New Media Classroom

Utilizing the Registers of Free Blacks for the city of Staunton and Augusta County, Virginia, 1803-1864

Carl Schulkin, Pembroke Hill School

Overview

Created by historian Edward Ayers and a team of graduate students at the University of Virginia, "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War" documents the histories of Franklin County, Pennsylvania and Augusta County, Virginia in the years before and during the Civil War. One of the best history sites on the Web, this site is an invaluable resource for teaching students not only about the Civil War but also about how historians uncover and interpret the past.

The Valley site contains two archives ("The Eve of War" and "The War Years"), with a third planned ("Emancipation and Reconstruction"). These archives present a vast trove of primary documents, including censuses, tax digests, registers of slaveowners, registers of free African Americans, letters, diaries, newspapers, church records, military records, maps, and images. The site also contains essays, a bibliography, student work, and links to other websites on the Civil War and U.S. history generally. This activity utilizes only a tiny fraction of the documents available in this vast archive, and raises such questions as: What important conclusions can be drawn from examining sets of very brief primary source documents? What are the limitations of such sources? How does one utilize quantitative data in an effort to answer qualitative historical questions? What other sources of information are needed in order to place primary source documents in their proper historical context?

Objectives

to have students undertake the process that practicing historians utilize when they use primary sources to construct an historical narrative or analysis

to enrich students' knowledge of the daily lives of free African Americans in the antebellum South and help them to appreciate the similarities and differences between the roughly ten percent of African Americans who were free and the nearly ninety percent who were enslaved.

Resource(s)

Two registers of free blacks in Augusta County, Virginia and a register of
free blacks in the city of Staunton, Virginia, all of which have been transcribed and reproduced as part of The Valley of the Shadow Web Site (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/choosepart.html).
The registers are located in the Public Records section of "The Eve of War" archive (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/govdoc/free.html

Activity

Step I:

In pairs, choose ONE of the registers of free blacks to search AND COUNT for one or more of the following categories:

trade (including apprentice and journeyman)
neighboring states
born free/free born
emancipated/manumitted
mulatto

Step II:

Work together searching one of the registers and recording your count(s). Concentrate initially on only one of the five topics suggested above. Move on to a second topic only after you have completely exhausted the possibilities relating to the first in the time allotted. Keep in mind that finding only a few references or no references to a particular term or topic may be just as significant as uncovering numerous references.
Searching Tips: Always try to use the fewest possible letters that are unique to the phrase or term you are searching for. For example, use "manum" instead of "manumitted." Conduct related searches using synonyms. For example, count instances of both "emancipated" and "manumitted" individuals. Finally, in utilizing your browserís "find" function, close the find dialogue box after the first hit and then strike the F3 key (on a Mac hold down the apple key while hitting the f key) to find each subsequent instance. When you receive the message "search string not found," make sure to use the "find" function to locate a string at the very beginning of the register (for example, "Part One") before beginning another search. Otherwise your subsequent search will find only those instances in the remainder of the register; it will not search the entire register.

Step III:

With your partner, discuss what significant hypothesis (or hypotheses) you can formulate on the basis of the data in the register you examined. To focus your discussion consider the following questions:

Is the data in this register consistent with what you know about free African Americans in other parts of the United States in the period 1803-1864?
Where the data is sparse or absent from the register entirely, is it more likely that the data reflects a lack of activity on the part of African Americans or a lack of interest in collecting such data on the part of the government?