The emancipation of millions of enslaved people during and following the Civil War led to a wide variety of outcomes for them as individuals, families and communities. The stories of these people and their struggle to adapt and fight for the rights of full citizenship have been told in many ways, including Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet and in the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930’s. In the years since many plantations were divided or sold, and in many cases effectively ceased to operate as entities, many of them have become tourist attractions, for the gracious houses and lovely gardens. A trend in the past decade has been to add the stories of the enslaved to the narrative from Charleston’s Middleton Place to the more recent acquisition of McLeod Plantation down the road from it. Both locations strive to include the lives of the enslaved people who worked and built lives there.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/17/us/charleston-race-one-girls-view/index.html
This project seeks to develop a tool to identify where the enslaved people came from, and equally important, their fates after emancipation. Conceptually, the project would focus on the South Carolina Lowcountry as a test platform. Several archival and databases are available as a resource, to include the following:
http://www.informationwanted.org
http://www.hastac.org
http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/
https://www.ccprc.com/1447/McLeod-Plantation-Historic-Site
