http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
Reviewed: July 2003
Mounted: August 4, 2003
By Claus K. Meyer
Slavery and Slave Testimony: The Context of the Collection
Sections and Features
Layout and Technical Issues
Some Critical Remarks
Conclusion
Notes
Rating
Slavery and Slave Testimony: The Context of the Collection
Slaves have often made history. The almost universal presence of slaves and slavery throughout the human experience has of course long been well-known. In the decades since World War II, however, historians have reached an ever greater appreciation of the significant contributions slaves have made to the slaveholding societies. These contributions have gone well beyond the material fruits of slave work and had a particular impact upon the small number of true slave societies (Moses I. Finley) where bondage reached such a scale as to become a structural determinant of social and economic life at large. Arguably the influence of slaves and slavery has nowhere been greater than in the history of Western civilization, which includes the most prominent and best known examples of slave societies: the late Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the plantation regimes in the Americas. Indeed the very concept of freedom so peculiar and dear to the West is closely intertwined with the history of slavery.
If slaves have often made history, few have had the chance to write it or to tell it beyond the narrow circles of their own families and communities. The last generation of slaves in the Southern United States provides the most important exception to this rule. Slave narratives, it is true, have been published since the beginning of the early modern period. Reports of Christian captivity in the Barbary states and the Ottoman empire captured the imagination first of the European and later of the American public (note 1). Following the American Revolution, the debate on slavery in the New World created considerable interest for autobiographical accounts of fugitives, who were helped by abolitionists to publicize their experiences (note 2). But interest in such narratives abated as the threats posed by Muslim pirates to Western sailors disappeared and as slavery was abolished in the New World. It was under different circumstances that a substantial number of the last generation of Southern slaves had a unique opportunity to tell their history well after the end of slavery (note 3).
In the 1920s and 30s, several efforts were made to interview surviving former slaves. It was the first time that attempts were made to collect eyewitness accounts of life under slavery in a relatively systematic and scientifically informed manner for the purpose of creating a historical record of first-hand experiences of slavery. The largest of these projects was conceived and conducted by the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) in the late 1930s. A total of some 4,000 former slaves were interviewed under the auspices of the FWP. Transcriptions of some 2,300 interviews along with some 500 photographs eventually reached the Library of Congress where the project was coordinated. Submissions arrived from a number of Northern and Midwestern states as well as from all parts of the South except for Louisiana where the interviews were processed differently. It is this fascinating material that the web site "Born in Slavery" made available online in 2001.
The transcribed FWP narratives available on the site were first compiled and microfilmed at the Library of Congress in 1941 and became widely accessible -- and used -- when the entire collection was published in print for the first time in 1972 (note 4). The interviews have since become staples in the study of Southern slavery. Going beyond the printed edition, the "Born in Slavery" web site also includes all of the photographs accompanying the transcribed material, 200 of which had never been published before.
Sections and Features
"Born in Slavery" was compiled jointly by the Manuscript and the Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress. The site provides access to the scanned images of the compilation of FWP narratives produced in 1941: more than 10,000 pages including not only the typed narratives themselves but also some FWP documents illustrating the history of the project and reproducing the instructions given to the interviewers. The images are available in two resolutions, at the higher of which they do not display directly in web browsers, but must be retrieved for viewing with specialized software. (The site provides technical assistance directing the user to suitable programs available for download.)
The visitor may browse the collection by informant name and in the order in which it was compiled in 1941 (by state, then alphabetically by informant name). Each narrative is accompanied by detailed and searchable bibliographic information. Moreover, the site also features limited access to the full text of the interviews obtained from the page images by use of OCR software. These texts cannot be viewed in this form and are available for keyword searches only, the results of which are linked back to the images of matching documents. The editors of the site do not state the rationale for this setup, but a technical note detailing the scanning and the OCR process informs the visitor of a high rate of recognition errors, only part of which have been corrected manually -- a factor certainly limiting the usefulness of both the electronic text and the full-text search. The problem is demonstrated by a random test of the search function, for which a keyword or phrase was arbitrarily chosen from each of six South Carolina narratives. In five cases the search correctly retrieved the document; one interview, however, could not be found.
The primary documents are accompanied by a 10,000-word introduction to the collection, its historical background and significance, and its problems and strengths as research material. The essay is broken down into a series of seventeen topical sections roughly fitting one screen respectively. The fully documented article is authored by Norman Yetman, professor of history at the University of Kansas and a leading expert on the FWP slave narratives.
