Lieutenant Thomas Grosvenor and His Negro Servant

During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, years of revolutionary convulsions on both sides of the Atlantic, not only in politics but in all walks of life and thought and art as well, the ways in which blacks were regarded underwent profound and far-reaching changes ...

An avid reader from his youth, Trumbull developed many of the tastes of his European contemporaries— including a respect for the great deeds of the past and for literature and art that instructed men’s moral sensibilities...