Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Bee
with a large circulation among merchants, planters, and professional men, and thus
“a fair index of the 'public opinion' of Louisiana,” published ads for runaways identifying
women by their whipping scars or physical deformities on parts of their bodies that
would require that the women be stripped to show the marks, and thereby providing
evidence that Southern public opinion did not object to this.
19
Marking and reprocessing the newspapers allowed Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah
Grimké to compile the topic's “many thousand facts thus authenticated by the slave-
holders themselves. ”
20
Having sorted and categorized the data in the ads, the sisters and
Weld offered various modes of sorting the same information in the body of the topic.
Testimonies of white former Southerners, or Northerners who had visited the South,
or those still living in the South, for example, were presented as blocks of narrative.
Then, some of the same material was extracted from the narratives and broken up into
topics. While some topics, such as “Slaves suffer from hunger” were supplied mainly by
brief extracts from narratives or questionnaires or other personal accounts, and others
like “ Punishments: Floggings ” and “ Punishments: Tortures ” entirely from runaway ads,
others, like “Clothing,” drew together individual testimony, material from legal docu-
ments, and runaway ads. Those ads were central. The text explains: “We have . . . given
to the testimony of the slaveholders themselves, under their own names, a precedence
over that of all other witnesses.” It follows with testimonies that back up these ads and
“show, that the slaveholders who wrote the preceding advertisements, describing the
work of their own hands, in branding with hot irons, maiming, mutilating, cropping,
shooting, knocking out the teeth and eyes of their slaves, breaking their bones, etc.,
have manifested,
as far as they have gone
in the description, a commendable fidelity to
truth. ”
American Slavery As It Is
moves recursively; each set of data is backed up by another
level of evidence. The compilation of runaway ads supply solid evidence in the slavehold-
ers' words, but further testimony confirms that specific slaveholders have committed
these deeds. Personal testimony explains the analysis of runaway ads, and ads authenti-
cate the testimony.
The topic was made more usable to readers via a detailed table of contents and an
index, which allowed for discontinuous, topical access. The table of contents breaks the
sections down via headings and offers a nearly page-by-page digest, which forecasts and
prepares the reader to be bombarded with horrifying particulars, as Stephen Browne
notes.
21
Indexes generally serve as a bridge between author and reader, offering con-
cepts, even if the author did not use a specific term directly. Indexes allow readers to
access material from additional angles. One can use the
American Slavery As It Is
index
