Turning the Tables on the Overseer

In this 1863 abolitionist print a crowd of enslaved men, women, and children watch cheerfully as their overseer, tied to a whipping post, prepares to be lashed by an enslaved man. The illustration originally appeared in the New York Illustrated News, but in 1863 New York-based Black publishers Robert and Thomas Hamilton produced it as a print for people to purchase individually. Enslaved people overpowering their overseer was not unheard of in the antebellum South, which made the image encouraging to abolitionists and frightening to those who wished to uphold the institution of slavery.