In April of 1851, a fugitive slave case involving a black man by the name of Sydney was decided in the Knox County Circuit Court. Sydney's counsel argued that he was a free black man born in Tennessee, whom at an unspecified date was kidnapped and smuggled across the state line to Alabama. There, he was subsequently sold into bondage. The case arose when Sydney escaped from his master and returned...
In late December of 1827, Sally Champs Carter, living in Richmond at the time, wrote home to her mother who was living in Albemarle County (approximately sixty miles west of Richmond). Sally described her living situation in the city, telling her mother that she participated in the gaieties of the city, however more moderately and prudently than she had in her first year residing there, as some of...
Angry voices yelled out through the night as the dim lights of the Levee shown on several slave girl's faces. The police broke apart their gathering on September 5, 1855. Ther girls were arrested for pilfering and prostitution and were taken to the New Orleans jail until their owners called for them. Occurences such stealing and prostitution were not uncommon in the streets of New Orleans. There were...
In August of 1815, George Hay put an add in the Richmond Enquirer newspaper offering a fifty dollar reward (plus expenses) for the apprehension and delivery of Manuel, a runaway slave. Hay gave only the name Manuel; either Manuel had no last name, or Hay felt that labeling him as a negro and a slave was sufficient. Hay described Manuel as broad shouldered and well formed, along with giving his height...
On October 14, 1854, a neighbor found the Braden family of Portsmouth, Virginia dead in their home. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death was excessive amounts of laudanum in their stomachs. The town was outraged and astonished. Who would commit such a heinous crime? The members of the community greatly respected the Braden family, and mourned their loss. A carpenter who was in the house that...
Slavery was not a permanent institution for some Southerners. In 1838, Dr. Brisbane, a Charleston, South Carolina resident, sold his twenty-seven slaves in order to move to Cincinnati, Ohio. While in Cincinnati, he decided that he did not want his former slaves to be subjected to bondage any longer. Brisbane returned to Charleston in 1844. Searching for and finding the twenty-seven enslaved African...
Having a petition granted for divorce was hard to come by in the nineteenth-century. However, each year many divorce petitions were filed in the South. In 1857, Mrs. Charlotte Smith of Lowndes County, Mississippi stated that she caught her husband committing adultery with a negro girl named Nancy in April of that year. Mrs. Smith, devastated by her husband's crime, filed for divorce, alimony, and...
In less than thirty years following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, Florida became host to a violent flare up of racial tensions between a white man and a black man in Madison, Florida. The United States of America was one of the few major players in the world economy that still had a firmly intact system that subjugated a race by the late nineteenth century. However, the race lines...
The majority of farms in Brunswick, Missouri used slave labor up through the Civil War. H.C. Bruce was a slave on one of these farms. Many years after the Civil War, Bruce reflected on his experiences as a slave and recorded them in a book. According to Bruce, slave owners in Brunswick believed in having their slave women live a virtuous life. About nine miles from his farm lived a slaveholder named...
Race relations and classifications resounded strongly in the minds of many in the South. West Virginia was no exception to this. A story ran in the Martinsburg Gazette on December 11, 1866 that a young African American boy living in Chicago, Illinois was supposedly turning white. Born to two African American parents, the pigmentation in the young boy's skin was becoming increasingly lighter beginning...