Collection | Text

Black History Collections

The New-York Historical Society holds important collections relating to Black history, slavery in the United States, and the Atlantic slave trade. Dating from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, they constitute a rich archive of primary source materials that will be of value to anyone researching the history of African Americans, slavery, the slave trade, emancipation, and the abolitionist movement.
NYHS Identifier
Library Collection
Contributor
New-York Historical Society

Item Details Content statement

Description
The New-York Historical Society holds important collections relating to Black history, slavery in the United States, and the Atlantic slave trade. Dating from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, they constitute a rich archive of primary source materials that will be of value to anyone researching the history of African Americans, slavery, the slave trade, emancipation, and the abolitionist movement.
English
PID
islandora:130602
NYHS Identifier
Library Collection
Language
eng
Member of
New-York Historical Society Digital Collections
Genre
accounts
account books
birth certificates
birth registers
bylaws (administrative records)
calligraphy (visual works)
clippings (information artifacts)
correspondence
deeds
depositions
diaries
drafts (documents)
drawings (visual works)
editorials
ephemera (general object genre)
estate inventories
free papers
indentures
journals (accounts)
letters (correspondence)
lists (document genres)
memorandums
minute books
minutes
petitions
poems
receipts (financial records)
registers (lists)
regulations (executive records)
reports
resolutions (administrative records)ships' manifests
speeches
tax returns
Owning Institution
New-York Historical Society
Publisher
New-York Historical Society
Type
Text
Subject (Topical)
Abolitionists--United States
African American children
African American women
African Americans--Colonization
African Americans--Education--New York (State)--New York
African Americans--History
African Americans--New York (State)--New York
Antislavery movements--United States
Black people--History
Black people--United States
Black people--West Indies
Enslaved persons--United States
Enslaved persons--Social conditions
Enslaved persons--Emancipation--United States
Fugitive slaves--United States
Registers of births, etc.--New York (State)--New York
Schools--New York (State)--New York
Slave bills of sale--United States
Slave records--United States
Slave trade--Africa, West
Slave trade--Southern States
Slave trade--United States
Slave trade--West Indies
Slave traders--United States
Slaveholders--United States
Slavery--United States
Slavery--West Indies
Subject (Name)
New-York Historical Society--Archives
Subject (Geographic)
Southern States--History--1775-1865:
United States--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
United States--History--1783-1865:
United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865:
United States--History--1865:-
Contributor
New-York Historical Society
Date Created
1709 to 1939

Items in this collection

107592-Service File.jpg
Still Image

Caesar, an enslaved man, 1851

Daguerreotype. Portrait of an African-American male figure, three quarters-length, front view, holding a staff or a shovel (?) in his right hand, wearing a white collar, dark foulard, and checked waistcoat. A note taped to the back of the case identifies the sitter and sitter's history: "born a slave of Van R. Nicoll, son of William, in 1737 at Bethlehem, N.Y., where he died in 1852, the last slave to die in the North."
View Item
107594-Service File
Text

Freedom's journal, Vol. I, No. 3, New-York, Friday, March 30, 1827

First page of Vol. I, no. 3 (March 30, 1827) of the first newspaper published by African Americans in the United States. Weekly. Published: Vol. 1, no. 1 (March 16, 1827)-v. 2, no. 27 (September 26, 1828) ; v. 2, whole no. 80 (October 3, 1828)-v. 2, whole no. 104 (March 28, 1829). Issues for April 11, 1828-September 26, 1828 called also whole no. 55-whole no. 79. New-York Historical holds scattered issues.
View Item
107599-Service File
Text

By the president of the United States. A proclamation. … That on the first day of January ... one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves ... shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free ...

