Foreword
The scholar's research strategy is influenced by the basic constraints of
time and money. Choices must be made as to which archives are to be visited
and how much time is to be allowed at each. Once there, the more effectively
the time can be used in finding and examining relevant materials, the more
productive will be the research endeavor. It is for these reasons that
publications such as Michael Plunkett's Afro-American
Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts are so valuable to
scholars. Plunkett, Curator of Manuscripts at the University of Virginia
Library, here presents the information derived from a survey of the
resources in Virginia repositories, describing the principal collections of
interest to scholars concerned with the Afro-American experience. In these
Virginia repositories there are extensive collections of primary documents,
only some of which deal with Afro-Americans. This compilation will greatly
aid the researcher, who will be able to use the Guide's annotations to focus upon those specific collections with
materials of interest.
Although Virginia repositories include collections with materials related to
the Afro-American experience in other parts of the South and in the North,
the most important of the collections are for the colony and state of
Virginia. These run in time from the seventeenth century to the current
period. Collections include the papers, letters, and records of individuals
and families; documents of towns, cities, and counties; official state
records; church records; material from the Works Projects Administration
Folklore Collection; college and university archives; and a variety of other
types of documents of importance for understanding the Afro-American
experience.
While it can hardly be claimed that the story of Afro-Americans in Virginia
has been neglected by historians or that these collections have been ignored
by those writing on Afro-Americans, an examination of the Guide and of the collections themselves points to several areas in
which important new research using these archives is possible. Reflecting my
interests and use of archival sources, there are some particular areas
related to the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century which I wish to
note.
Virginia's importance, as measured by its percentage of the overall
Afro-American population, declined dramatically over the course of the
nineteenth century: about two-fifths of the Afro-Americans in the United
States resided in Virginia at the time of the first census (about 95 percent
of them enslaved), the share falling to about one-eighth on the eve of the
Civil War, and about one-tenth by 1880. Yet as late as 1860 Virginia still
had more Afro-Americans (and more slaves) than did any other state. For all
the writings on antebellum slavery, we still have much to learn about the
distinct economics and culture of slavery in Virginia. While most writings
focus on the cotton South with its large plantations, Virginia slavery was
characterized by relatively small slave farms, growing mainly tobacco and
wheat. Thus in many important dimensions slavery in Virginia was different,
for slaves and for masters, than slavery elsewhere in the South.
Many of these Virginia repositories have been used by scholars writing on the
history of slavery in Virginia from the colonial era to the Civil War.
Several of the archives were recently used by Allan Kulikoff when writing
his important study of slavery in the early Chesapeake, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the
Chesapeake 1680-1800.
Robert McColley's Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia
remains the major work on its period, but there is no similar work on
Virginia slavery covering the important years of 1820-60. As a survey of
their bibliographies and references sources will indicate, many of the
writings of the past decades on American slavery consulted Virginia
collections. Of particular note are the important writings of two major
black historians, Luther Porter Jackson (Free Negro Labor
and Property Holding in Virginia 1830-1860) and James Hugo Johnston
(Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the
South 1776-1860), both
of whose papers are now available to scholars at Virginia State University.
More recently, for their heavy reliance on these sources one can, in
particular, point to Todd L. Savitt's Medicine and
Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum
Virginia and, for the use of one part of the extensive John Hartwell
Cocke collection at the University of Virginia Library, the letters of
slaves and ex-slaves to their former master in Randall M. Miller's edited
collection "Dear Master": Letters of a Slave Family.
In addition, for different aspects of the slave experience, there are Richard
Dunn's use of the plantation records in the Tayloe Papers at the Virginia
Historical Society; Charles B. Dew's study of the Tredegar Iron Works, Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the
Tredegar Iron Works, based primarily on the company's records now
at the Virginia State Library; and Mechal Sobel's Trabelin' On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith and her
The World They Made Together: Black and White Values
in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Suzanne Lebsock's significant study
of The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a
Southern Town, 1784-1860, which includes an examination of free
women of color, similarly draws heavily upon materials from several Virginia
repositories. More, however, can be done on the host of issues related to
Afro-American slaves and free persons of color in Virginia by using many of
the cited collections. A fuller examination of, for example, black
demography can draw upon various planter listings of slaves, slave birth
registers, free black registers, and police daybooks — even the
detailed account book of a slave trader in the late antebellum period.
The atypical pattern of slavery in Virginia also makes the transition from
slavery to freedom, and the economic and social adjustments to emancipation,
a particularly interesting subject for examination. For this period, as for
the slave era, much of the recent work on political and economic changes has
concentrated upon those parts of the South in which the plantation had been
the dominant institution. Yet to more fully understand the impact of
emancipation, particularly in its economic aspects, attention to areas with
smaller farms, growing a different set of crops, is important. The focus
would contribute, for example, to the analysis of the factors explaining
postemancipation declines in agricultural production in the South, which
appear to have been smaller in Virginia than elsewhere in the South. There
are a number of collections with labor contracts between freedmen and
landowners, as well as sources with account books and farmers' letters, that
can be used to examine such questions, as was done by Crandall A. Shifflett,
drawing mainly upon the Watson Family Papers at the University of Virginia
Library, in his Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco
South: Louisa County, Virginia 1860-1900. Not only would we expect the economic
effects of the end of slavery in Virginia to differ from those elsewhere,
but because of the differences in the relative numbers of blacks and whites
(among other reasons) we would also anticipate variations in the social,
cultural, and political consequences. Some of these social and cultural
issues are examined by Robert Francis Engs in his Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton. Virginia 1861-1890, which utilizes the
Hampton University Archives. Moreover, the differences in the social and
economic adaptations made in the migration northward by those Afro-Americans
born in Virginia and those born elsewhere in the South means that studies of
Virginia slavery and emancipation will have wider implications.
There are obviously other questions and other periods for which archival
repositories in Virginia will prove very useful and for which this Guide
will be an essential aid. This compilation is most useful in drawing
attention to relevant collections and indicating the range of materials they
contain. The annotations for each collection and the subject index can be of
enormous help to scholars, leading them to those collections with materials
of interest and for which the examination of detailed inventories at the
repository will yield a high payoff. Use of the Guide
will permit a great savings in time and effort, making it a most useful
reference aid to be consulted by scholars of Afro-American history,
literature, and culture.
Stanley L. Engerman
Departments of Economics and History
University of Rochester
Michael Plunkett
Curator of Manuscripts
University of Virginia
Library