Negro Slavery in Arkansas

About

Long out of print and found only in rare-book stores, it is now available to a contemporary audience with this new paperback edition.

When slavery was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation, there were slaves in every county of the state, and almost half the population was directly involved in slavery as either a slave, a slaveowner, or a member of an owner’s family. Orville Taylor traces the growth of slavery from John Law’s colony in the early eighteenth century through the French and Spanish colonial period, territorial and statehood days, to the beginning of the Civil War. He describes the various facets of the institution, including the slave trade, work and overseers, health and medical treatment, food, clothing, housing, marriage, discipline, and free blacks and manumission.

While drawing on unpublished material as appropriate, the book is, to a great extent, based on original, often previously unpublished, sources. Valuable to libraries, historians in several areas of concentration, and the general reader, it gives due recognition to the signficant place slavery occupied in the life and economy of antebellum Arkansas.

Author

Orville W. Taylor was a professor of history at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia. Winner of the Duke University Publication Award for the original edition of this book, he also co-authored Religion in the Southern States.

Review

“Negro Slavery in Arkansas traces the roots of Arkansas’s slavery from its origin in French and Spanish colonization, its induction into the United States, through the Civil War and Emancipation. Forty years after its original publication, this new edition, with an introduction by Carl Moneyhon, still addresses the health, food, clothing, marriage, and workloads of the slaves. Largely based on original sources, Taylor’s work still stands as the leading authority on the institution of slavery in Arkansas.”
—Journal of Negro History, Spring 2001

Series

With the publication of A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory during the Year 1819 by Thomas Nuttall, edited by Savoie Lottinville, the University of Arkansas Press inaugurated its new paperback reprint series, Arkansas Classics. This hallmark series will bring back into print, and keep in print, important works about Arkansas and by Arkansans. These books are essential reading for scholars and for general readers who wish to know more about the state’s history and literature, its people, and its cultural heritage. Titles will come from all eras of Arkansas’s past and will include fiction and nonfiction, personal accounts and scholarly studies, many with new introductions and annotations. This list as it develops will reflect the diversity of voices and experiences that is Arkansas.