“Family amalgamation among the man-stealers.”

Although they vehemently opposed slavery, few antislavery advocates believed blacks and whites could or should live together as equals. Some abolitionists viewed the potential for intimacy between whites and blacks as one of the demoralizing effects of the “peculiar institution.” This unlikely domestic scene in a plantation household, with slave children joining their owners at the dinner table, was published in an 1834 antislavery tract as one indication of the scandalous relations fostered by slavery.

Source: George Bourne, Pictures of Slavery in the United States of America (1834)—Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.