Rev. Thornton Stringfellow was the pastor of Stevensburg Baptist Church in Culpeper County, Virginia, and one of the most notorious defenders of slavery in antebellum America. While he also promoted Sunday Schools, and domestic missions, his enduring legacy is...
William Byrd II was one of colonial Virginia’s most powerful men. He was wealthy, educated, politically connected, and widely respected among the white ruling class. He helped found Richmond and Petersburg, served on the Virginia Governor’s Council for decades,...
Quamina Gladstone was an African-born enslaved man in British Demerara (modern-day Guyana) whose religious leadership and moral authority placed him at the center of one of the most significant slave uprisings in British colonial history. A carpenter by trade...
Peter Randolph was born into slavery in Virginia but rose to become one of New England’s most respected Black ministers. His 1893 autobiography, From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit, recounts his journey from slavery to freedom, his legal fight...
Among the many forgotten names buried in America’s history of slavery, few stories are as disturbing as that of Ginger Pop, an enslaved African man whose life ended brutally on a Louisiana plantation in 1853. His death, and the...
In the afternoon of February 15, 1851, inside a federal courthouse, an enslaved African man named Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped slavery in Virginia less than a year earlier, was being held under the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of...
Edmund Ruffin was a Virginia planter, politician, and fierce pro-slavery advocate, who spent his life defending the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. When the Civil War ended in 1865, the South lay in ruins, millions of enslaved Black...
The transatlantic slave trade was one of history’s darkest enterprises, carrying millions of Africans across the ocean in brutal conditions to serve as labor in the Americas. The ships that ferried them were not just centers of commerce but...
In his 1956 classic The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, historian Kenneth M. Stampp shattered the myth of slavery as a gentle system. Using plantation records, letters, and slave narratives, he revealed that white enslavers deliberately sought...
Harriet Jacobs’ story is one of the most extraordinary acts of survival in American history. To escape her master’s relentless sexual abuse and also slavery, she spent seven years hiding in a tiny attic, unable to stand or move...
