History.org: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's Official History and Citizenship Website

"Finding Slaves in Unexpected Places"

Slavery was not a southern monopoly, James Breig explains in this article from the Colonial Williamsburg Journal. Though many northern states enacted gradual emancipation laws to slowly abolish slavery within their borders, "nobody wanted to quit" slave owning, historian Ira Berlin says. The "commitment to slavery ran very deep" among slave owners in the North, "even when it contradicted their ideology...Slavery was not a minor institution, and it took enormous energy and about fifty years to end it. It didn't go easily." Even with northern abolition, the percentage of enslaved people in the United States stayed steady from 1790-1860.

Teaching Strategy: Interpreting Census Data on Slavery

In the years slavery was legal in this country, the census recorded the enslaved population of each state. In this lesson, students will use census data and maps relating to the enslaved population and the U.S. population as a whole to answer questions about population density, migration patterns, and the changing nature of slavery in the United States from 1790 to 1830.

Colonial Williamsburg Teaching Resources for Your Classroom

Colonial Williamsburg offers a variety of quality instructional materials about 18th-century life, including:

• Slave's Bag Hands-on History Kit
• From Ear to Ear CD-ROM
• No Master Over Me EFT on DVD

21st Century Award
for Best Practices in Distance Learning, preK–12
United States Distance Learning Association, 2010

Distinguished Achievement Award Finalist 2011
Association of Educational Publishers

Quotation of the Month

"...they earnestly entreat your serious attention to the Subject of Slavery, that you will be pleased to countenance the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men, who alone, in this land of Freedom, are degraded into perpetual Bondage, and who, amidst the general Joy of surrounding Freemen, are groaning in Servile Subjection..."

—Benjamin Franklin, in a petition from the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, February 3, 1790.

Colonial Williamsburg for Teachers

2011–2012 Electronic Field Trip Scholarships

The Colonial Williamsburg Electronic Field Trip Series is supported in part
by the William and Gretchen Kimball Young Patriots Fund.

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