The Laws of Virginia (1662, 1691, 1705)
These statutes chart the development of regulations on the sexual and reproductive lives of indentured servants and slaves, the growing institutionalization of slavery, and the construction of racism. Note the increasingly harsh penalties and how punishments differed by gender.

Richard Frethorne, Letter to His Parents (1623)
This is a letter written by Richard Frethorne, an indentured servant in Virginia, to his parents in England. By 1623, Jamestown was well established. Frethorne lived about ten miles from Jamestown, in Martin’s Hundred. Whatever their contract promised, most indentured servants could expect poor food, scant clothing, and overwork. Many did not live out their period of service.

Gottlieb Mittelberger, The Passage of Indentured Servants (1750)
Gottlieb Mittelberger was an indentured servant from Germany who worked in Pennsylvania, where he served as a schoolmaster and organist. After only four years, he returned to Germany. The following is a detailed and graphic account of the trans-Atlantic journey and the fate that awaited indentured servants upon arrival in North America.

Elizabeth Sprigs, Letter to Her Father (1756)
This letter was written by Elizabeth Sprigs, an indentured servant in Maryland, to her father in England. It is clear than conditions for indentured servants had not improved much in the more than 100 years since Richard Freethorne wrote from Virginia to his parents. Note how Sprigs compares her treatment to that of "Negroes."

Petition of “A Grate Number of Blackes of the Province” to Governor Thomas Gage and the Members of the Massachusetts General Court (1774)
The rhetoric of natural rights appealed directly to African American slaves. White patriots regularly protested that “taxation without representation” transformed free men into the “slaves ” of Parliament. With the exception of James Otis and a few articulate Quakers from the Middle Colonies, they rarely connected their own passionate defence of “rights” with the enslavement of colonial blacks. The slaves knew better, of course, and, using the language of rights and liberty, they petitioned for freedom. On the eve of independence, a group of Boston slaves eloquently reminded white colonists that “we have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedoms.”

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)
In 1780 François Marbois, secretary of the French legation in the United States, sent a questionnaire to leading members of Congress. Marbois wanted information about the institutions and physical character of the various states. A copy of the document found its way into the hands of Thomas Jefferson, then governor of Virginia. For several years Jefferson worked on a manuscript eventually published as Notes. The essay is much more than a survey of Virginia’s natural resources. Jefferson speculates about the future of the nation, arguing that its continuing strength depended on yeomen farmers, in other words, on free, white landowners. The Jeffersonian vision did not include blacks, at least, not as full citizens. He turned science into a tool for excluding African Americans from republican equality.

Alexander Falconbridge, The African Slave Trade (1788)
An Account of the African Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa by Alexander Falconbridge gives a precise description of the inhumanity of the middle passage to the New World. Falconbridge served as a surgeon on slave ships at the end of the eighteenth century. Note his description of the relationships between the white sailors and African women.

Olaudah Equiano, The Middle Passage (1788)
This is a selection from the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa), who was brought to Barbados, Virginia, and, later, England from his home West Africa in the early eighteenth century. He was able to purchase his freedom in England and became an abolitionist. His autobiography was written to describe the inhumanity of slavery as part of his abolitionist activities. These passages describe the middle passage and Equiano’s experiences as a slave in Virginia.

Benjamin Banneker, Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1791)
Benjamin Banneker was a free black mathematician and surveyor living in Maryland who helped lay out Washington, D.C. He also published an astronomical almanac which was sold throughout the Middle Atlantic states. This is an excerpt from his letter to the then secretary of state Thomas Jefferson, inspired by Banneker’s reading of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.

State v. Boon (1801)
Early North Carolina statutes treated the murder of a slave differently than other murders. According to laws in 1741 and 1774, people who murdered slaves were required to compensate their owners (unless they killed in the supression of an insurrection) and they risked jail time if they failed to do so. In 1791 an act of the legislature noted that the "distinction of criminality between the murder of a white person and of one who is equally a human creature, but merely of a different complexion, is disgraceful to humanity and degrading in the highest degree to the laws and principles of a free, Christian and enlightened country." The law then provided that the murderer would suffer the same punishment as he would if he "killed a free man," but provided exceptions for slaves killed in insurrections and slaves "dying under moderate correction." This is an excerpt from the North Carolina Supreme Court decision in the first case brought under the new law, concerning a man, Boon, indicted, convicted, and sentenced to death for killing a slave that belonged to another man.

Nat Turner, Confession (1831)
This is a selection from Nat Turner’s confessions, collected by his white lawyer after he had been apprehended for leading a revolt that culminated in the murder of fifty-five whites and the death of at least that many African Americans from white retaliation. The revolt, intended, in Turner’s words, to "carry terror and devastation," was spurred by his divine vision. This selection describes the origins of Turner’s sense of his own uniqueness and his divine revelation.

“Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, as Dictated to Charles Campbell by Isaac” (1847)
Recalling Jefferson in 1847, his former slave Isaac offers in this document a private perspective on the man at the time of his ascendance to the presidency. Isaac portrays Jefferson in a warm, respectful light while detailing the sumptuous life of Monticello, his travels with the new president, and his own start in metalsmithing, a vocation encouraged by his master and from which he was allowed to gain a portion of the profits. Isaac lived into his seventies and continued to ply his trade in Petersburg, Virginia, until his death in 1849.

National Convention of Colored People, Report on Abolition (1847)
Most abolitionists, white and black, believed that intensive exposure and denunciation of slavery would make the South’s position untenable. Northern blacks, those born in freedom, and those who ran away to freedom, formed a critical portion of the small Northern constituency for abolition. On their own as well as through participation in organizations led by whites such as William Lloyd Garrison, they advocated reform. Here the National Convention of Colored People’s Committee on Abolition, which included runaway-slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass, expressed the importance of winning over public opinion through peaceful means.

Benjamin Drew, Narratives of Escaped Slaves (1855)
These two stories of fugitive slaves who escaped from Maryland to freedom in Canada were recorded by Benjamin Drew, an abolitionist. Most runaway slaves were young men, who, like these young women, had suffered physical abuse. Relatively few women were able to make the dangerous journey to freedom because of the difficulty of fleeing with children. These women’s stories document some of the sadistic physical abuse many slaves-men and women alike-suffered at the hands of their masters: whippings, brandings, and confinement, for instance. They also provide evidence of the attempt by women to maintain family ties, relationships, and commitments.

Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)
Dred and Harriet Scott first sued for their freedom in 1846, after their master, a doctor, had brought them from Missouri to Minnesota and Wisconsin. They waited more than ten years before the Supreme Court decision, which ultimately denied them their freedom, was handed down. This excerpt is from Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision.

George Fitzhugh, "The Blessings of Slavery" (1857)
This selection, from Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters, is a justification and defense of slavery. In other portions of his radical book, Fitzhugh argued that (as his title implies) work relations made cannibals of everyone and that, ideally, liberty was meant only for the few-that "some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them-and the riding does them good." In justifying slavery in principle rather than as only a natural state for nonwhites, Fitzhugh ran counter to the general ideology of the antebellum period, a time of increasing democratization, expansion, and participation. In doing so, he became fodder for those northerners who were terrified of a "slave power" conspiracy emanating from the South.*

Abraham Lincoln, "A House Divided" (1858)
This speech, one of the Lincoln’s first as he came into the national spotlight, showcases his simple, clear style and persuasive rhetoric. Lincoln opposed the Dred Scott decision and believed that the South exerted an undue influence on national policy making. Far from a radical abolitionist, however, Lincoln believed blacks were inferior to whites and opposed allowing blacks to vote, marry whites, or to become citizens.

Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Confederate Lady’s Diary (1861)
The daughter and wife of wealthy southern senators, Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823–1886) lived a plantation mistress’s life of class and race privilege. Her diary provides evidence of male slave owner’s sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Chesnut’s primary concern was the impact of this sexual misconduct on wives. What evidence does Chesnut offer to support her allegation about interracial sexual relations between owners and enslaved women?

Jefferson Davis, Address to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America (1861)
On April 29, 1861, President Jefferson Davis of the newly established Confederacy delivered a message to its Provisional Congress at Montgomery, Alabama. Davis outlined the sources of tension between North and South that had triggered secession. He argued on several different grounds that the South had been driven to extreme solutions by aggressive northerners, who seemed bent on destroying the U.S. Constitution as well as the slave-based economy.

The Christian Recorder (1864)
Nearly 200,000 African Americans, freed slaves as well as those living in the North, volunteered for service in the Union army. Although they played a critical role in ensuring a permanent end to slavery, such troops nonetheless suffered unequal treatment. In addition to serving under white officers in otherwise segregated units, African Americans received less pay than their white counterparts. In this May 1864 letter written by a free black volunteer from Ohio to the Christian Recorder, an African American newspaper published in Philadelphia, he expresses his anger not only with unequal treatment but with the dim prospects for genuine racial equality in the United States.

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
Lincoln also interpreted events, both historical and contemporary, in a light favorable to his cause. As the conflict entered its bloody endgame and as the future of slavery thrust itself into the nation’s consciousness, the president redefined war aims in the broadest possible terms. Thus, in his Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1865, Lincoln argued that underlying the prolonged conflict were the transcendent issues of slavery, freedom, and democracy.