Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia." Anti-Slavery Tracts. No. 1. New Series.
Child, Lydia Maria. Pamphlet: “Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia” Anti-Slavery Tracts. No. 1. New Series. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860.
Pamphlet: 4-3/4 x 7-5/16,” 28pp; printed self-wrappers (stapled); some uneven fading; edgewear, particularly along spine; three minor (light) waterstains (about 1/2” each) at rear cover; final leaf detached but present; generally a very good copy of this fragile item. In a specially made cloth folding box.
First edition. Second printing (the Boston imprint likely precedes, though Blanck indicates that “the order has not been established with certainty”). A 1936 note indicates “This copy belonged to Margaret Sangster, who got it directly from one of the Childs family.” With “The Touchstone,” a poem by William Allingham.
In 1860, soon after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) wrote Governor Henry Wise as Brown’s official custodian offering to tend the wounded prisoner. Wise replied that while he would use all the powers of the state to protect her if she came to Virginia, he warned her of the feelings her presence would arouse. He declared that Child and fellow abolitionists had, like Brown, “whetted knives of butchery for our 'Mothers, sisters,' daughters 'and babes'.” Brown’s raid “was a natural consequence of your sympathy.” Proud of his response, Governor Wise then sent copies of both letters to newspapers. Carolyn Karcher relates: “He quickly learned that he had underestimated an adversary who long ago pierced the mask of southern chivalry and mastered the art of propaganda.” The writer sent off a letter of rebuttal to the New York Tribune, together with a letter from John Brown, soliciting aid for those families left without support. Child’s rejoinder shredded Governor Wise’s vaunted “constitutional obligation” by pointing out that the imprisonment and enslavement of free blacks, the outrages committed in the name of the Fugitive Slave Act, gag laws against the expression of antislavery opinions, etc., all blemished the South’s so-called respect for the Constitution: “[B]ecause slaveholders so recklessly sowed the wind in Kansas, they reaped a whirlwind at Harper’s Ferry.”
Margaretta Mason, wife of Senator James M. Mason (author of the Fugitive Slave Act), then entered the fray, by publishing an answer to Child in a Virginia paper. It opened by chiding, “Do you read your Bible, Mrs. Child? If you do, read there, 'Woe unto you hypocrites' .” Ignorant of the character of the woman whom she addressed, Mrs. Mason suggested Child would be better to give her attentions to the poor who suffered on her doorstep and then limned an affecting portrait of southern matrons attending ailing and suffering slaves: “Would you stand by the bedside of an old negro...to alleviate his sufferings as far as human aid could?...Do you soften the pangs of maternity in those around you by all the care and comfort you can give?...” Lydia Maria Child wrote an 11-page letter which she sent to Horace Greeley at the Tribune. The letter gave “a trenchant summary of her myriad antislavery tracts, using southern law codes, advertisements for fugitives, the testimony of converted slaveholders, and the avowals of southern politicians to establish the brutality of slavery” (The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child, by Carolyn L. Karcher, Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, p. 422). Child pointed out that though Mrs. Mason’s letter would be printed by Northern papers, hers would be banned in the South; by holding on to the institution of slavery, the South was suffocating its own liberties. Finally, the writer spoke to the charges that she and fellow New England women lack personal charity: “It would be extremely difficult to find any woman in our villages who does not sew for the poor, and watch with the sick.... I have never known an instance where the 'pangs of maternity' did not meet with requisite assistance; and here at the North, after we ha
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