Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.


Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me,” 2015

Real people are the stuff of compelling history. Those long dead and buried have something to teach us about the painful, dramatic and uplifting stretch of mid-nineteenth century Georgia history. In attending to the arcs of their lives, we can see how the “slave South” was endured, overthrown, and then recast and remembered.

The distinctive portraits of this project bring alive three sequential dramas. Documents before the 1860s reveal how white America’s commitment to unfree labor impacted the Black majority (both the enslaved and “free people of color”) across two rural Georgia counties. Material from the early 1860s demonstrate wartime alterations in deeply rooted systems of violence and exploitation in these same locales. In evidence documenting emancipation, we can perceive Black freedom co-existing with stubbornly persistent structures of white supremacy.

A team of Dartmouth College students working with Professor Robert Bonner is scouring the records of Alexander H. Stephens to excavate forgotten lives and gripping stories. As a singularly important political leader of the Civil War-era South, Stephens’ public career has long drawn attention. He was a powerful antebellum Congressman, proslavery ideologue, Confederate Vice-President, and an important figure in the “Lost Cause” myth-making of the late 19th century. Upon his death, while serving as Georgia’s 50th governor, Stephens had established himself as one of the most notable figures in the history of his state.

The details of Stephens’ public career, while fascinating in their own right, are only mentioned in passing in the documents we select and the lives we explore. Our focus is on the dynamics of the interconnected households within the orbit of Stephens and his white kin. “Life Stories of Black Georgians” works in conjunction with a project hosted by “From the Page,” a site that supports crowd-sourced transcription of historical materials. Members of the public with an interest in this topic are encouraged to enlist themselves as a transcribers. To do so, follow the guidance provided at this link.

This Dartmouth-located wordpress site, to be regularly updated across 2023 and 2024, allows all participants in the project to step back and appreciate broader historical and biographical contexts in which meaningful life stories can be assembled. Across sections that will be revised in light of new discoveries and insights, we will gather and reflect upon individual travails and triumphs of Black Georgians. A series of capsule biographies will be our most important objective. Our research will prioritize particularly well-documented lives that appear in surviving materials created between the 1820s and the 1880s.

While by no means comprehensive, the paper-trail offers glimpses of individual predicaments faced by actual men, women, and children. Much surviving evidence comes from the ongoing dialogue among white Georgians who held Black Georgians in bondage. It hardly need be said that these are not “objective” sources. The extensive correspondence between Alexander Stephens and his half-brother Linton Stephens (a wealthy cotton planter, lawyer, politician, and resident of Sparta, Georgia) can, even so, yield pertinent information across a broad chronological sweep. More than a hundred documents gathered thus far were written by a cluster of Black Georgians who knew slavery’s brutality first-hand.

  • IMAGE CREDIT: Photograph of an Unnamed Woman from “Alexander Stephens’ Family Photograph Archive,” sold by Cowan’s Auctions in 2009.