Browse Items (27 total)

In this letter written in 1820, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and former president of the United States, revealed his understanding of the primary difficulty with rectifying the injustices he saw in the institution of…

Colonization was one of the first post-revolutionary movements seeking to deal with the problem of slavery in the new United States. Whites from both slaveholding and nonslaveholding states formed the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1817 in…

The son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was born a slave in Maryland. While living in Baltimore and working at a shipyard, Douglass fled the city. He settled in Massachusetts and became the most prominent…

Anthony Burns, a slave, escaped Virginia and fled to Massachusetts. He was captured and returned to slavery. He later spoke at a black church in New York in February of 1855. In this speech, published subsequently in newspapers, he gave his account…

Reverend A. T. Holmes of Hayneville, Georgia, wrote the following essay in response to a contest offered by the Alabama Baptist State Convention in 1849 on “the Duties of Christian Masters to Their Servants.” Holmes won $200 for this winning entry,…

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…