“Cash for negroes," "cash for negroes," "cash for negroes.”

The ubiquitous notices for slave auctions pasted on public walls and printed in newspaper advertisements--“in great capitals down the long columns of the crowded journals”--were among the shocking aspects of life in the United States that greeted the British novelist Charles Dickens during his 1842 visit. The terrible everyday nature of such announcements of human sales was matched by the regular appearance of reward notices for the apprehension of “fugitive” slaves. “Woodcuts,” Dickens observed acerbically in his 1843 account of his visit, American Notes, “of a runaway negro with manacled hands, crouching beneath a bluff pursuer in top-boots, who, having caught him, grasps him by the throat, agreeably diversify the pleasant text.”

The very visibility of slavery, the casual and daily reminders of its operations and depredations, shocked Dickens, as it did many other travelers to U.S. shores. A certain fashionable disdain toward the brash young country certainly characterized the attitudes of European visitors, and made many of their published criticisms very unpopular on this side of the Atlantic. But if there was one “peculiarity” of American life that haunted and disillusioned even the friendliest of foreign commentators, it was slavery. “[T]his is not the republic I came to see,” Dickens wrote to a friend after his visit; “this is not the republic of my imagination.”

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