Primary Sources: Slavery & Abolition: America

"This website features 117 items from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. This group of unique manuscripts and rare published materials includes handwritten documents and letters (Phillis Wheatley and members of the Hartford family), the earliest antislavery pamphlet published in Massachusetts (The Selling of Joseph, printed in 1700), petitions of enslaved people requesting freedom, documents certifying the freedom of specific individuals, materials relating to two people involved in landmark legal cases that helped to bring an end to slavery in Massachusetts (Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker), warrants and depositions for freedom seekers, bills of sale and account books documenting enslavement transactions, and a series of letters written in 1795 in which some notable men share their perspective on the history and end of slavery in Massachusetts."

Contains historical documents and pictures related to the history of African AmericansA site from PBS

"The American Slavery Documents Collection contains an assortment of legal and personal documents related to slavery in the United States. Nearly all of the documents are singular and otherwise unrelated to the other, but as a composite, the collection brings to light the details of the lives and deaths of free and enslaved African Americans during the Antebellum and early Reconstruction Eras. The type of materials include bills of sale, manumission papers, emancipation notes, bonds, auction notices and other assorted items. The documents represent nearly all of the states of the American south including: North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, but a few documents are from northern states like New York and New Jersey."

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.

A website from the University Library at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This digital project "provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture." Indexes are provided by author, title, subjects, or geographic area. Users may also browse or search collections. Collections include : "First-Person Narratives of the American South" , "Library of Southern Literature" , "North American Slave Narratives" , "The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865" , "The Church in the Southern Black Community" , "The North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940" , and "North Carolinians and the Great War" . The site provides information on citing the documents and lesson plans and activities for classroom use.

"The majority held that “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves,” whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore did not have standing to sue in federal court. Because the Court lacked jurisdiction, Taney dismissed the case on procedural grounds.

Taney further held that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional and foreclose Congress from freeing slaves within Federal territories. The opinion showed deference to the Missouri courts, which held that moving to a free state did not render Scott emancipated. Finally, Taney ruled that slaves were property under the Fifth Amendment, and that any law that would deprive a slave owner of that property was unconstitutional. "
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/60us393

"Digital History projects present history using new multi-media and technological tools. Each project focuses on a theme."

"... gives a panoramic and eclectic review of African American history and culture from the early 19th through the early 20th centuries, with the bulk of the material published between 1875 and 1900. Among the authors represented are Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin W. Arnett, Alexander Crummel, and Emanuel Love."

"Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress."

"The recordings of former slaves in Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine states. Twenty-three interviewees discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. 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. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond."

"Several thousand items ranging from historical documents and rare visual materials to contemporary photo-journalism, relating to the entirety of African American history from the 16th century to the present; selected in the course of developing the NYPL website "African American Migration Experience." "

"The collection of pamphlets and supplementary texts within Recovered Histories covers a century of campaigning in Europe and America, capturing the voices of the enslaved, enslavers, slave ship surgeons, abolitionists, parliamentarians, the clergy, planters and rebels."

"A full-text legal case history of the Dred Scott case expanded to include thirty-three additional resources in a fully searchable collection in TEI encoded XML documents and images." Washington University

A collection of inspiring speeches on the social movements that have changed America. Gottheimer examines speeches as tools of persuasion and relates the history behind the speakers and their movements and their fervor and passion, which caused them to put their careers and sometimes their lives at risk.
Description from Amazon.com
CNU ONLY

This digital archive is the result of the Georgetown University Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation.

"Website visitors should be warned that several of the words, descriptions, and images from Harper’s Weekly are considered racially offensive by today’s standards. The materials are presented in order to give a true historical picture of the leading 19th-century newspaper’s view of black Americans. We at HarpWeek hope this site will serve as a valuable resource which provides an important perspective on the multifaceted history of black Americans, generates a deeper understanding and respect for the subject, and sparks further interest in its study and discussion."

Includes a database of documented slaving expeditions and a database identifies over 67,000 Africans aboard slave ships, using name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation.

This site provides three different modes of access: Browse Mode - "provides access to all the primary material in the archive -- texts, images, songs, 3-D objects, film clips, &c. -- one at a time." Search Mode - "allows you to search all the primary material at once." Interpret Mode - "includes an interactive timeline, virtual exhibits designed to suggest ways of exploring and understanding the primary material, as well as lesson plans for teachers and student projects. Usually the best place to enter is the BROWSE MODE, which gives you the most direct access to the story of Stowe's story as an American cultural phenomenon." Use this site to research Uncle Tom's Cabin; site includes reviews, articles and numerous other resources..

"... is an electronic archive of two communities in the American Civil War--Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennyslvania. The Valley Web site includes searchable newspapers, population census data, agricultural census data, manufacturing census data, slaveowner census data, and tax records. The Valley Web site also contains letters and diaries, images, maps, church records, and military rosters. The Valley project is a University of Virginia research project funded in part by the National Endowment of the Humanities."