In addition, a section entitled "Voices and Faces from the Collection" presents brief excerpts from eight interviews accompanied by photographs of the informants. These pieces are published in HTML format. Their narrators range in age from 80 to 121 years and lived in states as diverse as Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas when interviewed.
A further helpful note introduces the visitor to the language of the interviews, a problematic aspect of the material as the field personnel of the project consisted of white-collar workers not specifically trained for the task of collecting the oral testimony of former slaves. Few of the interviewers belonged to the African American community, and the attempts to transcribe the dialect of the informants produced erratic results. This problem, it may be added, also complicates the use of the full-text search.
The presentation of the FWP interviews is rounded out by a bibliography of relevant publications in print and by a list of links to Internet resources both internal and external to the site of the Library of Congress. A section entitled "Collection Connections from the Learning Page" mainly provides the information also presented on the start page of "Born in Slavery" in a different layout.
Finally, legal and copyright notes inform the visitor about legitimate uses of the material published. As the collection forms part of the "American Memory" initiative at the Library of Congress, visitors have also access to the virtual help desk of that project, which includes live chat with a librarian as well as a comment form, FAQs, and technical information. These services can only be reached through the main page of "American Memory."
Layout and Technical Issues
"Born in Slavery" is presented in a simple, yet overall effective layout, which avoids the use of frames and ensures that the site is accessible to all browsers. In programs with graphical interfaces, the font size used for the display may be adjusted without impairing the layout. However, as only scanned page images of the narratives are available for display, users of the character-based Lynx browser can only view the introductory and explanatory material accompanying the collection.
All pages of the site -- including the images of the typed interviews in the standard GIF format -- load quickly. The quality of the scanned page images varies with that of the originals, but is reasonably good even if the sources are viewed at the standard lower resolution. No broken links were found at the time of the review. A small formatting problem on the first page of Yetman's introduction and some minor typographical errors do not interfere with the use of the site.
It would be useful if the site offered a downloadable and printable version of Yetman's very important essay. Many users would certainly prefer to read a paper copy of the piece, which can now be only obtained by printing out its seventeen sections individually.
Educators will appreciate the possibility to link directly to individual documents in the collection as described in the technical information section of the "American Memory" initiative.
On the whole, the presentation of the site may be described as solid and functional. It combines speed with broad accessibility, even though it may lack the visual appeal of more complex graphical page designs.
Some Critical Remarks
"Born in Slavery" is an important web site. It provides access to authentic reproductions of historical documents essential for the study of slavery. The technical details of the edition are made fully transparent, and the quality and functionality of the site do not only equal but even exceed that of printed editions of primary sources. The use of the Internet makes it possible to publish for the first time all extant photographs related to the interview collection together with transcripts of the narratives themselves. Moreover, the full-text query allows an access to the narratives not feasible in print publications, technical limitations of the search facility notwithstanding. But "Born in Slavery" also suffers from some important shortcomings.
It may prove difficult for visitors without professional experience or prior knowledge of the narrative collection to find suitable points of entry to the immense body of material. This problem has particular weight for two reasons: On the one hand, the "American Memory" initiative is not addressed to scholars only, but explicitly seeks to make the Library's resources widely accessible. On the other hand, the page images available online cannot be quickly browsed in the same manner as a printed edition.
When the visitor enters the site, only the first part of the start page is displayed. The links to the indexes and the search facility are visible, but the references to Yetman's introductory essay and to the excerpts in "Voices and Faces from the Collection" come only to view when the user scrolls down. The temptation to randomly browse the collection will no doubt be great -- an approach which may prove both frustrating and problematic given the large volume and special difficulties of the interviews. But even the user who does start his visit by viewing the selected excerpts and the article discussing the narratives may fail to get a sense of orientation.
The eight brief excerpts presented as "Voices and Faces from the Collection" lack any specific introduction. The rationale for selecting the pieces remains largely unclear. The editors limit themselves to observing that the interviews chosen reflect the wide range in tone and substance found in collection. The excerpts are indeed taken from interviews with five men and three women covering a broad range of age and having experienced slavery in various parts of the South. Moreover, the pieces do raise a number of important themes in the collection (slave flight, the slaves' aspiration to read and write, the role of slave patrols, the experience of emancipation, among others). But the reader is not provided with any assistance. In particular, it does not become clear in which relation the pieces stand to one another and to the body of narratives at large.
