- Historical Eras > Antebellum America (1816-1860) (x)
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A Southern Newspaper Reports on Northern Racism
The Staunton Spectator, a Virginia newspaper, reported on the "miserable" treatment faced by fugitive slaves who had been "abandoned" by abolitionist supporters in the U.S. North and Canada. Using quotes from northern papers, it described a fight a [...]
A Southern Newspaper Concludes "We are all therefore slaves"
The Staunton Spectator, a Virginia newspaper, frequently used material printed in northern newspapers in order to defend the southern institution of slavery. In this, and many similar articles, it detailed the unfortunate circumstances that [...]
A Know-Nothing Compares "Romanism" with "Republicanism"
In the mid-nineteenth century, the arrival of large numbers of Catholics from Ireland and Germany made the new immigrants' faith and its place in American society a hot-button issue. Such ideas found their expression in the anti-Catholic polemics of [...]
The People of Ireland Ask the Irish in America to Support Abolition
This call for unity was written in Ireland by Irish and American abolitionists in the summer of 1841. The petition was eventually signed by 60,000 Irish men and women. Catholic abolitionists in Ireland wanted their countrymen in America to draw [...]
A New York Democrat Champions Territorial Expansion
Mike Walsh was an Irish immigrant, former gang leader, and editor of the radical Democratic newspaper The Subterranean. An advocate of working-class causes, he was strongly anti-abolitionist and supported the annexation of Texas. He gave the [...]
An Abolitionist Denounces War with Mexico
Theodore Parker, a well-known abolitionist and Congregationalist minister, delivered the following sermon to an antiwar group gathered in Boston in June 1846.
A Southern Senator Opposes the "All-Mexico" Plan
John C. Calhoun, Senator from South Carolina and future spokesman for southern secession, delivered the following speech to Congress on January 4, 1848. At the time, U.S. and Mexican diplomats were in the midst of negotiating a peace treaty to [...]
An Abolitionist Speaks Forcefully for Women's Rights
Women and African Americans were demanding the rights of citizenship in the 1850s. At an 1851 women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio Sojourner Truth rose and asked the president, "May I say a few words?" She then conveyed to the audience a [...]
Timeline of Compromises over Slavery
From the nation's very inception, the existence of slavery stood in glaring contrast to the ideals of liberty and justice expressed in the preamble to the Constitution. The Constitution itself protected the institution of slavery (while never [...]
Ex-Slaves Recall Sunday Meetings
Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers Project conducted interviews with thousands of former slaves, part of a larger project to collect first-hand biographies of "ordinary" American people. The excerpts below are from two of those interviews, [...]