This 1769 broadside advertises the sale of ninety-four slaves who had just arrived in Charleston from West Africa. Broadsides like this one were displayed prominently by slave traders to drum up business. What was the artist who created the broadside trying to convey by the way he depicted the slaves? How do you think colonists, who at this very time were defending their liberty against British policies, justified importing and selling slaves?

The slaves in this broadside are depicted as strong—with large, muscular bodies. The muscles on their arms and legs are bulging, and the artist attempted to depict the slaves as ready and able to work. In addition, the slaves seem primitive; as they are wearing very little clothing and one is carrying a spear. Their clothing is made of very little cloth and involves only simple garments that are tied together. The artist wanted to show the slaves as primitive in their appearance and mentality.
The colonists, asking for their own freedom from Britain, justified selling and buying slaves because they depicted them and treated them as less than human. The artist of this broadside was complicit in this type of thinking because he rendered the slaves as primitive and inhuman to justify the sale of human beings.

Look at the language of the broadside, in conjunction with the artist's depiction, for help understanding how the advertisement is trying to present these slaves. They are described as a "choice cargo," the "likeliest Parcel that have been imported this Season." The language is not dissimilar to what we might expect in an advertisement for food or other inanimate goods: they are described as a "choice" cargo as we might describe a "choice" crop, while the comment that they are "the likeliest Parcel" suggests that they are merely imports of high quality. Nothing in the language of the advertisement indicates that the cargo is, in fact, human. The phrasing barely suggests that it even describes something living.
The artist's depiction of the "two hundred & fifty negroes" works in conjunction with these words to influence purchasers. The primary drawing is of an enormous black man, disproportionate to the small person, possibly a child, between his feet. He carries a spear and wears a tribal skirt. He is a stereotype deliberately designed to appear alien and exotic—and, importantly, faceless. He is completely black, with no discernible features either of body or face. Across the top of the broadside, we see a sort of frieze depicting a group of black people, including children, who are similarly featureless and carrying primitive-looking weapons. The artist has depicted them in the fashion of a Stone Age carving or cave painting. They appear foreign, backward, primitive, and homogeneous: their largeness suggests that they would be strong, but their lack of individuality dissuades the purchaser from imagining them as human beings with thoughts or feelings, and their primitive tools indicate that they are almost a separate species from "modern" (white) humans.
All of this gives us some understanding of how the colonists, now protesting that in being taxed by Britain they were being treated as slaves, sought to justify the slave trade. The use of slaves was vital to America's economy at this time. The depiction of these black people, then, shows how the white colonists tried to make a distinction between themselves as slaves and the black people who did their hard labor for them. While they argued that it was amoral for white men to be "enslaved" by the mother country, black people were presented as racially inferior, subhuman, and otherwise completely unworthy of the same sorts of consideration.
Ultimately, of course, cracks in this rhetoric became clear, and the abolition movement built up in the United States, as elsewhere. But ideas about the inherent racial inferiority of the black race continued for centuries.