I’d often observed the “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” and the “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister” anti-slavery pleas on coins and medallions. The ones at this auction were in two new forms: a plaque framed in marble and a print in a wooden frame accompanied by thick iron slave shackles.
The pleas were imprinted on items in the 18th and 19th centuries to raise money for the movement to abolish slavery in Great Britain and the United States.
The original image was an enslaved African man, distributed as a medallion by English potter Josiah Wedgwood. Sculptor Henry Webber created the design in 1787 based on a kneeling figure on the seal of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded that year in London. William Hackwood modeled it for production on black jasper against a white background in Wedgwood’s factory. The British Parliament voted to abolish slavery in 1807.
Wedgwood sent some of the medallions to Benjamin Franklin, also an abolitionist, with the intent that they would “acquaint (Franklin with a subject that) is daily more and more taking the possession of men’s minds on this side of the Atlantic as well as with you.”
It’s not clear who made the female version, but it seemed to have first appeared in England in the early 19th century. By the 1830s, it had made its way to the United States, popularized by a white writer named Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, who advocated against slavery in her poetry, including the poem “The Kneeling Slave” in 1833. Sarah Mapps Douglass, a black woman who was one of the organizers of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, was said to have sent her a drawing of a kneeling woman after seeing the poem.
The male and female images were used on all sorts of items, from snuff boxes to hatpins to brooches to milk jugs to sugar bowls to silk purses.
So it was not surprising to see the images on other forms at the auction. The auction house described the wall plaque as rare, circa 1800-1830, along with the following:
“1-7/8 inch watercolor of the classic kneeling slave; at his feet, a tiny bunch of moss, his hands in shackles with very fine gilt chain; over him, a narrow band carrying the well-known motto; this in turn is set under a piece of convex glass with double gilt borders reverse painted; this then is set in a circular piece of pink marble 3-3/4 inches in diameter; the latter with several age cracks.”
The plaque sold for $900 (with buyer’s premium, $1,143). It had been sold in 2015 at another auction for $1,400 (with buyer’s premium, $1,820). The framed composition sold for $425 (with buyer’s premium, $540).
The female figure in the framed piece was different. While the man’s head was turned upward – as in the originals – the woman looked downward and her head was covered. The slave shackles, according to the inscription, were hand forged, circa 1820.
I’d come across these images at several auctions – some ancient with a political purpose and some modern with a decorative purpose. A few years ago, I picked up three anti-slavery tokens – two women and one man – at another auction. They resembled “hard times” tokens produced in the 1830s when the nation’s economy was on the rocks. Those tokens were used by merchants as one-cent change pieces. They were imprinted with ads for businesses and political causes.
The American Anti-Slavery Society issued the female tokens.
Another time, I found a 20th-century reproduction of the Wedgwood medallion in the form of a brooch/pen, an early 20th-century drawing of a man with the male inscription and an 18K reproduction pin in a blue velvet case.
Artist Marlene E. Miller re-created the plea in a 1970s poster featuring the face of Sojourner Truth, who gave an extemporaneous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron on May 28, 1851. There are two versions of the speech, a transcription of which does not mention the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?”
The female and male images are as popular today as they were more than 200 years ago – although less available – because so much has changed but also so little.