Souvenir copy of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, with autograph signatures of Lincoln, William Seward, Secretary of State, and John Nicolay, Private Secretary to the President. This is known as the Leland-Boker edition of the Emancipation Proclamation, after the two men who arranged for its printing by Frederick Leypoldt and subsequent sale at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair of June 7-29, 1864. The Sanitary Fairs were created to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers, and to improve conditions in military camps.
View Item
107600-Service File.jpg
Text

Injured humanity; : being a representation of what the unhappy children of Africa endure from those who call themselves Christians

Broadside illustrating the brutalities of the life of enslaved people in the hope of effecting a boycott of the West Indian trade in enslaved people. Wood-engraving at upper left signed: A.A. [Alexander Anderson]. Samuel Wood is listed at this address in New York City directories from 1805-1808. The text and illustrations in this broadside also appear in the following work, first issued by Wood in 1807: The mirror of misery, or, Tyranny exposed. Not in Shaw & Shoemaker. Not in Lib. Company. Afro-Americana.

View Item
94075-Service File.jpg
Text
5 Items

The annexed plate represents the lower deck of an African ship of 297 tons burthen : with the slaves stowed on it, in proportion of not quite one to a ton

This engraving shows bodies packed into the cargo hold of a slave ship. First published in 1788 by the Plymouth Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it gestures toward the brutality of the Middle Passage from Africa to New World slave markets. By the end of the eighteenth century, the image had proliferated in British and American abolitionist propaganda in varied forms and with different accompanying texts. It remains today one of the most recognizable symbols of abolition and the transatlantic slave trade.
View Item
94088-Service File.jpg
law codes; laws (documents); pamphlets
16 Items

Le code noir ou Edit du roy, servant de reglement pour le gouvernement & l'administration de justice & la police des isles françoises de l'Amerique, & pour la discipline & le commerce des negres & esclaves dans ledit pays

The first edition of the French code noir regulating slavery in the Antilles, and one of only two copies in the United States. "Edit du roy ... pour l'établissement du conseil souverain & de quatre siéges royaux dans la coste de l'isle de Saint-Domingue en l'Amerique. Du mois d'aoust 1685"--Page 12-14. Signatures: A-B⁴. Leaf B4 blank.
View Item
Date Created
1718
104283-Service File.jpg
Text
4 Items

Jupiter Hammon poem on Anne Hutchinson, 1770

Untitled poem attributed to Jupiter Hammon (1711-circa 1806), a Black man enslaved by the Lloyd family, proprietors of the Manor of Queens Village in what is now the Village of Lloyd Harbor, N.Y. It was composed as a tribute to Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for challenging the authority of Puritan ministers. The poem is part of the Townsend family papers, and was written down by Phebe Townsend, youngest of Robert Townsend's three sisters. The Townsends interacted with the Lloyd family.
View Item
107538-Service File.jpg
Text
58 Items

Joseph Goodwin diary, 1820-1827

Joseph Goodwin was a plantation manager in Cuba originally from Hudson, N.Y. This diary was presumably kept by Goodwin, although it may have been kept by his brother. After leaving home in Hudson, N.Y., Goodwin worked for Gen. George De Wolf, first in Bristol, Rhode Island for a few months and then on De Wolf's plantations near Matanzas, Cuba as a manager or overseer. The plantations grew mainly coffee, although other crops are mentioned. The crops were worked by enslaved labor. The diary entries are mainly routine and record weather, plantation activities, people met, and local news.
View Item
292618-Service File.jpg
Text
112 Items

Bolton, Dickens & Co. account book, 1856-1858, 1865

Account book, 1856-1858, kept by the prominent slave trading firm of Bolton, Dickens & Co. of Lexington, Kentucky, with branches in Memphis, Charleston, Natchez, and New Orleans. It chiefly records people purchased and sold by the firm, with entries giving the names of enslaved persons, purchase and selling price, profit, names of suppliers, and occasional remarks. Some persons involved in the firm's recorded transactions were Washington Bolton, Isaac Bolton, Samuel Dickens, and the slave trader G.L. Bumpass.
View Item
292731-Service File.jpg
Text
226 Items

Mahlon Day, Journal of a voyage among the West India Islands, November 11, 1839-April 20, 1840

Mahlon Day (1790-1854) was a Quaker, publisher of children's books, printer, and bookseller in New York City. This is a contemporary copy of a diary kept by Day while on a tour of the West Indies (November 1839-April 1840) in the company of Joseph John Gurney, the English Quaker philanthropist, minister, and writer. In most of the places they visited, they did considerable sightseeing, held religious services for all faiths, and were entertained by many residents.
View Item
293938-Service File.jpg
Text
27 Items

