The “slave narrative”– an autobiographical genre composed expressly for publication– holds pride of place in accounts of how bondage was experienced, survived, and escaped. Piecing together the lives of the rural Black population who remained in bondage until 1865 requires a different approach. Reconstructing these experiences involves fashioning fragmentary sources into a coherent whole. Only rarely did the protagonists themselves execute a retrospective account of their travails and triumphs.

As our Stephens-based project develops, we will devote attention in this space to a select number of men and women whose biographies can be built from the records we are transcribing. We will be placing that material in relation to other evidentiary residue from the nineteenth century and striving for the sort of vivid detail that can collapse some of the distance between their times and our own.

This section will be expanding over the months to come.