Browse Items (377 total)

This image documents a convention held in Cazenovia, New York, to protest the Fugitive Slave Act, a bill that was being considered in Congress. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 people attended the meeting, including a number of escaped slaves and the…

Each year the American Anti-Slavery Society published an almanac containing poems, abolitionist tracts, and, beginning in 1838, drawings. As Angelina Grimké noted, "Until the pictures of the slave's sufferings were drawn and held up to the public…

Abolitionist Samuel May Jr, the compiler, sent this copy to fellow abolitionist Lysander Spooner with a note that “give me additions to this catalogue, or corrections of it, I shall be much obliged.”

Henry Brown, an enslaved man who worked in a tobacco factory and who watched as his wife and children were sold at auction, escaped north by shipping himself in a wooden crate measuring 3 feet long by 2 feet wide and 2 feet deep.

After his escape north, Henry Brown collaborated with Boston artists to create a moving panorama, The Mirror or Slavery, that he exhibited in New England and through England to explain the evils of chattel slavery. Part of his panorama may have been…

George Bourne declared that illustrations in his Picture of Slavery, first published in 1834, were accurate illustrations of slavery. A clergyman, Bourne became an abolitionist while serving a Presbyterian church in the Harrisonburg, Virginia, area.…

Henry Bibb escaped slavery in 1838 and became a leading figure in the fugitive slave community in Canada. In his memoir, he described an auction of enslaved people: "The slaves were offered on the auction block one after another, until they were all…