(1984-1995)
In 1984, while still an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, I stumbled upon a trove of historic data in a courthouse in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Over the next 15 years, I painstakingly uncovered over 100,000 descriptions of slaves brought to or born in Louisiana through 1820. Poring through documents from all over Louisiana, as well as archives in France, Spain and Texas, I designed and created a database into which to record information from these documents about the enslaved including many African names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnic designations, places of origin, prices, slave testimony, emancipations and the names of owners, buyers, sellers and freers. In March 2000, Louisiana State University Press published it on a CD-ROM. This rich data has amazed some scholars and many genealogists with the breadth and depth of its information.
My philosophy is that the conceptualization and design of born-digital, humanistic databases are the work of scholars, not technicians. Database design cannot be divorced from the process of research. The early design does not produce a finished product. It evolves as the creator becomes more familiar with the documents, with the data, and with new questions as they arise. Answers, tentative answers, and partial answers lead to new questions. Additional fields are entered and recorded during and after the data-entry process has been completed. Maintaining flexibility to make changes in database design and to make corrections in data entry is essential. In databases created from original manuscript documents, fields are defined which can answer the questions their creators wish to pose. The definition of fields is a long process requiring a thorough knowledge of the documents. As the researcher becomes more familiar with the documents, fields are added as regular significant information appears. There is a COMMENTS field in the Louisiana Slave Database where important information for which there were no defined fields was placed and from which new fields were created. Complete descriptions and explanations of the fields of each database are contained in the files SLAVECODE and FREECODE.
Why Louisiana? Well, it’s my beloved native land and I know all three languages its documents are written in well: French, Spanish and English. But most important, Louisiana always had a notarial system. All documents must be approved by, preserved, and cared for by official notaries and made available to the public. So we have chronologic records of all legal transactions preserved in documents including many about slaves and slavery. For scholars who thought such information never existed, was lost or could never be collected and analyzed, the database is a once-unimaginable, far-reaching treasure. There are many who have a stake in being able to freely access these data, including historians, anthropologists, economists, musicologists, geneticists, linguists and genealogists. I was passionate about seeing that this work reached the broadest possible audience. Did it? Well, yes and no. Genealogists went wild. Specialists in Creole linguistics loved it. But only a handful of other scholars paid any attention to it at all, even after it was the first case of historic scholarship reported on the front page of the Sunday New York Times (July 30, 2000): https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/30/us/identity-restored-to-100000-louisiana-slaves.html?searchResultPosition=5
I never planned to create this database. It just happened. But now, thirty-five years later when digital humanities has become the rage, it is time for me to demonstrate the questions a complex database can answer with reasonable confidence. This book is written not just for scholars, but also for genealogists and the general public. The creation, application and utility of this database is a big subject and requires detailed explanations.
The database and supporting documentation, calculations and images were first published in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1699-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). This is a compact disk publication that also included census databases and spreadsheets by Paul LaChance and by Jeffrey and Virginia Gould. Final design, manufacture, and packaging was very ably overseen by Joel Williams and carried out by Tod Love and others at the Computer Services Center of Louisiana State University. Maureen Hewitt, Associate Director and Editor-in-Chief of Louisiana State University Press, threw herself into this project with as much enthusiasm and dedication as I did, carefully, skillfully, and tactfully sponsoring and editing the final product.
Each record in these databases describes an individual slave. Throughout the Americas, slaves were listed as property and therefore described and inventoried after the master died, when slaves were bought and sold, when they were reported as runaways, when slaves testified in court cases including interrogations about running away, conspiracies and uprisings against slavery, and in several other types of documents including wills, marriage contracts, leases, seizures for debt or for the criminal activities of the master, mortgages of slaves, apprentice contracts and reports of death. The Louisiana Slave Database also includes all clearly documented voyages that brought enslaved Africans from various African coasts to Louisiana. It contains over 104,000 records (individual slaves) and 162 fields (bits of comparable information). Complete document retrieval information is included in each record. Type of document, name, birthplace, numeric age or age category, gender, racial designation, if the slave was involved in running away/and or in conspiracies and revolts against slavery, family relationships from which child/woman ratios and age of mother at the birth of her first surviving child and age specific marriage patterns can be calculated. Skills, illnesses, character, African language group, language of document, and linguistics are some of the fields. The VIA and the WENT fields record where the sellers came from and where the slaves were sold to when this information was given, in addition to the slave's birthplace. Two fields FREE and ESTATEFREE indicate if there was someone described as at least partially of African descent involved in any of these transactions as buyer, seller, or the deceased.
