Images played an important role in the antislavery movement in the nineteenth century. On the top left is a diagram showing how human cargo was packed into a slave ship; it was distributed with Thomas Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1804). On the top right is Frederick W. Mercer’s photograph (April 2, 1863) of Gordon, a “badly lacerated” runaway slave. Images such as the slave ship and the runaway slave worked against slave owners’ claims that slavery was a humane institution — claims that also were supported by illustrations, such as the woodcut at the bottom, titled Attention Paid to a Poor Sick Negro, from Josiah Priest’s In Defense of Slavery (1843).