LibGuides: Civil Rights Research Collections: Slavery and Abolition

The Atlantic Slave Trade Triangle

Microform Collections

Papers of the American Slave Trade Series

Papers of the American Slave Trade documents the international traffic in slaves in Britain’s New World colonies and the United States.

Race, Slavery and Free Blacks

This collection contains all 2,917 extant legislative petitions on the subject of race, slavery, and free blacks in the South dating from 1777 to 1867. The petitions come from the following states: Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Written by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, blacks and whites, men and women, slaves and freemen, petitions include requests for emancipation, mass campaigns demanding the total abolition of slavery, and complaints about the activities of free blacks and address issues such as manumission, colonization, religion, laws governing slaves, racial mixing, and black military service.

Records of the Freedmen's Hospital, 1872-1910

The papers document the various administrations of the hospital. The files include annual reports, correspondence, bills, newspaper clippings, rules and regulations handbooks, testimony transcripts, and memoranda.

Records of U.S. Colored Troops (1863-1865)

This collection consists of correspondence from military officers and from civilians regarding the members of the U.S. Colored Troops.

Slavery in Ante-Bellum Southern Industries

This collection consists of letters and other documents relating to specific industries in the South that commonly used slave labor.

State Slavery Statutes

This collection includes over 7, 100 state statutes regarding slavery dating from 1789 to 1865 in the United States. Included is every statute passed in the fifteen slave states that dealt with slavery, free blacks, and the broader issue of race. Also included are private laws, special acts, legislative resolutions, and texts of state constitutions and subsequent revisions as they affected slavery.

Electronic Collections

Slavery and Anti-Slavery Collection, Part 1
This first component of Slavery and Anti-Slavery includes collections from the United States and Europe on the worldwide movement for the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

This database contains:

1.9 million cross-searchable pages: 7289 books, 79 serials, 16 manuscript collections, 377 supreme court records and briefs and 194 reference articles from Macmillan, Charles Scribner's Sons and Gale encyclopedias.

Links to websites, biographies, chronology, bibliographies, and information on key collections, to give users background and context for further research.

Collections published through partnerships with the Amistad Research Center, Oberlin College, Oxford University and many other institutions.
American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography
A collection of slave narratives, including oral histories and sound files.
Accessible Archives: African-American Newspapers
This collection of 19th Century African-American newspapers includes the following sources:

The Christian Recorder
The Colored American/Weekly Advocate
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
Freedom’s Journal
The National Era
The North Star
Provincial Freeman
Accessible Archives: The Liberator
The Liberator was a weekly newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, Massachusetts. This became the most influential newspaper in the antebellum antislavery crusade. It was published from 1831-1865, and the archive includes every issue.
Accessible Archives: The National Anti-Slavery Standard
The National Anti-Slavery Standard was the official weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society, containing essays, debates, speeches, events, reports and anything else deemed newsworthy in relation to the question of slavery in the United States and other parts of the world. It ran from 1840-1870.
Accessible Archives: The Civil War
The archive is divided into the following subparts:

Part I: A Newspaper Perspective
Part II: The Soldiers’ Perspective
Part III: The Generals’ Perspective
Part IV: A Midwestern Perspective
Part V: Iowa’s Perspective
Part VI: Northeast Regimental Histories
Black Studies Center
Contains the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, including a timeline, images, video, and interdisciplinary essays. Also includes the International Index to Black Periodicals, the Black Literature Index, and the full text backfile of major black newspapers.
African American Newspapers 1827-1998
Newspapers geared toward the African American community from 1827-1998.
Slavery in America and the World
This HeinOnline database includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery. This library has hundreds of pamphlets and books written about slavery—defending it, attacking it, or simply analyzing it—including an expansive slavery collection from Buffalo & Erie County Public Library. They have also gathered every English-language legal commentary on slavery published before 1920, which includes many essays and articles in obscure, hard-to-find journals in the United States and elsewhere. They have provided more than a thousand pamphlets and books on slavery from the 19th century. They have also included many modern histories of slavery. Within this library is a section containing all modern law review articles on the subject, as well.