Are you interested in understanding the context of your findings on this database? Can we learn more about the lives recorded in this database? How can we fill in those gaps with richer narratives that more fully articulate the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people and their enslavers, such as how they were enmeshed in, benefitted from, or suffered under the practices and institutions enslavement in St. Louis. Here are some resources to help deepen your detective work.
Hundreds of people sued for their freedom in St. Louis. View the cases from the St. Louis Circuit Course files online through the Washington University Libraries Digital Gateway, or schedule an in-person visit with the Missouri State Archives in St. Louis.
We hope to incorporate freedom suit records into SLIDE at a future date.
For more information on St. Louis freedom suits, read:
- Kennington, Kelly M. In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
- Twitty, Anne. Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- VanderVelde, Lea. Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
A guide to resources on the history of St. Louis, including specialized sections on African American history in the city. Assembled by Rudolph Clay, AFAS Subject Librarian and Senior Lecturer at Washington University.
While much of the “Digital Library on American Slavery” does not geographically pertain to St. Louis, their “Race & Slavery Project” includes information on slavery in Missouri, and includes information the SLIDE database does not yet incorporate.
The Federal Writers Project’s Ex-Slave Narratives collects the stories of over 2,400 formerly enslaved people. While this makes it a potentially invaluable resource, there are notable drawbacks to this source material. For one, these stories were recorded in the 1930s, more than seventy years after emancipation. However, a more fundamental issue concerns the manner in which these narratives were collected and transcribed. The interviews in Missouri, for example, were conducted by a white interviewer with a Black interviewee in the 1930s Jim Crow South. This dynamic, as well as the leading questions interviewers were prone to ask, influenced which stories the interviewees felt safe sharing or felt especially impelled to share. The interviewers, often without any training, attempted to transcribe the language and dialect of the interviewee, which often served more to caricature their subject than to faithfully record their words and lives.
If you’re interested in learning more about the limitations of the Ex-Slave Narratives, “The Limitations of the Slave Narrative Collection,” “Note on the Language of the Narratives,” and “Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?” are good places to start.
“First Person Narratives of the American South” is a collection of personal accounts of life in the American South from between 1860 and 1920 and is focused particularly on accounts from African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. Here is the link to the Missouri-specific page.
Elephind provides access to historical newspapers, which may help with research on people found on this database. These sources often reflect the biases and editorial choices of predominantly-white journalists and editors.
The State Historical Society of Missouri’s “Missouri Digital Newspaper Project,” is a collection of historical Missouri newspapers.
Sites like Family Search and Ancestry, as well as genealogical sites compiled by The National Archives are also useful research tools. People affiliated with WUSTL can gain access to Ancestry.com with their WUSTL Key credentials here. Free access to the 1850 Census and the 1860 Census are available by following the links.