Two Antislavery Quilts

Signature Quilt with an antislavery message, about 1848,

in the collection of the Royall House.

From the Massachusetts Project & the Quilt Index.

The Royall House & Slave Quarters is a Massachusetts museum with restored colonial era buildings including the only surviving slave quarters in the northern states (I'm always doubtful about words like "only" and "first".) 

Isaac Royall was a Maine merchant with plantations in the West Indies (the Caribbean) who built a mansion in what is now Medford, Massachusetts, in the mid-18th century, described as "one of the grandest in North America.” 

The two-story brick dormitory for slaves who were

brought from the Caribbean.

At least 27 enslaved people worked on the estate. After his father's death Isaac II, a British loyalist, abandoned the colonies and the home when the Revolutionary war began. The slaves became free people by default.

The museum is open to visitors in the summer.

http://www.royallhouse.org/

Isaac Royal II and his wife Elizabeth Mackintosh Royall (in blue)

Like many historic houses the museum has a rather random collection of old quilts that have been donated over the past century. Small museums rarely kept detailed acquisition notes and a collecting focus was unusual until recent decades. Whether any of the quilts have a connection to anyone who lived in the house is unknown.

The notes in the Quilt Index indicate this 

quilt has an antislavery message.

But at least two quilts have a connection to the mid-19th-century's antislavery movement, indicating someone saw a focus in the connection to the house's history as a large slave-holding estate.

Mid-19th-century silk quilt. 

Notes in the Quilt Index indicate a poem in

the center.

In the corners a detail photo reveals a printed silk:

"Plead for the Slave."

See the records for the antislavery quilts here:
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1D-FC-E5A
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1D-FC-E5F

You can view all the quilts in a museum collection if they are in the Quilt Index by searching by museum name. Here's a link to the quilts recorded at the Royall House.
http://www.quiltindex.org/search_results.php?page=1&page10=0&keywords=royall&search=go