Slavery, legally sanctioned in the south, and for a long time in the north as well, was supported at every turn by legal structures. So, something that I like to use a lot in teaching, just to get students thinking about this, are—these are receipts, these are receipts. And, the one I'm holding right now is dated Norfolk, September 17, 1853. It's a printed receipt that's been filled out. It's something that, it's very similar in a way, to something that you might buy at an office supply store. If you went and needed a book of receipts because, you know, you had a business.

It's got a blank space that you can fill in the place and date. And then it says 18-five and blank.

So just like today in writing a check you might have—or a set of receipts—just to make things easier they might write two-zero-zero and then you can put in 2009, or 2008, or something like that. Just to make it just a little easier in filling out a receipt. It's got this, it's for—it's obviously a book of receipts that you can fill out all through the 1850s. Then it says, "Received of 'blank,' 'blank' dollars, being in full for the purchase of 'blank' Negro slave named 'blank.' The right and title of said slave 'blank' warrant and defend against the claims of all persons whatsoever, and likewise warrant 'blank' sound and healthy, as witness my hand and seal," and then the title of this. And it's a very elegant 19th-century receipt. It's in a nice filigreed kind of handwriting, it's got lovely illustrations on the side that depict kind of the engines of commerce for the time. There's a steamboat and there's a clipper ship and there's a railroad.

And it says, "Murphy and Company, Printers, Baltimore." Thinking about it, how many people are involved in this receipt? It's been printed by a printer in Baltimore, but it's been printed for probably a lot of people. But, this one in particular, it's noted it's sold by a bookseller in Richmond. This particular receipt is dated in Norfolk.

Now, if you were teaching students, using this for the classroom, one of the first things you might want to do is list all of the locations that are on this receipt and any of the other receipts, you know, so that students get a sense of the geography of the place. Like, where is Baltimore in relationship to Richmond? Where is Norfolk and why might this receipt be dated in Norfolk?

The thing, as an historian, that strikes me about these documents is, first, how mundane they are, how banal they are, how similar they are to the kinds of—the book of receipts that you could pick up today. But then, to realize that the people that are kind of in this kind of elegant handwriting, that are signing their names to this receipt, are engaged in the sale of humans.

This particular receipt from Baltimore, dated in 1851, "warrants and defends against the claims of all persons whatsoever and likewise warrants sound and healthy and slaves for life." So, it's almost identical, but it adds the little phrase "and slaves for life," that none of the others do. So, you ask yourself, "Well, what might account for that little bit of fine print, that little legal boilerplate being added to this receipt?"

People keep records of property in a way that they don't keep of people, and they lay—these records stay around with us for a long time.

You often will hear that, well, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any slaves really, because it only was under effect for those areas that weren't under the control of the Union Army. But what it did do, was take this huge amount of capital that was vested in slaves and wiped it out. It just erased billions of dollars of capital. It's one of the reasons that New York City was such a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment, because the banks and the trading houses in New York City were very invested economically.

We know that, in this particular one, "Received of Charles H. Shield, Esquire, 1,000 dollars, being paid in full for the purchase of a Negro slave named Mary and her child, Louisianna. The right and title of said slave, I warrant and defend against the claims of all persons whatsoever," and it's signed by William W. Hall. So, Charles Shield and William Hall are engaged in the transaction of Mary and her child. But this is a legal document. Think about what is the backing? What is the legal claim that this receipt gives to the bearer? So that there's a certain#&8212;in other words, it's kind of to demonstrate that I have the legal right that I've been given by the seller, to the ownership of Mary and her child. The other thing, of course, you keep receipts for, is in case you have to return something.

It's very similar when you think about it, to the kinds of promises that you make when you're buying anything. Here—there's a warrant. In other words, someone is making a kind of authoritative claim and "defend against all claims of all persons whatsoever." So, by that, in other words that, "I have legal title to these people, and I warrant, I signed this in warrant that in fact, I'm transferring that title to the bearer, and I likewise warrant them sound and healthy, as witnessed by hand and seal." So, they're making a claim about these people, and it's not surprising that they make a claim about this. As I said, the law is imbued in every aspect of slavery, including all of these kinds of transfers, these kind of transfers, the sale of slaves. And there's a whole kind of, a set of legal laws about, "Well, what would happen if you sold a slave to someone, and the slave died? What if the person knew that they were ill? So, what does it mean to say that someone is healthy?" and what, what are the kinds of—these things come up. The courts serve the function of making sure that the business of slavery proceeds in an orderly fashion.

