A student emailed a question which reminded me of an excellent, if disturbing, digital resource on American slavery and Romantic Literature, namely, the articles published by Harper's Weekly. Harpers was an early, illustrated magazine. Initially, the magazine became famous for publishing American (as opposed to British) authors, but as the technology for printing illustrations changed in the 1840s and '50s, so did the magazine.
Just as modern photojournalism and TV-journalism changed how many modern Americans regard war, these early, illustrated articles in Harpers helped to change how many Americans of the Antebellum period regarded slavery and a number of other reform issues. You can think of these articles as part of the Romantic struggle to help people feel more deeply and to sympathize with others.
Below is the link to the digitized collection, and I'll follow it by an image from one of the articles on the capture of the Wildfire, a slave ship. Here's the link: http://blackhistory.harpweek.com
What most modern Americans don't know is that the Trans-Alantic import or export of slaves was outlawed in the United States long before the Civil War; it was outlawed in 1808. While outlawing the import and export of slaves did little to change the condition of slaves in the United States, it was an essential, early, moral victory for the Abolitionist movement.
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