Because of the social, cultural, political, and intellectual engagement of Bowdoin College's students, alumni, and faculty, especially in their connections to antislavery movements and the Civil War, and because of the general reading interests of Bowdoin students about slavery and emancipation, the Bowdoin College Library has accumulated and acquired a substantial collection of manuscript resources and printed works that document both antislavery movements and the sentiments of slavery apologists.
In England and America, pro- and antislavery sentiments were articulated mainly through newspapers and pamphleteering. These publications shaped the debate at the time, and they survive today both as artifacts from the period and as resources for current scholars in understanding why and how advocates adopted their respective positions. Pamphlets by notable abolitionists Angelina Grimke, Horace Mann, William Lloyd Garrison, and Gerrit Smith are all represented among these resources, as are the published constitutions, bylaws, as are published proceedings of numerous colonization and abolitionist societies, both white and Black.
Slave narratives (including those about Frederick Douglass, Pierre Toussaint, and Henry Box Brown), which appeared from the 1830s onward and proved powerful both in shaping antislavery sentiment and in influencing white writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe to advance the cause of emancipation.
