Weston Sisters – Anti-Slavery Collection

ANTI-SLAVERY COLLECTION (ca. 17,000 pieces). In the late 1890’s, the family of William Lloyd Garrison, along with others closely involved in the anti-slavery movement, presented the Boston Public Library with a major gathering of correspondence, documents, and other original material relating to abolition. The major groups consist of the papers of William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Weston Chapman, Deborah Weston, Anne Warren Weston, Caroline Weston, Lucia Weston, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Augustus Phelps, John Bishop Estlin, and Samuel May, Jr. Other valuable resources are the account books of the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator; records of the American, Massachusetts, and New England Anti-Slavery Societies; scrapbooks concerning Anthony Burns and John Brown; and the files of Ziba B. Oakes, a slave broker of Charleston, South Carolina.


The library also has extensive holdings of printed material relating to the anti-slavery movement. The libraries of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker are here, all rich in relevant pamphlets and broadsides.




Associates of Boston Public Library contacted Bahadir from BMK to archive this important collection. So far 1,192 documents has been archived from the Weston Sisters, Anti-Slavery Collection. You can also views the Anti-Slavery Manuscripts Collection online.