This is all about the buying and selling of people. But, there's this huge set of laws that are protecting every transaction. So, a lot of this printed language is what a lot of people, they'll refer to it as "boilerplate." This is the fine print, the fine print of the sale of slaves, that has a special meaning for every jurisdiction that this receipt is made out in.

The state, whether it's Virginia here or elsewhere, does have an interest in knowing about this, in part, just to keep track, but also because these transactions are often—they'll say "paid in full," but they're really also backed by loans. People are buying slaves on credit. It's very speculative. So, there are banks, insurance companies, who also have a stake in the ownership of Mary and her child, Louisiana, that may go far beyond Norfolk and the environs.

Now, one thing that this document won't tell you is, in and of itself, and I can't say that I know the answers to this myself, but who William Hall and Charles Shield are, but you can kind of make some educated guesses. This is happening, the sale is recorded in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk is, it's on the coast. It's 1853. Virginia is an old part of the kind of slave south of the Chesapeake [region]. There are hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in Virginia. But, the real money in 1853 to be made in slavery, is not in Virginia. It's in the new southwest. It's in places like Louisiana and Alabama, Mississippi.

A lot of legal cases developed over this because people wanted to make sure they were getting maximized profits for the sale of the estate, including slaves. It was found that "items sell best when sold separately." In other words, given the opportunity to sell a family, self-contained as a lot, to an individual, or to sell them as individuals, more money would be made selling them as individuals.

And, because the courts have a fiduciary responsibility in making sure that the heirs get the best bargain that they can from the estate, they're mandated to sell separately. So, it reminds one that there are hundreds of thousands of families that are being broken up through these types of trade. It's also a good thing to stop and think about how often we talk about the transatlantic slave trade, but to consider the domestic slave trade as well, as being a great tragedy and something that continued to wreak havoc for years and years. Some of the saddest documents that one can find are in African American newspapers and magazines, sometimes 10, 20 years after the Civil War. They're often called "Information Wanted" notices, looking for a mother or a sister or a child, still trying to find their family members.

In Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, it's the fourth of his autobiographies, and he elaborates upon a story that he tells in his first autobiography, The Life of Frederick Douglass. And it's where he meets up with Sandy, who he knows from the region as an African conjurer. Sandy is also a slave. He is also a slave who has been sent to the region of the Eastern Shore to be broken. But he is known in the slave community for not giving up the customs and traditions of Africa. And Douglass is a Christian, and the scene is, or the setting is that Douglass has just run away from Covey after being beaten by Covey, and he is fearful of who he hears walking in the woods, and it turns out to be Sandy. And he goes home with Sandy, and he is talking with Sandy about his problem about, "I don't want to be beat any more. I don't want to be put in a situation." And Sandy offers him a root as a talisman, he offers him some herbs from the woods, and it's a real symbol to Douglass of traditional African customs of "something from the earth gives you power." And Sandy encourages Douglass to put it in his pocket and assures him that when he goes back to Covey that Covey won't beat him, or if he does he will have the power to overcome Covey, and it works.

Or at least Douglass questions if it works because when he does go back, Covey is not successful in his second attempt to beat Douglass, and Douglass really struggles then with the confrontation of something African, traditional tribal—prevailed over his traditional, his accepted views of Christianity, and that's a real personal conflict for him.

Well, in his first autobiography, The Life of Frederick Douglass, which is probably the most commonly read, it's barely mentioned in passing. It's barely mentioned. He doesn't go into any kind of details about his own personal struggles with the talisman, about how the fact that he had it in his pocket challenges his own Christian beliefs. So he's thinking a little bit more later in life about who Sandy was, what Sandy represented on the Eastern Shore, how dramatically unique Sandy was from all the other slaves that Douglass encountered. Douglass was almost surprised later in life that the extent to which there could be one person who was still so African.