Turning to Yetman's essay, the uninitiated visitor may find it likewise difficult to locate interviews suitable for a first engagement with the collection. To be sure, the scholarly quality of the article is beyond any question. It is a well argued and largely effective introduction to the historical context of the narrative collection, its historiographical significance, and its composition, strength, and weaknesses as a body of sources. But while the article includes some references to other pages, it is not linked to specific interviews -- the photographs included on the pages merely accompany Yetman's essay without illustrating it. No doubt this failure is in part explained by the editors' attempt to keep the length of the text manageable for online viewing. Nevertheless, the lack of integration with the narratives is an opportunity lost. Two brief examples will serve to illustrate this point.
Yetman correctly observes that the informants may have responded differently to African American and to white interviewers. The problem is revealed by the testimony of Susan Hamlin, an ex-slave more than 100 years of age when interviewed twice by Jessie A. Butler and once by Augustus Ladson, the latter one of only two African American field workers employed by the South Carolina project.
Hamlin, who had lived through slavery in Charleston, made her points, but was clearly on her guard when talking to the white woman:
Lots of wickedness gone on in dem days, just as it do now, some good, some mean, black and white [...] Sometimes chillen was sold away from dey parents. De Mausa would come and say "Where Jennie," tell um to put up clothes on dat baby, I want um. He sell de baby and de ma scream and holler, you know how dey carry on.
Geneally (generally) dey sold it when de ma wasn't dere. Mr. Fuller [Hamlin's former master] didn't sell none of us [...]
In her conversation with Ladson, Hamlin was more outspoken:
All time, night an' day, you could hear men an' women screamin' to de tip of dere voices as either ma, pa, sister, or brother wus take without any warnin' an' sell. [...] People wus always dyin' from a broken heart.
One night a couple married an' de next mornin' de boss sell de wife. De gal ma got in in de street an' cursed de white woman fur all she could find. She said: "dat damn white, pale-face bastard sell my daughter who jus' married las' night," an' other t'ings. [...] De police took her to de work House [...]
Certainly Hamlin's testimony as given to Ladson was extreme. But precisely for this reason it strikingly demonstrates that the interviews must be read with great care and generally do not reflect the sentiments of the informants in any direct way.
This point is further substantiated by a chilling account from the North Carolina narratives. Mary A. Hicks, a white field worker of the Writers' Project, interviewed eighty-seven year old Cornelia Andrews
'Wuz I eber beat bad? No mam, I wuzn't.'
(Here the daughter, a graduate of Cornell University, who was in the room listening came forward. 'Open your shirt, mammy, and let the lady judge for herself.' The old ladies [sic] eyes flashed as she sat bolt upright. She seemed ashamed, but the daughter took the shirt off, exposing the back and shoulders which were marked as though branded with a plaited cowhide whip (note 5). There was no doubt of that at all.)
'I wuz whipped publicly', she said tonelessly, for breaking dishes an' bein' slow. I wuz at Mis' Carrington's den, an' it wuz jist 'fore de close o' de war. ...'
Within the framework of this review, it is not possible to provide further examples that might help to link Yetman's essay to the narratives. But "Born in Slavery" would no doubt greatly profit from such an integration. Moreover, a study guide providing leads to themes raised by the interviews would help users to make the most of the rich and gripping material made available by the site. To be sure, the "American Memory" project, of which "Born in Slavery" forms part, provides general suggestions for the classroom use of primary sources. A number of lesson plans are available from the project's "Learning Pages," but none of them focuses on slavery or on the FWP narratives. An "American Memory" time line, "From Slavery to Civil Rights," merely links to one of the interviews without providing further information.
On a different note, it is regrettable that the audio material related to the FWP narrative collection is not even mentioned by the site. To be sure, no sound recordings were made of the interviews contained in the collection as it is published by "Born in Slavery." But in the wider context of the FWP initiative to collect the testimony of former slaves, some audio files were indeed created. Today the Library of Congress houses several hours of taped material. A small selection from these documents is available from other sites on the Internet. A larger sampling has been published together with a recent hardbound edition of selected interviews. Although the "Related Resources" page lists one of these web sites as well as the printed volume, it omits any reference to their audio components (note 6).
A final remark regards the relation of the narrative collection deposited in the Library of Congress with those FWP interviews located in various other collections throughout the United States. George P. Rawick and his collaborator Ken Lawrence, who compiled the latter material for publication in the 1970s, found evidence of systematic tampering on the state level in Mississippi and Texas. Thus earlier, usually longer versions exist for no less than 90 percent of the Texas narratives sent to the Library of Congress and included in the compilation now available through "Born in Slavery." Yetman's introduction, to be sure, mentions evidence of tampering in passing, but users unfamiliar with the material are not sufficiently advised of the difficulty and may well altogether overlook it (note 7).
