The collection consists of minute books, cash books, a subscription book, and annual reports of the Glasgow Emancipation Society; minutes and other records of the Glasgow Freeman’s Aid Society; and other papers, pamphlets and reports relating to the anti-slavery movement in Glasgow, Scotland.

Robert Bostock was a Liverpool trader who continued to be involved in the slave trade after its abolition by Parliament in 1807. His factory on Bunce Island was raided by H.M.S. Thais in 1813 and 233 slaves were seized. Also captured were Bostock, his partner Charles Mason, and the captain of an American slave-ship, the “Kitty,” which was to have smuggled the contraband slaves to Charleston, South Carolina.

The collection contains, 2,604 letters, 2,228 of which are from Lydia Maria Child. Topics include antislavery, politics, Childs’ professional writing experience, her work as an editor of a children’s magazine, her financial assistance to musicians and artists, feminism, and Child’s personal life. Recipients include Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, Margaret Fuller, Charles Dickens, James T. Fields, William Cullen Bryant and other prominent cultural figures.

The Yale Map Collection has the largest collection of maps in Connecticut and one of the largest university collections in the United States. Its collections are geographically comprehensive and consist of over 200,000 map sheets, 3,000 atlases, and 900 reference books. There are several maps and atlases with an explicit focus on slavery, including Lewis’ Free Soil, Slavery, and Territorial Map of the United States, “Gulag Slavery” maps of Russia, and theAtlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture. 

The Law Library’s American Trials Collection includes numerous books and pamphlets related to slavery, abolition, and their legacies. Several pamphlets pertaining to slavery and race in the antebellum United States have been made available through the Library’s Rare Books Blog. A brief guide, Researching Race in the American Trials Collection, is also available online.

The papers consist of correspondence, writings, and topical files, primarily documenting the professional career of historian C. Vann Woodward. A Yale professor for many years, Woodward was a leading scholar of the U.S. South.

Family members include author and suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950); her parents, Henry Browne Blackwell (1825-1909) and Lucy Stone (1818-1893), abolitionists and advocates of women’s rights; her aunt, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman to receive an academic medical degree; and Elizabeth Blackwell’s adopted daughter, Kitty Barry Blackwell (1848-1936). Includes correspondence, diaries, articles, and speeches of these and other Blackwell family members.

Printed forms, completed in manuscript, containing the triennial registration information for the slaves of Edward Owen of Jamaica as required by the Jamaica Registration Act of 1816 and the British Slave Registration Act of 1819. The 1817 form contains information for each slave including name, age, color, and origin (African or Creole) and often lists the mothers of Jamaica-born slaves. The returns for 1820 and after provide information on slaves acquired since the previous return, and also indicate whether they were obtained by birth, purchase, or inheritance.

The records consist of correspondence written by Civil War soldiers from Yale College, 1855-1865. These records might be more revealing for what they do not say about slavery and emancipation than what they do offer on the subject. See also similar holdings at the Beinecke Library.

Richard Bridgens, West India scenery with illustrations of Negro character, the process of making sugar, &c. from sketches taken during a voyage to, and residence of seven years in, the island of Trinidad (London, 1836). Twenty-seven plates with accompanying text.

Correspondence, diaries, writings and other papers of John Pitkin Norton, professor of agricultural chemistry at Yale from 1846-1852. Norton’s diaries contain observations on slavery and abolition, the Amistad case, the Liberty Party, religion, and temperance, among other topics. Professor Norton was also closely associated with the early days of the Sheffield Scientific School and was a pioneer in the application of scientific principles and methods to agriculture.

From the library of Simeon E. Baldwin. Includes several rare books and pamphlets on the Amistad slave revolt, manuscript correspondence about the revolt and its aftermath, and two notebooks used by attorney Roger Sherman Baldwin during the trials.

Draft, holograph, corrected, of a novel about a young woman from New York who learns of her African-American ancestry while travelling through Florida, Tennesee, and other parts of the southern United States in the mid to late nineteenth century. The novel, by an unidentified author, addresses issues of race, slavery, and women’s rights during the Reconstruction.

A rare line engraving, produced by Robert Brandard at some point in the first half of the nineteenth century. Based on an earlier image by George Cattermole.

This is a rare copy of a play about slavery, published in Mexico in 1825. Totaling 65 pages, the play is billed as a “melodrama in two acts.”

