Slavery in the United States: Websites for Primary Sources

The Antislavery Collection contains several hundred printed pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725-1911. The holdings include speeches, sermons, proceedings and other publications of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, and a small number of pro-slavery tracts.

Part of the Library of Congress's American Memory Project, this database contains full-text accounts by thousands of former slaves still living in the 1930s when the federal government as part of the New Deal sponsored the collection of their first-person stories. Also available in the library

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro offers this database of abstracts of about 3,000 petitions to courts and legislatures in the antebellum South, portraying slave/owner relations. interracial sex, free blacks, the black family, and racial attitudes. Many are printed in full in the two volume set The Southern Debate over Slavery.

A Fordham University site with primary-source links under headings such as "Civil War", "Conflict over Slavery", and "Reconstruction and Jim Crow".

Besides the full text of the novel, this UVa site provides primary texts reflecting how Stowe's book stirred anti-slavery opinion.

The provost marshals were the Union’s military police. They hunted and arrested deserters, spies, and civilians suspected of disloyalty; confined prisoners; maintained records of paroles and oaths of allegiance; controlled the passage of civilians in military zones and those using Government transportation; and investigated the theft of Government property.
The entries in this database are based on a microfilm collection of 94 rolls created by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). These materials were collected from War Department files and are dated 1861 to 1867. Each document pertains to two or more civilians, or “citizens”. The materials were gathered from provost marshals across the country. They include correspondence, oaths of allegiance, orders, passes, transportation permits, lists of prisoners, paroles, provost court papers, and claims for compensation for property used or destroyed by military forces.

The Library of Congress has acquired 540 rare and historic Civil War stereographs from the Robin G. Stanford Collection. The first 77 images are now online, including 12 stereographs of President Lincoln’s funeral procession through several cities and 65 images by Southern photographers showing South Carolina in 1860-61. The images can be viewed in this gallery within the Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. More images will be added until all are online.

The documents comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance. Most of the items date from the nineteenth century and include materials associated with the Dred Scott case and the abolitionist activities of John Brown, John Quincy Adams, and William Lloyd Garrison. Eighteenth-century cases include Somerset v. Stewart, decided in England a few years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which "underscored the great tension created by slavery in Anglo-American law."

The concept of Civil War Day by Day is a simple one: every day for four years, a document was presented that was 150 years old to the day.
Civil War Day by Day will contain images of more than 1458 primary source documents. Contributions from Documenting the American South, the North Carolina Collection, the Rare Book Collection, the Southern Folklife Collection, the Southern Historical Collection, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Archives will include newspapers, pamphlets, books, broadsides, legislation, photographs, sheet music, letters, diaries, order books, and telegrams.

includes sixteen thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture. Black Church, Civil War, North Carolina Settlements, First-Person Narratives, and more

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an online database providing information about slaves and slave trading voyages, will soon expand to include information about intra-American slave trade as well as have a new accessibility. The online database is supervised by two Emory faculty members in partnership with international scholars. This new project aims to add in-depth information about individual slaves to the database’s catalogue of information regarding voyages, the number of slaves on the voyages, where the voyages landed and more.

"Voyage of the Echo" examines the world of the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade by reconstructing the voyage of the slave ship Echo in 1858. Although the United States outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade after 1807, and every other European and American carrier enacted similar bans by 1836, slave ships brought a further 1.2 million Africans to the Americas between 1836 and 1866. The Echo’s voyage from New Orleans, Louisiana to Cabinda in West Central Africa, and then to the Spanish colony of Cuba, is one example of over 3,000 illegal voyages that took place during these decades.