This 19th-Century Diary Written by an Enslaved Maryland Man Is a Crucial Record of His Life and Family History—and the Only One of Its Kind Found in the United States

A diary kept by an enslaved man in 19th-century Maryland is now on public display at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C., and researchers say it stands alone in the historical record. Historians who have studied the document believe it is the only known journal of its kind in the country: a multigenerational chronicle begun by a person held in bondage and carried forward across the family for years afterward.

The diarist, Adam Francis Plummer, lived and labored on Maryland farmland in the decades before the Civil War. Rather than a single entry or scattered notes, his record spans more than six decades of continuous writing, an extraordinarily long run for any personal journal from the period, let alone one produced under the constraints of slavery.

Plummer used the pages for far more than reflection. He logged the arrival and loss of family members, kept inventories of household belongings, and tracked money he owed and money owed to him. Taken together, the entries function less like a diary in the modern sense and more like a working ledger of a family's survival, documenting the practical realities of daily life alongside its emotional weight.

The most wrenching passages concern a forced separation. Plummer's wife, Emily Saunders Arnold Plummer, and the couple's eight children were sold away from him and taken to a plantation in Howard County, dozens of miles to the north. Plummer had no reliable way to learn where his family had been sent, and his early attempts to trace them turned up nothing.

His search stretched on for months without success. Then, unexpectedly, Emily managed to get word to him herself, reestablishing contact after a prolonged period of silence. From that point, Plummer kept up a correspondence by letter, using it to track his family's circumstances and whereabouts even while they remained apart.

In his own writing, Plummer described the toll of the split, noting the family was "broke up and parted" at the close of 1855 and that he searched for five anguished months before Emily's letter finally reached him the following spring, proposing a meeting point roughly 20 miles from where he was held. He confessed in the entry that he doubted he would ever feel at ease again, writing that he feared he'd "never be comfortable again."

Scholars view the diary as a rare firsthand counterweight to the historical record on slavery in the United States, much of which survives through the accounts of enslavers, court documents, or after-the-fact interviews rather than contemporaneous writing by enslaved people themselves. Because literacy was systematically denied to most enslaved individuals, surviving journals of this length and detail are exceptionally uncommon, making Plummer's decades-long habit of recording his family's life a significant exception rather than the rule.

The document's continued preservation and its move into a museum setting also reflect a broader, ongoing effort by descendants and institutions to keep such family records from being lost or scattered. Its display at the Anacostia Community Museum gives the public direct access to a text that had largely remained within family and archival circles, offering a firsthand narrative of resilience, separation and reunion that official records of the era rarely captured.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine