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SLAVERY AND ABOLITION

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. Written in 1776 by Thomas Jefferson, this document helped to ignite the War of Independence. It would later have great importance to persons of African descent with the phrase “all men are created equal,” guaranteeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

THOMAS JEFFERSON. Born in 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, Thomas Jefferson lived abroad as the young nation’s diplomat to France. During the Constitutional Convention, he initially did not support the US Constitution, but changed his mind after the Bill of Rights was added. During his presidency, Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, which doubled the size of the country, and initiated the official Indian removal policies of the young nation. After retiring from the presidency in 1808, Jefferson returned to Monticello, led a campaign to build the University of Virginia, and subsequently served as the institution’s first president. Throughout his lifetime, Jefferson also owned over 600 persons of color. While he wrote of his deep moral anguish about slavery, he was perpetually in debt and thus never freed more than a handful of his own slaves. Recently, several scholars have uncovered evidence that Jefferson had a relationship with one of his enslaved African American woman, Sally Hemmings, and fathered at least one of her children. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

THE CONSTITUTION. In 1787, delegates from 12 states met in Philadelphia and created the US Constitution. On the topic of human bondage, the Constitution allowed for the Atlantic slave trade to continue until 1808 and made it possible for states to count enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining a state’s representation in the House of Representatives. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW OF 1793. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a group of proslavery men demanded that measures be enacted to stop rebellions and runaways. As a result, the foundation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was written, which provided that persons “held to service or labour in one State, escaping into another . . . shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.” (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. Born in 1706 in Boston, the young Franklin was not a vocal supporter of human bondage, but he did own two enslaved African Americans. However, with the end of the American Revolution, Franklin became a staunch antislavery activist who eventually freed his enslaved persons of color and also championed the education of African Americans in numerous articles and essays. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

THE NORTHWEST ORDINANCE. The most important achievement of the Articles of Confederation was the plan of Congress to develop the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. Based on many of Thomas Jefferson’s governmental ideas, Congress created and adopted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlawed slavery in the new western territories and also specified that the sale of some lands would provide for support of schools. (Courtesy of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.)

THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY. On July 13, 1787, the Articles of Confederation enabled Congress to pass the Northwest Ordinance, which led to the creation of the Northwest Territory. Settlers had started to move into the region that would become the city of Cincinnati as early as 1788, but the city was not incorporated as a village until 1802 and was not an official city until 1819. (Courtesy of the Cincinnati Historical Society.)

WHIPPING SCARS OF RUNAWAY SLAVE GORDON. Individuals who used enslaved African Americans as laborers on plantations, small farms, and in their homes frequently offered incentives to induce their captives to perform well. Some of the most popular incentives were days off work or additional food and clothing. However, enslavement, by definition, is forced labor based on the threat of physical punishment or controlled violence. This image shows the scars that resulted from repeated whippings, illustrating that violence was inherent in the system of human bondage. (Courtesy of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.)

HARPERS WEEKLY SLAVE AUCTION, ABUSE OF SLAVERY. In the Americas, slave auctions were used until the end of the Atlantic slave trade. By 1860, the average field hand could be purchased for nearly $40,000 in today’s money. Enslaved people who were sold in southern slave ports quite possibly could have traveled down the Ohio River, past the city of Cincinnati. The image here depicts a group of enslaved individuals being viewed before an auction. (Courtesy of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.)

RECEIPT FOR PURCHASE OF AN ENSLAVED PERSON. The profits gained from owning an enslaved person were enormous. Indeed, some enslaved African Americans could be worth almost $1,000. However, there were some shortcomings within this “peculiar institution,” such as the fact that most whites (and the law) viewed enslaved black Americans as property, which meant taxes had to be paid. Pictured here is a receipt of purchase that an owner could use when paying their taxes on their human property. (Courtesy of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.)

COURT DOCUMENT APPROVING THE SALE OF A YOUNG ENSLAVED CHILD. Throughout the antebellum period, as owners trimmed the number of excess enslaved persons that they owned from their workforces or switched their labor system from slave labor to wage labor, they sold men, women, and children to nearby slave traders. This document represents one example of a child involved in this economic machine. (Courtesy of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.)

