About
About Enslaved Texas
Enslaved Texas
Enslaved Texas is a nonprofit, a 501(c)(3) public charity, that preserves, maps and shares the history of enslaved people in Texas: who they were, where they were brought from, and where they lived, drawn from the records that name them, and accessible to the public.
In 1860 the census counted 182,566 enslaved people in Texas and recorded almost none of them by name. In 1867 more than 50,000 of those men registered to vote and gave a board of registrars their name, their birthplace and the year they came to Texas. Enslaved Texas puts every one of them back on the map: county by county, birthplace by birthplace, name by name, with the original handwritten page behind each entry, so that a descendant tracing African American genealogy, a student or a historian can find them. Browse the counties, see where they came from, or search a name.
Deborah M. Liles, Ph.D.
Deborah M. Liles, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and W. K. Gordon Endowed Chair in Texas History at Tarleton State University, and the historian who directs Enslaved Texas. Her research examines the connection between slavery and the antebellum livestock industry in Texas. It rests on years of work in county tax rolls, deed books and census schedules, records more than 150 years old in which enslaved people were listed beside land and cattle. She has written or co-edited five books, among them Women in Civil War Texas and Texas Women and Ranching, each awarded the Liz Carpenter Award, and African Americans in Central Texas History: From Slavery to Civil Rights; she is a Fellow and past president of the East Texas Historical Association, a Fellow of the West Texas Historical Association, vice president of the Alliance for Texas History, and a board member of the Texas Library and Archives Foundation and of the Friends of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, the archive that holds the registers this site draws on.
Her research produced databases with tens of thousands of names of the enslaved and then freedmen of Texas. Enslaved Texas is the culmination of that vision and of years of work: the people the tax rolls reduced to valuations, and whom the history of the state has largely overlooked, found again by name in the records they left and brought to the public.
The team
The site, the map, the search and the transcription and review tools behind Enslaved Texas are designed and built by the team at Salt Branch Technology Group, an AI consulting and software firm in Fort Worth, Texas. Its work is AI-powered business systems modernization: turning a company's decades of records into working data, building custom web and mobile applications, and bringing legacy systems into the present. The same methods that modernize a business's records are what turn a handwritten register of 1867 into a map anyone can search. The team provides its work to Enslaved Texas as a contribution to the history of the state it calls home.
Volunteer reviewers read every published entry against the original register page; the counties still waiting are waiting for more of them. Become a reviewer.
Enslaved Texas is a 501(c)(3) public charity (EIN 42-3809138); contributions are tax-deductible. Questions, corrections and research enquiries: info@enslavedtexas.org.