[Detail] Soldier and Two Women.
Historical Research: Inventors and The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Print of Granville T. Woods, 1887.
This collection provides the opportunity to learn about African-American inventors. Searches on scientists and inventors yield a number of documents including an 1884 Cleveland Gazette biography of Benjamin Banneker, an eighteenth-century astronomer and inventor. Also available is a print of Granville T. Woods, an electrical and mechanical engineer who had more than sixty patents and was known as the "Black Edison." Searches of names such as George Washington Carver and Garrett Morgan also provide a variety of articles.
The collection can also be used to study the transatlantic slave trade from several vantage points. A search on slave trade provides a number of documents including an article, "Among Old Books" based on The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, describing the life of a slave born on board a slave ship bound for the Spanish West Indies in 1729. Thomas Clarkson's 1815 account of an interview with Czar Alexander I of Russia discusses the imperial's opposition to the transatlantic slave trade:
[H]e had been always an Enemy to the Slave trade, tho' he . . . knew only that the Africans were taken from their Country against their wills and . . . they were made to work under a System commonly reputed cruel; but this he considered as an outrage against human nature . . . and when he had seen the print of the Slave Ship he felt he sho'd be unworthy of the high situation he held if he had not done his utmost . . . to wipe away such a pestilence from the face of the Earth.
- How did Czar Alexander I find African slavery intolerable, yet find it easy to countenance serfdom in Russia?
A two-part article entitled "Horrors of the Slave Trade" in the May 1844 edition of the Palladium of Liberty, described the capture of a Portuguese ship that was transporting slaves:
The deck was crowded to the utmost with naked Negroes . . . in almost riotous confusion, having revolted before our arrival against their late masters . . . . The Negroes, a meager, famished looking throng—having broken through all control, had seized everything to which they had a fancy in the vessel; some with handsful of ‘farinha,' . . . others with large pieces of pork and beef, having broken open the casks, and some had taken fowls from the coops, which they devoured raw.
Reverend George Williams shed light on the nature of the slave traders in his 1876 oration, "The American Negro from 1776-1876." As he provides a brief history of African Americans from the slave trade through the Civil War, he explains:
The prisons of Europe were emptied of the worst elements of society, to be employed in the slave trade, while every unseaworthy vessel was immediately brought into requisition. The vilest, most ignorant elements of France, Spain, and Portugal engaged in the trade. And before 1650 the seas were covered with the greatest curse that ever afflicted the earth. The southern colonies were populated rapidly, and slavery spread through all the settlements, both North and South.
In addition, the collection provides information about the conditions of American plantations in W.P.A. narratives and documents such as the Eustatia Plantation, Mississippi, Account Book, which provides an opportunity to investigate the daily workings of a plantation in 1861.
- What were the motives, attitudes, and practices of slave traders?
- How do these compare to the motives, attitudes, and practices of slave owners on plantations?
- What kinds of conditions did the captive Africans live in while aboard slave ships?
- What were living conditions like for slaves on American plantations?
- What are the different objections people have had to slavery?
- What does the seizure of a slave ship in the two-part article in Palladium of Liberty convey about the efforts to outlaw the slave trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century?
