Browse Items (31 total)

This cartoon was published in an 1860 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which was a Republican periodical before the Civil War. In 1860, the country was in a heated debate over slavery and secession. The cartoon portrays a baby sitting on top of a box…

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,…

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 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…

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…

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…

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,…