History: Civil War & Reconstruction

(Library of Congress)

(Library of Congress)

Important daily newspaper covering both regional and national news (Brooklyn Public Library)

Digitized newspapers from a number of states, with most coverage 1860-1922. Library of Congress project. More newspapers are being added regularly. Texas component: Texas Digital Newspaper Program.

Huge online collection of scanned letters, newspaper articles, images, photographs, diaries, and much more. (Michigan State Univ.)

Includes diaries, newspapers, and other ephemera. (Pennsylvania State Univ.)

Selected materials digitized from the LSU Special Collections. (Louisiana State Univ.)

Covers both sides of the war. (Auburn Univ.)

Primary sources, including photos and battle maps (including modern, historical, and even animated maps). (Civil War Preservation Trust)

(Library of Congress)

Primary source documents, images, and maps, plus scholarly essays and encyclopedia entries, relating to the Missouri-Kansas border war in the mid-19th century. (Kansas City Public Library)

Blog format--Use the "Resources" button at the top left to access primary content. Includes transcriptions of reports, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and other primary sources related to the series of nine offensives between June 15, 1864, and April 2, 1865, known as the Petersburg Campaign.

(National Park Service)

Easiest way to access primary content: scroll down in menu on left and use "Browse Soldiers" or "Search Letters".

Uses contemporaneous articles & images from The Times (New York Times)

Includes 1864-1865 newspapers from D.C.; medical and surgical cases from the The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion; slaveholders' petitions for compensation, 1862; photographs; maps; and downloadable data sets. (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Use the tab labeled “Primary Sources Online.” Links to diaries, letters, and more. Includes a collection from Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow, letters from African American slaves, etc.. (Duke Univ.)

(Duke Univ. Libraries)

Contains the congressional debates of the 23rd through 42nd Congresses (1833-73). (Library of Congress)

(Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Approximately 7,000 portraits and battleground images are available. The collection is from the glass negatives of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, as well as other photographic collections. (Library of Congress)

All pages from the 1861–1865 Civil War period have been scanned including the engravings and illustrations. (Lee Foundation)

Includes digital images of the original diary and text transcripts. Smithsonian Institution)

(West Virginia Division of Culture & History)

(Mississippi State Univ. and the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries)

A collection of letters from both Union and Confederate soldiers, organized by name and regiment. (Civil War Archive)

(Univ. of Virginia)

Digital library of primary sources (mostly books and journal articles) in American social history, from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

The records in the Civil Works Map File comprised the main map collection for the Corps of Engineers during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. They include manuscript maps forwarded to headquarters by Corps of Topographic Engineers and Army Engineer surveyors and cartographers in the field, and published editions of selected maps.

"Emilie Davis was an African-American woman living in Philadelphia during the U.S. Civil War. This website is a transcription of Emilie’s three pocket diaries for the years 1863, 1864, and 1865."

Under "Type," choose "Civil War." Optionally enter a state or a year, or just click Search to view all. (Office of Coast Survey, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA))

Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photographs from the Civil War. (National Archives)

Newspaper published from the Confederate capital; 1,384 issues. (Univ. of Richmond, et al.)

Transcribed editorials from contemporary newspapers, all from the 1850s. Issues discussed include the Nebraska Bill debates, the caning attack on Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks, John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry, and the Dred Scott decision. (Furman Univ.)

(Mississippi State University)

Compares Northern and Southern experience of the war through primary sources from two communities. (Virginia Center for Digital History)

Transcribed texts of the debates concerning Virginia's secession or support of the Union in 1861. Also includes data visualizations of secession votes by county and similar. (Univ. of Richmond)

Digitized edition of the War Department's official Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, published in 1895. Contains more than 1,000 maps, illustrations, and diagrams detailing battlefield maps, scenes from the conflict, and military equipment. (Baylor Univ.)

