Caption from poster__

" Caution!! Colored People "

                                      
A poster displayed in Boston warns African Americans to be on
the lookout for slave catchers hunting for fugitive slaves in the
area.  Notices such as this one may have caused George Latimer
to fear for his family’s safety.  For unknown reasons after 1858,
George Latimer lived apart from his wife and children.

Slavery proved unprofitable in the Northern states and by the early 19th cent. had disappeared. Its abolition had been hastened by the work of the Quakers, who, as in Great Britain, were staunchly opposed to the institution. In the South, however, where African slaves arrived in the tens of thousands from the late 17th through the early 18th cent., slavery came to be an integral part of the plantation system (especially after the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793). From the late 18th cent. to the eve of the Civil War, more than a million slaves were moved from the Eastern Seaboard to the Deep South, where many labored in the sugar and cotton fields. This vast internal slave trade, which often tore slave families apart, was the South's second largest enterprise; only the plantation system itself surpassed it in size.