How enslaved and free African Americans buried their dead before the Civil War, and what survives of those grounds today.
The Plantation Burial Ground
On plantations across the antebellum South, the enslaved community typically maintained a burial ground at some distance from the main house, often in a wooded area or on land considered too marginal for cultivation. These plantation slave cemeteries are the single largest category of African American burial ground in the United States, though the great majority survive only as unmarked or fieldstone-marked sites whose existence is preserved in oral memory or in the records of the families that once owned the surrounding land. Most plantation slave cemeteries received no permanent stone monuments; the burials were marked, when they were marked at all, with wooden stakes, conch shells, broken pottery, plant material, or simple fieldstones.
Funerary Practice
Antebellum African American funerary practice drew on a deep well of African religious and ceremonial tradition adapted to the conditions of life in slavery and free Black communities. The washing and dressing of the body by women of the community, the all-night wake with songs and remembrances, the daytime funeral sermon delivered by an itinerant preacher or by the senior man of the community, and the careful tending of the grave in the years that followed were nearly universal features. Where conditions permitted, funerals were occasions for the gathering of large numbers of enslaved people, often crossing plantation boundaries, and were tolerated by slaveholders despite their potential for political organization because of the depth of their cultural importance.
Free Black Cemeteries
In the antebellum North and in the small free Black communities of the upper South, free people of color established formal cemeteries that prefigured the church- and society-based burial grounds of the Reconstruction era. The Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church burial ground in Philadelphia, the African Burial Ground in New York (active until 1794, then closed), and several burial grounds associated with the early African Methodist Episcopal Zion congregations of the urban Northeast are among the most important antebellum free Black cemeteries. These sites carry a particular historical significance because they document a distinctly African American institutional life that was developing in the United States even as the great majority of Black Americans remained legally enslaved.
Survival and Recovery
The survival rate of antebellum African American burial grounds is poor. Plantation slave cemeteries have been disproportionately lost to twentieth-century agricultural intensification, suburban development, and the simple absence of legal protection for unmarked burials on private land. Free Black cemeteries in urban areas have been disproportionately lost to nineteenth- and twentieth-century street widening, the construction of public infrastructure, and the deliberate erasure of historic Black neighborhoods through urban renewal. The work of locating, documenting, and protecting the surviving antebellum African American burial grounds is one of the most urgent tasks in American historic preservation today.
Researching an Antebellum Site
Researchers attempting to document an antebellum African American burial ground should begin with the records of the slaveholding family, including plantation journals, plantation maps, probate inventories, and (where they survive) records of births and deaths among the enslaved population; with county deed and probate records; with the records of any nearby Black or biracial church congregation; with the WPA Slave Narratives collected in the 1930s; and with the oral history of any descendant community in the area. Archaeological and bioarchaeological investigation is sometimes possible, particularly when a site has been threatened by development and when descendant community consent has been obtained.
Honoring the Dead
Where antebellum African American burial grounds survive and have been identified, the work of honoring the dead has typically taken the form of perimeter fencing, the placement of an interpretive marker explaining the historical significance of the site, the periodic gathering of descendant and allied community members for memorial observance, and the careful protection of the ground from further disturbance. Several historically significant antebellum sites have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places under the historical-significance exception to the general regulatory presumption against the listing of cemeteries.