Poems.
[Stanton, Elizabeth Cady]. Whittier, John Greenleaf. Poems. Philadelphia: Joseph Healy; Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co.; New York: John S. Taylor, 1838.
8vo.; original dark red leather elaborately blind-stamped at front and spine with a series of frames and borders; title in gold-gilt at the spine; yellow endpapers; a.e.g.; 3/4” piece lacking at head of spine; mild rubbing to binding; some foxing.
First edition. Inscribed, To Miss Elizabeth S. Cady, with the profound regards of a friend. Further inscribed faintly in pencil, Presented to G. Yost, March 12th, 1843, Elizabeth S.C. Stanton.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the most significant thinkers and activists in the American suffrage movement, was born on November 12, 1815 in Johnstown, New York. She attended Emma Willard’s Seminary and received a supplemental education from her father, a judge. Through her marriage in 1840 to abolitionist orator Henry B. Stanton, Stanton was exposed to the multiplicities of abolitionist thought and to leftist political speeches and organizations. Immediately after their wedding, the Stantons departed for the World Anti-Slavery Convention, to which Henry was a delegate.
Incensed by the fact that the majority of abolitionists seemed “oblivious to the equal wrongs of their own mothers, wives and sisters” and at the abolitionists’ refusal to allow female colleagues to speak or vote at the convention, Stanton returned home with a keen interest in promoting the rights of her own sex. In 1847 the Stantons moved to Seneca Falls, New York, where Stanton—who had met Lucretia Mott and other suffrage figures through her husband’s abolitionist activities—served as a pivotal organizer of the first women’s rights convention, held there in July 1848. The convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by Stanton and read by her at the meeting, contained the first cohesive public demand for American women’s suffrage, launching a campaign which would last 72 years. From 1848, Stanton devoted herself ceaselessly to the feminist cause. In 1849 she began writing for the women’s rights/dress reform publication The Lily, edited by Amelia Bloomer; in 1851 she met Susan B. Anthony and began a political collaboration that would last till Stanton’s 1902 death; and in 1854 she was elected president of the New York State Suffrage Society, a lobbying organization.
John Greenleaf Whittier’s first official book of poetry (abolitionist publisher Isaac Knapp had printed an unauthorized volume of Whittier’s antislavery verse in 1837 without his knowledge or consent). The poet dedicated the book to his good friend and fellow abolitionist Henry Stanton, future husband of Elizabeth Cady “as a token of the author’s personal friendship, and of his respect for the unreserved devotion of exalted talents to the cause of humanity and freedom.” Henry Stanton and John Greenleaf Whittier’s relationship grew out of their mutual dedication to the abolitionist cause. They shared offices at the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York; and when Whittier moved to Philadelphia, Stanton stayed with him when he traveled there. (A recent volume of the correspondence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opens with a letter Henry wrote to his fiancée from the poet’s rooms in Philadelphia). Elizabeth Cady met Henry Stanton in 1839 through her cousin Gerrit Smith in Petersboro, New York. While polite society generally looked askance upon abolitionists as radicals, Cady found his eloquence and passion compelling. Within the month, Henry Stanton and Elizabeth Cady became engaged; within the year they married. Later Elizabeth Cady Stanton recollected: “Soon after our marriage we spent a few days with our gifted Quaker poet, on his farm in Massachusetts. I shall never forget those happy days in June; the long walks and drives, and talks under the old trees of antislavery experiences...”
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, evokes the im
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