I collected documents recording the same price in different currencies over many years. Robert A. Rosenberg, Director of the Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University, helped me develop the price calculation formulas in 1988 using comparable price data collected from the Pointe Coupee Post during the Spanish period. The original formula has held up remarkably well as comparable prices continued to be collected for the entire range of times and places and the original price conversion formula was used. Both inventory and sale prices indicated the currency used as well as the amount paid in this currency. Two fields, INVVALP and SALEVALP convert prices in various currencies into common denominator prices. A few changes by hand were made in price fields record by record all of which are indicated in the comments field. Subtleties still need to be ironed out, but the price data are abundant and largely reliable after 1769. Earlier prices, especially between 1735 and 1769, were quite unstable due to price inflation. The GROUP field indicates if the price or prices is of an individual, of a group, or if no price information exists at all. Only individual prices must be chosen for price calculations at this time, but group prices can eventually be recoded to allow for calculations. The records involving the manumissions of slaves contain several additional fields including MEANS, the means of manumission, FREEREL, the relationship of freer to freed when a third party purchased the slave in order to manumit, REASONS given for manumission, GRATUITOUS, if no payment was made, CONDITIONS imposed, for example, additional time of service required, SALEVALP, the price paid in case of a purchase or self-purchase, FREER, the name of a third party involved in the manumission, and FREED, the likelihood that the slave was actually manumitted, family relationships among the manumitted including names, racial categories, ages, and birthplaces of mothers of slaves involved in manumissions. WHITEDAD allows choice if the manumitted was certainly, probably or possibly freed by a white father.
The database has been especially useful to genealogists. It is likely that most people and/or families who lived in Louisiana through the year 1820 regardless of racial designation or status can be found in these databases by name. Many people owned slaves in early Louisiana. Aside from large slaveholders, many whites and free people of African descent owned at least one or two slaves. They were sometimes domestic slaves and some of them were blood relatives of their owners. Thus, a very broad range of people who lived in Louisiana through 1820 is recorded. The names of the slaves can be linked to the names of the masters as well as their own family members over time.
Precise information recorded in every record includes the exact date, location and the document number (when one exists), and often the name of the notary. This information will allow the genealogist or scholar to easily find, identify and copy the original document. But the new data entry form housed on https://dev.louisianaslavedatabase.org/ will make original manuscript documents available. Those searching for names must use their imagination about how names could have been spelled. Both SOUNDSLIKE and name indexes should be used and various spellings tried. While the ibiblio search engine allows for a SOUNDSLIKE search, there are some names written in different languages which will not be picked up: for example, Santiago in Spanish would be written Jacques in French. The best way to search for all possible spellings of names would be to create an alphabetical index of the relevant name field and search for every conceivable spelling.
I began creating this database in 1984 after I discovered an impressive number of notarial documents dating from 1745 in the courthouse at New Roads, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana which indicated the African ethnicity of the slaves. Robert A. Rosenberg, Director of the Edison Papers at Rutgers University, helped, encouraged, and taught me how to use Powerbase, an early but limited software for use on personal computers. Results and calculations for Pointe Coupee during the Spanish period (1771-1800) went into my book, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). To my knowledge, none of its many reviewers even mentioned the database.
