Abstract: Letters to his family from Garver, a federal soldier with the 9th Iowa Regiment in Missouri and Arkansas, 1861-1862, as a patient in Lawson Hospital, St. Louis, Mo., 1863, and in Alabama, 1864-1865. The letters concern camp life, troop movements, battles, Garver’s health, and other matters.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Some letters discuss African Americans Garver encountered. A letter from 28 April 1862 discusses coming upon a meeting group of African Americans. Another letter from 28 August 1862 discusses the skills and skin complexion of an African American female cook.

Abstract: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, organized at Poinsett County, Ark., in 1934, was especially active in Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. The Union spread into the southeastern states and to California, affiliating off and on

with larger national labor federations, and maintaining headquarters at Memphis, Tenn., or, from 1948 to 1960, at Washington, D.C. It has become successively the National Agricultural Workers Union and the Agricultural and Allied Workers Union. Correspondence files of H. L. Mitchell and others at union headquarters at Memphis, Tenn., Washington, D.C., and in Louisiana; executive committee minutes, legal papers, surveys, annual reports, special reports, membership records, applications for local charters, financial records, and contracts; data on conventions, strikes, litigation, and legislation; histories and articles; clippings; relevant mimeographed and printed matter; and miscellaneous forms, lists, and routine local organization papers. The papers concern union organizing, financing, relationships with various federal agencies, strikes, legal defense, and other activities, mainly among cotton field workers in Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas, sugar cane workers in Louisiana, and migrant laborers in Florida and California, but also among agricultural workers in other states.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Formed to challenge many of the injustices remaining from the old plantation system, the Union papers include thousands of letters from members, including African-American sharecroppers.

Abstract: Correspondence; legal and financial papers; genealogical material; student notebooks, account books, and other volumes; pictures; and other papers of members of the Houston, Young, Dalton, and Kennedy families of Iredell County, N.C., and other locations in the South. Most of the papers are family letters exchanged among members of this large family, as they spread out from Iredell County seeking more profitable lands to the south and west.The letters provide vivid pictures of frontier life in Tennessee and Missouri, including reports of weather, health, crops, religion, education, slavery, and, especially, the daily lives and work of women. Letters of Christopher Houston (1744-1837) from Maury County, Tenn., about 1814-1837, contain discussions of his Presbyterian faith and anti-slavery convictions; papers dated after his death relate to attempts to challenge and settle his will, through which he had manumitted his slaves. Also included are documents relating to property; items relating to the postmastership in Iredell County, which was held by family members for nearly a century; and scattered papers relating to the North Carolina tobacco trade form the 1840s through the 1880s.There are also Civil War era letters written by soldiers, who told of military life, and civilians, who wrote about local conditions in various southern states. The extensive genealogical materials were chiefly collected by Mary Cecelia Houston Dalton (1814-1901) and her granddaughter Mary Hunter Kennedy. Volumes include school notebooks and account books relating to the tobacco industry and to general merchandising, as well as to estates and domestic expenses.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Letters discuss domestic matters and plantation management, such as buying and supervising slaves (Correspondence in Sub Series 2.1: 1824-1834; see also Folders 12 and 13 in Series 1); the prices of slaves (1835-1860); and problems with former slaves and Reconstruction policies (1866-1879). The collection also contains contracts for the sale of slaves (1812; See Folder 3) and for the hire of slaves (1835-1860) and freedmen (1866-1870; see subseries 2.2.1: Legal Items).

Abstract: Elizabeth Washington Grist Knox was the wife of Dr. Reuben Knox (1801-1851) of St. Louis, Mo., and mother of Franklin R. Grist (b. 1828), a Yale graduate, painter, and diplomat. Her father was cotton planter John Washington (1768-1837) of Kinston, Lenoir County, N.C. Her brother, James Washington (1803-1847), was a doctor in New York City. The collection includes correspondence, chiefly consisting of letters received by Elizabeth Knox in Washington and New Bern, N.C., between 1827 and 1840, and in St. Louis, 1840-1849, many of which are from her brother James. There are also many letters received by Franklin Grist, mostly 1845-1849, chiefly from relatives and school friends. Also included are letters from John Washington to his wife and daughter about running the family’s plantation in Lenoir County, N.C., and about his daughter’s schooling, and others between various members of the Washington and Knox families. There are also six letters from Elizabeth’s friend, reformer Dorothea Dix. Topics include family life in eastern North Carolina, St. Louis, and upstate New York; plantation and household affairs; westward migration, especially passage by steamship and wagon train; encounters with the Nez Perce, Pawnee, and Flathead (Salish) Indian tibes; observations on the Mormon community in Salt Lake City; descriptions of ranching and mining in California; Franklin Grist’s travels as a sketch artist with the Stansbury Exploration of the Great Salt Lake region of Utah in 1849-1850; the activities of slaves in Missouri; Franklin’s student life at Yale in the late 1840s and as an art student in Paris, 1855-1858; and James Washington’s experiences as a medical student in Philadelphia, 1824-1829, and Paris, 1829-1831. There are also a few college compositions, poems, and other papers.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Included is a 19 December 1847 letter from Elizabeth Grist Knox, concerning several slaves working to pay for their freedom in Saint Louis, Missouri,  one by opening a barbershop.

