Story By Julia Masters
Photos By Eleanor Burcham
When Wilson Swain was born on Feb. 27 he wasn’t given his father’s last name. He was a slave and in 1841, it was customary for slaves to take the last name of their owners.
He was born in bondage to the home of David Swain, who served as the state’s governor for three terms and then as the second president of UNC-Chapel Hill from 1835-1868. As a child, Wilson served the Swain household as a personal servant to David’s son Robert and later was an apprentice to UNC-CH’s chief gardener.
He was part of the delegation that negotiated terms with Union troops to not destroy Chapel Hill, and he took his father’s name only after emancipation—becoming Wilson Swain Caldwell.
After serving as justice of the peace and opening a school for African American children in Chapel Hill, Caldwell was elected to the Chapel Hill Board of Alderman in 1886.
He died in 1898 and was buried in the Chapel Hill Town Cemetery under an obelisk that has since been changed from honoring UNC-CH’s first president and slave owner to commemorating Wilson Swain Caldwell and other university servants.
Caldwell’s story is just one record among more than 600,000 that have been brought to life by “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade” or Enslaved.org, founded in 2018.
“We are trying to understand and trying to make visible the fullness and the various dimensions of life and human life for the enslaved,” said Daryle Williams, principal investigator and founder of Enslaved.org and professor of history at the University of Maryland.
Scholars and researchers at Michigan State University, the University of Maryland, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and other institutions recognized the need for an accessible and comprehensive database that could make sense of the records of historical enslavement. With the goal of identifying, exploring, and visualizing enslaved peoples and those who owned slaves, Enslaved.org invites the public to connect individuals to events and times in history, subscription-free.
“The website itself is a reflection of our goal to create an open-source, open access, digital discovery tool to understand the lives of the enslaved,” Williams said. “We also see ourselves as being part of a broader conversation about race and racism in the Americas and probably the world.”
The project’s main objective is to bring clarity to the lives of enslaved individuals and founders hope that audiences will be able to see how the lives of the enslaved are built into the fabric of society.
Williams said there is a hunger for African-Americans to know their family history and to discover the part African-Americans had in building America.
“I think it’s really important to try to understand how we got to be where we are in this moment,” said Chaitra Powell, African American Collections and Outreach Archivist at UNC-Chapel Hill. People “are wanting to advocate for social justice and fight environmental racism and having stories recorded has really helped them make their case.”
She said that historical archives give people evidence that empowers their drive for a better future.
“We are part of a moment right now where genealogy, genetics, family history are all very important,” Williams said. “At the national level, we think about how the last year has been an intense sort of acceleration, intensification of debates about what is the role of slavery in the formation of the United States, what is the role of race and racism, what roles and contributions did African-Americans make, what roles and contributions did anti-blackness make.”
He said that Enslaved.org is a conversation about race and reconciliation and reckoning.
Dr. William Andrews, former professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill and expert in African American literature, has written multiple publications of slave autobiographies and helped establish “North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920.”
Andrews said slave narratives in themselves are a commitment to the pursuit of true freedom and each autobiography is taking a stand against the institution of slavery.
“Reading these autobiographies today, anybody regardless of color or ethnicity can learn how depraved an institution slavery was and how much human depravity was brought about by white people so you see the worst of America when you see what slavery was really about,” Andrews said.
“But you can also see the best because of the people who resisted, who found various ways to obtain their freedom. Those people are tremendously inspiring because they had such faith. They refused to give in, they refused to become demoralized, they were determined.”
Historic sites as tools of empowerment
There was something majestic about the way the branches of the walnut tree reached for the sky, thought Michelle Lanier, as she stood outside of the old slave dwellings at Horton Grove, part of the Historic Stagville Plantation Site in Durham, North Carolina.
“Everything felt charged with story. I felt that I was entering into a sacred place, into a place that held memory, that connected directly to me,” said Lanier, director of N.C. Division of State Historic Sites. “I felt quiet. I felt that I needed to be still and contemplative. I felt sadness for the condition of human bondage and its legacies. I felt something bigger than that, which was a sense of gratitude for the ability to stand as a free person, as a liberated person, knowing that my ancestors did not have that luxury.”
Historic Stagville was once home to one of the largest plantations in North Carolina, owned by the Bennehan-Cameron family. It was comprised of 30,000 acres of land and enslaved over 900 people—including some of Lanier’s ancestors.
She talked about the importance of visiting historic sites like Stagville as ways to inspire connection and feelings of resiliency, seeing the way that enslaved peoples carved out family culture and humanity even amid the most inhumane practice on earth.
“Our historic sites stand as tools for moving us through to new possibilities of coming together as people in this country and certainly in the South,” Lanier said.
Her goal for the N.C. Division of State Historic Sites is True Inclusion, that people of every background can see themselves reflected in the division and its work.
Historic Stagville has its own African American genealogy program rooted in oral histories, family records, and primary documents. To date, it has traced over 3,000 people with connections to the site.
“For some families, it is particularly powerful to discover that their ancestors are from a place that they actually can visit and can still feel in connection with because so many lives have been lost across this country,” said Vera Cecelski, site manager of Historic Stagville.
Their project is fueled by family oral histories of the descendants in the area and plantation records.
“Stagville can also be a place of memory for the resistance and the resilience and the freedom of thinking and the building of culture of people and their descendants held here on this place,” Ceceliski said. “It has a rich ability to be a place for us to remember the people who survived and endured here and the way that they continually sought freedom in the way that they continually fought back against injustice.”
Learning through preservation
Dolly was described as good-looking. She was 30 years old, with a light complexion and good teeth. Dolly, who had an 11-year-old daughter, ran away from enslavement on the Manigault plantation in Augusta, Georgia, on Tuesday, April 7, 1863. A $50 reward was advertised for her capture. Her story lives in the archives at Wilson Library at UNC-CH.
“I don’t know if she was able to take her daughter,” Powell said. “And just thinking about my own kids and how you could be caught up in the system that you have no control over, and it’s just innocent people that we know today or 400 years ago can be treated in the same way,” Powell said.
As an archivist, she draws on parallels between the material she collects and things that are happening today.
At the Orange County Historical Museum, exhibits and programs coordinator, Courtney Smith said the displays she curates are meant to tell the whole story of Orange County, incorporating the histories of African Americans.
“Their story is history, their story matters and has contributed. Everything that we are today is based on what has happened in the past,” Smith said.
Each of these methods of preserving history helps people today connect, heal and learn from the past to build a better future.
“For me, it has been holy work,” Lanier said. “There’s something very spiritual about it to connect the dots between my life and the lives lost and life stories of my ancestors. I feel stronger knowing as much as I can about them. Many of them faced extreme hardship because of legal and socialized racism, and so in many ways, I think about how I can live a healthier, more just, more abundant life for myself, my family, and as many others as possible.”
