Browse Items (27 total)

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…

This lithograph by Currier & Ives, an American printmaking firm based in New York, satirized President Zachary Taylor's attempts to balance southern and northern interests in 1850 as they related to slavery in the territories gained in the Mexican…

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…

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…

Solomon Northup, a resident of the free state of New York, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841 while visiting Washington, D.C., where the institution was legal. After twelve years, Northup managed to contact friends in the North who secured…

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,…