Correspondence of the Secretary of the Navy relating to African Colonization, 1819-1844
Consists mainly of copies of letters sent by the Secretary of the Navy to agents of the United States stationed on the northwest coast of Africa for the purpose of receiving blacks freed by the capture of slave ships, and letters and reports received by the Secretary of the Navy from these agents.
Records of the American Colonization Society
Founded in 1817, the American Colonization Society sought to resolve the problem of slavery in America by helping African-Americans to return to Africa. The records of the ACS are available through interlibrary loan from the Center for Research Libraries.
Bibliography of Slavery and World Slaving (1900+)
Searchable database containing verified references (except as noted) to approximately 25,000 scholarly works in all academic disciplines and in all western European languages on slavery and slaving, worldwide and throughout human history, including modern times. It includes all known print materials published since 1900 in scholarly formats, as well as digital scholarly journals, recent unpublished presentations at academic conferences, professional historical sites, and major museum exhibitions and catalogs.
Manuscript collections related to slavery
Consists of an open collection of correspondence and documents related to slavery in America, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean area in the 17th through 19th centuries. Among the documents included is a manuscript copy (1830) of the 1st American census conducted in 1790, with statistics for slaves in each state, and several bills-of-sales for slaves.
Papers of the American Slave Trade
This material "documents the international slave trade in Britain's New World colonies and the United States from 1718 to the trade's demise after 1808."
Race, Slavery and Free Blacks: Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1777-1867
This collection consists of petitions by slaves and free persons of color to local legislatures. The petitions were selected from those files at county courthouses in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Material from the UK National Archives, CO 137, Jamaica Correspondence, relating to the slave rebellion trials of 1832.
Slave Trade, 1858-1892: British Foreign Office Collection 541
Consists of correspondence and reports of British officials in Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, from the Foreign Office confidential print.
Slave Trade Journals and Papers. Pt. 1. The Humphrey Morice Papers from the Bank of England, London
Papers of Humphrey Morice, a prominent British slave trader of the 18th century.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
Part 1: Debates over Slavery and Abolition. Part 2: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World. The entire collection, which will have five parts when completed, has a transnational and comparative focus, and encompasses a wide variety of materials, both printed and archival.
Slavery Source material and Critical Literature
Large collection of primary source documents on slavery in the United States. All works are cataloged in the library's Main Catalog.
Slavery Tracts and Pamphlets from the West India Committee Collection
Consists of pamphlets on the sugar trade and slavery in the West Indies.
Southern Historical Manuscripts
From original plantation records in the collection of Louisiana State University, Dept. of Archives and Manuscripts (Baton Rouge).
The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography
Oral histories prepared by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer’s Project, 1936-1938.
Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves.
Voices from the Days of Slavery
“Twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings.”
African American Newspapers: The 19th Century (1827-1882)
Complete text of the major African-American newspapers published in the United States during the 19th century.
Pamphlets collected by H.G. Wilson and now held at John Rylands University. The collection is particularly rich in materials from British provincial philanthropic societies. Also includes materials from America, the West Indies (Jamaica), and India.
Black Abolitionist Papers, 1830-1865
Primary sources from African Americans actively involved in the movement to end slavery in the United States between 1830 and 1865.
Papers covering the activities of J. B. Estlin and his daughter Mary in supporting the British and American anti-slavery movements.
Born a slave, Douglass escaped to the north and became a leading abolitionist in the 1840's
Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society
These papers document the activities of the first formal abolitionist society in America. Included are minutes from 1787 to 1916 and the society's large collection of manuscripts dealing with abolition, spanning the years of 1775-1868.
A collection of anti-slavery papers acquired in 1951 from the Anti-slavery Society by the Rhodes trustees. This is the largest Anti-slavery collection in Great Britain, containing well over 1,000 volumes of manuscript and typescript material in addition to pamphlets and periodicals.
