Afro-American Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts

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Michael Plunkett, Editor

Published by the University Press of Virginia
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Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies
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Foreword to the Electronic Version

1) Michael Plunkett

When I was first contacted about the possibility of publishing Afro-American Sources as an electronic work, my reaction was negative. What I remember most about my work on the book was the enjoyment of visiting many institutions and examining outstanding collections, with the aid of a grant that enabled me to devote my total energy to the project. I could not imagine expanding the work without the luxury of such uninterrupted time. But then I considered the flexibility inherent in an electronic work. It is never static. It becomes kinetic, always available for additions. The more I deliberated, the more advantages became apparent. This work would require close involvement with the University Press and the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library. We would have to work together to examine this new process and our cooperation would establish a framework for future electronic publications.

Another benefit was the inclusion of images, prohibited in the print edition for reasons of cost. Most significantly, the work would be available to a wider and constantly expanding audience. Once I was convinced of the efficacy of an electronic edition, the obvious place to begin adding new entries was with my own institution, the University of Virginia. I surveyed our holdings since 1990 and added twenty new entries. With the assistance of the University Press, I updated addresses and added phone and fax numbers and e-mail addresses to those institutions that responded to a request for such information. Finally the most enjoyable part was selecting the images and then helping David Seaman, Director of the Electronic Text Center, to scan them.

The next obvious step is to update all the repositories and add new collections and institutions. This depends, of course, mainly on others submitting the information. It is my hope and the hope of the University Press of Virginia and the Electronic Text Center that we can periodically update this work and truly never finish it.

Michael Plunkett

2) David Seaman

This guide is a joint collaboration between Michael Plunkett, The University Press of Virginia, and the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center. It was undertaken both as an opportunity to provide an expanded version of Michael's book and as a training exercise for a Press ambitious to get to grips with a new publishing medium. While we still do not have the "pay per use" charging mechanisms in place that will make Internet publishing a commercial venture of the sort we would like, the Director of the University Press realised clearly that the time had come in late 1993 to tackle the production and distribution issues of the new medium.

The labor of producing the Guide was divided between the participants, each drawing on his or her own strengths. The print text of the first edition was scanned in at the Electronic Text Center by members of the Press, who in the process learned something about scanning technology. The newly created electronic files were delivered to Michael Plunkett, who made his additions and revisions. After some editorial work and proofing at the Press they were returned to the Electronic Text Center where the WordPerfect files were converted to Standard Generalised Markup Language (hereafter SGML) encoding, following the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines (hereafter TEI), and parsed.

The level of SGML markup is not exhaustive, and much was done by automatic means, principally a series of "search and replace" routines in WordPerfect and SED that turned proprietary markup and implicit patterns of spacial layout into explicit SGML tags. The resulting TEI document allows us both to have a browsing copy on the World Wide Web, by converting the TEI tags automatically to HTML, and also to provide a searchable document that contains database categories and sectional divisions. The Web "forms" interface to this searchable database was designed by Jeff Herrin, in the University of Virginia Library's Systems Office. The search software is PAT, from OpenText, the same tool we use for all our on- line full-text databases at the University of Virginia.

The final stage of the production was to scan a set of digital images of some of the items in the University of Virginia section of the Guide. Michael Plunkett and I digitized various manuscripts and photographs, creating TIFF format images at 300 dpi. From these archival TIFF copies, JPEG files were made for use on-line. A text description and cataloging record was added into the binary code of these image files, for reasons of data control and attribution, according to a practise popularized by the Electronic Text Center. Finally, I needed only to write the main Web page for the book and connect the various parts together, drawing on the design expertise of Janet Anderson from the University Press.

This project has been a good example of collaboration between publishers and libraries, information managers and scholars, each drawing on his or her particular skills and each learning from the other.

Since the Guide has been on-line, it has garnered considerable attention and use; most constructively, perhaps, was the new submission that was sent in from the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Va. After reading about the Guide in a Virginia newspaper — being the first full University Press publication on the Internet generated several press features — they contacted Michael Plunkett with the details of five collections in their library that were pertinent to the subject of the Guide, and we were able to add them as a new section the same day.

For this type of work, it would be desirable in the future for the various institutions featured in it to take responsibility for their sections and run them from their own Internet servers, with images of selected items provided in the same manner that we have done for the University of Virginia section. That would be truly to take advantage of the possibilities of the medium, and help ensure that the Guide keeps current.

David Seaman
Electronic Text Center
University of Virginia
1995

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

Preface

This Guide is a result of grant support that I received from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy as a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Humanities, but the motivation and the need were established and recognized by historians, archivists, and manuscripts curators long before that. The definition of an archivist is one who cares for records, the person charged with both the preservation of the record and the dissemination of the information contained in the record. Historically this responsibility charged to the archivist has led to the gathering of records primarily belonging to that class of people best prepared by society to chronicle events: the public official, the landowner, the educator, the business and industrial leader. When in the 1960s historians began to question and change their own traditional approach, archivists changed their collecting strategies to correspond to new historical and sociological research and began to look to nontraditional sources for archival records. This new vigor led to a major effort to collect material on the history of Afro-Americans, but that endeavor, though sustained by many institutions, has never garnered the amount and quality of material about Afro-Americans demanded by the historian. The effort to collect archival material documenting the history and culture of Afro-Americans must continue; at the same time existing collections that contain a wealth of Afro-American material must be examined and described. Additionally, Afro-American materials in institutions, such as historically black colleges, where they have long existed but have received little publicity, must be described. I have tried in this work to search for new sources but also to examine collections that may have been overlooked as source material documenting the contribution of Afro-Americans.

