Slavery in Mecklenburg County Home

“...as good a boy as I own” refers to Milas, a slave owned by Joseph Ross, who asked for his master’s permission to marry a slave girl from the Walker plantation. Ross, in a letter to Walker, acknowledges the marriage and encourages Walker to do the same.

This website provides a glimpse into 19^th century slavery in Mecklenburg County located in south-central North Carolina. The documents contained herein were all pulled from the Special Collections Department at the J. Murrey Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The site has six main sections: Medical, Daily Life, Advertisements, Propaganda, Commerce, and Legal. These categories were determined by the letters, bills, receipts, journals, ads, invoices, and other documents found in Special Collections. All the documents pertain to slavery and range from newspaper editorials, poems, hiring contracts, wills, ordinances, court cases, slave sales, inventories of Negroes, rules for owning slaves, and medicines used in the treatment of slaves.

We hope this website will encourage further study of slavery in Mecklenburg County.

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We attempted to fix our site for Mozilla Firefox users, but, not being Computer Science majors, had no luck. Sorry.