I think it's a great source to start inquiring about "to what extent have African customs survived the middle passage and the horrors of slavery?" I think the conversation is a natural one to have in the early years of slavery, obviously, but by the time Douglass comes around, slavery is already, the transatlantic slavery has already been cut off.

Slaves are not seen as imported any more, but yet it's a testament to the extent to which African customs and traditions and culture survives the institution, the trade, the trafficking, and the attempts, quite literally, to beat the Africans into submission, into slavery. So, it's a good document for asking those kinds of questions about how does this survive? What does its survival mean? What happens when an African American is confronted with African customs that they have rejected? That's a real internal personal struggle for Frederick Douglass, and it tells us a little bit about the character of the community in which African Americans are operating, that there is no one set definition of what slavery was, who was a slave, how did slaves live their lives, and all the facets that go into creating the African American community.

So, I really ask my students to kind of probe it on that particular level and the questions that come out of that document that lead them to discover a new sense and a new understanding of African Americans.

I usually use it with John Hope Franklin's book, In Search of the Promised Land, which is the story of a female slave who's owned by a Virginian but who lives in Nashville. So, she's allowed to live and exist almost as a free black woman with these tenuous connections to slavery, and it really shows in her life then, the kinds of things that can happen in those complex situations. Douglass's life is also very complex, and so I ask the students to think about this little story, this little snippet, in the larger story of his life.

Well, I hope that they'll try to find out the extent to which slaves were, in fact, either dominated by their master and not dominated by their master. Where are the margins within which slaves can control their own lives? I hope that they'll question their monolithic understanding of slavery because it seems to me that a lot of students come with such an understanding that all slaves lived on a large plantation, all slaves picked cotton, all male slaves were in the field, all female slaves were in the house. It's not the kind of story that gives us any kind of agency among the slaves. So, I really want them to examine that.

It's very important for them to read excerpts about the same event across the four different autobiographies of Douglass.

How did he change in the course of his life? Why did he expand upon the story in one of the narratives but not in the other narratives? Is it something he remembered? Is it something that gained greater importance as he went on in his life?

Those are the kinds of questions that you can ask of an individual, and we always need to get past, especially in slavery, we always need to get past the sense that we're looking for consistency and that individuals are not consistent, and we shouldn't expect that of our historical figures. Here's a slave who was taught to read against the law, and it's done openly. Here's a slave who passes through many masters; again, not the perception most students have of slaves. Here's a slave who does the unthinkable. He confronts a slave breaker. And so in that sense it gives them the hero story, but it also, it's building from a story about which they already think they know something, and I think that's real important that we start with things that they think they know and that they can then learn that there's more to that.

The first source is by Frederick Law Olmsted, published in a collection called The Cotton Kingdom, in 1861. Olmsted was an eclectic man to be sure. He was an agricultural journalist, he was a landscape architect. He designed New York Central Park. But in 1853 he was commissioned by the New York Times to conduct a number of investigative tours through the American South and the slaveholding states of that region.

Over the course of the next 18 months he toured practically every part of the American South, compiling reports, sending them to the Times, and publishing them. And his intention was really to give Northern readers, who had no sense of the region of the Southern states and no sense of slavery, to give them an "authentic," in inverted commas, impression of what slavery was like.

The second source is by Solomon Northup, and Northup is an absolutely fascinating man. He was born free in Saratoga Springs, in New York, whose mother was of mixed-race origins, but importantly, Northup was a free man. In 1841 he is kidnapped, and he is sold into slavery in Washington, DC. He was transported south, and he was then sold to a number of different planters in central Louisiana, particularly on the Red River. Finally, after 12 years in bondage, Northup encounters a Canadian, a Canadian carpenter, who is anti-slavery himself, and it is that carpenter who writes letters north to—back to Saratoga to achieve and to require legal documentation that Northup was indeed a free man, and indeed, at that point he is finally liberated.

And one of the problems of writing history, and teaching history in point of fact, is: How do we recover the slave's voice? How do we recover those who actually were there? What did they think? What did they feel?

