- The Slavery Collection contains correspondence and legal and financial documents related to the North American slave trade, slave ownership, abolition, and political issues pertinent to slavery. The Slavery Collection is called an "artificial" collection because unrelated items with different provenance have been grouped together according to subject matter. Highlights of the collection include the records of Samuel and William Vernon, business partners involved in the triangular trade, 1756-1799; the Rhode Island slave trading firm of Gardner and Dean, 1771-1787; material relating to slavery in Kentucky, 1785-1864; the records of E.H. Stokes, slave trader in Richmond, Va., 1859-1862; manifests of slave ships, 1812-1855; and birth certificates of children born into slavery in New York, 1800-1818.
- This engraving shows bodies packed into the cargo hold of a slave ship. First published in 1788 by the Plymouth Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it gestures toward the brutality of the Middle Passage from Africa to New World slave markets. By the end of the eighteenth century, the image had proliferated in British and American abolitionist propaganda in varied forms and with different accompanying texts. It remains today one of the most recognizable symbols of abolition and the transatlantic slave trade. The engraved illustration has caption: "Plan of an African ship’s lower deck, with Negroes, in the proportion of not quite one to a ton". Signed at end: By the Plymouth Committee, W. Elford, chairman. Printed as a broadside in Philadelphia, 1789 under title: Remarks on the slave trade., English short title catalogue T148326, New-York Historical Society