Slavery in America. 19th-century illustration produced in 1841 by an apologist for slavery in the USA. This is a fragment (the left side) of a larger print which contrasted British white factory workers with America's supposedly contented black slaves. Artist Edward Williams Clay (1799-1857) shows a slave-owning white family with a group of happy slaves. The wording at top states that the slave owner feeds, clothes and nurses his slaves, depicted here as a 'sacred legacy' from his ancestors. The issue of slavery was one of the causes of the US Civil War (1861-1865), which led to the abolition of slavery in the USA in 1865.