[1] Donovan, in company with Austin Woolfolk, Bernard M. Campbell, and Hope H. Slatter, have been described as one of the "tycoons of the slave trade" in the Upper South, "responsible for the forced departures of approximately 9000 captives from Baltimore to New Orleans.

[12] In 1848, the Edmondson sisters were shipped to New Orleans; the manifest listed Donovan as the shipper although they were legally titled to Joseph Bruin and another trader called Hill.

[15] A 1849 report in the New-York Tribune offers a glimpse of Donovan's trading practices and network at that time:[16] "A week ago last Monday morning I took the cars at Baltimore for Washington.

While talking we advanced a few steps, which brought us opposite the Jim Crow car, in which were seated a clerk or runner from Donovan's slave-pen, with five slaves, a young man and woman, the exact picture of despondency and desolation, and three children, who seemed satisfied with the novelty of the scene about them.

[17]In 1851, the newly passed Fugitive Slave Act was used to recapture James Hamlet, a self-emancipated man who had been living free in New York City.

[18] According to Frederic Bancroft in Slave-Trading in the Old South, "Joseph S. Donovan, who appealed to slaveholders for 500 negroes, put special stress on the facts that his office and yard adjoined the Baltimore and Ohio station and were close to the steamboat landings; and, later, that he had built a secure jail where he would 'receive negroes for safe-keeping, at the southwest corner of Eutaw and Camden streets, opposite' the west side of that station.

[4] In March 1860, Donovan assisted in the return of a free man named John Brown who had been kidnapped into slavery by four men who entered his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the middle of the night.

Circuit Court was to hear Donovan's suit against a man named James G. Noel "to recover from the defendant the amount paid to him for a negro woman warranted to be in sound health".

Joseph S. Donovan, Esq., a well-known slave-dealer, and extensively known throughout the South, died yesterday morning, after a short illness, at his residence, southwest corner of Eutaw and Camden sts.

"[26] The following day the same paper published another notice: "His male friends are respectfully invited to attend his funeral, on this (Tuesday) afternoon, at three o'clock, from his late residence.

[42] The pallbearers at Caroline Donovan's funeral included Mayor of Baltimore F. C. Latrobe, chemistry professor and Johns Hopkins University president Ira Remsen, and Col. Albert Ritchie.