Programme of Anti-Slavery Meetings. Anniversary Week, 1860
[Stanton, Elizabeth Cady]. Printed broadside, entitled Programme of Anti‑Slavery Meetings. Anniversary Week, 1860. [New York: Office of the American Anti‑Slavery Society, spring 1860].
Single leaf, 7 ½ X 13 ½”; folded, with tape on verso. Glazed under glass.
Not identified in standard bibliographical references.
Conjecture about Abraham Lincoln‘s nomination over chief rival William Henry Seward (May 18, 1860) preoccupied delegates at the American Anti-Slavery Society’s 27th anniversary convention (May 8th and 9th). Cooper Union speakers scheduled on the Programme of Anti‑Slavery Meetings included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Wells Brown, Beriah Green, Wendell Phillips, Robert Purvis, a founding society member, and chairman William Lloyd Garrison. The Programme also advertises various abolitionist texts, including some of activist Lydia Maria Child’s correspondence, and her work, The Right Way, The Safe Way; Proved by Emancipation in the British West Indies, and Elsewhere. While Lincoln’s Cooper Union address on February 27th (starkly contrasted with the New York senator’s moderately tempered speech before colleagues two days later) had proved decisive in shifting significant abolitionist sentiment, Garrison demurred: “[G]ive me the resources of the eighteen free States of our country, on the side of freedom, as a great, independent, free empire, and I will ask nothing more for the abolition of slavery.
Does not the Republican party believe that, by the Constitution, the slaveholder has a right to make slave‑hunting ground of the entire North? Yes…Does it not concede that, in proportion to the number of slaves in the Southern States, the slaveholders may have added political power? Yes!…Then, how can I, claiming to be a friend and representative of the slave, on the day of election, march up to the ballot‑box, and give my vote for such a party, and say that I have done a deed for freedom? I see no hope for the peaceful emancipation of the slave…I see nothing before us but fire and blood. [By 1865 more than six hundred twenty thousand American soldiers would lose their lives in war.]
Years later, after scrutinizing the President’s efforts on behalf of black Americans, Garrison secured a White House interview. “[I]t was a very satisfactory one indeed,” he attested in June 1864. “There is no mistake about it in regard to Mr. Lincoln’s desire to do all that he can see it right and possible for him to do to uproot slavery, and give fair play to the emancipated. I was much pleased with his spirit.”
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