By Troy Valos, 2020

Timeline of Major Points During Virginia’s Slavery Period

1619 – First Africans Landed at Jamestown as indentured servants.

1662 – Law passed based on doctrine of “Partus sequitur ventrem” for blacks to start having lifetime servitude.  A child’s

status was based on their mother’s status.

1775 – (November 7) Royal Governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, offers slaves freedom in exchange for military

service.

1782 – Virginia’s General Assembly passed law allowing slaveowners the ability to free their slaves.

1800 – Gabriel's Conspiracy in Richmond.

1808 – (January 1) Transatlantic Slave Trade Officially Outlawed by United States and Great Britain. 

1808 – Domestic Slave Trade develops.   Slaves are sent to Deep South (primarily to New Orleans) overland in coffles or

by coastal ships.

1831 – (August 21 to October 30) Nat Turner’s Slave Uprising in Southampton County, Virginia.

1840 – Grounding of Schooner Hermosa in Bahamas and the freeing of slaves abroad.

1841 – Successful Slave Revolt Abroad Brig Creole (Slaves from Richmond and Norfolk area abroad).

1859 – (October 16 thru 18) John Brown’s Raid of U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia).

1861 – Union General Benjamin Butler captures slaves as “contraband”, which frees the slaves from bondage

1865 – Richmond falls to Union forces.

Experiences in 1600s:

Cope, Robert S. Carry Me Back; Slavery and Servitude in Seventeenth Century Virginia. Pikeville, Ky: Pikeville College Press of the Appalachian Studies Center, 1973.   (Call # 326 COP)

Craven, Wesley Frank. White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2004.  (Call # 975.502 CRA)

Hashaw, Tim. The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown. New York, NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007.  (Call # 305.896 HAS)

Parent Jr., Anthony S. Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.  (Call # 326.09755 PAR)

Experiences in 1700s:

Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000.            (Call # 973.311 HOL)

Tate, Thad W. The Negro in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg. Williamsburg, Va: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1987.  (Call # 301.451 TAT)

Free Blacks, Emancipation, and Manumissions:

Bogger, Tommy Lee. The Slave and Free Black Community in Norfolk 1775-1865.  Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia, 1976.  (Call # 975.5521 BOG)

Latimore, Carey H. The Role of Southern Free Blacks During the Civil War Era: The Life of Free African Americans in Richmond, Virginia, 1850 to 1876, 2015.  

(Call # 305.896 LAT)

Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.  (Call # 975.5 WOL)

Revolts, Resistances, and Conspiracies:

Breen, Patrick H. The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. 2016. (Call # 975.5552 BRE)

Greenberg, Kenneth S. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.  (Call # 975.5552 NAT)

Nicholls, Michael L. Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel's Conspiracy (Carter G. Woodson Institute Series). University Press of Virginia, 2012.  (Call # 306.362 NIC)

Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.  (Call # 975.5451 SID)

Taylor, Alan. The Internal Enemy Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. New York, NY: Norton, 2014. (Call # 973.503 TAY)

Walters, Kerry S. American Slave Revolts and Conspiracies: A Reference Guide. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2015. (Call # 306.362 WAL)

Whitfield, Theodore Marshall. Slavery Agitation in Virginia, 1829-1832. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930. (Call #:326.09755 WHI)

Economic:

Bruce, Kathleen. Virginia Iron Manufacture in the Slave Era. New York: Century Co, 1931.    (Call # 330.9755 BRU)

Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill: Publ. for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia by the University of North Carolina Press, 1986.  (Call # 306.0975 KUL)

Minchinton, Walter Edward. Virginia Slave-Trade Statistics, 1698-1775. Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1984. (Call # 382.440975 VIR)

Zaborney, John J. Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.   (Call # 306.362 ZAB)

Medicine and Health:

Savitt, Todd L. Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in an Antebellum Virginia. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978.  (Call # 362.84 SAV)

Fugitive Slave Accounts:

Blight, David W. A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom: Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation. Boston: Mariner Books, 2009.   (Call # 973.7115 BLI)

Mullin, Gerald W. Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. London: Oxford University Press, 1981.  (Call # 304.4493 MUL)

Newby-Alexander, Cassandra. Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2017.  (Call # 973.7115 NEW)

Ramsey, Janet R. Contraband Slaves: Captured, Fugitive and Emancipated Slaves Regarded As Contraband During the Civil War: a Collection of Articles from the Richmond Daily Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia, 1860-1865. Richmond, Va: [S.D.], 2013.   (Call # 973.70896 RAM)

Still, William. The Underground Railroad. New York: Arno Press [u.a.], 1968.   (Call # 973.7115 STI)

Windley, Lathan Algerna. A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730 Through 1787. New York: Garland, 1995.  (Call # 973.26 WIN)

Religion:

Irons, Charles F. The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.  (Call # 241.675 IRO)

Slave Narratives:

Dusinberre, William. Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.   (Call # 326.0975 DUS)

Perdue, Charles L., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976.   (Call # 975.5 WEE)

Virginia Federal Writers' Project. Virginia Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in Virginia from Interviews with Former Slaves. Hamburg, MI: Native American Book Distributors, 2002.  (Call # 920 VIR)

Slave Trade:

McInnis, Maurie Dee. Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2013.  (Call # 704.9493 MCI)

Schermerhorn, Calvin. Money Over Mastery, Family Over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.  

(Call # 975.518 SCH)

Trammell, Jack. The Richmond Slave Trade: The Economic Backbone of the Old Dominion. Charleston: History Press, 2012.  (Call # 306.362 TRA)

Slave Life and Family:

Hunter, Tera W. Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017.  (Call # 390.2509 HUN)

Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Almost Free: A Story About Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900). University of Georgia, 2012.   

(Call # 975.5 WOL)

Political and Legal:

Campbell, James M. Slavery on Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011.  

(Call # 364.9755 CAM)

Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003.  (Call # 326.0975 HAD)

Munford, Beverley B. Virginia's Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession. Richmond, Va.: L. H. Jenkins, [c1909]. 

(Call # 326 MUN) 

Root, Erik S., and Erik S Root. Sons of the Fathers: the Virginia Slavery Debates of 1831-1832. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010.  (Call # 975.503 SON)

Schwarz, Philip J. Slave Laws in Virginia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.   (Call # 342.755 SCH)

_________. Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865. Union, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange, 1998.  (Call # 346.755013 SCH)

Tillson, Albert H. Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia's Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760-1810. University Press of Virginia, 2010.   (Call # 975.52 TIL)

Major Keywords and Concepts