This database was made possible because of the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and other funding agencies supplying matching funds and other funding. In 1991, the National Endowment for the Humanities funded a contract mainly to expand the databases that I began in 1984 in space and time. All matching funds allocated by the National Endowment for the Humanities were met by contributions from the Cultural Affairs Office of France, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between the Spanish Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the University of New Orleans, with in-kind support from Northeastern University. Aside from administering the grant, Rutgers University did not collect overhead costs during the first two years of the project and provided very generous released time for me in return for a very modest compensation from the NEH contract. The project finally included all the geographic areas constituting the State of Louisiana through 1820 and also included a few documents originating in or involving parts of what are now Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The vast majority of the documents are housed in Louisiana, but a few were consulted in archives in France, Spain and at the University of Texas in Austin. The project stopped with 1820 when descriptions of the African ethnicities of slaves became sparse at the same time as the volume of documents escalated. Our current new team, led by Kathe Hambrick and Ibrahima Seck, plans to complete the database through 1865 using a new user friendly data entry form created by Kartikay Chadha, CEO of Walk With Web Inc.
I was project director of the NEH contract and co-principal investigator with Patrick Manning. We were very fortunate that database and statistical software had greatly improved since my original databases were created, so that by 1991 we were able to define many more fields and input many more records than was possible using Powerbase for DOS when my project began in 1984. Patrick Manning contributed to the expansion of the database definitions and the creation of code sheets when our collective project began in 1991. It is hard to overestimate his role in avoiding mistakes that would have haunted us ever after. Thereafter Manning devoted most of his research time funded under this project to developing and researching his Louisiana Sacramental Records Spreadsheets which hopefully will be published in the future.
Patrick Manning played a major role in expanding the identification of African ethnicities and their African regions of origin at the early stages of the NEH project. Beginning in 1996, members of the international community of scholars generously contributed their expertise in identifying still unidentified African ethnicities over H-Africa.net and through email. The input of Adam Jones, Owen Kalinga, Martin Klein, Robin Law, Michael Levin, Paul Lovejoy, Joseph C. Miller, Bruce Mouser, Mikael Parkvall, and Stephen Rockel is gratefully acknowledged. Dr. Ibrahima Seck, an outstanding historian then living in Senegal who is of mixed Wolof and Fulbe ancestry and has a strong feeling for language, helped identify many of the African names (Code 4 in NAMETYPE field—about 10,366 names), names which were possibly African or European (Code 8 in NAMETYPE field-about 8,743 names), and Islamic names (about 1,017 names). He also included explanations of some of these names in the NAMEXPLAIN field where his input is initialed IS.
Pinpointing and identifying some of the African "nations" (ethnicities) found in the documents was more difficult than one might expect. Much information was initially taken from Philip D. Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. But an amazing array of varieties of "nations" was found in the documents. There are about 9,000 records that contain specific African ethnicity information. These involve 217 different ethnicities among which 96 have been identified and 121 (consisting of only 152 individuals) whose "nation" was given but remains unidentified. All of these unidentified ethnicities are represented by very few individuals. Among the 8,840 Africans of identified ethnicities, 8,508 (96.2%) were clustered among 18 ethnicities who have been recoded in SPSS as AFREQ. This recoded field ranges between a low of 68 records for the Edo of the Bight of Benin to a high of 3,035 for the Congo of West Central Africa. Although Africans represented by very few ethnicities are of interest to specialists in African history, they are too few in number to use for studies of distribution of ethnicities in Louisiana.
