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Resources & Links

Resources & Links

In the process of researching and compiling these documents we have found
many useful resources that may be helpful to anyone interested in this topic.
This list will be updated from time to time.

Online Links:

An Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves (1782)

Missing Documents and Burned Courthouses in Virginia

Library of Virginia - Virginia Untold - Searchable archives

Germantown Friends' protest against slavery 1688

Pre-1820 Virginia Manumissions Database

The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

Free African Americans

Founders Online Archive

Library of Congress

Pleasants against Pleasants (1798)

Albemarle County Free People of Color: 18th Century Residents

Virginia Emigrants to Liberia

The Reginald D. Butler Local History Archive

Manumission in South Carolina

Manumission in Frederick Co, Maryland

The Horrible Fate of John Casor

Articles:

Manumission in Virginia

“Always Said to be of Indian Extraction”: Native/African American Freedom Suits in Virginia 1773-1853

Manumission in Nineteenth Century Virginia

Manumission in Certain Virginia Cities

Slave manumission in Virginia, 1782-1806: the Jeffersonian dilemma in the age of liberty

Native/African American Freedom Suits in Virginia 1773-1853

Free Black Residency in Two Antebellum Virginia Counties: How the Laws Functioned

The Virginia Free Negro Farmer and Property Owner, 1830-1860

Freedmen and enslaved soil: A case study of manumission, migration, and land (Samuel Gist)

Strangers setting among us: The sources and challenge of the urban free Black population of early Virginia

ANTI-SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The Rev. Edward Dromgoole, Sr., Emancipator and Enslaver

Creating Identity: Free Blacks and the Law

Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian America

Free Black Populations of the Southern Appalachian Mountains: 1860

Toward Freedom For All: North Carolina Quaker Legal Theory on the Trust for Manumissions

Book List:

The Free Negro in Virginia 1619-1865 - John H. Russell -1969

American Slavery 1619-1877 - Peter Kolchin - 1993

The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States - Ira Berlin - 2015

Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World - Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks - 2010

Race and Liberty in the New World - Eva Sheppard Wolf - 2006

Israel on the Appomattox: a Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from
the 1790s through the Civil War
- Melvin Patrick Ely - 2005

The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding
Father Who Freed His Slaves
- Andrew Levy - 2005

The Problem of Slavery In Western Culture - David Brion Davis - 1969

Black Rednecks and White Liberals - Thomas Sowell - 2005

Slave No More : Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas - Aline Helg - 2019

Free Blacks of Lynchburg Virginia 1805-1865 - Ted Delaney & Phillip Rhodes - 2001

Strangers in Their Midst: The Free Black Population of Amherst County, Virginia - Sherry McLeRoy & William McLeRoy - 1993

The Midas of Manumission: The Orphan Samuel Gist and his Virginian Slaves - Barb Drummond - 2018

Free Negroes in Halifax County, Virginia, 1767-1864 - Lander G. Anderson (2018)

Pittsylvania County, Virginia, register of free Negroes and related documentation - Alva H. Griffith (2001)

Bedford Black History 250 Years - Annie S. Pollard (2015)

A History Of The American Nation - Willis Mason West (1929)

Newspaper Articles: 

Manumission of a Whole Drove of Slaves (Cincinnati, OH)