(Duke Univ. Libraries)

Includes correspondence, clippings, photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, various legal papers and documents, speeches and military orders, and more. Click the blue links to view the digitized images. (Univ. of Notre Dame)

A listing of free online primary source collections, from College & Research Libraries News

(New York Public Library)

(National Archives, via Flickr)

Civil War-era photos from The Atlantic covering the battleships, prisons, hospitals, urban centers, and rural pastures of the Civil War.

(Princeton Univ.)

Database of records pertaining to 100,000 slaves brought to Louisiana. (Professor Emeritus of History Dr. Gwendolyn Hall; University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Center for the Public Domain)

(Indiana U.-Purdue U. at Indianapolis)

Contains several hundred pamphlets and books pertaining to slavery and antislavery in New England from 1725-1911. These items include speeches, sermons, proceedings, and other publications from organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society, the American Colonization Society, and a small number of pro-slavery tracts. (Univ. of Massachusetts-Amherst)

Including papers of William Lloyd Garrison and the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Boston Public Library)

(Univ. of Virginia)

(U.S. Civil War Center)

Collection of over 800 speeches by antebellum blacks and approximately 1,000 editorials, from the 1820s through the Civil War. Provides a portrait of black involvement in the anti-slavery movement.

Includes primary sources on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, black in the World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement. (Fold3)

(Library of Congress)

Collection consists of over 4000 pieces dating from 1724 to 1897, and relate directly to the social, economic, civil, and legal status of enslaved Negroes and Free People of Color in Louisiana an especially in New Orleans. The manuscripts are written in French, Spanish, and English. (Xavier University of Louisiana)

Data on race and slavery, including black slaves, free people of color, and whites, extracted from 18th and 19th-century documents, including court documents, wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, etc. TIP: Click Browse Subjects for a different way to dig into these documents. (Univ. of North Carolina at Greensboro)

Ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans, Afro-descended peoples, and other non-European groups (such as Chinese and indigenous groups) in the Americas. Nearly 400,000 documents from archives in four countries. Most documents date from the 18th and 19th centuries, though there are documents from Cuba and Spanish Florida from the 16th century and Brazilian documents from the 17th. TIP: To begin browsing documents, roll over a country in the menu and select "Documents." (Vanderbilt Univ.)

(Library of Congress)

Large collection of Freedman's Bureau records (mostly transcribed, not digitized) from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington D.C. Also provides links to several other sites with Freedman's Bureau materials.

Digitized collection of runaway slave notices in newspapers, which "provide significant quantities of individual and collective information about the economic, demographic, social, and cultural history of slavery." (Cornell University)

Newspaper documenting early anti-slavery and other reform movements, published in Central New York. (Cornell Univ.)

(Library of Congress)

Online documents including speeches, letters, cartoons and graphics, interviews, and articles. (Yale Univ.)

In 1838, Maryland's Jesuit priests sold hundreds of men, women, and children to Southern plantations to raise money for the construction of Georgetown University. Though they faced incredible hardship, most didn't perish. They married and raised children. Today, more than 8,000 of their descendants have been located through genealogical research. Use this site to search for an ancestor and to hear the stories of the descendants.

A collection of digitized historical Massachusetts petitions relating to anti-slavery and anti-segregation activities. (Harvard Dataverse Network, Harvard Univ.)

Digitized books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights. Part of the Documenting the American South collection. (Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

Documents American slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. 14 collections include diaries, account books, letter books, ships’ logs, indentures, bills of sale, personal papers, and records of institutions (such as NY Manumission Society, African Free School, MA Anti-Slavery Society, and more). (New York Historical Society)

42 digitized documents in both English and Arabic, including an 1831 manuscript in Arabic on "The Life of Omar Ibn Said," a West African slave in America--the only known extant narrative written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States. (Library of Congress)

Projects documenting topics such as the Underground Railroad, black hospitals and health care, the Brown decision, and white vs black housing in Virginia. (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities)

Pamphlets and leaflets document the social and political implications of the anti-slavery / abolitionist movement at the local, regional, and national levels. Includes sermons, position papers, offprints, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and Anti-Slavery Fair keepsakes. (Cornell Univ.)

