Slavery & Abolition

Slavery & Abolition Resources

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy

Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy

Database of enslaved brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries. Includes documents from archives in France, Spain, and Texas. Information includes African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations.

Antislavery Pamphlet Collection

Antislavery Pamphlet Collection | 1725 – 1911

University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries – Printed pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725-1911. Includes speeches, sermons, proceedings and other publications of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, and a small number of pro-slavery tracts.

Black Abolitionist Archive

Black Abolitionist Archive

University of Detroit Mercy – Collection of speeches by antebellum blacks and editorials from the 1820s – Civil War, providing a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement.

Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery

Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery

Database on research and analysis of slave owners to understand slavery’s role in shaping British history and present, research on the lives of enslaved people in the Caribbean.

Charles F. Heartman Manuscripts of Slavery Collection

Charles F. Heartman Manuscripts of Slavery Collection | 1724 – 1897

Xavier University of Louisiana Library – Pieces dating from 1724 to 1897 relating directly to the social, economic, civil, and legal status of enslaved Negroes and Free People of Color in Louisiana, especially in New Orleans.

Colored Conventions Project

Colored Conventions Project | 1830s – 1890s

Primary sources from the long conventions movement. Includes minutes, proceedings, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, transcripts, and images.

Documenting the American South

Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives

Digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture. Includes autobiographical narratives of self-emancipated and formerly enslaved people published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books up to 1920.

Freedom on the Move

Freedom on the Move

Database of “runaway ads” posted in American colonies with details of individual lives–their personality, appearance, and life story. The ads constitute a rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.

The Free Womb Project

The Free Womb Project

Multilingual digital collection of laws legislating the gradual abolition of slavery through “Free Womb” decrees across the Atlantic World. Each law is translated and accompanied by a historical essay and reading list.

Guide to the Slavery in North America Collection

Guide to the Slavery in North America Collection | 1752 – 1864

University of Chicago Library – Sources documenting slavery and the treatment of enslaved persons in the 18th and 19th centuries, primarily in the U.S. Includes bills of sale, letters, wills, and more.

Log Book of Slave Traders

Log Book of Slave Traders | 1757 – 1758

Museum of Connecticut History – Nine pages from the logbook of Samuel Gould, a first mate or supercargo on three slave ships. Full logbook available to researchers at the State Library.

Massachusetts Historical Society

Massachusetts Historical Society

Historical manuscripts and rare published works that serve as a window into the lives of African Americans in Massachusetts from the late 17th century through the abolition of slavery under the Massachusetts Constitution in the 1780s.

Medford Slave Trade Letters

Medford Slave Trade Letters | 1759 – 1765

Medford Historical Society and Museum – Series of letters from 1759 – 1765 between Timothy Fitch, a merchant and Medford resident, and his employee Peter Gwinn. The letters reveal the realities and truths of the Atlantic Slave trade and remain a historic link and witness to eighteenth-century human trafficking.

Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie

Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie | 1761 – 1763

Zeeland Archives – Reconstruction of one triangular or slave voyage using authentic archive documents. The voyage can be followed from day to day. The “pivotal characters” of 252 years ago “report” the events on board and sometimes ashore, through the records they have left behind.

Native Bound Unbound Project

Native Bound Unbound Project

Transcription project on primary source documents related to indigenous slavery, aiming to reclaim the voice of the millions of enslaved Indigenous people of the Americas, telling the stories of their lives through surviving historical documents.

People of the Wye House

People of the Wye House | 1770 – 1826

Searchable database of the enslaved people of the Wye House Plantation, historic home since the mid-seventeenth century in Maryland. Aims to bring the lives of the enslaved peoples on the plantation through archaeological remains.

Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain project

Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain project

A searchable database of newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. Many were of African descent, though a small number were from the Indian sub-continent and a few were Indigenous Americans.

Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice | 1753 – 1835

Brown University – Digital archive of varying historical documents, from the records of slaving voyages to personal correspondence to student commencement orations. Focus on university’s region.

Slaves and the Courts collection

Slaves and the Courts collection | 1740 – 1860

Library of Congress – Mostly legal documents from the 19th century, including materials associated with the Dred Scott case and the abolitionist activities of John Brown, John Quincy Adams, and William Lloyd Garrison. 18th-century cases include Somerset v. Stewart, decided in England a few years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Slave Revolt in Jamaica

Slave Revolt in Jamaica | Cartographic Narrative | 1760 – 1761

Animated thematic map narrating the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the 18th century British Empire, offers an interpretation of the military campaign’s spatial dynamics. Spurs thought about the importance of the landscape to the course of the uprising and the difficulty of representing such events cartographically with available sources.

Slave Societies Digital Archive

Slave Societies Digital Archive

Vanderbilt University – Endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. Extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World, and also includes information about the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them.

Slave Voyages

Slave Voyages

Compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Database of origins and forced relocations in the trans-atlantic world and Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more.

(Un)Silencing Slavery

(Un)Silencing Slavery

Aims to respectfully and lovingly remember and hold space for the enslaved Africans and their enslaved African-born and Caribbean-born descendants who lived and labored at Rose Hall Plantation in Jamaica.