Digital Library on American Slavery

Underwritten by a "We the People" grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Digital Library on American Slavery is a cooperative venture between the Race and Slavery Petitions Project and the Electronic Resources and Information Technology Department of University Libraries at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The Digital Library offers a searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia.

To visit the library: Click Here.

Note: Contrary to the above, as of the Revolutionary War all US states had slavery, with the Northern states gradually abolishing slavery one by one in the years following the Revolution, with New Jersey at the time of the Civil War still having a handful of elderly slaves deemed too old to be emancipated. And that is to say nothing of Northern involvement in the international slave trade and Northern consumption of slave-produced cotton and other products. Slavery was a national sin, not a regional one as it is almost always portrayed as having been.