Scroll down for heading "St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, Baptism, Slaves and Free People of Color." Digital images of church records, mostly in Spanish, 1777-1812. (Archdiocese of New Orleans Office of Archives)

Read petitions to Washington, D.C., from slaveholders requesting compensation for their emancipated slaves. (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

(Brown Library)

Includes primary sources on the history of slavery in Delaware. (Delaware Public Archives)

"Interactive map of the spread of slavery in the United States from 1790 to 1860. Using Census data available from the NHGIS [National Historical Geographic Information System], the visualization shows the population of slaves, of free African Americans, of all free people, and of the entire United States. It also shows those subjects as population densities and percentages of the population." (Lincoln Mullen, PhD candidate at Brandeis Univ., joining the faculty of George Mason Univ. in fall 2014)

"Examines the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850." Includes dynamic interactive maps, a population database search engine, and digitized original documents from the era. (Andrew J. Torget & the Rector and Board of Visitors, Univ. of Virginia)

Includes more than 1,500 names found in letters, wills, court records and other sources, along with a digital copy of the original source document. Search by keywords like name, occupation, and plantation. (Virginia Historical Society)

"Visualizing Emancipation is an ongoing mapping project...on when and where men and women became free in the Civil War South. It tells the complex story of emancipation by mapping documentary evidence of black men and women's activities--using official military correspondence, newspapers, and wartime letters and diaries--alongside the movements of Union regiments and the shifting legal boundaries of slavery." (U. Richmond)

The almost seven hours of recorded interviews presented here took place between 1932 and 1975 in nine Southern states. Twenty-three interviewees, born between 1823 and the early 1860s, discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, coercion of slaves, their families, and freedom. Several individuals sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement. It is important to note that all of the interviewees spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives that are reflected in these recordings. The individuals documented in this presentation have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond. (Library of Congress)

"This online exhibition examines the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade through the voyage and capture of the slave ship Echo in 1858. The Echo voyage demonstrates how port cities such as New York City and New Orleans were strongly tied to the slave trade long after the U.S. Abolition Act of 1807. The subsequent Echo trials in South Carolina provide insight into debates about the future of U.S. slavery in the years preceding the American Civil War." (Lowcountry Digital Library at the College of Charleston)

Offers all of the records that remain from the journey of the Sally, which set sail from Providence, Rhode Island to West Africa on a slaving voyage in 1764. Visit "The Documents" area to find letters, invoices, legal documents, and trade books that tell how the ship was outfitted, who sailed aboard, and what cargo she carried. (Center for Digital Initiatives, John Carter Brown Library, Brown Univ.)

Information on more than 35,000 slave voyages between the 16th and 19th centuries.
- Look for particular voyages in this database of documented slaving expeditions.
- Create listings, tables, charts, and maps using information from the database.
- Use the interactive estimates page to analyze the full volume and multiple routes of the slave trade.
- Search the African Names Database, which identifies 91,491 Africans taken from captured slave ships or from African trading sites, including the African name, age, gender, origin, country, and places of embarkation and disembarkation of each individual.
(Emory Univ.)

Documents newspaper advertisements placed by masters seeking the capture and return of runaway slaves, primarily in Mississippi, but with plans to expand to the larger Gulf South, the rest of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil.

Database that digitizes, preserves, organizes, and enables analysis of all surviving runaway ads from the historical period of North American slavery.

Transcriptions and images of more than 4,000 newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants between 1736 and 1803. (Virginia Center for Digital History)

Provides online access to all known runaway slave advertisements (more than 2300 items) published in North Carolina newspapers from 1751 to 1840.

Covers the period from 1842 to 1863 and primarily advertises slaves that ran away from the Baltimore County, Maryland area.

Database of runaway slave advertisements, articles and notices from newspapers published in Texas. The project has so far documented the names of over 1400 runaway slaves from Texas.