Being an enslaved person in America in the 1850s meant the ever-present threat of violence and separation from loved ones. And throughout the decade, the white South became increasingly determined to spread it as far as they could.

Sources for this episode:

Berlin, Ira and Rowland, Leslie, ed. Families and Freedom:  A Documetary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era. The New Press; 1997.

Berlin, Ira, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Belknap Press; 2003

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938. Hosted by the Library of Congress.

Berry, Dana Ramey, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia. University of Illinois Press; 2007

Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. 1953 Edition hosted by the University of Michigan.

Genovese, Eugene, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Vintage Books; 1972.

Johnson, Walter. Soul By Soul: Life Inside The Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University Press, 1999.

Mellon, James, ed. Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember. Grove Press; 1988

McCurry, Stephanie, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, ad the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country.  Oxford University Press; 1995.

McDonald, Roderick, "Independent Economic Production By Slaves on Antebellum Louisiana Sugar Plantations" in Cultivation and Culture, Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, eds. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan. University Press of Virginia; 1993.

Rothman, Joshua D., The Ledger and The Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America.  Basic Books; 2021.

Waller, John C., Health and Wellness in 19th Century America. Greenwood; 2014.