Methodology
The Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) was founded to make important documents concerning emancipation accessible to both scholars and the general public. Pursuing this fundamental goal led the project’s current editors to begin publishing our documents and accompanying research in a digital format.
Our digital edition, Black Maryland in the Civil War, represents the next step in a larger transition to digital publishing for FSSP. In it, we present the story of emancipation from the perspective of Black Marylanders, both enslaved and free, to show how they advanced the struggle for freedom and equality.
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.
One of the hallmarks of previous editions published by FSSP has been its rigorous methodology. It is a tradition project editors continue to embrace as we work to update the forms of media and terminologies employed by the project.
When the project first began publishing Freedom in the 1980s, it was limited by the spatial constraints of a bound volume. Not only was it impossible to include images of every document alongside transcriptions, for example, but the editorial team was forced to cut important documents for want of space. The current and forthcoming digital publications allow FSSP to grant readers access to these images and to enhance our ability to tell freedom's story.
Published documents have been carefully chosen from our pre-selected and indexed collection of the most important documents related to the story of emancipation from the National Archives. As in previous editions, they have been carefully transcribed. However, we view the original documents themselves as the final authority on matters of punctuation and style. Every effort has been made to accurately represent these in our transcriptions, but as with any collection, matters of voice and form vary significantly, sometimes within a single document, and are at times ambiguous. Granting readers access to images of these original documents allows them to engage these issues of author intent and self-representation for themselves.
Readers of Freedom will notice several other differences too. Our transcriptions employ breaks to account for page breaks in the original document. We have also opted to transcribe material—return addresses, ranks and titles, file notes, and occasionally endorsements—that would not have been included in our previous methodology. Editors likewise decided to publish images of endorsements and file notes, even when these are not important enough to transcribe, because they contain crucial information for researchers interested in additional documents or similar cases. Our goal in these instances is to present readers with as rich and authentic an experience with the documents as possible while retaining the rigor and standards for which the project has long been known.
Ultimately, the current editors curated and published this collection for you, the scholars and genealogists, students and teachers, and descendants and community members we aim to serve. We hope you will find it a valuable resource, one that ideally raises new questions and promotes further inquiry into the meaning of freedom and its implications in the United States.