Several people assisted with the data entry carried out in courthouses and archives throughout Louisiana between July 1, 1991 and August 31, 1996. Ulysses S. Ricard, Jr., Chief Archivist of the Amistad Research Center, received released time to work full time as associate researcher on the project during its first year. Unfortunately, he became quite ill at the outset of the project, emerged from the hospital nearly blind, and died two years later. Ricard's enthusiasm for the work and his skills in the paleography of Louisiana French and Spanish colonial documents were an inspiration to all of us. He is sorely missed. The original database CD is dedicated to his memory. Philip S. MacLeod, then a student in Tulane University's Latin American Studies Ph. D. program, filled in when Ricard got sick and worked full time on the project during the first year, continued to work at least part time throughout the entire project and devoted much time and care to the final checking, translation into English of skills and illnesses, and cleaning of the databases before publication. His diligence, skill, modesty, dedication, open-mindedness, care and attention to details in research and data entry was invaluable. Despite the years he devoted to this project, he was able to complete a fine Ph. D. thesis about colonial Costa Rica. He was one of the last Richard L. Greenleaf student to complete his Ph. D. He is now Archivist for Manuscripts and Archives at Sterling Memorial Library Yale University. Gregory Osborne moved to New Orleans from Los Angeles to work full time on the project during academic year 1991-92. He still works in the Louisiana Room of the New Orleans Public Library and devotes much of his time and attention to Afro-Louisiana genealogy. Mabel Macias devoted careful time and attention to research and data entry for about a year. Peter Caron and Osvaldo Ortega each entered data for a few weeks. Liliane Chauleau, Director of the Archives of Martinique, now retired, made several trips to New Orleans and then consulted the microfilms of the Louisiana Superior Council Records, assisting with some of the especially thorny problems of paleography of eighteenth century French documents. Mabel Robinson Williams helped me reorganize some of the fields and checked for typos in the name fields in preparation for publication. Inevitably, there are still some errors on such a huge database, but I hope they are minimal.
This project owes a deep debt to Paul Lachance who spent a full week showing me how to use SPSS for Windows during the summer of 1996 and created the initial SPSS syntax file for the Louisiana Slave Database. This has allowed me to make calculations and graphs on my databases without assistance from others. His help is gratefully acknowledged. SPSS.syn (syntax) and SPSS.sav (data) as well as sample graphs calculated from these files are included on the ibiblio website. The SPSS syntax files allow the user to customize the databases in accordance with the user's opinions and needs. The SPSS syntax files provided on this disk contain value labels for each field, which translate digits into words. JNLSLAVE.syn recodes birthplaces of Africans by coastal region under the field AFREGION. The recoded field AFETH disaggregates Africans assigned to various coastal regions based upon "nation" descriptions in the documents from those identified by coastal regions only. Slaves described as "Guinea" or from the "Coast of Guinea" were placed under the Sierra Leone coastal region based upon the author's study of the context in which these terms were used. They can be easily moved to the Africans of unknown origin category by changing one digit on the syntax file if the researcher so wishes.
These databases were created almost entirely from original, manuscript documents located in courthouses and historical archives throughout the State of Louisiana. The project lasted 15 years but was funded only between 1991 and 1996. I retired from Rutgers University in 1996 in order to complete the project, which had expanded beyond my wildest expectations because of the extraordinary quantity and quality of documents found. All sources and repositories where these documents were found are fully cited in the DEPOT field. There is complete document retrieval information for every record (individual slave) contained in these databases. Some records were entered from original manuscript documents housed in archives in France, in Spain, in Cuba and at the University of Texas in Austin. A few were entered from transcriptions of original documents published in books and journals. Some were supplied by Emily Clark from her research in the archives of the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans. I entered records from French Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages from original manuscript sources in France and in Louisiana. Records for British Atlantic slave trade voyages to Louisiana were entered from a pre-publication version of David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein editors, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).
Once we largely completed the data entry process, many details had to be ironed out--always a slow, tedious process on a huge database. Checking for duplications of identical documents found in more than one archive and deleting the duplications was a major chore. We did not delete the same slaves duplicated over time because, aside from the difficulties and uncertainty of such an undertaking, it would have eliminated much data demonstrating changing patterns and made it impossible to trace particular slaves in time depth.
When estates were inventoried and then sold immediately afterwards, we recorded slaves only once, indicating the date of the inventory and the date of the sale and both the inventory and the sale price. In cases where months and, at times, years elapsed between inventory and sale of estates, we recorded slaves separately in order to be able to calculate changes over time in the same estate.
