Census returns and other government documents, newspapers and periodicals, travelers' accounts, memoirs and autobiographies, and an abundance of polemical literature have much to tell historians about life on ante-bellum plantations. The autobiographies of former slaves, several twentieth-century oral history collections, and a rich record of songs and folklore are significant sources for the black experience in slavery. All the historical literature, however, from Phillips to the most recent studies, has relied heavily on the enormous collections of manuscript plantation records that survive in research libraries scattered throughout the South. These manuscripts consist of business records, account books, slave lists, overseers' reports, diaries, private letters exchanged among family members and friends, and even an occasional letter written by a literate slave. They come mostly from the larger tobacco, cotton, sugar, and rice plantations, but a significant number survive from the more modest estates and smaller slaveholdings whose economic operations tended to be less specialized.
Plantation records reveal nearly every aspect of plantation life.
Moreover, these records are immensely valuable for studies of black slavery. Needless to say, since they were compiled by members of the white master class, they provide little direct evidence of the inner feelings and private lives of the slave population. But they are the best sources of information about the care and treatment of slaves, about problems in the management of slave labor, and about forms of slave resistance short of open rebellion. They also tell us much about the behavior of slaves, from which historians can at least draw inferences about the impact of slavery on the minds and personalities of its black victims. Deposited in southern state archives and in the libraries of many southern universities and historical societies, the number of available plantation records has increased significantly in recent decades.