Manuscript Collections Relating to Slavery
Sample Image
Collection Description
The site offers access to fourteen of the New-York Historical Society's most important collections of source materials documenting the history of slavery in the United States, the Atlantic slave trade and the abolitionist movement. The collection includes account books and ship manifests documenting the financial aspects of the slave trade; legal papers such as birth certificates and deeds of manumission; and political works and polemics. The materials range from writings by the abolitionists Granville Sharp, Lysander Spooner and Charles Sumner to the diary of a plantation manager and overseer of slaves in Cuba, Joseph Goodwin, and that of a former slave in Fishkill, New York, James F. Brown. The collection also provides access to the archives of abolitionist organizations such as the New-York Manumission Society and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, as well as the records of the African Free School, which document the education of free blacks in early nineteenth-century New York. With nearly 12,000 pages of text dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this collection constitutes a rich archive of primary source materials on the history of slavery, the slave trade, and the abolitionist movement.
Collection URL
Click URL to view — https://www.nyhistory.org/slaverycollections/
Creator
Subjects
Materials
Additional Creator(s)
Institution Type
Special
Geographic Place(s)
New York City
Inclusive Dates
1709 1886
Sample Object URL
http://cdm15052.contentdm.oclc.org/u?/p15052coll5,24495
Part of Collection
Citation
New-York Historical Society, "Manuscript Collections Relating to Slavery," in digitalMETRO, Item #177, http://www.nycdigital.org/items/show/177 (accessed February 8, 2012).
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