Reflecting on the JCB's Work on the Sally

In 2006, Brown University issued the results of a three-year investigation into the university’s historical relationship with slavery and the Transatlantic slave trade. Led by the university’s president, Ruth J. Simmons, Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report was an important inauguration of the movement for universities studying slavery. The Report has had its own afterlife locally, informing practices across the university and, importantly, establishing the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, now the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

The history at the heart of Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report, archivally, resides almost entirely at the John Carter Brown Library (JCB). It can be found in the Brown Family Business Records (BFBR), correspondence and accounts that document the Brown family’s direct investment in the slave trade. The BFBR also holds much of the material that evidences the lives and work of enslaved and free Black people in Providence and beyond.

The central artifact of this archival collection is the logbook of the slave ship Sally. Tattered by time and chewed by bugs, documenting the perversity and violence of making commodities of people, the logbook is an ugly object by any measure.

The logbook and the other material associated with the history undergirding the Report is an important part of the JCB's collection, and we want to do our utmost both to make it fully discoverable for researchers and to fully engage with this history-- it is our library's history, too. In this series of blog posts, the JCB staff reflects on the work that has been performed over decades to preserve and order these materials. This is a mid-stream status report in advance of a dedicated website that will offer better, fuller access for the Sally and other related manuscripts. And it is part of our broader work that includes collaboration with the Simmons Center.

Revisiting the Sally: Innovation, Change, and Institutional History

Kate Goldman, Communications Manager

The Brown Family Business Records, the Sally, and the John Carter Brown Library

Kimberly Nusco, Associate Librarian for Research and Reference

Concepts of Care in Preserving the Sally Account Book

Roger S. Williams, Head of Libraries Conservation