Abstract: Barbara Lau (1958- ), folklorist and program coordinator, has studied African-American shape-note singing groups in the midwest, coordinated the 1983 Shape-Note Singing Reunion in St. Louis, Mo., and documented the 1983 and 1984 Ohio-Indiana-Michigan Vocal Singing Conventions. While doing graduate work in folklore at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lau worked with a Cambodian community in Greensboro, N.C., through the Greensboro Buddhist Center. In 1999, she became the community-based documentary programs coordinator at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Materials, 1980-1995, include audio tapes, videotapes, photographs, slides, logs, and manuscripts from two of Barbara Lau’s folklife projects. Documentation of Lau’s work with African-American shape-note singing groups in the early 1980s includes her senior thesis, “Black Shape-Note Singing: A Beginning,” along with surveys on which she based her writing. Also included are photographs, audio recordings, and slides from the 1983 Shape-Note Singing Reunion in Saint Louis, Mo., and the Ohio-Indiana-Michigan Vocal Singing Convention, 1983-1984. Materials documenting the Cambodian community in Greensboro, N.C., include nearly 1,200 color slides and prints by Lau and photographer Cedric Chatterley of the 1995 Cambodian New Year celebration. There are also photographs of New Year celebrations in Lexington, N.C., and Charlotte, N.C., and videotapes by Jim White and photographs by Lau of a 1995 Cambodian wedding in Greensboro, N.C.. Lau also interviewed two Cambodian dancers, Chea Khan and Chaa Moly Sam, while they were in residence at the Greensboro Buddhist Center and photographed their classes. All photographs and interviews have extensive logs with commentary and field-note summaries by Lau. The Cambodian Immigrant Folklife series contains materials documenting interviews performed by Lau in preparation for a 2003 exhibit at the Greensboro Historical Museum entititled “From Cambodia to Greensboro: Tracing the Journeys of New North Carolinians.” It also includes a children’s book with text by Barbara Lau and photographs by Cedric Chatterly entitled Sokita Celebrates the New Year.

Repository: Southern Folklife Collection

Collection Highlights: Materials include audiotapes, videotapes, photographs, slides, logs, and manuscripts from two of Barbara Lau’s folklife projects. Documentation of Lau’s work with African-American shape-note singing groups in the early 1980s which helped produced her thesis “Black Shape-Note Singing: A Beginning,” along with surveys on which she based her writing. Also included are photographs, audio recordings, and slides from the 1983 Shape-Note Singing Reunion in St. Louis and the Ohio-Indiana-Michigan Vocal Singing Convention in Indianapolis in 1983 and Detroit in 1984. (See documentation and audio in Series 1)

Abstract: Lenoir family members include William Lenoir, Revolutionary War general and N.C. politician of Fort Defiance, Caldwell County, N.C.; Lenoir’s friend and father-in-law of two of Lenoir’s sons Waightstill Avery, lawyer, legislator, and signer of the Mecklenburg Declaration; and his son-in-law Israel Pickens, N.C. congressman, 1811-1817, governor of Alabama, 1821-1825, and U.S. senator from Alabama, 1826. Also important are William Lenoir’s children, especially William Ballard Lenoir of Roane County, Tenn.; Thomas and his wife Selina Louisa Avery Lenoir of Fort Defiance; and Walter Raleigh Lenoir of Boone County, Mo. Much material relates to Thomas and Selina’s children, especially William Avery Lenoir; Sarah (Sade) Jones Lenoir of Fort Defiance; Walter Waightstill, a lawyer in Lenoir, N.C., and his wife Cornelia Isabella Christian Lenoir; Thomas Isaac and his wife Mary Elizabeth (Lizzie) Garrett Lenoir of the family plantation at East Fork of Pigeon, Haywood County, N.C.; Rufus Theodore and his wife Sarah Leonora (Sallie) Gwyn Lenoir of Fort Defiance; son-in-law Joseph Caldwell Norwood, a teacher in Hillsborough, N.C.; and cousin William Bingham of the Bingham School in Orange County, N.C. There is also material relating to the children of Rufus and Sallie, including Thomas Ballard of Fort Defiance; Rufus Theodore, Jr., of Athens, Ga., and his wife Clyde Lyndon Lenoir; and to members of the related Avery, Norwood, and Pickens families. Selected series, some of which have been grouped together for convenience in online searching, have been cataloged separately. They are: Subseries 1.1. Correspondence, 1773-1839 (426 Series 1.1a; 426 Series 1.1b); Subseries 1.2. Correspondence, 1840-1860 (426 Series 1.2); Subseries 1.3. Correspondence, 1861-1865 (426 Series 1.3); Subseries 1.4. Correspondence, 1866-1890 and Subseries 1.5. Correspondence, 1891-1937 (426 Series 1.4,1.5); Series 2. Diaries and other writings, 1776-1940 (426 Series 2); Series 3.1. Household and plantation records, 1768-1929 (426 Series 3.1); Series 3.2. Legal and business records, 1765-1909 and Series 5. Financial and business volumes, 1781-1892 (426 Series 3.2,5); Series 3.3. Political and election records, 1775-1882 and Series 4. Land records (426 Series 3.3,4); and Series 6. Government records, 1776-1888 (426 Series 6).