The choice of dBASE V for DOS as the software package for the expansion of my original database was a good one. The data are entirely portable and can be uploaded into new database and statistical software packages for Windows or Apple and beyond as this technology rapidly advances. The data can be uploaded into good database or spreadsheet software, recoded, queried, reorganized, and/or uploaded into SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) or other statistical software to allow for easy recoding, complex calculations, and for making graphs. In the process, the data can be reorganized or redefined to suit the user. Complex computer programming had been avoided, keeping costs down and flexibility up. Compact disk writers for desktop computers appeared on the market just as publication and manufacturing of the databases began. As a result, much time, money, and aggravation were saved and we were able to keep the price of the compact disk published by Louisiana State University Press in 2000 at only $45. I am happy to see that my complete databases as well as a search engine to use them became available in 2001 through ibiblio.org free of charge.
Data were almost always entered directly from the original manuscript documents into dBASE V for DOS using laptop computers. I entered data alongside the other researchers while training and supervising them until I was confident of their competence and then carefully reviewed their work, correcting detectable errors and maintained the central databases into which new data were downloaded as they were collected. These databases contain at least 1,000,000 entries of often-complex information. Standardized spellings did not exist in these documents. Names were entered the way they were spelled, and spellings of the same names varied among documents. They were written in three languages: French (60,914 or 60.5%), Spanish (17,848 or 17.7%), and English (21,878 or 21.7%). We had to identify and translate words for skills and illnesses some of which are no longer used in any language. In the process of translation, we made every attempt to include the original words and spellings in the original languages in all fields as well as in phrases and sentences in the COMMENTS field. There is a LINGUISTICS field that flags records relevant to linguists. Most of the documents were located in Orleans Parish (58,058 or 57.7%), the rest (42,582 or 42.3%) in rural Louisiana where throughout the Spanish period, almost all documents were in French. By 1804, after the United States took over Louisiana, the rural documents became more English while the New Orleans documents, which had been almost entirely in Spanish during the Spanish period (1770-1803) reverted largely to French with substantial numbers in English as well.
Correction of typos found among many thousands names and recoding and reorganization of some fields for ease in calculations and the creation of graphs took place in the final stages of database preparation. Errors had to be checked and corrected. Corrections were made with maximum respect for the data since standardized spelling was not the norm and names spelled differently could have been distinct names.
Some of these data have been entered into the fields in the form of digits. Because digits are more precise than words, they generally improve the accuracy and uniformity of the data and facilitate complex, statistical calculations. An explanation of what each digit represents for each field is contained in the files SLAVECODE and FREECODE, but it is rarely necessary to consult them. Genealogists searching for ancestors using database software alone have very few digits to deal with. The name fields are not digitalized. The genealogist can do a name search, preferably by using the alphabetized index of their software and locating a particular early Louisiana person or family, pinpointing where and when they lived or died, and obtain precise information about where these documents listing their names are housed so they can be easily located, consulted and copied. It is sometimes possible to identify the ethnicities or "nations" of the African ancestors of individuals who have ancestors in Louisiana by making links with information contained in the Sacramental Records of the various Archdioceses of the Catholic Church of Louisiana.
The vast majority (74.4%) of ages are recorded in the Louisiana Slave Database in numeric form. A much smaller percent (15.3%) give age categories, which are digitalized. Skills, illnesses, character as described by the master or appraiser, family relationships, are all described first in plain English and then digitalized. The COMMENTS fields have been translated into English. The various currencies in circulation were converted into common denominator prices. Parish names are abbreviated in English in the PARISH field and should be clear to the user without consulting the digitalized LOCATION field. Many of the African birthplaces (meaning mainly ethnicities) as well as other birthplaces are written out in the SPELL fields and record the exact way the "nation" was spelled in the document, but the codes for the BIRTHPL fields will sometimes have to be looked up in the Codesheet files by researchers who do not use SPSS or other statistical software which automatically converts the digits into words. For researchers making complex calculations on SPSS Version 9 or higher, the SPSS.sav files translate all digits into words. When the researcher needs to know what these digits represent in order to select data for calculations, the researcher simply clicks on the icon for codes which looks like a vertical ruler on the menu line and then clicks on the relevant field and the SPSS package displays value labels for each digit of the field. SPSS syntax files are supplied for both databases. These syntax files can be altered to recode and reorganize the data in any way the researcher wishes.
