This page focuses on several important collections found in the databases listed above. There will be much more in those and other primary source databases, but there are some of the highlights.
The statutes in this collection allow scholars to see how the South crafted, and recrafted, legislation to control its peculiar institution. The laws adopted by a democratically elected legislature reveal much about the society that it governs. The laws in this collection show that slavery was often on the mind of southerners and that they were seldom satisfied with the laws and controls they had. Some of these laws are responses to particular events while others respond to more general developments in society. Laws prohibiting the circulation of abolitionist papers, for example, are in direct response to the growth of the antislavery movement of the 1830s. Most of this legislation is neither dramatic nor politically motivated. It responds to the day-to-day needs of an enslaving society. Far more than court decisions, this legislation reflects how citizens of the South viewed their world, and what their goals were.
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, tens of thousands of southerners petitioned their legislatures for redress of grievances. Their petitions concerned a broad range of topics--the creation of a new county; the location of a new courthouse; the construction and maintenance of roads, canals, bridges, and railroads; and the incorporation of savings institutions, turnpike companies, and manufacturing enterprises as well as lyceums, academies, schools, and towns. Southerners petitioned to eliminate poll taxes, expand suffrage, and protect their rights as citizens. In addition, they asked for private acts of relief: payment for services rendered, exemptions from court fines, and assistance during times of drought and disaster.
The petitions fall into many categories that you can use to refine your research. Here are a few examples:
Other examples include property value, personal property, uprisings, prisons, trials, religious liberty, aging, relationships, estates, etc.
The county court petitions in Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks, Series II: Petitions to Southern County Courts offer immediate testimony on a broad range of subjects by a variety of southerners--Black and white, enslaved and free, enslaver and non-enslaver, men and women. The documents include rare biographical and genealogical information about people of color; they detail how enslaved people, as chattel, could and often did find themselves sold, conveyed, or distributed as part of their masters' estates; and they reveal the impact of market forces on enslaved families. The emancipation petitions present an unusually clear picture of the association between whites and free Black Americans, and the divorce petitions provide a unique picture of enslaving white women. These documents give a unique view of the workings of local court systems: who approached the courts and why, how they fared, how their pleas varied in different states and locales during different time periods, and how judges and juries responded to their pleas. They illuminate, in hidden and unexpected ways, intellectual history and religious experience, containing references to debates over theology, ethics, law, social theory, and epistemology that occurred outside traditional academic, religious, and cultural institutions.
For a more complete overview of the contents in this collection, see the link below:
Types of petitions:
Since it first appeared in 1862, John Codman Hurd's The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States (2 vols.) has served as an invaluable resource for scholars, historians, and concerned citizens.
The volumes contain brief abstracts of many hundreds of state laws passed by general assemblies on the subject of race and slavery in the United States. Generations of researchers have referred to Hurd's work for quick and accurate summaries of legislation dealing with a broad range of topics, from how states controlled their enslaved populations to statutes concerning freedom. John Codman Hurd (1816-1892) attended Columbia College and Yale where he graduated in 1836 and remained to study at the Yale Law School. A person of independent means, he devoted many years to compiling his accurate and indispensable two volume summaries of laws relating to African Americans.
The following original 1926 introduction accompanied the release of Helen Tunicliff Catteral's volumes. The content has been lightly edited to conform to ProQuest preferred terminology.
That the history of American slavery and Black Americans forms a most important chapter in the history of the United States no one will deny. An institution that for two centuries formed a principal basis of economic and social life throughout large parts of the country, a portentous growth in the body politic, whose removal called for the sharp surgery of civil war, a residual mass of difficult problems in the relations of races, the historical development of a tenth of our present population--such elements as these invest the theme with an interest and importance that will not be questioned. Anyone however who is solicitous for the secure and orderly progress of American historical studies will readily perceive that this chapter of American history is very insufficiently documented. Of the hundreds of volumes of historical materials which the federal and state governments and our numerous historical societies have poured forth, almost none concerns the history of the Black Americans and of American slavery. Political and other reasons make it unlikely that in the immediate future--apart from the excellent work which is being done, with limited means, by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History--such organizations, governmental or private, will do much towards illuminating by documentary publications this large and momentous chapter in our history.
For a more complete overview and archival organization of the collection, see the link below: