Blog post by Randi Richardson Tony, a slave from Kentucky sometime in the years before the Civil War, escaped from his master and made his way north. He got as far as Monroe County before he was captured on a Saturday night by the Corsaws who were prominent among Bloomington slave catchers. The following morning
Blog post by Randi Richardson Deed books include property transactions and slaves were considered property. Occasionally, then, even in those states where slavery was banned by constitutional law, deed books include contracts of indentured servitude, one of the ways whites maneuvered to keep possession of their slaves in spite of the law. John Sedwick,
Blog post by Randi Richardson On Reel 18 of the Local History Microfilm Collection at the Monroe County Public Library is a paper titled “An Early Sketch of Bloomington and the Family of David H. Maxwell” written by Martha (Maxwell) Howard, a resident of Terre Haute, Indiana, in July 1907. According to that paper, Martha
Biosketch of Thomas Lewis, Former Slave
In the 1930s and early 1940s, more than 140 years after the U. S. Constitution declared slavery illegal in the United States, former slaves were interviewed under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. The materials, archived at the Library of Congress, are known as the Slave Narrative Collection. Some of the narratives have been
Read More