These products, these slave-written products, often published with the assistance of the abolitionists, represent one version of slavery. Olmsted represents another version of slavery. If we were to go to a plantation, archives in Georgia, Louisiana, across the American South, you'd read documents written by the slaveholders themselves. None of these versions are authentic in and of themselves. It is the task of the historian to essentially read against the grain of these documents, to push them back, to see what is probable, what is hidden, so that we assess these various documents in tandem, until collectively they represent a version that we might call the nearest to the facts of American slavery.

Both documents are suffused with 19th-century text. They're melodramatic, they're in one sense romantic. But they represent wholly different impressions, and this is really the nature of slavery. If you read, for example, Olmsted's account, it appears that the masters and the slaves seem to have a relatively good relationship. There's a sense of a kind of intimacy within the plantation world.

By contrast, if we pick up Northup's account, Northup's account is suffused with violence. It's suffused with the realities from the African American perspective, the realities of slaveholding, the realities of life in bondage.

When we look at Olmsted, we look at the way in which slaveholders manipulate the slave system. They provide the African Americans with absolutely nothing within the plantation and they make them use any money that they earn on Saturdays or Sundays to pay for the most modest of additional items: slightly improved food, plates, cups, the very raw products of life in a clapboard shack. Solomon Northup, of course, alludes to the fact that how significant this money becomes, that even though it is very small, the amount of money that is accrued by African Americans by Sunday trading, to those people in chains, the significance of purchasing cups, pails, calicos, of a very constrained commercialism, of a very limited commercialism, that for those people, that's enormously significant, the idea of ownership, of anything in a system that denies fundamental ownership.

If you put it in contrast to Olmsted, they look like completely separate regimes. They look like completely separate worlds, and it's the task of the historian to essentially place those two perspectives together and to tease out—Olmsted represents very much what planters wanted to think of the regime; Northup very much what slaves experienced of the regime.

We see a planter, Mr. R, he's probably [Mr. Andre Román], owner of a major plantation on Houmas Band on the Mississippi River in today's Ascension Parish. If we look at his description, Mr. R walks out onto the plantation. He's returned from illness, and he orchestrates this entire visual imagery.

So he marches out and he immediately inquires of the slaves: "Well, how are you girls?" he refers. "Oh"—and there's this immediate repartee between the enslaved and the enslaver, one that appears to be in a sense of mutual interest. But even at this earliest point, the planter is beginning to inscribe his authority.

This really gets to the core of how slaveholders thought of themselves. So he immediately inquires: "How are the children?" and he's very quick to make sure that the children, the sick children, are on the road to recovery. He begins to enforce a visual image of his authority as a slaveholder, and also, this sense that slaveholders had of themselves. And they often describe themselves as standing in pater familias, in replacement to the father.

And again we begin to see this relationship develop as he goes on into the plantation, and he goes out viewing the slaves and goes out making reference to the work. But herein lies the essence of the relationship. He goes to the [fence] he goes to a lad driving a cart, and he pulls out and he pulls up to him. He says, "Well, I'm getting on all right. But If I don't get about and look after you, I'm afraid we shan't have much of a crop. I don't know what you're going to do for your Christmas money."

And this was a tradition very common in south Louisiana, that to make a slave essentially work exceptionally hard, they were rewarded at Christmas, at the end of the harvest, with a small financial token relative to the proportionate size of the crop that they'd cultivated. The planter enforces this idea of his generosity.

But the slave is nonplussed. He's not fooled by this charade that the slaveholder has orchestrated, the showy display of authority that we have just seen with the slave women, now this rather ostentatious expression on the relationship with the young lad in the cart, because the slave returns and says, "Oh, well, you just go on. You just go and look down the field somewhat, and you just go and see what's there." And of course, what the slave is reporting and pointing to is a fine stand of cane in the distance and, importantly, by implication, that the slaveholder will pay the Christmas money and this time, a substantial amount of it.

Slavery is a relationship built on force. It's built on the ownership of one person by another. It's built on the power to compel that work—compel it by extreme physical violence. The slaveholders also knew that under these circumstances they had to combine it with elements of waged work to create what they needed at the end. What they needed was the cane cultivated, the cane cut, the cane ground and processed.

