Browse Items (27 total)

In the first image of the cartoon, a slave who has been given a pike by John Brown is depicted using the weapon as a potato-farming tool, rather than a weapon to fight with the revolt group as intended. In the bottom image, a southern plantation…

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…

In this book, historian William L. Barney explored transformations in white southern identity through the life of Walter Lenoir of North Carolina. Before the war, Lenoir, uncomfortable as a slaveholder, contemplated abandoning slavery and moving to a…

Virginia's secession ordinance was created in April of 1861, after months of meeting as the Virginia Session. The Session was called on January 7, 1861, and met from February to May of that year. Many counties in the western part of the state felt…

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…

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…

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…