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 and to 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.