History - Primary Sources: Slavery & Abolition

Including papers of William Lloyd Garrison and the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Boston Public Library)

Collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials, from the 1820s through the Civil War. Provides a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement.

Includes primary sources on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, black in the World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement. (Footnote.com)

Data on race and slavery extracted from 18th and 19th-century documents, including court documents, wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, etc. TIP: Click Browse Subjects for a different way to dig into these documents. (Univ. of North Carolina at Greensboro)

Transcriptions and images of more than 4,000 newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants between 1736 and 1803. (Virginia Center for Digital History)

Digitized books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights. Part of the Documenting the American South collection. (Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

Projects documenting topics such as the Underground Railroad, black hospitals and health care, the Brown decision, and white vs black housing in Virginia. (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities)

Pamphlets and leaflets document the social and political implications of the anti-slavery / abolitionist movement at the local, regional, and national levels. Includes sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes. (Cornell Univ.)

Read petitions to Washington, D.C., from slaveholders requesting compensation for their emancipated slaves. (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. (Library of Congress)

Offers all of the records that remain from the journey of the Sally, which set sail from Providence, Rhode Island to West Africa on a slaving voyage in 1764. Visit "The Documents" area to find letters, invoices, legal documents, and trade books that tell how the ship was outfitted, who sailed aboard, and what cargo she carried. (Center for Digital Initiatives, John Carter Brown Library, Brown Univ.)