James Armstrong Thorne

Beginning in the 1830s, Presbyterian minister and abolitionist James A. Thome argued for the immediate and unconditional emancipation of enslaved people. Born to a family of enslavers, he became convinced of slavery’s immorality as a divinity student at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. He denounced it in 1834 as “an outrage, a complication of crimes, and wrongs, and cruelties that make angels weep.” In 1836, the American Anti-Slavery Society sent Thome to observe the effects of recent emancipation in the British colonies of Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica. He coauthored Emancipation in the West Indies (1838) to convince skeptics of its success.

Thome is portrayed here holding a copy of Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is (1839). The book, to which Thome contributed primary research, presents eyewitness testimony detailing the appalling living conditions of enslaved people in the United States.