However objectionable slavery is, the slaveholders truly believed this image of themselves. It was a charade. It was deeply objectionable. But it was a way to justify holding other people in bondage. And it's important to say that these are amongst the last slaveholders in the new world. They're standing against time. They're standing against modernity. Only Brazil, only the Spanish Empire, and only the United States by the middle of the 19th century, are slave-holding powers.

Olmsted, however, interviews a African American and what occurs within this context is, we're stripped away from the planter's charade. Instead, we have a one-on-one conversation with a slave by the name of William.

So we learn at the very first instance that he comes from Virginia, and like so many of his compatriots of those slaves who resided in south Louisiana, they were part of the inter-regional slave trade, a movement of slaves from Virginia, Maryland, to the deep south. Hence the expression "sold down the river."

He wants, above all, to return to his family. When he's finally released and he asks "If I was free, if I was free," he indicates one, that he wanted to return to Virginia to see his mother. Secondly, he says what kind of a world he wants to live in, and he says what he wants to do is raise some crops on a little farm, a little land, but land of his own, independent land. And he says he wants to trade them down in New Orleans.

But ultimately, that's his vision of freedom: a restoration of family and independent land ownership. And those things ring absolutely true with what we know of African Americans as they come out of slavery and into freedom, through the Civil War years, and immediately on into the immediate aftermath of reconstruction and emancipation.

So Northup, as we've made reference to, offers almost an entirely opposite perspective to that presented by Olmsted. Olmsted looked at it in terms of these economic incentives, this Sunday money, etc., as a way to cajole the slaves to work even harder. Northup explodes that image here. As Northup observes, in this way only are they able to provide themselves with any luxury or convenience whatsoever.

"When a slave, purchased, or kidnapped in the North, is transported to a cabin on Bayou Boeuf, he is furnished with neither knife, nor fork, nor dish, nor kettle, nor any other thing in the shape of crockery, or furniture of any nature of description. He is furnished with a blanket before he reaches there, and wrapping that around him, he can either stand up, or lie down upon the ground, or on a board."

"To ask the master for a knife, or skillet, or any small convenience of the kind, would be answered with a kick, or laughed at as a joke. Whatever necessary article of this nature is found in a cabin has been purchased," he says, "with Sunday money. However injurious to the morals, it is certainly a blessing to the physical condition of the slave, to be permitted to break the Sabbath."

Here lies the slave's perspective in its rawest form. Here lies not a planter class who is offering some kind of added benefits like better housing, some food, some money or the like, as some kind of generosity. Here it's a cynical, abusive planter class, that essentially denies their slaves every single thing, and makes them—makes the slaves pay for any object.

So I think the first question the students would ask is, "Why are they so different? Why are these accounts so different?" Because they are, and they're not. They describe the same phenomenon, but from two sides of the telescope, if you like. The planter's side in Olmsted, and then the slaves' side—although Olmsted, as we pointed—tries to give this conversation with the slave William as well. So where does reality lie between this image that slaveholders have and this experienced reality that Northup gives?

I think another question that students should want to ask themselves is, "By reading this document, how can we best understand the system of slavery, both as a racial system, as an economic system, and as a system of power?"

Slaveholders wanted to inscribe that authority time and time and time again. Slaves, by contrast, generally speaking, wished to reject that authority. How, then, by reading these documents, do we begin to understand how people thrown together in the American south of the 19th century, both lived and experienced slavery.

The average plantations numbered about 75 slaves. Most plantations numbered much less. The largest number of slaveholders in the American south, the largest number of slaveholders, owned one slave, one or two slaves.

Ultimately, what defines slavery in the American south is a very uneasy, uneasy compromise. An uneasy compromise where unfortunately power does lie, and laid very firmly with the slaveholders, and as Solomon Northup indicates, it rests also with the compulsion of the power of the whip and the power of the slaveholders to enforce their will by violence when they so wished.

Both texts provide a way of understanding this very, very complex, and often extremely violent relationship between blacks and whites in the American south. The texts offer us a way to understand how slavery ultimately worked as a system, how it ended up becoming so profitable as it did.

I think the texts also provide us with a way of examining how American racism will ultimately impinge upon the visions and aspirations of African Americans as they go from slavery into freedom.