Dr. Stephanie J. Richmond, Norfolk State University
Sold Down River is a digital history project aimed at finding and tracing the family histories of enslaved people from Virginia who were sold in the domestic slave trade to the deep south. To trace individual people, we reviewed ship manifests, notary public records documenting sales of enslaved people, census records, plantation records, and court records in Virginia and Louisiana. The database contains information on tens of thousands of enslaved people as well as thousands of free people (Black and White) from Virginia, Louisiana and the surrounding states. The database lists the names, ages, physical descriptions, places of origin and destination for enslaved people, and similar information for enslavers, slave traders and their agents. It also allows users to explore connections between people, both enslaved and free, such as enslaved people who were transported together, sold together, and whom they were sold by and too and the middle-men who conducted the trade. This information is useful to both historians of the American South and genealogists and family history seekers who are trying to bridge the gap in records before the 1870 census which often prevents tracing Black families in the south prior to the abolition of slavery in 1865.
Sold Down River has its roots in classroom projects. The initial research and transcriptions of the ship manifests were done by high school students, and once a process was established for searching notary public records, students did much of the initial search and data entry. Framing this project, providing historical background and supporting students as they learned the skills needed to read, transcribe and contextualize the records of the domestic slave trade has been essential to student success and the project’s continued growth. This essay explains how this digital history project has been an effective tool for teaching budding historians how to do the work of history.
Framing
The students who work on this project first encounter it as part of one of two undergraduate courses: one on methodology, or one on antebellum America. The methodology course, titled Introduction to History, is a required course for sophomore-level history majors and minors. The project is the third module of the course, and prior to working in the records, students read multiple longer primary sources, visit archives and hear how they are created and curated. They also help to create oral history recordings, and participate in a historical debate centering primary sources. These earlier assignments–and focusing the course on the primary source as the most important element of writing and understanding history–is key to student success in engaging with the notary public records and making sense of what they find. Many sophomore students have taken two or three survey courses, have read some primary sources and used them as evidence in writing assignments before taking this course; but few have done the sustained research in primary source records or visited an archive. A grounding in historical methods is key to their successful completion of their assignment within the larger project.
For Antelbellum American history, the second course where the project has been a large part of the required work, we spent half a semester reading a range of texts on the domestic slave trade, including monographs, articles and other primary sources, before diving into analyzing handwriting and searching the notary public records. The primary source work the students do with the project directly connects to the monographs and articles we read and gives them first hand experience on how historians find records, contextualize them, and compile large research projects.
Background
Over the past several years, the project team (which includes academic historians, archivists, genealogists and high school teachers) has gathered a collection of articles, book chapters, podcasts, and websites that provide students with a solid foundation in understanding the domestic slave trade and its centrality to the economic and social history of the United States. These readings, as well as in-class lectures and discussion, inform students about the historiography of the domestic slave trade and the difficulties of conducting research on individual enslaved people in an archive that is both incomplete and undermined by historical oppression and ongoing discrimination. We begin with the social history of the slave trade through excerpts from Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul, which has long been considered a foundational text in the study of the slave trade. From there, students participate in an in-class discussion and lecture on the slave trade. We read monographs and articles on the economic history of the slave trade (notably selections from Calvin Schermerhorn’s “Capitalism’s Captives”, and Diana Ramey Berry’s The Price Per Their Pound of Flesh), and then we dive into the theoretical and philosophical discussion of recreating enslaved people’s lives from fragmentary and oppressive archives through Haartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” placing it in dialogue with books like Alexandra Finley’s Intimate Economies.
These discussions provide students with the historiographical and theoretical grounding to begin to imagine and understand the archival record of the slave trade, and the difficulty of this work before they even encounter their first record of a sale. Here we also have to have a conversation about the emotional and spiritual toll the work can take on a historian. I warn students that the material we will find will likely be graphic and disturbing, and that everyone must care for their own selves in order to do justice to these histories. This conversation includes thinking about our own personal emotional vulnerabilities. I often give the example of how becoming a parent has shifted my emotional connection to family histories and that there are times where I have to put down my work for a time or change which set of records I am reviewing because the separation of mothers and children is too hard for me to read at that moment. Sexual violence is another area where we talk about how important it is to be self aware and take care of our own mental health if this is a triggering issue. I let students know that for any record they find too hard to read, they can simply leave a note in the data collection file and I will go back and finish recording the information.
We talk about how we need to have outlets for joy and to intentionally engage in things that bring us joy and peace to balance the spiritual weight of the work we are doing. Building classroom community is an important part of balancing the emotional weight of the project. I intentionally make sure we have time before and after we work to talk together about mutual interests (music, food, local events, and college sports are frequent topics with my students). We often work in our local public library’s archival reading room and I encourage students to spend time browsing the books or viewing the art exhibits. We also discuss how important doing this work is for bringing these stories to light and to hopefully allow the people in them a voice they were denied during their lifetimes.
