Slavery in America Image Gallery

The American slave trade was an international business. It began in Western Africa, where prisoners were taken for sale to European and American slave traders, and continued in permanent and impromptu slave markets in the United States, ultimately concentrated in the South. Not only were some ten to fifteen million Africans ripped from their lives and families to be imported to the New World--some half a million of them destined for the United States--but the enslaved were also bred for sale on American soil and transported, often under brutal conditions, throughout the slave states. This Image Gallery will continue to grow over the coming months.

Click here for a lesson to help students view images and documents as historical artifacts.

The Slave Trade The American slave trade was an international business. It began in Western Africa, where prisoners were taken for sale to European and American slave traders, and continued in permanent and impromptu slave markets in the United States, ultimately concentrated in the South. Not only were some half a million Africans ripped from their lives and families to be imported to the New World, but the enslaved were bred for sale on American soil and transported, often under brutal conditions, throughout the slave states. Special appreciation goes to the Mariners' Museum for permitting the use of some of the images from their extensive "Captive Passage" exhibit. To see more of their collection, visit the Mariners' web site at http://www.mariner.org	The Underground Railroad The images in this gallery document the activities of those courageous men, women, and children who participated in the so-called Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad refers to a loosely organized system of safe houses, guides, and routes used by runaway (fugitive) slaves to flee to northern free states from around 1830 to 1860. In fact, however, it was neither underground nor a railroad. Participants in the URR used railroad terms in talking about the system. "Conductors," for example, were those who helped runaways on their journeys. A "station" was a safe house in which escaping people could hide. And its exact route and operation was a carefully kept secret, thus the reference to it as something underground. The route generally ran through Ohio and Indiana in the middle South and through New Jersey and New York in the upper South. Other escaping slaves used the Mississippi River to flee north into Illinois and Ohio. It is estimated that at least 40,000 people used the system to escape slavery. Northern abolitionists, black and white, and escaped slaves raised funds and acted as guides in helping fugitives flee north. Harriet Tubman, the most famous of these guides, led 300 slaves to freedom, making 19 trips south during her lifetime. She carried a price on her head of $40,000, placed there by slaveholders who wanted her captured dead or alive. Click here to view a map of the Underground Railroad.
Contraband Slaves and the Civil War: The Photography of Henry P. Moore In the images that follow, photographer Henry P. Moore, of Concord, New Hampshire, captures a brief moment of tranquility in the life of enslaved refugees on the Sea Islands along the South Carolina Coast shortly after Yankee soldiers occupied the islands. At the time of these photographs, the enslaved refugees were designated as "contraband", or confiscated property of the enemy, rather than free people. Moore arrived in the Sea Islands with Company D of the Third New Hampshire Regiment in 1862. Most of the images in this collection are staged by Moore; they clearly do not document the horrors of slavery. Nor do they tell the observer much about the individual character or personality of the enslaved people he photographed. Why do you think he avoided doing these things in his pictures? What ideas about race, the role of the U. S. Army as a force of liberation, and the causes and character of the Civil War possibly underlay Moore's work and possibly explain the photography in this collection? The pictures in this collection are provided by the New Hampshire Historical Society. Additional information on Moore and his pictures can be found in W. Jeffrey Bolster and Hilary Anderson, Soldiers, Sailors, Slaves, and Ships: The Civil War Photographs of Henry P. Moore (Concord, N. H.: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1999).	