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James A. Thome, 1813-1873
Born into a slave-owning family, James A. Thome became convinced of the moral iniquity of slavery while a divinity student at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. Thereafter, he helped craft the radical abolitionist message that slaves had to be granted immediate and unconditional freedom. Thome worked as a traveling agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and he also investigated conditions in slave societies to provide documentary evidence against slaveholders' arguments that slavery was a positive good. In 1839 Thome fled Ohio, where he was teaching at Oberlin College, when he was threatened with arrest for assisting a runaway slave. He went to Connecticut, where he was portrayed by the artist and abolitionist Nathaniel Jocelyn. Thome is shown holding a copy of Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It Is (1839), to which he had contributed much of the primary research.
Nathaniel Jocelyn, 1840 |