Browse Items (27 total)

Born into slavery, Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) thwarted repeated sexual advancements made by her master for years and then ran away to the North. She later published an account of her life (under the pseudonym Linda Brent) in her autobiography,…

This cartoon was published in an 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which was a Republican periodical before the Civil War. In 1860, the country was in a heated debate over slavery and secession. The cartoon portrays a baby sitting on top of a box…

During the presidential election in 1860, James D. B. DeBow (1860-1867), the publisher of the influential DeBow’s Review, campaigned in support of secession. His most famous speech, excerpted here, replied to Hinton R. Helper whose Impending Crisis…

Melton A. McLaurin, professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, recounted the story of Celia, an enslaved woman, and her trial for the murder of her sexually abusive master. McLaurin placed Celia's trial in the…

Southern Democrats supported Stephen A. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill, introduced in January 1854, which proposed to repeal the Missouri Compromise line, thereby possibly opening the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery on the basis of popular…