Freedmen and Southern Society Project
"...the nation's preeminent historical papers project. . . . [T]hese volumes bring us to eye level with the former slaves who bravely sought to establish their own freedom at the close of the Civil War." --Journal of American History
Drawing on the rich resources of the National Archives, the project's editors have pored over millions of documents, selecting some 50,000 for further examination. They are transcribing, organizing, and annotating the documents to explain how Black people in the US South traversed the bloody ground from slavery to freedom during the Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction.
The documents convey with first-person immediacy the experiences of the liberated: the quiet personal satisfaction of meeting an old master on equal terms and the outrage of being ejected from a segregated streetcar; the elation of a fugitive slave enlisting in the Union army and the humiliation of a laborer cheated out of hard-earned wages; the joy of a family reunited after years of separation and the distress of having a child involuntarily apprenticed to a former owner; the hope that freedom would bring a new world and the fear that, in too many ways, life would be much as before. Interpretive essays by the editors provide historical context.
The Freedmen and Southern Society Project has enjoyed longstanding funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), including, most recently, a $300,000 grant from the NEH for 2023-26 and a $125,000 grant from the NHPRC for 2024-25. The grants are supporting final production work for a volume on law and justice, 1865-1867, late-stage editorial work for a volume on family and kinship, 1865-1867, and initial document selection for a volume on church, school, and community, also in 1865-1867.
Future historians may well regard the work of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland as this generation's most significant encounter with the American past.
New York Times Book Review