Pictures of Slavery and Anti-Slavery. Advantages of Negro Slavery and the Benefits of Negro Freedom. Morally, Socially, and Politically Considered.

A proslavery critique of abolitionists, with harsh attacks on Harriet Tubman

---

First edition and self-published, John Bell Robinson’s Pictures of Slavery and Anti-Slavery (Philadelphia, 1863) presents a vitriolic pro-slavery argument at the height of the Civil War, even attacking Harriet Tubman at length.

Robinson, a Philadelphia Unionist, viewed abolitionists as instigators of national discord, blaming their agitation for events like John Brown’s Raid. He dismissed any moral or political criticisms of slavery, instead portraying it as a benevolent institution that provided security for Black Americans. He claimed that enslaved people were better off in servitude, rejecting the idea of emancipation and advocating either perpetual slavery or deportation to Africa.

Robinson vilified Harriet Tubman as a criminal after learning about her appearance before a Boston abolitionist convention: “What could be more insulting after having lost over $50,000 worth of property by that deluded negress, than for a large congregation of whites and well educated people of Boston to endorse such an imposition on the Constitutional rights of the slave States?” he asked. Certainly, he proposed, white Bostonians were too smart to be fooled by an uneducated “deluded negress” like Tubman (pp. 322–325; see also McGowan and Kashatus, pp. 89–90).

Grotesquely, Robinson even denounced Tubman’s efforts to rescue her elderly parents, portraying slavery as a benevolent system. He claimed, “Now there are no old people of any color more caressed and better taken care of than the old worn-out slaves of the South,” arguing that enslaved individuals had “earned their living while young, and a home for themselves when past labor,” and that their masters ensured their well-being in old age, including a “respectable burying.” He insisted Tubman’s parents would have fared better in the South, where laws required their owner to “give them support righteously due them for the balance of their days,” rather than in the North, where “no rich white man or woman” would call them “‘Uncle Tom, and Aunt Lotta.’” (ibid)

This copy likely bears the inscription of Union soldier Joseph W. Detwiler (d. 1932), a Pennsylvania 51st Volunteer Infantry, Company C private from Montgomery County, who was severely wounded at Fredericksburg in 1862. Losing his left arm, Detwiler was discharged from service on April 6, 1863.

Represented in institutions, but scarce to commerce and curiously absent from the standard references.

Price: $300.00