Congressman, abolitionist, and Radical Republican, Thaddeus Stevens emerged as a leader of the fight for emancipation and equal rights in the era of the Civil War. The papers include correspodence, speeches and resolutions, and legal and buisness papers. Accompanied by a printed guide.

A small porcelain jar decorated with two scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Both scenes are variations on illustrations by Hammatt Billings that appeared in the illustrated edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in Boston by John P. Jewett and Company in 1853. Other artifacts relating to the novel include aporcelain statuette and Staffordshire child’s plate.

The papers consist of correspondence and official government and military directives to and from Holwell Walshe, which document his career in the 1st and 2nd West India Regiments, particularly his years as commander of Sherbro Island, Sierra Leone. Walshe took possession of Sherbro in September 1862 and successfully defended the island and revitalized its economy. He remained as Civil Commandant until 1871, when he was transferred to Singapore as a police magistrate.

The collection includes about 73 microfilm reels and several printed guides. Documents cover plantations in Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Also included are the Albert A . Batchelor papers, Weeks Family Papers, Hammond Family Papers, 1866 - 1907, and Hammond Bryan Cummings Papers, 1866-1920.

The Yale Tocqueville Manuscripts contains papers of both Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, intermixed. It features material pertaining to Tocqueville’s study of American democracy, including a letter discussing slavery, abolition, and emancipation. The papers also include manuscript drafts and notes for Beaumont’s Marie, ou l’Esclavage aux Etats-Unis (1835), one of the first novels about racial slavery in the United States.

The collection consists of letters sent to New England resident Adella Fowler Larkin by her family and friends during the second half of the nineteenth century. Prominent in the collection are letters from her sister Myra Fowler McFarland, a teacher with the American Missionary Association working in Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia before, during, and immediately after the Civil War.

The papers include correspondence, journal extracts, newspaper clippings, and printed material relating to Susan Walker’s activities as a teacher for the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society in Port Royal, South Carolina. Originals are in the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Correspondence, diaries, proclamations, and drafts of letters chiefly relating to the Civil War, but also including letters from the Jacksonian period. The major portion of the collection concerns the siege of Fort Sumter with letters from both Major Robert Anderson and General P.G.T. Beauregard. Included also are a diary kept by General S. Wylie Crawford during the siege and two letters from Abraham Lincoln.

Established in Philadelphia in the 1700s by Richard Allen, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was the first black church to expand on a national level in the United States. These extensive records of the first AME church detail the establishment and daily operation of the church. The collection also contains committee meeting minutes, records of marriages and baptisms, financial records, receipts, lists of church officers, class roll books, records of committee activities, and other items. More information is available online.

The Medical Books collection at the Medical Historical Library contains rare books from the 15th through 19th centuries. Some of the books pertain directly to slavery or abolition, such as Lucretia Mott’s Sermon to the Medical Students. Others deal with slavery indirectly, such as Lorenzo Fowler’s Illustrated Phrenological Almanac, which published an image and analysis of Amistad captive Sarah (Margru) Kinson.

The Civil War Manuscripts Collection was created to give the researcher more direct access to small and fragmentary collections of material on the subject of the Civil War in the United States, 1861-1865. It is an intentionally assembled collection of diaries, correspondence, photographs, printed material, and ephemera primarily documenting military events and daily camp life, as well as family life on the home front and civilian activities.

Correspondence, diaries, writings, photographs, scrapbooks, research materials, and miscellanea documenting the personal life and literary career of Katherine Mayo, an author of several historical and investigative articles, essays, and books from 1896 to 1940. Prior to Mayo’s success as a literary figure she was employed by Oswald Garrison Villard to conduct extensive field research for his biography of John Brown. The collection includes a piece of the rope allegedly used to hang Brown.

Published in Jamaica in 1837-38 by the Jewish Jamaican-born artist Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica provides the first detailed visual representation of Jonkonnu (or John Canoe), the celebrated Afro-Jamaican masquerade performed by the enslaved during the Christmas and New Year holidays. These illustrations formed the centerpiece of an exhibition organized by the Yale Center for British Art: Art & Emancipation In Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds.

The papers consist of correspondence, clippings, photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, legal papers, financial records, speeches, articles, and military papers relating to the career of General William Tecumseh Sherman, his father Charles R. Sherman, his wife Ellen Ewing Sherman and her family, and Sherman’s children. Filmed guide available.

