During the American Civil War, abolitionists and their allies gathered an extraordinary amount of written material from the abandoned offices of slave traders. Though engaged in the common practice of relic hunting, they also intended these letters and ledgers to convey the significance of slavery's demise. As reconciliation shaped white Americans' attitudes toward the war in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these materials disappeared from the public eye. A century later, however, the archives abolitionists created from slave traders' records re-emerged, with transformative effects for the study and understanding of slavery and emancipation in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]