Primary Sources: Civil War & Reconstruction, 1861-1877

This online exhibit from Cornell University includes a number of primary sources related to abolitionism including slave narratives and digitized copies of broadsides, manuscripts and illustrations.

This collection, from Northern Illinois University, includes a variety of Lincoln's writings and speeches. Lincoln's Illinois years, from 1830-1861, are the focus of this digitization project.

The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 20,000 documents. The collection is organized into three "General Correspondence" series which include incoming and outgoing correspondence and enclosures, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed material. Most of the 20,000 items are from the 1850s through Lincoln's presidential years, 1860-65. Items include Lincoln's draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, his March 4, 1865, draft of his second Inaugural Address, and his August 23, 1864, memorandum expressing his expectation of being defeated for re-election in the upcoming presidential contest.

The 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.

This collection, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, contains more than 85,000 documents pertaining to the presidency. The items span all eras of American history and range from the public papers of George Washington to the victory speech of Barack Obama.

In the 1800s, publishers printed the lyrics to popular songs, without their tunes, on small sheets called song sheets, handbills, or broadsides. Duke University's collections contains more than 1500 of these resources.

This collection, launched by the English Department at Arizona State University, provides access to a variety of materials related to slavery - including documents relating to modern-day slavery.The collection includes new accounts, children's literature, slave narratives and more.

The Avalon Project provides access to digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. Its coverage spand from 4000bce to the 21st century.

From the website: "This online exhibition of letters and audio, created by the Gilder Lehrman Institute and the Legacy Project, features correspondence from over 200 years of American conflicts, ranging from the Revolution to the war in Iraq.

The website is divided into three main areas: African American History, African American History in the West, and Global African History . Under each of those headings you will find a vast array of resources. Under African American History for example we invite you to view our encyclopedia entries, full text primary documents, and major speeches of black activists and leaders from the 18th Century to the present as well as other public figures who debated the question of African American liberty. There are also historical timelines, a list of major newspapers, magazines, and journals, and research guides and websites.

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.

Brings together materials from three premier collections: the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Library of Virginia. Among the reconnaissance, sketch, and theater-of-war maps are the detailed battle maps made by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss for Generals Lee and Jackson, General Sherman's Southern military campaigns, and maps taken from diaries, scrapbooks, and manuscripts all available for the first time in one place.

This online collection from the Library of Congress provides access to about 7,000 different views and portraits made during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and its immediate aftermath.

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.

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.

Historical collections for the National Digital Library, from the Library of Congress. Provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American 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.

"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 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.