On October 28, 1830, Josiah Henson crossed into Canada with his wife, Nancy, and their children, escaping slavery in the United States. But Henson’s journey did not end with his own freedom. He went on to help other Black...
Slavery produced countless victims and countless perpetrators. Most slave owners faded into obscurity, but Edwin Epps remains infamous because one of the men he enslaved survived to tell the world exactly what happened on his plantation. His memoir, Twelve...
When people think of slavery in America, they often picture plantation owners, politicians, and traders. Few imagine that some of slavery’s most passionate defenders stood behind church pulpits. One of the most influential was Benjamin Morgan Palmer, a celebrated...
At a time when Kentucky was a slave state and many churches either defended slavery or remained silent, John Gregg Fee preached that slavery was a sin against both God and humanity. For that, he was disowned by his...
George W. Lee was a Baptist minister, businessman, and civil rights leader who became one of Mississippi’s leading advocates for Black voting rights. His efforts to help African Americans register to vote challenged the foundations of Jim Crow, and...
Rev Frederick Augustus Ross, was a Presbyterian minister whose 1857 book, Slavery As Ordained of God, became one of the most influential religious defenses of slavery in the United States. While abolitionists argued that slavery violated both Christian teaching...
History often remembers inventors for the machines they built, but some left behind a legacy that went far beyond their patents. Thomas Elkins was one of them. Long before his name appeared on U.S. patent documents, he was helping...
In 1934, in the Jim Crow South, a Black man could lose his life for almost anything. Looking a white person in the eye, refusing to step off a sidewalk, or arguing with a white man could be enough...
For decades in the mid 19th century, a brick slave jail in Lynchburg, Virginia, functioned as one of the busiest holding points in the domestic slave trade of the Upper South. Enslaved Africa men, women, and children were confined...
Throughout American history, politicians, plantation owners, lawyers, and religious leaders all offered different arguments in defense of slavery. Some claimed it was necessary for the economy, while others argued that it maintained social order. Few, however, relied as heavily...