Conclusion
"Born in Slavery" provides unrestricted access to a large body of essential sources for the study of slavery. The accompanying essay by Norman Yetman provides a well-structured, balanced, and readable introduction to the collection. As might be expected from a resource produced by the Library of Congress, the site meets the highest technical standards of electronic editorship. It is easy to use and fast. Thus "Born in Slavery" is an achievement that exemplifies the potential of the Internet for the publication for historical sources.
Notwithstanding its many strengths, however, the site also suffers from some shortcomings. First, the user unfamiliar with the sources and not trained in historical methods may find it difficult to locate interviews suitable as entry points to the collection. Yetman's essay introduces the narratives as a body of sources but is not linked to individual interviews. Eight brief interview excerpts presented as "Voices and Faces from the Collection" lack any introduction. Secondly, "Born in Slavery" does not direct the user to sound recordings related to the FWP narratives. Thirdly, the site does not sufficiently clarify the relation between the interviews deposited in Washington and presented on its pages on the one hand, and the narratives that have been found in various other collections on the other hand. The negligence is significant as in the case of two states -- Mississippi and Texas -- there is good evidence that editors at the state level systematically tampered with the material submitted to Washington.
These problems certainly are of some consequence. But they do not undermine the overall usefulness of a solid and functional online edition of primary sources. "Born in Slavery" is sure to remain an important and valued asset for the study and teaching of both the 'peculiar institution' in the South and bondage at large.
Notes
1. For two recent compilations of captivity narratives, reviews are available online: Paul Baepler, "Christian Captives in the Islamic World" [rev. of Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption. Barbary Captivity Narratives From Early Modern England, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus (2001)], H-Albion (August 2002); and Robert J. Allison, rev. of White Slaves, African Masters. An Anthology of American Captivity Narratives ed. and with an introduction by Paul Baepler (1999), William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., v. 57, no. 2 (Apr. 2000). (return to text).
2. See William L. Andrews, ed., North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920, part of Documenting the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, ©1998). (return to text).
3. The differences between the antebellum and postbellum narratives and the slave interviews collected in the twentieth century are developed by Norman Yetman in his introductory essay to the site under review. (return to text).
4. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, no. 11 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publ. Co., 1972). (return to text).
5. Andrews's suffering is graphically illustrated by an oft-published picture of a badly scarred fugitive slave named Gordon, which had originally appeared in Harper's Weekly on 4 July 1863. The image is included in the database "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record" (Reference HW0051).(return to text).
6. Library of Congress. American Folklife Center, "Recordings of Slave Narratives and Related Materials in the Archive of Folk Culture." -- The web site and book publication accompanying a radio broadcast prepared by the Smithsonian Institution make some sound recordings available. Only a part of the audio files is of historical origin presented here; others have been recorded by prominent African American actors for the broadcast. See "Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation" (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1999); and the volume under the same title ed. Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998) (book and audio-tapes). Both web site and book are listed as "Related Resources". (return to text).
7.Ken Lawrence, introduction to George P. Rawick, Jan Hillegas, and Ken Lawrence, eds., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, suppl. ser. 1, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, no. 35 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publ. Co., 1977), vol. 6.1, p. lxix-cx (Mississippi); George P. Rawick, introduction to idem, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, suppl. ser. 2, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, no. 49 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publ. Co., 1979), vol. 2.1, p. xxvii-xxix (Texas). – An electronic edition of The American Slave comprising the original set published in 1972 (see note 4 above) as well as the two supplemental series is available from Greenwood Publ. by subscription only. (return to text).
Point Assessment for Review of Born in Slavery
(more information on PHRC's rating system is available)
Basic Criteria
| Scope/Content | 15/15 |
| Authority/Bias | 15/15 |
| Permanence and Timeliness | 15/15 |
| Value Added Features | 10/15 |
| Technical Aspects | 13/15 |
| Aesthetics/Clarity | 12/15 |
| Overall Impression | 9/10 |
Public History Specific Criteria
| Interpretation of Materials | 25/40 |
| Primary Source Documents | 20/20 |
| Education | 7/20 |
| Promotion of a Community of Interest | 5/20 |
Total: 146 points -- 4 Earths
Claus K. Meyer (claus_k_meyer@gmx.net) is working on a doctoral dissertation comparing the slave-planter relationship in antebellum South Carolina with the subject-lord relationship in eighteenth-century Brandenburg, one of the core territories of the Prussian monarchy.
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