Trade book of the sloop Rhode Island, January 18, 1749-May 6, 1749

Account book, January 18, 1749-May 6, 1749, kept aboard the sloop Rhode Island while on a voyage to Africa to procure enslaved people for her owners, Philip Livingston and sons, New York City. Peter James was shipmaster. Included are accounts for the purchase of enslaved people, gold, and other goods; for sales of rum and other provisions to the crew, various expenses, the purchase of provisions, an inventory of goods delivered to Captain David Lindsey, a record of the deaths of 37 enslaved people, etc. The trading was carried out on various locations between Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast.
View Item
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21
107599-Service File
Text

By the president of the United States. A proclamation. … That on the first day of January ... one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves ... shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free ...

Souvenir copy of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, with autograph signatures of Lincoln, William Seward, Secretary of State, and John Nicolay, Private Secretary to the President. This is known as the Leland-Boker edition of the Emancipation Proclamation, after the two men who arranged for its printing by Frederick Leypoldt and subsequent sale at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair of June 7-29, 1864. The Sanitary Fairs were created to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers, and to improve conditions in military camps.
View Item
107600-Service File.jpg
Text

Injured humanity; : being a representation of what the unhappy children of Africa endure from those who call themselves Christians

Broadside illustrating the brutalities of the life of enslaved people in the hope of effecting a boycott of the West Indian trade in enslaved people. Wood-engraving at upper left signed: A.A. [Alexander Anderson]. Samuel Wood is listed at this address in New York City directories from 1805-1808. The text and illustrations in this broadside also appear in the following work, first issued by Wood in 1807: The mirror of misery, or, Tyranny exposed. Not in Shaw & Shoemaker. Not in Lib. Company. Afro-Americana.

View Item
94075-Service File.jpg
Text
5 Items

The annexed plate represents the lower deck of an African ship of 297 tons burthen : with the slaves stowed on it, in proportion of not quite one to a ton

This engraving shows bodies packed into the cargo hold of a slave ship. First published in 1788 by the Plymouth Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it gestures toward the brutality of the Middle Passage from Africa to New World slave markets. By the end of the eighteenth century, the image had proliferated in British and American abolitionist propaganda in varied forms and with different accompanying texts. It remains today one of the most recognizable symbols of abolition and the transatlantic slave trade.
View Item
94088-Service File.jpg
law codes; laws (documents); pamphlets
16 Items

Le code noir ou Edit du roy, servant de reglement pour le gouvernement & l'administration de justice & la police des isles françoises de l'Amerique, & pour la discipline & le commerce des negres & esclaves dans ledit pays

The first edition of the French code noir regulating slavery in the Antilles, and one of only two copies in the United States. "Edit du roy ... pour l'établissement du conseil souverain & de quatre siéges royaux dans la coste de l'isle de Saint-Domingue en l'Amerique. Du mois d'aoust 1685"--Page 12-14. Signatures: A-B⁴. Leaf B4 blank.
View Item
104283-Service File.jpg
Text
4 Items

Jupiter Hammon poem on Anne Hutchinson, 1770

Untitled poem attributed to Jupiter Hammon (1711-circa 1806), a Black man enslaved by the Lloyd family, proprietors of the Manor of Queens Village in what is now the Village of Lloyd Harbor, N.Y. It was composed as a tribute to Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for challenging the authority of Puritan ministers. The poem is part of the Townsend family papers, and was written down by Phebe Townsend, youngest of Robert Townsend's three sisters. The Townsends interacted with the Lloyd family.
View Item
107538-Service File.jpg
Text
58 Items

Joseph Goodwin diary, 1820-1827

Joseph Goodwin was a plantation manager in Cuba originally from Hudson, N.Y. This diary was presumably kept by Goodwin, although it may have been kept by his brother. After leaving home in Hudson, N.Y., Goodwin worked for Gen. George De Wolf, first in Bristol, Rhode Island for a few months and then on De Wolf's plantations near Matanzas, Cuba as a manager or overseer. The plantations grew mainly coffee, although other crops are mentioned. The crops were worked by enslaved labor. The diary entries are mainly routine and record weather, plantation activities, people met, and local news.
View Item
292618-Service File.jpg
Text
112 Items

