Library Guides: Primary Sources in African-American History: Slavery Debates (U.S. and British)

Correspondence on Abolition

Visualizing Abolition
A database documenting nearly 31,000 records of correspondence exchanged between the British Foreign Office and British commissioners, ministers, naval officers, and representatives of foreign governments around world over the course of the nineteenth century. The images page includes digitized documents, photographs, and illustrations of relevant ships, people, and places.

Freedom Suits

O Say Can You See: Early Washington D.C., Law & Family
This site documents the challenge to slavery and the quest for freedom in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing freedom suits filed between 1800 and 1862, as well as tracing the multigenerational family networks they reveal. Organized by cases, people, and families.

Published Pro- and Anti-Slavery Writings

British Periodicals
Debates over slavery often took places in the pages of popular magazines.
Date coverage: 17th - early 20th century.
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
Contains thousands of original manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings and maps. All printed items are full-text searchable and manuscripts have document-level indexing. Topics covered include: Slavery in the Early Americas, African Coast, Middle Passage, Slavery and Agriculture, Urban and Domestic Slavery, Slave Testimony, Spiritualism and Religion, Resistance and Revolts, Underground Railroad, The Abolition Movement and the Slavery Debate, Legislation and Politics, Freed Slaves, Freedmen and Free Black Settlements, Education, Slavery and the Islamic World, Varieties of Slave Experience and The Legacy of Slavery and Slavery Today.

Oberlin College Anti-Slavery Collection (Internet Archive)
2500 printed titles, including books, pamphlets, and key anti-slavery periodicals like The Abolitionist, The American Anti-Slavery Reporter, The Emancipator and Republican, The Gerrit Smith Banner, The Liberator, Liberty, and many others.
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The collection includes: Anti-slavery societies' documents such as annual reports, addresses, and publications; books, pamphlets, and other documents outlining the moral, religious, economic, and legal aspects of the slavery debate; travelers' observations of slavery; slave narratives - autobiographical, biographical, and fictional; and biographies of leaders of the anti-slavery movement. There are numerous newspapers and periodicals, including The Abolitionist, The American Anti-Slavery Reporter, The Emancipator and Republican, The Gerrit Smith Banner, The Liberator, Liberty, and many others.

There are also political works, including documents related to the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Controversy, party propaganda, and speeches made in and out of Congress. There are books for children; poetry, songs, anthologies, and gift books. There is some pro-slavery literature as well. The collection includes ephemera, including manuscript bills of sale for enslaved people, manumission papers, and artifacts including shackles and other memorabilie collected by abolitionists from Oberlin on trips to the South after the Civil War.
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection
Numbering over 10,000 titles, May's pamphlets and leaflets document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels. Much of the May Anti-Slavery Collection was considered ephemeral or fugitive, and today many of these pamphlets are scarce. Sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes all document the social and political implications of the abolitionist movement.
Slavery and Abolition in the U.S.
More than 24,000 individual pages of printed text and corresponding searchable transcriptions of books and pamphlets, first person narratives, legal proceedings and decisions, anti-slavery tracts, religious sermons, and early secondary works. The publications are all drawn from the holdings of the Millersville University Library and the Dickinson College Library (Pennsylvania),

Papers of Antislavery Organizations

Records Relating to the Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of British Negro Slaves

In the early nineteenth century, Birmingham was an important center of anti-slavery activity. Birmingham itself was a prosperous manufacturing town engaged in some cotton trading. Joseph Sturge, one of the leaders in the British anti-slavery movement, was secretary of the Birmingham anti-slavery society and active in several national anti-slavery organizations. On April 8, 1825, Lucy Townsend and Mary Lloyd founded the Birmingham Ladies Society, which published several pamphlets, compiled annual reports, and recorded minutes relating to their activities. Members wrote letters and petitions urging others to support their cause. They supported education as a means of solving the problem of freed slaves, focusing on aid to blacks in British territories. They were reluctant to deal with the problem of American slavery for fear of inflaming the issue.

A description of the contents and their arrangement is on the first reel.

Special Collections FILM 22:3 - Library Use Only

Writings Relating to Quaker Abolitionism

An address to the inhabitants of Europe on the iniquity of the slave trade, 1822. MU Special Collections, HT991 .F7 1822, Library Use Only.
The case of our fellow-creatures, the oppressed Africans : respectfully recommended to the serious consideration of the legislature of Great-Britain by the people called Quakers. MU Special Collections, HT1033.S63 C3 1784, Library Use Only.

Frederick Douglass Papers
The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress presents the papers of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist who escaped from slavery and then risked his freedom by becoming an outspoken antislavery lecturer, writer, and publisher. The online collection, containing approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), spans the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1865. Many of Douglass’s earlier writings were destroyed when his house in Rochester, New York, burned in 1872.