Chicago History Museum: Updating The Archival Descriptions Of Enslavement Documents

Press release from the Chicago History Museum:

Guest Author

2021-09-28

CHM collections intern Ella Trotter writes about the critical process of describing archival documents regarding enslaved people in the United States.

The Chicago History Museum’s Abakanowicz Research Center holds a collection of more than fifty documents, manuscripts, and letters regarding enslaved people in North America. The largely handwritten collection offers a glimpse into the lives of enslaved people through the writing of enslavers, buyers, and auctioneers. For my internship at CHM, I was asked to engage in an archival description process and provide unique titles for all the objects in this collection as part of CHM’s larger critical cataloging work. During this process, a certain set of objects caught my special interest: the manumission (release from enslavement) documents from Robert Carter, who was born into one of the wealthiest families in Virginia and heir to hundreds of enslaved people. For three decades beginning in 1791, Carter systematically freed more than 500 people he enslaved, making him the protagonist of one of the largest individual acts of manumission in the United States before 1860.

Engraving of Robert Carter, 1801. Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, artist. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Describing Archives Content Standards Letter written by Robert Carter, January 2, 1792. CHM, ICHi-176982

This press release was produced by the Chicago History Museum. The views expressed here are the author’s own.