The papers consist of correspondence and business papers of Aaron Columbus Burr, merchant of New York City and adopted son of Aaron Burr. The papers relate to an attempt by Burr and James Grant to establish a colony for freed American slaves in Honduras. There is also material relating to the American Honduras Company, a firm formed by Burr and Grant for the cutting and exporting of mahogany.

Painted by the London-based Italian artist Agostino Brunias, circa 1780. The Yale Center for British Art holds numerous oil paintings and engravings by Brunias, all of which document life in the colonial West Indies, especially on the Island of Dominica in the Lesser Antilles.

The papers include correspondence, journals, memorabilia, and photographs that document the life of Samuel Willard Saxton and the career of his brother General Rufus Saxton during the Civil War. Samuel Saxton’s journal highlights his ardent abolitionist and reformist interests, his work on behalf of freedmen’s education, and his strong Republican loyalties. The letterbooks reflect Saxton’s position as an aide-de-camp for his brother and Rufus Saxton’s administration of the Department of the South and the former slaves under his jurisdiction.

Correspondence, writings, speeches, diaries, clippings, printed matter, sermons, and other papers of two centuries of Beecher family members. The papers relate principally to Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), popular 19th century clergyman and orator, and members of his family. Among those represented are his father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), clergyman; his brothers, Edward Beecher (1803-1895), educator and antislavery leader, and Thomas Kinnicut Beecher (1824-1900) and Charles Beecher (1815-1900), both clergyman and antislavery activists; and his sisters, Harriett Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe (1811-1896), author, Catherine Esther Beecher (1800-1878), pioneer educator and writer on ‘domestic economy,’ and Isabella Homes (Beecher) Hooker (1822-1907), well-known suffragist.

Group of 18 financial documents connected to John M. McQuie, the majority of which document his purchases, and sales, of slaves. The bills of sale and receipts usually list the names, ages and prices of the slaves, and occasionally other personal characteristics. An indenture for the work of two of McQuie’s slaves specifies that their employer must agree to “treat said negroes with humanity & to find them in good holsome food & cloathing together with a blanket to each.”

Highlights include recordings by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and the Tuskegee Institute Singers as well as excerpts from Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech. The Beinecke Library holds complementary material related to blackface minstrelsy and spirtuals, including sheet music for the original “Jim Crow.”

Books, pamphlets and other documents outlining the moral, religious, economic and legal aspects of the slavery debate. Includes anti-slavery society records, campaign literature and speeches made in and out of Congress, children’s literature, sermons and theological works, proslavery literature, and more. There are 7,235 fiches, accompanied by a printed guide.

The records consist of family papers, plantation journals, crop books, overseers’ journals, account books, medical records, and slave lists relating to antebellum southern plantations from the American Revolution through the Civil War. Over 600 microfilm reels from numerous regional archives.

Papers of the American Slave Trade, provides scholars with access to primary source material on the business aspect of the trade in human beings. The collection documents the international slave trade in Britain’s New World colonies and the United States from 1718 to the trade’s demise after 1808. There are multiple series accompanied by printed guides. The printed guides are also available online.

Agents within the Office of the Secretary of the Interior were authorized by the Secretary of the Navy to receive any “Negroes, mulattos, or persons of color” found aboard vessels seized off the coast of Africa and relocate them to what is now known as Liberia. Ten microfilm reels, based on the originals held at the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. These documents and several related collections are now available in full online.

This Collection, originally called at Yale the Mason-Franklin Collection, is the most extensive collection of materials by, about, and around Franklin and his times to be found in a single collection anywhere in the world. The main body of the Collection is housed in three adjoining rooms on the second floor of Sterling Memorial Library, where it is available for research and study. The published papers and their digital compliment contain numerous references to slavery and abolition.

Correspondence, business and personal papers, volumes and pamphlets, diaries, family papers, planation records, and miscellanea of families and individuals in Louisiana and the Mississipppi Valley. The effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction, emancipation, and social and economic change in the South are documented in nineteen separate collections. An unpublished finding aid is available.

The collection documents black life and American racial attitudes from the 1850’s to the 1940’s, and includes about 2500 items, chiefly historical photographs, accompanied by slave manifests, military medals, and civic trophies. The collection includes albumen photographs of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Photographic formats include daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and cabinet card photographs.

The Beinecke Library holds numerous books and pamphlets related to slavery and abolition, some of which were owned and annotated by prominent abolitionists. These include two books on the Somerset case (1772), concerning the legality of slavery in England, with extensive marginal annotations by Granville Sharp.

