In the first decades of the nineteenth century, white editors and cartoonists regularly lampooned free blacks who organized to advance their rights or who gained. economic and political standing in their communities. This broadside is one of many that ridiculed black efforts to abolish slavery and achieve full citizenship by portraying free blacks as ignorant and infantile. Originating in Boston, these Bobalition broadsides were professionally printed and widely circulated just as slavery was ending in the northern states.