Classroom Resources

Documents

Web Resources

Local Links

 

I. Documents

Millerton Baptist Church Votes Against Slavery 1778

Catechism 1815 (from Nine Partners Boarding School)

Letter from Angelina Grimké 1837

Dutchess County Antislavery Society, Executive Committee Minutes, 1838

Letter to Poughkeepsie Citizens 1838

2007 Research Report

 

II.  Web Resources

The Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, based at Russell Sage College, has a wealth of online information about the abolitionist movement in Albany, Troy, and environs.  The Project operates walking tours of these sites, runs an annual late-winter workshop that draws scholars, teachers, and organizers from across the U.S.:

http://ugrworkshop.com/

Hudson River Valley Heritage has posted 20 runaway slave advertisements on its site (use the search function to search for "fugitive slave"):

http://www.hrvh.org/

For additional advertisements, and a student project based on them, developed by Historic Hudson Valley, see "Pretends to Be Free: Imagining Runaway Slaves"

http://www.hudsonvalley.org/runaway/

For John Jay's antislavery efforts during and after the American Revolution, see the helpful overview and wonderful online document collection at Columbia University:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/jay/JaySlavery.html

Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, the 1855 narrative of African-American abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward, who lived and taught in Poughkeepsie in the 1830s, is online at the Documenting the American South, from the University of North Carolina:

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/wards/menu.html

Cornell University's online site, the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, has (among many other documents) the text of the fiery antislavery sermon preached at First Congregational Church in Poughkeepsie, by Rev. Moses Tyler, on the eve of Abraham Lincoln's inauguration (search "author = Tyler, Moses"):

http://dlxs2.library.cornell.edu/m/mayantislavery/search.html

Cornell has also posted online its collection of The Friend of Man (1836-1842), newspaper of the New York Anti-Slavery Society; it contains some items from the Hudson Valley, and many reports on state-level antislavery activities:

http://newspapers.library.cornell.edu/collect/FOM/

For Fergus Bordewich's excellent overview of the Underground Railroad in the Hudson Valley (treating both myths and realities) see:

http://www.fergusbordewich.com/blog/archives/2005/07/the_underground.html

 

III. Local Sites (a suggestive—NOT comprehensive!—list)

For information on sites near Albany, see the Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region (web address above)

For information on sites in Dutchess County, see Slavery, Antislavery and the Underground Railroad: A Dutchess County Guide, published in 2009 by the Mid-Hudson Antislavery Project, and available for purchase online as well as through Dutchess County independent bookstores (including the FDR Home and Library):

http://www.hudsonhousepub.com/9781587769085.htm

Philipsburg Manor in Tarrytown, operated by Historic Hudson Valley, interprets early African American life in Dutch New Netherlands; because of its superb living-history reenactments and exhibits on slavery, it has been designated as a site on the New York State Underground Railroad Heritage Trail:

http://www.hudsonvalley.org/content/view/14/44/

Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz has recently begun interpretation of African American life and history:

          http://www.huguenotstreet.org/

The New Castle Historical Society in Chappaqua is located in the historic home of Horace Greeley, antislavery editor of the New York Tribune

          http://newcastlehistoricalsociety.org/

          http://johnjayhomestead.org/site.html

          http://www.teachingthehudsonvalley.org/