The Rare Slavery Papers collection offers a window into the daily realities of slavery, recorded in documents that range from personal letters to court filings and estate inventories. These materials do not just tell us that slavery existed—they show how it operated, how it shaped lives, and how people navigated its restrictions. In letters, we encounter instructions, requests, and negotiations; in estate papers, the cold arithmetic of valuing human lives; in legal records, struggles over freedom and property; and in literary works, the public debates that framed the moral and political questions of the time. Together, these documents provide both evidence of oppression and traces of resistance, offering a detailed and tangible record of the people and systems that shaped this era.

Explore Correspondences

At first, these correspondences seem ordinary—notes about labor, payments, or property—but closer reading reveals the human pulse beneath the paper. These letters capture negotiations, instructions, and the anxieties of life under bondage. Through them, we encounter people navigating power and survival, their voices asserting agency in a world designed to deny it.

Explore Estate Papers

These subset of documents usually speak in columns and figures. Wills, inventories, and estate records place men, women, and children on the page beside livestock and furniture, their lives reduced to appraisals in the language of property. The precision is chilling: a human being accounted for in the same breath as a table. Yet these records, meant to erase individuality, now serve another purpose. Today they allow descendants and historians to recover names, trace kinship, and rebuild stories that the arithmetic of slavery tried to silence.

On the right, you can discover some of the estate papers housed at The Florida A&M University's Meek-Eaton Black Archives. Click on each document image to access the full artifact. 

Explore Legal Documents

Many of the legal proceedings showcased center on ownership—disputes over the sale, trade, or inheritance of enslaved people. They show how deeply the legal system was invested in protecting slavery as property, codifying human lives into contracts and transactions. Yet scattered among these records are moments of challenge: an enslaved person petitioning for freedom, cases where the law was bent—if briefly—toward recognizing agency. Together, they reveal a legal system designed to uphold bondage, but also one that occasionally became a fragile arena for contesting it.

On the right, you can discover some of the leagal documents associated with slavery in the American South housed at The Florida A&M University's Meek-Eaton Black Archives. Click on each document image to access the full artifact.