Assessing Literacy among the Enslaved in the Antebellum South

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the antebellum United States, white enslavers were initially ambivalent regarding the literacy of enslaved Africans. This ambivalence radically changed with Nat Turner’s revolt, and after 1835, when the American Anti-Slavery Society began to flood the southern states with abolitionist newspapers, handbills, and other abolitionist literature. Period slave narratives, writings by abolitionists, and the 1930s ex-slave narratives, have all aided historians in understanding these strictures, and the means by which many African Americans surmounted them. While artifacts associated with writing, such as slate tablets and pencils, have been recovered from enslaved contexts since the beginnings of plantation archaeology in the 1960s, a detailed assessment and interpretation of these data has been lacking. Using artifacts derived from Kingsley Plantation (Fort George Island, Florida) as a primary dataset, along with comparisons made to other plantation excavations, this study examines previous interpretations, and suggests new possibilities for understanding literacy through these objects.   

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow