Views of Slavery
date: label: Date made
content: ca 1835
label: date made
content: ca 1836
name: label: maker
content: unknown
notes: label: Description
content: This abolitionist broadsides depicts six scenes revealing the cruelty and injustice of American slavery. These scenes include: enslaved women working in the field while their children are left alone; a freedwoman and her child watching as their free papers are destroyed by a man who has kidnapped them from the street; enslaved men being whipped and beaten; an enslaved woman watching as her child is taken away from her and sold; a slave auction; and a shipment of slaves being loading onto a ship at Baltimore bound for New Orleans. Above the images, the broadside challenges how slaveholders could see their slaves as people but not adhere to the rule of “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.” Below the images, a quote from Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing argues that keeping a man enslaved is just as much a crime as reducing him to slavery.
label: Description
content: The print was produced and distributed by the Emancipator, a weekly newspaper published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. The Society was an abolitionist activist group founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan in 1833, which had gained between 150,000 and 200,000 members by 1840. The Society held public meetings, printed vast quantities of anti-slavery propaganda (such as this piece), petitioned Congress, and sponsored lecturers to further the cause of the Abolition Movement in the North. Its membership was composed of white Northerners with religious and/or philanthropic convictions, but also free black citizens, including Frederick Douglass, who often delivered first-hand accounts of his life as a slave during the Society’s public meetings.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: World
topic: label: Subject
content: Children
label: Subject
content: Reform Movements
label: Subject
content: Blacks
label: Subject
content: Furnishings
label: referenced
content: Civil War
label: referenced
content: Slavery
label: Subject
content: abolitionism
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Domestic Life
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content: Clothing & Accessories
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content: American Civil War Prints
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content: Art
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content: Domestic Furnishings
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Harry T. Peters "America on Stone" Lithography Collection
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: DL.60.3489
label: catalog number
content: 60.3489
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Lithograph
label: Object Type
content: Lithograph
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: paper (overall material)
label: Physical Description
content: ink (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: image: 9 7/8 in x 8 3/4 in; 25.0825 cm x 22.225 cm