Browse Items (74 total)

        I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away. My father was a carpenter, and considered so intelligent and skilful in his trade, that, when buildings out of the common line were to be…

The master is not liable to an indictment for a battery committed upon his slave. One who has a right to the labor of a slave, has also a right to all the means of controlling his conduct which the owner has. Hence one who has hired a slave is not…

The Edenton Gazette states, upon information received from an undoubted source, that there have been killed in Southampton county upwards of one hundred negroes, consequent upon the late insurrection in that county. Fourteen of the thoughtless,…

Fear created suspicion, suspicion led to torture, torture to confessions. Or, it is possible, and that is but a guess, that panic, or part of it, was maintained by people interested in the purchase of slaves at a low price. Another hypothesis was…

From Sterling Ruffin. [Brunswick, June, 1804] I have no apology to offer for not complying with the promise made in my last, of writing again, in a few days, except that I wish'd to have forwarded you a small B. Note, for fear, from some unforeseen…

Slavery in the American South could not have existed without the authority of law defining slaves as the property of their masters. But the fact that slaves were also human beings placed limits on this harsh reality. When the rigor of the law and the…

Just weeks after the incident in Baltimore, a fellow North Carolinian was also attacked for his abolitionist stance. Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, born and raised near Salisbury, was dismissed from his fac ulty post at the University of North Carolina…

Missing from these historiographical studies are the views of Southern Unionists. Although containing elements of both contemporary Northern and Confederate interpretations, the Unionist critique of the war is unique, providing insights into the…

She was a slave in the South and a fugitive in the South and in the North. She was an abolitionist, the author of a published slave narrative. She was a relief worker during the Civil War, and after Reconstruction, she was an entrepreneur. Although…

"A large portion of the citizens of Craven" met in a meeting on December 12, 1860, to discuss "the present alarming state of national affairs." The citizens noted that white North Carolinians possessed a common interest with the "slaveholding states"…