Digital Library on American Slavery
The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from 18th- and 19th-century documents that were processed over a period of 18 years. Launched October 1 by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the collection contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals. The data were painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, and amended petitions. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slaveowners and non-slaveowners. One of the unique aspects of the Digital Library is the information on individual slaves made available along with additional data on their owners; no other online database connects slaves with their owners in such a manner. Each set of documents is uniquely identified by an eight-digit PAR (Petition Analysis Record) number. The list of subjects reveals the variety of “causes” or “bills of complaint,” in the language of the courts, that petitioners brought, or defendants raised, in their civil suits. The general topics include slave ownership, slave management, freedom suits, crime and punishment, health, death, social and civic life, marriage, women, and family, among others.
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