Project Description
Our online archive features a sample of voices from the abolitionist movement in the United States. The correspondence highlighted in this collection emphasizes the often invisible labor inherent to abolitionist work. An assortment of relationships formed through anti-slavery action are on full display in these letters, characterized not only by the people who sent and received them, but also their spacio-temporal locations within and around the abolition movement in the United States. One major focal point of the collection is the correspondence between American abolitionists and international benefactors, representing the Transatlantic supporters of the American anti-slavery movement (notably, societies in Ireland and Great Britain).
Our archive both upholds and challenges the notion of archiving materials only relating to famous figures. While these important people are included in our archive, so are the “everyday people,” that Zinn calls for us to archive and hear from (Zinn 1977). We hope to challenge the myth of neutrality and elevate the voices of those involved in the abolition movement, both remembered and not. In creating a digital archive which explores relationships between individuals with many roles in the abolition movement and broader society, we hope to illuminate the importance of correspondence in major historical movements. Users who would consider themselves “everyday people” can relate to those individuals highlighted in the collection, and also draw connections between modern and historical correspondence, relationships in activism, and communication practices throughout time and space.
We used UMich library search to find digitized representations of letters relating to the abolition movement. We eventually narrowed down our search to letters that were between a famous figure in the abolition movement and those who were not as revered by history. The main source for our collection is the William L. Clements Library’s Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society papers, 1848-1868.
The target user group of our archive is primarily students and researchers, whether for personal or academic purposes. A secondary user group may be hobbyist historians. We think these users would want clear information regarding the relationships between the correspondents, and we hope to provide some context as well. Contemporary target users will be able to parse the letters by sender/recipient, by time, or by location.
Our collection includes perspectives from famous abolitionist figures such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. It also represents the voices of some of the white women abolitionists associated with the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, as well as their correspondents and benefactors overseas. The letters we selected help convey the importance of relationships and networking in supporting the Douglass papers, moving fugitive formerly enslaved persons to safer areas, and gathering funding for abolition. Some of these letters, though, revolve around the personal lives of those involved, demonstrating the full humanness of historical actors working against systems of slavery in the United States and abroad. This perspective reminds users that manuscripts offer us an intimate, albeit incomplete, understanding of the personal and relational aspects of activist labor.
We also acknowledge that our collection lacks many perspectives – namely the perspectives of formerly enslaved persons discussed in the letters, other Black individuals involved in the abolitionist movement, and those who were unable to read or write. One of the goals of the society highlighted in the letters was to endorse and provide education for formerly enslaved individuals, but this very context reminds us that the voices of those impacted by slavery’s attack on literacy constitute a large gap in the anti-slavery and abolition archives and their enduring narratives. It is important to acknowledge that correspondence was not accessible to all, and that the correspondence that we have collected is far from representative of the scope of those involved in anti-slavery and abolitionist activism.