SlaveNorth.com
Title
Slavery in the North
Description
Douglas Harper is a historian, author, journalist and lecturer based in Lancaster, Pa. He is the author of "If Thee Must Fight:" A Civil War History of Chester County, Pa." (Chester County Historical Society, 1990); "An Index of Civil War Soldiers and Sailors from Chester County, Pa." (Chester County Historical Society, 1995); "The Whitman Incident: Revolutionary Revisions to an Ephrata Tale" (Lancaster County Historical Society Journal, 1995); "West Chester to 1865: That Elegant & Notorious Place" (Chester County Historical Society, 1999).
Harper is a graduate of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa., with a degree in history and English. He has been featured in a BBC production on the Welsh settlements in America, and has been interviewed as a source for historical articles by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post and many magazines.
I began researching Northern slavery about three years ago during the course of general Civil War research, and I noticed there was a dearth of information about it online. There's a dearth of it in print, too. I remembered reading Leon Litwack's excellent book "North of Slavery" in college. Technically, it is not about Northern slavery but rather about race relations in the North between the end of slavery there and the Civil War. But on that topic, too, little is readily available in print or online that treats it to any depth.