Bolton, Dickens & Co. account book, 1856-1858, 1865

Account book, 1856-1858, kept by the prominent slave trading firm of Bolton, Dickens & Co. of Lexington, Kentucky, with branches in Memphis, Charleston, Natchez, and New Orleans. It chiefly records people purchased and sold by the firm, with entries giving the names of enslaved persons, purchase and selling price, profit, names of suppliers, and occasional remarks. Some persons involved in the firm's recorded transactions were Washington Bolton, Isaac Bolton, Samuel Dickens, and the slave trader G.L. Bumpass.
View Item
292731-Service File.jpg
Text
226 Items

Mahlon Day, Journal of a voyage among the West India Islands, November 11, 1839-April 20, 1840

Mahlon Day (1790-1854) was a Quaker, publisher of children's books, printer, and bookseller in New York City. This is a contemporary copy of a diary kept by Day while on a tour of the West Indies (November 1839-April 1840) in the company of Joseph John Gurney, the English Quaker philanthropist, minister, and writer. In most of the places they visited, they did considerable sightseeing, held religious services for all faiths, and were entertained by many residents.
View Item
293938-Service File.jpg
Text
27 Items

Trade book of the sloop Rhode Island, January 18, 1749-May 6, 1749

Account book, January 18, 1749-May 6, 1749, kept aboard the sloop Rhode Island while on a voyage to Africa to procure enslaved people for her owners, Philip Livingston and sons, New York City. Peter James was shipmaster. Included are accounts for the purchase of enslaved people, gold, and other goods; for sales of rum and other provisions to the crew, various expenses, the purchase of provisions, an inventory of goods delivered to Captain David Lindsey, a record of the deaths of 37 enslaved people, etc. The trading was carried out on various locations between Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast.
View Item
107592-Service File.jpg
Still Image

Caesar, an enslaved man, 1851

Daguerreotype. Portrait of an African-American male figure, three quarters-length, front view, holding a staff or a shovel (?) in his right hand, wearing a white collar, dark foulard, and checked waistcoat. A note taped to the back of the case identifies the sitter and sitter's history: "born a slave of Van R. Nicoll, son of William, in 1737 at Bethlehem, N.Y., where he died in 1852, the last slave to die in the North."
View Item
107594-Service File
Text

Freedom's journal, Vol. I, No. 3, New-York, Friday, March 30, 1827

First page of Vol. I, no. 3 (March 30, 1827) of the first newspaper published by African Americans in the United States. Weekly. Published: Vol. 1, no. 1 (March 16, 1827)-v. 2, no. 27 (September 26, 1828) ; v. 2, whole no. 80 (October 3, 1828)-v. 2, whole no. 104 (March 28, 1829). Issues for April 11, 1828-September 26, 1828 called also whole no. 55-whole no. 79. New-York Historical holds scattered issues.
View Item
107599-Service File
Text

By the president of the United States. A proclamation. … That on the first day of January ... one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves ... shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free ...

Souvenir copy of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, with autograph signatures of Lincoln, William Seward, Secretary of State, and John Nicolay, Private Secretary to the President. This is known as the Leland-Boker edition of the Emancipation Proclamation, after the two men who arranged for its printing by Frederick Leypoldt and subsequent sale at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair of June 7-29, 1864. The Sanitary Fairs were created to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers, and to improve conditions in military camps.
View Item
107600-Service File.jpg
Text

Injured humanity; : being a representation of what the unhappy children of Africa endure from those who call themselves Christians

Broadside illustrating the brutalities of the life of enslaved people in the hope of effecting a boycott of the West Indian trade in enslaved people. Wood-engraving at upper left signed: A.A. [Alexander Anderson]. Samuel Wood is listed at this address in New York City directories from 1805-1808. The text and illustrations in this broadside also appear in the following work, first issued by Wood in 1807: The mirror of misery, or, Tyranny exposed. Not in Shaw & Shoemaker. Not in Lib. Company. Afro-Americana.

View Item
94075-Service File.jpg
Text
5 Items

The annexed plate represents the lower deck of an African ship of 297 tons burthen : with the slaves stowed on it, in proportion of not quite one to a ton

This engraving shows bodies packed into the cargo hold of a slave ship. First published in 1788 by the Plymouth Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it gestures toward the brutality of the Middle Passage from Africa to New World slave markets. By the end of the eighteenth century, the image had proliferated in British and American abolitionist propaganda in varied forms and with different accompanying texts. It remains today one of the most recognizable symbols of abolition and the transatlantic slave trade.
View Item
94088-Service File.jpg
law codes; laws (documents); pamphlets
16 Items

Le code noir ou Edit du roy, servant de reglement pour le gouvernement & l'administration de justice & la police des isles françoises de l'Amerique, & pour la discipline & le commerce des negres & esclaves dans ledit pays

The first edition of the French code noir regulating slavery in the Antilles, and one of only two copies in the United States. "Edit du roy ... pour l'établissement du conseil souverain & de quatre siéges royaux dans la coste de l'isle de Saint-Domingue en l'Amerique. Du mois d'aoust 1685"--Page 12-14. Signatures: A-B⁴. Leaf B4 blank.
View Item
Date Created
1718
104283-Service File.jpg
Text
4 Items

Jupiter Hammon poem on Anne Hutchinson, 1770

Untitled poem attributed to Jupiter Hammon (1711-circa 1806), a Black man enslaved by the Lloyd family, proprietors of the Manor of Queens Village in what is now the Village of Lloyd Harbor, N.Y. It was composed as a tribute to Anne Hutchinson, who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for challenging the authority of Puritan ministers. The poem is part of the Townsend family papers, and was written down by Phebe Townsend, youngest of Robert Townsend's three sisters. The Townsends interacted with the Lloyd family.
View Item
107538-Service File.jpg
Text
58 Items

Joseph Goodwin diary, 1820-1827

Joseph Goodwin was a plantation manager in Cuba originally from Hudson, N.Y. This diary was presumably kept by Goodwin, although it may have been kept by his brother. After leaving home in Hudson, N.Y., Goodwin worked for Gen. George De Wolf, first in Bristol, Rhode Island for a few months and then on De Wolf's plantations near Matanzas, Cuba as a manager or overseer. The plantations grew mainly coffee, although other crops are mentioned. The crops were worked by enslaved labor. The diary entries are mainly routine and record weather, plantation activities, people met, and local news.
View Item
292618-Service File.jpg
Text
112 Items

Bolton, Dickens & Co. account book, 1856-1858, 1865

Account book, 1856-1858, kept by the prominent slave trading firm of Bolton, Dickens & Co. of Lexington, Kentucky, with branches in Memphis, Charleston, Natchez, and New Orleans. It chiefly records people purchased and sold by the firm, with entries giving the names of enslaved persons, purchase and selling price, profit, names of suppliers, and occasional remarks. Some persons involved in the firm's recorded transactions were Washington Bolton, Isaac Bolton, Samuel Dickens, and the slave trader G.L. Bumpass.
View Item
292731-Service File.jpg
Text
226 Items

Mahlon Day, Journal of a voyage among the West India Islands, November 11, 1839-April 20, 1840

Mahlon Day (1790-1854) was a Quaker, publisher of children's books, printer, and bookseller in New York City. This is a contemporary copy of a diary kept by Day while on a tour of the West Indies (November 1839-April 1840) in the company of Joseph John Gurney, the English Quaker philanthropist, minister, and writer. In most of the places they visited, they did considerable sightseeing, held religious services for all faiths, and were entertained by many residents.
View Item
293938-Service File.jpg
Text
27 Items

Trade book of the sloop Rhode Island, January 18, 1749-May 6, 1749

Account book, January 18, 1749-May 6, 1749, kept aboard the sloop Rhode Island while on a voyage to Africa to procure enslaved people for her owners, Philip Livingston and sons, New York City. Peter James was shipmaster. Included are accounts for the purchase of enslaved people, gold, and other goods; for sales of rum and other provisions to the crew, various expenses, the purchase of provisions, an inventory of goods delivered to Captain David Lindsey, a record of the deaths of 37 enslaved people, etc. The trading was carried out on various locations between Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast.
View Item
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