This exploration of popular images of slavery and abolition provides close readings of a range of mid-nineteenth century visual works, including statues, political cartoons, reform illustrations, paintings, and photographic portraits. Examining these diverse sources reveals the complicated ways that images influenced popular understanding about race and equality in the antebellum period, and how visual media were used in the struggle to end slavery.
This is part of the "Lessons in Looking" project out of the City University of New York
This one minute video describes Theodore Weld's "Slavery as it is" in such a way that it can be included in direct instruction to show students how the nature of slavery was exposed to the non-slave holding public and the motivations that fueled the "benevolent institution" argument. Perhaps this can be linked with an exercise in looking at the book itself. http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/amslavhp.html
Lincoln's response to Stephen Douglas's attack that he supports equality of the races impels Lincoln to say the following at their sixth debate in 1858. Students can consider this quote and how it reflects the tenor of race relations in the 1850s - then can be shown the sentences that follow to learn how excerpts need to be read in context.
" I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together on the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position."
