enslave

In many Southern states, the workforce was principally composed of enslaved people, whose forced labor drove its immense agricultural output.

After Britain offered freedom to those slaves who joined the British army, a South Carolinian aide to Gen. George Washington suggested raising “an all-black regiment” of 3,000 enslaved African-Americans to help defend Charleston.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863—declaring enslaved people in the rebellious states “forever free” and opening the Union Army to black enlistment—Douglass and other skeptics were electrified.

Established in 1862 as Freedmen’s Hospital, Howard was the first federally funded hospital intended to provide care for formerly enslaved Black people during the Civil War.

Charles Darwin is a household name, but how many people know that the world’s most famous naturalist learned taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved Black Briton who owned a bird-stuffing shop in Edinburgh, Scotland?