Holograph manuscript diary describing a trip taken by Charles Peter Gizzard, a New York City businessman, and his wife, Martha Gizzard, to visit Martha’s brother, Major Feltus, on his plantations near Woodville, Mississippi. Gizzard describes in detail his travel experiences, including steamboat travel on the Ohio, Mississippi, and Alabama Rivers, his views on plantation life and slavery, and other impressions of the South.

The papers consist of miscellaneous personal papers of Edward Parmelee Smith including letters to his future wife (1851-1854) and letters to his daughter (1872-1873) with an account of a sea voyage to California and his impressions once there. His years at Yale College are documented by an autograph album with messages from his teachers and classmates (1849-1855). Among the four photographs in the papers is one showing Smith with six students when he was president of Howard University, Washington, D.C. (1875). Clippings and correspondence describe his work as Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1873) and his death in Africa in 1876 while an envoy of the American Missionary Association.

Manuscripts and typewritten copies of newspaper articles, ships’ logs and letterbooks in the Library of Congress relating to the slave trade after 1806, especially during the years 1810-1811, 1816-1821 and 1860-1863. These were collected but not used in connection with herDocuments Illustrative of the Slave Trade, published 1930-1934.

Letters of the Secretary of the Navy to and from agents stationed on the northwest coast of Africa. The agents often dealt with Africans freed from captured slave ships. From the Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Correspondence, sermons, speeches, missionary reports, writings, and printed matter of approximately three hundred nineteenth-century black abolitionists, documenting their activities in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. The collection consists of 17 microfilm reels, drawn from numerous international archives. This collection is also available online.

Correspondence and writings by and about Abraham Lincoln. Includes an autograph praecipe issued by Lincoln for writ in his first law case, two volumes containing letters and writings by and about members of Lincoln’s cabinet, a fragment of a speech on slavery, and the gold pen used by Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

This newspaper was printed by students at the Mendi Mission in Sherbro, West Africa, beginning in March 1861. Established by American abolitionists in the wake of theAmistad slave revolt, the Mendi Mission served as a bridge connecting the struggle against slavery across two continents. The Divinity Library also holds a rare copy of the Sherbro and English Book published by the mission in 1862.

The collection consists of photoduplicates of original Mary Chesnut manuscripts, from the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina and from private owners, collected by C. Vann Woodward for the preparation of his book, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War.

Part of a series of watercolor images entitled “Emancipation of the Slaves,” produced during the Civil War era in the United States. The Yale University Art Gallery owns a corresponding image from the same series.

Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, West Indian Scenery: Illustrations of Jamaica in a Series of Views Comprising the Principal Towns, Public Buildings, Estates and Most Picturesque Scenery of the Island (London & Kingston, 1840). An extremely rare collection of 50 colored plates, produced during the transition from apprenticeship to full emancipation.

Manuscript fair copy, of dated entries recounting the departure from Liverpool, the shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, the crew’s enslavement in northern Africa, and their return to Dartmouth. Many entries concern the work done, foods, illnesses and injuries, and racial and religious differences encountered. The manuscript dates from about 1790.

The papers consist of correspondence, writings, manuscript notes, and printed material documenting the life of Harriet Martineau. Among the noteworthy correspondents are Matthew Arnold, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Courtauld, W. E. Gladstone, Robert Graves, Samuel Lucas, Lord John Russell, Maria Weston Chapman, and Henry William Wilberforce.

Correspondence and official documents originating from various CSA government departments and from individual Confederate states, 1861-65. Includes correspondence of Jefferson Davis, Confederate cabinet members and congressmen, and other officials, as well as official reports of Civil War battles and events, estimates of expenditures and appropriations, petitions, special orders, forms, passes, receipts, bonds, tax records, and other documents. The collection also includes designs for an alternate Confederate flag.

The Freedmen’s Missions Aid Society was the British Counterpart to the American Missionary Association. It provided financial support for educational and religious work among former slaves and their descendants in Africa and the United States.

The collection, assembled by the rare book dealers Jenny Allsworth and Humphrey Winterton, brings together photographs, photograph albums, glass lantern slides, and a lantern projector, which document the Sultanate of Zanzibar and European colonial expansion in East and Central Africa from 1870 to 1914. Also documented are early Arab and Portuguese coastal settlements at Kilwa, Mafia, Pemba, Sofala, and Zanzibar and the work of photographers who operated in different parts of the region.

