Primary Sources: Slavery & Abolition

"Anti-Slavery collection (approximately 40,000 pieces). In the late 1890's, the family of William Lloyd Garrison, along with others closely involved in the anti-slavery movement, presented the library with a major gathering of correspondence, documents, and other original material relating to the abolitionist cause from 1832 until after the Civil War. The major holdings consist of the papers of William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Weston Chapman and Deborah Weston, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Augustus Phelps, John Bishop Estlin, and Samuel May, Jr. "

FROM The Liberator, 27 March 1846; Reprinted in Philip Foner, ed., Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), p. 138.

Digital document courtesy of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (http://www.yale.edu/glc/)

"This database contains 828 indexed articles (436 which are provided in full-text) which appeared between 1831 and 1855 in William Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. These articles were chosen as potentially useful to the research of civic engagement through voluntary assocations among both African-American and white Bostonians during the antebellum period. The resulting database is provided to complement our biographical database of African Americans in Beacon Hill and the West End, 1848-1853." primaryresearch.org

The Liberator was a weekly newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, Massachusetts. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts in December, 1805. At thirteen years of age he began his newspaper career with the Newburyport Herald, where he acquired great skills in both accuracy and speed in the art of setting type. He also wrote anonymous articles, and at the age of twenty-one began publishing his own newspaper.

"This is a collection of items which appear in THE LIBERATOR, a Boston-based Abolitionist newspaper, published under the editorship of William Lloyd Garrison, who lived from 1805–1879.

The assembled items represent only a tiny portion of what appeared in the 1,803 editions of the paper, published weekly from 1831-1865. . The source of the collection has been Garrison’s copies of THE LIBERATOR., access to which has been granted and facilitated by the Boston Public Library, Rare Books."