Once students have engaged with the context and understand the importance and difficulty of the task they will undertake, we begin by finding and documenting the sale of one person together as a group. We talk about how we use the names of slave traders to find the transaction records in indexes, how we collect the details of each sale (name, age, gender, physical description, origin and price and any other details we can glean). Once we enter the data and list our names next to a record of one person’s trauma, we have to pause and think about the experience they had. Who did the person described in the transaction record leave behind? What was their life like in Virginia and how would it change in the Mississippi River Valley? How does the physical description conceal as much as it reveals about who the enslaved person was and who they were to their family, friends and community back in Virginia, as well as what their loss would mean to those that they loved? Once we find a name, and the name of the person who bought them (and often the name of the person who sold them away from their families and communities), we can try to find out where they were taken from, what kind of work was done at their destination, how many others they lived with and worked alongside, and what were the conditions like at that site of enslavement.
This next step after finding a record is what makes up the students’ final project. Once we find the records, our work is not done. We must contextualize the documents and explain what they mean to our understanding of the past. Students write, or attempt to write, the story of one enslaved individual’s life. Those stories, which are featured on our website, are sometimes only a few sentences long, and others can span pages with illustrations and details, highlighting the uneven and fragmentary nature of the archive. We piece together one person’s story as a class, and the students are then each assigned the records of one notary. They begin to search on their own and to reconstruct a few stories with the help of the group. The classroom group is key to a positive experience. Students need both practical support to read handwriting and understand terminology, but also the collective gasps, horror and sharing help students (and their professor) process their emotions as they encounter the horrors of the domestic trade on the pages of the ledgers.
Norfolk State University is a historically Black university (HBCU), and as such the majority of our students are African American. As a long-time White faculty member at an HBCU, I am very cognizant of my position in the classroom: as an authority figure, as a subject matter expert, and as an outsider to the African American experience. I am always careful to be clear about what I can do to support students (teach the skills, provide historical context) but also that I will listen to them and trust that they know their own limits, life experiences, and needs. Doing a project like this one in a classroom setting requires mutual respect and trust that has to be cultivated before starting the project. How that happens will be different for every classroom, but in my experience, humility, genuine respect for students as whole people, and an attitude that students will teach you as much as or more than you teach them are at the root of developing a classroom culture that can tackle a project like this one.
The research done to unearth the stories also highlights the power of flipping the narrative. Searches of census records, historical society proceedings, newspapers, and wills require using the names of enslavers to find the records of the enslaved. Imagination is required to take an image of a plantation house, a map, or a newspaper advertisement for a bankruptcy auction, and to center an enslaved man, woman or child in the story those sources tell. We can often only make our most educated guess at how someone felt, what work they did, and how they survived the tumultuous and violent experience of enslavement in the Deep South.
The results for students are not just essays that may get published on the project website, but also the experience of working in an archive for the first time in a sustained manner. Historians know that archival work is a mix of tedium and excitement. Paging through volumes only to find one or two documents that reveal the details of the past we are seeking is a practice that requires patience and diligence. Working with microfilmed and scanned handwritten images requires learning to use the intertwined tools available to parse out the words on the page, paleography, and computer literacy. Students encounter the vocabulary of the slave market and the ledger in the records: mortgages, liens, racial terminology and dehumanizing descriptions. Working together in a room on the project means we can share, ask each other’s input, and get real time feedback on the accuracy of our readings and our understandings.
Projects like this are meaningful to students. Student feedback in teaching evaluations, emails, informal conversations, and graduate school application essays demonstrate the impact that doing historical research has on students’ academic engagement and success. Out of the several dozen students who have worked on this project, close to half have continued working on the project after the class or internship experience was over, including several students who continued to volunteer their time after graduating. They are participating in knowledge creation as well as learning skills. They feel much more invested in the classroom experience and build relationships with one another and their professors through mutual support, shared experiences, and grappling with a difficult past that shapes our present. Students report that the work makes them feel like historians for the first time. In an era when the numbers of history majors are dwindling, experiential learning with projects like Sold Down River gives a tangible and valuable learning experience that students can use to explain why history matters, and why the skills of a historian are highly employable.
Appendices:
Appendix A: Sample Syllabi
Appendix C: DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Appendix D: Lesson Plan for Language about Slavery
Appendix E: Reading Nineteenth Century Handwriting
Appendix F: Diagram of a notary public record
Stephanie J. Richmond is a professor of history at Norfolk State University and the project director of Sold Down River. This essay was kindly reviewed by Dr. Catherine Denial and greatly improved with her feedback.