About
For nearly fifty years, the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) has emphasized the key role that formerly enslaved people played in their own emancipation. Since 1976, its editors have collected and analyzed letters, testimony, and petitions from the moment when four million people emerged from slavery and began to claim their freedom in the U.S. South. Published as Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, these volumes tell the story of emancipation in the words of freedpeople and their contemporaries. Across six acclaimed volumes, Freedom has reshaped how scholars, teachers, and the public understand the struggle to build a multiracial liberal democracy in the wake of slavery.
As it approaches its fiftieth anniversary, FSSP is beginning a new chapter. In 2025, project staff began the process of transforming Freedom from a print series into a digital edition. This change will allow FSSP to make its materials available more quickly, to offer enhanced discoverability, and to reach larger audiences. While parts of emancipation’s archive have previously been digitized, the digital edition of Freedom will provide scholars, teachers, and the public at large infinitely greater access to these crucial documents.
The digital collection on this website, which documents the experiences and aspirations of Black Maryland during the Civil War, is the first part of this much larger effort to bring freedom's archive more fully into public view. It was made possible by generous support from the Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture.
The edition engages accounts like that of Barbara Diggs, who indignantly testified that “I am a free woman, but my children are slaves of Dr. Featherbridge of Talbot. Co Md.,” alongside those of Black soldiers like Surgeon Alexander Augusta. Assigned to the 7th U.S.C.T., Augusta elicited surprise and indignation from the Army medical examination board after they observed “that he is a person of African descent.” For many Black Marylanders, seizing freedom positioned them in opposition to the state and federal authorities who oversaw a sprawling system of racial expropriation and repression, even while ostensibly waging a war for freedom. As Black recruiter George Hackett observed, enslaved people would join “like bees to the hive” in the struggle against the Confederacy, but only if their rights as free people were guaranteed. For Diggs, Augusta, and countless others, that guarantee was tentative at best.
There are several ways to use this collection. You may decide to scroll down to the exhibits, featured below, which offer an overview of each section of the collection along with an interactive map of the full edition. But because the accounts within often involve ideas beyond each exhibit theme, you may find it useful to search by tag, which allows you to view all of the documents related to a particular topic. Teachers may find this function useful, for example, assigning small groups a tagged topic to research before facilitating a larger discussion of the trends they reveal. Finally, the documents in this collection are fully searchable, so you may find it productive to search by name or term, pulling, for example, all of the documents dealing with Frederick Douglass or every item mentioning jails.