Johnson, Michael, and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South, W.W. Norton, 1986.

While this history is ostensibly about the lives of biracial people in antebellum South Carolina, it focuses primarily on the life of a freed slave named William Ellison, who became quite wealthy.

Johnson, Walter, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Harvard University Press, new ed., 2001.

This book is a comprehensive history of slave markets in the United States, including information on how slaves were treated from market to plantation and how slaves struggled to preserve their humanity.

Lester, Julius, To Be a Slave, Penguin Modern Classics, 1968.

This compilation includes first-person accounts of what it was like to be a slave in pre-Civil War America and related historical commentary.

Link, William A., Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia, University of North...