mapping exceptional lives across the Atlantic world
The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history (12,500,000 people) and the toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalcuable. Of this amount only an estimted 389,000 people came to the American South, and about 79,000 of those after 1800. Most of the slaves' stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed, critical to an understanding of slavery in the South. Subjects in this book were all natives of West Africa who lived in the American South between 1760 and 1860. They include Elizabeth Cleveland Hardcastle, the mixed-race daughter of an African slave-trading family who invested in South Carolina rice plantations and slaves; Robert Johnson, kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Georgia; Dimmock Charlton who bought his freedom after being illegally enslaved in Savahhah; and a group of unidentified Africans who were picked up by a British ship in the Caribbean, and were eventually returned to their homeland. All of these people led exceptional lives, of which slavery was just one part, and show how the slave trade operated and who was involved.
