An imaginative portrayal of the violent suppression of abolitionist propagandizing and insurrectionism in the South. The print may have been stimulated by several instances during the early 1830s of hanging, tarring and feathering of anti-slavery activists in Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. In 1835 resolutions were passed by various Southern states urging Northern suppression of the abolitionist societies.
In the image a judge with ass's ears and a whip, seated on bales of cotton and tobacco with the Constitution underfoot, condemns a white man (an abolitionist) to hanging. The prisoner is roughly dragged by two captors toward a crowd of jubilant men who surround a gallows. In the distance a cauldron of tar boils over an open fire.
The text below the image reads:
Sentence passed upon one for supporting that clause of our Declaration viz. All men are born free & equal. "Strip him to the skin! give him a coat of Tar & Feathers!! Hang him by the neck, between the Heavens and the Earth!!! as a beacon to warn the Northern Fanatics of their danger!!!!"
The Library's impression of "Southern Ideas of Liberty" is printed on the same sheet as "New Method of Assorting the Mail" (no. 1835-2). Both prints are closer stylistically to lithographs published in Boston, particularly those of J. H. Bufford, than with ones produced in New York or Philadelphia during this period.