“Slave Market of America” is clearly the later form, with images ranging from the reading of the Declaration of Independence at the top of the page to illustrations of prisons for enslaved Black people a half century later. Using deep zoom, the researcher can enlarge an image on the middle right of the page to see the tragic story of Fanny Jackson.
While she may look, and is presented by the illustrators, like a completely helpless figure, Jackson was imprisoned while in the course of suing for her and her family’s freedom, as William G. Thomas III explains in “Suing for Freedom in Washington.” Fanny was imprisoned as a “runaway” along with her three children, Louisa, Robert, and Maria, but that was a ploy to sell them further south before their freedom suit could remove them completely from the system. Abolitionist leader Amos Phelps visited the pen where the Jackson family was held and transmitted her story to the American Anti-Slavery Society, leading to their immortalization on this broadside. What isn’t covered in the broadside is that the Jacksons comprised only one of the hundreds of families who filed more than 500 freedom suits in the Nation’s capital. Thomas describes the legal planning Black families committed to:
A single freedom suit, like Fanny Jackson’s, might crystalize the collective effort of an entire family across two, three, and even four generations. Black families planned lawsuits and fathered testimony, handing down these accumulating resources over the years. Often it was a slaveholder’s action in preparing to sell people or break up families that triggered a family’s formal legal action.
Thomas details the legal strategies pursued by both the Jackson family, who filed five freedom suits covering eight family members, and their enslavers, Ariss and Bernard H. Buckner. The Buckners, perhaps realizing the soundness of the Jacksons’ legal arguments, asked that the trial be moved to Alexandria, Virginia—a place they could be assured of a jury sympathetic to the rights of White slave-trading men. It took more than two years for the Jackson family to finally get their day in court, where their pleas were denied. It’s not known what happened to the Jacksons after their suits were denied. With this illustration, however, papered across the city in 1836 and preserved in archives physically and digitally almost two centuries later, Fanny’s role as a wife and mother who actively pursued her family’s freedom has become emblematic of the various ways Black people have played conscious roles in seeking liberation for themselves and those they love.