African Slave Women in South Carolina: Analysis and Guide to Both Primary Sources and Resources to Primary Sources
The purpose of this paper is to discover primary sources as well as resources to primary sources that provide information about African slave women in the South Carolina of the 15th to 17th century. The provided resources/primary sources are those that deal with gender issues related to slave women in Antebellum South Carolina. Library materials as well as online links are provided.
Some primary sources are descriptions that were handed down verbally from generation to generation which are then backed up by supporting documentation. One such source can be found at the website, Priscilla's Homecoming (2009: 1-6), http://www.yale.edu/glc/priscilla/index.htm. This source is the official webpage of Mrs. Thomalind Martin Polite who is the 7th generation descendant of Priscilla, a 10 year old girl taken on the slave ship Hare from Sierra Leone to South Carolina in 1756. Mrs. Polite still lives in South Carolina and provides a lengthy description of her heritage back through all seven generations with both images and supporting documentation.
In addition to documentation on the history of Mrs. Thomalind Martin Polite's family background, the website also provides a list of several books about slavery in South Carolina which serve as resource to several other primary sources about slave women in the Carolinas. These books include, books such as:
Joyner, Charles. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1984.
Littlefield, Daniel. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1981.
Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 1996.
Another book which is a resource which ...