Beinecke Library

121 Wall Street | Library Home | Hours

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.

A letter dated 1835 Dec 24-26, at Clinton, East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, was written while Hulin worked as a schoolteacher in Louisiana. He discusses his impressions of the South, the character of Southern planters, slavery, and attitudes of Southerners toward Arthur Tappan and other Northern abolitionists. The letter reports the hanging of a group of African American slaves and whites accused of planning a rebellion against slave owners in Jackson, Louisiana. Hulin also gives examples of Southern dialect and briefly discusses his work as a teacher.

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.

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.

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.

There are four scrapbooks of pastor Amos G. Beman in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection. Beman (1812-1874) was a prominent abolitionist, minister, and missionary, and a leader of the black temperance movement. The scrapbooks, which include newspaper clippings, programs, and correspondence, were a gift of New Haven’s Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church.

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.

Manuscript account book, in unidentified handwriting, for Austin & Laurens, in Charleston, South Carolina, recording purchases and sales. Includes accounts relating to the sale of slaves. The firm was founded by George Austin and Henry Laurens, and later joined by George Appleby. One volume, 368 pages.

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.

Darrach moved to Kansas Territory in 1855. About fifty letters dated at Osawatomie, 1855-1856, contain a detailed narrative of the lives of settlers and events of the Kansas border war, including discussion of elections and constitutional conventions; events in Lawrence and other fighting between free soil and slavery advocates; and the killings at Pottawatomie by John Brown and the subsequent sack of Osawatomie.

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.

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 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.

Twelve manuscript legal documents in unidentified hands concerning the slave trade in Louisiana and Mississippi and one printed broadside advertising the sale of slaves in St. Louis, Missouri. The legal documents include bills of sale for slaves.

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.

Documents relating to the registration, sale and manumission of slaves in Cuba, and contracts outlining the terms of service of African and Chinese indentured servants working in Cuba, for the Compañía Asiatica de la Habana and for other companies and individuals. The documents include a death certificate, identification passes, and authorizations to transfer slaves.

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.

Two manuscript legal documents written in unidentified hands concerning the purchase of slaves by David D. Withers of New York. A receipt, December 20, 1854, New Orleans, acknowledges the sale of thirty-seven slaves from Walter L. Campbell to Withers. There is another manuscript document regarding the 1855 sale of ninety-one slaves from the Union Bank of Louisiana to Withers for fifty-five thousand dollars.

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.

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.”

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.

The papers contain four letter books and other official papers sent, received, and kept by George F. Usher, Haitian consul in New York under President Fabre Nicolas Geffrard; the correspondence primarily details Usher’s diplomatic and commercial work in New York City on behalf of the Republic of Haiti during the years 1859-1867, which included, in 1862, the United States’s official recognition of the Haitian government.

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.

Although not focused primarily on slavery and abolition, this collection is a key resource for understanding the history of race in America. In addition to Johnson’s papers, there are significant manuscript materials from W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, Poppy Cannon White, Dorothy Peterson, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman.

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.

Report, manuscript in an unidentified hand, signed by Collas, Paris, 1858 December 8, advocating recruitment of agricultural laborers for French Caribbean colonies from Africa, India, and China. The report discusses the history of French and English colonies in the Caribbean, 1827-1858; conflict between France and England after abolition of the Atlantic slave trade; labor in the colonies after the French abolition of slavery in 1848; and colonial policy of Napoléon III.

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.

Letter to “Capt. Nathaniel Briggs. Master of the Ship the Three Friends favourd by Capt. Duncan, on the Coast of Africa,” with a long postscript, unsigned, by another hand. The contents relate to the trade in African slaves.

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.

Holograph diary addressed to “Meg,” narrating Leveson-Gower’s experiences as a Grenadier Guard, including a voyage to the West Indies and his impressions of slavery there. Illustrated with several drawings and watercolors of ships and scenery.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A rare compilation about the Amistad revolt, published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1839. Contains “a description of the Kingdom of Mandingo, and of the manners and customs of the inhabitants, an account of King Sharka, of Gallinas” as well as “a sketch of the slave trade and horrors of the middle passage, with the proceedings on board the ‘long, low, black schooner’, Amistad.”