This week’s edition of the Tennessee Baptist reprints a list of “Rules for a Good Overseer.” Slave overseers (generally white) are men who are employed by slave owners to manage plantation slave labor for maximum profit. Relatively few Baptists of the South in 1861 own plantations or own enough slaves to merit an overseer. Likewise,…
Today one of the worst fears of Southern slaveholders is realized: the first school for emancipated slaves is established in Alexandria, Virginia by Mary Chase, an African American woman. The laws of southern states, with the lone exception of Tennessee, have long decreed that it is a crime to teach African slaves to read and…
Today the informal emancipation of southern slaves begins, in the form of the United States’ Act to Confiscate Property used for Insurrectionary Purposes. While not mentioning slavery specifically, the Act approved by the President and passed by the Congress gives Union armies the power to confiscate the property of southerners – including slaves, the most…