Topic: African Americans
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Interior of the Slave Ship Vigilante
This image depicts the cramped and inhumane conditions existing on a slave ship. Although by 1829 both the U.S. and Britain had banned the international slave trade, other nations continued...
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Jefferson to David Barrow
Jefferson wrote this letter to David Barrow, a white Virginian who had moved to Kentucky in hopes of escaping slavery. Barrow had sent Jefferson some of his anti-slavery writings. Jefferson...
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Jefferson to Edward Coles
Jefferson wrote this letter to his kinsman and fellow planter Edward Coles, who had asked him to take a public stand against slavery. Jefferson agreed that slavery was wrong, but...
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Jefferson to Edward Rutledge
In this 1787 letter, Jefferson congratulated Edward Rutledge of South Carolina for introducing legislation to prohibit new slave importations to his rice-producing state. During the Revolution, no slaves were imported...
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Jefferson to Frances Wright
In this letter, Jefferson responded to the anti-slavery ideas of Frances Wright, who had recently visited him at Monticello. Wright was a feminist and an abolitionist. She later founded a...
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Jefferson to James Heaton
Jefferson wrote this letter shortly before his death in 1826. Yet another admirer had asked the still influential statesman to condemn slavery publicly. With some exaggeration, Jefferson claimed that he...
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Jefferson to Jean Nicolas Demeunier
As Jefferson explained here, Virginia’s leaders considered the gradual abolition of slavery in their state during the 1780s. Jefferson himself was a diplomat in Paris when the state’s legislators debated...
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Jefferson to John Adams
When Jefferson wrote this letter in 1819, the U.S. was in the middle of a severe financial crisis that ruined many Americans–including the former president. Yet Jefferson believed that Missouri’s...
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Jefferson to John Holmes
In this famous letter, Jefferson conceded that justice demanded an end to slavery, but he also insisted that the prosperity and safety of white people required its preservation and expansion...
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