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Correspondence includes discussion of the buying, selling, and supervision of slaves (See particularly subseries 1.1 and 1.3); the containment of slavery (subseries 1.2), and references to free blacks in North Carolina (subseries 1.4).

Among letters in this series relating to managing slaves are those of 21 March 1809, in which Thomas Lenoir asked that brother Walter Raleigh Lenoir look for a “young wench that he thinks would suit me”; of 2 February, 28 March, and 19 May 1811, in which Thomas and William Lenoir discussed buying and selling slaves and how the price for slaves had recently escalated; and of 11 September 1835, which shows that Walter Raleigh Lenoir had slaves on his Missouri property. Letters of 13 April 1806, 28 March 1837, 23 December 1839, and 10 January 1840 show that the Lenoirs were somewhat sensitive about buying and selling slaves. In the 1837 letter, Thomas Lenoir explained to William Avery Lenoir, who had just sold his own slaves in Alabama and wondered what to do with those of Thomas who were in his care, that William was to ask the slaves whether or not they wanted to be sold. The 1839 and 1840 letters between William Ballard Lenoir in Tennessee and L. G. Jones in North Carolina are about how to avoid breaking up a slave family.

The collection also contains a letter of 26 April 1875 of nephew William Ballard Lenoir,  to Walter Waightstill Lenoir about the African-American exodus northward (Folder 169).

William Lenoir’s speeches (subseries 2.2.1) also contain discussions of topics such as enslavement.

Subseries 3 (Plantation Records) contain several references to enslaved people, such as a list of slave births and labor performed on the plantation (including skilled labor).

Tax records in Series 4 and 6 also contain assessments and valuations of enslaved individuals.

Abstract: Ira Russell, physician of Massachusetts, who served in the Union Army as a surgeon during the Civil War, first as administrator of hospitals in northwest Arkansas, then as surgeon-in-charge of the hospital complex at Benton Barracks near St. Louis, Mo., which could serve between 2,000 and 3,000 patients at one time. Papers chiefly relating to Ira Russell’s service at Benton Barracks, Mo., including orders and military and personal correspondence. Most of the orders were recorded in an 84-page volume that covers operations at the hospital in 1864. Many of the letters, 1861-1865, relate to the running of the hospital at Benton Barracks. In some of them, Russell discussed the condition of African-American troops who were stationed at Benton Barracks and employed at the hospital. After March 1864, one of the hospitals at Benton Barracks was designated as a facility “for Colored troops only.” There are also a few letters of Ira’s son, Fred W. Russell, who, in one letter, discussed the progress of the war in Missouri and Arkansas. There is also a four-page journal Fred Russell kept of his sightings of meteors in Massachusetts in 1863.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights:  Folders 2 – 4 contain Some of Russell’s military correspondence that discusses issues pertaining to the African-American troops employed at the hospital, including their pay. Letters also cover the designation in 1864 of one of the hospitals to serve only African Americans .

This collection contains materials that have been digitized and are available online. Click here to link to the finding aid and to access the digitized content.

Abstract: William Page Saunders lives in New Orleans, La. The collection includes a bill of sale for a female slave named Emeline or Eveline from Lewis Brown of Missouri to William Page Saunders of New Orleans, 11 May 1854, and a letter, 26 April 1856, from F.L. Claiborne to Saunders. In the letter, Claiborne, who had purchased the slave in turn from Saunders, stated that she had a bad cough and a diseased leg, but that he intended to keep her and try to cure her.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: The  papers contain a bill of sale for a female slave named “Emeline” or “Eveline” from Lewis Brown of Missouri to Saunders of New Orleans (1854) and a letter from F. L. Claiborne to Saunders discussing the physical problems with the same slave, whom he had purchased from Saunders, stating that she had a bad cough and a diseased leg, but that he intended to keep her and attempt to cure her (1856).

Abstract: Wilkerson’s memories of her mother’s account of an 1841 journey from Virginia to Missouri. Making the journey were Wilkerson’s maternal grandfather and grandmother, James Blakely (1811-1887) and Anne Johnson Payne Smith (b. 1816) as well as several brothers and sisters of James B. Smith. More than forty slaves accompanied them on the journey, which required several months of travel. Most of this account, however, is not about the journey, but about the Smith and Payne family genealogies, their views of slavery and of particular slaves, and accounts of Quantrill’s Raiders spreading terror near their home (between Richmond, Mo., and Lexington, Mo.) during the Civil War. Written ca. 1941 this account jumps backward and forward in time, but offers few dates to identify events.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: Most of the account discusses family genealogies, views on slavery, and views on particular slaves. Microfilm only.

Abstract: Letters received by Betton, vice president of the National Agricultural Workers Union at St. Louis, Mo., from Harry Leland Mitchell and others, concerning the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and its successor organizations, and related printed material.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection