Abolitionism

In 1787, the London committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade adopted the seal “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” With its visual economy and questioning phrase, the image quickly became the symbol for abolitionism and remained so for decades.

Founded in England in 1787, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade campaigned in Parliament, wrote pamphlets and books, and published images to raise awareness of the horrible conditions of the Middle Passage. In 1807 Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, thus ending Great Britain’s participation in the international slave trade. In 1808 the United States also ended its participation in the Atlantic slave trade.

Opposition to slavery in the United States developed unevenly. At various times between the American Revolution and the 1807 federal law banning the importation of African slaves, some states, including southern ones, discussed gradual emancipation and/or manumission of enslaved people. States such as Vermont and Massachusetts banned slavery outright, while others, such as Rhode Island and New York, adopted a gradualist approach. Beginning in the 1810s, Quaker anti-slavery activists in the South and some southern slaveholders were particularly active in the colonization movement that relocated free and formerly enslaved African Americans to the state of Liberia in West Africa. The Virginia legislature openly discussed abolition in 1829 and 1831. By 1840, virtually all African Americans living in the North were free.

This broadside was issued during the petition campaign of 1835–1836 to end slave trading in the District of Columbia. The text argues for abolition and accounts for the atrocities of the system. The images highlight the contrasts between freedom and slavery, and pay particular attention to the slave trading of Franklin & Armfield, depicting both their jail in Alexandria and their packet ships that took people to New Orleans. According to the broadside, in 1834, Franklin & Armfield alone shipped more than 1,000 people. Each ship could carry as many as 180 people.

Those who called for an immediate end to slavery, called abolitionists, were centered in New England, especially in Massachusetts, and considered by many to be radical and dangerous in their political views. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator, among the first of what was to become an onslaught of anti-slavery publications: newspapers, pamphlets, books, and broadsides. Abolitionists also tried to build support for their movement through meetings and fund-raising bazaars with speakers such as Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips. At the beginning of the Civil War, abolitionism was still a small political movement and a greater number of Northerners favored a gradual approach to ending slavery. In response to abolitionist agitation, southern slaveholders developed a "positive good" argument in support of the "peculiar institution."