This image features the Wedgwood Anti-Slavery Medallion, created by British potter Josiah Wedgwood. While Wedgwood is best known for innovative stoneware and earthenware and the fine china and porcelain company that today bears his name, he was an outspoken abolitionist.
In 1787 Wedgwood created the image above to be used as a seal for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. It quickly was adopted as a symbol of the British abolition movement.
Its powerful image and question would echo across both sides of the Atlantic in Britain and the United States – "Am I not a man and a brother?"
Why did slavery exist in the United States, and how did it get that way?
To better understand America leading up to the Civil War, it's vital to trace its roots back to its origins and how its British history morphed into the Southern society, politics, and economy. As the US grew, every increase strained against the uneasy tension between the pragmatic and the moral perspectives on the South's "peculiar institution."
How would the country deal with this tension and the sparks that began to light the path towards war?
The southern socio-economic foundations for slavery had been legally permissible and geographically pragmatic. Those swept up in its profitability never bothered to assess its sustainability in the light of its moral cancer. It was a system built because it worked, but the full cost in human suffering was never counted.
This is a difficult conversation.