The papers of Lewis Tappan, merchant and abolitionist, consist of correspondence, letterbooks, journals, notebooks, clippings, photocopies, notes, and miscellanea. The journals and notebooks, which date from 1814-1869, document Tappan’s activities in the antislavery movement. The bulk of the correspondence consists of copies of Tappan’s outgoing letters. Originals are in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The papers document the activities of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society, the first formal abolitionist society in America. Included are minutes from 1787 to 1916, and the society’s large collection of manuscripts dealing with abolition, dating from 1774 through 1868. More information is available online.

The papers include records relating to trade, industry, plantations, agriculture, ranching, immigration and settlement, the anti-slavery movement, politics, religion, and military affairs of Scotland and England. Personal papers, diaries, state documents, printed material, and the records of industrial and commercial concerns are also included in the papers. Additional information is availableonline.

Fourteen autograph letters, signed, by members of the extended Junken family, primarily to Noble and Maria Junken. Margaret Junken and Richard Conkling both write on the subject of African Americans: Margaret describes what she sees as the happy lives of Louisiana slaves and Richard describes a hired African American girl’s attempted murder of her child in 1837.

The Society originated in a bequest by Robert Boyle in 1691 for advancing religion amongst infidels. In 1794, the charity was reconstituted as “The Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands,” and in 1836, after the abolition of slavery, as “The Society for Advancing the Christian Faith in the British West-India Islands, and elsewhere, in the Dioceses of Jamaica, and of the Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands, and in the Mauritius.” The papers document the Society’s activities from the 17th through the 20th centuries.

The papers document the life and career of Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, orator, journalist, diplomat, and public official. They contain correspondence, a diary, speeches, articles, a manuscript of Douglass’ autobiography, financial and legal papers, newspaper clippings, and other material, chiefly covering the years 1862-1895. Topics include emancipation and the problems of emancipated blacks, women’s rights, political affairs, a proposed naval station in Haiti, and family.

The records include correspondence, notes, printed circulars, and memorabilia which document the organization and functioning of the Liverpool Emancipation Society. The society sought to educate the public and thereby garner support for the Union side during the American Civil War. The society also raised funds to aid distressed freedmen.

The collection consists of over 100 reels, divided into six parts. Part one includes the complete papers of Thomas Clarkson, William Lloyd Garrison, Zachary Macaulay, Harriet Martineau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Wilberforce from the Huntington Library in California. Parts two and three reproduce the slavery collections of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool. Part four reproduces the Granville Sharp Papers from the Gloucestershire Record Office. Part five reproduces the Papers of Thomas Clarkson from the British Library, London. Part six reproduces the Papers of William Wilberforce, William Smith, Iveson Brookes, Francis Corbin and related records from the Rare Books, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

The Greek Slave, by Hiram Powers, was the single most celebrated work of sculpture in nineteenth-century America. Its pose—inspired by the well-known Medici Venus—represents a Christian girl captured by the Turks during the Greek War of Independence, for sale in the slave market of Constantinople. The statue inspired an outpouring of prose and poetry and became an anti-slavery symbol for abolitionists.

The papers primarily document the administration of the debt-burdened estate of Auchinleck after the death of Sir Alexander Boswell in 1822. The collection also includes the letters by Charles Douglas, a planter in Jamaica, concerning many aspects of his life and career, such as his ownership of slaves and opinions about slavery, immigrant life in Jamaica, and the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on the Caribbean.

These photographs are from a collection housed at the Medical Historical Library entitled Gunshot Wounds Illustrated. The collection is composed of enlarged photographs of individual soldiers who were treated at Harewood Hopsital in Washington D.C. during the Civil War. These images, some quite graphic, depict soldiers recovering from a variety of wounds, including gunshot wounds. The soldiers’ case histories and stories are included on the back of many of the photographs, although some remain anonymous.

The independently catalogued “Slavery Pamphlets” include over 750 books and tracts from several different regions and time periods. The bulk of the collection consists of American and British pamphlets and includes Elizabeth Heyrick’s famous work, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition(1824), which marked a revolutionary turn in transatlantic antislavery politics.

Printed material and manuscript documents relating to slavery and the slave trade, particularly to the Portuguese slave trade in the nineteenth century and British attempts to suppress it by means of the Palmerston Act (1839). Manuscript material includes a brief note on the legitimacy of the slave trade (1823) in Portuguese; documents and tax agreements in French; and receipts, declarations and agreements concerning American slaves, 1842-1864, in English.

