History 3724: Slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction

Search for "antebellum" in Library of Congress digital collections

Search for Confederate primary sources in LOC collections

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People, documents, and modern voices. (Note that "modern voices" here are secondary, scholarly voices).

The Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection contains 245 items ranging from 1787 to 1916 that focus on the abolishment of slavery and Reconstruction of the Southern States after the American Civil War. Represented are imprints from Europe as well as the United States, the European publications also discussing situations in Poland and its politics during the 1850’s.

This primary source set uses documents, illustrations, and maps to explore events and ideas that drove the formation of the Confederate States of America and the United States’ descent into civil war.

Collection of CSA sheet music.

Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network is an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves.

Boston-based Abolitionist newspaper, published by William Lloyd Garrison, 1831-1865

The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases are the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. See also the Image gallery and various explanatory essays.

"North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920.

True and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students at the University of North Carolina" presents 121 edited documents written primarily by students attending the University of North Carolina between 1795, the year in which the institution opened its doors, and 1868, when the devastation of the Civil War closed them for a semester.