In the Hands of Strangers: Readings on Foreign and Domestic Slave Trading and the Crisis of the Union

Front Cover
Robert Edgar Conrad
Penn State Press, Nov 1, 2010 - History

In the Hands of Strangers is a collection of sixty-seven documents by writers and witnesses from the past, both black and white, that offer perspectives on the trade and movement of slaves. Many elucidate the long-standing discord between North and South over the issue of slavery.

Documents are divided into three parts that cover the African slave trade, the internal U.S. slave trade, and the series of conflicts and crises that led to the Civil War. They cover a variety of topics including the forced transport of slaves throughout East Coast and Gulf Coast states, buying and selling of slaves, increasingly contentious debates over the legitimacy of slavery, and effects of the breakup of families. The volume concludes with a brilliant essay by Frederick Douglass that asks the question: &"What shall be done with the Negro?&"

From inside the book

Contents

PART ONE
1
It The Beginnings of the PortugueseAfrican Slave Trade in the Fifteenth Century
5
I2 The Disastrous Voyage of the Hannibal i693i694
11
t3 That Men Should Be Handelled So in Pennsylvania An Early Mennonite Protest Against Slavery and the Slave Trade i688
19
t4 A London Merchants Instructions to a Slave Trader on a Pending Voyage to the Guinea Coast and from There to Virginia with a Cargo of Slaves i...
22
t5 A Professional Slave Trader Analyzes and Justifies the African Slave Trade i734
27
Market i755i756
34
t7 The Hardships Are Scarcely to Be Conceived British Slave Trading in the Late Eighteenth Century
40
2t 9 Its a MoneyMaking Business The Enthusiastic Opinions of a Young Southerner
228
22O Unnatural Selection Slave Breeding in the South as Told by Former Slaves
231
22 t The Worst Abuse of the System of Slavery Is Its Outrage upon the Family The Author of Uncle Toms Cabin Refutes the Persistent Southern Clai...
246
222 Trustin Was the Only Hope of de Pore Critters in Them Days Slave Selling Public Auctions Family Separations and Overland Transportation as ...
259
223 Gone GoneSold and GoneThe Slave Trade in Verse Prose and Song
273
224 A Great Auction Sale of Slaves at Savannah Georgia March 2 and 3i859
284
225 It Was Evil Wretchedly Evil A North Carolina Minister Remembers the Local Slave Trade
301
A Georgia Congressman Demands Continuation of the African SlaveTrade and Benjamin Franklin Pokes Fun at His Assertions i790
315

