, runaways, and
free African Americans, many counties or states in the upper South, and border
states kept one or more sets of registers or papers. Some had registers of
slaves. Some kept registers of blacks, freedmen, "free men of color," or "free
negroes." Some kept copies of manumission papers of people freed from
enslavement. To find these kinds of registers or papers look in county
courthouse records. They are most likely found in the court papers, or among the
land and property deeds, or occasionally in probate records, or even with
taxation records. Sometimes these kinds of records are found at state libraries,
archives, or historical soci
The
Slave Trade Registers
The Constitution allowed the outlawing of the importation of slaves to the
United States after 1808. Between then and the Civil War the internal slave
trade became an important business in the Southern United States. Most states
regulated the slave trade. A few kept records of slave traders and their
businesses. Look for such business registers at state libraries, archives,
historical societies, or county courthouses.
Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade Database
The
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Internet site contains
references to 35,000 slave voyages, including over 67,000 Africans aboard slave
ships, using name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation. The database
is about the slave trade between Africa, Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the
United States.
