Circular: The People Are Coming!
Scarce
[Suffrage] Folsom, Abigail. Circular Letter. [Boston]: 1851.
Broadside; 7 ½ x 9 ¾ inches.
A previously unknown signed circular composed and signed by the notorious radical Abby Folsom:
There is not a true man or woman in in the universe, when they understand their true social condition ... but will be ready to do and suffer all that is necessary... saving themselves and their posterity, from the tyranny, oppression, pauperism, and slavery, which the American government—the slaveholding power of law, is constantly heaping upon the working class.
An extremely rare printed circular letter signed both in type and boldly in Folsom’s virtually unknown hand, Abby H. Folsom, dated in her hand, July 3 / [18]51 and headed, CIRCULAR. The people coming! Make way for the People!
Folsom’s missive opens with a warning:
The meeting will be no vanity-fair concern, no pic-nic or tea-party to humbug the people, but a gathering of true men and free-souled women. The children, too, many come to consult upon grave and important matters, discuss great principles, and adopt measures to disseminate them among the people.
True to her unwavering tenants, she exhorted,
Principle is everything. It is a consoling fact that whatever may be the up’s and down’s of parties and the changes of governments, and the upbuilding or downfall of empires, principle is the same, unchanging, unchangeable. That man, that woman, or that party who does not act from principle, can derive little satisfaction in the reflection, that men change, but principles never. There is not a true man or woman in in the universe, when they understand their true social condition, and the rights which nature designs for them, but will be ready to do and suffer all that is necessary for the accomplishment of so great an object, as that of saving themselves and their posterity, from the tyranny, oppression, pauperism, and slavery, which the American government—the slaveholding power of law, is constantly heaping upon the working class.
Amazingly, Folsom neglected to mention the time or place of the “great Mass meeting”. Fortunately, she added a date (3 July 1851) in ink at the bottom left. According to a sarcastic account in the Boston Herald describing a Fourth of July procession held the following day in Abington (organized by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society), Folsom was listed as a member of the procession. The Herald remarked that she was marching behind “Theodore Parker, on a colt,—the soul of an ass, (with his Lexington blunderbuss.)” Folsom was depicted in similarly sarcastic terms:“in Bloomer costume, mounted”, followed by “The Editor of the Liberator” and others including “A delegation of highly respectable colored ladies, from nobody knows where, on foot.”The Herald’s reporter remarked that “procession was exactly two hours and ten minutes in passing a given point Minute guns were fired, while it was on the move, and the bells of the Abington churches sent forth a right merry peal. Everything went off in good shape and the part broke at 5 o’clock... There was not a man among them all who did not go home fully satisfied that he was ‘some pumpkins.’”
Folsom was an American suffragette, Garrisonian abolitionist, and eccentric and notorious public agitator who was often forcefully carried out of meetings, deemed “that flea of conventions” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Born Abigail Harford in Rochester, New Hampshire, she married Peter Folsom, a saddler, then left him on account of his penchant for drink (though there is evidence that they reunited later in life). She moved with her sister to Boston, and acquired a reputation as a highly disruptive agitator garnering many critics both within and outside abolitionist circles.
Folsom was known for derailing conferences by insisting upon a woman’s right to speak, then monopolizing the floor with reformist agendas. Advocates of free speech, the anti-slavery movement was reluctant to
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