t8 Africans Stowed Aboard the Slave Ship Brooks in the Late Eighteenth Century
52
t9 Death by the Visitation of God News Items on the African Slave Trade from the Charleston Courier April i807
57
A Glimpse at the Record
59
ttt Revelations of a Slave Smuggler i808i853
63
tt2 Steeped Up to Their Very Mouths in This Stream of Iniquity Descriptions of the International Slave Trade Legal and Illegal
73
tt3 Every Tongue Must Be Mute Alleged Actions of the Federal Government on Behalf of the Illegal SlaveTrade
81
tt4 American and British Participation in the Illegal Slave Trade to Brazil in the i840s
92
tt5 A Slave Revolt at Sea on an American Ship en Route from Africa to Brazil i845
101
tt6 No OtherTrade Was Known to His People The King of Dahomey and the Slave Trade
104
2t The Speculators Have Got Us The Evils of the Domestic Slave Trade
121
22 I Never Again Heard the Voice of My Poor Mother Incidents from the Life of Charles Ball a Black Man
131
23 A Georgia Bureaucrat Requests the Purchase of Two Hundred Slaves in Maryland or Virginia for Labor on Public Facilities About i828
140
24 Pigs for People
142
25 A Congressman from Pennsylvania Denounces Slavery and the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia i829
144
26 Congressman Horace Mann Calls for an End to the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia i849
156
27 Things as They Are in America A Scottish Traveler Describes a Downtown Slave Market in Richmond Virginia i853
164
28 When a Hawk Flies over a Barnyard A Methodist Ministers Impressions of the Slave Trade in Maryland
173
29 The Buying and Selling of John Brown
178
2t0 A British Traveler Describes a Coffle of Slaves Fording a Mountain River in Virginia
185
Abolitionist and Former Slave Frederick Douglass Denounces the Evils of the Domestic Slave Trade i852
189
2t 2 No Mere Invention of the Novelist A Scotsman Reports on the Enslavement of a Free Citizen of Pennsylvania
196
2t3 A Free Man Seized Jailed and Advertised for Sale in the Nations Capital Petitions Congress for His Release
199
Louisiana and Her Life as a French Tutor in the Household of a Kentucky Slave Trader
200
2t5 Highborn Soul Drivers
203
2 t 6 The Author and Landscape Artist Frederick Law Olmsted Investigates the Domestic Slave Trade
206
2t7 Let Us Not Require Too Much of Slavery A Boston Minister and Onetime Abolitionist Justifies Southern Behavior i854
212
An Abolitionist Ponders the Role of Virginia in the Production of Slaves for Southern Markets i857
223
A South Carolina Congressman Defends Slavery and the African Slave Trade i790
319
33 A NorthSouth Exchange of Accusations on the African Slave Trade i806
325
34 We Have Enriched America with Our Blood and Tears WalkersAppeal and the Colonization Movement
328
35 A Most Detestable Plan of Persecution How Free Blacks Were Coerced to Emigrate to Liberia
338
36 When Our Ancestors First Settled on this Continent the Savages Were Around and Among Them Now Where Are They? Professor Thomas R D...
344
37 The Sun of American Freedom Will Set in an Ocean of Blood A Massachusetts Abolitionist Warns of the Perils Inherent in the Annexation ofTexa...
355
38 This Doleful Removal In an Open Letter to Martin Van Buren the Essayist and Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson Urges the President Elect to Reject For...
361
39 God Only Knows What Doctrines We Shall Next Be Called to Listen To A Congressman Calls for an End to the War Against Mexico
365
3t0 God Sent Ham to Africa Shem to Asia Japheth to Europe Slavery Ordained by God
373
3tI The Geography of Prejudice A New Yorker Analyzes the Many Varieties of Racist Oppression in Northern Free States
380
3t2 Negro Mania
391
Struggle between Freedom and Slavery on the Western Plains
395
3t4 The Dred Scott Decision i857
407
A South Carolinian Calls for the Reopening of the African Slave Trade i857
417
3t 6 Every White Man of Capacity Will Own His Slave L W Spratt Calls for a New SlaveTrade and a New South i858
427
3t7 Moral AntiquesThe Letters ofC A L Lamar Slave Trader and Promoter of a New African Slave Trade i857i859
439
3I8 Newspaper Reports on Charles Lamar and the Yacht Wanderer March i4 to April 1 i859
448
3t9 A Battle Is in Progress Between Liberty and Slavery A Northern Minister Issues a Warning Against Renewal of the African Slave Trade i860
455
Selected Narratives of Arrivals of Fugitive Slaves in Philadelphia by William Still Chairman of the Vigilance Committee
464
32t Show Me a Bill of Sale from the Almighty The Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child Exhorts the Legislature of Massachusetts to Defy the Fugitive Slav...
473
322 Like Thrusting a Walking Stick into an Ant HillThe Beginnings of the Civil War and the Outbreak of a Major Runaway Movement
484
323 The Greatest Possible Blessing That Could Be Bestowed upon the Freed Negro A Plan to Colonize American Blacks in Brazil i862
494
324 In a Debate on a Bill to End Slavery in the District of Columbia Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson Clashes with a Kentucky Senator Demandi...
500
325 The Execution of Amy Spain i865
506
Speaks Out against Old Prejudices and Deceptive Solutions and Calls Instead for Justice
508
abolitionism in Pennsylvania xiv
513
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About the author (2010)

Robert Edgar Conrad is Center Associate in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and an independent scholar. His book Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (1994) is published by Penn State Press.

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