Special Collections: Civil War and Slavery

The C. Fiske Harris Collection on the Civil War and Slavery was the first collection acquired by PPL. It was purchased for $2,000 in 1884, not long after the Library was founded, from the estate of Mr. Harris, a Providence book collector. Nearly all of this money was given to the Library by the Portsmouth Grove Hospital through the efforts of a Library trustee, Mr. Sidney S. Rider, who was a Providence publisher and bookseller. Several important gifts of books on the Civil War were later added to the collection, and today it is by far the Library’s largest special collection. It contains more than 10,000 books and pamphlets including more than 100 scrapbooks of newspaper clippings of the Civil War period. There are hundreds of 18th century pamphlets relating to slavery worldwide; there is a great collection of editions and translations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, together with other books by and about her. The collection also contains a number of letters written home by Rhode Island soldiers who served in the Civil War.