Manuscript Collections: Archives of the Antislavery Movement

Everything else in this bibliography is a published document — something printed, circulated, meant to be read by strangers. This section is different. These are the archives: the letters people wrote to each other, the minutes nobody expected outsiders to see, the account books, the school notebooks, the day books.

Seventeen collections, held at eleven institutions. Nine are fully digitized, which means you can read them tonight from anywhere. The rest have finding aids online—inventories telling you exactly what is in which box—but the documents themselves require a visit or a reproduction request.

Three of these collections hold John Brown material directly, and one holds his own papers.

Where the John Brown material is

Boston Public Library Anti-Slavery Collection holds Brown's personal papers among its major holdings, alongside those of Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Lydia Maria Child, and Maria Weston Chapman. The most striking single item is John Brown's Day Book, volume 2 — a handwritten chronology of his correspondence with abolitionists together with records of the Free State Regular Volunteers of Kansas, covering 1855 to 1859. The collection also contains scrapbooks on Brown and on the Anthony Burns rendition case.

The Gerrit Smith Papers at Syracuse document Brown's arrival at Peterboro in February 1858, where he laid out his plans to Smith and others. The surviving documents indicate Smith understood precisely what Brown intended and that it would involve violence. Smith became one of the Secret Six who financed Harpers Ferry.

The Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection at Cornell lists John Brown among the correspondents in its manuscript holdings. Its digitized pamphlet collection also contains contemporary responses to the raid, including a sermon on "The life and character of John Brown" preached in Pittsburgh on December 4, 1859 — two days after Brown was hanged.

Fully digitized — read online now

Boston Public Library Anti-Slavery Collection (Boston Public Library) → Collection guide · Digital Commonwealth · Internet Archive ‍

Roughly 40,000 pieces of correspondence, plus newspapers, broadsides, photographs, pamphlets, books, and objects. One of the largest institutional holdings on nineteenth-century American abolition anywhere. The core was given to the library in the late 1890s by the Garrison family and others close to the movement. See the John Brown holdings noted above.

Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (Cornell University) → Collection home · Digitized pamphlets, 10,000+ titles · Digitized manuscripts · Manuscript finding aid

Over 10,000 pamphlets and leaflets, all digitized as searchable text, plus a manuscript collection of correspondence among Garrison, the Chapmans, the Childs, Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, William Still, and John Brown. Many of the pamphlets linked elsewhere in this bibliography live here.

New-York African Free-School Records, 1817–1832 (New-York Historical Society, MS 747) → Finding aid · Digitized volumes

Four volumes: classroom observations, student performance records, examination speeches, penmanship and drawing exercises. Founded by the New-York Manumission Society in 1787 to educate Black children for lives as free citizens.

Read the alumni list against the rest of this bibliography and the point of the school becomes obvious. Alexander Crummell, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Peter Williams Jr., James McCune Smith, Ira Aldridge, Patrick Reason, Peter Guignon — Crummell, Ward, and Williams all appear in the Addresses and Autobiographies sections of this bibliography as authors. Volume four preserves McCune Smith's speech delivered on the Marquis de Lafayette's visit to New York in 1824, written when he was a schoolboy.

New York Manumission Society Records, 1785–1849 (New-York Historical Society) → Finding aid, digitized

The organizational records of the society founded by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, which lobbied for gradual emancipation in New York, defended free Black New Yorkers against kidnapping, and ran the African Free Schools.

Frederick Douglass Papers (Library of Congress) → Digital collection ‍

About 7,400 items and 38,000 images spanning 1841–1964, the bulk from 1862 to 1895. Includes general correspondence with Gerrit Smith, Garrison, and Susan B. Anthony; Douglass's 1886–87 European and African diary; and a partial handwritten draft of Life and Times. Much of Douglass's earlier material was lost when his Rochester house burned in 1872. Volunteers have transcribed large portions through the Library's By the People project, so the collection is keyword-searchable.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936–1938 (Library of Congress) → Digital collection

More than 2,300 first-person interviews with formerly enslaved people, conducted across seventeen states by out-of-work writers employed by the WPA, together with 500 photographs. A very different kind of source from everything else here — recorded seventy years after emancipation, mediated by mostly white interviewers, and indispensable anyway. ‍

James G. Birney Collection of Anti-Slavery Pamphlets (Johns Hopkins University) → Finding aid · Digitized pamphlets

The pamphlet library of the Kentucky slaveholder who freed his slaves, edited The Philanthropist, and ran twice for president on the Liberty Party ticket. Several items linked in the Addresses section of this bibliography are digitized from this collection.

Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society Papers (Clements Library, University of Michigan) → Finding aid · Digitized collection

The society that sustained Douglass's newspapers financially and organized the Rochester end of the Underground Railroad — the same city where Brown drafted his Provisional Constitution in Douglass's home in 1858.

Gerrit Smith Pamphlets and Broadsides Collection (Syracuse University) → Finding aid · Digital collections

Over 700 items from Smith's own library; more than half have been digitized. Distinct from his personal papers, below.

Finding aid online, materials on site

For these, the inventory is public but the documents are not. Most repositories will supply scans of specific items on request, often for a fee, and the finding aid tells you exactly what to ask for.

Gerrit Smith Papers (Syracuse University) → Finding aid · Collection inventory ‍

Smith's correspondence touches nearly every public question between about 1820 and 1870. With the papers of his father Peter Smith, the microfilm runs to 89 reels; a partial calendar of the general correspondence was published in 1941. This is the collection documenting the February 1858 Peterboro meeting.

William Lloyd Garrison Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society) → Collection guide

Lewis Tappan Papers (Library of Congress) → Catalog record and finding aid

The New York silk merchant who, with his brother Arthur, bankrolled the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Emancipator, Oberlin College, and the Amistad defense.

American Colonization Society Records (Library of Congress) → Finding aid

The archive of the organization that proposed removing free Black Americans to Liberia — the position Garnet, Douglass, Cornish, and Brown all rejected. Included here because you cannot understand the abolitionist argument without the argument it was made against.

James G. Birney Papers (Clements Library, University of Michigan) → Finding aid

Birney's personal papers, as distinct from his pamphlet collection at Johns Hopkins.

Anti-Slavery Collection (Oberlin College) → Collection page

Roughly 2,500 printed titles, catalogued and searchable: society reports, pamphlets, slave narratives, biographies, and long runs of antislavery newspapers including The Liberator and The Gerrit Smith Banner. Oberlin was the college that admitted Black students from 1835 and whose townspeople carried out the Oberlin–Wellington Rescue of 1858.

New York Colonial Manuscripts (New York State Archives) → Finding aid

‍Dutch and English colonial records — the documentary base for slavery in New Netherland and colonial New York, and the manuscript layer beneath the published record sets in the Official Records section of this bibliography.

Temporarily unavailable‍ ‍

Antislavery Collection (Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst) → Collection page

Several hundred printed pamphlets and books on slavery and antislavery in New England, 1725–1911, including publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society, plus a small number of proslavery tracts. The collection is currently unavailable because of renovations to SCUA and the materials are in offsite storage. Researchers can still contact SCUA directly to request specific items. Several titles listed as "not located" elsewhere in this bibliography are likely here, including William Slade's 1840 speech on the right of petition.