The Slaves of Liberty: Freedom in Amite County, Mississippi, 1820-1868

by Dale Edwyna Smith

Overview

This study focuses on the lives of the black slave majority in the deep South in the mid-19th century. The topics of civil law, demographics, the role of the church, family life, plantation economics, and gender issues are all revealed through careful study of primary sources previously unexamined by historians. The author has meticulously researched newspapers, court transcripts, county archives, church minutes, plantation journals, and oral histories to produce an astonishingly detailed picture of the lives of blacks and whites during this critical period. The readable narrative was nominated for the Allan Nevins Prize for dissertations in American history in 1993.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781136747748
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/01/1998
Series:	Crosscurrents in African American History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	222
Sales rank:	312,972
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dale Edwyna Smith

Table of Contents

Series Editors' Foreword, Acknowledgments, Introduction, Chapter 1. Amite County, Mississippi, Chapter 2. The Color of Law, Chapter 3. The Broken Circle: Our Family, Black and White, Chapter 4. The Kindlier Sphere: The Women of Amite County, Chapter 5. Plantations of the Lord, Chapter 6. War, Chapter 7. Emancipation, Chapter 8. I and Tone: The Lives of Eli and Tony Capell, Chapter 9. Conclusion, Appendix, Bibliography, Index

Editorial Reviews

A new wave historian mines previously unexamined documents of the Amite county seat courthouse (Liberty, MS) in relating the lives of black Americans under and freed from slavery. Main foci are: slave law, gender issues, local churches, the "troubles" of 1861-65 as related in a slaveowner's diary with references to his black slave overseer, and emancipation. Appends "The Legacy of Irris Bonner Harris" from The Southern Review, vol. 26, no. 4, October 1990. Developed from an award-nominated doctoral dissertation (1993, institution unspecified). Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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