ProQuest Congressional (1789+)
Indexes publications of the U.S. Congress such as hearings, committee reports, documents and prints. Material is available in microfiche and/or electronic. Essential tool for doing legislative history research. Includes Congressional Research Reports from 1916 to the present, U.S. Serial Set from 1789-1969, Annals of Congress from 1789-1824, Register of Debates from 1824-1837, Congressional Globe from 1833-1873, and Congressional Record from 1873-1997.
U.S. Serial Set Digital Collection
Collection of U.S. Government publications compiled under the directive of Congress. Includes Congressional reports and documents as well as executive agency and departmental reports ordered to be printed by Congress.
Making of Modern Law Digital Archive (Legal Treatises 1800-1926)
Digital library of works from the 19th and early 20th centuries on British Commonwealth and American law. Includes treatises, casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches.
Making of Modern Law Digital Archive (U. S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs 1832-1978)
A fully searchable digital archive containing 150 years of U.S. SupremeCourt records and briefs. The record for a case may contain the following types of documents: motions, petitions, oral transcripts, transcripts of the trial record, applications for writ, appendices, letter briefs and jurisdictional statements.
Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1620-1970
Contains digitized and searchable copies of over 300 years of legal primary sources, such as early U.S. state codes, city charters, constitutional conventions and compilations, and other documents.
Comprehensive database of legal materials, including cases, statutes, and regulations of the U.S. government and the various state governments; includes the legal encyclopedia American Jurisprudence 2nd and American Law Reports; case law from 1789 to present; current statutes and regulations. Documents can also be accessed through broad subject categories such as Civil Rights, International Law and Environmental Law.
Slavery and the Judiciary, 1740-1860.
Drawn from the resources of the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, users may access first-hand accounts of trials and cases, reports, arguments, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, and other primary historical materials. Although limited to 105 items, some of the more noteworthy works include the Case of Dred Scott in the United States Supreme Court, the Trial of John Brown, and the Argument of John Quincy Adams, before the Supreme Court of the United States, which is also known as the Amistad Case.
"This project explores multigenerational black, white, and mixed family networks in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing thousands of case files from the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. We include petitions for freedom, civil, criminal, and chancery cases. And we incorporate where possible related documents about these families from special collections, archives, churches, and local historical societies. Scholars from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Maryland will collaborate by uncovering the web of litigants, jurists, legal actors, and participants in this community, and by placing these family networks in the foreground of our interpretive framework of slavery and national formation."
The Avalon Project: Documents on Slavery.
The Avalon Project at the Yale University Law School brings together digitized primary documents, treaties, speeches, and biographical texts relevant to the fields of history, economics, politics, law, diplomacy and government. The documents on slavery include literary works, federal and state statutes, and treaties and agreements concerning the slave trade. Coverage spans pre-eighteenth century to the twenty-first century.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
“A single multi-source data-set of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.”
Black demographic data, 1790-1860: a sourcebook, by Clayton E. Cramer. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1997.
Distribution of Slaves in 1860
Historical statistics of Black America
Historical Statistics of the United States Millennial Edition (Colonial Period to 2000)
Statistical series on subjects ranging from population and land area to production figures for crops and manufactured products. Detailed documentation provides brief histories of the statistical series and source materials.
Digital Library on American Slavery
“The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The Digital Library contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners.”
The Geography of Slavery in Virginia
“The Geography of Slavery project presents full transcriptions and images of all runaway and captured ads for slaves and servants placed in Virginia newspapers from 1736 to 1790, and is in the process of compiling advertisements well into the nineteenth century. In addition, the project offers a number of other documents related to slaves, servants, and slaveholders, including court records, other newspaper notices, slaveholder correspondence, and assorted literature about slavery and indentured servitude.”
“I Will Be Heard!” Abolitionism in America
“Featuring rare books, manuscripts, letters, photographs, and other materials from Cornell University’s pre-eminent anti-slavery and Civil War collections.”