The Charles O'Conor Collection

The Charles O'Conor Collection

Charles O’Conor, was a leading New York attorney with pronounced pro-Southern, pro-slavery views, who left the library $21,000, and the multi-volume bound sets of “My Own Cases” and “My Own Opinions,” relating to the most notable cases of his long career. The volumes in this collection include the well-known Lemmon Slave Case of 1860 in which the "New York Court of Appeals made the strongest statement against slavery of the highest court of any state before the Civil War."* Interestingly, the judge presiding over this landmark case was Elijah Payne, Jr., former librarian at the New York Law Institute. Also included in these cases are the The New Almaden Mine case and the Vigilance Committee case.