Browse Items (31 total)

In August of 1831, seventy slaves in Southampton County, Virginia, revolted and killed 57 whites. The rebels and their leader, minister Nat Turner, were captured and hanged. “Horrid Massacre in Virginia” is an image from a pamphlet published by…

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,…

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…

This political cartoon by Philadelphia printer, John L. Magee, depicts an incident that occurred on the floor of the Senate on May 22, 1856. During a session of Congress, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks repeatedly struck Massachusetts…

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…