Paradoxically, though it was the cradle of American liberty, Philadelphia was a place where slavery thrived into the early decades of the nineteenth century. From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the nation's capital and President George Washington brought with him several slaves from his Virginia plantation.  Not far from the President's home, near Independence Hall, slaves were also auctioned off until 1790 when Pennsylvania outlawed the slave trade. 

Philadelphia can, however, also lay claim to being the birthplace of the American antislavery movement. In 1775, a group of Quakers and other opponents of slavery, organized the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first abolitionist society in America. In December 1833, opponents of slavery from throughout the United States gathered in Philadelphia to form the American Anti-Slavery Society, which issued a famous "Declaration of Sentiments".   As these and other formal efforts to promote the abolition of slavery were underway, scores of people in Philadelphia and the surrounding region--both white and black--were working to help thousands of enslaved persons escape from bondage. Their efforts are a heroic story of risk-taking, collaboration, struggle and resistance known as the "Underground Railroad." The Philadelphia region is replete with staging points and shelters that were part of this clandestine campaign.

The 1860s and 1870s, MOLLUS members involved in the effort to collect and preserve materials relating to the Civil War understood that the issue of slavery was central to the history of that conflict. They donated items such as receipts for the purchases of slaves, memoirs and autobiographies of abolitionists and individuals involved in the antislavery movement, copies of "The Liberator", the leading antislavery newspaper, and a first edition of William Still's classic "History of the Underground Railroad", published in 1872.