Manuscripts

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Papers of Benjamin Franklin

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.

Tags: Eighteenth Century, Manuscripts, Printed Material, Slavery, United States

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Records of Ante-bellum Southern Plantations: From the Revolution through the Civil War

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.

Tags: Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, Slavery, United States

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Robert Bostock Slave Trade Documents

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.

Tags: Atlantic World, Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, Slave Trade

Robert Durand's Journal

Holograph journal of a voyage to Martinique of the three-masted ship Le Diligent. Probably not an official log, the journal was written by First Lieutenant Robert Durand and describes in detail a voyage from Vannes, France, to the coast of Guinea, each slave trade port encountered on the coast, purchase of 256 slaves at Jacquin, voyage to Martinique, selling of the slaves at St. Pierre, and return to Vannes. Also described are conditions of trade in the African and Caribbean ports, dealings between slave traders and kings and chiefs, prices of provisions, competition among slave traders, effects of climate and disease, and expenses and revenues of the voyage.

Tags: Africa, Atlantic World, Drawings and Images, Eighteenth Century, Manuscripts, Slave Trade

Savannah, or the Form of a Servant

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.

Tags: Emancipation, Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, United States

The Bondwoman's Narrative

Bound holograph draft, revised, of a fictional or semi-fictional autobiography of a former slave. It details her experiences as a maid in several households in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina, and her subsequent escape to the North, where she settled in New Jersey. The narrator also tells the stories of other slaves she knows or comes into contact with, and to some extent the histories of the families she works for, identified as the De Vincents, the Henrys, and the Wheelers. An edited editionof this manuscript was published by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Tags: Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, Slavery, United States

The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

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.

Tags: Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, United States

William H. Swift Journal, 1856-1858

The diary contains entries from July 1 to September 5, 1856, January 11 to March 11, 1857, and February 14 to June 12, 1858, describing Swift’s activities as a surveyor in Leavenworth, Kansas, and the local struggle between the Free-Soil and proslavery parties. One volume, fifty-one pages.

Tags: Antislavery Movements, Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, Slavery, United States

Yale Tocqueville Manuscripts

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.

Tags: Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, Slavery, United States

128 Wall Street | Archives Home | Hours

Rufus and S. Willard Saxton Papers

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.

Tags: Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, United States

Slavery Miscellaneous Manuscripts

Includes seven scrapbooks titled “Tracts on Slavery in the United States, and on the U.S. Constitution and Organic Laws.” Also includes a manuscript book containing records of punishments administered to slaves in a South American mining camp between 1836 and 1847, numerous deeds for slaves dating from 1783 to 1848, newspaper clippings from the 1840s through the 1860s relating to the anti-slavery movement in Kansas, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, and a manuscript census of slaves in Chester County, Pennsylvania, from 1780 to 1815.

Tags: Africa, Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, United States

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips Papers

The papers consist of the research files of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, an author and history professor. The papers include Phillip’s notes and transcripts of historical source materials and the collected papers of several southern families from 1712-1933. The collected papers include correspondence, account books, business records, farm and plantation records, diaries, and other papers which focus on the years 1790-1865, and the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia and the Piedmont region of Georgia. Numerous photographs drawn from the collection are available online.

Tags: Historiography, Manuscripts, Photographs, United States

Thomas Thistlewood Papers

The papers consist of diaries, weather journals, commonplace books, reading notes and other material documenting the life, work, and intellectual interests of the Jamaican planter and slaveowner Thomas Thistlewood. Thistlewood’s 37 diaries, in Series I, contain daily entries dating between 1750 and 1786. Topics include Thistlewood’s work as an overseer, and later owner, of slaves, including his methods of assigning work, alloting provisions, and discipline; his personal and sexual relationships with several, including his lengthy relationship with Phibbah; and slave rebellions and rumors of rebellions, including Tacky’s Revolt (1760).

Tags: Caribbean, Drawings and Images, Eighteenth Century, Manuscripts, Nineteenth Century, Slavery

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Yale Indian Papers Project

The New England Indian Papers Series Database includes several documents directly related to slavery and the slave trade in early America. Manuscripts include information on Indian slaves taken after King Philip’s War and their fate in the Caribbean, Spain, and North Africa.

Tags: Atlantic World, Manuscripts, Seventeenth Century, Slave Trade