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Documenting multiple aspects of slavery and its development in North America, this collection provides more than 100 exerpts from personal accounts, songs, legal documents, diaries, letters, and other written sources. The book portrays the day-to-day connections between, and among, slaves and their owners across more than two centuries of subjunction and resistance, despair and hope. Beginning with a chronicle of the origins of slavery in the British colonies of North America, the collection traces the growth of the system to the antebellum period and includes accounts of slave revolts, auctions, slave travel and laws, and family life. Intimate as well as comprehensive, the documents reveal the individual views, goals, and lives of slaves and their masters.