Existing comment:
Free Negroes in the North:
In this sketch Volck satirizes the lives of "free negroes" in the North. The well-dressed man in the center offers a tract on slavery to a beggar instead of alms, while nearby, a physician bargains with two black men over a dead body, probably to be used for dissection. They stand just outside a "Colored Home," in which scenes of riot and orgy are taking place. Volck, in the most graphic way, raised questions that seemed to ask if free blacks in the North were really better off than slaves in the South.
Transfer lithograph, 1864 |