Am I Not a Man and a Brother?

Date1835-1837

Publisher American Anti-Slavery Society

MediumWoodblock engraving on wove paper with letterpress

DimensionsOverall: 19 × 12 1/2in. (48.3 × 31.8cm)

Credit LineGift funds from the Joseph R. and Ruth P. Lasser Philanthropic Fund.

Object number1999-66

DescriptionThe lower margin reads, "He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death. Exod. xxi.16. *ENGLAND had 800,000 Slaves, and she has made them FREE. America has 2,500,000! --and she HOLDS THEM FAST!!! Sold at the Anti-Slavery Office, 144 Nassau Street. Price TWO CENTS Single; or $1.00 per hundred."
Label TextThis anti-slavery broadside published by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) contains a large woodcut of a kneeling enslaved person in chains. Under the kneeling figure, a ribbon reads the motto: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” Below the motto is a fourteen-stanza poem titled “Our Countrymen in Chains!” by Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. In 1833, Whittier was the secretary at the AASS’s Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia and helped to draft the organization’s principles. The American Anti-Slavery Society comprised of prominent anti-slavery activists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and advocated for the immediate abolition of slavery in the United States. To promote their cause, the AASS underwent an extensive campaign of printing and distributing abolitionist pamphlets, tracts, and broadsides, including this one. The AASS created a distribution network to carry these print materials all over the United States.

This large woodcut image was first created in 1787 in Josiah Wedgewood’s seal for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in London. Both the kneeling figure and the “Am I Not a Man and Brother?” motto appeared alongside each other in jasperware cameos made by Wedgwood. The image quickly became part of the central iconography of the anti-slavery movement.
ProvenanceBefore 1999, M & S Rare Books, Inc (Providence, RI); 1999-present, purchase by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (Williamsburg, VA)