Slavery and Freedom

The first set of documents we need your assistance with include notifications of sales of enslaved persons, a broadside asking for rewards of fugitive slaves, and a railroad bond. These documents help the exhibit explore how Africans and African Americans made (and continue to re-make) American freedom through three fundamental components of nation building: the accumulation and control of capital (told through the slave trade, the plantation system, and empire building); the political turn towards democracy (from the Revolution through the reconstruction of the nation following the Civil War); and concepts of national belonging and exclusion (centered on the development of race-making). Within each, African Americans have innovated and pushed the nation forward to deepen its understanding of liberty, as Americans who lived through the fullest challenge to their freedom in almost every area of life from the most personal to the most public.