Little Robert Anderson stuttered as he sat on the dirt floor of his slave cabin at his grandmother's feet. Over and over again, he painfully tried to recite the Lord's Prayer, but each time he failed. First, he could not remember how it began. After a hint from his grandmother, he ran into trouble with the latter parts. After many long, frustrating hours, his grandmother, with a pained expression...
In December of 1829, Houston had narrowly prevented the abolition of slavery in Texas. On September 15th (in honor of Mexican independence) President Guerrero had sent out a proclamation abolishing slavery throughout the Republic. The object of this was to check emigration from the US. At this time there were over 1000 slaves in Texas, so Houston obviously fought the application of this proclamation...
As early as 1816, Maryland and other Southern states pleaded with the federal government to procure a site for the colonization of free blacks. Within the next two decades the American Colonization Society formed chapters in Maryland and other Southern states. Many chapters of the American Colonization Society advocated the creation of Liberia, an area on the tip of Africa, as a homeland for freed...
"I was only a slave; my wishes were nothing, and my happiness was the sport of my masters." During Frederick Douglass's life he experienced separation from his family, the death of both an old friend and his grandmother, and his escape from slavery. In his early twenties, Frederick Douglass was sent to Baltimore to serve a farmer named Captain Antony, but after Captain Anthony's death his...
On January 2, 1830, the state of Tennessee passed “an Act to establish a board of Internal Improvement, and set apart one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to be appropriated to the improvement of the navigable rivers and other objects of Internal Improvement in (the) state,' as reported by the Knoxville Register on January 27, to be divided on various works across the state. Designed...
The steamboat made it safely over the sand bar and arrived at the mouth of the Brazos River in Texas. Upon landing, William Hunter quickly composed a letter to his business associate James Perry to give tidings of his safe arrival. Hunter noted to Perry the presence of 30 Negroes on board and wrote of his plan to inquire of the owner, a settler from Alabama, about the means of their transport into...
In the Antebellum South, before railroads were widely used, Southern societies did not encounter people from other places very often. An anonymous man wrote a letter to the editor of The Argus in the summer of 1828, and in his etter he clearly demonstrated his inherent mistrust of outsiders. This man owned a boarding house and was writing to the paper in search of a solution to a problem...
What became the state of Texas was in 1830 still a part of the nation of Mexico. However, for many years Mexico had been encouraging U.S. citizens to emigrate and settle what to the Mexican government was its far away northern provinces -- provinces that were sparsely settled and thus perfect for the Americans. As the Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser reports on January 8, 1830, “the...
The Census of 1830 reported that out of a total of population of 12,858,670 people, there were 2,009,050 enslaved and 319,576 free blacks. It is no wonder, therefore, that in what is still primarily a slave-based economy, especially in the South, Americans began to wonder what to do with this growing free black population. After all, how could formerly enslaved blacks fit into white society when...
On January 15, 1830, the Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser included a report “respecting the state and progress of this important work,' the Louisville-Portland Canal, and the specific methods and requirements of its construction. Finished later in 1830, the Canal, which stretches mostly through Kentucky, allowed steamboat travel to avoid the impassable Ohio River Falls and continue...