Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection
About this collection
This collection offers digitized pamphlets and manuscripts from the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, a nationally significant collection on the history of the abolitionist movement in the United States. The originals are held by Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. The collection was digitized in 1999 with $331,000 in funding provided by a grant from the "Save America's Treasures" initiative, a public-private partnership between the White House Millennium Council and National Trust for Historic Preservation, administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was one of 62 projects funded nationwide in 1999, and one of only two awards made to libraries that year. Selected manuscripts in the May Collection were later digitized by Cornell University Library.
The pamphlets in May's collection number more than 10,000 titles, documenting the anti-slavery struggle at the local, regional, and national levels. Many of the pamphlets were ephemeral at the time of first publication and remain scarce today. Sermons, position papers, local Anti-Slavery Society newsletters, speeches, poetry anthologies, freedmen's testimonies, broadsides, and publications issued by the Colored Conventions movement all document the social and political dimensions of the abolitionist movement and the fight for equality and human rights.
The May Collection also includes manuscripts and letters, featuring correspondence among several American abolitionists, such as John Brown, Henry Grafton Chapman, Maria Weston Chapman, David Lee Child, Lydia Maria Child, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Wendell Phillips, William Still, Reuben Tomlinson, and George Cabot Ward. The manuscripts also include many letters to Samuel Joseph May, his diaries from 1859-1861 and 1865-1870, and correspondence among members of May's family and the family of presbyterian minister and abolitionist James Miller McKim. The collection also preserves some correspondence with Cornell University Librarian Daniel Willard Fiske and George William Harris concerning the building of the May Anti-Slavery Collection at Cornell.
Historical context
Cornell University’s efforts to collect documentation on the history of the anti-slavery movement extends back to the university’s founding in the 1860s. Cornell’s co-founder and first president, Andrew Dickson White, was a historian and life-long book collector. Even before his arrival at Cornell, White had begun collecting materials written by abolitionists and ephemera documenting the Civil War. As a history professor at the University of Michigan, White used his lectures to illuminate the issues of the War, drawing the attention of his students to societies that valued the rights of free men and inviting abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass as guest lecturers. White also assembled his own collection of documents, pamphlets, and letters on the progress of the war, saving letters his students sent him from the battlefield, and gathering maps, newspapers, prints, clippings, and other ephemera.
In 1870, just five years after Cornell’s founding, White built upon his collecting efforts by facilitating the gift to Cornell of an extensive collection of abolitionist materials gathered by his close friend, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May of Syracuse, NY.
Using the collection
For more information about this collection, contact rareref@cornell.edu.
More information
- Collection steward
- Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts
- Metadata creation
- Cornell University Library
- Funding
- Funding: "Save America’s Treasures", a public-private partnership between the White House Millennium Council and National Trust for Historic Preservation, administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1999.
- Credits
- This collection overview was prepared by Katherine Reagan, Ernest Stern Curator, Rare Books & Manuscripts, April 2025.
- Collection sources
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- Individually cataloged materials
- May Anti-Slavery manuscript collection
- Exhibits featuring items from this collection