Research Guides: Enslavement and Sharecropping in Florida: Home

Image: George Whitfield's list of enslaved people that he owned in Tallahassee, Florida, 1862.

"List of Negroes," January 1, 1862, Box 517, Folder 1, Whitfield Notebook, MSS 0-261, Florida State University Special Collections & Archives. Note: Image citation reflects the record-naming practices of the creator.

Available in our digital library at: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_MSS_0261_B517_F001_I001.

What's in this guide?

This guide includes primary sources of enslavement and sharecropping created during the 19th and 20th centuries in Florida that can be found in FSU Special Collections & Archives. The goal of this guide is to aid both historical and genealogical research within the Tallahassee locale and surrounding counties.

Most of the materials in this guide are primary sources--historical records created by a participant in or observer of an event either when it happened or afterwards from their memory. In this guide, you will find the personal papers and business records of enslavers, rare books as published versions of original sources, and oral history interviews of sharecroppers and former enslaved people.

By no means is this guide exhaustive of every resource. Archives, including ours, have been historically shaped by a bias towards white slaveholding men because of historical views towards what was deemed important enough to keep indefinitely. Laws reflected the views of enslavers, which prevented many enslaved people from becoming literate. These historical processes created an archival bias because enslavers created most of the surviving textual primary sources documenting enslavement and the people they took captive.