The importance of original source materials to historians is obvious. Afro-American historians, especially those writing about American slavery, have long sought and used original source materials. Prominent historians such as John Hope Franklin, Stanley Engerman, Eugene Genovese, John Blassingame, Winthrop Jordan, Nathan Huggins, and Herbert Gutman have relied on these materials to write their story of American slavery and the history of the Afro-American. How could John Hope Franklin have written his biography of the black historian George Washington Williams if he hadn't access to manuscript materials on the man? In fact, Franklin points out that some of his information came from contacting libraries mentioned by Williams in his preface to History of the Negro Race. These libraries were able to check their own archives and uncover correspondence with Williams. The importance of original source material has been noted by business, witnessed by the recent and continuing endeavor by the University Publications of America to microfilm and make available original materials on the subject of plantation slavery in the American South. This is a massive project with a definite financial and staffing commitment, and the end product is extremely expensive but judged worthy of the expense because of the value of the materials on American slavery both for research and pedagogical reasons.

The academic need for materials on American slavery is self-evident. In addition to slavery, other topics, such as civil rights and voting rights, and other histories, such as local, regional, and comparative studies, can be written from materials that not only document Afro-Americans but are generated by them. For example, the papers of Luther Porter Jackson, the noted black historian and educator, at Virginia State University are obviously ripe for research. Another more recent area of interest is Afro-American genealogy. The "Roots" phenomenon excited much interest in black genealogy, and now, after the initial media outburst, there remains a strong interest. Another important need for this work has been expressed by the archival/library profession: more and more library/archive users demand subject access to such materials. This subject access will eventually be satisfied when the massive amount of cataloging data of archives and manuscripts is entered into computer data-bases. But this eventuality is far in the future. As an interim measure, the compilation and publication of subject guides serve to answer the urgent demand, especially for Afro-American materials.

I initially contacted twenty-six institutions in Virginia, including college and university repositories, black institutions, public libraries, and private institutions. My search began in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections where I examined every entry on all Virginia institutions. Comparing those entries with the Directory of Afro-American Resources revealed the deficiencies of that twenty-five-year-old guide. As an example, the Directory lists 20 collections relating to Afro-Americans in the Virginia Historical Society; I was able to identify 173 during my visit. Most of the institutions contacted were manuscript repositories; their collections are family papers and derivative in nature, that is, whites writing about blacks. Most of these collections revealed Afro-American strength in two areas: materials on slavery and materials on the civil rights era. In the beginning of the project the shortage of materials in other areas led me to consider whether the search should be limited to slavery and civil rights, but I decided against that approach, because I knew that Afro-American materials outside of those two areas exist and need to be publicized.

Several types of records were examined.

1. Plantation records. Although predominantly records kept by slave owners, these sometimes include letters from former slaves or, as in the University of Virginia collections, letters from former slaves who had emigrated to Liberia.
2. Church records. Both black and white churches are included; most of the original source materials on black churches have come from white religious organizations.
3. Bible records. Many slave-owning families registered the births and deaths of their slaves in their family bibles.
4. Diaries and travel journals of the South. Often there is comment on the institution of slavery or individual slaves.
5. Photographs. Slave-owning families would sometimes have household slaves photographed.
6. Medical records. These were kept both by slave owners and by itinerant doctors.
7. Records of black institutions, especially educational ones.
8. Autograph letters of well-known Afro-Americans.
9. Collections of Virginia politicians during Reconstruction and in the Constitutional Convention of 1902 when Virginia blacks were disfranchised. These collections also may contain material generated by Afro-Americans, because these lawmakers might have tried to contact an influential moderate black leader such as Booker T. Washington to enlist support.
10. Papers of educators in the South. Educators in the first part of the twentieth century studied the Afro-American, often traveling to and corresponding with black institutions and educators. A prime example is the collection at the University of Virginia of the Papers of Jackson Davis, a white member of the Virginia General Board of Education who traveled extensively in the South in the 1920s investigating black education.
11. Business records. Often laborers were recorded separately by race.
12. Collections of civil rights groups. In Virginia the papers of the local groups involved in school integration are especially pertinent.
13. Afro-American authors. Such papers are sadly lacking in Virginia repositories.
14. Papers of black families. These are mostly in black institutions, but they do exist elsewhere.
15. State and local government records. State records are in the Virginia State Library and Archives, but often local government records are kept in other institutions.

The collections here are arranged alphabetically by their respective repositories. The collection description, date range, and size refer to the whole collection. The abstracts sometimes are based on a necessarily brief examination; this is especially true of the larger collections which often contain more Afro-American material than is described. Unless otherwise indicated, all place names may be assumed to be in Virginia. If the collection is available on microfilm, the microfilm number has been noted.

This work does not purport to be definitive; it is based solely on the research and interpretation of the compiler. I wish to thank the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy for providing the grant support to accomplish my work and the University of Virginia Library's Faculty Research Committee for granting me additional time to complete the effort.

Michael Plunkett
Curator of Manuscripts
University of Virginia Library