In A Sketch of My life and Our Family Record, handwritten on twenty-two pages in the 1890s, Willis M. Carter tells of his life enslaved in Virginia and describes his education. It is one of the longer and more-detailed accounts of a former Virginia slave written after the American Civil War (1861–1865) and includes information about his great-grandmother’s birth and enslavement in Africa before the American Revolution (1775–1783).
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