From: Marci Lewis
Date: 3/29/00
Time: 9:10:31 PM
Remote Name: 205.188.200.193
In the Illustrations from the American Anti-slavery Almanac of 1840, slaves were portrayed as many different things. In the illustrations, slaves were portrayed as dumb, sad individuals. The slaves were portrayed as dumb in most of the illustrations. The one that portrays this the most is the one that says, “poor things.....” In this illustration, the slaves looked as if they needed slave holders to be over them to make it. In my opinion it suggest to me that the man making statement believes that slaves wouldn’t be able to hold their own as a free man. The slaves are portrayed as sad in all of the illustrations. They are either having their head hung low or not living at all. In some of the illustrations you see slaves crying, mostly for their children. In my opinion slavery has had a very powerful impact on the slaves. Slavery has had strong emotional effects because they were taken away from their children ; if they got to keep their children they had to suffer seeing them abused by slave holders or chained up. It has to be hard for any parent, especially a mother to see their child treated in these ways.
I believe that the illustrations are a propaganda. I believe that these illustrations were done to help the cause of the anti-slavery movement. The illustrations were done to show people just how bad these slaves were being treated and how they were thought of at that time. The creators of the illustrations might have been considering the future while forming this almanac also. They might have been thinking about showing future Americans how things were going on in that time. Thinking of it as a way of preserving the history