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The Film:
Interview Transcripts:
Loren Schweninger
Loren Schweninger,
Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, on
The Race and
Slavery Petitions Project
 In 1994, John
Hope Franklin, a distinguished scholar, asked me to co-author a book
on runaway slaves with him. He had begun the study of runaway slaves
in 1978, and had given a group of lecturers in the early 1980s at the
University of Virginia titled, “Plantation Dissidence.” During the
1980s and early 1990s, he had collected thousands of runaway slave
notices, advertisements and newspapers, documenting slave owners
seeking their property. And he had also gone around to various
archives and looked at correspondence among plantation owners.
Meanwhile, in
1994, I was in the midst of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project in
which I was collecting petitions to county courts and state
legislatures about slavery. In these petitions, of which the
collection now includes 18,000 and about 140,000 pages of documentary
evidence, there was all kinds of information about conflict and
runaway slaves and violence and difficulties that planters were having
on the plantation then went into the court system and was
adjudicated.
We combined our
efforts and over the next several years, brought together the runaway
slave notices, the planters records, as well as the petitions to the
courthouses and to the state legislatures.
These three types
of evidence have many beneficial qualities. One is that planters who
were seeking a return, or slave owners who were seeking a return of
their property were not going to lie in describing their property, and
thus, these notices and newspapers were among the best sources
describing individual slaves that we have. “He was so tall,” or “she
was so tall,” “she was a good seamstress,” “she was wiry and
intelligent, and be prepared that she can make an excuse and you won’t
know that she’s making an excuse.” All of these kinds of descriptions
of demeanor and physical attributes, as well as where they might be
headed or where they planned to go, are seen in this type of
evidence.
When we brought
runaway slave notices, correspondence between plantation owners and
court records and petitions of southern legislatures together, we
discovered that in these documents there were a number of dramatic
stories about slaves who had attempted to escape. |
rebels on the plantation
obstacles and
heart-wrenching decisions
three groups of free blacks
dramatic slave escapes
slavery’s long shadow
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