On September 7, 1889, a white mob broke into the Boone County Jail in Columbia, Missouri, seized a Black teenager named George Bush and hanged him from a second-story window of the county courthouse. Bush was just 17 or...
In the years before the American Civil War, slavery was not only defended by politicians and slaveholders. Some Christian ministers also built theological arguments around it, using the Bible to argue that slaveholding was compatible with Christianity. One of...
In December 1869, a young Black man named Cyrus Guy was taken by a white mob in Orange County, North Carolina, and lynched for allegedly insulting a white woman. There was no trial, no opportunity for Guy to defend...
In 1712, colonial South Carolina passed a law establishing increasingly severe punishments for enslaved people who repeatedly ran away. The law, titled “An ACT for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and Slaves,” treated escape as an offense...
In the fall of 1861, Mary Peake began teaching Black children who had escaped slavery in Virginia. Her classroom was beneath a large oak tree near Fort Monroe, where thousands of formerly enslaved people had sought refuge behind Union...
In 1818, Rev. Jacob Gruber stood before thousands of people at a Methodist camp meeting in Maryland and openly condemned slavery. He called the institution a “national sin” and warned that it was offensive to God and harmful to...
In 1662, the colony of Virginia passed a law that changed the future of slavery in North America. It declared that the status of a child would be determined by the condition of the mother. If an enslaved African...
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...
