Browse Items (31 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…

Each state that withdrew from the Union prior to the Civil War did so by formally drafting an “Ordinance of Secession.” From January to May of 1861, delegates from the State of Virginia met in convention to consider their options. The deliberations,…

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, originally a resident of the free state of New York, was kidnapped in 1841 while visiting Washington, D.C., where slavery was legal. After twelve years of bondage on plantations in Louisiana, Northup managed to contact friends in the…

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…