A rare bill of sale dated at Charleston, November 29, 1856 in the State of South Carolina, of a "brown girl named Mary warranted sound," for $820.

At left is a letter dated August 11, 1835, from A.G. Mills, quibbling over the price of slaves in Virginia because he wishes to purchase forty hands between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, plus twenty efficient field hands.

In like manner are the advertisements for slaves posted by C. E. Girardey & Co., January 18, 1859, and N. Vignie, February 18, 1859, in New Orleans.

Examples of abolitionist literature published in pamphlet form are the 1855 publications titled Letters on Slavery Addressed to the Pro-Slavery Men of America,²⁵ in which the author sets out the immoral and destructive nature of the practice. In The Matter of George Gordon's Petition for Pardon,²⁶ the Reverend George Gordon, a member of the secessionist Free Presbyterian Church, which had separated from the Presbyterian Church of the United States because of the latter's stance on slavery, had been charged with interfering in the apprehension and arrest of the slave, Grandison Martin, a fugitive from Kentucky. Gordon, who had been convicted in Cincinnati in November 1861, sentenced to prison and fined, claimed he did not want a pardon because he was not guilty of anything since he considered the Fugitive Slave Laws as unconstitutional. The pamphlet is a legal examination of Gordon's constitutional claims, and thereby the Fugitive Slave Laws themselves.

To commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation, Currier and Ives issued a coloured print titled "Freedom to the Slaves" in which Lincoln is portrayed in a quasi-biblical stance, the caption, in fact, quoting scripture: "Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."²⁷ Former slaves unashamedly did abase themselves before the President at which point Lincoln himself would raise the person with the caution that he kneel to no one but God.