These remarkable Louisiana documents pay particular attention to recording the birthplace of the slaves described, including their African "nations." The richness of this information is certainly unique for any documents that describe slaves who became part of the population of the United States. The vast majority of slaves whose birthplaces were identified were Africans. Among 38,019 slaves whose birthplaces were recorded, 24,349 (64.0%) were of African birth. Among these, 8,994 (36.9%) indicate specific "nations" (ethnicities), 9,382 (38.5%) indicate their African coastal origins only. The vast majority of the latter involved Atlantic slave trade voyages. Some 5,973 records (25.3%) simply indicate that they were Africans with no other information about their origins. Information about the maritime slave trade is rich: 11,139 records contain information about the voyage individual slaves arrived on, among whom 8,655 arrived on Atlantic slave trade voyages and 2,484 on transshipment voyages from the Caribbean and from East Coast ports of the United States. The vast majority of slaves of identified origins transshipped from the Caribbean were newly arriving Africans (listed as brut in French or bozal in Spanish) purchased from Atlantic slave trade ships. There is a particularly high percentage of identified birthplaces, especially many African "nations" of slaves, recorded in documents dating between 1770 and 1820 in lower Mississippi Valley parishes: St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, Pointe Coupee, and to a lesser extent Orleans. This remarkably full information allows us to make accurate estimates of the proportions of Creoles, Africans of various "nations," Caribbean, English-speaking, and Indian slaves over time. There are 1,069 records involving runaway slaves (select maroon=1) and 589 records which indicate and record some testimony by slaves (select doctype=24). To access all records describing slaves involved in conspiracies and revolts against slavery, select revolts=1. There are 22,274 records (22.4%) which show family relationships among slaves. At least one character trait is shown for 855, at least one skill for 8,745, and at least one illness for 2,392 slaves. Complete inventories for 2,904 individual estates are recorded with estate numbers that show, in addition to a unique number, the parish, the number of slaves on the estate, and the year.
In short, the Louisiana Slave Database is a unique tool for studying the slave as well as the free population of Louisiana through 1820. They contain a vast amount of rich and unusual, hitherto unexplored and unrecorded data and organize them to ask and to quickly and easily answer many complexes, previously asked and unasked questions. They should be helpful to scholars making comparisons of patterns of slavery in other places in the Americas. They should help clarify patterns of the slave trade in Africa as well, pinpointing which ethnicities had entered the Atlantic slave trade by a certain time, their gender, the changing proportions among ethnicities taken from various African coasts over time, their marriage and parenting patterns, their resistance to slavery, and their age patterns. They will certainly be very useful to anyone searching for a Louisiana ancestor.
I demonstrated the usefulness of these databases for historical research and interpretation in several publications: "In search of the Invisible Senegambians : the Louisiana Slave Database (1723-1820)", in Saint-Louis et l'Esclavage, Actes du symposium international sur la traite négrière à Saint-Louis du Sénégal et dans son arrière-pays, Saint-Louis, 18, 19 et 20 décembre 1998, Djibril Samb Editor, IFAN (Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noir, Dakar, Senegal) , Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Initiations et Etudes Africaines N° 39; "The Meanings of Mina," in Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman, editors, Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2002); in my book published in 2005: Slavery and African Ethnicities: Restoring the Links (University of North Carolina Press). Several other of my publications and of others are included in this book.
The Louisiana Slave Database has been used to help solve a thorny problem in creole linguistics in Thomas A. Klingler, "Louisiana Creole: The Multiple-Geneses Hypothesis Reconsidered," Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, summer 2000. It has also turned out to be of increasing interest to geneticists.
It is my hope that this database will help other scholars and genealogists in their fascinating and absorbing work. Best of luck to all of you.