RICHARD ALLEN. Born an enslaved person in 1760 in Philadelphia, Richard Allen converted to Methodism as a young man and eventually helped to form the African Society of Philadelphia in 1787 and subsequently a separate Methodist church for African Americans in 1794, also in the “City of Brotherly Love.” Many of these facilities were used to harbor escaped African Americans during the years of the Underground Railroad. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

BETHEL AME CHURCH. Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the nation, founded in Philadelphia in 1794 by Richard Allen. Allen founded Mother Bethel AME after the church he had been attending, St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, began to segregate its parishioners by race for an unknown reason. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

DAVID WALKER’S APPEAL. During the early antebellum period, the assault on the system of human bondage in the United States began to shift to a more militant perspective that did not accept either colonization or gradualism as key components to end the peculiar institution. One individual who represented this new era was David Walker, who advocated the use of violence to overturn the system in his pamphlet Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

NAT TURNER’S REBELLION. Born in 1800 on the Virginia plantation of Benjamin Turner in Southampton, Nat Turner was allowed to learn how to read, write, and study the Bible at a young age. Believing that God had told him to start the rebellion, in 1831 Turner and six other enslaved African Americans managed to secure some arms and horses and eventually enlisted some 75 others to begin the insurrection that resulted in the murder of 51 whites. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1805, William Lloyd Garrison eventually became one of the nation’s most important and fiery abolitionists. In 1831, Garrison published the first edition of his own antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, which continued his untamed assault on the system of enslavement despite constant personal threats and harassment from proslavery individuals and groups. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

THE LIBERATOR. The Liberator was a weekly newspaper primarily published by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison from January 1, 1831, to December 29, 1865. This paper was the most influential antislavery periodical during the antebellum period. Published in Boston, the Liberator claimed that it had a paid circulation of only 3,000 subscribers. However, it reached a much wider audience with its uncompromising and fiery advocacy for the immediate end to the institution of enslavement. In the North, Garrison’s message of moral suasion challenged moderate reformers to apply the principles of the Declaration of Independence to all people, regardless of color. Fearful slave owners in the South believed that The Liberator represented the majority opinion of northerners, causing hundreds of southerners to react militantly by defending slavery as a “positive good” and by passing even more legislation aimed at repressing all possible opposition to its peculiar institution. In the end, Garrison’s publication further altered the course of the American antislavery movement by insisting that abolition, rather than African colonization, was the answer to the problem of slavery. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

ANTISLAVERY SOCIETIES. Before the articulation of the concept of Manifest Destiny, the American Antislavery Society (AASS) was created and quickly became the most significant abolitionist organization of the 1830s. Primarily based on the views of William Lloyd Garrison, who in 1831 called for the creation of an antislavery movement that was dedicated to the immediate, uncompensated emancipation and equal rights of African Americans throughout the United States, a national antislavery convention was held in Philadelphia in December 1833. At the event, a biracial group was organized that called itself the American Antislavery Society, whose members pledged their allegiance to the immediate destruction of the system of human bondage. Several residents of Ohio attended the convention, including Theodore Weld, Arthur Tappan (right), and Lewis Tappan (below). These same men helped to establish the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1835. (Both, courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

HARRIET TUBMAN. Born into enslavement in Bucktown, Maryland, in 1820, as a young child Tubman was hit in the head while trying to protect another enslaved African American and suffered an injury that led her to have sudden blackouts throughout her life. Nevertheless, on her first attempt to escape, she trekked through hundreds of unknown woods at night, found shelter, and was aided by several free African Americans and Quakers until she reached freedom in Philadelphia with William Still’s Vigilance Committee. After hearing that her niece and her children would soon be sold, she arranged to meet them in Baltimore and usher them north to freedom. It was the first of numerous trips Tubman made to the South as she led almost 300 enslaved African Americans to freedom. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a spy, scout, and nurse for the Union Army. When the government refused to give her a pension for her wartime service, she sold vegetables and fruit door-to-door and lived on the proceeds from her biography. (Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society.)

FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Born into enslavement in 1817 near Tuckahoe, Maryland, Frederick Augustus Washington Baily was taught how to read as a house servant, but at the age of 16 he became a field-hand. In 1838, he escaped and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he took the name Frederick Douglass. After his initial speech before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841, Douglass became a regular speaker for the abolition movement. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

COMPROMISE OF 1850. Sen. Henry Clay (pictured) crafted the Compromise of 1850, which proposed the admission of California into the Union as a free state and the elimination of the slave trade (but not the institution of enslavement itself) in Washington, DC, and offered the creation of a strong fugitive slave law to make it easier for owners to recapture their runaways. Also, the states of Utah and New Mexico would be organized without any mention of enslavement. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT OF 1850. With the adoption of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 took effect, which created bitter resentment and division between African American and white abolitionists and made the institution of enslavement an emotional and personal issue for many white Americans. The new law directed federal marshals to aid private citizens (such as slaveholders) in pursuing and returning fugitives. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

HARPERS WEEKLY SLAVE POPULATION. By 1860, the total United States population was more than 31 million people. This number included nearly four million enslaved people living in the South. In both South Carolina and Mississippi, the slave populations made up over 50 percent of the total population. (Courtesy of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.)