Routes of the Underground Railroad, 1830-1865, Image from Wikimedia Commons: Public Domain

These online sites focus on the transatlantic slave-trading system between west African states and the Americas, and the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements. See this note on primary sources and offensive language.

Abolition, Abolitionists, and Antislavery

• “An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Service of such Slaves” - British Colonies, 1833
• Antislavery Collection 1725-1911 - Small collection of scanned documents - pamphlets, speeches, sermons, books - on slavery and antislavery in New England.
• Antislavery Literature Project - Contains a significant collection of slave narratives, tracts, prose fiction, religious literature, journals, and other resources. 
• Black Abolitionist Archive - Hundreds of speeches and editorials by antebellum blacks who were part of the anti-slavery movement. See also the related ‘American Memory’ page: From Slavery to Freedom (Pamphlet Collection 1822-1909):  
• JSTOR History Pamphlets - The JSTOR database has nine collections of pamphlets, one of which is the Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection. It contains resources from the philanthropic and emancipation societies, and shows the prominent role of women in the movement. 
• Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection (Cornell University) - Contains about 10,000 items – sermons, pamphlets, newsletters, testimonials, and broadsides on slavery, abolition, and the Civil War.
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive - This large collection is divided into four topics: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, The Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, The Institution of Slavery, and The Age of Emancipation. Slavery and Anti-Slavery. It is one of the collections from ‘Points to the Past’ (http://pointstothepast.ca/database-list.php).

Atlantic Slave Trade

• Digital Public Library of America - Transatlantic Slave Trade - Primary source collection
• Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade - Focus on enslaved people. "From archival fragments and spreadsheet entries, we see the lives of the enslaved in richer detail." 
• SlaveVoyages - "A collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history." Includes places and routes, slave population estimates, timeline, 3-D video reproduction of slave ships, etc.
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive - This large collection is divided into four topics: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, The Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, The Institution of Slavery, and The Age of Emancipation. Slavery and Anti-Slavery. It is one of the collections from ‘Points to the Past’ (http://pointstothepast.ca/database-list.php).
• Voyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Emory University) - Contains statistical information on 35,000 slave voyages that embarked more than 12,000,000 Africans from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Canada

• "An Act to prevent the further introductino of SLAVES, and to limit the Term of Contracts for SERVITUDE within this Province" - Upper Canada, 1793

• Black Loyalists in New Brunswick - A collection of petitions for land grants that were made by free Black Loyalists when they left the US to settle in New Brunswick.  

• Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People - See the "Documents" link in the sidebar. A small collection of primary sources: personal journals, letters, and official documents.

Slave Narratives

• Born in Slavery - This collection from American Memory contains 2300 slave narratives from first-person interviews collected in 1941.
• Excerpts from Slave Narratives - About fifty original documents. Topics deal with enslavement, the middle passage, conditions of life, resistance, emancipation, etc.
• The Slave, Freedom, or Liberation Narrative (Washington State University) - A collection of first-person accounts of slaves who escaped to freedom.

United States

• African-American History - Contains three collections:

• African American History
• African American History in the West
• Global African History

• American History: From Revolution to Reconstruction - When you choose the “Documents” link you’ll see that this site contains much more than slave sources, so expect to do some hunting. See, for example “1776-1785” Jefferson’s Notes on Slavery; “1826-1850” Refugee Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada; and “1851-1875” Henry Carey’s The Slave trade Domestic and Foreign 1853
• Avalon Project: Documents on Slavery - A sub-set of the large Avalon collection on law and history. There are about thirty documents on the laws, agreements, and history of slavery in the US.
• Documenting the American South - A collection of primary resources on history, literature, and culture from the University of North Carolina. Slavery-related documents form only part of the site.
• Geography of Slavery in Virginia - A digital collection of newspaper ads concerning runaway and captured slaves in Virginia in the 18th & 19th centuries.
• Repository of Historical Documents - A Slavery & Justice collection of source documents from Brown University. Includes scans of original hand-written documents (and some transcripts) related to slave voyages, contracts, inventories, pamphlets, speeches, etc. 
• Slavery Code of the District of Columbia (1862) - A compendium of American laws on slavery (primary source)
• Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law - This collection brings together a multitude of essential legal materials on 
• Slaves and the Courts 1740-1860 - Includes trial transcripts, cases and decisions, proceedings, and other historical material on legal cases dealing with slavery from 1772-1889.
• Spartacus Educational: Slavery in the US - An educational resource site that contains both primary documents and secondary-resource essays.
• Texas Slavery Project - Contains hundreds of letters, newspaper articles, and legislative decrees. 

Other

• Internet African History Sourcebook (Fordham University) - See the sub-heading ‘The Impact of Slavery’.
• Liberian Letters (University of Virginia) - A small collection of fifty-one personal letters from the mid-nineteenth century.
   

Note on primary sources and offensive language:

We do not endorse the dated language and terms of degradation found in source documents.. Language in primary sources comes from the era in which they were written, and we cannot edit them without distorting these texts. Some sites put quotation marks around possibly offensive terms.

The term “holocaust” has been borrowed from the vocabulary of World War II to describe the enforced deportation and enslavement of millions of people from states in Africa. The Swahili term “Maafa” has more recently been used to describe slavery – it’s a word used of tragedy and disaster.