Down South: The Photography of Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. The pictures in this gallery were taken by Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr., and published in a book of photographs called Down South. (New York: R. H. Russell, 1901.) The book includes a preface by Joel Chandler Harris. Eickemeyer approached photography as an artistic endeavor and tried to create highly posed compositions, much like a painter does. The pictures in this collection show a romanticized view of life among those people who survived slavery and lived as rural folk in the 1880s and 1890s. His images beautified the harshness and impoverishment of slavery and its aftermath. For him, the formerly enslaved people of the rural South were an authentic folk culture as unique as any that ever existed in Europe’s peasant past. Unlike the baldly racist Harris, who romanticized the image of the happy-go-lucky and trickster slave in his Uncle Remus folk tales, Eickemeyer felt genuine affection and sentiment for the black people he photographed. The images that follow are both nostalgic and compelling. They need to be viewed in the context of the "pictorialiast movement" that dominated photography at the beginning of the 20th century. Most importantly, although often misleading about the vestiges of slavery, they offer a dignified contrast to the stereotypical images of blacks that pervaded American culture for all of the 19th century. Click here for a lesson using these images.
Sugar and Cotton: The Paintings of Steele Burden The paintings in this gallery are part of a larger-than-life mural displayed on the walls of a massive barn-like exhibition building housed on the grounds of the Rural Life Museum, which is owned by Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The grounds were part of the Windrush plantation, which had been in the family of Steele Burden, the artist, since the 1850s. A landscape architect by trade, Burden developed five acres of gardens on the grounds of his family’s home plantation, which became a kind of bucolic refuge in the 1920s and 1930s. The land was donated to the LSU Rural Life Museum in 1972. Today, the Rural Life Museum contains lushly planted gardens, a wilderness landscape, and the largest collection in the nation of artifacts dealing with the rural heritage of the Louisiana plantation country in the 19th and early 20th century. Burden, who died in 1995, created the brilliant images in this gallery as a kind of visual memory of life on the sugar and cotton plantations of his youth. The images here capture his perspective on what it was like to labor in cutting sugar cane and picking cotton over a span of time dating from the 1800s. Much of what he painted resembled life in slavery and its immediate aftermath in the world slavery left behind. Students can learn more about the workings of the sugar industry and an African-American inventor who helped revolutionize the processing of sugar by reading From a Sugar Bowl to the International Space Station: Norbert Rillieux, African-American Inventor. For an in-depth essay on cotton and its connections to slavery, click here. click here. Click here for a lesson using this collection.	Political Cartoons of Slavery: The Defense of Slavery The comic and often ridiculous images in the four Political Cartoons of Slavery Collections are drawn from the archives of the Library of Congress. They are editorial cartoons, posters, cover pages to music sheets, and other pictures. These Collections are separated into four themes that cover the years in which the issue of slavery and its aftermath was hotly debated in the nation, 1830 to 1890. Around the time of the Nat Turner Rebellion in Virginia in 1831, southern supporters of slavery began more aggressively to defend slavery as a moral and positive institution. These same supporters used editorial cartoons and posters to visually attack those northern politicians opposed to slavery or its expansion into the western territories. Before viewing these images, please share with students the essay, An Introduction to Political Cartooning. Click here for a lesson using this collection.
Political Cartoons of Slavery: Antislavery By the 1840s, Americans opposed to slavery on moral, social, and economic grounds began to merge into abolitionist groups. Some wanted slavery to be limited to where it existed in the South. Some wanted it to be abolished gradually. Others wanted it to end immediately. Newspaper cartoons and posters were used by antislavery and abolitionist journalists to attack with humor and sarcasm the political supporters of slavery. Click here for a lesson using this collection.	Political Cartoons of Slavery: Civil War Years American journalists used satire and humor to make points about the value of black soldiers during the Civil War, northern and southern politicians and leaders, and almost any issue of the day that related to the combat or the handling of the war. Click here for a lesson using this collection.
Political Cartoons of Slavery: Legacy of Slavery During the generation after the Civil War, journalists used biting cartoons to address issues of voting rights, equality, education, and social and political justice for African Americans in the aftermath of slavery. Click here for a lesson using this collection.	Johnnie Mae Maberry-Gilbert Johnnie Mae Maberry-Gilbert is a Jackson, Mississippi artist who serves as the chairperson of the Art department at Tougaloo College. She has been creating images based on slave narratives for 13 years and she says of her work, "I was inspired to create images that would motivate curiosity and offer a pathway to a more accurate history through the slave narratives." Click here to read an interview with Johnnie Mae Maberry-Gilbert. Click here for a lesson using this collection.