The Thaumaturgy Department

Richmond Slave Trail is a walking trail that chronicles the history of the trade in enslaved Africans from Africa to Virginia until 1775, and away from Virginia, especially Richmond, to other locations in the Americas until 1865. […] It follows a route traveled by some of the thousands of Africans who made their journey south by crossing the James River chained together in a coffle, or by getting on ships to New Orleans. The trail then follows a route through the slave markets of Richmond….

from the site:

This online resource was created in 2009 as part of an ongoing initiative to help document the history of slavery in Richmond, Virginia. Its sponsors include the Richmond Slave Trail Commission, the public history program of VCU’s Department of History and the Special Collections and Archives department of the VCU Libraries.

This site will function as a learning resource and will help identify images, print sources, manuscript collections, and other online resources related to the history of slavery in Richmond. This project is also intended to identify, acquire, and organize for public access the archives of the Richmond Slave Trail Commission.

For more information about this project please contact Special Collections and Archives. 

As we rehearse The Whipping Man, a reminder that the reality, and the capacity, for the cruelty & dehumanization of slavery is not a thing of the distant past, nor even just recent memory. It lives today.

Professor Blight of Yale University uses Herman Melville’s poem “On the Slain Collegians” to introduce the horrifying slaughter of 1864. The architect of the strategy that would eventually lead to Union victory, but at a staggering human cost, was Ulysses S. Grant, brought East to assume control of all Union armies in 1864. Professor Blight narrates the campaigns of 1864, including the Battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. While Robert E. Lee battled Grant to a stalemate in Virginia, however, William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union forces took Atlanta before beginning their March to the Sea, destroying Confederate morale and fighting power from the inside. Professor Blight closes his lecture with a description of the first Memorial Day, celebrated by African Americans in Charleston, SC 1865.

Yale History Professor David Blight offers some thoughts on the nature of history and the study of history, before moving into a discussion of the reasons for Americans’ enduring fascination with the Civil War. The reasons include: the human passion for epics, Americans’ fondness for redemption narratives, the Civil War as a moment of “racial reckoning,” the fascination with loss and lost causes, interest in military history, and the search for the origins of the modern United States.

Having dealt with the role of violence and the Supreme Court in bringing about the end of Reconstruction in his last lecture, Professor Blight now turns to the role of national electoral politics, focusing in particular on the off-year Congressional election of 1874 and the Presidential election of 1876. 1874 saw the return of the Democrats to majority status in the Senate and the House of Representatives, as voters sick of corruption and hurt by the Panic of 1873 fled the Republicans in droves. According to many historians, the contested election of 1876, and the “Compromise of 1877,” which followed it, marked the official end of Reconstruction. After an election tainted by fraud and violence, Republicans and Democrats brokered a deal by which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes took the White House in exchange for restoration of “home rule” for the South.

Professor Blight finishes his lecture series with a discussion of the legacies of the Civil War. Since the nineteenth century, Blight suggests, there have been three predominant strains of Civil War memory, which Blight defines as reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist. The war has retained a political currency throughout the years, and the ability to control the memory of the Civil War has been, and continues to be, hotly contested.