Beinecke Library

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.

Fifteen volumes of original correspondence, typed and bound, from the archives of the U.S. Navy Department at Washington, D.C. Letters range from 1819 to 1861 and cover all aspects of the African Squadron, including the settlement of Liberia, the repatriation of captured slaves, and efforts to suppress the international slave trade.

The Beinecke Library holds several important abolitionist newspapers from various time periods and geographic locations, including the Alton Observer, American Citizen, Charter Oak, Emancipator, Liberator, Philanthropist, National Anti-Slavery Standard, and True American. Other newspapers, including the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, American Missionary, Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, and British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, are available through Orbis.

The papers concern Barbara D. Simison’s projected edition of the letters of Lydia Maria Child, and consist of research correspondence with other scholars and with libraries and Simison’s annotated working transcripts of Child’s letters. In addition, the collection contains 15 autograph letters by Lydia Maria Child, including an ALS to Richard Fletcher describing the Samaritan Asylum for Colored Orphans; 3 ALS to Oliver Johnson concerning publishing projects and Civil War politics; and an ALS to James Redpath in support of a woman sculptor’s effort to secure the commission for a statue of John Brown.

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.

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.

Autograph manuscript letters and receipts, dated 1858 to 1868, and other letters, deeds and documents relating to slaves and the slave trade, from 1788 to 1863. The focus is on the firm of J. D. Fondren & Bro., based in Richmond, Virginia. About 80 items total, in one volume.

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.

The E. L. McGlashan Collection of Papers Concerning Slavery in the United States consists of bills of sale, receipts, estate records, and other material documenting slave ownership and the slave trade in the United States. The papers span the dates 1770-1862, and predominantly document transactions in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, and Alabama. There are also records which document legal actions involving slaves in Maine, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana.

The collection comprises Howe’s outgoing and incoming correspondence, third-party correspondence, and six manuscript writings pertaining to slavery and ethics. The letters address Howe’s religious beliefs, opposition to the institution of slavery, support of the temperance movement, the annexation of Texas, and other political matters.

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.

Four manuscript letters, dated between 1855 and 1856, provide information on the conflict between antislavery and proslavery settlers in Kansas Territory. Narratives by Frederick and Jason Brown, sons of the militant abolitionist John Brown, describe the family’s encounters with proslavery forces in various locations.

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.”

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 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.

Holograph manuscript containing copies of letters sent by William Codrington to his agents in Antigua and Barbuda from 1779 to 1782 concerning the management of his estates and accounts, the employment of servants and slaves, the sugar trade, and the effects of war on contact with the West Indies.

Amassed by Frederick Hill Meserve with the help of his daughter Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, the collection contains more than 73,000 items, including 57,000 photographic prints, as well as thousands of books, pamphlets, maps, and theater broadsides. These materials document American history from the Civil War through the end of the 19th century and record the emergence of photography as a distinctive cultural practice. The collection’s significance also lies in the tens of thousands of portraits of American politicians, army officers (of both the Union and Confederate forces), writers, actors, singers, scientists, African Americans, and Native Americans.

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.

Manuscript of a detailed description of the geography, population, economy, government, and social organization of Jamaica by John Dalling, who was appointed Lieutenant Governor of the colony in 1767. Topics include agriculture, the sugar trade and the mechanics of a typical sugar plantation, slavery and slave customs, and relations between the races.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Holograph manuscript, corrected, of a memoir by a young African-American, circa 1858. The memoir documents the major events in the author’s life leading up to and including incarcerations in the New York House of Refuge, the first juvenile reformatory in the United States, and Auburn Prison, the first state prison in New York, from 1833 to the late 1850s. The author compares the New York penal system to the slaveholding South.