The book-length narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), chronicles the experiences of Harriet Jacobs who was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. Harriet was unaware of her slave status until at age six, her mother died… [more]
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM, edited by David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, contains the best quantitative evidence to date on the number of Africans sold into the slave trade. A… [more]
Born in present-day Ghana, young Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped and sold into slavery at the young age of 13. Cugoano worked in the sugar fields of a Grenadan plantation until 1773. That year, Cugoano traveled to England with his owner where he… [more]
Born in present-day Ghana, young Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped and sold into slavery at the young age of 13. Cugoano worked in the sugar fields of a Grenadan plantation until 1773. That year, Cugoano traveled to England with his owner where he… [more]
In this excerpted source, Venture Smith recalls his experiences in the slave trade as a child. This source is especially important, as Smith gives a very vivid account of slave raiding, a common practice that took place during the peak years of the… [more]
This image shows children and adults making their way from the African interior to the coast in a slave coffle. While some may think that children were given special treatment because of their age, and some may have, this image suggests that this was… [more]
The Graphic, a London periodical owned by liberal reformer William Luson Thomas, was not an abolitionist publication per se, but it did seek to inspire action against those causes that Thomas felt demanded immediate attention, such as poverty,… [more]
This image is of an advertisement for a nearly equal number of adults and children from Sierra Leone at a Charleston Auction. This image is important for several reasons, namely because one should see what an auction advertisement looks like, but… [more]
This excerpt is of a request made by Playden Onely to the members of the Royal African Company in 1721 for 130 children to be taken from West Africa to the West Indies for sale as slaves. The RAC commissioned the slave ship Kent for the task, and… [more]
