Primary Sources: Civil War & Reconstruction, 1861-1877

From Duke University Libraries, this guide provides descriptions of and links to a variety of digital collections related to African American Women's History.

This Library of Congress collection contains more than 11,100 items. This online release presents over 1,300 items with a over 4,000 images and a date range of 1824-1931. It includes the complete collection of Stern's contemporary newspapers, Lincoln's law papers, sheet music, broadsides, prints, cartoons, maps, drawings, letters, campaign tickets, and other ephemeral items. The books and pamphlets in this collection are scheduled for digitization at a later date.

From the website: "From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered."

This collection includes autobiographies, biographies, church documents, sermons, histories, encyclopedias, and other published materials. These texts present a collected history of the way Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life. Coverage begins with white churches' conversion efforts, especially in the post-Revolutionary period, and depicts the tensions and contradictions between the egalitarian potential of evangelical Christianity and the realities of slavery. It focuses, through slave narratives and observations by other African American authors, on how the black community adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for freedom, community, and personal survival.

This collection, from the Library of Congress, provides access to digitized copies of books, pamphlets, government documents, manuscripts, prints, photographs and audiovisual footage.

This collection features diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. The majority of materials in this collection are written by those Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.

This site contains collections of advertisements for runaway and captured slaves and servants that were published in Virginia newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries. This project was developed at the University of Virginia.

From the website: "an online exhibition produced by the Chicago Historical Society and Academic Technologies of Northwestern University to mark the 125th anniversary of one of the most famous events in American history.

This site, part of Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program, documents voluntary immigration to the US from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression. Within the collection are approximately 1,800 books and pamphlets.

This collection, from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, features images, texts and maps that illustrate the African-American migration experience.

The Life photo archive, hosted by Google's Image Search, features millions of photographs from the magazine's archives. You can search the database keyword or by category. Those categories include: time period, people, places, events, sports and culture.

The site provides access to digitized copies of letters to, from, and about Abraham Lincoln that are held in the collections of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Rochester.

This site, which is part of the California Digital Library, features more than 2300 letters written by Twain. Those letters are accompanied by detailed notes. Additionally you’ll find access the full text of Twain’s autobiography as well as the full Text of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. More digitized texts will be added in the future.

This digital public law library, a project of The Native American Rights Fund, is devoted to Federal native American and tribal law.

This collection currently includes the narrative reports of the commissioner of Indian affairs for 1871, 1872, 1874, 1875, and 1876, and three additional reports for 1871. It also includes a map of western reservations published with the 1875 report.

"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. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.

The Papers of Jefferson Davis is a documentary editing project based at Houston's Rice University. As part of that project, a variety of primary source documents relating to the President of the Confederacy have been made available.

From Cornell University Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections: "Numbering over 10,000 titles, May's pamphlets and leaflets document the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels. Much of the May Anti-Slavery Collection was considered ephemeral or fugitive, and today many of these pamphlets are scarce. Sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes all document the social and political implications of the abolitionist movement."

This collection offers valuable materials for studying antebellum culture, American religious history, print culture, and education.

This collection comes from the Library of Congress's American Memory Project. According to the website: Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books published between 1772 and 1889.

This collection presents materials related to Southern life during the Civil War and the challenge of creating a nation state while waging war. The collection includes government documents, personal diaries, religious pamphlets, and many other materials.

This site, part of Harvard University Library’s Open Collections Program, features images of more than 420 separately published trial narratives from the Harvard Law School Library's extensive trial collections. Some items in the collection include: an account of the adultery trial of Caroline, Queen Consort of George IV and the sodomy trial of Oscar Wilde.

The National Archives and Records administration maintains a site devoted to Historical Election Results. Included on this page are the results of the electoral college votes dating back to 1789.

This project interweaves the histories of two communities on either side of the Mason-Dixon line during the era of the American Civil War. It incorporates a narrative and electronic archive of the sources on which the narrative is based.

This collection, form Rice University, contains two primary databases - a voyages database and an African names database. The voyages database can be searched in a variety of ways including geographic region, date, captains name, and vessel name. The database contains records of voyages from 1514 to 1866.

This site provides access to Whitman's letters, correspondence, public works, and papers. Also available on this site are a variety of portraits of the poet/essayist.

William Emerson Strong (1840-1891) served as Inspector General and later Chief of Staff of the Army of the Tennessee (Union) during the American Civil War, 1861-1865. After the war, Strong began collecting war-related items. His collection included this photograph album, which he titled "Officers of Army and Navy and Notorious Characters of the So-called 'Confederate States'."