Terry,

Thank you for the sources and discussion about the phrase, "Am I Not a Man
and a Brother?" and also the reference to your N&Q article from last year.

I'm the author of “Doing Well by Doing Good:  The Decision to Manufacture
Products that Supported the Abolition of the Slave Trade & Slavery in Great
Britain” in *Slavery and Abolition*, Vol. 29, No. 2 (June 2008), 219-231,
and in *Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery*, ed. Celeste-Marie
Bernier and Judie Newman (London:  Routledge, 2009), 82-94, and I continue
to be very interested in how this one phrase and one image became the
iconographic slogan and symbol of the anti-slavery/abolition movement.

Unfortunately, your N&Q article is behind the paywall, and I don't have
easy access to it. Would it be possible to get a copy of it from you
directly?

Many thanks!

Martha Katz-Hyman
Independent Curator
[log in to unmask]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2023 at 9:47 AM Meyers, Terry L <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The history of this famous icon is well known, as at
>
> https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h67.html#:~:text
>
> though there is at least one other, different account of where the icon
> originated:
>
>
> https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-92867
>
> In any case,  I’d like to know more about the actual words, “Am I not a
> Man and a Brother?,” and especially the source of its rhetorical power.
>
> To my mind that power comes from what seems a direct challenge to
> Jefferson’s “all men are created equal,” but though I can find works where
> the phrases are mentioned near to each other, I so far have found no
> comments on the force of what might be a rebuke.   Jefferson must have seen
> the medallion in some form but I can find no comment by him on it.
>
> I wonder if that phrasing might have appealed to Wedgwood from his
> membership in the Lunar Society, more particularly perhaps from associating
> with a fellow member, William Small, onetime Professor at William and Mary
> and mentor to Jefferson.
>
> Small didn’t leave much to study directly, but his influence on Thomas
> Day* and Day’s abolitionist writings was powerful—of the same sort, I
> think, that likely shaped Jefferson’s antipathy to slavery (I know, I know;
> I don’t mean to reopen that!).
>
> Small died before the Declaration of Independence and long before
> Wedgwood’s medallion, but I just wonder if Wedgwood might have recalled
> Small’s mentorship of Jefferson and knowingly approved of a phrasing that
> would sting.
>
> This probably has to remain speculation, I suppose.
>
> ——————————————————————
> *As I suggested in N&Q last year, Small likely conveyed to Day details
> about slavery drawn from his days in Virginia that Day then used.
>
> See my  “Possible Sources for Thomas Day’s Depictions of the Enslaved,"
> Notes and Queries, 69:2, (June 2022), 143–145.
> https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjac045
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College of
> William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg  23187
>
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>  --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
>
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