A black citizen and her child are kidnapped, 1853 (engraving)

A black mother and her child are kidnapped in a northern United States city by slave traders to be smuggled and sold into southern slavery. Freed black slaves and free born blacks alike were targeted. Solomon Northrup's 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, tells of his abduction and subsequent years of slavery. After an illustration by an unidentified artist in American Slave Trade; or, An account of the manner in which the slave dealers take free people from some of the United States of America, and carry them away, and sell them as slaves in other of the states etc by Jesse Torrey, published London 1822.