Slave's Appeal, The.
A FORGOTTEN STANTON ANTI-SLAVERY TRACT
EXTREMELY RARE
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Slave’s Appeal. Published at the Anti-Slavery Depository, 15 Steuben Street. Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., Printers, 1860.
Slim 12mo.; printed wrappers; 8 pp.; disbound with stab holes at left margin; fragile. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of this forgotten text, which was curiously omitted by Stanton’s bibliographers and has been largely ignored by scholars. Months before publishing the tract, Stanton delivered a speech to the American Anti-Slavery Society, in May of 1860. In the speech, Stanton likened the oppression of African-Americans to that of disenfranchised women. In A Slave’s Appeal, she went one step further, embodying the voice of a female slave. Theologian Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner writes, “Stanton made an unprecedented move in The Slave’s Appeal when she spoke as a Southern slave…slaves of custom, creed, and sex are connected in this moment of history by a woman who spoke as “‘The God of thunder’” (Stevenson-Moessner, 681).
Printed on the verso of the upper panel is a petition to stop “slave hunting” in New York; petitions bearing signatures can be sent to “some reliable member of the Legislature” or to Lydia Mott at the Anti-Slavery Depository. Mott and her sister Abigail (cousins of Lucretia) were reportedly very active with the Underground Railroad in Albany.
The lower panel contains an advertisement, also placed by Mott, for “Books For the Times” which are available for purchase at the Anti-Slavery Depository. Titles listed include The Speeches and Writings of W. Lloyd Garrison and A True Life by Lydia Maria Child. The ad also mentions that “a great variety of Pamphlets and Tracts on slavery, temperance, woman’s rights etc” will also be kept there “for gratuitous distribution.”
A dramatic address to the “men and women of New York,” The Slave’s Appeal employs a number of bold rhetorical devices to advance Stanton’s abolitionist argument. Most strikingly, Stanton chose to write the tract from the first-person viewpoint of a slave. The opening lines convey her passion for the cause:
From the tobacco fields, the rice swamps, the cotton and sugar plantations and orange groves of your southern states, we have, for nearly a century, sent up one long, agonizing cry for help. With eyes and ears and souls expectant, we have stood on tiptoe to catch from northern breezes the first sound of hope. Cold winds from New York’s harbor have sometimes roused our sluggish natures, and waked us up to thought. (3)
Switching tactics, Stanton then uses theology to illustrate the myriad evils of slavery, reinterpreting the Decalogue. She implores her audience to consider each of the Ten Commandments through the lens of slavery, which she claims has made the United States into a nation “that has no fear of God” (4). For instance, in response to the commandment “Honor thy father and mother,” Stanton asks, “How can the beautiful daughter of a southern master, honor the father who with cold indifference could expose her on the auction block to the coarse gaze of licentious bidders; or the ignoble slave mother, who could consent to curse her with such a life of agony and shame?” (5) Adultery is another sin that many slave owners commit—“The trembling girl for whom thou didst pay a price but yesterday in a New Orleans market, is not thy lawful wife,” she chides (5).
Until slavery is outlawed, the United States cannot consider itself a great nation; since Canada made owning slaves illegal, Ontario’s waters “need no longer scorn to wash [America’s] shores” (7). New York must lead the country in abolishing slavery in the South and until that happens, every passive citizen is complicit in slavery’s crimes. “On the soul of every man, and woman and child, rests the guilt of this Bastile [sic] of horrors,” she writes, “so long as they are not pledged with all their power and influence to pull it down” (7).
Stanton concludes with an excerpt from a speech by the newly-elected President Lincoln, whom she calls the “greatest statesman” of the Republican party, and encourages all Republicans to follow his lead and “make New York sacred to freedom, that when the panting fugitive shall touch your soil, his chains must fall forever” (7).
A remarkable find; OCLC only lists microform copies and we know of no copies ever passing through the market.
(#11642)
Stevenson-Moessner, Jeanne. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Reformer to Revolutionary: A Theological Trajectory.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Vol. 62, No. 3. pp. 673-697. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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