If you’re interested buy the original WPA interviews with surviving slaves I from all over the South...
Be sure to only buy pre 1960 publishing dates if you can find them
All the newer ones are edited for the worse to fit today’s bias that white people suck
Many modern academia and literary houses detest these studies because frequently the slaves speak kindly of their masters and how they were treated and so progressives dismiss them or rewrite them ....i kid you not...they rewrite these slaves own words to suit their bias and claim its for the common good
The early ones are truthful and more fairly representational of the slaves experience which ran from fairly benign to sorta rough but nothing like say Cuba or Brasil
Very enlightening
Some slaves truly feared the overseer and whippings for runaways etc so don’t misunderstand but some adored their masters
It’s a view highly unpopular today and doesn’t fit the narrative
Why did the great migration take the invention of the assembly line?
Why didn’t they all run north in 1866...I mean they were free and Yankees were their liberators
You may want to look at “The Slave Ship” by Rediker.
Mostly from ship logs and sailors journals.
A grim tale of woe, but not all the usual horrors, a new category of victims.The sailors.
Most of the illnesses of the cargo were also suffered by the crew. The cargo had value, the crew replaceable.
A sick or weakened sailor is left in port.
Many of the forlorn sailors ended up with the same sick slaves in port and died together.
One of the few good things I’ve gotten from the government. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/
You can read them online. Absolutely fascinating - I have a hard bound book with a lot of them. It gives you the FULL picture of the true life back then. Slave owners were as different as people always are. There were slaves that became part of the family, treated well (though not free), beloved, love going both ways between the families, and there were the cruel masters who beat and raped, etc. The slaves themselves were extremely different. These narratives were written down (THANK Gd before PC!) exactly as the teller told them. So you can see that some barely had any command of English, and some were more literate than most FReepers.
Somewhere to 1/3 or so of the ex slaves telling their life story had it easier and better before they were freed and they look on their childhoods somewhat fondly. It was not all bad, but slavery is abhorrent. Like war is abhorrent. My dad was a child in the war and his schools were bombed but he just had a good attitude and remembers not the bombings so much but the chocolate bar every kid got in his govt gas mask. Any of us could have been born into slavery. Sometimes life is what you make of it, in any situation.
The denial of historic truth, of course, is typical of the hate-mongers, who are apparently willing to stoop to any fabricated version of reality, so long as it will serve their end of turning one group against another. Lies with a vengeance are the standard tactic of those who seek to disrupt society for devious motives.
For independent confirmation of the implied background of Washington's Address, above, readers should check out the published book length study by the chief actuary for the Prudential Insurance Co., Frederic L. Hoffmann, in the 1890s, which documents how far the Reconstructionists set back the Southern Negro, before Booker T. Washington emerged to begin to effect a positive change.
"the story is a fascinating first person account, well written and much better than expected. Particularly good as a primary source. A very interesting look at the African end of the slave trade- he lived and worked with the African chieftans who captured the slaves for sale, in addition to running a slave ship. His adventure of being captured by pirates was a surprise."
It's free in the Kindle version