Includes the Slave Journal of Humphrey Morice (1721-1730), Journal of Humphrey Morice (1708-1710), trading accounts, personal and business papers, and documents relating to British trade with Africa, America, and the West Indies. More information and a detailed research guide are available online.

The papers consist of selected manuscripts from the Public Archives Record Center, Canada. Included are P.A.R.C. File No. 297-1-21, “Enlistment of Colored Men in the Canadian Militia,” and the Rev. William King Papers, M.G. 28/127. The King papers include three files: his “Auto biography”, “Correspondence”, and the “Buxton Mission and Elgin Settlement.” Part of this collection is available online.

Waller went to Africa in 1861 as Lay Superintendent of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. He resigned from the Mission in 1863 following a disagreement related to liberated slaves under the care of the Mission. These papers document the Zambezi expedition of David Livingstone (1813-1873) and the early history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa.  Waller’s deep interest in Africa and the problem of slavery continued throughout his life and is reflected in his correspondence with Livingstone and in diaries dated 1875-1876, after his return to England.  Selections from Waller’s diaries for 1875 and 1876 have been scanned.

The records consist of registers, letters, reports, and newspaper clippings received by the Commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1872. There are 74 microfilm reels and a published finding aid. Additional Freedmen’s Bureau records are available for Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

The collection consists of 37 manuscript legal documents from Adair County, Kentucky, regarding slaves and freedpersons. The papers include affidavits, summonses to court, and deeds of emancipation; most are docketed on the verso. Several of the documents deal with the apprenticeship of children, and one concerns the marriage of two former slaves.

The records consist of statutes passed in fifteen states that deal with slavery, free blacks, and the broader issue of race. Also included are private laws, special acts, legislative resolutions, and state constitutions with subsequent revisions. A published guide is available.

Thirteen printed and manuscript documents and fragments of documents, dating from 1794 to 1889, and signed by Haitian presidents and other government officials including Charles Hérard, Jean-Baptiste Riché, Jean Pierre Boyer, François Denis Légitime, Alexandre Pétion, Fabre Geffrard, Faustin Soulouque, Philippe Guerrier, Louis Étienne Salomon, and I. Dufrene.

Aaron Dutton and his son Samuel William Southmayd Dutton were Congregational clergymen in Connecticut who were known for their abolitionist views.  Aaron Dutton served as minister of the First Congregational Church in Guilford from 1806 until 1842, at which time he resigned due to the dissension in the congregation regarding his abolitionist stance. Samuel Dutton was minister at North Church (now United Church on the Green), New Haven from 1838 to 1866.  He was a noted champion of the antislavery cause. Selected sermons of Samuel Dutton and an article by Aaron Dutton are available online.

New Haven resident William H. Townsend made pen-and-ink sketches of the Amistad captives while they were awaiting trial. Twenty-two of these drawings were given to Yale in 1934 by Asa G. Dickerman, whose grandmother was the artist’s cousin. Townsend, who was about 18 years old when he made the drawings, is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, beside the Yale University campus.

A portrait of Elihu Yale (1649-1721) and associates being waited upon by an enslaved young man. Painted circa 1708. The Yale University Art Gallery owns a different version of this painting and a related portrait depicting Yale interacting with a similar “black servant.”

The collection consists of eight documents concerning slavery in Delaware: six signed manuscript records, manuscript copies of documents dated between 1783 and 1809, documenting the trade and emancipation of slaves and indentured servants by individual slave owners in Delaware; an order, dated April 29, 1829, signed and sealed by Delaware Governor Charles Polk, pardons James John for kidnapping Betsy Martin, a free racially-mixed woman, and transporting her across state lines; and a brief letter, dated December 11, 1910, from Henry C. Conrad, Delaware Superior Court judge, to Walter V. Johnson of Johns Hopkins University, concerns Abraham Lincoln’s abolition of slavery in Delaware.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) was a Quaker abolitionist and poet of international renown. He was affiliated with the National Era, one of the most important abolitionist newspapers in America. This collection consists of miscellaneous correspondence, manuscripts, and other material by and about Whittier. Included is the orignal draft for “Moloch in State Street,” about the arrest of fugitive slave Thomas Sims, with significant alterations and revisions.

The Mirror of Liberty was the first magazine owned and edited by an African American. This issue from July 1841 contains a report of a meeting in New Bedford, MA, led by David Ruggles and Frederick Douglass.