The Hunted Slaves

Ansdell showed this at the Royal Academy in 1861, the same spring the United States broke apart over slavery. It is a British picture about an American horror, a man standing over his wife with a broken chain still on his wrist, holding off the dogs sent to drag them back. He hung it with lines from an American poem, Longfellow's account of a fugitive hiding in the Dismal Swamp, so London viewers would know exactly what they were looking at. There is a sharper twist to its later life. Lancashire's mills ran on cotton picked by enslaved people, and when the war cut off that supply and threw mill workers into hunger, Ansdell gave this very painting to a lottery that raised money for their relief.