Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress & Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1808), First American Edition, Vol. I, illustration between pp. 300-301
Slavery was a historical reality in the Americas, but many have little sense of the devastating impact of the “peculiar institution” on the lives of those who bore the burden of its chains and the brunt of its brutality. A new exhibit at the John Hay Library seeks to tell this side of the story with the display of a set of 18th century leg shackles accompanied by three narratives of African American men and women enslaved in the United States during the 19th century.
The leg shackles, which are displayed courtesy of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool (UK), represent the Middle Passage – the sea voyage from Africa to the Americas, during which newly enslaved Africans were kept chained in the ship’s hold. Such shackles were identified by anti-slavery campaigners as emblematic of the violence deemed necessary to maintain captured Africans in a state of slavery and submission.
Jesse Torrey, “…but I did not want to go, and I jumped out of the window” in Torrey, A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: Jesse Torrey, 1817)
The narratives are drawn from the collections of the John Hay Library and represent the voices of three people who struggled within the strictures of the slave system: the poet George Moses Horton, enslaved in North Carolina until emancipated by Union forces during the Civil War; the church deacon James Mars, born into slavery in Connecticut and kept by white owners there until he turned 25 in 1815; and an un-named African American woman in Washington, D. C., interviewed by Dr. Jesse Torrey Jr. in 1816, who, faced with the prospect of being sold away from her husband and children, leapt from the third floor window of a tavern.
This exhibit is a collaboration between the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown, and the Brown University Library.
Dates: January 7 – March 13, 2016
Time: John Hay Library Hours
Location: Lobby Cases, John Hay Library, 20 Prospect Street, Providence