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L'embarquement des Negres (The Embarkment of Blacks)
This eighteenth-century French engraving depicts captive Africans being whipped and herded onto waiting slave ships in the background. The willing accomplices in eighteenth-century slave trade were often fellow Africans, especially those living in [...]
Boston Abolitionists Warn of Slave Catchers
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which required police officers everywhere in the country to capture escaped slaves and return them to their owners. Anyone who was caught helping escaped slaves could also be arrested and face large [...]
Am I Not A Woman And A Sister?
This illustration from an abolitionist book was a variation on the original 1787 seal of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The original organization symbol, showing a supplicant male slave, was designed by the famous British [...]
A Woodcut Depicts Nat Turner's Rebellion
The event known as Nat Turner's Rebellion was the largest slave uprising in the antebellum South. Beginning in the early morning hours of August 21, 1831, Turner, a literate slave who claimed to be guided by religious visions, led a group of slaves [...]
"Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788"
The campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade first emerged during the 1780s in Great Britain. Although slavery was not widespread in Britain, its merchants had long dominated the trade and helped to promote slavery throughout European colonies [...]
Selling Sweet Potatoes in Charleston
Slaves commonly sold produce like sweet potatoes or peanuts and other goods on the streets of Charleston. Slave owners coordinated this “slave-hiring system” to help raise additional income for the plantation. Mary Reynolds, a former [...]
Night Patrols Check Slave Passes in Mississippi
This scene of white patrollers examining “Negro passes” in Mississippi illustrates the constraints placed on all African Americans in the slave South. This news illustration captured a scene during the Civil War, when slave owners in [...]
Pro-Slavery Pamphlet, circa 1860
Two pages from a proslavery tract published around 1860 present the contrasting fates of free and unfree labor. After decades of attack from abolitionists, in the 1850s slavery advocates defended plantation slavery as the most efficient and most [...]